Shardplate say what?

[Tamriel Wolfsbaine]

So I was just throwing together a bunch of numbers and got a ton of decent data points for different ammunition as well as hammers as found in @therunner and my conversation Spheres vs Shards. Kaladins fall is still the most energy I can come up with.  Not by a ton.  The shardhammer at 100kg, as well as the 700 nitro and 50 BMG are all right behind it with hot load outs (just like a hammer can be swung slower or faster the ammunition can be loaded differently)  all of these come out to somewhere in that 20,000 joules range.  

Being a forged in fire fan I also calculated out the biggest sword they ever made.  It weighed 15lbs only but landed that ~6 foot blade length and I feel it is a good comparison for the shardblades we see most commonly in the dueling arena.  I had it swing at 40m/s (thinking shardplate would enable you to swing it that fast at least) and got about 5400 joules.  

And assuming a parshendi club generates 1600 joules and the slings do just under that I think this might work. 

In my efforts to make sense of all of this I fell back on my old gaming habits and tried to remember those years tanking in various MMOs.  In WoW there are 3 or 4 main concepts I think could be combined to explain most of what we see shardplate do. First off, the HP bar for a person wearing shardplate is really actually just stormlight and what makes living plate a cut above the rest is that they are a raid teams worth of healers combined with the tank so that plate will likely suffer far less in the long run.  There is a good argument to be made that living plate could have higher base mitigation as well but it we push that too too far we break my brain further. 

So onto a bit of my theory (decided I wanted feedback before I deliver it in another thread):  

Like a shield in the MMO plate has a specific amount of damage that simply never gets through.  I think 1500 joules or so is a spot that is arguable for what we see in world.  Anything 1500 joules or less is going to be wholly ineffective.  So long as the plate was fresh and had not sustained a large enough hit yet.

The plate could be carrying a 75% kinetic energy reduction at that point. The first time the plate gets hit it lowers the damage reduction threshhold by an amount. Maybe the next hit only needs 1400kinetic energy to start to make those cracks. As well as weakening the large 75% damage reduction down to a more manageable amount. 

So give the plate a 10,000 kinetic energy threshold hold.  It starts out absorbing 1500 kinetic energy minimum without issues and lowers all other kinetic energy by 75%.  Your 20,000 kinetic energy kick, guns or shardhammer are only getting 5000 of that energy through. But at 50% broken the plate now only has a flat mitigation of 700 kinetic energy as it is losing structural integrity and it is fragile enough that it can only block upwards of 50% of the next blast. That gun can only do 10000 to it.  

Here we hit a snag.  I think the plate will always give you one last hold. All overkill on a piece of plate gets negated by the outward force of the explosion.  

Shardblades are magical and avoid all damage resistance by the plate.  So that first 5000 energy blow damages close to what the first 20000 energy shot or kick does. 

Plus it would allow the parshendi hammer time parties to make sense as well. 

I think it works fairly well considering the fact that it is powered by stormlight.  

More stormlight like in the case of radiants could heal back and as it heals back it will gain its resistances again proportionally.  Your big hits still have devastating effects while bringing a 20000 joule hit in line to make sense with the 5000 joule strike of a shardblade against full plate and still stopping the 1 shot potentials.  

It probably needs a bunch of tweaking but it is the only way I can make sense of what we see in book.  Kaladins drop kick didnt specifically say he broke 4 different pieces of plate just that it cracked in 4 corners on the back and not at the point of impact.  I kind of picture it as cracking at the edges as the plate tried to absorb the energy but a Shockwave hit where it wrapped around the guy and cracked at those corners.  

 

Now for some in world justification for the mechanic:

It is the spren making up the plates moral that allows them to be so efficient.  Large hits break moral quickly but many smaller hits will also wear it down.  As they take a massive blow they see failure more and more just as they would if 3 guys surrounded them smashing over and over.  Stormlight directly feeds their moral and thus you have healing plate. Their last ditch effort when dropped to 0% moral is to violently shove back one last stand against the thing hitting them before breaking fully. 

Investiture resists investiture and all shard blades cancel them out.  

Only think I can't wrap my head around is why everyone wouldn't just carry living shardhammers if this is anywhere near correct.  I guess if it works in this way nothing can get more than a 1 shot. A living shardhammer could do it but the overkill rule limits it to 1 piece or whatever at a time. For normal non shard weapons you would need 40000+ kinetic energy to destroy a single piece of armor in 1 shot. 

If you can land a hit on multiple pieces of armor they simply divide the damage dealt amongst themselves.  

[therunner]

I don't have time at the moment, so I will get to the rest later. But regarding your last point about hammers:
 

4 hours ago, Tamriel Wolfsbaine said:

Only think I can't wrap my head around is why everyone wouldn't just carry living shardhammers if this is anywhere near correct.  I guess if it works in this way nothing can get more than a 1 shot. A living shardhammer could do it but the overkill rule limits it to 1 piece or whatever at a time. For normal non shard weapons you would need 40000+ kinetic energy to destroy a single piece of armor in 1 shot.

One, only Radiant would have access to Living Shardhammer.
Two, up until the Last Desolations Radiants never fought each other and no one else had access to Plate. So there would be no reason to form Shardhammers.

Even now Odium's forces don't have that many Shardplates, and Radiants are needed elsewhere (especially since Deadplate vs Deadplate combat is known and tested).