bare-fingered digging and damage to hands?

[Plane]

So there's this scene in infinity train (ep 12) where one character is digging really quickly bare-handed and is asked if they have "special .. strength".

They reply "no, I just don't feel pain like you with your squishy flesh". IE they probably have some DR which is helping them.

B350 bases digging on one's basic lift.

Using a pick on "ordinary soil" makes it slightly more efficient, instead of 1/hour (3xBL f^3 per 3 hours) if you break up 4xBL in the first hour making it loose, you then pick up that 4x (at 2x per hour) over the next 2 hour, giving you a net rate of 4xBL f^3 per 3 hours) Not the hugest advantage but slightly beneficial.

It seems you can work around the need to break it up w/ a pick through non-picked digging.

It almost seems like on ordinary soil you are effectively using your first hour to break up 2xBL (instead of the 4xBL of a pick) into a loose soil, then the 2nd hour to lift it per usual.

This "pickless speed" is of course not bare-handed. I overlooked it initially but B350 mentions it assumes you have "iron or steel" tools, with x2 time (half speed) for wood and x4 (or more?) time (quarter or worse speed) for "improvised", listing "bare hands" or "mess kit" as examples (not the clearest guideline).

Should there maybe be some wear and tear on the hands when using your hands like a pseudo-shovel (much less a pseudo-pick, that should probably be impossible) in this fashion?

If we view wooden tools as half-effectiveness metal tools (I'm assuming the non-pick application of "tools" refers to shovels here, not sure what else you would need) then maybe we view bare hands as half-effectiveness wooden tools?

I was thinking maybe if we had some rules to allow for damage to happen to the hands while digging bare-handed (whether this is for ordinary or hard soil) and then having hand DR could insulate you against it.

You could even apply rules like this to wooden or metal tools but since they inherently have DR it probably wouldn't be an issue of them taking damage over time.

In terms of "damaging the ground" I don't think punching would make sense (you're only packing it harder) so maybe something like an "eye poke" (MA72 ignoring the -9 for hitting eyes, giving +4 to target a hex instead) could be used as the basis for damage (thrust-3 crush)

Unlike punches, the "poke" attack has "Hurting Yourself (p. B379) applies
if your target has any DR, not just DR 3+" which means if ordinary soil has DR 1 you're going to suffer 1/5 the damage you're inflicting to that homogenous entity as you poke holes into it and then scoop pieces out of it.

Per RAW of course this won't actually hurt you unless your poke does 5+ damage (pretty rare outside crits for normal ST) though if you house-rule w/ decile damage and accrue 0.2 per 1 dmg that could wreck your hands very rapidly.

If that were done when using "Fingerpoke" as an improvised "thrust shovel stab" then it would explain why digging with gloves (or natural hand DR) would allow you to dick much faster since you could make stronger-damage attacks (penetrating soil more deeply, breaking it up better) without self-harming.

That or I guess high pain threshold would work too (you'd suffer the HP but it wouldn't affect your DX via shock ... though I can't remember if there's a skill roll for digging)

The only thing of course is we don't exactly have any idea of how to adapt combat mechanics like damage for digging. The BL-based speed makes sense for "how long does it take me to scoop this loose stuff off the ground" as it's based on Lifting ST, but I would think Striking ST would be what you would use for the rapid strikes (whether with a pickaxe, a shovel or fingers) used to actually puncture the soil prior to a scoop.

Is there some way we could stat a cubic foot (or yard) of soil into some kind of creature and assign it HP and somehow depleting that HP is what transforms it into the softer stage of soil (diffuse instead of homogenous) that can actually be lifted up?

I'm assuming higher DR and mass is why a metal shovel would work better than a wooden one, since if they had the same blade size they should be able to scoop the same volume of loose soil as a metal shovel, so long as it didn't break under the load (and there's only so much mass of soil you can fit in a single scoop of a given shovelhead's surface area)

I'm aware PU2p10 has the "burrower" perk which lets you act as if you had a shovel (doesn't specify if this means a metal or a wood one though...) but that's not quite what I'm talking about. I assume that could refer to just having larger hands the size of a shovelhead, since this perk doesn't require having DR.

B94 tunneling could also be relevant in some way but I don't know how to make that interact with Striking ST or hand DR for "digging as combat" approach.