How does this wiki account for AP/Durability in terms of slashing/piercing attacks?

[LoudCloud]

Not sure if this has been adressed before but I've never seen it mentioned.

I'm wondering how this wiki accounts for a character's AP/Durabilty if they rely on slashing/piercing attacks/weaponry. This seems like it could cause problems with powerscaling. Real quick metaphor to get my point across:

- Metaphorical Dragon is at least Town level AP/Durabilty (via feats).

- Metaphorical Knight, who has only showcased Street level feats, comes along.

- Knight slays Dragon with sword through the heart.

- Is Knight powerscaled to the Dragon (despite the fact he had to rely on a weapon that could pierce skin and hit internal organs) or nah?

If no, I'm sure you could make the argument that a lot of weapon-wielders on this wiki only got their stats through misleading powerscaling.

 

[Saikou_The_Lewd_King]

While slashing certainly helps getting through durability more easily, it isn't enough to jump a tier usually. You can't cut a tank in half with a sword.

 

[LoudCloud]

But you can use it to get through an organic being's skin and damage its internal organs as is the case with most sword battles.

 

[Promestein]

If a normal knight with a normal sword pierces a town level dragon's scales that's PIS

 

[LoudCloud]

Would the sword supposedly bounce off due to the Knight's weak physical strength/Dragon's very durable skin?

I guess maybe I'm just too used to seeing small Knights killing huge Dragons by stabbing them in the heart that I never considered that the Knight would need to be physically strong enough to pierce through the Dragon.

 

[Promestein]

It'd be a bit of both.

 

[LoudCloud]

Alright, thanks.

But one last scenario. If the Dragon is Building-level by sheer size and is defeated by the Street-level Knight's sword piercing its heart. Does the Knight scale to the Dragon's Building-level durability or does this show us that despite its size the Dragon is only Street-level?

 

[Antvasima]

Piecing and cutting attacks cause a bit of a scaling problem yes, since, even in the real world, it takes considerably less energy to cause damage to a much larger and stronger opponent in this manner.

However, fiction can sometimes take this to ridiculous degrees, such as Wolverine making deep cuts in Thanos body, in which case we count it as Plot-Induced Stupidity.

 

[Lina_Shields]

In general, Attack Potency usually deal with attacks that deal damage on the outside, and not on the inside/internal organs.

As for what this means, if you are able to kill a dragon via striking it internally through the heart, that means you are bypassing that said dragon's regular durability.

 

[LoudCloud]

What if he cuts the dragon's head off? I'm just trying to see if a character's who's Durabilty stat is due to their sheer size is killed by a weaker enemy using a piercing attack, does that make the weak character scale or the strong character no longer that Durability due to their size.

 

[Gwynbleiddd]

Well there are a few factors when it comes to cutting.

First the energy density, a sword doesn't really need to curry much energy because all its KE and momentum are focused on a very small area making it a much more effective way to deal damage.

Just to give an example: Let's say someone's punch has KE = 100 J.The surface area of a fist is around 5*8 = 40 cm^2, so the E/SA = 2.5 J/cm^2.

Now let's take a sword: Maximum KE for a baseball bat is 481 J , the surface area of the cutting edge of a blade should be around 100cm*0.1cm = 10 cm^2.

E/SA = 48.1 cm^2

That's almost 20 times more concentrated energy.

Another factor is the hardness and durability of the sword and the material being cut.

 

[The_real_cal_howard]

Personally, I feel how we handle size is a bit wonky, so I don't know, @LC.

 

[LoudCloud]

Well in all honesty this has become more of a conversation about how we rate characters with the "via sheer size" reasoning and how them being defeated by piercing/slashing attacks plays into that. A dragon that is building-level "by sheer size" could theoretically still be decapitated by a sword from a street-level Knight because there's no evidence the dragon's skin is tough enough to not be pierced by it (unlike a Dragon that has showcase a clear building-level durabilty feat). I imagine a lizard 100 times its orignal size could still be killed by a sword despite it's size, because the lizard's skin would still have low durability (relative to the sword). In which case, this makes the whole "via sheer size" rating questionable since, just because a character is big that does not make them that durable.

 

[The_real_cal_howard]

Dude, I've been had a problem with "via sheer size"

 

[Antvasima]

Yes. I am aware that this is a serious problem for our energy-based Attack Potency scale. However, I do not know how to solve it in general terms.

 

[Matthew_Schroeder]

I'm pretty sure Wolverine has dozens, if not hundreds of instances where he's managed to stab Planetary and Stellar threats.

 

[Antvasima]

Yes, but given that he has never demonstrated raw power significantly beyond that of Captain America, I think that I simply wrote that his claws give him a large degree of durability negation.

 

[Gwynbleiddd]

Via sheer-size stats are usually very wanky though.That's because instead of doing a few simple calculations people just assume things.

 

[LoudCloud]

Ok, I think we should be on the lookout for them.

 

[Gwynbleiddd]

Yeap.

 

[ArbitraryNumbers]

I do recall a story from Greek Mythology when a dragon named Fafnir was killed because its underbelly was very soft, allowing it to be pierced easily when a guy hid in a hole in the ground and thrusted his sword upward when Fafnir walked over it.

So I think it should vary. If the dragon has weakpoint like Fafnir does, then the knight shouldn't scale.

I also definitely think tanking a Town Level explosion and a Town Level slash with a sword are two completely different things, as the former only involves tanking part of the force. Meanwhile the latter has all/most of the force condensed into a single direction.

I don't know if this answers anything, though.

 

[Reppuzan]

@Arbitrary

Fafnir is from the Germanic Nibelungenlied, but I get your point and you're right. I also believe it's how Frodo managed to kill Smaug in The Hobbit.

That said, we usually don't rate things based on those kinds of events.

Proximity matters for tanking explosions. Being close to the epicenter means taking the brunt of it, but being at the very edge wouldn't scale very much aside from the concussive force of the blast.

 

[LoudCloud]

Frodo killed Smaug?

Wow, Peter Jackson does not respect the source material.

 

[Reppuzan]

@LoudCloud

I'm not a Tolkien fan, so I apologize if I got details wrong due to my own shoddy memory. It seems like Bard the Bowman did it, but my brain sort of immediately went to Frodo due to him being the main character, so my apologies.

 

[LoudCloud]

Nah, it's alright.

 

[The_Living_Tribunal1]

piercing and cutting are pressure-based calcs

 

[Lina_Shields]

If they are based on pressure, can we still get energy values from them? I have notes about cutting/piercing somewhere...

 

[DontTalk]

@Lina: I think you can calculate piercing/cutting pretty much like the usual destruction with shear strength or maybe conpressive strength (IIRC I have seen the latter used until now, but might be wrong there). But one has to assume the width of the blade for that, which will usually probably be <1mm and for weapons that are possibly even supernaturally sharp it would probably not return anything, since for those weapons the blade width can be almost arbitarily close to 0.

That aside it shouldn't be much of a problem, I think.

 

[Antoniofer]

I consider cutting and pircing like some kind of durability negation, and as TLT said, is pressure based; I'm guessing that finding the perforation would require several variables, I tryed to find any equation months ago but was useless...

Iirc, there's no way to convert pressure to energy (at least is overpressure), so not sure if that is possible.

 

[The_Living_Tribunal1]

I mean its not hard, you just need to find the minimum pressure needed to cause a certain dent or a certain amount of damage based on compressive strength or tensilve strength, then factoring in the surface area used, see how much energy was needed for the thrust

iirc such a calc has been done here before in a calc evaluation thread

and no, this is not durability negation. to start with, durability isnt absolute in the sense that a town level dura being wont shrug off a small town level+ attack aimed at an eye or another weak point

 

[Antoniofer]

It couldn't be difficult, but last time that someone tryed to convert pressure to energy were used an awful calculator, hopefully only a pair of profiles were affected. Just want to avoid that people just use one method and apply to every franchise that use it every chance; will prefer a general equation.

 

[The_Living_Tribunal1]

well instead of memorising an equation, it is more important to rigourously look at a scenario and even improvise equations if needed. Not all scenarios fit pre planned calculations steps, just like any other basic physics problems

 

[Lina_Shields]

For problems that involve cutting objects into two pieces, such as a slash, wouldn't that be just classified as shear strength?

Shear strength is the energy required to split an object into two halves, I think.

 

[The_Living_Tribunal1]

For problems that involve cutting objects into two pieces, such as a slash, wouldn't that be just classified as shear strength?
Shear strength is the energy required to split an object into two halves, I think.

yeah

 

[Gwynbleiddd]

@TLT1 We could create a more absolute durability system though, by replacing the amount of energy a character can take by the amount of energy a character can take divided by the area that tanked the attack.

Like the example i posted above, tanking a human punch would require a durability of 2.5 j/cm^2 while a sword would require 48 j/cm^2.

 

[Antoniofer]

^That sound about right, but would be pretty laborious, and would only apply to human attacks, and swords could varie, can't compare a claymore to a katana, would require even more work to clasify swords.

 

[Gwynbleiddd]

I'm not proposing a change, i know it would be nigh impossible to do something like that on a wiki scale.

But such a system would be extremely effective and would resolve all issues with things like Enviromental destruction etc.

I don't think that the difference between swords wouldn't change the results that much.

 

[The_Living_Tribunal1]

tbh changing durabilities to proximal durabilites for all profies will be too much work

but the thing is, it would already be intuitive that a much faster small town level+ being should be able to strike the weak points of a relatively low level and slower town level being to make victory more likely.

thats the thing about swords, in real life, you have to look at how much energy or pressure a certain area of a surface can take before being substantially damaged, meanwhile in fiction, debators have not really thought about it too much for the sake of simplicity

 

[LoudCloud]

thats the thing about swords, in real life, you have to look at how much energy or pressure a certain area of a surface can take before being substantially damaged, meanwhile in fiction, debators have not really thought about it too much for the sake of simplicity

This guy

 

[Antvasima]

Gwynbleiddd and The Living Tribunal1 are correct. It would technically be preferable if we could list the ability to withstand energy taken per area, but it is regrettably not practically feasible to apply.