Talk:Jet Stream/@comment-178.204.114.119-20160219085720/@comment-172.15.16.99-20160428181005

Terminal ballistics are considerably more complicated than that.

For example, one of the primary reasons why railguns haven't been persued as small arms is due to the wound they would create. They would pass much faster through a target, flash-cauterizing the wound as they go. That SOUNDS super-badass, but what it actually MEANS is that the wound wouldn't bleed, and very well might not even take the target out of the fight for even a moment.

Plain old slow bullets that fragment on impact and send shrapnel bouncing around inside the target's ribcage, on the other hand, may or may not kill them, but is 99.999999999% garanteed to take them out of the fight.

And at the end of the day, that's what war is all about. It's actually better on a macro level to wound your enemy's entire army than to kill them all. Wounded soldiers require medical treatment, which diverts more resources away from the fight, and after the fight ends, they can recover and you can put them to use, be it as citizens in your new land or slave labor or something in between.

This is, in large part, why terrorist snipers in Iraq have been trained not to shoot the head or even the "T" area that American snipers aim for, but in fact for the base of the spine. This leads to fewer American soldier deaths, but far, far more paraplegics than we've had in any pervious war. Sad as it is to say, paraplegics are just vastly more expensive than dead soldiers, and terrorists understand these economics of war as well as anyone.

Back to your point, it might sound good and it might even be a fair buff to the augment in game (though honestly, Jet Stream is already one of the 4 or 5 best augments we have) but the logic isn't there. Faster bullets, after a certain point, cause less "damage" in a target and are not actually desirable.