Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-26397825-20170730020549/@comment-30803571-20170804163641

okaaaay, here goes my 2 cents of SCIENCE!.

so, considering what we've seen i think what gravity dust does is generate a directed gravitational field. imho this would explain why it works like it does, and why it SEEMS to act in inconsistent ways.

this would mean the gravitational field can be directed towards a certain surface or object. by itself gravity dust would only be able to "pull", but in any direction. now normally this would mean whatever surface, object or point in space gravity dust is applied to would have things pulled towards it. However, we know Shnee glyphs can manipulate and redistribute the effects of dust in very complex ways, i think it's within reason that, when using Glyphs (or something else that allows similar control over dust) one would be able to reverse the gravitational field, effetively forming an "anti-gravity" field. in the case of the "anti-gravity biome" it'd simply be gravity dust being applied to the platforms, thus pulling things towards them.

Now you must be wondering, how does this allow gravity dust to be used to higher-recoil ammunition? the answear is deceptively simple: gravitational mass. Gravitational mass is the effective mass by which any object interacts with gravity, and doubles as the source of it too. now if gravity dust generates a gravitational field it must also generate an equivalent gravitational mass. furthermore, innertial mass (the one that defines how objects interact with forces, as well as their resistance to acceleration) is always equal to gravitational mass, noone knows why but we know it's a fact. This is turn means that increasing an object's gravitational mass will effectively increase their innertial mass, thus making the object heavier without adding matter or volume. If we assume gravity rounds infuse/apply gravity dust into the bullet, we'll get a heavier (and thus harder to stop) bullet. this explains why gravity rounds would be used as high-penetration rounds, but this doesn't explain the greater recoil yet (since the amounth of propellant would be same), for that we need to delve a bit into Jet propulsion.

you see, Jet propulsion works literally by chucking stuff out of a system/object. the bigger the kinetic energy of the stuff when it leaves the system the bigger the propulsion. the key here is said propulsion only happens as the stuff leaves the system, regardless of how much it's moving while still inside it. now we can assume the dust in a gravity dust round is activated a minuscule fraction of a second after the propellant is detonated, this would actually make sense, as the easiest way to handle activtion would be by letting the propellant do it, which would mean the propellant would have to go off first, in onder for th blast to activate the dust. If this is the case, then you have an already accelerated bullet that has it's mass suddenly increased BEFORE it leaves weapon's barrel (and thus before leaving the system). since most of the accelerating force has already been spent and the bullet is already moving at V speed this shouldn't slow it down in the slightest, in fact it's more likelly to give it greater recistance to decelleration from air resistance, thus allowing it to travel further and with greater energy. Since the round is already accelerated and moving at V speed before it leaves the barrel, it's kinetic energy will be equal to ((M + G) x V^2) / 2, compared to  (M x V^2) / 2 for a regular round; where M is the bullet's mass, G the gravitational mass added by the gravity dust, and V the muzzle velocity. This means the bullet leaves the system with greater kinetic energy than a regular bullet. and according to Jet propulsion, it'll excert a greater force over the system when leaving, thus causing greater recoil.

Here's hoping this helps explain gravity dust satisfactory. if anyone has any question regarding my hypothesis feel free to ask in this same thread.