Dune Weapons (Split from Meele Weapons Thread)

[Symmetry]

flamer thrower dude + shield = good.

since flamers are cheap, everyone gets a flammer.

BURN BABY BURN.....

What's the muzzle velocity of the flame thrower spray? If its over 9 m/s you might have to turn off the shield before you start fireing.

[SWPIGWANG]

What's the muzzle velocity of the flame thrower spray? If its over 9 m/s you might have to turn off the shield before you start fireing.

well, it is of course varible depending on the design. Limitations in velocity will limit effective range however.

[beyond hope]

Relevant quotes on the subject from Dune. All italics are original.

Paul snapped the force button at his waist, felt the crinkled-skin tingling of the defensive field at his forehead and down his back, heard external sounds take on characteristic shield-filtered flatness.

Around the table they fought-thrust and parry, feint and counterfeint. The air within their shield bubbles grew stale from the demands on it that the slow interchange along shield barrier edges could not replenish. With each new shield contact, the smell of ozone grew stronger.

An unmarked ornithopter squatted nearby, humming softly on standby like a somnolent insect. An Atreides guard stood beside it with bared sword and the faint air-distortion of a shield around him.

The Baron Vladimir Harkonnen stood at a viewport of the grounded lighter he was using as a command post. Out the port he saw the flame-lighted night of Arrakeen. His attention focused on the distant Shield Wall where his secret weapon was doing its work.

Explosive artillery.

The guns nibbled at the caves where the Duke's fighting men had retreated for a last-ditch stand. Slowly measured bites of orange glare, showers of rock and dust in the brief illumination-and the Duke's men were being sealed off to die by starvation, caught like animals in their burrows.

The Baron could feel the distant chomping-a drumbeat carried to him through the ship's metal: broomp... broomp. Then: BROOMP-broomp!

Who would think of reviving artillery in this day of shields? The thought was a chuckle in his mind. But it was predictable the Duke's men would run for those caves. And the Emperor will appreciate my cleverness in preserving the lives of our mutual force.

The Baron stood with his back against his private door, his own bolt hole behind the table. He had slammed it on a door full of dead men. His senses took in guards swarming around him. Did I breathe it? he asked himself. Whatever it was in there, did it get me too?

Sounds returned to him... and reason. He heard someone shouting orders-gas masks... keep a door closed... get blowers going.

The others fell quickly, he thought. I'm still standing. I'm still breathing. Merciless hell! That was close!

He could analyze it now. His shield had been activated, set low but still enough to slow molecular interchange across the field barrier. And he had been pushing himself away from the table... that and Piter's shocked gasp which had brought the guard captain darting forward into his own doom.

Hawat's attention was caught by a flash of sun on metal to the south, a 'thopter plummeting there in a power dive, wings folded flat against its sides, its jets a golden flare against the dark silvered gray of the sky. It plunged like an arrow toward the troop carrier which was unshielded because of the lasgun activity around it. Straight into the carrier the diving 'thopter plunged.

"Only a handful of our men got away," the Emperor said. "Got away! You hear that?"

"We'd have had them, too," the child said, "except for the flames."

"My Sardaukar used the attitudinal jets on their carrier as flamethrowers," the Emperor said. "A move of desperation and the only thing that got them away with their three prisoners. Mark that, my dear Baron: Sardaukar forced to retreat in confusion from women and children and old men!"

The following are from the "Terminology of the Imperium" section at the end of Dune.

Assassins' Handbook: Third-century compilation of poisons commonly used in a War of Assassins. Later expanded to include those deadly devices permitted under the Guild Peace and Great Convention.

Great Convention: the universal truce enforced under the power balance maintained by the Guild, the Great Houses, and the Imperium. Its chief rule prohibits the use of atomic weapons against human targets. Each rule of the Great Convention begins: "The forms must be obeyed...."

Judge of the Change: an official appointed by the Landsraad High Council and the Emperor to monitor a change of fief, a kanly negotiation, or formal battle in a War of Assassins. The Judge's arbitral authority may be challenged only before the high council with the Emperor present.

Kanly: formal feud or vendetta under the rules of the Great Convention carried on according to the strictest limitations (see Judge of the Change.) Originally the rules were designed to protect innocent bystanders.

Lasgun: continuous-wave laser projector. Its use as a weapon is limited in a field-generator-shield culture because of the explosive pyrotechnics (technically, subatomic fusion) created when its beam intersects a shield.

Shield, Defensive: the protective field produced by a Holtzman generator. This field derives from Phase One of the suspensor-nullification effect. A shield will permit entry only to objects moving at slow speeds (depending on setting, this speed ranges from six to nine centimeters per second) and can be shorted out only by a shire-sized electric field. (see Lasgun.)

Stunner: slow-pellet projectile weapon throwing a poison- or drug-tipped dart. Effectiveness limited by variations in shield settings and relative motion between target and projectile.

War of Assassins: the limited form of warfare permitted under the Great Conventions and the Guild Peace. The aim is to reduce involvement of innocent bystanders. Rules prescribe formal declarations of intent and restrict permissible weapons.

Based on the above:

1) 9.2 m/s, although the best figure i could find for the speed of a full-strength knife stab, was a gross overstatement. At 6 cm/s, a .50 BMG bullet would only have 77.382 microjoules of energy. Despite this, projectile weapons (slow-pellet stunners) are still in use in Dune: their projectiles simply require drugs or poisons to be effective.

2) Whatever the upper limit is for what man-portable shields can withstand, it includes artillery.

3) The shield effect is visible enough for Hawat to know that a troop transport flying an unspecified distance away from him is unshielded. Its visibility is mentioned numerous times in the book.

4) The Sardaukar actually have heard of a flamethrower before. While I suspect that they'd be precisely the sort of weapon the conventions would ban to limit collateral damage, there are still practical reasons against them. Based on the quotes above, firing a flamethrower while shielded would fill your shield bubble with noxious fumes and superheated air, while the stream of fire would be more of a trickle. The tank version has the same drawback and makes a bigger target in the bargain. Shut the shield down to fire at full power, and you're sending out a 30m beacon saying "unshielded target here."

In the worst case, if you had to deal with both full-strength flamethrowers and shields, I'd expect a slow, agonizing death by napalm to be a much more frightening prospect than the instantaneous vaporization of a lasgun-shield interaction., particularly if the soldier with the lasgun is burning already.

5) Some sort of armored units are still in use in Dune, because the book specifically mentions them. What they are, and how they deal with the shield issues we've been discussing, is unfortunately not mentioned.

For what it's worth, the source for my comment about survivors is here: I found it in the course of looking up the specifications for the M2-2 flamethrower. This site, while not mentioning people actually being hit by the flame stream, also mentioned the tendency of flamethrower crews to attract fire.

[SWPIGWANG]

6 cm/s

Thats really slow.....

[beyond hope]

I know, I just figured when I went looking for the average speed of a knife thrust that a slow thrust through the field would be something like 50-75% of that figure, not <1%.

[Bob the Gunslinger]

Could we please split the Dune stuff off and get back on topic?

[beyond hope]

Another good rationale for the continued use of melee weapons would be Chalker's Well World novels. With the tech limitations, a high-powered laser or particle beam weapon suddenly becomes an incredibly expensive club if you cross the wrong hex boundary. If you plan to go fight in a low-tech hex, you have to have some kind of muscle-powered weapons available.

[NecronLord]

Done.

[Bob the Gunslinger]

Thank you.

[tharkûn]

1) 9.2 m/s, although the best figure i could find for the speed of a full-strength knife stab, was a gross overstatement. At 6 cm/s, a .50 BMG bullet would only have 77.382 microjoules of energy. Despite this, projectile weapons (slow-pellet stunners) are still in use in Dune: their projectiles simply require drugs or poisons to be effective.

In which case they are collectively stupid not to develop high capacity versions and fight with those instead of swords.

2) Whatever the upper limit is for what man-portable shields can withstand, it includes artillery.

So in other words if my flamethrowing tank is equipped with a shield, you can do jack didly squat to stop it.

The shield effect is visible enough for Hawat to know that a troop transport flying an unspecified distance away from him is unshielded. Its visibility is mentioned numerous times in the book.

So sending of hordes of unsheilded morons to their death in swarm attack is lousy strategy, because it would become readily apparant and a traditional machine gun could mow down such swarm attacks.

The Sardaukar actually have heard of a flamethrower before.

So what? It just means they are too stupid to use effective technology. The Klingons are issued ranged weaponry and elect to use blades. It is still collective stupidity.

Based on the quotes above, firing a flamethrower while shielded would fill your shield bubble with noxious fumes and superheated air

And this is a problem how? A very simple insulation suit will stop convective heat transfer and a simple filter will deal with most noxious fumes. Dealing with simple noxius fumes is WWI technology; dealing with superheated air is trivial.

The tank version has the same drawback and makes a bigger target in the bargain. Shut the shield down to fire at full power, and you're sending out a 30m beacon saying "unshielded target here."

You are kidding me right? Heat transfer through tank armor is nonexistant if you design for it. Just put in a layer of two of dead insulative space and you can flame youself directly without problems.

Shut the shield down to fire at full power, and you're sending out a 30m beacon saying "unshielded target here.

Why in hell would I need to shut the sheild down at all? Superheated air is nothing to a hardened tank. Hell whatever alleged problem with firing a flame thrower behind a sheild has the simple solution is to just extend the muzzle beyond the range of the shield.

Seriously if you can't operate a flamethrowing tank inside a shield then you may as well rule out all jet egines, rockets, and large internal combustion engines. Tell me how do they get to orbit or operate air vehicles with these poorly permeable sheilds?

5) Some sort of armored units are still in use in Dune, because the book specifically mentions them. What they are, and how they deal with the shield issues we've been discussing, is unfortunately not mentioned.

In other words the is jack didly squat to support your nonsense that a flame throwing tank wouldn't work.

9.2 m/s, although the best figure i could find for the speed of a full-strength knife stab, was a gross overstatement. At 6 cm/s, a .50 BMG bullet would only have 77.382 microjoules of energy.

You are kidding me, right? If you are going to shoot a slow bullet you shoot a heavy bullet, further 6cm/s is BS that is less than the width of your hand in a second. Try working with DU, say 6m/s and possibly increasing the dimensions of the round (like say going to a 15 x 200 mm bullet or 15 x 300). You can deliver a crapload of energy on a low velocity high mass round. If you offset your lower velocity with a higher mass the target is still going to have a new hole.

Let's face it, not only do you admit they have effective ranged weapons, but fail to employ them in a remotely compotent way, you admit they manage to use flamethrowers but fail to employ them in sensible ways, but you still hold they are substantially superior to Klingons?

Oh that's right shields will work for tanks, planes, and orbital transports ... but not for flame throwing tanks

[Uraniun235]

With the exception of a few, I think the great majority of power players in the Dune universe have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, not disrupting it with arms races. Hell, I think open warfare is even prohibited.

[beyond hope]

1) 9.2 m/s, although the best figure i could find for the speed of a full-strength knife stab, was a gross overstatement. At 6 cm/s, a .50 BMG bullet would only have 77.382 microjoules of energy. Despite this, projectile weapons (slow-pellet stunners) are still in use in Dune: their projectiles simply require drugs or poisons to be effective.

In which case they are collectively stupid not to develop high capacity versions and fight with those instead of swords.

I gave you the information the book had on "slow-pellet stunners." There was no statement in any of that as to their ammunition capacity, so I'd be curious how you arrived at the conclusion that it must be low. As far as not using them in preference to edged weapons goes, how much range do you think a 6 cm/s dart has?

2) Whatever the upper limit is for what man-portable shields can withstand, it includes artillery.

So in other words if my flamethrowing tank is equipped with a shield, you can do jack didly squat to stop it.

In my earlier replies, I had forgotten you could shield vehicles.

Based on the quotes above, firing a flamethrower while shielded would fill your shield bubble with noxious fumes and superheated air

And this is a problem how? A very simple insulation suit will stop convective heat transfer and a simple filter will deal with most noxious fumes. Dealing with simple noxius fumes is WWI technology; dealing with superheated air is trivial.

So, on top of the 32kg mass of the flamethrower, we now have an insulated suit adding another 22-25kg and trapping their body heat.

This cuts both ways, too: what's to stop your opponent from putting their troops in fire suits? While they probably wouldn't be enough if the wearer was coated directly in napalm, they would still require the expenditure of more fuel for each kill.

The tank version has the same drawback and makes a bigger target in the bargain. Shut the shield down to fire at full power, and you're sending out a 30m beacon saying "unshielded target here."

You are kidding me right? Heat transfer through tank armor is nonexistant if you design for it. Just put in a layer of two of dead insulative space and you can flame youself directly without problems.

Shut the shield down to fire at full power, and you're sending out a 30m beacon saying "unshielded target here.

Why in hell would I need to shut the sheild down at all? Superheated air is nothing to a hardened tank. Hell whatever alleged problem with firing a flame thrower behind a sheild has the simple solution is to just extend the muzzle beyond the range of the shield.

Seriously if you can't operate a flamethrowing tank inside a shield then you may as well rule out all jet egines, rockets, and large internal combustion engines. Tell me how do they get to orbit or operate air vehicles with these poorly permeable sheilds?

I'm getting the strangest sense of deja vu, as if for some reason you quoted part of that twice.

As far as the air vehicles go, ornithopters are so named because they have mechanical wings that actually flap as a bird's do. They have a supplemental jet pod to supply extra power, but they can take off and fly without using it. They can also hover. The carryalls for the spice miners and the aforementioned 300-man troop carrier use the same principle on a larger scale. I'd also point out that a suspensor field can be used in conjunction with a shield (Baron Harkonnen uses both.)

That aside, let's assume you can stick the barrel out from the shield. If you can do that, what's to prevent me from putting cannon fire on the flame tanks or bunkers to damage the barrels?

The shield effect is visible enough for Hawat to know that a troop transport flying an unspecified distance away from him is unshielded. Its visibility is mentioned numerous times in the book.

So sending of hordes of unsheilded morons to their death in swarm attack is lousy strategy, because it would become readily apparant and a traditional machine gun could mow down such swarm attacks.

Based on the above, swarm tactics wouldn't be necessary.

The Sardaukar actually have heard of a flamethrower before.

So what? It just means they are too stupid to use effective technology. The Klingons are issued ranged weaponry and elect to use blades. It is still collective stupidity.

Did you read the quote? The Sardaukar used the attitude jets of a troop transport as a makeshift flamethrower against Fremen,who generally do not use shields. How you jumped from using the thrusters of a 300-man troop ship in a desperation tactic to a blanket statement that "man-portable flamethrowers and flame tanks are effective in Dune" is beyond me.

5) Some sort of armored units are still in use in Dune, because the book specifically mentions them. What they are, and how they deal with the shield issues we've been discussing, is unfortunately not mentioned.

In other words the is jack didly squat to support your nonsense that a flame throwing tank wouldn't work.

Here's the exact quote:

"I've taken over a council room topside here. We'll hold staff there. I want to arrange a new planetary dispersal order with armored squads going out first."

I also found this:

"Some ground cars are moving toward the south wall," the man at the telescope said. "Some are using projectile weapons, testing." Our people are using body shields as you commanded. The ground cars have stopped."

There you have it: one vague reference to "armored squads" that are never specifically described, and one mention of "ground cars," some of which are firing some kind of projectile weapon (on Arrakis, against an enemy not normally known to use shields.) They desist both firing and moving towards the Fremen they spotted when it becomes apparent they are shielded.

9.2 m/s, although the best figure i could find for the speed of a full-strength knife stab, was a gross overstatement. At 6 cm/s, a .50 BMG bullet would only have 77.382 microjoules of energy.

You are kidding me, right? If you are going to shoot a slow bullet you shoot a heavy bullet, further 6cm/s is BS that is less than the width of your hand in a second. Try working with DU, say 6m/s and possibly increasing the dimensions of the round (like say going to a 15 x 200 mm bullet or 15 x 300). You can deliver a crapload of energy on a low velocity high mass round. If you offset your lower velocity with a higher mass the target is still going to have a new hole.

Let's face it, not only do you admit they have effective ranged weapons, but fail to employ them in a remotely compotent way, you admit they manage to use flamethrowers but fail to employ them in sensible ways, but you still hold they are substantially superior to Klingons?

Oh that's right shields will work for tanks, planes, and orbital transports ... but not for flame throwing tanks

Another duplicate quote.

Okay... despite the fact that I got the 6 to 9 cm/s figure right from the book, let's disregard it and say 6 m/s. At that speed, the .50 BMG (12.7x99mm) round is up to ~774 millijoules. Assuming a 100% iridium bullet (using a cylinder for volume because I'm lazy,) the same round would be roughly 1.125 kg and give you 20 J. With the anti-tank gun sized 15x200mm (3.181 kg) it would be 57 J, and the 15x300mm (4.77 kg) round would be 86 J. For comparison's sake, the original .50 BMG round was around 17 megajoules. Assuming the 20x200mm rounds and a rifle comparable in weight and ammo capacity to an M4 carbine, that's a roughly 98kg rifle (95.5kg of which is the ammo.) If nothing else, it does make the 32kg weight of an M2-2 flamethrower look much more reasonable by comparison.

"Shielding" and "Spice-Addicted Klingon" points replied to above.

[tharkûn]

I gave you the information the book had on "slow-pellet stunners." There was no statement in any of that as to their ammunition capacity, so I'd be curious how you arrived at the conclusion that it must be low. As far as not using them in preference to edged weapons goes, how much range do you think a 6 cm/s dart has?

If they have high capacity "stunners" or other projectile weapon and don't use them then it is no different than the Klingons being equiped with stunners. I went with the assumption that assumes the least amount of collective stupidity.

Range? A damn sight better than edged weapons.

So, on top of the 32kg mass of the flamethrower, we now have an insulated suit adding another 22-25kg and trapping their body heat.

No you only need a 25 kg insulated suit if you are going to deal with conductive heat transfer or ungodly temperatures. In any event I refer back to WWII where Jasper Maskelyne developed a light weight flame retardant jell which is more than sufficient to shield the wearer from hot air.

This cuts both ways, too: what's to stop your opponent from putting their troops in fire suits? While they probably wouldn't be enough if the wearer was coated directly in napalm, they would still require the expenditure of more fuel for each kill.

This cuts both ways, but my guys don't have direct contact going against them. It is one thing to stop heat transfer from piss poor convection, it is an entirely different thing to do so when the napalm is in direct contact.

As far as the air vehicles go, ornithopters are so named because they have mechanical wings that actually flap as a bird's do. They have a supplemental jet pod to supply extra power, but they can take off and fly without using it. They can also hover. The carryalls for the spice miners and the aforementioned 300-man troop carrier use the same principle on a larger scale. I'd also point out that a suspensor field can be used in conjunction with a shield

Thank you, concession accepted. Jet engines require either that the exhaust can leave the sheilded vehicle or that the nozzle is beyond the sheild boundary. Either of these options means that nothing precludes flamethrower use with shields.

I could further note that your average oxygen molecule has an average velocity in excess of 400 m/s (carbon dioxide is in excess of 300 m/s). In other words if the shields were going to enclose superheated air based on velocity discrimination, the normal grunt would asphyxiate due to a lack of oxygen and an extreme surplus of carbon dioxide. Note this is not just "stale air" but quite literally levels which kill humans. Somehow that carbon dioxide travelling at 300 m/s has to get out and the oxygen at 400 m/s has to come in.

Given:
Jets work with sheilds.
People don't asphyxiate in shields without breathing apparatus.

Then it is trivially obvious that the air within a flamethrowing sheild will vent in the same manner as a jet engine or carbon dioxide and we have no problems.

That aside, let's assume you can stick the barrel out from the shield. If you can do that, what's to prevent me from putting cannon fire on the flame tanks or bunkers to damage the barrels?

The fact that I would harden the barrel so it can take heavy damage. The fact that I can use mutiple barrels and fakes at that. The fact that I can replace barrels.

Your entire rationale rests upon hitting a pitifully small target which I can harden to ludicrious levels and do NOT require fine tolerance to work and being able to disable all of this magically.

Of course if you have this level of strong, accurate, and precise firepower, why not just say blow the ground in front of the sword weilding hordes? Why not just drop some willie pete in front of said sword weilding hordes and let them burn to death that way? If you can deliver enough fire power to reliably knock harden targets like tank barrels, I can deliver AP flame rounds just as easily, not to mention target your artillerly.

Based on the above, swarm tactics wouldn't be necessary.

Yes because the wouldn't accomplish squat.

Did you read the quote? The Sardaukar used the attitude jets of a troop transport as a makeshift flamethrower against Fremen,who generally do not use shields. How you jumped from using the thrusters of a 300-man troop ship in a desperation tactic to a blanket statement that "man-portable flamethrowers and flame tanks are effective in Dune" is beyond me.

They managed to use a weapon effectively against the enemy and didn't develop a useful version. Further this aught to lay to rest all the crap about sheilded flame throwing tanks not working, somebody in universe got a shield transport (or do the Sardaukar count on their enemies being to stupid to level your massive firepower onto an unsheilded transport?).

Tell me, why not just take a "thurster" and place in on a sheilded, armoured body and call it a flame tank?

There you have it: one vague reference to "armored squads" that are never specifically described, and one mention of "ground cars," some of which are firing some kind of projectile weapon (on Arrakis, against an enemy not normally known to use shields.) They desist both firing and moving towards the Fremen they spotted when it becomes apparent they are shielded.

The BS detector has fired.

Are sheilded objects clearly visible as you stated earlier or are they not visible such that these cars would know that before they fire?

Okay... despite the fact that I got the 6 to 9 cm/s figure right from the book

You are kidding me, the stupidity it burns. These guys have *knife* fights at 6 to 9 cm/s? Not only can you dodge such thrusts easily even the most trivial of body armor is going to stop that. If this is the case Dune melee tactics are below Klingon level collective stupidity for not wearing traditional body armor. I think even millenia old leather armor should be up for stopping such a knife thrust. Certainly the momentum and KE of such a lethal knife blow are not going to be siginificantly greater than for a properly shaped bullet of DU.

Tell me how many joules do you beleive their knives are going in with at 9 cm/s?

The blunt fact is if a knife going in with X KE and Y momentum can kill you, it shouldn't be all that hard to find a bullet with >>X KE and >>Y momentum to kill you as well.

Assuming the 20x200mm rounds and a rifle comparable in weight and ammo capacity to an M4 carbine, that's a roughly 98kg rifle (95.5kg of which is the ammo.) If nothing else, it does make the 32kg weight of an M2-2 flamethrower look much more reasonable by comparison.

Crew served vehicle mounted weapons. The first machine guns were pathetically heavy and unweildy, they still literally cut down thousands of foes wielding edged weapons. Just about the most craptacular machine gun in history greatly surpasses edged weapons.

U235:

With the exception of a few, I think the great majority of power players in the Dune universe have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, not disrupting it with arms races. Hell, I think open warfare is even prohibited.

When you are faced with utter destruction (like House Atreides) you are a damn fool if you don't buck the status quo. Not developing weaponry because the current balance of power suits you only works if you can trust that everyone else won't develop it either. Even the most extreme minority of players could upset the status quo and then it is damn better to be on top than on bottom.

Until I see where flame throwers are banned weaponry or some form of arms agreement governs their use or development; the only evidence points to stupidity on the part of those not using them (or something else superior to edged weapons).

[Frank Hipper]

With the exception of a few, I think the great majority of power players in the Dune universe have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, not disrupting it with arms races. Hell, I think open warfare is even prohibited.

Of course open warfare is prohibited in Dune. That's the entire rationale behind "Wars of Asassins", the lack of competitive militaries, and the absence of major weaponry.

WAR OF ASSASSINS: the limited form of warfare permitted under the Great Convention and the Guild Peace. The aim is to reduce involvement of innocent bystanders. Rules prescribe formal declarations of intent and restrict permissible weapons.

[SWPIGWANG]

I was just thinking about the 6cm/s number....and it came to me

Why don't we just RAM THEM UNTIL THEY GIVE UP

If momentum is transfered to a shield user, one can simply put a shield on a car and bounce people into the air like ping pongs. Even the if shield holds the person probably won't.

It would be a sight to behold

[beyond hope]

I'm conceding that items can be stuck through the field based on the following:

He felt the field crackling as shield edges touched and repelled each other, sensed the electric tingling of the contact along his skin.

Obviously their swords have to be outside of the shield or they'd just be repelled.

I gave you the information the book had on "slow-pellet stunners." There was no statement in any of that as to their ammunition capacity, so I'd be curious how you arrived at the conclusion that it must be low. As far as not using them in preference to edged weapons goes, how much range do you think a 6 cm/s dart has?

If they have high capacity "stunners" or other projectile weapon and don't use them then it is no different than the Klingons being equiped with stunners. I went with the assumption that assumes the least amount of collective stupidity.

Range? A damn sight better than edged weapons.

Where the fuck are you getting "do not use them" from? The Atreides and Sardaukar use both slow-pellet stunners and edged weapons. The range is going to be <25m (probably significantly less.) Given that, I'd say it's understandable why they carry both weapons: if you're within stunner range, you'll soon be within knife-fighting range.

So, on top of the 32kg mass of the flamethrower, we now have an insulated suit adding another 22-25kg and trapping their body heat.

No you only need a 25 kg insulated suit if you are going to deal with conductive heat transfer or ungodly temperatures. In any event I refer back to WWII where Jasper Maskelyne developed a light weight flame retardant jell which is more than sufficient to shield the wearer from hot air.

This cuts both ways, too: what's to stop your opponent from putting their troops in fire suits? While they probably wouldn't be enough if the wearer was coated directly in napalm, they would still require the expenditure of more fuel for each kill.

This cuts both ways, but my guys don't have direct contact going against them. It is one thing to stop heat transfer from piss poor convection, it is an entirely different thing to do so when the napalm is in direct contact.

The point is that with fire suits of some kind in use, you wouldn't just be able to spray fire across the landscape: you need direct contact to get through the suit's protection. That'll make your flame tank's 2 minutes of flamethrower fuel go much faster.

As far as the air vehicles go, ornithopters are so named because they have mechanical wings that actually flap as a bird's do. They have a supplemental jet pod to supply extra power, but they can take off and fly without using it. They can also hover. The carryalls for the spice miners and the aforementioned 300-man troop carrier use the same principle on a larger scale. I'd also point out that a suspensor field can be used in conjunction with a shield

Thank you, concession accepted. Jet engines require either that the exhaust can leave the sheilded vehicle or that the nozzle is beyond the sheild boundary. Either of these options means that nothing precludes flamethrower use with shields.

I could further note that your average oxygen molecule has an average velocity in excess of 400 m/s (carbon dioxide is in excess of 300 m/s). In other words if the shields were going to enclose superheated air based on velocity discrimination, the normal grunt would asphyxiate due to a lack of oxygen and an extreme surplus of carbon dioxide. Note this is not just "stale air" but quite literally levels which kill humans. Somehow that carbon dioxide travelling at 300 m/s has to get out and the oxygen at 400 m/s has to come in.

Given:
Jets work with sheilds.
People don't asphyxiate in shields without breathing apparatus.

Then it is trivially obvious that the air within a flamethrowing sheild will vent in the same manner as a jet engine or carbon dioxide and we have no problems.

Conceded that objects can extend through a shield. Despite that, your reasoning in the first "given" strikes me as unsound. In and of itself, the fact that there are both jets and shields on ornithopters proves nothing. In fact, since ornithopters are capable of taking off and remaining airborne using their wings alone, it is perfectly plausable that the entire craft is shielded and they shut the shield off when they wish to use the jets.

Your second "given" is a strawman that ignores the following three quotes already provided to you:

Around the table they fought-thrust and parry, feint and counterfeint. The air within their shield bubbles grew stale from the demands on it that the slow interchange along shield barrier edges could not replenish. With each new shield contact, the smell of ozone grew stronger.

Paul snapped the force button at his waist, felt the crinkled-skin tingling of the defensive field at his forehead and down his back, heard external sounds take on characteristic shield-filtered flatness.

The Baron stood with his back against his private door, his own bolt hole behind the table. He had slammed it on a door full of dead men. His senses took in guards swarming around him. Did I breathe it? he asked himself. Whatever it was in there, did it get me too?

Sounds returned to him... and reason. He heard someone shouting orders-gas masks... keep a door closed... get blowers going.

The others fell quickly, he thought. I'm still standing. I'm still breathing. Merciless hell! That was close!

He could analyze it now. His shield had been activated, set low but still enough to slow molecular interchange across the field barrier. And he had been pushing himself away from the table... that and Piter's shocked gasp which had brought the guard captain darting forward into his own doom.

Congradulations, you proved that shields don't stop the flow of air through them. Per the quotes we already knew that the shield slows, but does not stop the exchange of gases between the shield bubble and the outside. We also knew it affects the transmission of sound waves but does not stop them.

That aside, let's assume you can stick the barrel out from the shield. If you can do that, what's to prevent me from putting cannon fire on the flame tanks or bunkers to damage the barrels?

The fact that I would harden the barrel so it can take heavy damage. The fact that I can use mutiple barrels and fakes at that. The fact that I can replace barrels.

Your entire rationale rests upon hitting a pitifully small target which I can harden to ludicrious levels and do NOT require fine tolerance to work and being able to disable all of this magically.

Of course if you have this level of strong, accurate, and precise firepower, why not just say blow the ground in front of the sword weilding hordes? Why not just drop some willie pete in front of said sword weilding hordes and let them burn to death that way? If you can deliver enough fire power to reliably knock harden targets like tank barrels, I can deliver AP flame rounds just as easily, not to mention target your artillerly.

Conceded.

Did you read the quote? The Sardaukar used the attitude jets of a troop transport as a makeshift flamethrower against Fremen,who generally do not use shields. How you jumped from using the thrusters of a 300-man troop ship in a desperation tactic to a blanket statement that "man-portable flamethrowers and flame tanks are effective in Dune" is beyond me.

They managed to use a weapon effectively against the enemy and didn't develop a useful version. Further this aught to lay to rest all the crap about sheilded flame throwing tanks not working, somebody in universe got a shield transport (or do the Sardaukar count on their enemies being to stupid to level your massive firepower onto an unsheilded transport?).

Tell me, why not just take a "thurster" and place in on a sheilded, armoured body and call it a flame tank?

Remember this quote?

Hawat's attention was caught by a flash of sun on metal to the south, a 'thopter plummeting there in a power dive, wings folded flat against its sides, its jets a golden flare against the dark silvered gray of the sky. It plunged like an arrow toward the troop carrier which was unshielded because of the lasgun activity around it. Straight into the carrier the diving 'thopter plunged.

Both the Harkonnen mercenaries and the Sardaukar were fond of using lasguns to fight Fremen, since Fremen don't use shields. If you'd stop beating up this "knife-wielding moron" strawman for a minute you might remember that. Its also possible that the shields could have been off because of one of those giant electically-charged sandstorms that short out shields.

The troop carrier in the "attitude-jets-as-flamethrowers" quote is the sole survivor of a flight of 5, by the way. If the Fremen shot the other 4 down it is trivially obvious, to borrow your phrase, that for some reason their shields were off. Unless you propose the Fremen climbed up on each others' shoulders and knifed them.

There you have it: one vague reference to "armored squads" that are never specifically described, and one mention of "ground cars," some of which are firing some kind of projectile weapon (on Arrakis, against an enemy not normally known to use shields.) They desist both firing and moving towards the Fremen they spotted when it becomes apparent they are shielded.

The BS detector has fired.

Are sheilded objects clearly visible as you stated earlier or are they not visible such that these cars would know that before they fire?

Change the batteries.

As I said the first time, while Hawat is observing a band of Sardaukar walking across a dust basin to the cliffs on the opposite side, he can see that they have a shield glimmer around them and that the troop carrier which arrives later on does not. There are numerous occasions where the book refers to the "glittering," "shimmering", or "blurring" effects of active shields.

Okay... despite the fact that I got the 6 to 9 cm/s figure right from the book

You are kidding me, the stupidity it burns. These guys have *knife* fights at 6 to 9 cm/s? Not only can you dodge such thrusts easily even the most trivial of body armor is going to stop that. If this is the case Dune melee tactics are below Klingon level collective stupidity for not wearing traditional body armor. I think even millenia old leather armor should be up for stopping such a knife thrust. Certainly the momentum and KE of such a lethal knife blow are not going to be siginificantly greater than for a properly shaped bullet of DU.

Tell me how many joules do you beleive their knives are going in with at 9 cm/s?

The blunt fact is if a knife going in with X KE and Y momentum can kill you, it shouldn't be all that hard to find a bullet with >>X KE and >>Y momentum to kill you as well.

Based on the knife stab characteristics I linked previously, at 9 cm/s the knife should have roughly 10 millijoules of KE and a momentum of ~1.02 kg*m/s. The 15x200mm DU round (2.7kg) would have about 11 millijoules and a momentum of .243 kg*m/s. The 15x300mm DU round (4kg) would have around 16 millijoules and a momentum of .36 kg*m/s. Oh... and the range of those bullets is <25m. Exactly how much less I don't know, because the ballistics program I was playing around with would only tell me that in going from the muzzle to 25 yards, they ended up with negative velocity.

There are two big differences between the knife and your shield-piercing bullets:

One- you can keep applying muscle power to the knife: the bullet only has what it left the barrel with.

Two- If the shield is dialed up to a higher power, the 9 cm/s bullets will be too fast and get repelled. The knife-user can simply time his next strike to be slower.

I'm sure we'll eventually get to ">>X and >>Y" if we keep scaling these bullets up indefinitely, but by that point we may as well just drop the idea of guns and discuss the plausability of running Sardaukar over with a cement mixer.

Assuming the 20x200mm rounds and a rifle comparable in weight and ammo capacity to an M4 carbine, that's a roughly 98kg rifle (95.5kg of which is the ammo.) If nothing else, it does make the 32kg weight of an M2-2 flamethrower look much more reasonable by comparison.

Crew served vehicle mounted weapons. The first machine guns were pathetically heavy and unweildy, they still literally cut down thousands of foes wielding edged weapons. Just about the most craptacular machine gun in history greatly surpasses edged weapons.

You still don't seem to grasp the essential difference between these shield-piercing bullets of yours and a standard machine gun. A pathetically heavy and unwieldy conventional machinegun still has the advantage of spitting out a hail of high velocity metal for a distance of a mile or so. The shield-piercing gun has the same drawbacks with none of the benefits, save possibly for rate of fire. Oh, yeah, and since they're vehicle-mounted you can outrun the enemy.

As an alternative you could always use a smaller projectile, say something dart-sized coated in one of the innumerable poisons available in... oh, wait, those are an example of "collective stupidity."

When you are faced with utter destruction (like House Atreides) you are a damn fool if you don't buck the status quo. Not developing weaponry because the current balance of power suits you only works if you can trust that everyone else won't develop it either. Even the most extreme minority of players could upset the status quo and then it is damn better to be on top than on bottom.

Until I see where flame throwers are banned weaponry or some form of arms agreement governs their use or development; the only evidence points to stupidity on the part of those not using them (or something else superior to edged weapons).

Ask and ye shall receive.

From Dune:

Assassins' Handbook: Third-century compilation of poisons commonly used in a War of Assassins. Later expanded to include those deadly devices permitted under the Guild Peace and Great Convention.

Great Convention: the universal truce enforced under the power balance maintained by the Guild, the Great Houses, and the Imperium. Its chief rule prohibits the use of atomic weapons against human targets. Each rule of the Great Convention begins: "The forms must be obeyed...."

Judge of the Change: an official appointed by the Landsraad High Council and the Emperor to monitor a change of fief, a kanly negotiation, or formal battle in a War of Assassins. The Judge's arbitral authority may be challenged only before the high council with the Emperor present.

Kanly: formal feud or vendetta under the rules of the Great Convention carried on according to the strictest limitations (see Judge of the Change.) Originally the rules were designed to protect innocent bystanders.

War of Assassins: the limited form of warfare permitted under the Great Conventions and the Guild Peace. The aim is to reduce involvement of innocent bystanders. Rules prescribe formal declarations of intent and restrict permissible weapons.

From Children Of Dune:

His mind flashed through the review of those conventions which had ended primitive forms of warfare:

One-All planets were vulnerable to attack from space; ergo: retaliation/revenge facilities were set up off-planet by by every House Major. Farad'n would know that the Atreides had not omitted this elementary precaution.

Two-Force shields were a complete defense against projectiles and explosives of non-atomic type, the basic reason why hand-to-hand conflict had reentered human combat. But infantry had its limits. House Corrino might have brought their Sardaukar back to a pre-Arrakeen edge, but they still could be no match for the abandoned ferocity of Fremen.

Three-Planetary feudalism remained in constant danger from a large technical class, but the effects of the Butlerian Jihad continued as a damper on technological excesses. Ixians, Tleilaxu, and a few scattered outer planets were the only possible threat in this regard, and they were planet-vulnerable to the combined wrath of the rest of the Imperium. The Butlerian Jihad would not be undone. Mechanized warfare required a large technical class. The Atreides Imperium had channeled this force into other pursuits. No large technical class existed unwatched. And the Empire remained safely feudalist, naturally, since that was the best social form for spreading over widely dispersed wild frontiers-new planets.

[tharkûn]

Where the fuck are you getting "do not use them" from? The Atreides and Sardaukar use both slow-pellet stunners and edged weapons. The range is going to be <25m (probably significantly less.) Given that, I'd say it's understandable why they carry both weapons: if you're within stunner range, you'll soon be within knife-fighting range.

They do not use them against sheilded targets. Having a short range with a high rate of fire is not a problem, think about it why do we not go into house fights with with knives? Engagement ranges are far less than 25m, yet even at such short ranges guns are a damn sight better than swords. It is quite common to begin room to room fights damn close to knife range, does anyone advocate knife fights?

You can't carry both? Drop the damn sword.

The point is that with fire suits of some kind in use, you wouldn't just be able to spray fire across the landscape: you need direct contact to get through the suit's protection. That'll make your flame tank's 2 minutes of flamethrower fuel go much faster.

You must be an idiot. If I spary an arc of liquid flame there will be direct contact. I suppose you could survive that with something cheap (i.e. not asbestos) but it will cause significant casualties and that is the name of the game. Flamethrowing tanks can burn for longer than 2 minutes, that was just what the Satan had (which was a quick job done when it was shown just how damn effective flames where at killing humans in close quarters). The only limits on flame time is how much weight you want the tank to carry. Given the strength of shields in dune you can bet on far longer flame times.

However even two minute flamings is not all that bad. You have to remember that each second at least 2 gallons of thickened fuel were being spewed at the enemy; far more than sufficient to kill infantry en masse. If you can adopt counter march tactics continious heavy flaming is still an option as long as you can protect the fuel depot.

You of course are completely ignoring the shock value of flames. People fear flame, it is instictual. Rather than burn people jumped out of the WTC to certain death. After two minutes of flaming just about nobody is going to be willing to advance. Running forward into flames just doesn't happen.

Around the table they fought-thrust and parry, feint and counterfeint. The air within their shield bubbles grew stale from the demands on it that the slow interchange along shield barrier edges could not replenish. With each new shield contact, the smell of ozone grew stronger.

The human body requires about 2.75 kg a day or about .03 g per second. However when exercising this requirement goes up about fifteen fold. So figure that that the average knife fighter needs about 2.4 g of air per second. This puts rather severe limits on how "slow" you can recirculate air. Further it should be noted that because the "slowing" is due to velocity carbon dioxide and oxygen are not going to be exchanged at an even rate. In short if you honestly think that hot air is going to vent in timely manner, then the poor bastard is going to asphixyiate.

Now here's a novel idea what if the air was growing "stale" (Having lost freshness, effervescence, or palatability) simply refers to the fact that high concentrations of ozone (> 1ppm) lead to: coughing, rapid beating of the heart, chest pain, and general body pain. Perhaps the problem is that ozone is not dissipating quickly from the point of origin and is causing the staleness.

If you can supply the lungs of the average human in strenous exercise, using a flamethrower is not hazardous to your health.

Paul snapped the force button at his waist, felt the crinkled-skin tingling of the defensive field at his forehead and down his back, heard external sounds take on characteristic shield-filtered flatness.

Wahoo it modulates sound. That means jack didly squat about how effective it is at trapping air. The fact that one can hear at all inside a shield tells you something given that the speed of sound is over 300 m/s. Face it the energy field created by a shield is not going let oxygen in, carbon dioxide out, sound in, and heated air in all off the velocity discriminating principle

In any event if such venting is a problem, you just extend the nozzle beyond the shield.

He could analyze it now. His shield had been activated, set low but still enough to slow molecular interchange across the field barrier. And he had been pushing himself away from the table... that and Piter's shocked gasp which had brought the guard captain darting forward into his own doom.

And the right conclusion is the baron happens to reach a wrong conclusion. Whatever the gas is, it is going to permeate the shield faster than air, because of its higher mass and lower RMS. If the oxygen is making it in, so is the poison. Perhaps he was a lucky bastard. Perhaps the convection currents carried the poison away from him. Such things happened in WWI. Maybe it was not a particularly volatile gas and had already settled. But the simple fact is the STRONGER the slowing effect of the shields, the greater the relative rate at which the poison will enter the shield and hence the body.

Congradulations, you proved that shields don't stop the flow of air through them. Per the quotes we already knew that the shield slows, but does not stop the exchange of gases between the shield bubble and the outside. We also knew it affects the transmission of sound waves but does not stop them.

Slow it enough and you still die. You need a steady FLOW of oxygen, and that is going to be MORE retarded than poison by a long shot. If you can diffuse enough oxygen across the barrier to survive, the heat will dissipate with the carbon dioxide.

Think of it this way. Every gram of oxygen you breath comes back out as water vapor and carbon dioxide. there has to be equilibrium or you eventually asphixyiate. If you are flaming it will heat the air, and whatever air diffuses across the barrier will carrying away heat.

Both the Harkonnen mercenaries and the Sardaukar were fond of using lasguns to fight Fremen, since Fremen don't use shields. If you'd stop beating up this "knife-wielding moron" strawman for a minute you might remember that. Its also possible that the shields could have been off because of one of those giant electically-charged sandstorms that short out shields.

I am speaking entirely of their pitiful tactics for attacking sheilded targets. They have a marginally effective way of beating up natives with little access to technology, wahoo that is so impressive. If you have effective firearms, flamethrowers, or anything else why do you combat other shielded troops with knives?

As I said the first time, while Hawat is observing a band of Sardaukar walking across a dust basin to the cliffs on the opposite side, he can see that they have a shield glimmer around them and that the troop carrier which arrives later on does not. There are numerous occasions where the book refers to the "glittering," "shimmering", or "blurring" effects of active shields.

So how come the cars were firing?

Based on the knife stab characteristics I linked previously, at 9 cm/s the knife should have roughly 10 millijoules of KE and a momentum of ~1.02 kg*m/s. The 15x200mm DU round (2.7kg) would have about 11 millijoules and a momentum of .243 kg*m/s. The 15x300mm DU round (4kg) would have around 16 millijoules and a momentum of .36 kg*m/s. Oh... and the range of those bullets is <25m. Exactly how much less I don't know, because the ballistics program I was playing around with would only tell me that in going from the muzzle to 25 yards, they ended up with negative velocity.

Where is the ballistics program? Even at 10 m an effective machine gun will be able to kill hundreds of enemy before being overrun. Massed charges against machine guns at that range historically failed, even when the enemy was better armed than a roman legionaire.

you can keep applying muscle power to the knife: the bullet only has what it left the barrel with.

Please don't make me laugh. From your page one stab with a maximum of 2261 N (though this is doubtful because that is an awful lot of jerk from an essentially imobile position). Spreading this across a square mm one comes up with an impressive looking 2,261,000,000 pascals of pressure or 2.2 GPa. That can quite easily be stopped by steel as penetration leads to ever increasing surface area without an increase in force.

The blunt fact of the matter is that ancient armor is quite effective at stopping pointed weapons from piercing it. There are historical accounts of mailled individuals withstanding repetitive strikes from full force sword blows without piercing the armor (your collarbone might be shattered from transmitted energy but the armor often held). Without the ability to play off torque, momentum, or use anything else that exceeds the velocity limitations it is easy to stop knife thrusts.

Two- If the shield is dialed up to a higher power, the 9 cm/s bullets will be too fast and get repelled. The knife-user can simply time his next strike to be slower.

This is retarded. If I'm a sheilded individual no knife would EVER breach the shield. Why? Because I'd run straight at the idiot and my velocity would cause ANY possible knife thrust to be "too fast".

Knife fighting at these relative velocities is the height of stupidity. If by some miracle you make it through my sheild, you should still have to deal with the armor, and if by some freak of nature you actually have the ability to penetrate the armor I can move in ANY direction and suddenly you sword/arm is moving too damn fast to get through the shield.

I'm sure we'll eventually get to ">>X and >>Y" if we keep scaling these bullets up indefinitely, but by that point we may as well just drop the idea of guns and discuss the plausability of running Sardaukar over with a cement mixer.

Only because you can't get it through your head that at 10 m a machine gun could literally mow down hundreds of Saudakur before they came into knife range?

You still don't seem to grasp the essential difference between these shield-piercing bullets of yours and a standard machine gun. A pathetically heavy and unwieldy conventional machinegun still has the advantage of spitting out a hail of high velocity metal for a distance of a mile or so. The shield-piercing gun has the same drawbacks with none of the benefits, save possibly for rate of fire. Oh, yeah, and since they're vehicle-mounted you can outrun the enemy.

You fail to get this. The average human being has range less than 1 m in effective striking distance. In WWI trenches were stormed from quite close quarters, and still repulsed. The range of the machine gun was not particularly relevant, rifles of the day had a similar range. The only major advantage was rate of fire. Guess what advantages a shield piercing machine gun would have:
range (however limited)
rate of fire

With a sufficiently high volume of fire and a fallback firing tactical approach you will find that:

Dead Sardaukar are going to pile up the moment they come into range. Vehicle mounting means one can make a tactical retreat to maintain rate of fire. You are still looking at hundreds and thousands to one causulty exchange rates.

As an alternative you could always use a smaller projectile, say something dart-sized coated in one of the innumerable poisons available in... oh, wait, those are an example of "collective stupidity."

And when one fails to regularly utilize them at high volume against sheilded enemy in favor of using edged weapons (and training for unholy amounts of time to use bladed weapons) yes it is collective stupidity.

It was collective stupidity when the RN placed masts on steamships and endeavored to fly under sail when much superior steam powered screws were already onboard the ships. They did it (until Fisher and a few others forced a change in tactics).

If you have an effective machine gun with ANY range superior to a sword, then one should employ said machine gun against the swords instead of swords.

Force shields were a complete defense against projectiles and explosives of non-atomic type, the basic reason why hand-to-hand conflict had reentered human combat. But infantry had its limits. House Corrino might have brought their Sardaukar back to a pre-Arrakeen edge, but they still could be no match for the abandoned ferocity of Fremen.

BS detected. Does Dune posess affective poisoned dart projectiles or are all projectiles completely ineffective.

In short the only reason melee combat returned is because shields stopped guns, wahoo. They do nothing against willie pete, flamethrowers, or simply flattening human infantry under sheilded tanks. So why are NONE of the above used against shielded foes? Why is the primary method of engagement HtH (as expressed above)?

Because:
"Three-Planetary feudalism remained in constant danger from a large technical class, but the effects of the Butlerian Jihad continued as a damper on technological excesses. Ixians, Tleilaxu, and a few scattered outer planets were the only possible threat in this regard, and they were planet-vulnerable to the combined wrath of the rest of the Imperium. The Butlerian Jihad would not be undone. Mechanized warfare required a large technical class. The Atreides Imperium had channeled this force into other pursuits. No large technical class existed unwatched. And the Empire remained safely feudalist, naturally, since that was the best social form for spreading over widely dispersed wild frontiers-new planets."
Otherwise known as the collective stupidity of the Butlerian Jihad.

Ask and ye shall receive.

Good let me know when you post it. We have evidence of the use of poison gas and everything thus far refers to atomics. Yes I can read "restrict permissable weapons", but that does NOT state flamethrowers nor poison gas or anything else of that nature.

Face it from using artillery to deliver willie pete, to vehicle mounted "slow velocity" machine guns, to flametanks ... something is superior to "hand-to hand-combat". Certainly if you are engaged in hand to hand combat you might try using body armor like every other society that engaged primarily in HtH combat No pesky high velocity arrows, crossbow bolts, or firearms to contend with. Aught to be a paradise for heavily armored individual.

[beyond hope]

They do not use them against sheilded targets. Having a short range with a high rate of fire is not a problem, think about it why do we not go into house fights with with knives? Engagement ranges are far less than 25m, yet even at such short ranges guns are a damn sight better than swords. It is quite common to begin room to room fights damn close to knife range, does anyone advocate knife fights?

Red herring. We use firearms in preference to knives because we're not limited to 6 cm/s bullets. Your statement that they do not use stunners against shielded targets is untrue, as the following quote shows:

Stunner: slow-pellet projectile weapon throwing a poison- or drug-tipped dart. Effectiveness limited by variations in shield settings and relative motion between target and projectile.

Simple deduction: if the weapon were not intended to be fired at shielded targets, concerns about shield settings and relative motion would be a non-issue.

You can't carry both? Drop the damn sword.

Huh? I already indicated that the Atreides and Sardaukar are armed with both weapons. In fact, when the Sardaukar capture Hawat they are fighting with a stunner in one hand and a knife in the other.

You must be an idiot. If I spary an arc of liquid flame there will be direct contact. I suppose you could survive that with something cheap (i.e. not asbestos) but it will cause significant casualties and that is the name of the game. Flamethrowing tanks can burn for longer than 2 minutes, that was just what the Satan had (which was a quick job done when it was shown just how damn effective flames where at killing humans in close quarters). The only limits on flame time is how much weight you want the tank to carry. Given the strength of shields in dune you can bet on far longer flame times.

However even two minute flamings is not all that bad. You have to remember that each second at least 2 gallons of thickened fuel were being spewed at the enemy; far more than sufficient to kill infantry en masse. If you can adopt counter march tactics continious heavy flaming is still an option as long as you can protect the fuel depot.

Thanks to the Butlerian Jihad and the Great Convention, it's a moot point.

You of course are completely ignoring the shock value of flames. People fear flame, it is instictual. Rather than burn people jumped out of the WTC to certain death. After two minutes of flaming just about nobody is going to be willing to advance. Running forward into flames just doesn't happen.

Heh... I'm "ignoring the shock value of flames" now, and yet several replies back I said this in my post dated 6/14/04 at 2:42 pm:

In the worst case, if you had to deal with both full-strength flamethrowers and shields, I'd expect a slow, agonizing death by napalm to be a much more frightening prospect than the instantaneous vaporization of a lasgun-shield interaction., particularly if the soldier with the lasgun is burning already.

When I go back to your reply, dated 6/16/04 at 6:12 pm I see that you just snipped it out.

Around the table they fought-thrust and parry, feint and counterfeint. The air within their shield bubbles grew stale from the demands on it that the slow interchange along shield barrier edges could not replenish. With each new shield contact, the smell of ozone grew stronger.

The human body requires about 2.75 kg a day or about .03 g per second. However when exercising this requirement goes up about fifteen fold. So figure that that the average knife fighter needs about 2.4 g of air per second. This puts rather severe limits on how "slow" you can recirculate air. Further it should be noted that because the "slowing" is due to velocity carbon dioxide and oxygen are not going to be exchanged at an even rate. In short if you honestly think that hot air is going to vent in timely manner, then the poor bastard is going to asphixyiate.

Now here's a novel idea what if the air was growing "stale" (Having lost freshness, effervescence, or palatability) simply refers to the fact that high concentrations of ozone (> 1ppm) lead to: coughing, rapid beating of the heart, chest pain, and general body pain. Perhaps the problem is that ozone is not dissipating quickly from the point of origin and is causing the staleness.

If you can supply the lungs of the average human in strenous exercise, using a flamethrower is not hazardous to your health.

The bolded portion in the above quote from the book makes it painfully obvious that the author was, indeed, referring to the oxygen supply inside the shield bubble being used up faster than it could be replaced by exchange of gasses across the shield barrier. Your theory of ozone being trapped within the bubble implies the same: something is building up within the shield faster than it can vent, whether it is carbon dioxide or ozone.

Paul snapped the force button at his waist, felt the crinkled-skin tingling of the defensive field at his forehead and down his back, heard external sounds take on characteristic shield-filtered flatness.

Wahoo it modulates sound. That means jack didly squat about how effective it is at trapping air. The fact that one can hear at all inside a shield tells you something given that the speed of sound is over 300 m/s. Face it the energy field created by a shield is not going let oxygen in, carbon dioxide out, sound in, and heated air in all off the velocity discriminating principle

Your "all or nothing" strawman is not any more convincing with repetition. The quotes already show that the Holtzman Effect, however it works, is selective. It slows the exchange of gases across the shield boundary but does not stop it. It affects the passage of sound waves through the barrier but does not block them. It will still allow objects traveling slower than six to nine centimeters per second through the field. It follows the outline of the wearer rather than being a sphere centered around the shield belt, and yet allows the wearer's blade to extend through. There is obviously more to it than just "anything faster than x is repelled."

In any event if such venting is a problem, you just extend the nozzle beyond the shield.

No shit, I already conceded that you could stick the barrel through the shield in my last reply. Do you read these at all?

He could analyze it now. His shield had been activated, set low but still enough to slow molecular interchange across the field barrier. And he had been pushing himself away from the table... that and Piter's shocked gasp which had brought the guard captain darting forward into his own doom.

And the right conclusion is the baron happens to reach a wrong conclusion. Whatever the gas is, it is going to permeate the shield faster than air, because of its higher mass and lower RMS. If the oxygen is making it in, so is the poison. Perhaps he was a lucky bastard. Perhaps the convection currents carried the poison away from him. Such things happened in WWI. Maybe it was not a particularly volatile gas and had already settled. But the simple fact is the STRONGER the slowing effect of the shields, the greater the relative rate at which the poison will enter the shield and hence the body.

The previous quote from Paul's practice with Duncan Idaho is not from a character's point of view and concurs with the one above from the Baron's POV: the shield boundary slows gas exchange. The fact that the Baron went through his bolt-hole door should tell you that he wasn't expecting the shield to stop whatever the gas was.

Slow it enough and you still die. You need a steady FLOW of oxygen, and that is going to be MORE retarded than poison by a long shot. If you can diffuse enough oxygen across the barrier to survive, the heat will dissipate with the carbon dioxide.

Think of it this way. Every gram of oxygen you breath comes back out as water vapor and carbon dioxide. there has to be equilibrium or you eventually asphixyiate. If you are flaming it will heat the air, and whatever air diffuses across the barrier will carrying away heat.

Golly, is that how respiration works? Thanks, Mr. Wizard!

All you have stated in the above is that the shield allows some interchange. We knew that already. Obviously the limit lies somewhere in between the level of a man at rest and a man performing strenuous activity. I'll remind you that my original point was that a flamethrower fired inside the shield bubble would give off noxious, superheated fumes faster than they could escape the shield bubble.

I am speaking entirely of their pitiful tactics for attacking sheilded targets. They have a marginally effective way of beating up natives with little access to technology, wahoo that is so impressive. If you have effective firearms, flamethrowers, or anything else why do you combat other shielded troops with knives?

The quote has nothing to do with their tactics for attacking shielded targets: it describes the outcome of a battle between unshielded troop carriers (unless, again, you propose the Fremen knifed them) and unshielded Fremen. There is also curiously no mention of blazing heaps of dead Fremen, although you somehow seem to be reading that into the quote. In short, there is nothing there to justify your conclusion that they "had an effective weapon they didn't develop."

As I said the first time, while Hawat is observing a band of Sardaukar walking across a dust basin to the cliffs on the opposite side, he can see that they have a shield glimmer around them and that the troop carrier which arrives later on does not. There are numerous occasions where the book refers to the "glittering," "shimmering", or "blurring" effects of active shields.

So how come the cars were firing?

Hmmm, let's see. By that point in the book, the Fremen under Paul Atreides have been kicking the Harkonnen garrison's ass for 2 years. The Emperor has had to bring his Sardaukar legions, along with fighting forces from most of the Houses Major and Houses Minor, to Arrakis in an attempt to restore order. It was also shortly after the incident in which the Emperor had dispatched 5 troop carriers to investigate rumored dwellings in the south and only 1 carrier managed to return. In their place I'd lay on the trigger if anyone so much as whispered "Fremen."

Based on the knife stab characteristics I linked previously, at 9 cm/s the knife should have roughly 10 millijoules of KE and a momentum of ~1.02 kg*m/s. The 15x200mm DU round (2.7kg) would have about 11 millijoules and a momentum of .243 kg*m/s. The 15x300mm DU round (4kg) would have around 16 millijoules and a momentum of .36 kg*m/s. Oh... and the range of those bullets is <25m. Exactly how much less I don't know, because the ballistics program I was playing around with would only tell me that in going from the muzzle to 25 yards, they ended up with negative velocity.

Where is the ballistics program? Even at 10 m an effective machine gun will be able to kill hundreds of enemy before being overrun. Massed charges against machine guns at that range historically failed, even when the enemy was better armed than a roman legionaire.

You don't have an effective machinegun, you've got a tripod or vehicle mounted monstrousity firing 4 kg DU projectiles at 6-9cm/s with a range under 25m. A subsonic 9mm round has 3,550 times the velocity these absurd shield-penetrating bullets do.

The program is here: knock yourself out. The grain weights you'll be wanting are 48,987 grains for the 15x200mm and 61,723 for the 15x300mm.

you can keep applying muscle power to the knife: the bullet only has what it left the barrel with.

Please don't make me laugh. From your page one stab with a maximum of 2261 N (though this is doubtful because that is an awful lot of jerk from an essentially imobile position). Spreading this across a square mm one comes up with an impressive looking 2,261,000,000 pascals of pressure or 2.2 GPa. That can quite easily be stopped by steel as penetration leads to ever increasing surface area without an increase in force.

The blunt fact of the matter is that ancient armor is quite effective at stopping pointed weapons from piercing it. There are historical accounts of mailled individuals withstanding repetitive strikes from full force sword blows without piercing the armor (your collarbone might be shattered from transmitted energy but the armor often held). Without the ability to play off torque, momentum, or use anything else that exceeds the velocity limitations it is easy to stop knife thrusts.

Which brings us back to your original assertion, that your shield-piercing bullets would be better than a knife. Except, since they have only marginally more energy than the knife and less momentum, they'll have the exact same problem as the knife. To the list of differences between a real machinegun and yours we can add "will not penetrate armor."

Two- If the shield is dialed up to a higher power, the 9 cm/s bullets will be too fast and get repelled. The knife-user can simply time his next strike to be slower.

This is retarded. If I'm a sheilded individual no knife would EVER breach the shield. Why? Because I'd run straight at the idiot and my velocity would cause ANY possible knife thrust to be "too fast".

Knife fighting at these relative velocities is the height of stupidity. If by some miracle you make it through my sheild, you should still have to deal with the armor, and if by some freak of nature you actually have the ability to penetrate the armor I can move in ANY direction and suddenly you sword/arm is moving too damn fast to get through the shield.

"Quick on defense, slow on offense" is the shield-fighter's motto. They do make quick moves so that the knife contacts the shield barrier too fast to go through. The whole art of shield combat involves getting your opponent to make a mistake so you can slip the knife through before they can recover. That's also the rationale for the use of poison on the blades.

You also didn't touch the actual point, so I'll restate it. If you're firing your 4kg bullets at 9 cm/s and the shield is set for 7 cm/s, they'll still be too fast. With a knife you can adjust for that with your next attack, while with the machinegun you need to change out the belt for 7 cm/s bullets. In that respect, the humble combat knife is actually more flexible than your shield-piercing bullets.

I'm sure we'll eventually get to ">>X and >>Y" if we keep scaling these bullets up indefinitely, but by that point we may as well just drop the idea of guns and discuss the plausability of running Sardaukar over with a cement mixer.

Only because you can't get it through your head that at 10 m a machine gun could literally mow down hundreds of Saudakur before they came into knife range?

As you yourself just said, all those Sardaukar have to do is increase the relative velocity to where the bullets will bounce off the shield. To the list of differences between a real machine gun and your shield-piercing machine gun we can add "charging it is a good tactic."

You still don't seem to grasp the essential difference between these shield-piercing bullets of yours and a standard machine gun. A pathetically heavy and unwieldy conventional machinegun still has the advantage of spitting out a hail of high velocity metal for a distance of a mile or so. The shield-piercing gun has the same drawbacks with none of the benefits, save possibly for rate of fire. Oh, yeah, and since they're vehicle-mounted you can outrun the enemy.

You fail to get this. The average human being has range less than 1 m in effective striking distance. In WWI trenches were stormed from quite close quarters, and still repulsed. The range of the machine gun was not particularly relevant, rifles of the day had a similar range. The only major advantage was rate of fire. Guess what advantages a shield piercing machine gun would have:
range (however limited)
rate of fire

With a sufficiently high volume of fire and a fallback firing tactical approach you will find that:

Dead Sardaukar are going to pile up the moment they come into range. Vehicle mounting means one can make a tactical retreat to maintain rate of fire. You are still looking at hundreds and thousands to one causulty exchange rates.

A point-by-point comparison:

.50 machine gun:
Mass: 43 g
Velocity: 888 m/s
KE: 17,000 J
Momentum: 38 kg*m/s
Range: 1,800 m
Rate of Fire: 550 rounds/minute

Shield-Piercing 15x300mm:
Mass: 4,000 g
Velocity: 0.09 m/s
KE: 0.016 J
Momentum: 0.36 kg*m/s
Range: <25 m
Rate of Fire: ?

With a bullet 93 times the weight of a .50 BMG round you get 1% of the momentum, .0001% of the KE, and 1.3% of the range. The only point where your shield-piercing weapon might be comparable to a real machine gun is rate of fire; with 250 rounds of ammunition weighing a metric ton, that could end up working against you as well.

As an alternative you could always use a smaller projectile, say something dart-sized coated in one of the innumerable poisons available in... oh, wait, those are an example of "collective stupidity."

And when one fails to regularly utilize them at high volume against sheilded enemy in favor of using edged weapons (and training for unholy amounts of time to use bladed weapons) yes it is collective stupidity.

It was collective stupidity when the RN placed masts on steamships and endeavored to fly under sail when much superior steam powered screws were already onboard the ships. They did it (until Fisher and a few others forced a change in tactics).

If you have an effective machine gun with ANY range superior to a sword, then one should employ said machine gun against the swords instead of swords.

And, for the seventh time, you do not have an effective machine gun. So long as your bullets have to have the same velocity as a half-hearted poke with a knife they will never be able to significantly out-perform one, save by making them so obscenely heavy that they lose all practical value. The closest you will be able to come are the aforementioned slow-pellet stunners, whose effectiveness (as per the quote you've seen several times now) is limited by shield settings and relative velocity.

Force shields were a complete defense against projectiles and explosives of non-atomic type, the basic reason why hand-to-hand conflict had reentered human combat. But infantry had its limits. House Corrino might have brought their Sardaukar back to a pre-Arrakeen edge, but they still could be no match for the abandoned ferocity of Fremen.

BS detected. Does Dune posess affective poisoned dart projectiles or are all projectiles completely ineffective?

Once again:

Stunner: slow-pellet projectile weapon throwing a poison- or drug-tipped dart. Effectiveness limited by variations in shield settings and relative motion between target and projectile.

In short the only reason melee combat returned is because shields stopped guns, wahoo. They do nothing against willie pete, flamethrowers, or simply flattening human infantry under sheilded tanks. So why are NONE of the above used against shielded foes? Why is the primary method of engagement HtH (as expressed above)?

Because:
"Three-Planetary feudalism remained in constant danger from a large technical class, but the effects of the Butlerian Jihad continued as a damper on technological excesses. Ixians, Tleilaxu, and a few scattered outer planets were the only possible threat in this regard, and they were planet-vulnerable to the combined wrath of the rest of the Imperium. The Butlerian Jihad would not be undone. Mechanized warfare required a large technical class. The Atreides Imperium had channeled this force into other pursuits. No large technical class existed unwatched. And the Empire remained safely feudalist, naturally, since that was the best social form for spreading over widely dispersed wild frontiers-new planets."
Otherwise known as the collective stupidity of the Butlerian Jihad.

Was it collective stupidity at the time? Maybe. We don't have a whole lot of data on why the Bulterian Jihad happened (at least in the first three novels, which are all I've read.) It was a "crusade against computers, thinking machines, and conscious robots," also known as "The Great Revolt." It brings to mind the business about Tleilaxu artificial eyes in Dune Messiah: people in the book ask themselves "what bondage goes along with metal eyes?"

That aside, let's assume it was the work of a bunch of fundie freaks who got together and decided "Me Thag no like fancy server with blinkenlights." That does nothing to prove that their current tactics are stupid. In fact, since we have Idaho's comment that unfettered technological advancement would be a threat to the Imperium, they'd have to be collectively stupid not to crack down on it.

Ask and ye shall receive.

Good let me know when you post it. We have evidence of the use of poison gas and everything thus far refers to atomics. Yes I can read "restrict permissable weapons", but that does NOT state flamethrowers nor poison gas or anything else of that nature.

Face it from using artillery to deliver willie pete, to vehicle mounted "slow velocity" machine guns, to flametanks ... something is superior to "hand-to hand-combat". Certainly if you are engaged in hand to hand combat you might try using body armor like every other society that engaged primarily in HtH combat No pesky high velocity arrows, crossbow bolts, or firearms to contend with. Aught to be a paradise for heavily armored individual.

Poison gas is a red herring: the poison gas was in a false tooth. A VX-filled bicuspid is the sort of thing I'd expect to find in an Assassin's Handbook.

What do you need me to do, have John Edwards channel the spirit of Frank Herbert to say "flamethrowers are banned?" We know that the Guild Peace and Great Convention only permit certain "deadly devices." We know that the Guild Peace and Great Convention maintain a truce, with only formalized warfare permitted. We therefore have a perfectly plausable in-universe explanation of why we never see a flamethrower in Dune, rather than "they must be bloody morons." Since brazen violations of the Great Convention could conceivably result in planetary destruction (see the comment about Ix and Tleilaxu in the quote above,) we can see that all parties involved have a very strong incentive not to buck the status quo. The same can be applied to white phosphorus artillery shells, especially since we know that Baron Harkonnen could get artillery pieces made easily enough for Arrakis.

[Gaidin]

Was it collective stupidity at the time? Maybe. We don't have a whole lot of data on why the Bulterian Jihad happened (at least in the first three novels, which are all I've read.) It was a "crusade against computers, thinking machines, and conscious robots," also known as "The Great Revolt." It brings to mind the business about Tleilaxu artificial eyes in Dune Messiah: people in the book ask themselves "what bondage goes along with metal eyes?"

The massive AI mainframe was attempting to take over the galaxy and turn the human population into slaves. One of the robots captured Serena Butler in attempt to study her and learn about humans, as his programming was essentially to learn to be a human. She happened to be pregnant at the time of capture, and her son was born. The robot let her keep the son, though she still had to serve him.

One day the robot determined the son was too much of a distraction and threw him off the balcony. Serena went apeshit on the guy, and though she didnt destroy him, her behavior was seen by many and it served as a catalyst to start a rebellion(this was on old Earth btw).

All the humans on earth were killed, but she managed to escape with the first Atreides and her story got the rest of the free humans united and the war to kill off AI had begun.

SIDENOTE: The five ships attacking the fremen in the deep desert didnt have shields because in the deep desert worms would've gone batshit crazy and destroyed them after they landed.

[Gaidin]

sorry for the double post...but the rebellion was a bit of irony in the fact that the robot controlling Serena had a wager goind with the AI mainframe betting that he could incite a rebellion.

[tharkûn]

Red herring. We use firearms in preference to knives because we're not limited to 6 cm/s bullets. Your statement that they do not use stunners against shielded targets is untrue, as the following quote shows:

You know I'm awfully keen to see the actual quote for that 6 cm/s. I've found some RPG quotes online alleging to be from the encyclopedia I'll be running with for now.

The blunt fact of the matter is, at any range greater than striking range for the swordsman, the machine gunner is going to kick the ass of the swordsman.

Simple deduction: if the weapon were not intended to be fired at shielded targets, concerns about shield settings and relative motion would be a non-issue.

So why are they too stupid to USE THEM instead of swords? If they have better range than swords - make a high capacity version, vehicle mount it, and win every open battle you fight.

Huh? I already indicated that the Atreides and Sardaukar are armed with both weapons. In fact, when the Sardaukar capture Hawat they are fighting with a stunner in one hand and a knife in the other.

Which is an example of stupidity, drop the knife and have more firepower in the stunner.

Thanks to the Butlerian Jihad and the Great Convention, it's a moot point.

As I said, collective stupidity.

Heh... I'm "ignoring the shock value of flames" now, and yet several replies back I said this in my post dated 6/14/04 at 2:42 pm:

Your response was to use defacto nukes. Fine. If the lasgun-shield-big boom tactic is allowed then let's forget swords and flamethrowers altogethor. I'll just train small squads from birth to lasgun any enemy who approaches. If they are sheilded, they go boom. If they aren't, my sheilded lasgunners win.

Face it if using the Lasgun-sheild bomb is viable, then NOBODY WOULD BE USING SWORDS.

The bolded portion in the above quote from the book makes it painfully obvious that the author was, indeed, referring to the oxygen supply inside the shield bubble being used up faster than it could be replaced by exchange of gasses across the shield barrier. Your theory of ozone being trapped within the bubble implies the same: something is building up within the shield faster than it can vent, whether it is carbon dioxide or ozone.

How fast are we producing ozone, how fast would it normally vent? How about CO2?

"The Personal Defensive Shields of the Dune Universe are not round projections of force, but full-body shields which permit objects to pass through them, only slowly. An object attempting to pass through a planar field at a right-angle vector speed of more than the strike speed is faced with resistance which grows more intense as the fourth power of the velocity. When the speed is sufficiently high, the field becomes essentially solid to the impinging object. Shields have varying "strike speeds" -- that speed at which a normal object can pass a planar Holtzmann field -- that depends upon the electromagnetic admissions spectrum of the planar field. It is never less than 5.8 cm/s for one-angstrom fields, and increases only to 9.3 cm/s for all-absorptive fields. Typical shields have a strike speed of about 7 cm/s admitting most visible light, x-rays and gamma rays. "

So shields are simply a membrane of some unknown type which are selectively permeable based on velocity. Given that at least .075 moles of oxygen are coming in, how much carbon dioxide would be going out? The answer, given the above description, depends on the force of the sheild. With a 4:3 velocity ratio the force would be 256:81, correcting for mass imbalance gives us 8192:3564. What does this tell us? It tells us that you simply can't build up a helluvalot of carbon dioxide inside the sheild, it will preferentially cross the sheild and once you have a partial pressure where carbon dioxide is 43% of the partial pressure of oxygen it can go no higher. The only other way to increase the amount of carbon dioxide requires eventual asphyxiation of the sheild wearer.

Now what about ozone, surprisingly the numbers work out the same (44 vs 48), the difference happens to be that while breathing 2:1 oxygen:carbon dioxide into someones lung during CPR is fine, that level of ozone would kill. Ozone concentrations inexcess of 1 ppm are toxic. The build up of enough ozone to cause staleness does not require a miracle nor counteract the problem of the organic poison (which is going to preferentially effuse in greater amounts than carbon dioxide). Even something as simple as damping convective air currents would build up ozone.

Remember here we are looking at a rate of production vs a rate of venting. The rate of carbon dioxide venting must be greater than the rate of oxgyn "in-venting"; the production of carbon dioxide is strictly proportional to the uptake of oxygen. Ozone has no such limits. If it is being produced quickly enough, the concentration will go up even with unbounded effusion.

Your "all or nothing" strawman is not any more convincing with repetition. The quotes already show that the Holtzman Effect, however it works, is selective. It slows the exchange of gases across the shield boundary but does not stop it. It affects the passage of sound waves through the barrier but does not block them. It will still allow objects traveling slower than six to nine centimeters per second through the field. It follows the outline of the wearer rather than being a sphere centered around the shield belt, and yet allows the wearer's blade to extend through. There is obviously more to it than just "anything faster than x is repelled."

If it works on 6 cm/s then about 1 in 4096 oxygen molecules will be able to cross the sheild barrier (and that is playing around at STP, let alone upping the temperature for desert combat). If the 6-9 cm/s were completely valid you would be DAMN hard pressed to BREATH.

Of course the entire idea of 6-9 cm/s is BS from a hard physics standpoint. Even in a solid metal knife the individual atoms are in quite vigorous motion. Given that the sheild acts with individual molecules (otherwise none of this gas effusion slowing occurs), the same statistical mechanics distributions which cover oxygen and carbon dioxide cover iron. Yet the knives don't disintigrate on sheild contact.

Further given my quote, admittedly from a poor source but you haven't given yours, tells us that the sheild acts with velocity to the fourth. The interesting thing here is if I double the mass of the bullet, then with the same kinetic energy I'm coming in with 1/4th the velocity and thus the shield exerts 1/256 of the force. Even more fun is the fact that F =ma so that the net accerlation is 1/512 of the twice as massive bullet. That, is an x^9 growth function.

Now remember that all the sheild does is exert a FORCE, so with F=ma, a high momentum, high mass projectile is not going to feel all that much force. Sorry but this is not just wave thine hands and anything faster than 9 cm/s self destructs, but that resistance proportional to the fourth power of velocity occurs. Heavier bullets = less resistance for the same KE.

Of course the real kicker here is that NONE OF THIS MATTERS. Why? Because the sheild exerts a FORCE on the bullet, this force has to be balanced by something in the opposite direction. The MOMENTUM IS CONSERVED, so the best your sheild can do is to redistribute the momentum around the body . So if I throw enough KE at the sheild, regardless of it being on a bullet or a cement truck, I will crush the guy inside.

see http://www.stardestroyer.net/Empire/Tec ... index.html

For the basics.

Now of course the RPG cite I quoted could be horribly wrong, so if your quote about the 6 - 9 cm/s has a different description than resistance proportional to v^4, be my guest to post it.

The previous quote from Paul's practice with Duncan Idaho is not from a character's point of view and concurs with the one above from the Baron's POV: the shield boundary slows gas exchange. The fact that the Baron went through his bolt-hole door should tell you that he wasn't expecting the shield to stop whatever the gas was.

Anything which seriously slows the exchange rate KILLS the user. In order for carbon dioxide to build up to the levels needed, the user will die in a few minutes anyways. In order for high molecular weight toxin to be significantly slowed, please don't make me laugh. The higher the molecular weight, the LESS it is slowed. Given that he gets enough oxygen to breath, it can't be all that high.

Obviously the limit lies somewhere in between the level of a man at rest and a man performing strenuous activity. I'll remind you that my original point was that a flamethrower fired inside the shield bubble would give off noxious, superheated fumes faster than they could escape the shield bubble.

Your point remains impossible. Said noxious fumes will have RMS's two or more times lower than oxygen and will thus vent 512 times faster, 256 times faster than carbon dioxide. You simply cannot slow gas exhange a helluvalot before people start asphyxiating. Have you ever driven through a tunnel with fans? Even though the tunnel has giant frikking openings and the avaible surface area for exchange is greater than 1% of it being totally unenclosed ... they still need to vent the thing because people might asphyxiate if they don't. Compare THAT to the situation where less than .02% as much circulation is occuring and get back to me.

There is also curiously no mention of blazing heaps of dead Fremen, although you somehow seem to be reading that into the quote. In short, there is nothing there to justify your conclusion that they "had an effective weapon they didn't develop."

A flame thrower proved to be effective at stopping the enemy. Either the enemy is dead or the enemy is unable to attack (most likely from fear of being killed). The only thing STOPPING "heaps of dead Fremen" and that only occurs if they are too stupid to design it correctly.

Hmmm, let's see. By that point in the book, the Fremen under Paul Atreides have been kicking the Harkonnen garrison's ass for 2 years. The Emperor has had to bring his Sardaukar legions, along with fighting forces from most of the Houses Major and Houses Minor, to Arrakis in an attempt to restore order. It was also shortly after the incident in which the Emperor had dispatched 5 troop carriers to investigate rumored dwellings in the south and only 1 carrier managed to return. In their place I'd lay on the trigger if anyone so much as whispered "Fremen."

the point

________________

your head

If you can see sheilds why are they firing at THESE SPECIFIC TARGETS? If you have an ineffective weapon for a specific enemy you STOP FIRING (unless you are so poorly trained as to keep firing hoping for that "lucky shot").

You don't have an effective machinegun, you've got a tripod or vehicle mounted monstrousity firing 4 kg DU projectiles at 6-9cm/s with a range under 25m. A subsonic 9mm round has 3,550 times the velocity these absurd shield-penetrating bullets do.

Which is immently superior to swords.

Who gives a rip about velocity (except keeping it low enough that the v^4 sheild resistance doesn't stop the bullet)? What matters is momentum and velocity. The more mass in the projectile, the slower it goes with the same KE and with more momentum. Of course, if the quote I found is correct, one doesn't need to puncture the sheild, just hit with enough momentum to expert enough pressure to disable the target within. Absolutely nothing precludes the use of hypersonic rounds or anything else delivering sufficient momentum.

Which brings us back to your original assertion, that your shield-piercing bullets would be better than a knife. Except, since they have only marginally more energy than the knife and less momentum, they'll have the exact same problem as the knife. To the list of differences between a real machinegun and yours we can add "will not penetrate armor."

You need to go back to basic physics.

KE = mv^2/2
momentum = mv

The ONLY way I can have "more energy" and "less momentum" is if your knives outmass my bullets. The WHOLE FRIKKING POINT of increasing the mass on the bullets is to get substantially more momentum for the same KE.

ANY armour which a DU slug cannot penetrate cannot be penetrated by a knife if said knife has less energy and less mass (and is made of an inferior metal to boot).

"Quick on defense, slow on offense" is the shield-fighter's motto. They do make quick moves so that the knife contacts the shield barrier too fast to go through. The whole art of shield combat involves getting your opponent to make a mistake so you can slip the knife through before they can recover. That's also the rationale for the use of poison on the blades.

Art? Torquing one's chest makes the knife move to fast to strike ... and that is the instinctual response when someone thrusts. But who the hell cares? With properly designed armor, like from hundreds of years ago, I could do whatever I damn well please and you CANNOT peirce my armor. If you know anyone who can puncture Norman maille (good stuff with thick wire and small ID backed with good leather) with ANY knife from essentially standstill, let me know. As it stands the Saudaukar are abject morons because decently mailled individuals are IMMUNE from knife thrusts.

You also didn't touch the actual point, so I'll restate it. If you're firing your 4kg bullets at 9 cm/s and the shield is set for 7 cm/s, they'll still be too fast. With a knife you can adjust for that with your next attack, while with the machinegun you need to change out the belt for 7 cm/s bullets. In that respect, the humble combat knife is actually more flexible than your shield-piercing bullets.

Hardly. First I can just dump enough momentum on them that even if the bullet destroys itself, the sheild is driven with sufficient force over a sufficient area to crush the guy inside it. Second I can keep upping the mass and watching the effectiveness of the sheild drop off with m^9 . Third I can just launch a nice rocket propelled projectile with a rocket motor deliverying impulse proportional to (terminal velocity^4).

As you yourself just said, all those Sardaukar have to do is increase the relative velocity to where the bullets will bounce off the shield. To the list of differences between a real machine gun and your shield-piercing machine gun we can add "charging it is a good tactic."

Except of course that my bullets have more momentum and hence are LESS EFFECTED by that v^4 resistance.

Of course you might have noticed I specified fallback firing, which given the superior speeds of vehicles means your charge just makes me touch the accelerator to compensate.

I have range. I have speed. As Jackie Fisher pointed out, I have you by the balls and can kill you at my pleasure.

With a bullet 93 times the weight of a .50 BMG round you get 1% of the momentum, .0001% of the KE, and 1.3% of the range. The only point where your shield-piercing weapon might be comparable to a real machine gun is rate of fire; with 250 rounds of ammunition weighing a metric ton, that could end up working against you as well.

Why in hell are you being so stupid? This is not being used against a modern .50 BMG, it is against the knife of the Sadaukar. Do I have range on the Sadaukar? Yes. Do I have rate of fire? Yes. Do I have speed? Yes.

And, for the seventh time, you do not have an effective machine gun. So long as your bullets have to have the same velocity as a half-hearted poke with a knife they will never be able to significantly out-perform one, save by making them so obscenely heavy that they lose all practical value. The closest you will be able to come are the aforementioned slow-pellet stunners, whose effectiveness (as per the quote you've seen several times now) is limited by shield settings and relative velocity.

Except of course that isn't true. Double the weight, velocity falls by 4, sheild resistance by 256, and acceleration from resistance by 256. Triple the weight, velocity falls by 9, sheild resistance by 6561, and net acceleration by 59049. Unless your quote says something differing than the RPG one it is an m^9 function and my quite massive bullets are not limited by 9 cm/s.

Was it collective stupidity at the time? Maybe. We don't have a whole lot of data on why the Bulterian Jihad happened (at least in the first three novels, which are all I've read.) It was a "crusade against computers, thinking machines, and conscious robots," also known as "The Great Revolt." It brings to mind the business about Tleilaxu artificial eyes in Dune Messiah: people in the book ask themselves "what bondage goes along with metal eyes?"

They banned computers, and never made even the simplest machine to do ROTE MATH. It is collective stupidity to keep doing it. It is the equivalent of saying DDT is bad so let's ban all pesticides.

That aside, let's assume it was the work of a bunch of fundie freaks who got together and decided "Me Thag no like fancy server with blinkenlights." That does nothing to prove that their current tactics are stupid. In fact, since we have Idaho's comment that unfettered technological advancement would be a threat to the Imperium, they'd have to be collectively stupid not to crack down on it.

No it is collective stupidity to maintain the Imperium.

In any event everything suggested in this thread is NOT unfettered technological advancement. Everything here are things that can be worked out without computers and mostly with WWII technology. Adopting the flamethrower is not synonomous with unbridled technological advancement.

But the kicker is, even after the Imperium falls they still use piss poor tactics.

Poison gas is a red herring: the poison gas was in a false tooth. A VX-filled bicuspid is the sort of thing I'd expect to find in an Assassin's Handbook.

VX has a density of 1.0083 g /ml, a bicuspid is what .5 cc? That gives us .5 g of VX which if we spread it around a real small room with 8 cubic meters of volume gives us just enough to be lethal to about 70% of humans if nothing disturbs the air for the minute or so of exposure. However given the number of dead it had to be FAR higher than that (particularly if expect the good Baron to die within seconds without a sheild). In short whatever the hell it was, it is MUCH more lethal than VX or there was a helluvalot of it. In either case you are looking at something far LESS discriminating than a flame thrower and far MORE likely to cause obscene amounts of collateral damage.

What do you need me to do, have John Edwards channel the spirit of Frank Herbert to say "flamethrowers are banned

How about not being an ass and ascerting that the conventions bans things with no proof? This is your burden of proof and if you fail to meet it, don't bitch about it to me because you decided to take up a sisyphean task.

know that the Guild Peace and Great Convention only permit certain "deadly devices."

Like ubiquitious quantities of poison gas (enough so that seconds of exposure could well be lethal)? Like lasguns hitting sheilds? Like Artillery?

Face it the flamethrower is LESS random, more precise, and less likely to cause colateral damage than many weapons seen in Dune. Why lasguns would be legit and flamethrowers not is beyond me.

Since brazen violations of the Great Convention could conceivably result in planetary destruction (see the comment about Ix and Tleilaxu in the quote above,) we can see that all parties involved have a very strong incentive not to buck the status quo. The same can be applied to white phosphorus artillery shells, especially since we know that Baron Harkonnen could get artillery pieces made easily enough for Arrakis.

Don't give me that BS. When the Atreides are being killed by the Sadaukar (in violation of the rules I might add) what do they stand to gain by keeping to the rules? NOTHING. When the Fremen begin to conqueor the Imperium what is gained by keeping the old rules? NOTHING.

We see numerous uses of NBC weapons and horribly dangerous weapons like Lasguns ... all of which are permitted. If you can show me the clear and consistent logic behind the great conventions you might have a point. As of this point all you are saying is that everything which would crush Saduakar with ease must be banned

[beyond hope]

You know I'm awfully keen to see the actual quote for that 6 cm/s. I've found some RPG quotes online alleging to be from the encyclopedia I'll be running with for now.

Go to your bookstore or library. Flip the book Dune open to the back, where you'll see a "Terminology of the Imperium" section." You will see the following quote I already posted.

Shield, Defensive: the protective field produced by a Holtzman generator. This field derives from Phase One of the suspensor-nullification effect. A shield will permit entry only to objects moving at slow speeds (depending on setting, this speed ranges from six to nine centimeters per second) and can be shorted out only by a shire-sized electric field. (see Lasgun.)

You've had the actual quote since my post dated 6/14/04 at 2:42 pm.

The blunt fact of the matter is, at any range greater than striking range for the swordsman, the machine gunner is going to kick the ass of the swordsman.

Not with your craptastic retro-bullets he won't, which was the point you were attempting to reply to there. What part of "we use guns instead of knives because we're not restricted to 6 cm/s bullets" was unclear exactly?

Simple deduction: if the weapon were not intended to be fired at shielded targets, concerns about shield settings and relative motion would be a non-issue.

So why are they too stupid to USE THEM instead of swords? If they have better range than swords - make a high capacity version, vehicle mount it, and win every open battle you fight.

Huh? I already indicated that the Atreides and Sardaukar are armed with both weapons. In fact, when the Sardaukar capture Hawat they are fighting with a stunner in one hand and a knife in the other.

Which is an example of stupidity, drop the knife and have more firepower in the stunner.

Bullshit. You've apparently forgotten your own relative velocity argument as soon as it's become inconvenient for you.

Thanks to the Butlerian Jihad and the Great Convention, it's a moot point.

As I said, collective stupidity.

More bullshit. Per the background thoughtfully provided by Gaidin, the Butlerian Jihad was an uprising against intelligent machines that had enslaved humanity. It's a bit of an overreaction, maybe, but understandable under the circumstances. As far as the Great Convention goes, would you also cite the fourth Hague Convention (especially chapter II, section 1 of the Annex here) as an example of "collective stupidity?"

Heh... I'm "ignoring the shock value of flames" now, and yet several replies back I said this in my post dated 6/14/04 at 2:42 pm:

Your response was to use defacto nukes. Fine. If the lasgun-shield-big boom tactic is allowed then let's forget swords and flamethrowers altogethor. I'll just train small squads from birth to lasgun any enemy who approaches. If they are sheilded, they go boom. If they aren't, my sheilded lasgunners win.

Face it if using the Lasgun-sheild bomb is viable, then NOBODY WOULD BE USING SWORDS.

There's no need for suicide troops: Lady Jessica contemplates the threat of the Harkonnens setting up a lasgun with a timer and shooting it at the shield protecting the capitol on Arrakis at one point in Dune. She is assured they wouldn't dare because it could possibly be interpreted as an atomic attack. You propose to remove most of the force from that objection by being the first to piss all over the Convention.

How fast are we producing ozone, how fast would it normally vent? How about CO2?

"The Personal Defensive Shields of the Dune Universe are not round projections of force, but full-body shields which permit objects to pass through them, only slowly. An object attempting to pass through a planar field at a right-angle vector speed of more than the strike speed is faced with resistance which grows more intense as the fourth power of the velocity. When the speed is sufficiently high, the field becomes essentially solid to the impinging object. Shields have varying "strike speeds" -- that speed at which a normal object can pass a planar Holtzmann field -- that depends upon the electromagnetic admissions spectrum of the planar field. It is never less than 5.8 cm/s for one-angstrom fields, and increases only to 9.3 cm/s for all-absorptive fields. Typical shields have a strike speed of about 7 cm/s admitting most visible light, x-rays and gamma rays. "

So shields are simply a membrane of some unknown type which are selectively permeable based on velocity. Given that at least .075 moles of oxygen are coming in, how much carbon dioxide would be going out? The answer, given the above description, depends on the force of the sheild. With a 4:3 velocity ratio the force would be 256:81, correcting for mass imbalance gives us 8192:3564. What does this tell us? It tells us that you simply can't build up a helluvalot of carbon dioxide inside the sheild, it will preferentially cross the sheild and once you have a partial pressure where carbon dioxide is 43% of the partial pressure of oxygen it can go no higher. The only other way to increase the amount of carbon dioxide requires eventual asphyxiation of the sheild wearer.

Now what about ozone, surprisingly the numbers work out the same (44 vs 48), the difference happens to be that while breathing 2:1 oxygen:carbon dioxide into someones lung during CPR is fine, that level of ozone would kill. Ozone concentrations inexcess of 1 ppm are toxic. The build up of enough ozone to cause staleness does not require a miracle nor counteract the problem of the organic poison (which is going to preferentially effuse in greater amounts than carbon dioxide). Even something as simple as damping convective air currents would build up ozone.

Remember here we are looking at a rate of production vs a rate of venting. The rate of carbon dioxide venting must be greater than the rate of oxgyn "in-venting"; the production of carbon dioxide is strictly proportional to the uptake of oxygen. Ozone has no such limits. If it is being produced quickly enough, the concentration will go up even with unbounded effusion.

Let me see if I have this clear. I provide you a direct quote from Dune containing the 6-9 cm/s figure, and tell you what section it was from (Terminology of the Imperium to refresh your memory again.) You insinuate I'm pulling 6-9 cm/s out of my ass and post a descrition of the shield from "some RPG quotes online alleging to be from the encyclopedia," without even citing the source URL, as evidence against that figure. Then, when I read the quote, it has the 6 to 9 centimeter per second figure in it. I really have to ask at this point: exactly what the fuck do you smoke?

Explain how your "selectively permeable membrane based on velocity" stops a 9.2 m/s knife strike while allowing the exchange of gases at a slowed rate, affects the passage of sound waves without stopping them, and allows visible light through but suffers a catastrophic explosion when struck by a coherent beam of light.

If it works on 6 cm/s then about 1 in 4096 oxygen molecules will be able to cross the sheild barrier (and that is playing around at STP, let alone upping the temperature for desert combat). If the 6-9 cm/s were completely valid you would be DAMN hard pressed to BREATH.

Of course the entire idea of 6-9 cm/s is BS from a hard physics standpoint. Even in a solid metal knife the individual atoms are in quite vigorous motion. Given that the sheild acts with individual molecules (otherwise none of this gas effusion slowing occurs), the same statistical mechanics distributions which cover oxygen and carbon dioxide cover iron. Yet the knives don't disintigrate on sheild contact.

If you want hard sci-fi, shouldn't you be off in a Greg Bear thread?

The 6 to 9 cm/s figure is in the fucking quote you're using to stuff your fucking strawmen with! Even if we go back to the 9.2 m/s from the Knife Stab Characteristics page, it's still too fucking slow based on your logic above. You're ignoring evidence that you provided now!

Further given my quote, admittedly from a poor source but you haven't given yours...

Quote provided in my post dated 6/14/04 at 2:42 pm. My source, as I've reminded you on numerous occasions, is the novel Dune. You've stooped to an actual lie here.

I'm dubious about the pedigree of this RPG quote, but I'll go along with it for this reply.

...tells us that the sheild acts with velocity to the fourth. The interesting thing here is if I double the mass of the bullet, then with the same kinetic energy I'm coming in with 1/4th the velocity and thus the shield exerts 1/256 of the force. Even more fun is the fact that F =ma so that the net accerlation is 1/512 of the twice as massive bullet. That, is an x^9 growth function.

Now remember that all the sheild does is exert a FORCE, so with F=ma, a high momentum, high mass projectile is not going to feel all that much force. Sorry but this is not just wave thine hands and anything faster than 9 cm/s self destructs, but that resistance proportional to the fourth power of velocity occurs. Heavier bullets = less resistance for the same KE.

Either you're doubling the mass and dropping the velocity to 1/4th the original or you're doubling the mass and retaining the same KE. Using my trusty .50 BMG round as an example, at a mass of 43 g and a velocity of 888 m/s it has around 16,953 J of KE and a momentum of 38 kg*m/s. If you double the weight to 86 g and keep the KE the same, it would have to have a velocity of ~628 m/s and hence a momentum of 54 kg*m/s. That's roughly 71% of the original velocity. (.086)(222^2)/2!=16,953. Now, if you really did double the mass and slice the velocity to 1/4, we get 2,199 J and a momentum of 19 kg*m/s.

Since the actual force exerted is undefined in the quote you pulled out your ar... errr RPG website, I'll assign it an arbitrary value of 1 N at 1 m/s for purposes of this example. At 222 m/s the shield repels the bullet with 2.4E9 N, by 628 m/s that force has increased to 1.56E11 N and by 888 m/s it's up to 6.22E11 N (those numbers are obviously absurd for a man-portable shield, but I'll use them for this one point.) Assuming you keep the same KE, the bullet will experience 25% of the force it would have at 888 m/s. If you're firing at 25% of the original velocity, on the other hand, the bullet will experience only .4% of the force (1/256th in other words.)

It gets more fun when we try and pin a number on that undefined force. Let's assume the shield needs to exert enough force to bring the bullet to rest within a centimeter (in 1.12E-5 seconds, in other words.) That would give us about 3.4E6 N at 888 m/s. At 628 m/s, the resistance would have dropped to 852,954 N and at 222 m/s it would be 13,277 N. The 628 m/s bullet would go through since it would require 4.8E6 N to bring to rest in the same time, as would the 222 m/s bullet which requires 1.7E6 N. Of course, the flaw there is that at 9.2 m/s, the shield would only be exerting a resistance of .003 N: since we know shields will stop a full-strength knife strike, that obviously cannot be the case.

So, let's go from the knife strike. Assume again that the shield brings the knife to rest in a centimeter (1.1E-3 seconds this time.) That requires the shield to exert a force of 94,509 N, which would make that undefined force in the quote about 13.19 N at 1 m/s. Using that value, at 19 m/s the shield exerts enough force to stop the 222 m/s bullet, at 23 m/s it will stop the 888 m/s bullet, and by 25 m/s it will stop the 628 m/s bullet. That's even giving you the assumption that the shield is applying force to the knife over a period of time 100 times longer than with the previous bullet example.

Of course, that still leaves us with the problem that a "selectively permeable membrane based on velocity" still does not explain all the observed characteristics of the shield.

Of course the real kicker here is that NONE OF THIS MATTERS. Why? Because the sheild exerts a FORCE on the bullet, this force has to be balanced by something in the opposite direction. The MOMENTUM IS CONSERVED, so the best your sheild can do is to redistribute the momentum around the body . So if I throw enough KE at the sheild, regardless of it being on a bullet or a cement truck, I will crush the guy inside.

see http://www.stardestroyer.net/Empire/Tec ... index.html

For the basics.

None of it matters, but you're still hell-bent on arguing the point?

Perhaps you failed to grasp the point of my crack about running Sardaukar over with a cement mixer: of course the fucking shield has a fucking upper limit. It should be blindingly obvious, even to someone like you whose rectum has a deathgrip on his neck. If you're willing to keep on going up and up indefinitely, yes it'll get through and kill the man inside. Apparently you haven't realized that until now, or we'd never have had the whole inane retro-bullet argument in the first place. Of course, the recoil of your gun must be at least as much as the momentum you hope to transfer to the guy in the shield.

I knew you'd work your way up to tank guns eventually.

Now of course the RPG cite I quoted could be horribly wrong, so if your quote about the 6 - 9 cm/s has a different description than resistance proportional to v^4, be my guest to post it.

Posted 6/14/04 at 2:42 pm. Remember all the pissing and moaning you did about it being B.S. when I posted it? Apparently not. Well, here it is again:

Shield, Defensive: the protective field produced by a Holtzman generator. This field derives from Phase One of the suspensor-nullification effect. A shield will permit entry only to objects moving at slow speeds (depending on setting, this speed ranges from six to nine centimeters per second) and can be shorted out only by a shire-sized electric field. (see Lasgun.)

In short: go fist yourself, princess.

Anything which seriously slows the exchange rate KILLS the user. In order for carbon dioxide to build up to the levels needed, the user will die in a few minutes anyways. In order for high molecular weight toxin to be significantly slowed, please don't make me laugh. The higher the molecular weight, the LESS it is slowed. Given that he gets enough oxygen to breath, it can't be all that high.

How do you propose that works together with your "selectively permeable membrane based on velocity" again? I must have missed the part where you explained how v^4 fits neatly in with your objections to 6 to 9 cm/s on the grounds that it would asphixiate the user.

Your point remains impossible. Said noxious fumes will have RMS's two or more times lower than oxygen and will thus vent 512 times faster, 256 times faster than carbon dioxide. You simply cannot slow gas exhange a helluvalot before people start asphyxiating. Have you ever driven through a tunnel with fans? Even though the tunnel has giant frikking openings and the avaible surface area for exchange is greater than 1% of it being totally unenclosed ... they still need to vent the thing because people might asphyxiate if they don't. Compare THAT to the situation where less than .02% as much circulation is occuring and get back to me.

Let's see that again, shall we?

The air within their shield bubbles grew stale from the demands on it that the slow interchange along barrier edges could not replenish

The only reason that "remains impossible" is that you continue to stubbornly insist that the shield must be discriminating solely on velocity in an effort to chisel away at the 6 to 9 cm/s figure, which is contained in your own quote from some random RPG website.

the point

________________

your head

If you can see sheilds why are they firing at THESE SPECIFIC TARGETS? If you have an ineffective weapon for a specific enemy you STOP FIRING (unless you are so poorly trained as to keep firing hoping for that "lucky shot").

Umm, the last sentence in that quote was "they have stopped."

All we have on that ground car incident is that brief report from the observer. Given that the Fremen were outside the shield wall, do you not think it possible that they had the shields turned off until the ground cars started firing so as to avoid being eaten by a battleship-sized sandworm?

From Dune:

"They've a shield around the entire landing field now," the watcher said. "I can see the air dancing even to the edge of the storage yard where they keep the spice."

"My dear Rabban," the Baron said. He released the doorfield, but pointedly kept his body shield at full strength, knowing that the shimmer of it would be visible above the bedside glowglobe.

"You summoned me," Rabban said. He stepped into the room, flicked a glance past the air disturbance of the body shield, searched for a suspensor chair, found none.

The 'thopter circled once over them in a tight curve, came back for a dust-shrouded landing in front of the Fremen. Five men swarmed from the 'thopter and Hawat saw the dust-repellent shimmering of shields and, in their motions, the hard competence of Sardaukar.

From Dune Messiah:

As he crossed over on the high footbridge from his Keep to the Qizarate Office Building, Paul added a limp to his walk. It was almost sunset and he walked through long shadows that helped conceal him, but sharp eyes still might detect something in his carriage that identified him. He wore a shield, but it was not activated, his aides having decided that the shimmer of it might arouse suspicions.

You don't have an effective machinegun, you've got a tripod or vehicle mounted monstrousity firing 4 kg DU projectiles at 6-9cm/s with a range under 25m. A subsonic 9mm round has 3,550 times the velocity these absurd shield-penetrating bullets do.

Which is immently superior to swords.

Who gives a rip about velocity (except keeping it low enough that the v^4 sheild resistance doesn't stop the bullet)? What matters is momentum and velocity. The more mass in the projectile, the slower it goes with the same KE and with more momentum. Of course, if the quote I found is correct, one doesn't need to puncture the sheild, just hit with enough momentum to expert enough pressure to disable the target within. Absolutely nothing precludes the use of hypersonic rounds or anything else delivering sufficient momentum.

You did, remember? This whole thread was spawned by your idea of putting an explosive in the nose of a bullet to slow it down to the speed of a knife before it hit. Since you mentioned momentum, that subsonic 9mm bullet has a momentum of 5.64 kg*m/s (23.5 times that of your 4 kg chunk of DU at 6 cm/s.) That was the point: your retro-bullets are vastly inferior to the lowest velocity real bullet i could find short of a BB, so claiming "I have a machine gun" as if you had something equivalent in performance to a real gun was just laughable. Hell, you still answered it with a retort about it being "imminently superior to swords," after numerous examples of why your retro-bullets were in no way comparable to the performance of a real gun.

As far as the hypersonic projectiles go, nothing has ever precluded their use save for your inability to grasp the concept of an upper limit. Of course, considering the kind of force you want to exert now, we're certainly no longer talking about anything man-portable. That leaves you trying to get direct hits against shielded men with some kind of towed gun or groundcar-mounted cannon.

You need to go back to basic physics.

KE = mv^2/2
momentum = mv

The ONLY way I can have "more energy" and "less momentum" is if your knives outmass my bullets. The WHOLE FRIKKING POINT of increasing the mass on the bullets is to get substantially more momentum for the same KE.

ANY armour which a DU slug cannot penetrate cannot be penetrated by a knife if said knife has less energy and less mass (and is made of an inferior metal to boot).

Did you think that they used an exceptionally heavy knife for the "Knife Stab Characteristics" page, or did it occur to you that a percentage of the wielder's mass counts in with the weight of the knife? I suppose it didn't occur to you, even though it was spelled out on the link, because you specified two bullets whose dimensions (15x200mm and 15x300mm) result in them having less mass (2.67kg and 4.008kg) compared to the knife+wielder, even with the over-generous assumptions that they are 100% U (rather than an alloy, as real DU projectiles are) and cylindrical (hence having more volume and thus more mass than they should.) Hell, awhile back I was using fucking iridium (density 22.5 g/cc) as the material and you reiterated they should be DU (18.9 g/cc.) By applying those formulas that you just posted, you could have figured out for yourself how heavy your retro-bullet had to be to double the momentum of the knife. Of course, I can also see why you didn't: the answer is ~23kg. That's an awful lot of DU to throw at someone for a measly 41 mJ and 1.38 kg*m/s momentum.

You also didn't touch the actual point, so I'll restate it. If you're firing your 4kg bullets at 9 cm/s and the shield is set for 7 cm/s, they'll still be too fast. With a knife you can adjust for that with your next attack, while with the machinegun you need to change out the belt for 7 cm/s bullets. In that respect, the humble combat knife is actually more flexible than your shield-piercing bullets.

Hardly. First I can just dump enough momentum on them that even if the bullet destroys itself, the sheild is driven with sufficient force over a sufficient area to crush the guy inside it. Second I can keep upping the mass and watching the effectiveness of the sheild drop off with m^9 . Third I can just launch a nice rocket propelled projectile with a rocket motor deliverying impulse proportional to (terminal velocity^4).

This "more weight!" mantra of yours is becoming quite tiresome. If you're going to keep claiming that you can just keep making the bullets heavier and/or kill shielded men through momentum transfer, would it be too much to ask for you to produce some tangible figures on what mass and velocity you believe necessary to prove that these things are a feasable weapon?

As you yourself just said, all those Sardaukar have to do is increase the relative velocity to where the bullets will bounce off the shield. To the list of differences between a real machine gun and your shield-piercing machine gun we can add "charging it is a good tactic."

Except of course that my bullets have more momentum and hence are LESS EFFECTED by that v^4 resistance.

Of course you might have noticed I specified fallback firing, which given the superior speeds of vehicles means your charge just makes me touch the accelerator to compensate.

I have range. I have speed. As Jackie Fisher pointed out, I have you by the balls and can kill you at my pleasure.

The bullets you specified (15x200mm and 15x300mm) have less momentum than a fucking knife and a range under 25m. You can howl all you want about how you meant for them to have more, but your laughable incompetence is not my problem. Based on the caliber you specified, my statement was accurate.

Of course, you've moved on now and you're trying to hit men with tank guns.

With a bullet 93 times the weight of a .50 BMG round you get 1% of the momentum, .0001% of the KE, and 1.3% of the range. The only point where your shield-piercing weapon might be comparable to a real machine gun is rate of fire; with 250 rounds of ammunition weighing a metric ton, that could end up working against you as well.

Why in hell are you being so stupid? This is not being used against a modern .50 BMG, it is against the knife of the Sadaukar. Do I have range on the Sadaukar? Yes. Do I have rate of fire? Yes. Do I have speed? Yes.

Nice try, asshole. The point, which I made no less than seven times, was that your fucktarded retro-bullets had virtually none of the characteristics of a real-world machinegun. You made the comparison necessary by continual attempts to blur the distinction between the two, including that incredibly assinine question-begging of "think about it why do we not go into house fights with with knives?" at the beginning of your last reply.

And, for the seventh time, you do not have an effective machine gun. So long as your bullets have to have the same velocity as a half-hearted poke with a knife they will never be able to significantly out-perform one, save by making them so obscenely heavy that they lose all practical value. The closest you will be able to come are the aforementioned slow-pellet stunners, whose effectiveness (as per the quote you've seen several times now) is limited by shield settings and relative velocity.

Except of course that isn't true. Double the weight, velocity falls by 4, sheild resistance by 256, and acceleration from resistance by 256. Triple the weight, velocity falls by 9, sheild resistance by 6561, and net acceleration by 59049. Unless your quote says something differing than the RPG one it is an m^9 function and my quite massive bullets are not limited by 9 cm/s.

That RPG quote would be the very one that corroborates the six to nine cm/s figure I already provided you, right? The one that you claim proves shields are "a membrane of some unknown type which are selectively permeable based on velocity" while you claim that simple velocity discrimination would cut off the wearer's air? That RPG quote?

You neglected to mention that when you double the mass and quarter the velocity, the momentum is also halved and you have only 6.25% of the original KE. When you triple the weight cut the veloity to 1/9th, the momentum is 1/3rd of the original and you have 3.7% of the original KE. As demonstrated above, that approach is also entirely dependent on what value is attached to the undefined force in your RPG website quote.

They banned computers, and never made even the simplest machine to do ROTE MATH. It is collective stupidity to keep doing it. It is the equivalent of saying DDT is bad so let's ban all pesticides.

False analogy. DDT didn't try to enslave the human race. We didn't have to fight a revolution against DDT to remove it from the market.

No it is collective stupidity to maintain the Imperium.

Ah, I see: it's "collective stupidity" for those in power to wish to stay in power.

In any event everything suggested in this thread is NOT unfettered technological advancement. Everything here are things that can be worked out without computers and mostly with WWII technology. Adopting the flamethrower is not synonomous with unbridled technological advancement.

But the kicker is, even after the Imperium falls they still use piss poor tactics.

I didn't say the flamethrower was "synonymous with unbridled technological advancement." I said that we know the Assassins' Handbook lists what weapons can be used in a War of Assassins (the limited war of the Great Convention,) and that if we do not see a weapon being used in the novels, it stands to reason that it is not one of the permissable weapons in the Assassins' Handbook. Restrictions on technological advancement are the Butlerian Jihad, which is what makes mechanized warfare an impossibility.

I've read up to Children of Dune and the Imperium is still alive and kicking then. Maybe you'd care to expand on that "after the Imperium falls" bit.

Poison gas is a red herring: the poison gas was in a false tooth. A VX-filled bicuspid is the sort of thing I'd expect to find in an Assassin's Handbook.

VX has a density of 1.0083 g /ml, a bicuspid is what .5 cc? That gives us .5 g of VX which if we spread it around a real small room with 8 cubic meters of volume gives us just enough to be lethal to about 70% of humans if nothing disturbs the air for the minute or so of exposure. However given the number of dead it had to be FAR higher than that (particularly if expect the good Baron to die within seconds without a sheild). In short whatever the hell it was, it is MUCH more lethal than VX or there was a helluvalot of it. In either case you are looking at something far LESS discriminating than a flame thrower and far MORE likely to cause obscene amounts of collateral damage.

There wasn't "a hell of a lot of it," there was a poison tooth. Not piles of VX artillery shells, not chemical scuds, not cannisters full of chlorine gas... one fucking poison tooth. Please don't try to make a mountain out of a molar.

What do you need me to do, have John Edwards channel the spirit of Frank Herbert to say "flamethrowers are banned

How about not being an ass and ascerting that the conventions bans things with no proof? This is your burden of proof and if you fail to meet it, don't bitch about it to me because you decided to take up a sisyphean task.

The Assassin's Handbook doesn't ban weapons; it tells you what weapons are permissible. In that respect it's far more restrictive than the Hague Convention I linked above.

know that the Guild Peace and Great Convention only permit certain "deadly devices."

Like ubiquitious quantities of poison gas (enough so that seconds of exposure could well be lethal)? Like lasguns hitting sheilds? Like Artillery?

Face it the flamethrower is LESS random, more precise, and less likely to cause colateral damage than many weapons seen in Dune. Why lasguns would be legit and flamethrowers not is beyond me.

Again with the poison tooth. Once again: one poison tooth != "ubiquitous quantities of poison gas." You've already seen that the lasgun/shield interaction is avoided; that's the whole fucking point of the knives and stunners. Artillery is perfectly legitimate, but never used because of shields. In fact, after Baron Harkonnen uses artillery to seal the Atreides soldiers in the caves around Arrakeen he removes them afterwards, saying "they cannot go against shields" and "we need the metal." So, aside from that one specialized circumstance, they're more valuable to the Baron as scrap.

Don't give me that BS. When the Atreides are being killed by the Sadaukar (in violation of the rules I might add) what do they stand to gain by keeping to the rules? NOTHING. When the Fremen begin to conqueor the Imperium what is gained by keeping the old rules? NOTHING.

We see numerous uses of NBC weapons and horribly dangerous weapons like Lasguns ... all of which are permitted. If you can show me the clear and consistent logic behind the great conventions you might have a point. As of this point all you are saying is that everything which would crush Saduakar with ease must be banned

Were you aware that the Guild Peace also establishes a refuge for defeated Great Houses outside the boundaries of the Imperium, and that only the Spacing Guild knows where it is? The whole setup of Dune was that Duke Leto chose not to exercise that option because Hawat had unravelled the mystery of where the Emperor got Sardaukar from (the prison planet Salusa Secundus) and that Arrakis would provide another such source (the Fremen) who would give the Atreides soldiers to surpass the Sardaukar. Since Paul Atreides drove the Emperor into exile and took the throne with his Fremen, Leto's decision in that regard eventually proved to be a good one. His failure, if you choose to call it that, was in failing to anticipate the overwhelming force that the Baron would bring down on Arrakis (with Sardaukar aid,) and the treachery of Yueh (which the whole Imperium regarded as impossible due to the Suk Doctor training.) I'd be curious what you expect the Atreides to do in that brief period of time while they're being massacred by the Sardaukar: set up a tank factory?

The same holds true under Paul Atreides: he signs a treaty with the Guild that guarantees the secrecy of the refuge worlds. Thus, the worlds being conquered have a good reason to hold to the Convention (especially since the alternative is potentially facing planetary destruction, which happens 91 times during the Jihad IIRC.) Remember that the Atreides hold Arrakis, and thus are capable of cutting off the supply of spice to the Imperium. Without spice interstellar commerce stops, the Bene Geserit lose their truthsense ability, and any wealthy citizen using it for its anti-geriatric properties will age and die.

For fuck's sake, one poison tooth is not WMD. Yes, they use poison in Dune: poisoned blades, poisoned food, and poisoned drink. That is not the kind of indiscriminant slaughter you're trying to imply. The lasguns are only dangerous (aside from to the target) if you use them around shields.

[Gaidin]

Beyond Hope did quite a good job with the post, so I see no reason to repeat him. But I do have to make one point.

They banned computers, and never made even the simplest machine to do ROTE MATH. It is collective stupidity to keep doing it.

What do you think the Mentats are for? The guys(and plenty of girls by the end of the series) are walking computer processors. In fact, it takes multiple mentats to access the Bene Gesserit information mainframes with accuracy.

Make no mistake about it, Dune has its computers.

[The Nomad]

I might add that, in one of the last two books, it is stated that the Bene Gesserit has been using computers since its founding for their breeding program's purposes ( DNA analysis, bloodline monitoring, that kind of stuff ).
It stands to reason that computers might be secretely used throughout the Imperium.

In fact, AFAIK the Butlerian Jihad prohibits thinking machines, not computers... It's just that not having computers makes you beyond reproach, as no one can accuse you of using AIs...

[tharkûn]

Go to your bookstore or library. Flip the book Dune open to the back, where you'll see a "Terminology of the Imperium" section." You will see the following quote I already posted.

I have the original edition, I did not find your quote, thank you.

Not with your craptastic retro-bullets he won't, which was the point you were attempting to reply to there. What part of "we use guns instead of knives because we're not restricted to 6 cm/s bullets" was unclear exactly?

The part where a 6 cm/s knife is more effective than a 6 cm/s bullet. Virtually everything except a perfect orthogonal knife strike is going to fail, and that is going to have piss all of a time penetrating even ancient body armor.

The blunt truth is most knife and sword strokes are a damn site faster than 6 cm/s relative to the target and those that aren't tend to have a poor shot at piercing armor.

Bullshit. You've apparently forgotten your own relative velocity argument as soon as it's become inconvenient for you.

Do you ever maintain a consistent stand? Dune isn't stupid because they carry stunners, fine then if stunners are effective against shields - ditch the knives and use high volume "stunners". Sardaukar don't carry stunners because they aren't effective against shields? Gee then they are stupid because they don't use a ranged weapon which is (like burning napalm).

More bullshit. Per the background thoughtfully provided by Gaidin, the Butlerian Jihad was an uprising against intelligent machines that had enslaved humanity. It's a bit of an overreaction, maybe, but understandable under the circumstances. As far as the Great Convention goes, would you also cite the fourth Hague Convention (especially chapter II, section 1 of the Annex here) as an example of "collective stupidity?"

Right reducing the galaxy to a feudal system where you actively discourage most technological advancement, and generally reverse the trends of modern history is an "overreaction". The Butlerian Jihad makes the Spanish Inquistion look bloody enlightened, the Dark Ages a gilded age of science and reason, and the feudal lords of Europe paragon's of advancement and science.

As far as the 4th Hague it has a unified theme: protect noncombatants as much as reasonably possible and keep the means by which combatants are killed as humane as reasonably possible.

Dune's Great Convention, does not embody these positions. For instance the Hague bans the declaring of no quarter, Dune allows individuals to be buried alive without quarter. Dune allows massively toxic airborne poisons which would be banned for multiple reasons under the Hague (too easy to create disproportionate collateral damage, too inhumane a killing mechanism, etc.) and don't give me this BS that your toxin filled tooth is a simple poison that stuff makes your choline esterase inhibitors look candy in comparison.

There's no need for suicide troops: Lady Jessica contemplates the threat of the Harkonnens setting up a lasgun with a timer and shooting it at the shield protecting the capitol on Arrakis at one point in Dune. She is assured they wouldn't dare because it could possibly be interpreted as an atomic attack. You propose to remove most of the force from that objection by being the first to piss all over the Convention.

No I am the first to suggest that if you have never provided a quote which in any way substantiates that flamethrowers are banned.

To whit your entire crticism of flamethrowers comes down along to lines:
1. The GC bans them, even though no quote to that effect has ever been posted.
2. Lasgunners will shoot the sheilded soldiers and we get nuclear explosions, ergo the flame thrower will not win.

The first, as you seem to have a hard time excepting, is a figment of your imagenation until you provide evidence backing it up.

The second is BS, if lasgunnign shields were viable then NOBODY WOULD BE USING SWORDS IN THE FIRST PLACE.

Let me see if I have this clear. I provide you a direct quote from Dune containing the 6-9 cm/s figure, and tell you what section it was from (Terminology of the Imperium to refresh your memory again.) You insinuate I'm pulling 6-9 cm/s out of my ass and post a descrition of the shield from "some RPG quotes online alleging to be from the encyclopedia," without even citing the source URL, as evidence against that figure. Then, when I read the quote, it has the 6 to 9 centimeter per second figure in it. I really have to ask at this point: exactly what the fuck do you smoke?

My copy has no "Terminology of the Imerium" section, I was hoping for more context that the pitiful amount given in your quote.

The RPG quote is slightly less discontinutious with the actual reality described in the books in that:
1. Sound waves would make it through (the waveform would be slowed).
2. Air could theoretically make it through (by virtue of tunneling, or coming in with sufficiently high velocity to overcome the resistance).
In short the RPG quote does not state that by virtue of a black box, nothing going faster than 6 cm/s relative orthogonal will be prevented from coming through, it states that a force proportional to v^4 works on it, hence 6 - 9 cm/s would be the velocity at which said force is close to equivalent to the force exerted by a human arm.


But let's run with your basic definition, what would the temperature inside the shield be? A whopping .00001 K. That's right any oxygen that would be moving slowly enough to cross the shield barrier would be frozen solid, not to mention a hoste of problems coming up from that. But maybe you want to take a less direct definition of "object", then consider sound. The speed of sound is given by (gamma*R*T/M)^1/2 where gamma is the adiabatic costant, R is the gas constant, T is temperature, and M is molecular mass. It should be readily obvious that for sound waves travelling through air (gamma is about 1.4 and M is about 29 g/mol), the only time they are going to be going any frikking where near 6 cm/s is at abysmally low temperatures.

So what are you left with? Either we can keep the 6 cm/s figure from the back of the book or we can look at the facts that people inside don't asphyxiate, freeze, or go deaf. I chose to weight the latter, and given that neither individual atoms are restricted nor are macroscopic waves - the "Terminology of the Imperium" is in error. Perhaps it was written in universe and includes the biases, inaccuracies, and other inherent problems; perhaps 6 cm/s is the fastest a conventional bullet can be going and still penetrate and that was used as a standard baseline. However, the reason is immaterial; the balance of evidence is against your statement in any type of literal interpretation of the statement and if push comes to shove, suspension of disbeleif is in favor of actual physical evidence rather than disembodied numbers.

Of course you can pull out your invisible ink, and like the GC, insist that something which you have no evidence to support exists and somehow makes everything work, but frankly that conceeds that you have no case to stand out without so doing. Are you prepared to otherwise conceed?

Explain how your "selectively permeable membrane based on velocity" stops a 9.2 m/s knife strike while allowing the exchange of gases at a slowed rate, affects the passage of sound waves without stopping them, and allows visible light through but suffers a catastrophic explosion when struck by a coherent beam of light.

The easiest way? It acts only on paramagnetic substances (i.e. iron) at reasonably slow velocities. Instead of monotonic relationship between velocity and resistive force it is nice and parabolic blocking things faster than 9 cm/s and lower than a certain thershold (say 200 m/s). The dirt simplest is that due to the Great Conventions and general intellectual atrophy "objects" refers only to knives and other common weapons. The laser reaction makes no sense from any physical standpoint, hence I can call it technobabble unrelated to the other properties of the shield.

When I started out I assumed it was readily obvious that 6 cm/s is ludicriously frikking slow for most processes of physics. From internal motion, to tangential velocities, to air exchange, to sound propogation; the actual world described does not abide by the 6 cm/s rule. I tried to work with your quote, but the literal interpretation is BS. Rather than admit that if there are exceptions to the 6 cm/s rule, there is nothing in these unwritten exceptions that precludes some form of projectile, certainly NOTHING precluding flamethrowers.

If you want hard sci-fi, shouldn't you be off in a Greg Bear thread?

This thread initially asked for rational reasons to readopt melee tactics (before being split). Dune is not an example a rational reason. So the sheild stops some objects with velocities in excess of 6 cm/s. How does that preclude flamethrowers? Willie pete? Thermobaric grenades? How does it preclude better engineered bullets (be they hypervelocity to crush the chest through sheer momentum , "retorockets" to slow the bullets before impact, incideriary "buckshot" to have a good statistical chance that one fragment will have an acceptable orthogonal velocity, or what have you).

You essentially conceeded that NOTHING in Dune makes flamethrowers tactitically unsound.

Now you are pulling out the invisible ink on the GC saying they are strategically unsound; essentially that flamethowers, willie pete, and everything else which can defeat the shield is treated the same as nuclear weapons while poison gas is not

The 6 to 9 cm/s figure is in the fucking quote you're using to stuff your fucking strawmen with! Even if we go back to the 9.2 m/s from the Knife Stab Characteristics page, it's still too fucking slow based on your logic above. You're ignoring evidence that you provided now!

Only if I had a brain incapable of grasping that 9.2 m/s might be because that is is where the strength of the human arm is equal to the resistive force of the shield

The simplest way out is just to accept that whatever "speed limit" exists is not absolute and that any figure is a "rule of thumb" based on centuries of knife fighting tactics.

Look you've got Dune backed into a damned if does, damned if don't corner.

6 cm/s is piss all for trying to pierce most armor, particulary because you have to come in straight line and the opponent can simply torque his chest to avoid. Yet Dune shows no evidence of using effective body armor. In such a world of ludicriously slow moving icepicks (the only and doubtful way to pierce body armor) body armor would be EXTREMELY logical, when then do we not see its UBIQUITIOUS USE? Does the GC ban body armor too?

Faster than 6 cm/s makes effective bullets THAT MUCH EASIER to egineer.

Either you're doubling the mass and dropping the velocity to 1/4th the original or you're doubling the mass and retaining the same KE.

Bah made a simple error and kept on compounding it. Double the mass, reduce the velocity by a factor sqrt(2).

The fact remains you are still looking at a stunningly strong growth curve where I can deliver the same KE and more momentum using slower, heavier bullets.

Of course, that still leaves us with the problem that a "selectively permeable membrane based on velocity" still does not explain all the observed characteristics of the shield.

Selectively permeable membranes based on velocity do not exist in real life, in fact the ENTIRE BLOODY CONCEPT goes up against all the known laws of physics (and I do mean from basic QM up).

I named a black box. You don't want to name said black box, and then want to piss about how your quote with BS numbers trumps every single description of shields in the book.

Perhaps you failed to grasp the point of my crack about running Sardaukar over with a cement mixer: of course the fucking shield has a fucking upper limit. It should be blindingly obvious, even to someone like you whose rectum has a deathgrip on his neck.

Don't be so hard on yourself.

If you're willing to keep on going up and up indefinitely, yes it'll get through and kill the man inside.

No dumbass, I don't intend to "go through", I intend to let the bullet hit shield, bounce or disintigrate, and let the transferred momentum crush the poor SOB's ribcage. The reason I didn't use this option to begin with is if the shield splits and deflects bullets, in which case the net momentum transfer could be as low as zero. Seeing how the shield (from all sources thus far presented) does not do this and is said to work through resistance; there is no way out of momentum transfer.

How much momentum is depedant SOLELY on the surface area of shield device which contacts the human body and how much the device itself crompesses to moderate momemtum transfer.

Of course, the recoil of your gun must be at least as much as the momentum you hope to transfer to the guy in the shield.

Sigh, do you think before you type? Does a stinger missile impart the same momentum upon the firer as the target? No because the mometum is imparted on the exhaust as it accelerates in flight. So option one is rocketry. I hope this is not too complex for you to understand.

Option two is a recoilless rifle. You know a simple gun with both ends open (one end expells the projectile, the other the combustion gases).

Are seriously so ignorant as to not have read about recoilless rifles ever?

I knew you'd work your way up to tank guns eventually.

Human bonestend to take poorly to impacts of 100 MPa, it takes far less than a tank round to impart the momentum needed to do that to even a perfect shield that stops the bullet on contact.

Such a machine gun might need to be vehicle mounted, but still the fact of the matter is dune shields don't stop one from egineering something which kills the shield bearer aside from WMD.

The only reason that "remains impossible" is that you continue to stubbornly insist that the shield must be discriminating solely on velocity in an effort to chisel away at the 6 to 9 cm/s figure, which is contained in your own quote from some random RPG website.

Oh so what else does it discriminate upon? I assume you have the relevant quote showing this.

All we have on that ground car incident is that brief report from the observer. Given that the Fremen were outside the shield wall, do you not think it possible that they had the shields turned off until the ground cars started firing so as to avoid being eaten by a battleship-sized sandworm?

So you mean the gunners were so incompotent that they refrained from firing until they were seen by the enemy, and at that moment started firing?

You keep getting into trouble. If shields are visible, then the car shouldn't have fired. If the shields were off the car should have wasted the enemy prior to the enemy having a chance to turn the shields on. Are the vehicle crews so incompotent that they can't open up with machine gun fire before the enemy activates shields?


If shields cannot be used for fear of being eaten by a battleship-sized sandworm you are back to both sides being complete and utter dumbasses for not reverting to plain old ordinary machine guns when fighting on Dune. If the shield cannot be effectively used on Dune, why are Fremen insanely well trained knife fighters? No wait, this will be another of your having all ways fests. They train with knives for the rare occassions when shields are going to be used, the enemy uses guns up until they see shields, but fires off in the exact same instance that they are detected so the Fremen can raise shields

You did, remember? This whole thread was spawned by your idea of putting an explosive in the nose of a bullet to slow it down to the speed of a knife before it hit. Since you mentioned momentum, that subsonic 9mm bullet has a momentum of 5.64 kg*m/s (23.5 times that of your 4 kg chunk of DU at 6 cm/s.) That was the point: your retro-bullets are vastly inferior to the lowest velocity real bullet i could find short of a BB, so claiming "I have a machine gun" as if you had something equivalent in performance to a real gun was just laughable. Hell, you still answered it with a retort about it being "imminently superior to swords," after numerous examples of why your retro-bullets were in no way comparable to the performance of a real gun.

No dumbass, the whole thread was based on the fact that Dune reverted to melee warfare and NOBODY used there brains and found a better alternative. That was the first half-assed thing to come to mind; which you'd much rather attack than flame throwers or EVERY OTHER EXAMPLE I use to make my point that:
Dune is not an example of a rational basis for melee combat

As far as the hypersonic projectiles go, nothing has ever precluded their use save for your inability to grasp the concept of an upper limit. Of course, considering the kind of force you want to exert now, we're certainly no longer talking about anything man-portable. That leaves you trying to get direct hits against shielded men with some kind of towed gun or groundcar-mounted cannon.

Who the hell cares? Machine gun fire used to require 15 men to support. When marching through unforgiving African terrain European militaries gleefully lugged vehicle mounted weapons through it all because they have an obscene multiplier effect. The most craptacular machine gun is thousands of times more effective than an edged weapon.

Did you think that they used an exceptionally heavy knife for the "Knife Stab Characteristics" page, or did it occur to you that a percentage of the wielder's mass counts in with the weight of the knife? I suppose it didn't occur to you, even though it was spelled out on the link, because you specified two bullets whose dimensions (15x200mm and 15x300mm) result in them having less mass (2.67kg and 4.008kg) compared to the knife+wielder, even with the over-generous assumptions that they are 100% U (rather than an alloy, as real DU projectiles are) and cylindrical (hence having more volume and thus more mass than they should.) Hell, awhile back I was using fucking iridium (density 22.5 g/cc) as the material and you reiterated they should be DU (18.9 g/cc.) By applying those formulas that you just posted, you could have figured out for yourself how heavy your retro-bullet had to be to double the momentum of the knife. Of course, I can also see why you didn't: the answer is ~23kg. That's an awful lot of DU to throw at someone for a measly 41 mJ and 1.38 kg*m/s momentum.

Contrary to populat opinion you cannot impart your full mass into thrust, contrary to your opinion doing it under 6 cm/s is not going to happen (the are limits to the amount of jerk the human body can create and limits to the jerk it can sustain). According to:

http://www.utc.fr/esb/esb98/abs_htm/505.html

the maximum mass of the knife + weilder is 11.3 kg, and that is WITHOUT the speed limit.

Unlike you, I realize that a 6 cm/s limit on knife strikes is going to seriously hamper the knife strike (you seem unable to grasp why it might even be a good idea to adopt body armor in these circumstances, at least I've lost your stance on it).

This "more weight!" mantra of yours is becoming quite tiresome. If you're going to keep claiming that you can just keep making the bullets heavier and/or kill shielded men through momentum transfer, would it be too much to ask for you to produce some tangible figures on what mass and velocity you believe necessary to prove that these things are a feasable weapon?

Because I don't have the numbers needed, I need the load bearing area. This shouldn't come as a surprise. How about you show how a knife going 6 cm/s can punch through even the simplest maille? How about you show me how Saudakuar are anything but fuel for the fire against flamebait?

The blunt truth is I claimed that SOME solution existed that was superior to knives for combat. You rest your entire case on:
a. Text which cannot be taken at face value (and be consistent with the rest of the book).
b. Text which doesn't exist but you really, really, want it to.

Either admit that superior arms are possible in Dune or back up YOUR claims, preferably with actual text.

False analogy. DDT didn't try to enslave the human race. We didn't have to fight a revolution against DDT to remove it from the market.

Neither did a calculator, dumbass. It is called an analogy if computers enslaved the human race there are several options:
1. The most sensible is make them isolated systems. If they have no way of taking control of anything they are essentially brains in vats.
2. The next option is to simply ban the integrated circuit (or whatever came the density to make AI), if we can be enslaved by mechanical computer we DESERVE to be.

No they went and destroyed everything capable of doing mindnumbing rote math, and the people who kept their computers don't even manage to take the place over.

Ah, I see: it's "collective stupidity" for those in power to wish to stay in power.

When the Atreides are kicking your ass under the present rules you aren't going to be in power for long. Further is it better to be an equal among nobles of a king among beggars? Face the Imperium, with about the sole exception of spice, has a decidely lousy domestic situation.

I didn't say the flamethrower was "synonymous with unbridled technological advancement." I said that we know the Assassins' Handbook lists what weapons can be used in a War of Assassins (the limited war of the Great Convention,) and that if we do not see a weapon being used in the novels, it stands to reason that it is not one of the permissable weapons in the Assassins' Handbook.

Unfounded leap of logic. We never see chainsaws being used, are they banned? We never see Swiss Pike being used are they banned? I don't recall any bows and arrows, are they banned?

It is NOT valid to assume just because we don't see it, it is banned. Until you produce evidence to the contrary, if not banned it is assumed to be legal.

Restrictions on technological advancement are the Butlerian Jihad, which is what makes mechanized warfare an impossibility.

BS. they have mechanical airpower (even they just use it for transport), they have artillery, they have armored cars with guns.

I've read up to Children of Dune and the Imperium is still alive and kicking then. Maybe you'd care to expand on that "after the Imperium falls" bit.

Chapterhouse? I forget the latter titles.

There wasn't "a hell of a lot of it," there was a poison tooth. Not piles of VX artillery shells, not chemical scuds, not cannisters full of chlorine gas... one fucking poison tooth. Please don't try to make a mountain out of a molar.

Who cares if it fits inside a tooth or a canister? Some bioweapons capable of launching pandemics can fit inside a single drop. Volume is irrelevant. Would you rather be poisoned with a "toothful" of VX or an artillerly shell of Chlorine? The same analogy holds for whatever the hell this is and modern chem weapons - it beats the living crap out of anything known to exist today.

What is relevant is how many people could it kill. Poisons work via dosage and concentrations, at the LC-50 half the people exposed will die after a certain amount of time. Here we have numerous men all dying, before they can do jack didly squat, here we have pioson so toxic that mere seconds of exposure are alleged to be LETHAL. Quantitatively this stuff IS equivalent to canisters of Chlorine gas, hell massed artillerly barrages with heavier than air toxins in WWI rarely hit the LC-50 for transient exposure. Your "tooth" blew that out of the water, by orders of magnitude.

The Assassin's Handbook doesn't ban weapons; it tells you what weapons are permissible. In that respect it's far more restrictive than the Hague Convention I linked above.

For the sake of discussion let's avoid semantics and sayed that "banned weapons" are synonomous with those which are "not permissable".

Again with the poison tooth. Once again: one poison tooth != "ubiquitous quantities of poison gas."

It was more lethal than what Aum Shinryko pulled off in Japan. The fact that it killed 100% of the gaurds, who were fit military men, aught to tell you where the LC-50 is form the total population over the total duration of exposure.

Thus, the worlds being conquered have a good reason to hold to the Convention (especially since the alternative is potentially facing planetary destruction, which happens 91 times during the Jihad IIRC.)

So 91 planets would rather DIE than adopt flame throwing tactics and kick Fremen ass? Face it 91 times came up where people had NOTHING TO LOSE and sword weilding Fremen still won. One does wonder how "any planet vunerable to offworld attack" never managed to bring about massive nuclear reprisals.

Remember that the Atreides hold Arrakis, and thus are capable of cutting off the supply of spice to the Imperium. Without spice interstellar commerce stops, the Bene Geserit lose their truthsense ability, and any wealthy citizen using it for its anti-geriatric properties will age and die.

Which makes the Imperium the stupest government of all time. Here is the single most important real estate and you do piss all to gaurd it. Wait let me guess they follow the Microsoft model of security through obscurity?

Of course this begs the question of why the Atreides bothered to do anything other than threaten to destroy Arrakais and why 91 planets would fight to death knowing that as a last resort the Atreides STILL WIN.

For fuck's sake, one poison tooth is not WMD. Yes, they use poison in Dune: poisoned blades, poisoned food, and poisoned drink. That is not the kind of indiscriminant slaughter you're trying to imply. The lasguns are only dangerous (aside from to the target) if you use them around shields.

Any poison which kills that many men that fast, when spread over larger area with a civillian population is going to kill far more. It's bloody bell curve and you are least 2 STD's up in the gaurdroom (likely an order of magnitude more); if you use the SAME FRIKKING AMOUNT OF POISON over a wider area the concentration goes down, the lethality goes down (instead 100% dead in seconds it is 50% dead in minutes) and the death toll goes skyhigh.