Lord Woodlouse wrote:Axiomatic wrote:I thought that the knives were used instead of pikes because you needed REALLY fine control of the blade. I mean, you couldn't just stab a guy with your knife, because the shield's definition of "too fast" is really damn wide. You could defeat a squad of pikemen just by running into their pikes and they'd probably have to run backwards if they wanted the speed difference to be slow enough for their pikes to penetrate your shield.
Quite so. It's not just about the speed of penetration, it's the speed they come
at you to defend themselves. Formations would be pretty impractical for that mode of fighting, I would imagine. To devise an advanced weapon to fight that shield you'd probably need some advanced computers, which they're all itchy about in the Duneverse.
But you could charge them and slam into them just as hard. With both forces' momentum canceled the shock damage inside the formation would be immense, just like in real pike actions, which the ancient greeks called, after all, "the Push of Shields". And you could, if you had superiour momentum, smash and scatter the enemy formation by the collision of your shield barriers. It would be exactly like two knights in Jousting, the lance rarely penetrates the armour, but instead dismounts the knight and sends him flying to give him plentiful shock injuries and render him ineffective on the battlefield. The pike formation could
then be followed by secondary troops with daggers and such who would dispatch the disorganized and wounded enemies through their shields.
Should the two formations hit perfectly close enough in shock power as to avoid one being cracked apart by the other, then the pikes would
easily probe through the shields, since both formations would be more or less stopped relative to each other. That would demand heavy armour to provide further protection, but only so much could be provided and the pike formation would remain the fundamental force in combat. It would just be a slow, bloody, "push of shields" when they engage, relying on immense amounts of shock followed by a bloody stalemate if both sides hold, or an unmitigated, one-sided slaughter if one crumbles.
So the ideal Dune army would consist of men who have regular steel plate half-cuirass (protecting them forward only, to discourage running away and to keep weight down), helmet, etc, and all of that under a full energy shield, and then a 15 - 16ft pike as their main weapon, with a dagger and (probably, for use against unshielded enemies) a small pistol. They would fight in interlocking formations, and these heavy formations would have smaller formations of "cleaners" behind them, men armed and protected like they are in the books actually, who are quick and mobile, and can basically go around in the wake of an advancing pike army killing or capturing the shock-injured enemies.
