What would it take for melee weapons to make sense...

[Zeropoint]

Thing is that this sounds very unrealistic.

Realism, shmealism. Spaceships going at it with axes is awesome.

But yeah, I agree. People who care about things like "winning" and "surviving" aren't going to give up ranged weapons voluntarily.

[lance]

In Knights of Sodonia they used spears tipped with the only thing that could kill the enemy, of which they had 28 and didn't have the ability to replace any material they lost

[bilateralrope]

Just go for broke and say that the societies involved base their tactics off what they think is "cool." Sure, shooting people is damn effective. But going toe-to-toe against each other in melee combat? That's just fucking badass, man! Make it fun to read or watch and people really won't give a shit why people eschew a more effective weapon.

To add to that and to make it work in setting, have most combat be a future space version of Gladiator combat. Fighting is still done for resources, land, or whatever but rather then the winner being whoever clobbers the other guys instead they have a judging system. To avoid costly, WMD driven wars that would cause mass death and suffering, a group of nations came together to form a fighting alliance that decrees that combat will no longer be fought as it was but in small scale engagements away from civilians in specially prepared fields that will be judged by a panel of nobles drawn from all the nations and transmitted for all the alliance to see.

Combat is more like a sport now with judges more likely to give favor to armies that look impressive even if they aren't in practice. So one army can be decked in in drab body armor armed with rifles going against an army of brightly dressed dandies armed with swords and axes. The smart army of course cleans the floor with them but loses because the bright army looked more impressive while fighting, they were like a peacock dancing with beautiful grace and poise with their weapons while the other guys were a brown smudge that stood still and made little pews, not ever interesting to watch.

Thus "show" armies come into being. They still have normal brown smudge pew armies but are only used against outside threats. It helps the alliance too against stupid enemies who only see the transmissions of these ridiculously ineffective armies fighting and assumes thats what their entire military is.

What happens when people start thinking that the judges have been bribed or are otherwise so biased that they decided the winner before the battle ?

[Joun_Lord]

What happens to when that happens nowadays, when judges are thought to be bribed by rich people (like say giving no jail time for raping a 3 year old) or when the judges decision is most likely decided before hand (like say when a white cop kills a black boy man thug innocent angel)? There are riots and civil unrest and the paid bully boys of the rich come on with their night-sticks to stop the plebs from upsetting their betters. If things get bad enough their might be full scale civil disturbance with the judges and their ilk hanging from hover light posts but only if the populace is angry enough and inconvenienced enough to do so.

It would really depend how much the Dandy Games effect the people and who's doing the dying. If the outcomes of the battles really effect lives people would probably start getting more angry about it then say if it was just administrative transfer of land with the only real difference for the people living there is who's name they sign as their ruler. If the fighters are volunteers or paid mercenaries or even criminals (forced or given the choice) nobody would probably mind, they would however mind if the fighters were forcefully drafted from the population.

[Beowulf]

In Knights of Sodonia they used spears tipped with the only thing that could kill the enemy, of which they had 28 and didn't have the ability to replace any material they lost

Although true, the melee weapons are more for finishing the enemy off than for the majority of battle. Most of the battles still have plentiful amounts of ranged combat to whittle down the opposition.

[Gaidin]

If you want melee weapons in a modern setting you are going to have to invoke some kind of arbitrary magic line in the sand and it will create logical problems you will never resolve. You want that? Then do it. Plain and simple. Dune is complete failure at logical resolutions, its shields would cause high speed tankdozers to dominate warfare, not knives. It is not thought out logically at all, but the author just made some claims and then ran with them, and at least as far as writing success goes it was very effective.

Are you aware of how much debt House Harkonnen incurred by moving the artillery and the soldiers to Arakkis? Regardless of the size of the Guild ships? Let me answer this for you. Regardless of how rich they were from running that planet into the ground for a few decades, they were way deep into the red. In spite of the fact that the Guild let it happen. WAY DEEP INTO THE RED. Say what you want about the "science" about Dune's Shields and I'll probably agree with you, but the reason it worked as a world is largely because the Guild didn't let moving things like that around happen. And the reason Paul Atreides was able to do what he did at the end is because HE HAD THE GUILD BY THE BALLS. Not vice versa.

[Simon_Jester]

Thing is, how do Guild freighters even work as economic propositions if they won't let you move heavy machinery from planet to planet? If, presumably, you can take your hundred personal retainers with swords, but not a few bulldozers? These heighliners are supposed to be massively large in size; why is it worth the effort to build them if they are so limited in what they can carry that it costs exorbitant sums to move limited amounts of heavy equipment.

And if you say "the Guild is allowing civilian trade, but restricting the movement of anything that can be used as a weapon..." As Marvin Heemeyer demonstrated, it's really not that hard to take items with civilian uses (like construction equipment, concrete, and random steel plates) and turn them into an improvised armored vehicle that is nearly impossible to stop without antitank weapons.

[Gaidin]

Yea sure, if you want to sneak those things on and off and hope the Guild doesn't find out and penalize you. K.

[madd0ct0r]

@simon - true for the first time, but then the next time you need to move stuff, the Guild offers you a 'special rate'.

Their monoply on travel was the choke chain on the imperial house's ambitions and vendettas.

[Gaidin]

The difficulty of moving those things around is largely why House Wars were limited to what the series calls the War of Assassins, and thus, the shields and close range hand to hand weapons. What the Harkonnens did to the Atreides was a hilariously special case. And the Artillery was used for a specific terrain feature on Arrakis.

[Sea Skimmer]

Are you aware of how much debt House Harkonnen incurred by moving the artillery and the soldiers to Arakkis?

This is a universe in which they build ships to crush the enemy from orbit by landing on them. Obviously bringing very large mechanized weapons to battle is plausible. They sent what was it, 100 legions to functionally take one city? And a legion is the size of a modern brigade at the least. Obviously sending a much smaller but more effective force would have been cheaper. Which is the bloody point independent of any specific numbers.

Regardless of the size of the Guild ships? Let me answer this for you. Regardless of how rich they were from running that planet into the ground for a few decades, they were way deep into the red.

Let me tell you, you are an idiot who has not considered this subject in any worthwhile manner what so ever. Your just spewing out the book nonsense and assuming it must make sense, like everyone else who ever tries to defend Dune.

In spite of the fact that the Guild let it happen. WAY DEEP INTO THE RED.

Lol, you repeat this as if it fucking means a thing. Do you not grasp just how much debt is involved in every major war. Do you think people on earth just always have money in hand to pay for everything? The successful empires are the ones that find a way to pay off debt after they win, not the ones that avoid it.

Say what you want about the "science" about Dune's Shields and I'll probably agree with you, but the reason it worked as a world is largely because the Guild didn't let moving things like that around happen. And the reason Paul Atreides was able to do what he did at the end is because HE HAD THE GUILD BY THE BALLS. Not vice versa.

You might have an argument, except you've made assumptions which are false, because you never thought about it at all, and that even on Dune, let alone all the other planets you could blatantly build stuff locally. Because they can put up cities and maintain a thousand something supposedly super massive carryall and harvester combinations. Which means they have industry, and once you have a foundry of any significant size you can make engines, and beams and bearings, which means you can make new vehicles. Its not like you need a D11 here to knock people on foot out of your way. Now do you wish to make a real argument, such as an assertion that no iron ore or copper exists on a habitable planet, or what?

[Simon_Jester]

Yea sure, if you want to sneak those things on and off and hope the Guild doesn't find out and penalize you. K.

We're talking piles of concrete. Bulldozers. Things with fully legitimate and normal civilian uses.

The Guild can't crack down on the shipping of such items. And if they're going to arbitrarily penalize annyone who uses them for warlike ends, they have to make this known, in which case honestly they might as well just declare that they are enforcing total pacifism and refuse to transport any armed parties whatsoever.

Plus, of course, the observation that you could easily just build such things.

You'd do better to point out that the killdozers would be most useful in pitched, open-field battles, where they would be relatively vulnerable to things like air-dropped mines... and that most of the armed conflict we actually see is over built-up areas where a combat bulldozer would be of limited utility, because it can't engage soldiers in a building without leveling the building, to an even greater extent than is true of normal armored fighting vehicles with guns.

[Starglider]

I thought the personal shields in Dune weren't issued to normal soldiers anyway, just nobility. Neither the Fremen nor the Sardaukar had them on Dune; the Fremen didn't like them because they annoy sandworms, but I'm pretty sure the Sardaukar would have used shields in non-open-desert fighting if they could. Presumably the unit cost is too high. Certainly in the movies, games and TV series personal shields were only seen in use by commanders, all the normal soldiers are blasting away with guns, missile launchers, lasers and sonic projectors. For military purposes the large scale 'house shields' seem to be much more relevant.

[Simon_Jester]

True, although even if you can't shield the average foot soldier you could shield a tank... in which case the combat bulldozer makes sense again. Probably.

[FTeik]

For the reasons already stated melee-weapons won't become primary in a SciFi-setting. The best they can hope for is a complementary role, if one or all the factions involved have a means to neutralize the propellants or energy-systems of the weapons typically used. Some kind of force-field or something like the Seffle-particles from LoGH.

Although a forcefield, that makes the use of energy-weapons impossible might not work on weapons using gunpowder and vice versa. On the other hand people with access to blasters don't carry weapons with chemical propellant around. Not to mention the problem, WHY that system would only influence weapons, but not other systems or chemical reactions (like those in the human body). Basically you need something magical.

[Gaidin]

This is a universe in which they build ships to crush the enemy from orbit by landing on them. Obviously bringing very large mechanized weapons to battle is plausible. They sent what was it, 100 legions to functionally take one city? And a legion is the size of a modern brigade at the least. Obviously sending a much smaller but more effective force would have been cheaper. Which is the bloody point independent of any specific numbers.

Not culturally so, it would seem, after 10,000 years of ingraining the methods. I think there's only one group(Bene Gesserit) that would be open to this method and they're not even military until after Leto II dies. I've said I'd agree with most of your mechanical arguments but if you want to sweep away the world building it'd be a lot harder. The world doesn't drastically change until Leto II forces it to. That's most of the point of the books. Or did you totally miss that?

Let me tell you, you are an idiot who has not considered this subject in any worthwhile manner what so ever. Your just spewing out the book nonsense and assuming it must make sense, like everyone else who ever tries to defend Dune.

Issue seems like it'd be Dune is the only planet with sparse enough development to make such vehicles worthwhile. Everyone else could hide in the cities with the megashields while the military deals with it. But then, with the major attack, that was what the artillery was for, to deal with the retreating military into the mountains. And then the Baron throws them away because...well...see above.

Lol, you repeat this as if it fucking means a thing. Do you not grasp just how much debt is involved in every major war. Do you think people on earth just always have money in hand to pay for everything? The successful empires are the ones that find a way to pay off debt after they win, not the ones that avoid it.

It does. My point is he had to both get the Guild to do what he want, and he had to pay the Emperor's bill because they were in Harkonnen uniforms for that attack. So what if everyone knew. So what if they let him. Things were still going to be 'as they were supposed to be' as far as the true rulers(the Guild) felt.

You might have an argument, except you've made assumptions which are false, because you never thought about it at all, and that even on Dune, let alone all the other planets you could blatantly build stuff locally. Because they can put up cities and maintain a thousand something supposedly super massive carryall and harvester combinations. Which means they have industry, and once you have a foundry of any significant size you can make engines, and beams and bearings, which means you can make new vehicles. Its not like you need a D11 here to knock people on foot out of your way. Now do you wish to make a real argument, such as an assertion that no iron ore or copper exists on a habitable planet, or what?

Umm...yes and no. First, like I said, I agree with your mechanical arguments...again. But the entire theme of the Dune series is its stagnation. I'm not going past their traditional methods because there's no legitimate reason to. Dismissing the culture of the universe just because it pisses you off is a rather pathetic statement to make when getting past such cultural roadblocks is the entire point of the series.

I thought the personal shields in Dune weren't issued to normal soldiers anyway, just nobility. Neither the Fremen nor the Sardaukar had them on Dune; the Fremen didn't like them because they annoy sandworms, but I'm pretty sure the Sardaukar would have used shields in non-open-desert fighting if they could. Presumably the unit cost is too high. Certainly in the movies, games and TV series personal shields were only seen in use by commanders, all the normal soldiers are blasting away with guns, missile launchers, lasers and sonic projectors. For military purposes the large scale 'house shields' seem to be much more relevant.

The personal shields are one of their major and ultimately cheap soldier technologies. To the point that the Fremen were able to figure out a projectile weapon that pierced shields.

[Simon_Jester]

This is a universe in which they build ships to crush the enemy from orbit by landing on them. Obviously bringing very large mechanized weapons to battle is plausible. They sent what was it, 100 legions to functionally take one city? And a legion is the size of a modern brigade at the least. Obviously sending a much smaller but more effective force would have been cheaper. Which is the bloody point independent of any specific numbers.

Not culturally so, it would seem, after 10,000 years of ingraining the methods. I think there's only one group(Bene Gesserit) that would be open to this method and they're not even military until after Leto II dies. I've said I'd agree with most of your mechanical arguments but if you want to sweep away the world building it'd be a lot harder. The world doesn't drastically change until Leto II forces it to. That's most of the point of the books. Or did you totally miss that?

I think Skimmer's beef with the work is that while a ten thousand year period of technological and cultural stasis works as literature, as a way of exploring certain themes, it flies in the face of the actual human experience.

Humans are sneaky and resourceful, as a whole, when it comes to thinking of ways to bring harm to each other. So you'd expect a lot of ingenuity to go into efforts to bypass the War of Assassins and actually accomplish something decisive against an enemy.

Efforts to prevent heavy weapons from being smuggled across interstellar space aren't going to stop that, especially when many of the heavy weapons in question are easily manufactured ON a given planet just by repurposing civilian infrastructure.

On the other hand, the noble Houses have private nuclear arsenals and probably a number of other nasty options in reserve, so there may be a reason that escalation usually didn't pay off. It's not that swordsmen with personal shields are all they have, quite the opposite; it's that any attempt to fight anything other than a lightly armed proxy war runs into massive escalation from the combatants themselves and turns into something that attracts the hostile attention of the imperial government.

Umm...yes and no. First, like I said, I agree with your mechanical arguments...again. But the entire theme of the Dune series is its stagnation. I'm not going past their traditional methods because there's no legitimate reason to. Dismissing the culture of the universe just because it pisses you off is a rather pathetic statement to make when getting past such cultural roadblocks is the entire point of the series

Well, Skimmer is saying that this level of extreme stagnation is dumb and implausible given how easy it would be to take technology that already exists and weaponize it.

Assuming that the power structure favors lightly armed proxy wars over intense conflicts is at least less silly than assuming nobody's had a new idea about how to use well known technology in millenia.

[Gaidin]

Efforts to prevent heavy weapons from being smuggled across interstellar space aren't going to stop that, especially when many of the heavy weapons in question are easily manufactured ON a given planet just by repurposing civilian infrastructure.

I don't think it would stop single weapons no. I think it would stop the numbers he wants for the same reason it would be hard to move these kinds of things unnoticed in our world. I mean, there's even the example of them managing to use a certain kind of nuke against Paul Atreides in the second book in the first place. The Emperor where they have to take certain steps to prevent him from foreseeing their meetings. And he foresees the nuke and all but walks right into it willingly because he sees himself as stuck on the path he's on.

In the same sense, the Atreides foresee the Harkonnen attack as a matter of strategy in the first book, and to them it's all about whether they can prepare for it in time.

[Simon_Jester]

The thing is, we're talking about very mundane items that aren't any harder to maintain than the basic day to day tools of industrialized civilization. A planet full of Iron Age farmers might not be able to make their own bulldozers (or tanks), but it's strongly implied that most Dune worlds are not trapped in that kind of super-primitivism.

[Gaidin]

Except 'basic' is a bit of a misnomer for a book like Dune on a planet like Arrakkis with the most bribery uncontrolled and unpredicted weather in the galaxy. Mundane? It was practically a point that both families had a hard enough time keeping the mechanical harvesters going. This could work on other planets, and yes, I've conceded that already, in my first damn response in fact, and yes you can stop repeating it. But you want to kick up a sandstorm at the wrong time? Like the one they escaped in?

[TOSDOC]

Honestly, if you want to use melee weapons in combat I think your only option is to go for the age old warrior spirit thing. As in, maybe your army is fighting some sort of demons or stuff that can only be slain in combat by a blade wielded by a true warrior of pure heart or something. So you get legions of these highlander style guys with swords facing down hordes of enemies.

How about this, but just in a Sci-Fi setting instead of fantasy? Invent an alien species that's vulnerable to relatively low-force impacts, while high ones "feed" their physiology and metabolism to the point where they become even more dangerous. You don't have to explain the biology right away, especially in a first-contact scenario. Just make the action exciting to the reader.

[Starglider]

Several sci-fi universes have an effect where people go 'out of phase' and are intangible, but can still see, breathe and not fall through the floor. e.g. Star Trek 'The Next Phase' accident and the Pegasus phase cloak, Stargate has it happen by accident and later as a deliberate effect created by a generator to escape an Ori strike. Marvel universe has various characters who can phase through things etc. The self-sustaining effect isn't very plausible but you could imagine a man-portable 'phase shift generator' that actively maintains the effect and handled things like gas exchange / atmospheric pressure / surface resistance; wouldn't be any less plausible than a lot of other soft sci-fi tech. Then you can say that these phase shift generators are cheap enough that infantry soldiers can have them, and that the net result is that bullets/beams/blast effects pass harmlessly through them, and that the only way to physically damage them is to strike them with something that is itself actively phase-controlled. If the minimum feasible size of a phase shift generator is a backpack, and the area of effect is 'matter in physical contact with the generator up to a modest mass limit' and thus any fired projectiles immediately become un-phased when they lose contact with the gun barrel, then guns smaller than large field artillery pieces (that lob shells big enough to contain their own phase generator) will be useless, and even those will only work for direct kinetic kill not as blast/frag weapons (because once the generator in the shell is destroyed the shrapnel and blast will not be phased). So swords might actually be the only practical way for infantry to hurt other infantry.

That's the best I can think of anyway. There would of course be lots of secondary consequences.

[biostem]

In doing some more thought on the subject, the only mechanism(s) that seem to lead to this type of heavy use of melee weapons would be where the following conditions are met:

1. Defensive technology is such that *all* ranged attacks are basically rendered impotent.

2. The only means of bypassing/overcoming/circumventing said defensive technology is via extremely close-range manual delivery.


Basically, you'd need to concoct a series of conditions where the means to overcome these extreme defenses is by entering melee range of your opponent. In many series, (usually anime), this comes in the form of something like "spirit energy" that a person can manifest as a sword or such, but can only project as a sword/axe/etc.


Either way, I have definitely gained some insight from all your input. Thanks!

[lance]

In SRW, the Altesian used what was basically a melee revolver with a spike instead of a bullet. I imagine that this lets it add the mass from the mech to the force of the spike.

In a lost tech setting, where the people can't reproduce the super sturdy macguffinadium that they are using, and recovering small chunks of it is problematic due to getting lost in the ocean or space.

[LaCroix]

Or you need some technobabble shield that can only be pierced by some nearunobtanium that cannot be used in bullets for some reason, but is suitable for melee weapons.