Would the peasant railgun be possible in GURPS?

[Anders]

Here's the peasant railgun:

• Hire a ton of peasants; let's just say that it is two thousand two hundred and eighty. Line them up in single file; this will form a chain of peasants two miles long. It'd have been four miles back in MY day (witness me hiking up my 2nd Edition suspenders).
• Buy a ladder. Just buy a standard, ten-foot ladder. Disassemble the ladder into a bunch of rungs and a pair of mighty ten-foot wooden poles. Hand a pole to the peasant at the back of line.
• First round of combat. Peasant at the front of line readies an action to throw the pole at the enemy. Every peasant behind him readies an action to hand the pole to the peasant in front of him.
• Next round: peasants fire off their readied actions, passing the pole two miles down the line and hurling it in six seconds or less. Pole accelerates to the speed of 1188 miles per hour, or Mach 1.546875 in dry air, at 20°C/68°F, at sea level on our planet.
• Peasant Railgun can be reloaded and fired in less than 12 seconds.
• Variations - Really, your choice. Weapon is scalable, you could use your peasant railgun to fire a number of things at a really long range. Add more peasants to make the weapons even faster; paint them red to make them fasta. Use gobbos to make a DnD grot cannon. Hurl pointy bombs for HEAT weapons. Severed heads make an impressive psychological warfare tool. It's even more wild with a bag of holding - place a team of fighters in it for DYNAMIC ENTRY over castle walls and hell, hurl some bear cavalry directly into enemy lines, who knows. You can also throw a halfling monk to take full advantage of Flurry of Blows at 1200 mph and if you go with the falling object rule for 5e with the wooden rod being 7 lbs you have 5-9 lb per 60 ft do 2d6, making the rod going about 2 miles per 6 seconds making it do 300d6 A TURN!!!! Combine this with the 15,000,000 gold-a-day trick and you're ready to absolutely ruin your DM's day.
• ????
• PROFIT

How quickly would the projectile travel? GURPS has 1-second rounds, so I guess it would go six times faster, right? How much damage would it do?

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by Anders

Here's the peasant railgun:



How quickly would the projectile travel? GURPS has 1-second rounds, so I guess it would go six times faster, right? How much damage would it do?

The really funny thing about the peasant railgun? It doesn't work, because just as D&D internal 'physics engine' allows readied actions to work to allow instant movement of an object from one end of the chain to the other, they also confer no momentum on it as a result. Peasant chains are 'great' for instant communication, but terrible as railguns.

[Anders]

Originally Posted by Rupert

The really funny thing about the peasant railgun? It doesn;t work, because just as D&D internal 'physics engine' allows readied actions to wok to allow instant movement of an object from one end of the chain to the other, they also confer no momentum on it as a result. Peasant chains are 'great' from instant communication, but terrible as railguns.

*handwaving motions intensify*

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by Anders

*handwaving motions intensify*

That way lies handwave-powered flight.

As for the peasant-railgun in GURPS, chained waits should have a similar effect.

[Anders]

The railgun would propagate the staff at one mile/second, that's Move 1760. It has 12 HP. So that's a slam damage of (1760*12/100)= 211d or 6d*35. That's almost as much as the 40mm railgun in Ultra-Tech. Range is short, 700 yards (assuming no air resistance and the average peasant being 6 feet).

Now, the peasant FTL telegraph... it is well known that traveling at superluminal speeds allows you to create closed timelike curves, i.e. time travel. I think we have just figured out how to do time travel by RAW in GURPS.

[Varyon]

Player: Behold, my almighty Mach 9 peasant railgun!

GM: This isn't going to work, you know.

Player: Of course it is, it's genius! Now, the first peasant uses a Ready to hand over the pole to the second, who -

GM: - uses a Ready to grab and prepare it to hand over to the next one. Next round.

Player: [vader-noooo.mp3]

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by Rupert

The really funny thing about the peasant railgun? It doesn;t work, because just as D&D internal 'physics engine' allows readied actions to wok to allow instant movement of an object from one end of the chain to the other, they also confer no momentum on it as a result. Peasant chains are 'great' from instant communication, but terrible as railguns.

Honestly I don't think it even works in the D&D physics engine. Surely both pass and retrieve an item are Move Actions, you don't get to do two in a round, which means the railgun can only be two characters long. Sure you can *drop* the item as a Free Action for the next guy to retrieve but if you do that it's completely clear why it retains no momentum.

Instead of just mostly clear - after all if it's still moving relative to you, it's not really retrieved is it? You couldn't, say, drop it to the floor as a Free Action - it'd fly off somewhere rather than land at your feet - or prepare it as a material component to cast a spell if it was going to go flying out of your hand in the next millisecond.

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by malloyd

Honestly I don't think it even works in the D&D physics engine. Surely both pass and retrieve an item are Move Actions, you don't get to do two in a round, which means the railgun can only be two characters long.

I can't speak to anything outside of 3.x, but you absolutely can do two Move Actions in a round there - you get one Standard Action and one Move Action, with the option to trade in the Standard Action for an additional Move Action. So you can pass items, messages, etc at incredible speed doing this (but you can't retain that speed for an attack - just as the peasants don't have their hands catch fire for passing an item between them at supersonic speed, the item is treated as moving at a more relaxed speed; this is more akin to a Warp Drive than a railgun).

[Polydamas]

Originally Posted by Rupert

The really funny thing about the peasant railgun? It doesn;t work, because just as D&D internal 'physics engine' allows readied actions to wok to allow instant movement of an object from one end of the chain to the other, they also confer no momentum on it as a result. Peasant chains are 'great' from instant communication, but terrible as railguns.

It strikes me as a specifically computer game and 3e.3.5e D&D idea ... earlier editions of D&D were usually like GURPS, the GM was always right. It was 3e D&D which tried to offer exactly one clear and authoritative answer to any question governed by the rules.

Rules lawyering is an old tradition, but this specific idea strikes me as specific to a particular concept of the game.

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by Polydamas

It strikes me as a specifically computer game and 3e.3.5e D&D idea ... earlier editions of D&D were usually like GURPS, the GM was always right. It was 3e D&D which tried to offer exactly one clear and authoritative answer to any question governed by the rules.

Rules lawyering is an old tradition, but this specific idea strikes me as specific to a particular concept of the game.

D&D3.x was very clear that the GM could, and should, rule on ambiguous situations, and that they could and should change rules that were resulting in dumb outcomes. I don't know of any GM that's ever allowed instantaneous message movement via chain readies, let alone a 'peasant railgun', nor even teleporting samurai (there was a class feature for them that allowed a step between each blow of a great cleave, so as long as they never missed and every hit dropped someone they could 'teleport' across crowded battlefields).

Likewise, I don't know of anyone who allowed some of those obviously abusive character builds in their games (though less obvious builds certainly slipped through), just as I don't know any GURPS GM that would allow those cheap galaxy-killing area attacks you can legally build. In each case that doesn't mean people didn't have fun coming up with the builds, even though they probably never had any intent to use them in a game.