Board Thread:Speculation House/@comment-7713314-20130602161859/@comment-10390252-20130603194315

67.149.99.170 wrote: Huh. After watching the trailer a couple more times, I have to agree. I initially dismissed the shotgun classification due to the bullets she shoots during her fight with Miltia and Melanie. Of course, this would still imply two things: that humans in the RWBY-verse are able to sustain incredible amounts of damage (possible, but I want to avoid the "named characters have plot protection" trap), and that Yang can, again, switch between shotgun and bullet modes at will (some of her shots after she reloads resemble her earlier ones). I also considered the possibility that she simply uses bullets all the way through the fight, but some of her shots have visible sprays.

Why don't we just call them "Badass Rounds" that shoot pure Awesomeness? :) There are shells and there are shells.  The ones that Yang initially used might have been blanks - the propellent charges only to increase the power of her blows.  The ones she uses after she reloads appear to be solid slug or spin-stabilised explosive ammo, which you can get for shotguns and tend to blow holes in cars' engine blocks.  You'll notice that Yang didn't actually use those reload rounds up close; they would have blown holes right through everyone.

Of course, by that point, she was so flame-rage powered up, she probably didn't need that enhancement anymore.

That said, if Melanie and Miltia hadn't been so agile, the shots Yang fired might have hit and killed them, unless she was deliberately aiming to score near-misses to keep them off-balance. That's the root of a completely different discussion: Is Yang willing to kill humans?