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 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.

[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]

[TGLS]

OK, here's how you really do it.
1) Take: Impaling Attack 211 (Increased Range x10 [+30%], Accessibility (Requires thousands of people) [-20%]) [1857]
2) Don't fail the roll and hit something you don't want to.

[Anders]

Thousands of people is probably more than -20%. Otherwise I like your build.

[Anaraxes]

You'd have to sort the peasants into initiative order for the sequence to work. And that could change every round if you reroll initiative. Really cuts into the RoF when the peasants have to run a mile or two in between shots.

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by Anaraxes

You'd have to sort the peasants into initiative order for the sequence to work. And that could change every round if you reroll initiative. Really cuts into the RoF when the peasants have to run a mile or two in between shots.

Nah, in GURPS the scheme would be reliant on Cascading Waits. The peasant in the front of the line uses Wait (Throw the weapon once the guy behind me hands it to me), and each of the ones behind him use Wait (Hand the weapon to the guy in front of me once the guy behind me hands it to me), except for the last peasant, who instead just hands the weapon to the guy in front of him, no Wait needed (although he may need to Do Nothing for a second or two while everyone else gets their Waits set). Of course, in GURPS grabbing something and then handing it to somebody else typically takes two seconds - a Ready to grab and secure the item (making it ready for use - in this case, the use is "handing it to the next guy"), and another Maneuver - I assume Ready, as it's the only one that seems to fit - to hand it to the next guy. Now, certainly you should be able to Ready the item "instantly," but that would require a roll akin to fast-draw, and with 2,280 characters, even if they have skill 16+ (rather removed from the "peasant" concept) somebody is going to fail (on average, you're looking at ~32* Failures - each of which would add an extra second - and ~10.5 Critical Failures, each of which would prematurely terminate the chain when a peasant drops the near-sonic projectile, killing several in front of him). A realism argument can be made to claim something like just grabbing something handed to you and giving it to the next guy could be done with a single Ready, but you can't really expect a GM to deviate from RAW for the sake of realism in the process of enabling you to pull off something hilariously unrealistic.

*Initially closer to 31.5, but as each calls for another roll, you have to add around another 0.5 to account for the failures within the new set of rolls.