Quote:
Originally Posted by Anthony
It takes around ten times as much energy to melt a human-sized chunk of ice as it takes to kill a human by raising their body temperature outside of the survivable range. However, in mechanical terms I'd probably just figure reducing a chunk of ice to -10xHP completely melts it (far less to make it shatter).
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Given the density of ice isn't that far off from the density of a person, and that ice is homogenous, you're probably looking at damage in the vicinity of 400 (~115d) burn to melt a human-sized chunk of ice.
Another option would be to use the beam weapons from
Spaceships. Every kg of ice requires around 333.55 kJ to melt it once it reaches 0 C. Our weapon from above would be around 100 MJ (which is actually 100d burn), which would melt right around 300 kg of ice. Melting a chunk of ice of roughly human weight (62 kg) would require around 20 MJ, roughly 50d or so. That's 175 damage to melt 137 lb. Because the damage of beam weapons vs energy and quantity of HP vs mass actually both scale by cube root, that ratio should be fairly constant - call it 1.25 burn damage for every pound of ice that needs to get melted. Note you'll typically need to heat up the ice to get it to 0 C before you melt it, but IIRC the energy to shift it up to melting temperature is very low compared to what's needed to actually melt it.