They are in fact awesome books.

I did as well.

30 grams is a round number somewhere in the ballpark of a musket ball. I am also uncertain as to how you ended up with 19.2 km/s.

To the best of my recollection the energy should be conserved according to the formula: energy = mass * velocity squared

Mass is in kg and velocity is in m/s

So solving for v would give us around 2.3 km/s for a 0.5 g projectile. At that speed, the projectile would most likely detonate immedeately due to air resistance rendering it problematic as a firearm.

Unfortunately people who have X instead of M or F on their documents haven’t been able to get a passport at all, even with the wrong gender marker. They have functionally been banned from traveling.

Many of the things we take for granted as obvious these days were anything but until recently. Take bolt cutters for example. The compound lever that let’s them function so well seems like something that would have been around for centuries, but in reality wasn’t something that was widely used/understood until the 1890s when they were marketed as a wonder tool.

On the other hand, this is a game and should be fun regardless of how anachronistic it is at times. At least as long as the witch/duck proportionality is maintained. There has to be at least some realism.

I was assuming that the total energy would be maintained (In this case 1350 joules) and thus the damage should be the same if weren’t spread out. It has been 20+ years since I has to do any of that math so I could be wrong about any of that. And since the only paper that was handy happened to be an envelope I guess it was technically back of the envelope math. :)

I imagine that the momentum would be conserved. So if the rifle normally shot a 30 gram ball at 300 meters per second, it would shoot a 5 kilogram ball at around 23 meters per second.

• The larger size and lower speed of the cannon ball would likely reduce the range.
• The larger size of the projectile would spread out the impact causing reduced damage.
• The ballistics would be significantly different making it far harder to hit with.

This is how I would do it in my game:

• Reduce the damage from 1d12 to 1d10
• Change piercing type to bludgeoning
• Reduce range from 40/120 to something like 20/60
• Add knockback of 5 ft to medium targets or 10 for small

The really neat thing would be shooting non standard rounds that wouldn’t be possible from a musket like incendiary or smoke rounds.