>ITT: ideas for sci-fi melee weapons and/or world-building

Lightsabers
Jedi Code

>>52042218
was it ever agreed how lightsabers worked

A herring!
NI!

>>52042201
space-ship combat/boarding action. don't want to cause a hull breach and get sucked outside, so stick to melee weapons and beat the crap out of people

>strolling around planet in power armour
>carrying a heavy laser carbine capable of piercing power armour in weak points when fired in sustained barrages
>one laser barrage costs 100 space credits
>come across a bunch of planetary scavengers
>remnants of a crashed spaceship
>no armour
>carry primitive gunpowder based weapons
>total worth of all their stuff if you dragged it to a trading post would barely be 0.1 space credit

Why bother wasting your battery charges on such goons? Just grab your combat knife and eviscerate 100 dudes.

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>>52042241
I would assume military spacecraft hulls would be tough enough to stop small arms fire.

>>52042201
Sci fi melee weapons only work if there are good reasons for not just shooting the guy.

Therefore you don't need interesting melee weapons, you need interesting armour types.

Two common thoughts are either lightweight armor that protects for bullets effectively but not melee weapons, and power armor making anything short of tank rounds be utterly ineffective.

I'll expound on the first idea; let's say a new type of body armor is developed, called Trevlar; it's flexible, but when hit by bullets it absorbs the kinetic energy of the bullet and transforms it into heat without deforming, and it's no thicker than a few millimeters. You can get hit with an artillery strike and it won't hurt - the heat's dissipated mostly outwards. Everyone looks like they're wearing latex suits, but eh, it keeps you alive.

The main problem with the suit is that it doesn't work well when you hit it with electricity. It fucks up with the control mechanisms badly, and repeated hits will cause them to fail. So, you COULD use bullets that have electrical capacitors in them, and spend so much more money on it, and carry a pitiful number of bullets where you need to shoot a guy with a full mag so an actual bullet can work...

OR you can ghetto rig your knife with a battery and stab a fucker. And hey, if the other guy has an electroknife, why not take an electrosword, instead? Boom, suddenly you're using melee weapons.

Culture and tradition. This melee weapon has cultural / religious significance so people still carry them around and might even use them from time to time.

>>52042201
Offensive and defensive technologies are in a constant arms race. Just make it so that at that specific point in time, defensive technology has the lead. Power armor or personal shields or whatever has made ranged weaponry less effective, and maybe something like a strength enhancing exoskeleton or whatever has made melee weapons more viable. Remember, for more than a century guns coexisted with knights in plate armor and large formation of troops with pikes and other melee weapons. When defensive technology was more even with offensive technology, troops with guns often needed to be defended with melee troops because those guns were more limited in their ability to stop an enemy from reaching them.

>>52042201
>a futuristic or a near-fururistic setting
>body armor technology has gone through a breakthrough
>almost everyone now wears a very thin and flexible full-body suit that greatly diminishes the effect of projectile weapons, the force of impact of the projectile is spread out across the suit's user's entire body
>as a result, traditional firearms are much less useful tools for killing, especially in close quarters, but are still used in great number because of their availability and ability to reliably stun and damage combatants from a distance
>energy weapons are much more deadly, but are very expensive and only really used rarely as a consequence
>high-tech melee weapons also exist, but are more like luxury items because of their impractibility, high cost and high level of skill needed to use them

>>52042302
Also in space, no one can protect you from being launched the other way by shooting a gun, so either you make space bows or you use melee weapons

Maybe you guys can help, im trying to figure out a melee weapon for a one off cyborg npc with super-strength. It needs to be easily stored, I was thinking of just giving him an electric telescoping baton but I was wondering if anyone else had a more fun idea. Its a close to hard sci-fi setting so nothing too crazy.

>>52042382
>what are recoilless rifles
>or gyrojets
>or lasers
The acceleration of a modern gun would not be very much and could be corrected for.

An avenue I pursued was, rather than pursuing technological options for scifi melee weapons, looking into what living things would need to be made of for melee to be more efficient.

Anything highly compressible, say, a creature with alcohol for blood, or some kind of balloon robot, is going to much, much less damaged by a high energy, penetrating attack, compared to what we're used to happening when you shoot a person.

For something like that, you want slashing or twisting weapons, something nearly impossible to do at a distance.

>>52042382
>Also in space, no one can protect you from being launched the other way by shooting a gun, so either you make space bows
>a gun will cause recoil,
>a bow will not cause recoil

Thank you for demonstrating you have no understanding of the laws of motion or physics, you retard. Loosing a bow will cause you to start to move backwards as well.

Also
>swing melee weapon in zero G
>start rotating in the void like a tard, throw up inside your helmet and fly off into the distance screaming because you didn't correct for rotational momentum

>>52042302
From the outside, sure. But assuming we're going with hard Sci-fi, even piercing a small wire could cause catastrophic results inside.

You wouldn't want to spray bullets everywhere. Swords, while still really dangerous, are much more contained and controllable.
I'd think that rapiers, epees, and sabres would be the ideal weapon, precise and doesn't require you to wrestle your opponent.

>>52042201
I've always liked dunes "shields that stop anything moving fast and explode nuclearly when shot with lazors"
as an explanation for melee weapons

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Why not >muh honour?

The Predator could easily have just blasted the jungle with lasers, miniature black holes or anti-matter from the comfort of his ship, but he didn't. He went onto the ground, shanked some people, shot some people with a low-tech plasma gun, and fought a honourable melee battle with Billy and Dutch.

>>52042226
Quick rundown on the Legends explanation
>crystal is aligned to the force
>provides power
>saber emits plasma
>plasma is held in a magnetic field, thus forming the blade
They are no light sabers, they're just called that because it sounds cool. Star Wars lasers aren't lasers either, they're plasma weapons. Bigger versions of blasters.

>>52042328
they would just wear something over top of it... its essentially what we do now, just all in one vest

and we'd probably resort to some kind of radiation gun before electric melee weapons

How about "guns were just never invented,gunpowder doesn't exist", then you could have high tech society but with bows and high tech swords

>>52042537
If gunpowder doesn't get invented, bows will just straight up disappear along with crossbows outside killing unarmoured people.

The bow and crossbow were already completely unable to kill plate armoured people around the end of the Renaissance/beginning of the Early Modern period.

If you wanted someone in plate to die at a distance, you'd have an entire squad of gunners aim at that single armoured guy and hope for a lucky shot, or you just shot a cannon at him.

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>>52042404
Some sort of retractable blade like pic related?
His fists should be strong enough to maim people if he is super strong
Electrified hands?
Some sort of knuckle weapon
Retractable whips, posssibly electrified

>>52042565
High tech arrows could have electric charges on them

>>52042201
Didn't Dune have some sort of personal forcefield that stopped high velocity projectiles but not swords? If you have the tech to make it happen, it's certainly possible. You need air to breath and you don't want to be protected from a chair when you try to sit down so you calibrate it to only activate when something moving at 60mph or greater comes at you.

>>52042537
This is surprisingly reasonable.

It seems obvious in hindsight, but consider that explosives were discovered completely by accident only 2000 years ago, took over 100 years to see military use, and existed for 1200 years before anyone realised that you could use them in warfare as actual offensive weapons that directly killed people rather than just scaring people with the loud noise and unnatural light they make.

I'd say it is easy enough to imagine a world where we reached electricity, phones and computers without guns, but we'd never make it off this rock without some fairly robust exploration of what is possible with explosives, and that would eventually lead to guns. As a spin-off of the space race mind you, which is actually a really interesting setting in some ways.

Like, the sort of place where cloud computing is an every day phenomenon, but these dangerous new science fiction weapons hitting the streets that can fling iron spikes into people at a distance threaten the safety of the town.

>>52042537
You would just have airguns and (later) gauss/rail guns instead.

>>52042762
Those could be explained to be too large to use by infantry thus relegating them to tanks, battleships and such. Man portable air rifle doesn't have enough velocity to pierce any armor whatsoever which would make it only assassin's weapon of choice

>>52042762
Railguns are pretty hideous to make viable, and would end up being devastatingly powerful muskets really, since they tear their rails apart so much each time, you'd be hotswapping barrels or something. Presumably they would be this universe's Panzerschreck equivalent.

Coilguns or airguns, certainly deadly enough off the battlefield, but man-portable versions today would struggle to penetrate plate, for instance. Guns wouldn't be the insurmountable offence they are today, skirmishing infantry formations could still benefit from shields, full plate etc. and sometimes be in a situation where they are able to assault enemy positions using maces and knives that couldn't have been dealt with using (infantry scale) gunfire.

>>52043114
If you have mechanisation and industrialisation warfare would probably be vehicle focused.

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>>52042328

See here's the thing I never understood when we have these armor versus weapons discussions.

Okay, so you make armor that can withstand the forces of an artillary barrage from todays weapons. That's fine for all intents and purposes but I think it should go without saying even in a fantasy sense that level of force should still kill a person unless their super duper armor can also absorb the force of the shockwaves that will liquifiy their organs or just the explosion proper if they get directly hit by a shell for instance.

That said, such armor stopping small arms rounds is fine but getting hit with a grenade or rocket shouldn't be something you can just tank to face outside of a vehicle.

>>52042201
>Find a way to safely and reliably get from where your melee fighter is to where their enemies are.
Super-speed, teleportation, invisibility are all good options here.

>Now that we're in melee range, your weapon needs to be able to deal appreciable damage to said enemies while avoiding or tanking their own attacks.
Easy enough to fluff the weapons as more effective and such. Enhanced reflexes, power-armour, cyberware/bioware, the Force all help explain melee fighters turning into human/alien blenders when in close range.

Rinse, repeat and you should have an attractive reason to use melee in any setting, really.

>>52042537
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9lEeKdbQ_w

>>52043166
Fair point, presumably at this point you end up with the LoGH scenario where most armed forces aren't intended for anti-personnel combat at all, but the ones that are just use axes and full plate or some medieval bullshit along those lines and occasionally slaughter their way through dozens of men each prior to encountering resistance in the form of the enemy's knights, in the rare event that they actually get deployed.

This is still a setting where the practicality of melee combat is just barely holding on with white knuckles, since its what the people outside of the (comparatively common) tanks and planes do.

forcefields that stop whatever's trying to harm them

melee weapons that create a counter-forcefield so you are left to deal with whatevery armor that`s left, maybe slap high-frequency shit on it for that

>>52043256
Hell, take your LoGH example and enforce it through laws and (martial) culture.

"Spacy" refuses to touch (manheld) guns, sticking to their nuclear drones and railguns for space encounters, and melee weapons for when the fighting gets tough.
Thinks guns are for groundsloggers, Army goons dropped onto planets walking into horrible droppod massacres, sitting blind in a can waiting to either land or get vaporized by an anti-orbital missile battery. They'd rather enter a spaceship, parley the fight and surrender conditions, maybe have a champion fight, and depending on the conditions that were made, have a melee battle to the death, where one can see their opponent, and their survival depends on skill, not luck.

>>52043214
Not trying to be pessimistic here, I want to find the solution, but it isn't this easy. Every single thing you listed allows people to be much better at using guns than anyone without them.

Better at using guns to the point that they could probably just do a better job than a stabby person with the same stuff.

Super-speed? Fire and reload your weapon super-fast, flank people, etc. Teleportation? Flank people, get away from stabby dudes. Invisibility? Actually one of the only ones that is better for a stabby dude than a gunman, but a gunner would still be much better off invisible, and furthermore the response in a military sense in-setting is probably going to be landmines to catch invisible enemies which then renders gunners most efficient to shoot anyone who tries to cross it with a mine clearing vehicle.

Enhanced reflexes? Shoot at people quicker and more accurately, before they see you. Power-armour: Bring a heavier gun with you. Cyberware/bioware, allowing you to shoot a heavier gun faster and more accurately, or possibly *be* a gun and shoot people behind you with the eyes in the back of your head and the guns on the back of your shoulders.

The Force is a decent one, in that it was a precognitive effect that didn't work so well on living minds, so you knew where bullets were going to be but not where swords were going to be, but at this point it's some real magical bullshit. Furthermore, why not use your precognition to shoot people's bullets out of the air rather than swording them? That way you have a gun and you can shoot at the enemy if they don't have the force, and hit them in the fucking face with it if they do.

>>52042577
I like how Jensen has all of those except for the whip. Maybe if he gets blown up again they'll implant a whip on his crotch or torso or something

Armor tech was not developed by humans, it was discovered from ancient advanced civilization ruins. Ranged weponry hasn't caught up yet, but melee weapons work

>>52043363
Yeah, the swordsman would be less effective than the gunmen in my scenario, but they'd both be leagues beyond anyone without their enhancements. Using a melee weapon or not would come down to personal preference seeing as with a gun or no, you can safely close in to your targets, eliminate them, tank whatever they can dish out and do it all over again.

>>52043462
>humans discover some million year old alien sport gear in a fossilized stadium
>use it for war

I like it!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4yDIcNDAIo
the dune shields seem to cover it, anything moving faster then X is stopped by the shield.
and beam weapons cause a massive explosion (are you a bad enough dude to level a city to kill one guy?)

as a bonus spin-off you get a new martial art centred around stabling slowly

>>52043464
If they can kill any number of plebs anyway, their usefulness is distinguished by their ability to destroy facilities or kill each other, which I would argue in those cases is definitely going to be easier for the hypothetical gun-lord rather than the hypothetical stab-lord.

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>>52042201
Everybody is a highlander and everybody carries high tech sword of your choice to deal with whatever neck protecting measures you can think of

>>52043486
>to kill one guy?
>implying wars are about killing one guy
Also, how do they prevent desperate enough opponents from exploding cities?
Oh, right, such things don't happen in space operas.

>>52043486
>beam weapons cause a massive explosion (are you a bad enough dude to level a city to kill one guy?)
Imagine if we had this now and just how many cities would be wiped off the map. It's absurd to think this would be any kind of deterrent or that these shields would be seen as anything other than bombs that happen to have a cool side-use, but are mainly just city-destroying bombs.

>>52043534
The explosion happens at any point along the beam's travel path, it could nuke the city or the shooter, or both. If you nuke the city you lose any resources you would be fighting over

>>52043587
Have you heard of nukes?

>>52042201
Warframe comes to mind.
The Tenno are elite mutant ninjas who are usually too fast to gun down.
So what do the Grineer and Corpus do? Create melee weapons like shields, powerfists, rocket-hammers, force staffs, anything with enough raw power behind it to take the Tenno's blows, and stun them long enough to finish them off.

Tenno are the reason both factions use melee.

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>>52043587
I mean nukes exist and we (so far) aren't shooting them at each-other

>>52042530
>we'd probably resort to some kind of radiation gun before electric melee weapons

Radiation is stopped by thin layers of cloth, or isn't stopped at all. You'd need to throw out enough gamma rads to cook someone to kill them fast, and that number of rads will kill the user in half a day.

>>52043621
We also don't give them to literally every soldier.

>>52043613
>>52043621
Yeah, and we all know just how regulated they are. In Dune, just how many people have access to these shields and how many have access to beam weapons? Cause that all you need to wipe a city off the map. If we dropped these shields and a beam weapons in Africa and the Middle-East, would they all become melee focused societies or would everything go to shit even faster as cities start disappearing?

>>52043534
You fucking retard.

Shooting a laser at a shield might blow up the other guy in a nuclear explosion, it might blow you up in a nuclear explosion, or it might blow the shield user AND yourself up in two nuclear explosions.

>if I shoot a thing with a beem it explodes I also explode.
yea there will always be that one guy who wants to blow himself up, but most people have a sliver of self preservation
>>52043658
after a 100 years the surviving ones would be

>>52043677
No, you.
You missed point about "desperate enough opponent".

>>52043686
More like, if I put a timer on this beam weapon to shoot this shield, then I have a pretty fucking awesome bomb.

>>52043700
At that point they would just use nukes, which exist in Dune, They don't use it for the same reason we don't use them now, if you nuke someone everyone else nukes you

>>52043700
It worked in dune because basic things like timers and shit were practically illegal due to thinking machines trying to kill everyone.

Except that was also retarded, but ah well.

>>52043715
If a *country* nukes someone, everyone nukes that *country*. If every fifth chucklefuck you meet is walking around with half the components necessary to wipe the city off the map and every fourth is walking around with the other half, cities are going to blow up. It's either that or no one gets to walk around with shields or no one gets to walk around with beam weapons. The fact that anyone would view these things as shields first is fucking insane. These are bombs and they would always be seen as such. That they can be used for something else would be irrelevant when faced with the capacity to wipe cities of the map. We could use missiles as coffee tables too but that's not what everyone associates missiles with.

>>52043619
Actually, this is kind of wrong. The Tenno are quite strong and fast, and thus able to swing weapons pretty hard, and so are the factions. The factions are much less strong and fast, and so their melee weapons are pretty ineffective against Tenno.

However, they're still much pretty devastating when equipped with ranged weapons.

The reason that melee weapons are so prominent is that most battles are to take enemy ships intact and inhabit them with your own side's personnel, taking place in close quarters and also that the ultra-powerful civilisation that preceded them was in a pitched war with an enemy that could near-instantly hack or borg-adapt to anything more complicated than a mid-1900s gunpowder weapon in a setting where weapons technology was nearly at 'free planet killers for everyone'.

The amount of lost technology lying around for the modern day factions to excavate that is the culmination of essentially a post-human civilisation trying to forge the perfect sword or the best of all possible bow and arrows is absolutely staggering, allowing them to create devastating melee weapons, yet they still choose to use guns for most of their frontline troops.

>>52043592
So, you drop a bomb consisting of the smallest shield generator and laser. Or you drop a regular nuke with a shield.

Serious question: do timers exist in Dune? I know computers don't, but really, what's the most complex electronic device in the books?

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>>52043519
One thing really bothered me in that movie.
>Only decapitation will kill an immortal
>All immortals carry swords to kill other immortals
>Slashy, choppy, cutyourheadcleanoff swords
>Iman Fasil has a fucking rapier

It's a beautiful weapon, but I doubt it's easy to decapitate anyone with it, even if you are superhuman.

>>52043771
>>52043853

>timers and shit were practically illegal
I know they didn't have calculators in Dune®, but mechanical timers exist and aren't really that high tech.

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>>52043519
I can kinda imagine this in a trans-humanist setting where the only way to incapacitate a threat for sure is to lop off their head, or all their limbs.


My space opera setting has shielding which functions by having a cloud of nanites floating near your skin (presumably anchoring themselves with nanothread) which can fire lasers at eachother which create hyper-dense vacuum energy between them. Hyper dense vacuum energy being handwavium for "space that nothing can pass through".

The problem is that each "fire" of this point-defense system expends a massive amount of energy, which is ok when you are dealing with bullets that only have to be blocked once and then all their kinetic energy is gone, but isn't very effective against melee weapons where the user will just keep pushing or drawcutting against the target (chopping attacks are pretty ineffective though)

And obviously, like all ways of making melee weapons viable, ranged weapons are still superior if you have enough money to afford ammunition which can self-propel and correct its course back onto its target after deflection. But it is still highly practical to have a sword as you won't have much of that ammo, if you even have the legal permission/contacts/money to possess it.

>>52043859
In the series, one dude has a shotgun in the hilt of his sword so that he can shoot them in the fucking chest to distract them with pain while he chops off their head.

I couldn't help but wonder why none of them thought to do this until like, 1970?

>>52042706
What if the setting simply lacks sufficient quantities of the main elements of gunpowder? Cellulose in some form seems to come up in the production of many bullet propellants. How about a dystopian future world where cellulose is somehow a rare resource ? Ran out of trees Easter Island style, perhaps earlier in history and hence altering the trajectory of weapon developments?

>>52044028
How bad was the series?

>>52044038
Cellulose is not really a *super* critical element of propellants, not enough to prevent us making guns, and any world deforested hard enough to have no capacity for cellulose production would also be completely uninhabitable for human beings unless we had already reached a state of high technology.

>>52044048
About 3 or 4 times better than the Vampire the Masquerade series, so hovering around "tolerable".

It had a decent number of genuinely good scenes each episode, but the writing had me wondering why the fuck anything was happening most of the time. Honestly much less shittier than the movies than you would expect for a TV spinoff of that era.

>>52042328
>what are tasers: the post

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Look at all these dumb niggas not enjoying the benefits of malleable flesh.

>>52044246
I'm not clear how biological power armor solves any of the problems already raised in the thread.

>>52042462
Is that a concept from Dune, or the somewhat more comedic Rats, Bats & Vats?

Because I loved the flamethrower workaround in that latter book, and found the Slow-Shields interesting enough to introduce into my own traveler-based homebrew.

>>52044120
>Vampire the Masquerade series
What the fuck?

Everyone in the future has literal immortality based on super-advanced technology. They cannot be reasonably damaged by any weapons that a person could carry.

So how do factions wage war? How do people kill each other? Hacks. It's all electronic. You may not be able to kill anyone but if you can wrestle them down and break into some security thing, which maybe is on their body or maybe is at some central hub requiring lots of muscles or stealth to get to. You have some people who wrestle and some people who hack and sometimes people are nice and only bring wrestlers because they just want your stuff.

>>52044038

cellulose is in literally every plant, so unless said society can completely exist without vegetables, fruits, or vegetation of any kind then that wouldn't really work.

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>>52042201

why not the evangelion method?

ballistics and explosives are blocked by forcefields, but forcefields/resonance frequencies/someshit technobabble emitted from another entity effectively cancels out the forcefield of the first, enabling damage to be done in close quarters.

>>52044324
Look, take the worst possible thing that could mean to you, now imagine if the script for that was given to someone who had no idea what the fuck Vampire the Masquerade was, allow them to make some minor edits for their own personal flair, and then have them produce the script on unbelievably shoestringed technical budget with The Room tier acting.

>>52043771

Not really, the proscription covered more advanced computational electronics. They need enough electronics to build space ships, so it seems pretty reasonable shit like timers would be around.

>>52043935
You don't even need a timer, just a reliable mechanical trigger for the laser. Put a shield in front of it, make sure that falling down from an appreciable height triggers the gun 100% of the time, load it all into a crate and drop from a flying vehicle.

Cheap nukes without any radiation.

Hell I'm pretty sure they actually used buried stationary shields as a massive landmine of sorts in Dune.

>>52042201

This is hard. Best bet would probably be humanity cleaned it's shit up to extent that guns and bullets are hard to come by and most gang activity has returned to knife play. Like Japan and the Yakuza. Really hard to get a gun and the punishment for having one is absurdly high.

>>52042328
>>52042302
>>52042241
>>52042264
>>52042349
>>52042377
>>The rest of you idiots

Flamethrowers would be the stop gap for magic armor that stops bullets but not blades.

>>52044586
This is honestly one of the best ways to approach this. It's basically the Dune method without the unimaginably retarded nuke thing.

>There are energy shields capable of stopping anything harmful to the user
>Energy weapons are simply ineffective and do *NOT* turn into fucking bombs when used against them
>There exists melee weapons capable of ignoring these shields whether by moving at a certain speed or because of resonance frequencies or whatever

>>52043700
They specifically state that the explosion size was effectively impossible to predict. You could get a firecracker when hoping for a blockbuster, or vice versa. This made it extremely impractical as a weapon, only used by those who had nothing better.

>>52044842

Honestly the list of shit you can use is huge in a universe where projectile weapons are a thing.

Chemical weapons, temperature weapons, radiation weapons, sound weapons, electricity weapons, dropping big rocks on people, a bunch of other shit.

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>>52044282
What I mean is that I'm seeing a lot of talk about standard scifi, but none about the more interesting variants and how they can be explained or used.

>>52045409

Because biosystems are pretty dumb, the flesh is a weakness. Shred it.

>>52042201
>"the slow blade penetrates the shield"

Cyberpunk.
All ballistics have been confiscated by the World Inc.
The only ones that exist are on drones and peacekeeper mechs.
Even MP goons only have super tasers and a "literally cook your brain-stem" button for the average joe.
Unless you're literally in a situation where you're playing out the events of Neuromancer, you're doing the most damage with improvised ballistics and some amazing biotech that mutates you or data-slinging to fuck up people on the level of having "psychic" powers.
You *can* find older guns that aren't encoded with World Inc., but the calibers for them are wildly out of data and the World Inc. Surveillance System is automatically attuned to the sound and damage made by old ballistic weapons, so you'll have a swarm of drones on your ass unless you can figure out how to shoot and hide from literally 30 drones set to "Kill the motherfucker" mode as it wipes out the surrounding 5 city blocks to make sure the shooter is dead.

>>52045460
Its really not. Biological materials have shown themselves to be better in every way than mundane ones. Why do you think we're actively trying to genetically engineer spider glands for use in military applications and similar shit? Spider silk is stronger than steel, organic filtration systems are more efficent than any inorganic one, and bioprocessors are more compact and powerful than any computer we can build today. The difficulty is engineering it; but once its made, organic can be just as good if not better than inorganic in many capacities.

>>52042201
Gyrojet weapons become very popular for 0-g combat but their short range performance is so lackluster that if you want to storm a position it's better to use mono-edged blades.

>>52044842
Flamethrowers need oxygen to work properly. Also, a sealed and armored space suit would be able to handle the temperatures for some time. Modern space suits already need temperature controls just to deal with direct sunlight.

>>52045793
Awful, so convoluted and made for DM to abuse the players

>>52043621
Except, you know where we used nukes against a civilian population for no military purpose.

>>52045919
Sounds like every Shadowrun campaign I've ever played

>Unless you literally use to work for the Longhorns, they have fingerprinted all guns, know if you fucked with it, and have to find literally a gun from WWII to use against SF SWAT gear
>Unless you literally worked for this particular company, you have to make crit successes on your rolls to not be automatically discovered and have you brainstem cooked
>Unless you put all of your build points into augmentation, you body will reject anything larger than the most basic wetware implant, and even then, you have to make sure every day its not infected

Then again, my GM was an asshole.

>>52043859
In all honesty you'd be hard pressed to decapitate anyone cleanly with any kind of sword. Vertebra are no joke.

>>52042201
>THEY MADE A GUN THAT SHOOTS SWORDS!
Best possible choice of OP image.

In Blazing Spear (a big sword & sandals weird fantasy setting I'm helping develop), Almechany stores & directs energy via rasa circuits, which can be drawn on anything but burn out after one use UNLESS the "battery" section of the circuit is tattooed on living skin. The circuits can transfer energy across distances, but the there's an exponential decay in the percentage of the energy that makes it to the output.

In other words, a magitech melee weapon gives you the most bang for your buck.

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>>52046100
Pic related, he says. What pic, says person reading the post.

Though I can't really justify it, I think the idea of a simple baton that "tags" targets for a stealth drone with a powerful precision cannon would be neat.

Maybe it's in a situation where the user needs to be mobile while still fighting armored targets, and rather than carrying what is effectively a space anti-material rifle around, a drone follows him around and does it for him.

Of course then you'd have to ask why the drone just can't be remote piloted and remove the target designator altogether. To which I have no response. I just want to see some guy bop an armored guy on the head and then run off, leaving the armored guy to have a brief moment of confusion before he gets capped.

>>52044857
Yeah but why cant you just turn that melee weapon into a projectile?

Reminder that Sam stole that sword from a japanese schoolgirl

>>52046441
is that a fucking ga rei zero reference?

>>52046311
I always default to making it prohibitively expensive to do so. You 'can' make bullets out of them but you'd be shooting away a fortune with every one that leaves the barrel. Not to say it isn't done anyway, but then it's a matter of having a literal magic bullet, or a handful of them. A melee weapon that can be re-used and repaired is more cost-effective.

Add in enhanced reflexes to the mix and we might have an interesting setting with interesting use of weapons.

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>>52046619
You're goddamn right it is

>>52046311

maybe it's super expensive and/or made of extremely rare materials/parts so it's not worth the loss to use it as a projectile.

or it's too large or unseemly to be effectively fired.

or the effect must be applied continuously to deactivate the shield so a fire-and-forget projectile will only down it for a few seconds, which wouldn't be enough time to retaliate in most situations.

>>52042337
doesnt work if conflict is a focus since in the real world nobody uses swords in war

>>52043853
In universe no one apparently thought about doing that until Chapterhouse: Dune. They were mounted on dummy ships and were pretty effective.

It's probably a good thing that the Omnius in the Butlararian Jihad didn't have access to shields because he would have spammed laser/shield drones.

>Serious question: do timers exist in Dune? I know computers don't, but really, what's the most complex electronic device in the books?

Computers exist, they just are distrusted and somewhat taboo. It's AI that doesn't exist in the empire. You can find plenty of references to things that are nearly impossible or at least highly impractical without computers, though.

>>52042524
that's moreso the explanation for canon now, at least in regards to the kyber crystal's force sensitivity

which now means that the emotion of the user can dictate the power(or intensity?) of the blade

>>52042201
How about the LoGH route where there are grenades which jet out explosive gas into an area making firing weapons suicide. Also space axes.

>>52042201
OP actually did a reasonably good job at explaining why swords are a thing in MGRising.

Cyborg muscle fiber is highly resistant to traditional firearms, and integrating the high-frequency cutting technology into a ranged weapon either isn't practical or can't be done in the year the game takes place. So the most efficient way of dealing with cyborgs is with a bladed weapon.

I like it because it doesn't try to justify "swords are always better than guns" as a grand statement. The events of the game occur in at a very specific time where one technology has overtaken another. It's pretty easy to imagine that within a few years of Revengeance the march of progress makes HF weapons obsolete.

>>52047627
I'd prefer the route where all the guns are musket like - slow to fire but very powerful

>>52047627
To be fair, it's that plus the action movie convention that deflecting bullets with a sword is easy enough that really badass regular humans can do it. Skilled swordfighters with augmentations (even minimal limb enhancements) can use HF blades to deflect sustained volleys of mounted machine gun fire at a dead run.

>>52044294
Speed based shields as the other Anon described are from Dune. They are a major part of the plot in the first book.

>>52044038
Basic black powder is made from three very common materials.

And by very common I mean fucking carbon. sulfur, and literally dried, purified shit.

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>>52042201
What's wrong with old fashioned steel?
It's proven it's self time and time again long before your existence and will continue to prove effective into the far future for as long as humanity exists.
Hopefully eternally.

>>52044676
Plus it's what? 8 Episodes in total?

>>52049467
Hollywood/TV script gurus got told about a new fad at the time and naturally made an abysmal attempt to capitalize.

>>52042462
Dune is definitely the best example I can think of finding a way to fit swords into sci-fi.

>>52049538
Don't they use daggers tho ? I remember that Sting used dagger when he fought Dale Cooper

Couldn't you simply wear some sort of armour under the slow shield?

Hell, couldn't the shield just be programmed to have the speed thing set to 0 so nothing could penetrate?

>>52049582
They have both daggers and swords, though daggers are given the more important, ceremonial role. Plus with a shield, accuracy and precision are far more important; even a knife strike can be deflected if it's not done correctly, so if you flail around with a sword you probably won't accomplish anything in Dune.

>>52049775
>Hell, couldn't the shield just be programmed to have the speed thing set to 0 so nothing could penetrate?
And then you suffocate because you run out of air.

>>52050097
Hate to break this to you, but gas molecules are moving a fuck ton faster then a dagger.

>>52050097
What, you have a high-tech shield that allows "slow" things through, but isn't able to be made so it is porous? What kind of shitty setting is this?

>>52050307
The average gas molecule is, yes, which is why air in a shield quickly grows stale even on higher settings. But some air will diffuse through either because it's already moving slowly by random chance, or because it's slowed down on contact with the shield.
>>52050658
I don't understand why one of those should imply the other?

>>52049775
>>52050307
>>52051119
Alternatively, the shield repels things based on the amount of kinetic energy rather than velocity. Or maybe the minimum velocity/KE that is deflected is based on the amount of energy drawn by the shield, and it's prohibitively energy-expensive to have a personal shield generator that can get the velocity below that of a dagger stab. There are tons of ways to resolve this problem.

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how about that there is this ever present threat from an alien that enjoys using melee weapons and such, so anyone with guns has to be able to deal with them when they pop out at them?

>>52044005
In terms of actual energy transferred to target bullets still do way more than swords

Three answers for three different types of setting:

>The corporate overlords don't care about citizens killing each other, only being able to kill their guards. So any kind of guns are nightmarishly hard to get unless you work for corpsec, but you can buy a chainsword down at the Stuffer Shack. This has the unintended side effect of making it tough for unskilled young punks to upset the status quo in the criminal underworld, so the shadow operators and street gangs who run the lower levels find this state of affairs agreeable.

>At some point personal arms got autonomous and OP. Then some douche in a Boston bar threw a punch and the bouncer's gun automatically shot him dead. Whereupon five patrons' guns automatically shot him dead, then twenty-five bystanders automatically shot them dead, etc. When the dust settled half of New England had been vaporized, and guns had fallen sharply out of fashion.

>Nobles regularly wade into battle wearing stupidly powerful suits of armor and carrying only melee weapons, because their lives are otherwise so boring that it's the only way they can feel alive. The pauper soldiers who serve them, despite lacking the crucial stupidly good armor, still tend to follow their example. Analysts blame this trend for the war carrying on so long, but that hasn't stopped the swarms of patriotic simpletons from charging into plasma fire armed with sharp bits of metal.

>>52042201

Maybe you'd see people use ceremonial weapons for cultural reason (Japanese Officers carried swords during WWII) but otherwise...

Ultimately, any attempt to force melee weapons into sci-fi setting boils down to 'because I think its cool'. Most justifications are pretty contrived and only draw attention to how ridiculous the concept is. 40k is the only setting that's done it right, mostly because its ridiculous by design.

I'm trying to approach this issue from a nuanced perspective in my SF setting, such that both ranged energy weapons and melee weapons have a purpose and a role.

In this setting, lightweight body armor can be made from deflection fiber, which is effective against most forms of particle and energy weapons. It needs an electric current to work, though, so unless you plug yourself into a wall outlet or something you need to switch it on to be actively protected. D-fiber protectiveness is also limited by quality. A cheap D-fiber vest bought on the street might save you from one or two shots before its power is drained. Being genuinely bulletproof (so to speak) is rare and expensive.

D-fiber gear is can be overcome by cutting through it with melee weapons (or getting so close that you can accurately shoot around it), destroying its power source (which is typically very small and therefore quite hard) or just withering its power supply down with enough firepower.

D-fiber isn't a total game changer but it's altered how the major military powers in the galaxy approach warfare. Two factions in particular have diametrically opposed approaches. One believes in total warriors, and trains its forces to be equally effective at range and at close quarters. The other views the force itself as a single organism (enhanced by sense-sharing nanotechnology), so they deploy specialized close quarters troops supported by specialized artillery.

A secondary reason why melee weapons are still prominent is the presence of a malevolent life-form called Metacoral that, through various mechanisms, are virtually impossible to engage with at a distance.

>>52051119
>>52051218
Surely a porous shield would be more energy efficient because it would have microscopic holes instead of a full cover.

Why are we discussing incredibly specific shields again? Oh right, OP.

Uuhhh... Maybe melee weapons, wielded by stronger individuals, have far greater penetrating power than weapons of an equivalent weight?

Maybe, because there's so much metal used in the era the story's happening in that mining has become a huge industry and mining picks and drills are so far improved upon that they are powerful weapons in comparison to even the most powerful guns. I remember running a character with a mining pick who used it as a weapon in a space opera setting for this reason.

Melee weapons might be used by time warpers because they need to kill during the time warp and the gun's bullets don't leave the barrel until time resumes but a sword can stab people easily because it has no moving parts. I also ran this character in the same setting as mentioned above, but got banned pretty quick, leading to me creating the miner.

Melee weapons are far cheaper than guns beyond the cheapest ones which are negligible at best and dumpster trash at worst.

With little exception, melee weapons have far more varied types of damage (slashing, bludgeoning, piercing) compared to guns (piercing only usually).

It's really fun to whale on a guy with a melee weapon in comparison to a gun, where it's over in a few shots.

Seeing melee weapons gives you a sense of urgency, if a guy is running toward you with one ready. Cops have apparently said they'd rather come up against a guy with a gun compared to a blade like a knife, not only because a slash from one deals way more damage than a single bullet, but also because there's something unnerving about a guy attacking you with a knife.

Pick one or more, I guess.

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Fashion and Regulations

H/Bollywood movies show some pump looking dude/tte with swords and hammers and all that jazz, and it starts spreading out from there. Yeah, most are fakes, with kids spreading stuff on how to make imitation ones for prom and the like, but it just starts spreading out from there. Think about it, all those people who open carry guns right now, wouldn't they look cooler with a Saber and a shower? I mean, just look at the meme the Deagle became.

As for laws, it's not like there aren't a whole bunch right now. Sure the military is going to be running around with ultra bullets and super shotguns, but most settings still have normal laws about them regarding what they allow. And then if you go sci-fi with space travels and habitats, that'll be super important.

>>52042404
Concealed telescoping non-electric non-metallic baton; batteries are a sign of a bomb.
Overt: slight cosplay costume like an oni or Cloud Strife with a sword quiver/gym bag of consumer cosplay weapons and safety items like wiffle bats with his super strength he can carry them many places and avoid weapons charges. "Assault with a wiffle bat" may look like the victim was making it up or exaggerating their injuries.

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>>52042201
Player Characters and their NPC equivalent have been made sufficiently superhuman that only artillery strikes and being fired on en mass by an entire company worth of the best man portable shit can kill them
This means the only way for them too effectively engage each other is to enter melee range because it is the only form of combat effective and practical enough to work

Basically Revengeance

>>52042201
Ultra-tech magic devices exist but are licensed like firearms based on concealability. The most effective thing to do with potentially everyone carrying a shield is to get all your shield, movement boost & attack from a ultra-tech magic melee weapon and get it as close to your target as possible. QED.

>>52052663
Please give me sauce on that gif, is there some kind of Revengeance remake or something on the way? Or is it just a tech demo?

>>52052798
It was the original tech demo of reveangance before platinum took over.

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>>52052798
>>52052829
Yeak the original FOX Engine stuff makes MGR look like a very different game
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QlQk0I7ltFI

>>52052747
No one wants to shoot very much because that will weaken their own shield enough that they can be rushed or snuck up on and one-hit-killed with a ultra-tech magic melee weapon (which can also shoot). I'm thinking of a non-transforming God Eater/Nanoha weapon that also provides a shield that can be variably reduced for a stronger attack.

>>52052252
With the shield angling available from a melee weapon that also shields you firearms and other ranged weapons become only situational and completely useless in a frontal attack.

>>52042201
The easiest justification for melee in a sci-fi setting is personal shielding. Many would-be soldiers have some kind of built-in energy shield that stops bullets, lasers, concussive waves, and shit like that. However, these shields have to be calibrated for fast moving objects, otherwise the shield would go off every time the guy too a step or grabbed something. Melee weapons bypass personal shields, which can mean that even a basic knife could potentially kill the right guy faster than a minigun.
The issue of flamethrowers, or other "slow" weapons can be brought up, but can be easily waved away. Flamethrowers are chaotic weapons, and fire/heat proofing will only get better in the future. Shit like catapults exist, but are unweildly as fuck, and slow+long range = I'm just going to take ten steps that way..
The only way to protect against melee weapons is with solid matter, which is heavy as shit, and thus has drawbacks to wearing it, so it is only used by specialists designed to fight melee weapon users. People whose job titles are fighting melee users will probably need to be good at fighting in melee themselves, even if they rely on something like a shotgun, then boom. You have a class of soldier that needs melee weapons to survive.

>>52042577
WTF? Is he armed with a cyber-tableleg? Is it a saw or a 'plasma knife' or something?

>>52046009
No shit! That's why most executioners used a big f'ing axe with a lot of weight behind that edge. Every movie makes it seem like it's no different than swinging a fly-swatter around when it comes to decapitating something with an edged weapon. Personally the creepiest thing I've ever seen done with a knife was watching a butcher with a couple of decades of experience. Guy walks in and removes the head from a full grown bull in one deft motion using a blade about 6 inches long. *Yeah, the bull was already dead - but dayum they have huge freaking neck muscles, not to mention the vertebra. That guy was scary good with a blade.

tl:dr - Don't fuck with butchers, they don't need a large or heavy weapon to eviscerate you.

>>52043519
What happens if you hit a Highlander with a bullet that completely removes the head?

>>52044586
Why not simply strap one of these field generators or whatever onto your missile? We're a species that invented kamikaze, so it's not like it'd be absolutely unacceptable if it even required a sentient being or something.

>>52042201

Really effective gun control laws.

>>52046311
In Evangelion those were hypersonic vibration blades, which tend to veer wildly off course when attached to projectiles, and a magic javelin. They were prepared to dump literally a thousand H bomb equivalents on ONE target, that's how useless ranged weapons are against Angels.

>>52053266
If I remember the game right, its essentially a massive stun baton.

>>52054989
Well, judging by how the rules just say "don't lose your head"
I'd imagine the same thing would apply to bullets, or whatever, also
I think one immortal got their head cut off via train track once, another immortal just has to be near to take their power, other wise they die and their power goes to waste

>>52046311
more energy required than can be pumped into a projectile, or maybe the energy field needed to break the !at field is so large it needs to be on your person to work. like you can't break an !at field without being really close to it.
this is actually the best idea itt imo.

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I have been wondering this lately, mainly because I love the idea of a super advanced robot engaging in melee combat, and, you know, something something reason serves passions and nothing else
It would be something like this: technology for creating a ridiculously efficient and strong energy source is available, but energy weapons are still not efficient enough. on top of that, AI and nanomachines are also quite developed(the kind of "lol nanomachines son" level) and all of this comes together in developing a robot
due to the lack of efficient energy weapons, the regenerative ability of nanomachines being a selling point of said robot and how stupidly unconvencional melee combat is at the time, using our new efficient energy source for wrecking shit up while tanking everything they shoot at it is optimal. Plus I´m sure that the prospect of engaging with a unstoppable meatgrinder that is designed to precisely overcome whatever difference any long range weapon makes counts as psychological warfare too
also yes I love MGR

>>52042404
Nunchucks, any other answer is wrong.

>>52042201
Armour technology has advanced significantly, and the only bullets that can pierce the current armour are from high power, longer range rifles.

Plasma can melt the armour away but needs to be concentrated in a magnetic field,(+requires constant power), so it's only effective as a melee weapon where the hilt can generate a strong enough on-site field.

>>52057813
GUN chuks. Fear the chained double Obrez!

>>52046311
Needs a power supply, nach. You can't fire a bullet with a power supply attached effectively unless your gun is tank sized to shoot infantry, and you've got 50 shots and you better hope you don't miss and you can't aim fast for shit.

>>52059483

gun chucks you say?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwfQtTQ-j4E

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>>52052966
Seriously fuck Kojima, I wanted to play that version so badly ever since I saw it at E3.
>oh yeah, I'm just going to leave the development to you guys
>oh I see you fucked up, yeah I'll just give it to platinum so they can patch it up
>they changed the engine and literally ALL OF THE STORY, yeah that's fine, just make sure they release it on time

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>>52042524
>yfw it's not called a light saber for emitting light, but because it's not as heavy as other sabers.

>>52046441
Didn't he get it off his father? The whole hereditary samurai with a new world brazillian flair was his whole thing

Apart from being like the single strongest human in all of metal gear obviously

>>52047850
Sam was almost as good as raiden because of his exoskeleton as well as being good with a sword, like grey fox. Which always made me wonder why they were bothering to convert people into cyborgs anyway instead of making more exoskeletons, since the cyborgs are much worse

>>52060080
after the MGS V fiasco i'm glad platinum made it.

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>>52055012

maybe it takes a few seconds to fully deactivate, so the impact of the missile would likely happen too fast before the field completely disintegrates and would still be blocked by it. that way if it was on a slower-moving object like a mech, person, or vehicle it would have time to neutralize it.

even in evangelion they show it takes a slight bit for it to be disrupted, and sometimes the eva even needs to break it manually.

Or you could do what 40k does.

Namely make it so everyone is durable enough to survive long enough to get stuck in.

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>>52055012
At least in the show, it's because each giant cyborg robot is a multi-billion dollar project that requires very specific people to pilot them. Hell, giving one unit a new arm cost enough to bankrupt a small country. And if you destroy one unit, there goes another one of your only defenses against weird kaiju aliens.

>>52042201
>glass
>wires
>circuit boards
>important navigational equipment
>controls
>readout screens
>oxygen pipes
>gravity simulators
>water pipes

A stray bullet can cause a huge amount of damage. Add to that the confined spaces on most space ships, thus making a holstered gun useless, and you have a pretty good justification for melee weapons. Mostly knives though. Maybe a tomahawk if you're looking for flair

>>52042201
AT-Field/Barrier Jacket type-armor. However, prolonged contact or enough kinetic force will disable the defense for a brief second.