Look at that Rockman go, he could stand and shoot there all day if he wanted to. Special thanks goes to Inamori Mika for this demonstration.

     One of the beauties of Rockman's Rock Buster is that he has what seems to be an endless amount of ammunition. Why is this the case? Well Ockham's razor would tell you that it's a relic of the play mechanic.

    Rockman Games are fundamentally run and shoot action platformers. If Rockman were to be able to run out of bullets and can't shoot, players will find themselves in a Catch-22 situation where they need to defeat enemies for more weapon energy, but can't because they are out of weapon energy. And of course, even if you insist on just dodge everything, all progress stops the instance you reach any sort of boss battle with no way to attack.

Being a pacifist isn't going make this hippo decide to let Rock pass on through,...

     But this site is for me to geek out on Rockman. And one type of geeking out is creating theories out of existing series canon by drawing inferences and connections that have never been definitely stated or denied. So what theory can we come up with for the everlasting Rock Buster?

     According to various books including the Rockman Great Encyclopedia and R20, the Rock Buster is a weapon that produces energy projectiles with solid impact properties out of collected solar energy. The name of these projectiles are appropriately named "solar bullets".

     The keywords to pay attention to are "collected solar energy". Collected? As in he runs around collecting packets that contain solar energy? Maybe so, or maybe he has some sort of built in hardware that would collect the energy for him. Interestingly enough, a review of Rockman's special parts includes, built into his helmet, solar panels. In case you missed out on this wondrous technology, solar panels are panels designed to absorb the sun's rays as a source of energy.

     Thus my working theory of Buster science is as follows:

Rockman's Rock Buster is not a weapon of infinite ammunition. Instead, it is able to constantly produce projectiles as long as there is a steady supply of solar energy in the environment around him as raw energy material, which is channeled in from the solar panel on his helmet. This system would have no connection to his other energy systems, thus Rockman would be and is able to attack regardless of his current life energy state or stored special arms energy supply.

    So is this a full robust theory able to explain all scenarios of infinite ammo? Not quite so. There are still a few questions it does not address. Furthermore, what other possible scenario or questions does this theory open up? But I'll cover all this in the stealthy part 2 continuation of this article at a later date~