Buffy vs A Gun

[Captain Smith]

Don't know outside of the show. Didn't buy the books. If she becomes Superman, don't really care honestly.

Thus, she is invulnerable? I saw one issue where her sister became a giant centaur and was hanging around a camp of slayers, I think. I could only think of how did they deal with what the horse end did. Having watching the rear end of horses while riding them, I decided that whole scenario made the show's continuation ridiculous. In fact, creating thousands of slayers made the series ridiculous.

Mystical and bullet proof then why even have the question in the OP?

[Sharpandpointies]

Because the OP doesn’t know that if we gave her non-compartmentalized durability of the same level as her blunt durability, would that make her bullet-proof? And wants to know?

It’s right there in the original post.

And that’s the stipulations of the thread.

Ignoring that is basically coming in and arguing off-topic.

[Sharpandpointies]

To put it another way...

Let's say someone makes a thread that states 'For the purpose of this thread, assume Olympic Tae Kwon Do is a completely viable fighting system - how far would an Olympic gold medalist get on this gauntlet?' (and makes a gauntlet of characters)

I then come in and spend pages detailing 'why Olympic Tae Kwon Do is actually not a completely viable fighting system', despite that being the OP's stipulation, and I also argue that the gold medalist wouldn't get anywhere against the list of fictional fighters.

Well, I wouldn't actually be following the guidelines laid out in the OP, would I? And, in fact, if a moderator happened to be called, I would likely get my rear kicked off the thread, and justifiably so.

What's going on right now? Similar situation.

[BitVyper]

This is like posting a chess problem and about half the people who reply say something like "the horsey moves in an L."

[Noldere]

So is the real question "What gun/bullet combination has as much or more energy than the her best blunt force showing?"

Because if so, her showing against the backhand means you can tell the marksman to leave the handguns at home.

[BitVyper]

More or less. I mean you're free to debate what stuff like the backhand actually means or you know, anything else under typical rumbles rules, but the idea was to just look at her durability feats as durability feats and not compartmentalize anything (I have feelings about this subject honestly, but it's not one I care to open up).

On how much strength Glory may or may not have been using to smack Buffy around, while I can agree that she may not have struck with the exact same strength, I don't see a lot of reason to believe that Glory would be the "I was only using 1% of my power" type. She may have focused more for the pillar hits but I think she probably only hit fractionally harder, especially when you consider the collateral damage of that first backhand, and the casual destruction of some frustrated little footstomps that look way more careless than what she did to Buffy.

Nevertheless, Buffy's been hit by a lot of other things. At minimum, she's been struck by people who've been strong enough to pretty trivially overpower *her,* so yeah, I think even without her feats against Glory, you'd be looking at more stopping power than what it'd take to reliably bring down a grizzly bear.

[StupidMoniker]

A 9mm bullet has something on the order of 300 ft lbs of energy at 100 ft. That is about 50% greater than a 5 lb hammer swung at 50 ft per second (which could damage a concrete pillar). It is hard to get a perfect estimate of exactly how much energy she ever tanked. The thing about bullets is, they concentrate all the energy in a very small area, so they penetrate. That's why I said a normal bullet can probably kill Buffy. It isn't a matter of compartmentalized durability, it's a matter of physics. Wonder Woman can take hits from people that impart millions of ft lbs of energy in an attack, which is why her being damaged by ordinary bullets and knives requires that she have a specific weakness to penetration/cutting. Is there something has a greater energy per unit area than a bullet that has hit Buffy? I don't know. If we fudge it to ignore physics and say that the energy of the bullet is spread out over the size of Glory's fist, or Buffy's whole body, that is a different question. I didn't take that to be what the OP was asking, but maybe I was wrong. I would say either a punch from Glory or Olaf hitting her with a hammer is about as strong a blow as Buffy was hit with. Whatever energy that is could be translated to an equivalent bullet.

[Sharpandpointies]

If we're going to start comparing numbers, it's going to start getting really granular (granted, I brought up ft lbs first, but I wasn't intending on actually using them for calculations).

Like, the swat in the face that Glory gave Buffy that sent her flying more than 15' to crack a concrete wall...and didn't break her skin. Or significantly impair her in any way. So that's a nice baseline for what she can absolutely tank without taking any significant damage.

1. How much of the hand actually hit Buffy? It's a backhand - could have just been the knuckles, could have been the entire back of the hand (if we're going to get into surface area);
2. Buffy was still going UP when she hits the wall (I went back and checked) indicating she would have flown further than twice the distance to the wall (at least 10'-15', probably more like 15' given the shot, so the hit would have sent Buffy at least 30' if not more);
3. Her entire body hits the wall, so the force is spread out over a large area; nevertheless, the wall still cracks;
4. It was a sidelong slap that snapped her head to the right (Buffy's left) so the force of the blow was not focused in the direction of her travel; the impact on her head would have been much greater than the distance travelled would indicate;
5. To further that point, the human body tends to deform and bend when hit, and Buffy's head DOES snap to the right; this does bleed off some of the force (she's not a static structure taking it in a rigid fashion), so the amount of force required to launch her that distance would be even greater than if she was rigid.

We could go on and on, and I feel this is why we don't try to break things down to such granular levels.

I, myself, am not saying this thread's version of Buffy can eat a .460 Weatherby Magnum round, or a .50 BMG. We're getting into muzzle energies of ~8 000-12 000 ftlbs there (not to break into numbers, just to indicate how VASTLY more powerful these rounds are over pistol rounds), the BMG rounds can successfully engage light armored personnel carriers, people have used the Weatherby to hunt elephants (gross, but there it is), etc.

But given the Glory hit didn't even leave a contusion or break her skin or anything of the sort, and she clearly wasn't seriously debilitated by it despite the tremendous impact that also snapped her head to the right (easy grounds for a concussion), I'm personally of the opinion that 9mm bullets are likely not even breaking her skin assuming her durability isn't compartmentalized (ie, in this thread).

Mileage, it may vary. ^_^ Probably does!

[Captain Smith]

I'll bow out as I find it a silly debate. My last comment is that the firearms world has abandoned ft lbs and energy transfer as pretty meaningless for handgun rounds. You can talk about it but you are way behind the curve. If you can't penetrate her skull because of mystical whatever, estimating her resistance based on ft lbs of blunt force is not really useful.

[Powerboy]

Okay lets ignore the general separation of her performance against blunt damage and everything else for a moment and just look at her durability feats as durability feats. A marksman stands 100 feet away from her and shoots her perfectly directly in the forehead with... some relatively average handgun. I don't know guns, so pick whatever. Is she going to, in any length of time under her own power, get up? If so, the test is restarted with progressively larger calibres and bigger firearms. Where does she top out if she survives the first? Feel free to consider shots to other vital areas as well.

We're running with the assumption that there's no freak occurrences happening here like that sometimes have real people surviving headshots. The shot and conditions are perfect in that a normal human would die from it.

Going with the OP here, that no compartmentalization of durability. Her durability versus bullets is therefore the same as her durability versus blunt trauma.

In this scenario, she should take a 9mm round to the head fired from a hundred feet away with no problem.

As others have said, in the show, she has basically the Wonder Woman or television Hulk problem.