Hazekiller Rounds

[Oudeis he/him]

How would you go about making a bullet to fight a Slider? An Oracle? Steelrunner? Sparker? Would you need one for a Skimmer? Spinner?

[Ete'ni]

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Edited June 10, 2014 by Ete'ni

[Oudeis he/him]

Actually that's what made me think of it; I just read that passage and in addition to the four types she made for the physical allomancers, she expressly said she was working on one for a bloodmaker.

[Ete'ni]

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Edited June 10, 2014 by Ete'ni

[Swimmingly he/him]

Maybe one that employs the same strategies Wax uses against Miles: It immobilizes by binding the limb. Alternately, it could simply be barbed in such a way that trying to heal it would cause more damage, so a bloodmaker would just leak his health into the wound trying to heal it, or be release poison on impact that would remain embedded in the wound and disable them quickly. Something that would knock them out very strongly and very quickly would stop them from healing, because they would be asleep would work too. 

[Oudeis he/him]

Maybe one that employs the same strategies Wax uses against Miles: It immobilizes by binding the limb. Alternately, it could simply be barbed in such a way that trying to heal it would cause more damage, so a bloodmaker would just leak his health into the wound trying to heal it, or be release poison on impact that would remain embedded in the wound and disable them quickly. Something that would knock them out very strongly and very quickly would stop them from healing, because they would be asleep would work too. 

 

Not sure a bullet can really spread out in a barbed web.... and I'm pretty sure gold heals away things like drugs and poisons.

[Swimmingly he/him]

I mean having the bullet constantly releasing poisons. And if they aren't already tapping, knocking them out before they can turn on the Feruchemical gold, effectively taking them out of the fight. Basically, something that does slow damage over time, forcing the ferring to drain all his metalminds on a single bullet.

[Shardlet he/him]

Pechvarry had a pretty good idea for a bloodmaker hazekiller round.  Granted, you need to know about hemalurgy to make it work.  But, check it out here.  Basically, you use pewter bullets and shoot the bloodmaker through the heart with the intent of creating bullet spikes to rob him of his bloodmaking ability.  In Seattle, I asked Brandon about the feasibility of it and he said essentially that it would be tricky but possible (as shown below).

 

Q: If you shot Miles with pewter bullets through the heart, would the bullets become hemalurgically charged and remove Miles’s bloodmaking ability?

 

A: Umm, you would have to get them in exactly the right place.

 

Q: Oh, so it’s more than just the heart, it’s got to be the right place in the heart?

 

A: Well, you have to, it’s like acupuncture.  A hemalurgic spike has to be specifically placed.

 

Q: Well, I don’t mean for placement. I just mean for making Miles a donor.

 

A: You could hemalurgically steal Miles’s power.

 

Q: With pewter bullets?

 

A: I don’t know that bullets would work.  But they might.  How about this, it is theoretically possible to do what you just described.  If you knew what you were doing,  because intention is part of a lot of the magic system.  Intention is involved.  It’s tricky because Ruin did it to people who didn’t know what they were doing, but…

Q: But, Ruin intended to do it, though.

 

A: But, Ruin intended to do it and knows how to manipulate it so that intentions would happen.  Intention is very important, if you read through the magics, to a lot of them.

 

Q: It is part of the cognitive aspect.

 

A: Yes.

[Swimmingly he/him]

Pechvarry had a pretty good idea for a bloodmaker hazekiller round.  Granted, you need to know about hemalurgy to make it work.  But, check it out here.  Basically, you use pewter bullets and shoot the bloodmaker through the heart with the intent of creating bullet spikes to rob him of his bloodmaking ability.  In Seattle, I asked Brandon about the feasibility of it and he said essentially that it would be tricky but possible (as shown below).

Of course, this requires that you hit the heart exactly, with no error, which, in the case of any bloodmaker without an obscene amount of stored health, would probably enough to kill them anyway.

[Swimmingly he/him]

New idea: Kill multiple cows with iron to build up a hemalurgic charge, then make bullets with it. Much more difficult to pull and push on it, right?

[dyring]

For wayne, when hes bubbled, I would simply use a shotgun. Lots of bullets spread out. it wont matter so much that each bullet changes direction alittle. There are so many some should cover most of the bubble.

 

Wont hurt him much ofcourse, but should help drain his goldminds quickly.

 

Against bloodmakers, high speed large caliber. get hit by the right rifle and the exitwound is huge. would take loads more then a normal bulletwound to heal.

[Vortaan he/him]

I would think incendiary rounds might be good against bloodmakers. Maybe good against Pewterarms too, huh?

[Shardbearer he/him]

I would think incendiary rounds might be good against bloodmakers. Maybe good against Pewterarms too, huh?

You're forgetting that Miles kept dynamite around so he could blow himself up if he ever got tied up, and he used it. No way an incendiary round is going to do anything to him.

 

Napalm might be an effective, if horrifying, way to wear down a bloodmaker's reserves of Health.

[name_here]

Not terribly much to be done, bullet-wise, for sliders. If the bubble is up before the bullet is inside, they can just dodge anything. The only suggestion I can think of, and it's both unreliable and begging for an accident, is to have a double-fire on a delay, so if they count on the field to distort the flight path of the bullet instead of dodging and then drop the bubble the second shot will hit before they raise a new one. Though you could also try using canister rounds or birdshot in shotguns so that when the bullets hit the bubble and go everywhere it's fairly likely at least some of them will go at the slider. If you're using a pistol, I'd say the best bet is getting highly penetrating rounds so you can shoot at them again after the bubble drops even if they dive behind something sturdy.

 

I don't think you need anything special for Oracles. They basically look at their own Atium shadow cloud, and shadow clouds are notably unhelpful to Atium burners.

 

Steelrunners and Sparkers are both basically the same sort of problem, in that they have the capacity to not be where you're aiming. Thus, you want a bullet that can kill people where you aren't aiming. Actually, you probably want a contact-detonated grenade, although a steelruner could still dodge that.

 

Skimmers are not more durable than ordinary people and can just be shot.

 

For spinners, you want to remove chance as a factor. So the bullet should have a highly predictable flight pattern and absolutely no extra frills. Or you could go for something with a "hard-kill" radius: everyone close enough to the center and not in heavy cover definitely dies.

 

For bloodmakers, I think the incendiary bullet is a plan with something of a future. Contact toxins might also work. Yes, bloodmakers can heal, but the point is to keep hurting them so they have to keep regenerating until they eventually run out. Alternately, just do a lot of damage to them at once; Miles recovered from blowing himself up but non-compounders probably couldn't.

[Shardbearer he/him]

Oh, right, a normal bloodmaker probably wouldn't get along with a hail of incendiary rounds as well as Miles would.

[Oudeis he/him]

I don't think you need anything special for Oracles. They basically look at their own Atium shadow cloud, and shadow clouds are notably unhelpful to Atium burners.

I dont believe electrum defaults to a shadow cloud. I think it only clouds in the presence of an atium-burner. Otherwise i think it is the still not very helpful single electrum shadow, or maybe a few divisions when your choices might split. I could be mistaken.

[name_here]

Electrum generated a shadow cloud in the first fight in Hero Of Ages, and it is fairly unlikely the Inquisitor was burning Atium. Elend didn't think he was, so the shadow cloud isn't a litmus test for the presence of an Atium burner.

 

I once made a thread about Cosmere precognition. Essentially, my conclusion is that electrum inherently produces a shadow cloud for the same reason Atium might: it recursively predicts the future and incorporates your reaction to what you see. This iterates until either you see a future you like, every possible action you can take, or too many shadows to provide useful information. Atium doesn't show yourself and only looks a short distance ahead, so unless someone is specifically letting their action depend on yours or there's a feedback loop between two future sight sources it generally won't have a cloud, while electrum gets a cloud in any situation where it could possibly be helpful, i.e. any time knowing the outcome of an action would cause you to take a different action.

[Swimmingly he/him]

Could Feruchemical brass users melt bullets in midair, or tap heat fast enough to freeze them?

[name_here]

I doubt that would really help all that much. They'd still have their momentum and the collateral damage from that much heating/cooling would be considerable.

[Vortaan he/him]

You're forgetting that Miles kept dynamite around so he could blow himself up if he ever got tied up, and he used it. No way an incendiary round is going to do anything to him.

 

Napalm might be an effective, if horrifying, way to wear down a bloodmaker's reserves of Health.

 

Killing Miles and killing Wayne are two different prospects. The one is insanely difficult, the other would be a lot easier with an incendiary or toxic round. Personally I like incendiary more because it's got more uses, but that's just me. For example, though, an incendiary round or napalm might be the key against sliders.

[Swimmingly he/him]

Every time you think, "Kill it with fire/explosions," remember that those stop being hazekiller rounds and start being hazekiller cannons/BFGs.

[Oudeis he/him]

I think Ranette more-or-less flat-out says, the real hazekiller for thugs, brutes or bloodmakers is to simply shoot them in the brain. Anything else is just a crutch for people who are bad with guns.

[Pechvarry]

I think shotguns, in general, are fantastic for dealing with metal born.

Easier to build than Ranette's iron/steel killers: small rocks in your shell, along with normal metal pellets. Best fired from the protection of your own steelbubble though.

Anything with a dodge advantage: shotgun once again increases your success chances.

And if you're aiming to steal some bloodmaking, get your hemalurgic intent on, and fire pewter pellets out of your shotty. I find your chances of hitting the precisely correct part of the heart increase when you simply hit every part of the heart.

[name_here]

Shotguns don't really spread that much, and the ones that spread more have difficulty penetrating much of anything. I suggested it for Sliders on the theory that tagging them with some pellets might hurt them enough they stay still for a bit so you can shoot them with something more useful.

[Swimmingly he/him]

In that case, wouldn't a spray with low-calibre high fire-speed automatic guns work better? The other option would be to design them with bad aerodynamics that would make them corkscrew in every direction and change speed unpredictably