Salem

I found out you could move with the WASD keys after clicking the mortar and getting the targeting rings. The rings would remain but you could load new areas of the map as you got near enough. So, being an upstanding member of the Salem community, I decided to walk about 30 units away from the mortar until a new area became visible, and fire into it. I mean, you wouldn't want someone putting 1 mortar in a gigantic 5,000x5,000 town and then just clicking it and walking all over the place to hit anywhere outside the mortar's normal range, right? Well, the server did not appreciate my righteous inquisitiveness, and crashed.

It should be noted that I have a piddly 157 Sparks & Embers on my main character.

Given the large impact radius of the test projectiles and my very unimpressive S&E, I was rather surprised by how little travel time was required by them. I will cover this in detail later.

As it turns out, you can launch drying frames. This means that you have unlimited, albeit not very strong, ammo if you have a planted tree nearby from which to pick branches.
Interestingly, not only does launching a drying frame result in wood chips at the impact site, but also at the launch site.

The target area is circular and appears to have a diameter of roughly 22 units.

It fires very, very far. As far as I could see fully zoomed out in freestyle camera mode (In the Latikai client). If you can see the ground, you can place the center of the bullseye on it and fire, which may mean that objects outside your view would be caught in the radius, though I kind of doubt it. I couldn't tell by myself, and couldn't really surmise well from the wood choppings at the impact site. You only need to have the ground loaded, not all the objects on the ground there.

Unfortunately, in this crude preliminary solo testing, it was very hard to to tell when the impacts came beyond a small distance. I had to rely on the sound for the very far ones, but I confirmed that there were impacts. I used my ipad stopwatch and screenshotted each trial and then screenshotted the album full of those screenshots--hardly scientific. There wasn't very much variability between the distances, large and small. Whether point-blank or at clipping distance, they all seemed to occur between roughly 4 and a half to 5 and a half seconds (I was slow on the 5.53). Bear in mind that I don't have high Sparks & Embers at all. Despite this, I feel confident that another player who was trying to also attack a wall would have a challenging time avoiding 100% of even my poorly lobbed shots. Considering the large radius of impacts, and the lack of dropoff, if you get hit by a tar barrel by a high Sparks & Embers player, someone is likely getting hit by an anvil.

(I did more tests than this)

My loading speed seemed to always be around 12.50 seconds.

(I did more tests than this)

A direct hit from a Drying Frame did exactly 15 blood damage and inflicted 14 minutes of , which I assume is the Concussion effect JC mentioned. I tried seeing if I could reduce the duration of the debuff by leaving the impact site, but it appeared to have no effect. I traveled many tiles away (many thousands of units). It looks like you can be concussed for a very long time. Concussion didn't debuff any of my stats or anything apparently concussion will debuff your BB, but the effect of the drying frame ammo on my BB was so small as to be unnoticeable. Just remember that, if this is the concussion effect, do not sleep! JC said that you can die if you sleep while concussed.

I tried some more trials, gradually moving away from the direct center of the impact.

The resulting damage from this impact was exactly the same as the first (15 Blood damage and 14 minutes of the Concussion(?) debuff.


I moved further from the "bullseye"

The result here, again, was 15 blood damage and 14 minutes of Concussion.

I decided to try a near-miss next (zooming so far out reduced the quality).


Once again, 15 blood damage and 14 minutes of Concussion.

Clearly, I'm not a veteran Salem player, and have never really PvP'd in this game. I just did what I could to provide some preliminary findings. However, I can say that if two people with my S&E were firing at a few people with prepared projectiles, they would be getting hit a quite a lot. I would imagine one high S&E person would as well. Also, given the lack of damage dropoff on the test projectile, you could use the mortar practically point-blank, as the circle could be placed behind but just containing the target, and not you as well.

I'm going to suspend testing at this time because I want to be completely sure that "sleeping", which JC said could be fatal while under the effects of Concussion, doesn't include being logged off or knocked out. I highly doubt it does, but you never know. I'm pretty confident I could take a compost bin, whittler's bench, and a gardening pot to the head. So I might go ahead and do those, but I may have to leave the carpenter's benches, grinding stones, and anvils to the "titan"-type characters for now.

There wasn't any damage or debuff (when inflicted and when expired) notification in System Chat. There is also no damage displayed overhead when you are struck (at least on the Latikai client). This means you just have to note your Blood prior to taking the hit, and then subtract it yourself.