That might seem an attractive intuition based on observing damage and having an understandable intuition of how damage should relate to energy, its wrong. Ener

That might seem an attractive intuition based on observing damage and having an understandable intuition of how damage should relate to energy, its wrong. Energy is force × distance. For gravitational potential (and, equivalently, the kinetic energy acquired when that is tranformed into kinetic energy by a fall), the force is the force of gravitational attraction between the body and the object it is falling toward (the object’s weight) and the distance is the distance of the (actual or potential, as appropriate) fall. The nonlinearity you observe in damage is because damage is a complicated outcome that depends on a lot more than aggregate energy involved.