Rubber hose
) 
| |
|---|---|
| Name | rubber hose |
| Appearance | rubber hose |
| Damage vs. small | 1d4 |
| Damage vs. large | 1d3 |
| To-hit bonus | +0 |
| Weapon skill | whip |
| Size | one-handed |
| Base price | 3 zm (+10/positive enchant) |
| Weight | 20 |
| Material | plastic |
A rubber hose is a type of rarely-seen weapon that appears in NetHack. It is a one-handed weapon that uses the whip skill, and is made of plastic.
Contents
Generation
Rubber hoses are not randomly generated.
Keystone Kops have a 1⁄6 chance of generating with a rubber hose.[1]
Strategy
Rubber hoses do more damage than the bullwhip against small and large monsters, and are not rendered ineffective by thick-skinned monsters. Nonetheless, they are unremarkable as weapons and lack the bullwhip's other utilities (e.g., disarming monsters). Players that seek it out at all often use it for polyfodder, or else for some novelty purpose as with most items considered to be junk.
History
The rubber hose first appears in NetHack 3.0.0.
Variants
dNetHack
In dNetHack, rubber hoses are removed along with the Keystone Kops, which have been replaced by the Keter Sephiroth.
SpliceHack
In SpliceHack, a rubber hose can be combined with a club at a furnace to create a baseball bat.
SlashTHEM
In SlashTHEM, all Drunks start the game with a +0 rubber hose.
Hack'EM
In Hack'EM, rubber hoses can be found in junk shops.
Encyclopedia entry
The Keystone Kops and the rubber hose share the same encyclopedia entry:
The Kops are a brilliant concept. To take a gaggle of inept policemen and display them over and over again in a series of riotously funny physical punishments plays equally well to the peanut gallery and the expensive box seats. People hate cops. Even people who have never had anything to do with cops hate them. Of course, we count on them to keep order and to protect us when we need protecting, and we love them on television shows in which they have nerves of steel and hearts of gold, but in the abstract, as a nation, collectively we hate them. They are too much like high school principals. We're very happy to see their pants fall down, and they look good to us with pie on their faces. The Keystone Kops turn up--and they get punished for it, as they crash into each other, fall down, and suffer indignity after indignity. Here is pure movie satisfaction.
The Kops are very skillfully presented. The comic originality and timing in one of their chase scenes requires imagination to think up, talent to execute, understanding of the medium, and, of course, raw courage to perform. The Kops are madmen presented as incompetents, and they're madmen rushing around in modern machines. What's more, the machines they were operating in their routines were newly invented and not yet experienced by the average moviegoer. (In the early days of automobiles, it was reported that there were only two cars registered in all of Kansas City, and they ran into each other. There is both poetry and philosophy in this fact, but most of all, there is humor. Sennett got the humor.)
