scrape_r_rational/data/cache2/3uja01.md

How can you weaponize aerokinesis or the ability to control air?

• Author: u/None *

• URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/3uja01/how_can_you_weaponize_aerokinesis_or_the_ability/

• Score: 6

• Created: 2015-11-28T02:01:09

Post:

• You don't have full control of air, you have a very limited sphere of control about a square foot from your body which can improve slightly with practice.

• The closer it is to your body the easier it is to control, with it being easiest to control air in front of your hands. The difference in control between air in front of your hands and air at the outside edge of your control is massive.

• You can push or pull (and by extension compress) air but only to a degree. You start with the power to make a strong gust which can be improved over time to do things like fly, propel things fast etc.

• Using your power drains you and if you use it too much you will collapse. The stronger you push or compress air the harder it is on your magical stamina. This can increase with practice just like a muscle.

I'm mostly interested in combat applications. Some are obvious like firing compressed air into a tube for a makeshift gun, but others are questionable.

Can you really cut with air or make an air blade? I know if you add electricity you can get a plasma torch but how fast do you need to move air to get that to work? How can you use compressed air as a weapon? Is air useless without some sort of object (like a tube) to shape it?

I'm hoping to get some semi-scientific answers or some good ideas as I have no clue how you would do much with this power other than use it to make a gun or to fly.

Comments:

u/ulyssessword [+5] (an hour later)

Do you obey conservation of momentum? That is to say: when you pull some air upwards, does it push you downwards as well (as if you were holding a giant fan) or else is it independent of you (as if there was a giant fan attached to the earth, that you can control/aim)?

Assuming you can get good maximum pressures out of your power instead of just good velocities, the easiest force-multiplier would be bottles of compressed air. You only need pressure at the opening of the bottle, and you can easily charge the entire bottle instead of just the portion that's within a few inches of your skin. This could help with both making a gun and with flying, but I can't think of anything novel.

u/None [+2] (2 hours later)

Good idea with compressed air, though that sounds to me more like a grenade than a force multiplier. Maybe in metal containers and not glass. Imagine highly pressurized air in a glass bottle, then lobbing it at your opponent, ouch.

u/ulyssessword [+5] (3 hours later)

I was thinking compressed air as a power source, rather than as a discrete item (and bottles like this). The problem with air control isn't that you don't have enough energy to do anything, it's that you don't have enough power therefore you need to get a large amount of buildup to go into a single attack.

u/deccan2008 [+2] (3 hours later)

Yeah, you could equip the character with all manner of compressed air-powered devices, which he or she can re-pressurize as often as needed. However since apparently the character has no sensory powers over air, presumably he or she requires direct line of sight to the air that needs to be shaped and may lack the fine control needed as well.

u/ulyssessword [+2] (3 hours later)

I've always used "no sensory powers" to mean that target selection is based off of your sense of where your body is, not off of vision. For example, you could target "one foot out from the tip of your finger" or "along the inside of your forearm"

u/None [+1] (4 hours later)

I agree on the compressed air thing, what would you do with the compressed air though, just release tons of compressed air to create an extra large blast?

No sensory powers as in there is not another "wind sense" where you can feel how compressed it is or if the air behind your back is disturbed or something. That doesn't mean you can't manipulate wind somewhere you can't see, after all you are using your mind to control wind. As such if you imagine yourself sending a gust of wind from your back then it will happen.

u/ulyssessword [+1] (4 hours later)

I agree on the compressed air thing, what would you do with the compressed air though, just release tons of compressed air to create an extra large blast?

You'd probably have to fall back on using tubes to do stuff with, either as a normal gun, a vortex ring gun or the thrusters for a jetpack.

u/None [+1] (4 hours later)

Yea I figured as much, which is why I mentioned it in the post. I wouldn't feel good relying on tubes but I suppose a soldier relies on his gun even more.

Do you think compressed air going fast enough could rupture hearing and internal organs? Perhaps if it was fast but more spread out? You could probably create a type of thunderclap if you figured out the mechanics to stun enemies.

u/ulyssessword [+1] (5 hours later)

The maximum speed of an air based weapon is the speed of sound.

Shockwaves from explosions are "just" high and low pressure air, and it is possible to kill with them.

...actually, making a shockwave using this power (and no equipment) might not be impossible. It would take very good coordination and a lot of practice, but I don't see anything fundamentally different between doing that and something like a finger wave.

u/None [+1] (5 hours later)

The only problem I see is how would you not hurt yourself? Would it even be possible to create a directional shockwave? Perhaps with equipment? Something that hurt the ears only could be stopped with earplugs but a shockwave that actually kills people seems like a double edged sword.

u/ulyssessword [+1] (6 hours later)

I was thinking that shockwaves could be directional, but a bit of research suggests that they just turn into spheres again as quickly as they can. A vortex gun might be possible though, and it would have a similar effect.

u/sir_pirriplin [+1] (12 hours later)

Probably a stupid question, but what happens if you hold your breath then surround yourself with a one millimetre layer of air and hold it still? Wouldn't that make you invulnerable to shockwaves? And also incapable of breathing and hearing, but still.

u/None [+1] (12 hours later)

Not immune, but dampened, though good idea. The barrier aspects of air control haven't been discussed much yet.

u/deccan2008 [+1] (14 hours later)

Compressed air can be used to run air motors. From there you use to power any number of things, pistons, drills etc. Depending on the technology level, you might even be able to build a simple power armor that runs off of this stuff!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pneumatic_motor

u/gabbalis [+5] (an hour later)

Can you really cut with air or make an air blade?

I don't think you can shoot one or anything like that as a high speed line of air would have low inertia and would quickly destabilize outside of your control radius, but if your air control is fine enough you can get a sort of poor man's psychokinesis by pushing things around with air molecules. Just put all your mojo into a razor thin line of air molecules and bam, instant slice and dice. But only within your radius where you can keep exerting that pressure.

This would of course be useless just about always in your setting, because it sounds like the only way you could hope to have that much control in your setting would be to do it right in front of your hands, at which point you might as well use a knife.

Is air useless without some sort of object (like a tube) to shape it?

Can't you just shape it with your powers? I mean tubes aren't magical, they just direct the motion of the pressurized air, which your powers should presumably be able to do? I suppose that would require constant effort whereas a tube would do the heavy lifting for you.

How exactly would you fly, by pushing down on the air or by pushing air into you?

Assuming this power follows Newtons third law just pull/push air above you to below you, thus pull/pushing yourself upward.

if it doesn't follow Newtons third law just make a really big updraft below yourself. Also you can do lots of other awesome stuff if it doesn't follow Newtons third law, such as pushing your spacecraft forward by pushing the air inside it forward.

u/None [+2] (2 hours later)

Follows newtons third law, my last question was a little stupid but then again there are no stupid questions.

If you were using wind only you could do things without a tube but I don't see how you can control and accelerate a projectile effectively. You would have to push wind in every direction to stabilize the bullet + generate enough force to accelerate it, and then what happens if you want to spin it to add more power? I doubt I could do the math for that much less enact it with my power. Even if I could a simple rifled tube would allow me to conserve a lot of magical stamina since all I need to do is compress air and release it into the tube. You could simply push the bullet but your aim would probably suck and it would be less powerful, it would become more like a sling at that point.

Air by it's nature is pretty inaccurate it's not like I can put constant force upon objects directly, I'd need to basically constantly hit things with small gusts of air to keep them afloat. To even hold a bullet steady and straight in the air would take a lot of skill and concentration.

Actually now that I think about it if I can compress air then I can hold conflicting pressures around the bullet to hold it steady, but still less accurate and less power and more stamina usage than if I used a rifled tube.

u/Frommerman [+2] (2 hours later)

If your setting contains modern security elements like metal detectors, the air blade is useful as an undetectable weapon that will never leave traces identifiable to you in you in your victim. In addition, with weak areokinesis you could keep trace particles from leaving your area, preventing you from leaving DNA fragments. Assassinate at will.

u/None [+2] (2 hours later)

Which isn't really that useful a trained criminal with a non-metal knife can do the same thing.

Really all I'm getting so far is flying, gun, fast movement, gusts to both knock people down and deflect projectiles and weapons. Useful abilities but nothing overpowered. Setting I have in mind is medieval btw but I don't mind things that apply to modern society, this is a hypothetical question only tangentially related to a fiction I plan on doing.

u/Chosen_Pun [+6] The Chosen Ones (5 hours later)

The air blade should not be overlooked; even if it's little more than a weightless, invisible knife more or less held in your hand, that's still a weightless invisible knife that cannot be confiscated. The advantage of a knife over another weapon is the speed with which it can be wielded due to it's low weight, and an air blade maximises that advantage and then some. Moreover, a good blade is a versatile tool outside of combat, and not having to clean, sharpen, or otherwise maintain an actual knife is all by itself a pretty friggin' neat superpower, especially in a medieval setting.

The nearest approximation to this technique for which I could find a combat video was Kabuto's chakra scalpel.

u/None [+1] (5 hours later)

That is true, and funny that you bring up Naruto this is actually for a rational reincarnated SI naruto story that I plan on doing alongside my main project Wanderlust.

The idea is the naruto universe is much more brutal, has early medieval tech (no cameras and tvs etc like in canon) and there is no gunpowder. My SI sees that hand seals slow down the battle and take precious time to create and almost no one wears much armor so he takes to recreating bullets with seal-less wind chakra and pure chakra force.

The only problem is he's born as a poor peasant farmers son in the middle of nowhere with a next to non-existent chakra pool AND his knowledge is only useful in a general sense (knowing the theory behind S rank techniques, knowing the names of the major players etc). Things have changed drastically and people are in general not as friendly or merciful as in canon and children are actually trained to kill etc.

u/DaGeek247 [+1] Nudist Beach (4 hours later)

A good amount of control and you can use it to breathe underwater.

u/eaglejarl [+3] (4 hours later)

• What do you mean by "air"? Any gas? If so, get some chlorine trifluoride. Maintain it in a tight ball in your zone, then push it very strongly away from you. Keep pushing, because you don't want any of that crap coming back towards you. On second thought, forget it. This idea is suicide. Amazing to watch, but suicide.
• Learn some evasion- and blocking-based martial arts, get in close, suck the air out of their lungs. Do it fast enough and you can likely tear the lung tissue but no matter what they are going straight to the ground in unheard of pain.
• You can get stronger, can you get more precise? Shooting a needle-thin jet of air into someone's ear doesn't require a lot of power in order to deafen them and mess up their balance. A jet to the eye could rupture the cornea, blinding them. A blast up the nose might cause an embolism.
• Can you move air that's in a container? If so, control the air that's already in their lungs.

Okay, time for bed. I may edit in more of these tomorrow.

u/None [+1] (4 hours later)

I'm probably going to go with the cop out of living being have innate spell resistance to prevent you pulling air out of their lungs (though you can move air inside a container if you envisioned it), though if you are within a foot of the person you can kill them through other means. I'm of the opinion that the best combatant does things from far away or by proxy and the enemy never know what hit them. Blasting around and flying on gusts of wind does give you a huge mobility advantage though.

You can get super precise with practice but a super small jet of air is going to disperse the instant it get's past your zone of control while something like hurricane force winds won't, if they are already in your range you can kill them with your air gun.

A small electric current from a device on your person and you have a plasma cutter, though I don't know the exact mechanics of it, that would seem better than a needle-thin jet of air.

And yes any gas, though all you can do is push and pull not change molecules or vibrate them or whatever.

u/eaglejarl [+1] (11 hours later)

You can get super precise with practice but a super small jet of air is going to disperse the instant it get's past your zone of control while something like hurricane force winds won't,

Why?

A small electric current from a device on your person and you have a plasma cutter,

Not that small. And we're at a medieval tech level, right? How will you generate and store significant electricity? (Obviously you can make up magic for it, but that rather defeats the purpose.)

u/None [+1] (12 hours later)

Why?

Why wouldn't it? After it leaves your area of control what is going to happen to a needle-thin jet of air? It spreads out into a wider jet of air and then disperses over distance. Now if you are within your area of control you can keep your jet of air together, but that also means you can do other things with it, the ear thing seems like a non-lethal option.

This is for a naruto fanfiction so basically lightning jutsu. I didn't expect for there to be this much interest so I didn't go into specifics, you can read one of my earlier replies to get the gist of the story. My mc won't have these powers but it's a good abstraction for future things he can do with wind chakra.

u/sir_pirriplin [+3] (13 hours later)

Can it be used for stealth? By holding the air around you still, the sound of your movements won't be transmitted over the air, although some perceptive people might notice the vibrations you make on the ground.

u/FuguofAnotherWorld [+3] Roll the Dice on Fate (14 hours later)

Yes, you can cut with air. Observe this water jet cutting through steel plate. Both are fluids, air is simply less dense in its natural state. You could achieve a similar effect by adding small particulate matter to the air steam (sand, metal dust ect). The particulate pieces would grind through flesh and bone. It would work in either a point of plane configuration.

Similarly if you keep dust or sand in suspension with the air in motion you can create a static charge, which is how lightning is formed. Might not be any appreciable amount of lightning though, unless you're moving the air ridiculously fast. Like, fast enough to heat it to a plasma fast.

Poison is an obvious application, especially as a ninja. Poison gas, nerve gas, caustic gas ect can be spread about the battlefield and your control of air would allow you not to be killed by these things.

Take a sphere of metal (ribbed for her pleasure better fragmentation). Fill it with extremely high pressure air then throw it while hiding behind a wall or rock. It will explode like a grenade pretty much the second it leaves your zone of control as the high pressure air expands against the inside of the sphere.

Use air to hold and throw weapons. Take a tube, fill one end with an airtight sabot filled with poison senbon and the other end with compressed air. Continue to compress the air while not letting it touch the senbon. Then close the open end and release control. The air will expand and propel a hail of needles against whoever.

Get a pair of aerofoils, strap them to your back and run wind over them. Makes flying more efficient and less costly of energy.

Shoot tiny blips of air into your enemies' veins for subtle assassinations. A while later they will suffer a blood clot and possible stroke or heart attack. Use wind to empower your strikes and leaps while weakening and slowing your enemies'.

If attacked by lightning or fire create zones of low pressure air. The lightning will be unable to form a plasma arc with no matter to use and thus be unable to cross the area of higher electrical resistance. The fire will not be able to cross the windbreak with no oxygen or fuel to burn, meaning that you'll only have to deal with radiation, not convection or conduction. Deadly fire attacks will become merely hideously painful.

u/None [+1] (15 hours later)

All good ideas though some can't be achieved in my naruto story, since the powers aren't the same. It's more like he works so hard trying to get a gun to work that he can use limited wind nature transformations without any hand seals and has limited aeromancy. The working title is "Inventions of death" so I'll probably end up doing a lot of things like this. I especially like the senbon idea to fill the same role as a cannon filled with canister shot.

I'm still not sure on cutting with pure air, according to this air is 1000 times less dense than water, you'd need some sort of media like a media blaster, as you've said.

http://en.allexperts.com/q/Physics-1358/2010/10/high-pressure-air-jet.htm

Of course, air is nearly 1000 times less dense than water, right? Would the jet need to be 1000 times faster than a normal industrial water jet to cut through a metal sheet? To my knowledge water jets already expel their water at a velocity exceeding the speed of sound (in air). Air moving at 100s to 1000 times its speed of sound would be... plasma?

u/FuguofAnotherWorld [+1] Roll the Dice on Fate (16 hours later)

Ah, here's what I was looking for. Observe this abrasive jet cutting machine.

As for cutting with actual air? Doesn't even happen in canon. Rather if you go to chapter 317 page 17 you see that it's actually the chakra doing the cutting, it just happens to look like air.

u/None [+1] (16 hours later)

I see, I didn't know it was just the chakra doing the cutting, whats the point of nature transformation then? I'm still trying to hammer out what exactly chakra can do, there seems to be so much random crap that it's near impossible to get a rational magic system from it.

According to the wiki:

Wind Release is performed by making chakra as sharp and thin as possible. Wind Release is mainly short to mid-ranged offensive techniques that combine brute force and keen precision to deal cutting and slashing damage. A rarity among the five chakra natures, wind techniques are usually performed by generating air circulation and can be enhanced through this method as well. Wind-natured chakra can also be channelled into blades to increase their cutting power and overall range.

So you transform chakra into a type of chakra wind (instead of normal wind) that can be manipulated and shaped in ways normal air cannot because of its chakra infused? I guess that makes sense, kind of. I guess it's less turning chakra into an element and more of borrowing parts of an elements properties and adding them to a chakra technique.

u/FuguofAnotherWorld [+1] Roll the Dice on Fate (17 hours later)

I know the feeling, when I was trying to figure it out for my own fic I was halfway to throwing out the entire thing and inventing a system of chakra that actually makes consistent sense. I've got 7 pages of back and forth with me beta on the subject.

u/deccan2008 [+2] (2 hours later)

Do you have any sensory abilities over air, i.e. can sense fine differences in pressures within your sphere of influence, or is it just that you can exert undifferentiated force in any direction you wish on air? If so, is your sensory abilities and control fine enough to separate the different types of molecules in a gas?

Note that being able to generate winds strong enough to enable a person to fly implies a rather powerful effect. You could easily knock down people with that as wind speeds of over 8o mph around you still means very powerful gusts farther away.

u/None [+1] (2 hours later)

No sensory abilities and yes powerful gusts which I suppose could be useful to close distance or get a good shot. Also I'm sure you could probably create a tornado, not that I have the faintest clue on how to go about doing that. Something about low pressure air and high pressure air?

u/diraniola [+1] (3 hours later)

I would suggest building up endurance constantly. Have them spend as much of their down time hovering on a constant updraft to train staying power.

The most likely combat strategy would probably be something of an assassin/speed blitz. Use the lower control but equal power away from their hands to fly around, much faster mobility than most combatants, while keeping a highly compressed, extremely thin band or line of air at the hands to slice arteries or tendons.

u/Gurkenglas [+1] (10 hours later)

For some standard applications, you could look at air benders from Avatar, for example this one.

"About a square foot from your body"? That makes sense neither as distance nor as volume... what's the initial range? What could it become given lifelong training? (Can he ballpark the latter?)

u/narmio [+1] (a day later)

If you can get close to someone, you can cause air embolisms. Those are bad. Very bad.

u/AKAAkira [+1] (a day later)

Some questions:

• Can you control the air inside of your lungs/bloodstream? u/FuguofAnotherWorld noted that you could create a low pressure zone to avoid lightning and fire, but I recall stuff about how scuba divers need to wait before surfacing because the difference in pressure means they could have air bubbles forming in their veins. I'm not too sure of the specifics/numbers concerning this, but at the very least, that technique doesn't sound like something you can use without acclimatizing yourself to it first, or without those secondary powers I mentioned.

• When you say you can compress air to a degree, are you limited in any other way? Like only being able to exert pressure in one gross (if that's the right word to use here) direction at a time, or being able to make a personal zone around your body but not make a localized ball of compressed air right in your hand. I mention it mostly for that last bit; if you can make a localized air ball, well, you won't need any additional items to help you ramp up pressure. Unless your fine control over it is lacking, I suppose. Forget that one, just saw your mention about "magical stamina". The maximum pressure you can create should be the same whether you use a tube or create the localized point yourself, but yeah, using a tube would save energy from having to do it from all directions.

• How does the difference in control from the area closest to your body to the outermost edge of your influence scale? The way you put that (the difference being "massive") makes it sound like it's an exponential decrease. If it's only really potent when it's right up against your skin, your wind attack will almost certainly be more effective by, say, using the whole front of your chest to emit wind rather than running the air down the length of your arm or something. (I admit, I mentioned that one more for the joke factor than anything. Have you read Mahou Sensei Negima? There's a scene where a guy named Jack Rakan uses a full-body beam that leaves an impact outlining the shape of his body on a mountainside.)

Not too sure about the gimmick you mentioned, though. I dunno about the plasma torch, but an air blade probably would dissipate too quickly to be an effective ranged attack. Not much details I know of lightning, but the friction needed to generate natural lightning takes place inside huge, at-least-the-size-of-a-building clouds, doesn't it? And even if you could build up more than a static charge, you'd need something to send it in a direction that's not the ground. I don't see a way around this with just wind powers, especially not with a short range. That short range hurts its combat applications a lot.

Ugh, trying to think of some exotic uses you can do with it... Since it's most effective around your body, you could camouflage yourself within churning smoke or powder and no one will be able to see your face. Great for scare tactics, maybe, but doesn't change the ultimate fact that if somebody's trying to kill you, that by itself is not going to protect you. If your control is less than perfect, it might even leave a trail of smoke or powder behind. You'll want to bring some body armor that also covers your face in there with you.

While we're on the subject - inflatable body suit. Make yourself look bigger and more muscular than you are, and you have room to hide protection underneath without anyone the wiser...well, except for your face. Though maybe an iron faceguard wouldn't look too out of place on a "big and muscular" look?

You can mute the sounds you make by creating a layer of low pressure air around yourself (note that this can be slightly different from a low-pressure zone). It won't be 100% silent - if you have a limit on how much pressure you can ramp up, you don't have the power to make a complete vacuum that stops all sounds - but it'll probably be quiet enough.

Also if you can maintain a low-pressure area, you'll be able to do some chemical reactions easier than they would at normal atmospheric pressure. I can't think of anything potent off-hand, though.

And I'm spent. Wind seems like it's more suited towards supporting powers than outright offensive capability, huh. I hope some of that helped.

u/None [+1] (a day later)

I agree, though there have been some pretty good combat applications thought up by others I still think it's more of a supporting power. Some of the science on cutting people to pieces with air and doing certain other things seems pretty iffy.

u/eaglejarl [+1] (a day later)

I was thinking about flying. Your area of control is one square foot...does this mean always 12" x 12" or can it be shifted on the fly to, e.g., 6" x 24"?

If it's always 12" x 12", then flying by blowing air into yourself isn't going to work. You'd need a force greater than that of gravity, and you'd need to apply it at your center of mass, which is about at your stomach. That amount of force on your stomach is going to do bad things to you -- to test this, try just lying on a 1 sq ft table with your hands and feet off the floor. Not very comfortable, and much less so if you want to fly at any worthwhile speed.

If you can shift this to arbitrary dimensions so long as it's not more than 144 contiguous inches, then you could make it a little better by spreading the pressure across ribs and pelvis. Probably not going to be enough to matter, though.

A better approach would be to get yourself a parasail and blow air up into it.

u/CosmicPotatoe [+1] (8 days later)

Check out the japanese Horo. It was a cloak worn by samarai to diffuse the force of arrows. They used the air pressure from riding to protect themselves from arrows. Your character could be almost invincible to arrows while shooting his own projectiles. I think this could be a valuable skill.

u/EsperTouch [+1] (8 years later)

Air manipulation is basically gas manipulation meaning you have access to many different atoms at your disposal. You can steal air from someone to make them suffocate, Spiral air around a jab or blade to drill through opponents,

Yes air is capable of cutting through things as compressed air is viable for projectiles, using your body as the medium. If you wish to throw solidification into the mix, then you have air constructs which would technically be invisible to your opponent. Excluding Combat based techniques, you could also make mirages to make yourself invisible, make smoke-clouds, sensing through the wind, and vacuums.

If you wanna get even darker you are capable of dehydrating the body or absorbing all nutrients and fluid from the body which is technically just a supreme vortex so, depends on how you use the things. If you have a demonic or holy nature, i guess you could also add status effects into it but that’s a story for another time.

u/Gauntlet [+1] (21 hours later)

Sound is just vibrating air. Vibrate the air near your hands to create high intensity sound in a controlled direction. You could burst eardrums and even kill by shattering bones.

Are you able to sense changes in the air around you - it seems like a necessary secondary power required for fine control. If you can you could create ultrasonic waves and sense the echoes to see in the dark.

You should Google brown noise, but probably don't listen to it.

Do you impart energy into the air you move? Vibrate the air by your body to heat it up to harmful levels - probably not safe for the user.

Get close enough to still the air around an enemy's head. The will suffocate when the CO2 levels get to high.

Push air into a person's stomach until it explodes. Create vacuum around head/face burst ear drums and eyes.

Collect sand/dust using your control of air to create sandstorms around people. Could be used to disable vision or go as far as flying them.

A fast and dense enough jet of air could probably cut holes into people.

Change the density of air to refract light, creating visual illusions while fighting. Making it easier for the user to dodge and feint.

Stop some air in a line perfectly still. Anyone walking through it will be sliced into pieces.

Well that got pretty dark and gruesome. Controlling air is terrifying and OP even with the limits you've placed.

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