Punches are kinetic energy. It's
'Kinetic Energy= .5xmassxvelosity squared'. The key term you're forgetting is velocity. Bullets for example don't need leverage because they're traveling fast. You're not pushing against something; your fist has velocity (and mass) that makes it do damage. In fact if you jumped forward and punched in the air you would have even more energy than a standing punch.
ALRIGHT: Now I see the problem there: What happens is simply put, you are forgetting the most important part. WHAT gives you that kinetic energy in the first place. WHAT gives you the velocity and momentum.
First, bullets NEED leverage in a way: Guns are designed specifically to direct all the force of the explosion on the chamber forward. That initial burst is what gives a bullet it's terrifying penetrating power. The bullet itself does not need leverage as it is propelled by an explosion, not by you. However, the gun will also be affected by the explosive force, and you are holding it.
Now, have you seen all those gun safety pages that mention how to hold a gun to prevent it from getting you knocked out? The gun will go backwards due to the explosion and hit you in the face if you don't hold it the right way. I obviously have never used a gun, however something similar happens with a bow: When you release the string, you need to hold firm on the grip to avoid the bow from moving and the arrow from missing.
And just as I said, what gives a grounded Holt Jaymaker it's strenght, as you repeated, the initial jump. Off the ground, when you use the move, there is no place from where to jump, thus is much weaker. You COULD make the case of making the aerials a little bit stronger depending on the direction you are moving, wich would make sense, as a programming student, I can assure you that it would be a nightmare to code a move whose properties depends on your speed, and with the Autolink angle being already glitchy as is, I don't think it's worth the effort.
Friction (Force * Distance) =/= Momentum (Mass * Velocity), friend. You can't use those terms interchangeably. I throw you into space and watch you punch and kick and stuff and it's not going to do anything because flaying your limbs aren't going to change the force on your center of mass. If I did the same thing in air, you now have competing forces; gravity pushing you down, and terminal velocity (caused by air) limiting your maximum falling speed. That's why falling belly-flop style and nose-diving in air will go different speeds, air resistance is actually a thing.
I actually wasn't, but the comment was not comprehensive enough so I won't blame you there. I mentioned friction as the source of the leverage and momentum, by reaction. The correct term would be "the normal force" in the case of a vertical jump, or the force that in physics is described as the one that holds together an object and prevents it from being deformed, and inertia, that prevents it from moving or stopping; and that those two are the forces that indirectly causes the friction to ocurr, but that would be needlessly confusing so I preferred to omit that part.
And yes, I know about air resistance but it's very low in comparison to any other source of leverage, and in the scale of jumping, you won't come even close to terminal velocity, and the air resistance will equally be almost negligible. That's why I said "next to no friction" instead of "no friction at all".
Conservation of Momentum, bud. I could jump kick a falling elephant in the air, but I really don't think I'm gonna move the elephant at all. It's too heavy. There's a reason the bouncy ball bounces back to you from a wall, the clay ball splats on the wall, and the wrecking ball goes through the wall.
And that doesn't answer the question; what are you even arguing here? Is this supposed to be against Little Mac's design or what?
Well, you answered it yourself with the elephant example. You can do whatever you want, but it will do little effect on a grounded or heavy target because you will lack enough initial momentum. that's why none of Mac's aerials do significant knockback. If you say falled for an hour you would get the momentum from the gravity acceleration minus air friction, and you could potentially do a LOT of damage at the end of the fall when colliding with the ground, mostly to yourself; but as disscused above it would be impossible to happen on a realistic height scale, unless on something crazy big like the Smash Run stage, and it would be needlessly compliccated to code Mac's aerials to take his current falling speed and direction into account. At best it would justify to make a decent Stall-Then-Fall Dair for Mac that gained power the more time it stays active, in a sort-of-reversed Mario Nair.
Sorry if I wasn't clear enough there.
And yeah, we were discussing about Mac's design. I wanted to try to explain how it works and why it makes sense for his game to be polarized between good ground moves and bad air moves.
BTW: that's unrelated, but, If I could patch SSB4... I would bring the Ice Climbers back by taking advantage of the double character in one glitch in the WiiU. But I would do something for it to be put on 3DS: simply remove Nana's AI. Make it copy Popo's moves entirely. After all, that's how Luma works and it does not give the 3DS any problems.
But that would make her terrible... unless we tweak a couple of things:
Up-B becomes a copy of Mega Man's Up-B custom, Beat. By using the pterodactyl to fly, they can safely recover individually onstage, and you can even make a case of using the C-stick as a second controller while it is active to move each climber separately. Belay can be reworked as a stantard tether grab only usable with both climbers around, with the stantard grab replacing it when only one is nearby. That way we also compensate for the removal in Sm4sh of their most dominant attribute: their semi-broken zero-to-death chaingrab combo in Brawl.
Down taunt replaced by Popo doing a 4 frames long animation with the hammer. Using this taunt reverses the controls on Nana. If you input right, she goes left and viceversa. Using the taunt again gets the controls back to normal again. This way you can split and reunite them much more efficiently. Pressing the D-pad down during an attack animation or during hitstun, stunned animation, sleeping or on freefall, will still reverse the controls, but it won't buffer a taunt. That way you can still try to save her if you are in midair. Down Taunt has always been the most dull of the three so it's perfect for that.
On 3DS there is also the option of using Select for the control reversal command, and it was my original intention to be for this and for any transformation move, but no other controller has it so it's out of the question...
