Am I getting anything wrong here?
I think a knife uses force over a small area rather than energy, as pressure to cause cuts, splits and cracks.
A club can have the same pressure as the knife, but the club carries greater momentum and will knock around things more.
A bullet causes damage through the energy it carries and causes heat and deformations as it hits the target.
When people talk damage with bullets they use energy, but with melee it’s usually force. But when should I use them? Both are used at the same time but one is doing more of the effect. Don’t both result in work?
Like a force over a distance is work and thus the same as kinetic energy. Joules.
But if it’s pressure doing work I get unsure. I mix up how things break all the time.
In: Physics
Force is a result of energy. It’s the mass x acceleration. All of the things you mention use this formula, but the variables change a lot. A club has higher mass, but lower acceleration, and also distributes that force over a larger area than a bullet, so its tends to not penetrate, but also transfers most of its inertia into the target. A bullet has lower mass, but much higher acceleration that is also focused on a small area, so it results in a lot more pentration, but that low area of contact might not all get absorbed by the target, so the bullet might pass right on through.
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