jester47 said:
My thoughts are that the tree would just splinter (explode) upon impact. the lampost would just bend around the target. The axe would work. One of the things that is used commonly as a club is another mechs limb. The hatchetmans hatchet and the arm of a wolverine are both built using mech armor and materials. One would think (with my limited understadning of physics) that swinging mech armor against mech armor could actually do some damage. Both have the same hardness/density/toughness but one is moving at a good clip (probably faster than the speed of sound) and its force of impact combined with its hardness would be enough to damage the armor.
Aaron.
Thing is, you don't have to "breach" the armor to do damage. For instance, if I smack you in the head, my hand doesn't actually penetrate, or even damage, your skull (assuming we're talking about cranial hits here, not facial bones). But I can still do 'damage,' because the kinetic energy of my hand will be transferred
through the skull to the squishy brain within--which can damage itself by literally smacking against the inside of the skull, like a non-seat-belted passenger hitting the dashboard in a car crash.
The same with the computer + hammer analogy. I can probably bend the side of the computer case in with the hammer, but that's not what's going to stop the computer from working. It's going to be internal components that are damaged by the transferred energy of the hits.
Now, presumably interior components of a mech would be somewhat more robust than your average hard drive; but at the same time, there's still going to be an inherent fragility to them. Especially the "squishy" sitting in the cockpit.
I'd treat improvised hand-to-hand weapons in a similar manner as falling, or colliding with a barrier. I don't know how Battletech specifically handles those events, but it seems to me that being hit by a large, heavy object--regardless of whether the object is damaged or destroyed in the process--should have a high probability of knocking the mech over, stunning the pilot, or some other low-intensity type of damage; along with a relatively small chance of doing actual armor or internal-component damage (concurrent with denting or otherwise deforming the armor, adversely affecting its performance, internal components coming loose and smashing around, and so on).
