Fun fact about this in real life: A problem that gunmakers have had to deal with is that, although a faster-moving bullet fires straighter and penetrates better into its target, if the bullet moves *too* fast it will just poke a hole straight through a person without imparting enough of its kinetic energy onto them to be able to do real damage.

In 5e yes. I think the theory is once you hit terminal velocity, you aren't going to get any more damage from a longer fall. Fun fact, I actually did have a villain do exactly that in a campaign once. The party achieved a secondary win condition during combat and so the BBEG jumped off the top of the space elevator to escape.

There's a lot of factors, shape speed and deformation are all factors. Penetration and energy transfer are also at odds with each other in general. Gun manufacturers have this problem because speed is more or less capped by a practical barrel length, a rail gun can (theoretically) achieve enough speed that either factors start to become less relevant.

Pure theory, likely never ever going to be real, but could a bullet move so fast that it goes through someone without even damaging them?

... the death star orbits. The timer for the rebels to blow it up in a New Hope was how long its orbit would take to clear the moon in its path to the rebel base. The battle of endor was fought over the new death star in orbit over the moon. Yes, the death star is capable of warp, but that just puts it into orbit over different things.

> Cathy's Baby Shower? Also believe it or not, rail gun. Handing out gifts at the speed of sound.

That is simply not true. All you have to do is design your projectile in shape, construction and materials so the kinetic energy gets properly used to cause damage to the target. A tiny 40 grain .204 Ruger bullet with the absolutely insane muzzle velocity of 4100 fps will absolutely explode a watermelon if you use a rapidly expanding projectile such as a basic tipped varmint round. As a matter of fact, the problem you can recounted with projectiles that go too fast is that they will over expand and under penetrate depending on the nature of the target.

No, but it travels fast enough it would disintegrate and you could argue the resulting fireball would be what actually damaged the target. [Relevant XKCD.](https://youtu.be/3EI08o-IGYk)

Hold up. Didn’t some guy drop balls off a roof to show that things fall at the same speed?

Any matter going through you with that much mass is going to cause damage no matter how fast it goes. Billions of particles called neutrinos are moving through you right now as you read this but they are around 100,000,000,000,000x less massive than a hydrogen atom

So, yes and no. Acceleration due to gravity impacts all objects equally. With no air resistance, on earth, everything speeds up at 9.8m/s/s. But, that "no air resistance" is a big asterisk. This is why, say, parachutes work. It's also how we get terminal velocity. Often misinterpreted as "how fast you'd have to go to die from a fall" it's actually "how fast you need to go before the drag from your air resistance is a force greater than or equal to gravity"

Not really applicable but think there could be a small chance it would quantum tunnel through the person but that's such miniscule chance.

Right. That all makes sense. So the air resistance is what is also causing it to heat up. I still don’t see why a person wouldn’t do that.

So, multiple options here. Skydivers regularly hit terminal velocity, as fast as they'll go in atmosphere, before pulling their chutes. At these speeds, heat from friction isn't enough to worry about. Once again though, if you're coming down from space, that "in atmosphere" asterisk goes away. If you're dropping from a satellite, you're going at speeds necessary to orbit, and you don't have anything slowing you down until you hit the atmosphere. Suddenly your terminal velocity is way lower than infinity, and the friction you're feeling from the atmosphere is INTENSE, rapidly turning that speed into heat

Alight cool. All basically what I figured. Thanks!

I get the feeling the 4 million grain Revolving Peasant Gun with the velocity of 1% the speed of light will have the desired effect on any target.

Yes it orbits in the movies, that doesn't conflict with anything I said. I'm describing a scenario where it doesn't (which doesn't happen in the movies).

Alternatively, invest 18 levels into monk and get **no damage** in 99,51% of cases https://anydice.com/program/40317

Yes. ODST-Dropping your barbarian is objectively the best way to have him enter combat, and it inflicts psychological damage to anyone close enough to witness it.

What makes you say that?