How many hits for a human to destroy a battleship?

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by JCurwen3

This is true. Hence the house rule that's floating around to have hits to the vitals do standard HP injury, but count the wounding multiplier against bleeding (battery fluid loss?) and other damage effects.

It seems to me that the fundamental problem here is in adding damage from multiple hits together is the inaccurate simplification. Hit points are scaled nonlinearly - as square roots of energy, or cube roots of mass, so 10 blows of x hit points each are actually not equivalent to one blow of 10x hit points.

If a single blow is 1/1816 of the damage it takes to destroy a battleship, it ought to take 1816^2, about 3.3 million, blows to deliver as much energy as a single hit that can do that, or 1816^3, just under 6 billion, to destroy the same total mass. Of course calculating roots, adding, exponentiating and comparing to target hp for each blow would be horribly inconvenient in a tabletop game, but I think not doing that is where the problem is coming from.