Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-17970636-20160102112024

Alright, listen up kiddies, strap in your seatbelts and prepare your glasses because we have some reading to do, together. Well, not, together; together, but you get the point, just read the entire thing before putting in that unfortunate "Leaf you're so stupid for doing this" comment because yes, I know, I'm stupid, which is why I agreed to write this, now, shall we?

First of all, sustained flight, now the regular comments are around the lines of, wind dust, gravity dust, all these different sources of dust and no flying? Why not? It's not even in the rules.

Well, the rules haven't been updated in forever and the current staff intend on doing a full update come the end of Volume 3. However, that being said, seems like you all can't wait for Valentines Day (Hype's statement for when Volume 3 will end, not mine, go scream at him if it's wrong) to create your almighty flying characters, and since there's been a lot of whining about this recently, especially with a fellow reviewer receiving some heat for rejecting one character, well, that's where I came in.

Yes, I have accepted flying OC's but only after people gave me a hammering about rejecting things that could fly that submission was forced, regardless, it'd be easier to write this off at simple "reviewer discretion" and be off with it, that way those who incur my wrath upon their flying mechanisms merely incur my wrath, not a collectives, but, there are issues with this because then people will be whining about how X accepted this but X rejected the same thing, gotta be all on the same page, but regardless, let's move forward.

Let's start with some background information, wind dust, gravity dust, etc. While we know what wind dust is and such, gravity is assumed to be purple in colour and, surprise surprise, reduce the effect of gravity, current popular theory is that Ruby uses gravity dust with her bullets to propel herself with Crescent Rose, while this all makes sense, that means that Gravity Dust doesn't reduce the effect of gravity, it itself creates a gravitational force. Confused? Ruby's got enough strength and dexterity to wield Crescent Rose without consecutively firing shots. She doesn't need to make her weapon lighter to be able to move quickly, as her semblance is merely speed, as a result, whenever Ruby fires a gravitational shot the most reasonable idea is that it creates a gravitational wave. This enhanced with Ruby's semblance and whatnot, allows her to propel herself at higher speeds. Confused by how this pertains to flight? Let me get there.

It means that for Ruby to continuously fly with Crescent Rose she'd consistently require to fire shots once every second or so to propel herself upwards, in fact, this was proven in Players and Pieces where after grabbing hold of the Nevermore she had to continually fire shots behind here and had to stay rooted to the mountain via Weiss' glyphs to continue a straight upwards movement, meaning she'd have deviated without assitance. So when one attempts to explain that they use gravity dust to fly, the best one could pull off is a mere hover via constant waves, quite like Reese's hoverboard.

Ahh, the hoverboard, but she doesn't use gravity dust, she uses wind dust!

Correct, but her chocie of dust is arbitrary to the outcome of the hoverboard, wind just happens to be a preference, she doesn't need to use it to hover. I can see it, people already typing down arguments, but here's something. Bolin tossed her a fire dust crystal which she slammed into her hoverboard, effectively turning it red, and still managed to float over to Nadir and unmelt him. She was using two different dust at once, possible, but unlikely. If the dust combined, technically speaking, she'd create large flames, as wind makes a fire burn. The fact that she didn't melt the ice stage while she was moving proves to me that she activated the dust when near Nadir, meaning her weapon already has the technology in it to allow her to hover, and the choice of wind dust is merely her choice of attack, the fact that it hovers means a smaller engine and it also uses less dust as well as allowing it to transform into her dual pistols.

Before you get into how large engines can be may I remind you that there is a woman who hides a minigun in her purse.

Alright, now for Dew, picked up Scarlet and Sage via tornados and then flung em off. The tornadoes themselves did little to no damage on them, partially because wind can only harm someone so much, but people claim that's proof that wind dust can allow people to fly.

No it isn't.

For starters, they were flung and surrended to gravity once outside of the wind's range, and the speed of the tornados would have to be over 100 kilometers an hour, or over 75 miles an hour to pick someone up, that's a mere F2 tornado right there, it's when we hit EF3 tornados and such does the damage really come into play, but enough of that, merely speaking, the tornados could very well have been Dew's semblance, we don't know that, odds are it wasn't due to her weapon movement being used in order to create these phenomenons and she had a wind dust crystal in her weapon, but the fact is that once outside of the wind's range, one is doomed to fall via gravity, meaning the use wind dust to fly, well, I don't even want to explain how to make that work. I can explain it, but I don't want to, because frankly, this entire thing is taking up a lot of time.

Alright, now, the flying Bullheads and whatnot in RWBY, those fly using dust don't they?

They have engines that allow them to fly, they don't have dust in them that lets them fly, dust is used as a fuel, an energy source to make this work.

Alright, now for the moment you've all been waiting for, the basis for flight with your OC.

Now if it were up to me I'd wait for examples of actual sustained flight within canon and then have it allowed in, but since ya'll are an insistent bunch that don't know when to quit, here's what the lovely people in chat and I came up, note that all this stated was seen and approved by an audience of over 20 people, so, yeah.

<p style="font-weight:normal;">1. Your OC's flying apparatus and their weapon must be separate, their weapon cannot allow them to fly in dormant mode or whatever, they can have a jetpack that uses dust or something.

<p style="font-weight:normal;">2. If they DO have something that allows them to fly, then it counts as a weapon in itself, this is due to the rapid versatility of flight in battle, this wouldn't count for things like thermal goggles, earpieces, etc. However, exceptions have to be made, a flying mechanism does not count as a utlity.

<p style="font-weight:normal;">3. Your OC's height of flight and speed is up to reviewer discretion, so keep things versatile to keep us on our toes.

<p style="font-weight:normal;">There you have it, yeah, the last few lines could've done it, but a background as to why dust itself doesn't work is necessary. Thank you for reading.

<p style="font-weight:normal;">Leaf out. <ac_metadata title="Flight and Your OC"> </ac_metadata>