Quote:
Originally Posted by DouglasCole
I remember discussing Essential Wood with Bruno for TDS at some point, and we came up with something like "multiply certain favorable properties by 3" over yew. That made it very competitive with higher TL steels (higher than TL 3 or TL4); I don't recall offhand if it was also better than fiberglass or carbon fiber.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by malloyd
Better for what? The properties of a bow aren't constrained by the material it is made of nearly as much as they are by the user.
Changing what the bow is made from is not going to alter the range or damage you can obtain from a particular ST bow, it just changes how big the bow needs to be to have that ST. It's not difficult to build a bow too strong for anybody to actually draw out of ordinary wood (this is after all the entire idea of mechanically cocked crossbows). Tripling the relevant properties will reduce the weight of a bow of a particular draw to a third what it was, but it's not like a wooden shaft too strong for any human to bend significantly is enormously heavy to start with.
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In the context of The Deadly Spring, which was what I explicitly referring, that's not correct. A given ST bow can do more damage and range with essential wood over regular wood and some older types of steel because it's more efficient, and less of the energy in the draw goes into moving the limbs. This is more likely noticable ('cause the numbers are bigger) in range than damage (which is still chunky and 1d+1 is a sizable improvement over 1d, as an example)
If you're using GURPS RAW, and looking up damage on the thrust table, it's closer to correct, but since for a given ST you can do thr+1 to thr+4 or so with a bow/crossbow depending on the bow design and therefore its inherent properties, it can still be off. As mentioned, the scale of it (thr+2 going to thr+3 can be a large percentage jump in raw damage, and the output of 'better limb material is not going to be linear in bow mass) is probably higher than the materials change will warrant.
"It's a bit lighter in mass for a given net
damage" is accurate. How you get there via ST or draw weight is slightly more complicated.