– Ah, smaller bombs would equate to a larger (though still limited) pay load.

– As far as the jetpack burning his legs [shrug] After most of a century of heroes having jetpacks of one form or another, I just assumed he’s got adamantium pants or something.

– My fixation with his weapons loadout comes from my military background and the fact that it inspired a deep distrust of supply lines, so yeah, the availability of ammunition is important to me.

– Walter (and the rest of the group) are first and foremost soldiers. Their jobs are to kill the bad guys and break their things, so yeah the Bombardier’s accuracy is important. The only thing worse than a pilot who is out of usable munitions is one who still has weapons but can’t hit what he’s aiming at.

Well, Arvell did draw the bomb a bit large. In our conversations, we’ve described them as “grenades”. If you look at the page I linked above, you’ll see that he has a pouch on his left hip where the he carries the grenades, though his payload will be fairly limited.

It’s interesting that the bombs are what’s hanging you up. From my point of view, once we’ve accepted that a jetpack-equipped man can perform aerial stunts we’ve shown (and not have his legs burnt off), the idea that he could accurately throw a bomb at someone seems minor.

-Ok, sure, a precision bomber with a payload of what? From the size of the bomblet in his hand, and a noticeable lack of storage on his person for more of the same size, a maximum of 2-4 bomblets (lacking any undisclosed ‘bag of holding’ capability of the pouch on his hip) makes him extremely limited in his utility as a ‘Bombardier’ In very short order he is a flying guy with a pistol, and a limited load out for that as well (not to mention the difficulty of hitting a moving target with a pistol while moving yourself)

– Then you have to consider that in order to get the ‘precision’ in one of his bombing runs, he would have to be moving fairly slowly and be close to his targets, making himself vulnerable to his own bombs.

– When I was much younger and far more stupid than I am now, a favored sport among my peers was to stand in the bed of a speeding pickup truck and lob stones at various targets… not as easy as it sounded I assure you. I would suspect that the level of difficulty would increase dramatically if the targets were likely to be fighting back making it necessary for the truck to have to swerve and jink about.

– I suppose I’ll have to wait to see how Walter performs in combat in story to see what utility his apparently limited weapons base performs.

The main advantage would be precision. Walter can fly much lower and deliver a bomb much more accurately than a bomber could. His function is not to carpet-bomb large areas, but to surgically strike specific targets (as seen in his demo here: http://thespecialistscomic.com/page-69/ ).

Really, I think his bombs are the most common sense weapon that a flying guy could have in a war setting.

– The Jetpack and the Man of Mystery mask, +10 on the cool factor, having the ability to lob an extremely small number of man portable bomblets, -10000 on the common sense factor.