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(TFT) Marginalia
Next up is seeing if I can gorrila outlook to skip the front end.
Not too shabby for a 28 hundred connection IMHO
I've gotta swap some files.
Oh well.
Monster stuff.
Spitting Cobras have a range of over 10 feet.
How many hexes can a cobra reach from the ground to a Figures eyes given that range?
Pythag says a^2 + b^2 = c^2.
Lets call the Figures height a.
Six foot squared is 36.
That would make b equivalent to the number of hexes away of the target.
The range should not exceed the root of the hypotenuse, in this case around 10 feet.
One hex is 4.3 feet and @ 6 feet of altitude the root of the hypotenuse is about 7.38ft.
Two hexes work out to just over 10.48ft.
So it's a two hex range for Spitting Cobras, no?
Well..., for humans, yes, but what about a halfling?
4.3ft. x 3 hexes is 13ft, and that's outside of the Cobras range so the answer is yes for halflings too.
Its maximum height, ignoring gravity, air resistance, and the like, is about 9 foot at 1 hex, which works out to be an angle of about 65 degrees.
During the 70's a Grey Whale corpse measuring about 30ft.long (7 hexes long) and weighing around 8000lbs. washed ashore near Florence, OR.
In a move that seemed obvious to park service rangers, used to disposing of large animals on the order of Elk with a stick or two of dynamite, the body was packed with half a ton of TNT.
Pieces of blubber endangered the on lookers and TV crew located over a hundred yards (70 hexes) away and piece large enough to crush the roof of a brand new Cadillac hit the parking area well over a quarter mile away (307 hexes).
Think Reno 911 Miami, but with some of the chunks of gore weighing pounds and raining down at 32 feet per second, per second.
This was FAR from effective in disposing of the carcass, with well over three-quarters of the body remaining intact.
I have TNT listed at 4.2 * 10^16 ergs per ton, with half that being 2.1 * 10^16 ergs.
I have a conversion factor of 7.367 * 10^-8 for ergs into foot pounds.
That gives me 15.4707 call it 1.5 * 10^9 foot pounds in half a ton of TNT.
This works out to about 1,500,000 foot pounds of force per pound, and @ 100 foot pounds of force per point of damage, this works out to about 15,000 points of potential damage in a pound of dynamite.
This is in the neighborhood of the average damage of a 3333 ST Wizards Wrath @ 4.5 dam per 1pt ST, avg.
It's convenient to note that TNT is around 14 to 15 times more powerful than gunpowder, allowing for simple scaling between black powder and TNT.
Kinda makes you wonder about Dragons huh?
An animals aggressiveness is bounded by the fight or flight response, with the most likely to fight ranking as the most aggressive, the most likely to flee being the least aggressive, and those that ignore you if you ignore them as the middle range.
An aggressive animal with humanoid intelligence, or exceeding it, is a monster.
Most monsters are other humanoids, like serial killers and such.
(Consider a Dalmer type with the feudal authority of a knight or samurai as a Figure.)
Even non-humanoid monsters, such as the aliens of Aliens, are monsters by virtue of their hyper-aggressive nature and intelligence, which basically equates monsters with hunters.
This aint a moral judgement here, human hunting for food has been a necessary skill over much of our existence as a species and the aliens required hosts for the propagation of its species which is more fundamental in the long run than food.
I'm just saying that the simple definition of a monster is something that hunts humanoids.
>From a humanoid point of view of course.
I imagine that the Predators field guide for this corner of the outback of the Milky Way would include information about human habits like; "social or herd animals, most active during daylight. Peak seasons are spring and autumn (agriculture). Most commonly found in flat, open country and/or along significant waterways or bodies of water." and similar observations.
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