Lamech wrote:Gravity works. Fire works. Parson's watch works. Toliet paper works. Parson still works just fine. Complete with getting tired, and sore legs. And losing weight. Mirrors work. Crap still smells. I mean sure maybe all those things we have seen so far in erf just happens to mimic earth, or maybe earth's physics still underlies things, and wargame rules got layed over the top of that. It is a heck of a lot simpler. And even if all these thing Erf just somehow decides to mimic, why would it suddenly stop for gun powder? It mimics batteries, and electricty, and whatever the watch uses to light up.
Long list of basic physical properties and laws we know DON'T Work reliably, or at all, in erfworld.
1. Gravity. a 1-inch jump from air to ground, when it's not your turn, has roughly a one-third chance of killing you. A thousand-foot jump when it's not your turn has roughly a one-third chance of NOT killing you. In the real world, this is ridiculous. 1 inch falls should effectively never kill, and thousand-foot falls should effectively always kill.
2. Time. Even though gravity and velocity remain minimal, merely crossing hex boundaries can result in thousand-to-one time compression rates compared to an alternate hex observer. And time actually REVERSES itself if you return to the original hex, but WITHOUT violating causality.
3. Inertia. ANY inanimate object attempting to cross hex boundaries off-turn freezes in place, but apparently is not damaged in the proccess, and somehow RESUMES it's original velocity when its turn comes around. remarkably, this somehow discriminates based on which unit launched said object, according to whether or not THAT UNIT fired on its turn.
2. Human Nutrition. A human can live several days without water, and a week or longer without food. in erfworld, if a unit goes for a single day without rations, it dies instantly.
3. Cellular growth and reproduction. As nearly as we can tell, Hair doesn't grow, skin doesn't produce dandruff, fingernails don't get longer, and gametes transferred during sex never fertilize or create new life.
4. Ballistics. based on what we know of erfworld stats, if you set up two crossbows on a benchrest, anchored so that they each pointed EXACTLY at a prisoners head, and then had a level 10 and a level 1 crossbowman pull the trigger without moving the bow.... Whether or not their respective bolts hit the target, and how much damage they do on impact, is determined by random chance and the level of the bowman. In real life, if the weapons are anchored and zeroed, and the target is stationary, it doesn't matter WHO pulls the trigger.
5. Conservation of mass.
as unit creation has been described to us, they literally 'pop' out of nowhere. if you sealed the 'popping' area in a glass bottle, air pressure and mass would spontanously increase; it wouldn't be converted from one form to another.
6. Conservation of energy. caster's 'juice' comes from nowhere. unspent juice spontanously disappears. juice cannot normally be transferred between mages, nor it can it be stored for use on subsequent turns. juice that has been 'spent' by a mage inside a sealed glass container presumably does not result in an increase in heat inside the container, nor does it leave detectable trace of 'juiciness' in the air.
(end list)
Electromagnetism can be deduced not to work based on all the celluar biology that doesn't work, as those are chemical reactions based on the trading of electrons, etc.
Strong Nuclear Force, and weak nuclear force haven't been tested yet, but the only way TO test those would be for Parson to get his hands on fissile material or a particle accelerator, and that doesn't seem likely.
When two thirds of basic physics principles have been shown not to apply to a given fantasy world, it's pretty much a given that physics there is arbitrary or completely different, and any 'engine' (including 'guns') from our world is unlikely to function in the ways we expect.
By comparison, take, say, The belgariad series, by David eddings. In that fantasy world, it is clearly estabilished that using magic to do any useful work has roughly the same metabolic cost as doing it with your muscles. If you throw a rock to the west, an equal and opposite force throws YOU to the east. In the Belgariad, the CORE tenants of physics are shown as being roughly the same as ours, there are just additional magic 'engines' for interacting with the environment. in the Belgariad, a gatling gun probably WOULD work. But that is NOT a safe assumption for EVERY fantasy universe; only those few where text evidence supports basic-physics-as-we-know-it.
