Peasant Railgun

Why the number 2,280? What keeps you from adding peasants until your projectile travels at 0.99c?

I'm guessing to get a nice, round number of two miles:

> At the start of combat, the chain of events is initiated and that wooden rod is carried two miles in 6 seconds which means it had to accelerate to the speed of 1900 miles per hour. This is due in part that a medium creature (which human peasants categorize as) takes up a one-by-one 5 foot square. Multiply that space times 2,280, and you easily get a line that spans two miles.

As far as why two miles, specifically? I don't know. Wizards can cast Meteor Swarm out from a range of one mile, so maybe there's something that can counter-act this nonsense from a range of 1.9?

It's worse, if I follow the logic, the projectile will travel any distance in 6s, so long as you have enough peasants.

I don't know what the D&D5 rules are on relativistic time dilation, I guess these would perhaps need to be invoked.

Given how grid-based combat works, I'm not even sure that D&D exists in a Euclidean-adjacent space time.

Nothing in any of the D&D universes suggests that it follows the same physical laws as ours, and many, many things say otherwise.

Yeah, the whole thing gets messy in an interesting way.

- if the rod travels across 7 light seconds in a round, the only way to avoid breaking relativity is if the 6 seconds the round takes are measured in the frame of reference of the rod

- that would mean that from the frame of reference of the rest of the people/monsters/edgy antiheroes/misunderstood blob creatures, the rod’s “turn” took 7 seconds.

All characters in the D&D universe are accustomed to a reality where each round takes 6 seconds, and everyone - in synchrony - is able to perform an integer number of tasks that fit within that timespan. Rounds begin and end simultaneously for everyone involved in combat. How disturbing would it be for such beings to see those laws broken?

I demand at least a semblance of pythagorean distances for this reason; (N+M/2 is close enough for the distances involved in combat). The 5e default of diagonal moves being equal to grid-aligned moves is significantly more painful to my brain than dividing by two is.

...also, why does it have to be a ladder? Where does the ladder come from? And why can't you have all 2280 peasants just do a normal attack to do 2280d6 (or whatever) damage?

>What keeps you from adding peasants until your projectile travels at 0.99c?

Yeah so, I did have a group in a setting with fusion torches, deliberately accelerate a large mass to a decent percentage of the speed of light, aimed at a planet, just to commit genocide.

Perhaps time is quantized and to the outside observer, the action takes 12 seconds?