> As for flinch vs de-scoping in lore. De-scoping near very little sense because a Spartan isn’t looking through a scope, they’re looking through a visor that relays the weapons relative position and shooting angle directly onto said visor.
> Flinching can and will occur on a Spartans, Elites and even Prometheans… But I also concede that it’s a matter of energy shielding strength for flinching to become moot.
> That is because Spartans may weigh 1 ton and have inertial damping properties in their suits, however an arm doesn’t weigh 1 ton and a DMR’s 7.62mm high powered bullet, least alone a SRS99’s 14.5mm sabot round, can and will cause an arm to flinch with low and 0 shielding. In fact the DMR round is likely to puncture many of the medium and light armour grade suit pieces when there is 0 shielding (and definitely the undersuit)… You think a Spartan will flinch when a bullet actual punctures? Hell ya.
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> As for the inertial dampening, it’s only to protect the wearer from impact force, it doesn’t prevent physics from happening. Spartans are not immovable objects and unstoppable forces can and will cause limps to move, least alone bodies to lift.
> We’re not using weak weapons here, the AR fires a 7.62mm NATO round with a barrel cushioning system to allow for a short ranged heavy hitter. The DMR uses a higher grain count and likely match grade components (hence why we don’t use AR ammo for the DMR).
> It’s very likely the AR’s rounds are the same we use in current weapons, ie capable of passing through a 12" tree trunk and the soldier wearing body armour on the other side and the DMR’s rounds are even more powerful. Likely an 18"-24" tree and a soldier would still pose little problem.
Frankly, neither of the mechanics make any sense lore wise. Bullets, regardless of extremely high velocities, carry very little momentum due to their insignificant mass. The difference in mass of a bullet compared to that of an armored Spartan is, for a 50. caliber round is approximately four orders of magnitude. That is, in a space with no additional forces, a 50. caliber bullet would have to be fired at 10,000 m/s to get the Spartan move at 1 m/s.
When you add the Mjolnir armor to the equation that, as far as my understanding goes, due to the artificial “muscles”, only moves if the Spartan wants it to (with the exception of extreme levels of force), very little flinch would be expected even with high caliber rounds.
Of course, it’s also about the transfer rate of the momentum rather than only the pure momentum itself. The force, in high velocity collisions, of course is extremely high and hence momentum is transferred very fast. But nonetheless, the momentum of a 1,000 m/s 50. caliber round will only make the Spartan “move” at 0.1 m/s. Considering the response time of a Spartan is in tens of milliseconds, they would only move about 4-5 millimeters at most before they stopped the movement.
Of course that is, again, in ideal conditions. An immobile Spartan would, due to the armor, be essentially a 500 kg titanium frame with a weapon attached to it. I wouldn’t expect even a high caliber sniper rifle to cause it to flinch.