Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-108.214.113.232-20151015061142/@comment-73.165.21.136-20151116010207

I've actually got a theory about how Huntsmen block bullets.

So yeah, Huntsmen train for years learning to fight. But this does not really explain how they can swat bullets from the air. Bullets move too fast for the eye to follow. The speed at which neurons fire and muscles contract is not fast enough to catch bullets. But this is based off the assumption that Remnant uses our technology.

We need to be cognizant of the fact that all the technology in Remnant is based off of Dust. Second, we need to realize that Dust is a horribly inefficient propellant. We see that all the guns and all the explsoives in Remnant use Dust as the reactive compound. The first piece of evidence is in the 'Black' trailer. We see the Atlesian robots open fire on Blake and Adam, and we see Adam swat the shots out of the air. We also see that the bullets move very, very, slowly compared to our bullets. As in, we can see the actual rounds go through the air. This could be attributed to the possiblity that they were using tracer rounds, but in common military doctrine, if tracer rounds are used at all, they are only every fifth round, instead of comprising the entire magazine. This means that the bullets are moving well below the sound barrier.

The second giveaway is everybodies reaction to gunfire. More importantly, how they react to the sound of gunfire. Guns are pretty fucking loud. Ruby's rifle uses very high caliber of bullet, pretty much like a fifty-caliber round. Those are deafening. Yet, Faunus with extra ears, which should be extra sensitive to noise, are not remotely bothered by this. You could say they've gotten used to the sound of gunfire, but they would be practically deaf if that were the case. This also implies that the explosions caused by Dust are much weaker in their relative force.

This is proved a third time in the episode 'No Brakes'. We see that the bombs in the train cars are pretty big. But, the exposions they cause are pretty small compared to the overal size of the bomb. Lets compare this to modern explosive compounds. Half a pound (U.S) of Semtex has enough destructive power to practically vaporized a commercial airliner. A bomb the size of the one the White Fang used stuffed with Semtex would cause catastrophic damage, as opposed to the much smaller bang the Dust bomb cause. Also, the missiles we see in the series do almost nothing. Think about Junior's missile launcher. They seem like fireworks, especially compared to Yang. A normal explosive should have turned her into jelly, but she acts like nothing happened. Her Semblance doesn't even seem amplified by it.

So in conclusion, Dust is such a poor explosive that Dust rounds move slow enough to either be tanked by some characters, or deflected with minimal effort.

(So if someone introduced them to real gunpowder, the show's entire dynamic would change.)