Why is Wax such a crack shot?

[+ShardlessVessel]

I don't have a theory, I just wanted to put this out there. Wax is impossibly good at shooting. I know, this is fantasy, Wax is a good shot, all that stuff.

Thing is, it's not glossed over. Both the narration and the characters remark on how good Wax's shooting skills are all the time, and he's constantly doing things that do not make sense. He can hit the head of every bandit in a ballroom, or shoot a bullet off another bullet into a dude's head from inside a time bubble. THIS IS NOT NATURAL.

So I wonder: is Harmony guiding his shots? Is his (near-)savantism (savanthood? savantness?) interacting with his shooting? Is he really just that good? Is this Destiny with a capital D at work?

[Duxredux]

My guess? His Steelsight been giving him far, far more information on the trajectory and accuracy of his shooting for decades. Unlike people who have to fire a gun and then go down range to see where they hit on the target, he can feel the bullet as it travels and know exactly where it lands in relation to where he thought he was aiming. This additional sensory feedback with likely hundreds if not thousands of hours of practice lets him make ridiculously precise shots, even though he couldn't shoot worth beans in the SoS prologue. We also know he experiments with these kinds of things, practicing getting shot while wearing padding to try to deflect bullets with Steel, and seeing if he could outdraw someone in a standoff while using practice blanks, etc. He's likely been adapting, learning, and refining his technique the whole time. 

Wax also gets sensory feedback on his targets' positions if they happen to be wearing metal, based on money in wallets, buckles, guns, buttons, ammo, etc.. With the trick shot of hitting a bullet from a speed bubble, he could directly sense his target if he so chose. He is supernaturally good, but I think it's more to do with his supernatural senses than anything else.

[Returned]

In addition to the very good points made by @Duxredux describing that Wax gets extra precise, reliable, real-time information on his targets and shooting that could help refine his practice, I have to imagine that being a Coinshot helps you develop a great sense of linear paths away from oneself (you can only push directly away from your own body). Also, I think that there may be a couple of other items:

• First is that some people have natural talents that exceed those of others. Given that Harmony chose Wax specifically for his role we might presume that he has some natural skills and talents that most people don't. He isn't just some guy given a handgun and lots of practice, he's a naturally exceptional marksman given those things and more.
• Second is that he has an exceptional gunsmith working for him in Ranette. She painstakingly crafts weapons for him very precisely since she is very interested in guns and something of a perfectionist about her craft. Maybe her being a Lurcher gives her even more insight-- for example, with enough practice she might be able to sense exactly how much metal is in a part of a gun by judging the iron lines coming off of it.
• Third, if he pushes on a bullet it guarantees that he'll be adding momentum to it in exactly a straight line. If his initial shot is pretty close to being on-target that push might be enough to help ensure that it doesn't deviate much from what he wants to hit. The physics of it would be odd though, so I don't know if that could be much of a factor.
• Fourth, he might be able to quickly tap an Ironmind to minimize recoil. It would only take a fraction of a second, and might not drain much stored weight. He might not even notice it after a while, though I have to assume he would be aware of it as something he generally does (if, indeed, he generally does it).
• Finally I think that the fantasy and narrative elements are unavoidable. Handguns are hard to aim precisely, especially over even a modest distance. Once a gun is fired you have very little time to react in any way before the bullet reaches its target, almost certainly too little to perceive and respond to anything about it (even a fast pitch in baseball leaves very little time for a batter to respond, evidenced by the fact that a very good batter hits the ball in ~1 out of every 3 attempts; bullets go a lot faster than the ball!). It's a more exciting and streamlined story if he tends to hit his targets.

In any case, he definitely is a freakishly, suspiciously good marksman.

Edited June 3, 2022 by Returned

[Treamayne]

6 hours ago, Returned said:

Third, if he pushes on a bullet it guarantees that he'll be adding momentum to it in exactly a straight line. If his initial shot is pretty close to being on-target that push might be enough to help ensure that it doesn't deviate much from what he wants to hit. The physics of it would be odd though, so I don't know if that could be much of a factor.

The corollary here is that he could also be nudging his shots to hit correctly.

Given W -> B -> T, if that is a direct straight path from his center-mass the bullet would have no change in trajectory; but if there is, for example, a 1 degree shift in his center mass down, then the bullet trajectory should shift 1 degree up. So his bullet pushes may not just be to push them faster, but to compensate any target shifts with minor changes to bullet trajectory.

[Duxredux]

When I stop and visualize @Returned's comment on Wax's sense of linear paths away from himself, this gets even more obvious IRL terms. Wax essentially has had a limited form of laser sights for himself, if not his gun, in an era that has analog sights. He can literally line up the metal of the bullet in his gun with a metal object and make adjustments from there. The Steelsight lines pointing to metal surrounding a target gives him angular data he can mentally divide and compare to the angle of the metal bullet in his gun when not using Aluminum rounds, or the barrel of his gun when not using an Aluminum gun. That means he will never be more inaccurate than the 2 or 3 pieces of metal closest to his target. If he misses, the bullet now near his target gives him even more targeting data, if close enough to sense. Of course guns don't follow straight line firing and he has to adjust for gravity and distance, but if he's using known objects such as an enemy's pistol to get a general sense of the amount of metal he is using to aim, the width of the Steel line may give him ranging data in addition to regular depth perception.

What about how Steel lines point away from your center of gravity? Wax makes the third button down on his shirts out of steel (if I remember right), so presumably that's his center of gravity. For me, that's about in line with the middle of my shoulders, meaning that if I held my arm with a gun directly away from my body, it could be in line with my center of gravity with only minor adjustment. In fact at least the shots where Wax Pushes on the bullet as it leaves the gun, his aiming must mostly be in line with the Steel line from his center of gravity, so we know Wax does this.

Of course, we never see Wax actually thinking about all this and it's only as good as your ability to accurately process and utilize the information when moving your gun arm, but that's the kind of targeting information a Coinshot gunman could have. I'm a terrible shot, but give me a month or two with Steelsight and I could get way better than most I think. Then you add in what Returned and Tremayne have said about manipulating the shot itself, bracing himself, and using Ranette firearms, then his accuracy gets more plausible to me.  Maybe this post seems similar to my first, but I wasn't thinking about the environmental data Wax has or that all of his new info is in straight lines that he can literally use to line up his shots.

If Ranette uses Ironsight to test the accuracy of her weapons, she also has an advantage most gunsmiths don't have. She may even be adapting the guns to someone that can see metal lines.

One last new thought as an IRL comparison. To Wax, unless Aluminum is in use, everyone is effectively using tracer rounds that he can track with his eyes closed. In BoM he was instinctively tagging enemies firing Aluminum while fighting a small army. Wax's abilities specifically give him an advantage in gunfights, separate from standard target shooting.

Edited June 6, 2022 by Duxredux
Added another thought

[Stefano]

I am curious as well, might it have to do with his powers? Is it some specific trining not mentioned in the first books?

In the flashbacks the author remarks how bad his aiming was in the early days when he first met Lessie

[+ShardlessVessel]

1 hour ago, Stefano said:

I am curious as well, might it have to do with his powers? Is it some specific trining not mentioned in the first books?

In the flashbacks the author remarks how bad his aiming was in the early days when he first met Lessie

I've been convinced by the rest of the replies that it's plausible due to his use of allomantic steel.

There could still be some weird stuff going on - literal God has an interest in helping him - but it's not quite so insane when you consider that he's been combining steelsight, steelpush and guns for about two decades of constant practice.

[EmulatonStromenkiin]

On 6/6/2022 at 10:46 AM, Stefano said:

I am curious as well, might it have to do with his powers? Is it some specific trining not mentioned in the first books?

In the flashbacks the author remarks how bad his aiming was in the early days when he first met Lessie

He probably got better with practice. He had plenty of time to.

[cometaryorbit]

The extra "feedback" / information given by steel-lines is a super interesting idea.

It's also mentioned that Ranette can identify metals by burning iron (and confirmed by WOB that this isn't just a savant thing, so probably any iron or steel allomancer can learn this).

I wonder what other sensory tricks are possible with iron /steel lines? There's a mention in the annotations (for WoA I think) that any iron or steel allomancer could learn to see like an Inquisitor...

[+ShardlessVessel]

2 hours ago, cometaryorbit said:

There's a mention in the annotations (for WoA I think) that any iron or steel allomancer could learn to see like an Inquisitor...

There is indeed.

Quote

Brandon Sanderson

By the way, you probably remember form book one the way that Inquisitors see. They have such a subtle touch with Steel and Iron, and their lines, that they can see via the trace metals in everyone's bodies and in the objects around them.

The thing is, any Allomancer with access to iron or steel could learn to do this. Some have figured it out, in the past, but in current times, nobody–at least, nobody the heroes know–is aware of this. Except, of course, for Marsh.

And he chose not to share it.

The Well of Ascension Annotations (Nov. 11, 2007)

Pulling on this thread, I was reminded of some very interesting WOBs:

Steel sight

Steel pushing

One of these days I may start a topic to talk about my crackpot conspiracy that the Metallic Arts don't actually have anything to do with metal.