Ok, so I don’t think I explained my thoughts on crushing well. It’s not, in the real world, bludgeoning damage. I can see why they chose to not have a crushing damage type and just use bludgeoning though, as anything susceptible to one would be susceptible to the other.

Ugh, bringing AC into it is a mess. But I think your approach results in the tennis ball lasting an average of 20 hits in a game between two strong opponents. And less time the better they are at playing tennis?

I think you’ve moved the goal post, but perhaps in an interesting direction. If the goal is to simplfy the damage types, what do you lose by replacing force attacks with other types? I think you lose an impact type of damage like damage to creatures you can’t hit with a hammer. Magic missle goes from best to worst spell.

Physically its all same force, electromagnetic, but I think it misses the point. Nobody thinks that lightning is the same as slashing.

High pressure fluid injuries are significantly different, but we’re moving off track.

Let’s come from the other direction. Bludgeoning, slashing and piercing all do damage through the application of force. However, the damage they do is amplified and relise on a particular susceptibility of the victim.

Bludgeoning amplifies is force through rapid impact time.

Piercing amplifies is force through a sharp hard single point.

Slashing is more complex, but it amplifies with a sharp hard edge kinda.

But these ‘tricks’ to deal more damage don’t work on everything. For example bludgeoning requires ‘inelastic deformation’ before movement. I.e. a bat breaks a skull but not a tennis ball. I can see why crushing is put in this category, it recognises that damage is due to the susceptibility of the target to be inelastically deformed (bruised, broken bones, crushed organs w/e). Everything has an inelastic deformation point, put a tennis ball in a press and you can crush it. But in this case it’s not that the ball is susceptible to bludgeoning damage, it’s just that you have applied lots of force.

Same with piercing, the effectiveness of a spear is reduced by something that can distribute its force over a larger area. Which doesn’t matter if the ‘spear’ has a huge amount of force behind it. At which point it doesn’t matter if it was a spear with a sharp point or just a rod (or jet of fluid).

I don’t know what or if there are any cannon explanations, but I always had understood force as well… force. Bludgeoning, piercing, slashing are damage amplifiers that make do with limited force. But if you trying to damage say, a rock, they are basically irrelevant. But you put a rock in a hydrolic press and apply a enough force, and boom it cannot withstand. So being hit by an eldritch blast is less like being shot and more like being hit with a high pressure oil leak.

https://ndb.technology/

I worked up the energy to google. Turns out it’s not a photovoltaic (gamma-voltaic?) anyway, it’s a betavoltaic. I guess that makes more sense than the rubbish capture cross section of high energy light.

No one has directly answered your question.

The answer is yes, you can create photovoltaic cells better optimise to pick up high energy light such as that from nuclear decay (gamma radiation). However, the power generated by photovoltaics is limited more by intensity of the light, and not the energy per photon (wavelength). For physical reasons is hard to capture the energy of high energy light, so gamma photovoltaics are low power concepts.

There is an idea going around to grow diamond with c14 and also harvest that c14 decay with a diamond based photovoltaic. Making everlasting batteries, albeit radioactive and microwatt. (Specifics are probably wrong, working from memory.)

5sigma from the average person.