Talk:Weapons sheet base/@comment-24486500-20140705080115/@comment-24177975-20140721054000

based on the fact that it's been shown that a strong impact with a dust crystal causes it to explode, (at least for red dust) such as the impact of a bullet, it stands to reason that if you fired a dust crystal at a solid object as you would a bullet, it would explode then as well, given Newton's third.

The real issue here would be the fact that it would also be receiving the equivalent of said impact when it is fired from the gun, so you'd want to use some form of relatively slow acceleration method in order to fire it, or at least something that doesn't involve setting off a small explosion right next to the crystal, otherwise it'll detonate before it leaves the barrel. A bow or railgun type of firing method would probably be acceptable for safe dust-based ammunition use. Alternatively some form of protective casing might be enough to contain it, or you could fire it from a grenade launcher type thing with an impact triggered detonation method built into the ammo.

Something else to keep in mind is that AFAIK, we have little information on pretty much any of the mechanics of dust use. It's apparently valuable enough to be worth stealing, at least in high quantities, but cheap enough to be used by students. Although at the same time the only person we know has access to lots of dust, is the daughter of the owner of a large dust company. Plus while she seems to use a lot of dust for her attacks, I don't think we've seen her reload her weapon. For all we know Roman blowing up the crystal could've been a huge waste of dust, and Weiss only uses a few grains per attack, or maybe Nora has an entire crystal in each of her grenades. Basically, we need an exposition dump.