You know that feeling when your unit has 1 HP left after combat? How much is that? How much real-life firepower would be needed to knock what's left of that unit over?
I did some quickmaths and came to the conclusion that each bullet fired from the marine's gauss rifle does 1.5 damage. I got that by the fact that he fires four times in one "volley" and it does a total of 6 damage, so you just divide that by the four bullets fired.
A civilian, who is lightly-armored, has 40 HP in SC1 and 30 HP in SC2, probably due to the fact that in SC2 they're just colonists and lack the fancy headgear that the SC1 civilian is wearing, likely due to being portrayed as specialist personnel recruited by the Terrans.
A zergling does 5 damage with one swipe of its claws, which is still less than a gauss rifle but still pretty hurty.
So I imagine that the real-life equivalent of losing 1.5 HP would be getting shot by one bullet. I don't know how big the bullets are in the gauss rifles, but I'd imagine they're pretty standard-sized, so that gives us a somewhat accurate estimate.
The thing is, in real life, we're humans and we have weak points. That "1.5 HP" of damage from a single bullet has its lethality modified by where in the body it hits. If it goes through the heart, well, that's a lotta damage, but what if the bullet just goes through your toe?
How much HP do "we" have? We're ordinary Joes and probably don't go around wearing body armor like the SC1/SC2 civilians who have 30 HP, and we have to account for critical spots in our bodies like the heart and brain when determining lethality of bullets and attacks, my question is how does this translate to "hit points"?
How do marines wear all that body armor and still only have like 45 HP, 55 with shield? Zealots are huge and hearty compared to a human and are lightly-armored so it makes sense, but does that mean HP is just determined by grit and how much you can take before you pass out from the pain?
EDIT: I just realized that if SC2 were realistic, ranged units would be able to critically hit and I think that puts the "1.5 HP of damage either wounding or instantly killing something" question to bed
