Ideas on how melee weapons can be more efficient than range weapons in fantasy / science-fiction.

[Haruhi]

I like to discuss ways in which melee weapons can be more efficient than range weapons in fantasy / science-fiction scenarios. Some ideas are as follows.

1. Shields become more resistant when projectiles impacting them have more energy.

2. Combat precognition allow dodge or reject most of the projectiles, but the precognition is canceled if the enemy is also precog and melee combat happens. Ordinary range combat never cancels the precognition because once fired, the projectile is always predictable, but melee fight between precogs cancels the precognition because they never separated from their weapons and they can always vary the movement of their swords according to their precognitive experiences.

3. Super speed that allows dodge or reject most of the projectiles, but if you can dodge a shot, you can dodge a blade stroke. But no, because the sprinter also moves the blade at high speeds and usually a blade stroke travels less space than a shot, so it is still preferable that the sprinter carrying a melee weapon than a range weapon.

4. Shields teleporting any object within a range of size that approaches to the shielded, then any projectile fired on the shielded disappears, but not the air nor one who attack with a melee weapon for being too big.

5. Psychic shields that can only be pierced with something physically contiguous to psychic beings, that is, melee weapons carried by psychics. Psychic projectiles can not be obtained because the psychics are macroscopic and unable to accelerate at high speeds.

6. Camouflage is disabled when using range weapons but not to move melee weapons.

7. Force field manipulating the probabilities around a subject, making the chances that range weapons do not shoot are 100 percent, but melee weapons are unaffected because they lack mechanical parts.

What is your opinion?

[TheFeniX]

I've stolen a bit from Shadowrun for my own personal setting years back. Essentially in Shadowrun, magic is tied to the person. Enchanted melee weapons exist, but are just normal weapons in the hands of a mundane. A mage holding and activating the weapon can create a conduit to enhance it's performance. But if you tried this with a bullet, once it left your hand, it would become mundane again. There are ways around this (with mages giving up some "life force" to create lasting conduits), but they are cumbersome and dangerous and any mage would be better off spending his time on a well placed spell.

For my setting, and the naming conventions are pretty fucking lame (sue me): There's Nether energy (comes from people, akin to Rifts (sort of, the energy exists but HAS to be channeled through a person) and Shadowrun Magic. Devices made with this energy are useless to anyone who doesn't know how to use it) and Aether Energy (the type that's just been around forever, a lot like regular DnD magic. You could enchant a gun or whatever, and anyone can use it).

One caveat: Nether forging with certain metals creates an extremely hard (or soft, "made for killing the living") steel effective against certain... monsters, I guess. It's magically created and better at accepting magical enhancements, but is not inherently magical.

Slug-throwing and Aether ranged weapons exist and are very effective against normal people. But Nether users develop innate resistances over time. Their bones become like granite, their skin tougher, the energy accelerates the bodies natural healing to super-human level passively. Aether energy can heal, but it's more "brute force" healing and only on demand.

More importantly, Nether users begin to surround themselves with strong "current" of energy that disperse magic energies that aren't focused. These shields would slow slugs down enough (or disintegrate them) to make them bounce off every the lightest armor, and the Aether energy weapons "impact" would be spread out and easily handled. Aether armor is the same concept, except anyone can wear it and the magic is tied to the armor, not the person. But since the user doesn't control it via magic, you can't "hammer more magic" (for lack of a better term) into it on the fly.

However, there's no way to spread out the energy of a melee weapon (unless done so intentionally, channeling that whole anime of HUGE EXPLOSIONS sword swing). So, as power progresses, combatants are forced into melee fights just to do enough damage to slow or kill their opponent. A Paladin (Aetheric magic user, kind of Techno-Mage style, uses magic guns and swords, look: I said this shit was lame) might use his gun to stagger, temporarily blind, or knock something down on another powerful magic user, but would likely have to close distance to finish them off.

This setting was a "magic is damned near everywhere" setting, but we still wanted sword fights.

Science Fiction seems to ne a bit easier in this regard: just ape the Borg. DET weapons are absorbed and spread out. Slugthrowers don't work due to armor technology. Even in the modern day: Kevlar won't stop a knife, though they do make combination vests. But what can stop a bullet, may not stop a knife, and vice versa.

[Haruhi]

I've stolen a bit from Shadowrun for my own personal setting years back. Essentially in Shadowrun, magic is tied to the person. Enchanted melee weapons exist, but are just normal weapons in the hands of a mundane. A mage holding and activating the weapon can create a conduit to enhance it's performance. But if you tried this with a bullet, once it left your hand, it would become mundane again.

This is interesting but would have to explain why it is not possible to have microscopic magicians who can be brought into projectiles. This would be similar to my fifth point, and my answer is the psychics can only be macroscopic and generally not acelerables at high speeds.

Science Fiction seems to ne a bit easier in this regard: just ape the Borg. DET weapons are absorbed and spread out. Slugthrowers don't work due to armor technology.

But there are rail guns and explosive weapons.

[Zixinus]

Even in the modern day: Kevlar won't stop a knife, though they do make combination vests. But what can stop a bullet, may not stop a knife, and vice versa.

An idea: gaps in the armor. Armor is designed to withstand bullets from most angles and gaps are very, very hard to shoot. Gaps are necessary to ensure movement. But in melee you have either,
a, a long dagger that can get between plates and into weak spots, possibly going in at oblique angles.
b, a melee weapon that is somehow powered in a way that can get trough armor (lightsaber, motorized somehow, made of rare or expensive materials) but would be impractical or impossible to make into a ranged weapon.

[Elheru Aran]

Even in the modern day: Kevlar won't stop a knife, though they do make combination vests. But what can stop a bullet, may not stop a knife, and vice versa.

An idea: gaps in the armor. Armor is designed to withstand bullets from most angles and gaps are very, very hard to shoot. Gaps are necessary to ensure movement. But in melee you have either,
a, a long dagger that can get between plates and into weak spots, possibly going in at oblique angles.
b, a melee weapon that is somehow powered in a way that can get trough armor (lightsaber, motorized somehow, made of rare or expensive materials) but would be impractical or impossible to make into a ranged weapon.

Obviously you've never seen the gun that shoots swords

[Zixinus]

Nitpick: it's a gun that shots self-folding knives. Swords are fixed blades.

[TheFeniX]

This is interesting but would have to explain why it is not possible to have microscopic magicians who can be brought into projectiles. This would be similar to my fifth point, and my answer is the psychics can only be macroscopic and generally not acelerables at high speeds.

Like, shrinking down a magician and firing them at someone? I don't think a spell like that even exists in Shadowrun and I can't think of many people who would volunteer for that kind of mission. Bullets are fast. A thousand+ FPS. That kind of acceleration would be fatal and it's an over-complicated solution solution anyway.

If you wanted to go that route in Shadowrun, you could use Anchoring or Quickening to add magical abilities to something that leaves your person. Such as anchored throwing stars that explode on impact. But these are impossible to mass-produce due to the way they are created.

But there are rail guns and explosive weapons.

Both have a lot of destructive power. Neither will work well on a space-ship. They are loud, rail guns can permanently deafen you (something hit on by the Glitter Boy guns in Rift). And explosives out of a small caliber weapon can only be so powerful, so defeated by shields or full covering body armor. Man portable rail-guns deal with equal and opposite reactions: you have to handle the recoil somehow. So your super-space armor can easily be said to hold off what someone can fire out of a gun, but maybe you've got something like Vibro-weapons or molecluar edged weapons so sharp they can cut through "anything." They would be fairly delicate, but more than enough for one good stab.

Explosives are also dangerous to you. Hard to use during an assault if too powerful, useless against armor if too weak. Also if too powerful, might knock down the building you're in. Maybe your sci-fi dudes have telekinetic powers/technology and can just force anything with mass away from themselves, but the same tech up close cancels out: forcing either melee combat or close-range firearms use.

Fact is: you're going to have "well, why couldn't they do X?" when you want to focus on melee weapons in a setting where guns are prevalent. If you've got man portable rail guns, you're going to have to write your way out of why people still want to use melee weapons or why they don't work against X group. Hell, maybe your armor has some kind of displacement technology that actually puts you X meters off where you actually are, but fails in effectiveness at closer ranges. So in melee range X = 0.

The Nether users in my campaign found out that, for a limited amount of "energy" use, they could cause numerous effects such as mild earthquakes or even demolishing structures with an attack. Except they were dealing with enemies in highly populated areas and they weren't evil. Yet when they really wanted to go all out against the bad guys, I had them end up in decaying ruins so they could satiate their desire for wanton destruction and feel like badasses.

Also counted as payback since the faction of Paladins they were fighting gave no fucks about civilian causalities.

[Patrick Ogaard]

How about societal and cultural factors? Take as an example a society in a very constrained environment, such as the stereotypical science-fictional arcology or an independent orbital habitat. The use of firearms might well bring down terminal sanctions by a government perfectly content to allow its citizens to kill each other with knives or swords or high-ampere electrowhips. Similarly, it might just be seen as unspeakably barbaric to shoot someone as opposed to using your engineered diamond dirk to open your opponent from crotch to clavicle, and no civilized person would even so much as deign to recognize the existence of someone so unutterably gauche. Against outsiders, of course, it's perfectly fine to break out the railguns and particle beam rifles.

[Zixinus]

How about societal and cultural factors? Take as an example a society in a very constrained environment, such as the stereotypical science-fictional arcology or an independent orbital habitat. The use of firearms might well bring down terminal sanctions by a government perfectly content to allow its citizens to kill each other with knives or swords or high-ampere electrowhips. Similarly, it might just be seen as unspeakably barbaric to shoot someone as opposed to using your engineered diamond dirk to open your opponent from crotch to clavicle, and no civilized person would even so much as deign to recognize the existence of someone so unutterably gauche. Against outsiders, of course, it's perfectly fine to break out the railguns and particle beam rifles.

The problem with this is creative restrictions it places, including something like "what if I just don't give a fuck?" and bring a ranged weapon. Which is not an unreasonable attitude when killing people. Also would require a culture willing to accept loss of life for what is essentially whims. An example that comes to mind is if the habitat is overpopulated with men and they need to find a way to bring their numbers down.

Also, in duels, death was common but not necessarily the rule (depending on the dueling system). And in a highly cultural situation like this, actual bloodshed is something avoided unless the duelists are really out for blood.

[Sea Skimmer]

I suggest you either set your story in the 1450-1550 period which was the transitional end of the dominance of armored shock combat vs ranged gunpowder combat, or just invoke magic and not worry about it other then internal consistency. Details will not work out to be anything but highly convoluted.

1. Shields become more resistant when projectiles impacting them have more energy.

The threshold for dangerous grenade fragmentation is considered to be 19 joules KE. That's not much compared to the energy of a sword swing. Also you run into a big problem of the speed of the user affecting the energy of an impact. More energy being stopped easier would favor extremely high velocity low mass gunfire, not swords.

2. Combat precognition allow dodge or reject most of the projectiles, but the precognition is canceled if the enemy is also precog and melee combat happens.

I don't see how that would make guns not useful. Guns work point blank and they will destroy enemy melee weapons. You can slice a bullet in half with the end of a sword but both halves are just going to hit you anyway, and from any other angle the weapon will most likely be shattered. Certainly you won't be able to keep holding it in your hands without yet more magic powers.

Ordinary range combat never cancels the precognition because once fired, the projectile is always predictable, but melee fight between precogs cancels the precognition because they never separated from their weapons and they can always vary the movement of their swords according to their precognitive experiences.

Invoking 'precog' doesn't mean you can physically get out of the way of an aimed shot.

You might want to think about just how fast a person can move, and of course remember that you cannot dodge a high explosive blast wave if you intend a post 1880s setting, you've got to be outside the lethal zone.

3. Super speed that allows dodge or reject most of the projectiles, but if you can dodge a shot, you can dodge a blade stroke. But no, because the sprinter also moves the blade at high speeds and usually a blade stroke travels less space than a shot, so it is still preferable that the sprinter carrying a melee weapon than a range weapon.

If these people can move that fast they probably don't need real weapons in most cases, as the sudden acceleration of their movement would induce a pretty strong blast wave in the air. They'd also need to be able to survive that, suggesting simply magical characters whom obey no physics.

4. Shields teleporting any object within a range of size that approaches to the shielded, then any projectile fired on the shielded disappears, but not the air nor one who attack with a melee weapon for being too big.

Teleporters would overwhelmingly favor ranged combat on all kinds of levels. Why send yourself with a knife when you can send a bomb?

5. Psychic shields that can only be pierced with something physically contiguous to psychic beings, that is, melee weapons carried by psychics. Psychic projectiles can not be obtained because the psychics are macroscopic and unable to accelerate at high speeds.

Arbitrary Magic in other words. Why even care? Do you have a plot that requires this?

6. Camouflage is disabled when using range weapons but not to move melee weapons.

That would be helpful but it'd not solve the problem of the person being mowed down by a machine gun sweeping an open field ect... very situational how useful this would be. Also it'd still probably make sense to shoot the person point blank, or rather with the gun pressed into them because we can armor someone pretty damn well against bladed if we want still. Much more easily then gunfire. We just don't bother for lack of need.

7. Force field manipulating the probabilities around a subject, making the chances that range weapons do not shoot are 100 percent, but melee weapons are unaffected because they lack mechanical parts.

That doesn't make any sense. Melee weapons require a shitload of mechanical parts in the user to move to function, while a rocket gun could be made in which only the rocket bullet moved, at which point I fail to see any difference that is not totally arbitrary magic. Kinda of just stupid too, if you had that powerful of a god like power one would seriously ask why it wasn't being used to manipulate the probabilities of something more useful.

[Sea Skimmer]

Both have a lot of destructive power. Neither will work well on a space-ship. They are loud, rail guns can permanently deafen you (something hit on by the Glitter Boy guns in Rift). And explosives out of a small caliber weapon can only be so powerful, so defeated by shields or full covering body armor.

People would just use large caliber weapons to the point of needing a forked rest to fire is the problem with that. That's physically what already happened with the last models of full plate suit armor in the 1540s. They actually could stop the normal long arms of the day, but people just went and made even bigger ones once the firing locks were good enough to justify it. Also grenade launchers are a thing now.

Man portable rail-guns deal with equal and opposite reactions: you have to handle the recoil somehow.

Yeah but the trick at that point is railguns can in principle provide extremely high muzzle velocities with reasonable barrel lengths. From gunpowder arms a lot of the recoil is from the gunpowder also moving forward, waste which goes up and up with MV, that waste is eliminated, railguns will generally need a sabot but this is less parasite mass then a gunpowder charge and does not go up with velocity much. So you can fire a very lightweight round at say 3,200m/s and at close range will strike a hard material like it's a localized explosive while producing no more recoil then a 556 round. As far as defeating armor goes at close ranges such weapons could far outmatch anything we use today. You'd be able to do things with them like shoot the suspension off a tank you just don't think about doing today. This will not favor melee!!!

So your super-space armor can easily be said to hold off what someone can fire out of a gun, but maybe you've got something like Vibro-weapons or molecluar edged weapons so sharp they can cut through "anything." They would be fairly delicate, but more than enough for one good stab.

This just an appeal to magic of course. Sharpness doesn't increase the total force of the blow.

Explosives are also dangerous to you.

Not when you have your own super armor or shield! In fact if such projection existed all kinds of explosive and recoilless weapons should become feasible that would presently be semi suicidal.

Also if too powerful, might knock down the building you're in. Maybe your sci-fi dudes have telekinetic powers/technology and can just force anything with mass away from themselves, but the same tech up close cancels out: forcing either melee combat or close-range firearms use.

It'd still just favor shooting the point in the gut yeah, maybe with a gun on the end of a stick even. A sword swing is going to be way harder to pull off then firing a gun pike.

The best way to have melee combat is to set it in a time frame when it was relevant. That was pretty late into history as it was, swords were still used in naval boarding actions in the 1880s!

But my experience has been nearly every single time this comes up, and more then one person has started up a PM conservation over it with me, the author simply 'wants melee' and hasn't done much work on a plot or any reason why melee combat should or needs to be important to make this plot work. The understanding of how combat would work also tends to be on anime lines too rather then a real battle, at which point why care about details? Saying in the future we use swords is good enough, all the more so if combat is on an interpersonal level, and not actual warfare.

The funny thing too is one reason I see given for wanting melee is to have longer fights, but real sword fights are normally very very short if the people are actually trying to kill each other. A gun battle is much more likely to occupy time, and easier to describe too. Swords make more sense in a visual medium.

[Terralthra]

People want swords because swords are romantic, and our perception of swordsmanship is that a hero with a sword can take on innumerable mooks in melee because of their skill. The idea of a hero with even a really nice firearm taking on 30 guards with guns is much more difficult to justify in the heads of those who grew up on fantasy novels and books.

That the Romantic notions of melee combat don't match the reality of ancient, dark age, middle age, Renaissance, or early modern melee combat is a fact, but isn't particularly relevant. It is about feelings, not logic.

[Patrick Ogaard]

The problem with this is creative restrictions it places, including something like "what if I just don't give a fuck?" and bring a ranged weapon. Which is not an unreasonable attitude when killing people. Also would require a culture willing to accept loss of life for what is essentially whims. An example that comes to mind is if the habitat is overpopulated with men and they need to find a way to bring their numbers down.

Also, in duels, death was common but not necessarily the rule (depending on the dueling system). And in a highly cultural situation like this, actual bloodshed is something avoided unless the duelists are really out for blood.

Perfectly valid points about the limitations of cultural and societal restrictions. Then again, they do require fewer reality-bending flaming hoops to jump through than most other options already brought up.

[Elheru Aran]

So your super-space armor can easily be said to hold off what someone can fire out of a gun, but maybe you've got something like Vibro-weapons or molecluar edged weapons so sharp they can cut through "anything." They would be fairly delicate, but more than enough for one good stab.

This just an appeal to magic of course. Sharpness doesn't increase the total force of the blow.

Minor quibble:

Sharpness doesn't increase the force of the blow, of course. But, it does increase efficiency by concentrating said force along an extremely fine and narrow focus (the edge). It means you need less strength to do the same amount of work. Armour counters this by either absorbing, reflecting or deflecting the blow, or simply by being harder than the material of the weapon hitting it. Well, that's plate anyway. Fabric armours like Kevlar are a bit different, I'm not sure how to put that.

Traditional ways of defeating armour were either going for the gaps, hitting it with something greater than it could bear-- either bullets or a pick-- or not bothering with defeating the armour, but use it against the person inside by bouncing them off the inside of the armour more than they could take. There have been people killed by mere concussion-- hit them on the head hard enough, you might not put much of a dent in the helmet (cause guess what that's probably the toughest piece) but you could well do permanent damage, if not killing them, if it's not adequately padded.

[Sea Skimmer]

Minor quibble:

Sharpness doesn't increase the force of the blow, of course. But, it does increase efficiency by concentrating said force along an extremely fine and narrow focus (the edge). It means you need less strength to do the same amount of work.

Not all work is equally useful though as this is a case of practical and not theoretical measures, and that force multiplication will get you nowhere when were talking about armor that can withstand armor piercing rifle rounds (to the point of making them non viable) vs a sword blade. Such an ultra fine edge will simply get deformed if the armor has a similar or equally hard surface, its kind of a given it has enough toughness to withstand the stress of the hit since it already must withinstand the shattering effects of much higher velocity AP rifle impacts. And if we say the swordsman moves at 1000m/s then like I was saying before, that guy's own body movement is now a serious weapon in the first place. A mildly ranged one too.

If you want to start talking advanced future tech armor could become badass in some pretty crazy ways, like nanoscale reactive armor strips printed onto the surface that locally detonate to damage bullets or swords without killing the user, layers of embedded nanodiamonds, mechanical actuators to make true powered armor and god knows how many ways to spend money on carbon fiber. All of these would counter a very fine edge attack in principle, it isn't for nothing we make all our AP weapons blunt.

Armour counters this by either absorbing, reflecting or deflecting the blow, or simply by being harder than the material of the weapon hitting it.

Don't forget erosion, you could put that under reflecting but its rather more specific and the only way to actually defeat modern threats without large slabs of steel. Material being forced back into the projectile, which initially dislodged it, causing erosion of the projectile. Then all that stuff goes flying back out the hole.

Well, that's plate anyway. Fabric armours like Kevlar are a bit different, I'm not sure how to put that.

Kevlar absorbs energy through the friction of the weave tightening, and the elastic and inelastic tension failure of the yarns. This is why it is velocity limited, and you never see soft body armor made of kevlar rated to stop serious calibers of rifle. The velocity is simply too high for the fictional movement and stretching of the yarn to take place before the projectile has already penetrated. You must add something more solid to at least slow down the projectile and break it up, then the soft vest can still do something useful catching the slower debris and spreading out the overall shock impulse to the body.

Gambeson armor vests used to have very similar methods of constructions and concept, but using natural fibers instead of synthetic ones. Very important to the proper functioning of full plate armor suits.

Traditional ways of defeating armour were either going for the gaps, hitting it with something greater than it could bear-- either bullets or a pick-- or not bothering with defeating the armour, but use it against the person inside by bouncing them off the inside of the armour more than they could take.

They wore a Gambeson and a fair number of other things under the armor though to protect against this. It's thought the large amount of hair knights had was actually dense enough to serve as padding under the armor helmets too. Short cropped hair comes with gunpowder in warfare and came out of the shift from art to science in military training. Or rather that training became a thing, nearly all prior methods of combat having been learned local art forms on some level or another. This is why we lost most history of it in the West too, while Asian powers didn't modernize until far later in history.

Problems like this fundamentally underlie the whole subject of trying to force melee fighting into a modern or future setting. People didn't used to do a damn lot of things they might have simply because communication was too poor. It took something like 250 years for anyone in Europe to start to formally train artillery gunners for example. but once that idea even existed and was known to actually work...it doesn't go away.

There have been people killed by mere concussion-- hit them on the head hard enough, you might not put much of a dent in the helmet (cause guess what that's probably the toughest piece) but you could well do permanent damage, if not killing them, if it's not adequately padded.

Sure, but if you can kill someone with the concussion of a melee weapon strike then your going to have lots of ways to kill them with a concussion from a ranged weapon too, and that only goes up in the future.

The GUN HALBERD was a thing in the past though... it pretty much meets all requirements if you made yourself a telescopic pole.

[bilateralrope]

I can think of a few instances where preferring melee over ranged can be justified:
- Star Wars force users with a lightsaber. They have a device capable of deflecting incoming blaster fire. They have the precog/reaction times to use it. They still die when there is too much incoming fire.
- Sneaking around. Guns are loud, knives less so. So knifing someone, if done skillfully, will attract less attention.
- Resource limitations making guns expensive.
- There is an organisation that, if you get into a fight with them, you will lose. They are willing to ignore you if you stick to melee weapons. But if you bring out a gun, you will piss them off.
- You're a tough super soldier. The enemy isn't, but has large numbers. Fighting them in melee might help you survive longer, because enemy soldiers will get in the way of other enemy soldiers shooting at you.
- Outright stupidity and/or insanity in sufficient numbers to close to melee range. For example, Warhammer 40k.

2. Combat precognition allow dodge or reject most of the projectiles, but the precognition is canceled if the enemy is also precog and melee combat happens. Ordinary range combat never cancels the precognition because once fired, the projectile is always predictable, but melee fight between precogs cancels the precognition because they never separated from their weapons and they can always vary the movement of their swords according to their precognitive experiences.

If precog can cancel out precog for melee combat, why doesn't it also work on ranged combat ?

Any human movement to dodge a bullet at typical combat ranges needs to start before the bullet is fired. Meaning the bullets path is still under the control of the precog holding the gun, and thus precog cancels precog.

3. Super speed that allows dodge or reject most of the projectiles, but if you can dodge a shot, you can dodge a blade stroke. But no, because the sprinter also moves the blade at high speeds and usually a blade stroke travels less space than a shot, so it is still preferable that the sprinter carrying a melee weapon than a range weapon.

Lets use a ranged weapon with a blast radius large enough that it can't be dodged. Have a super speed user aim it.

4. Shields teleporting any object within a range of size that approaches to the shielded, then any projectile fired on the shielded disappears, but not the air nor one who attack with a melee weapon for being too big.

Lets tweak the software on our shields so that, when it recognises an incoming melee weapon, it teleports away parts of the attacker. If it can deal with an automatic weapon, it can quickly kill the attacker.

5. Psychic shields that can only be pierced with something physically contiguous to psychic beings, that is, melee weapons carried by psychics. Psychic projectiles can not be obtained because the psychics are macroscopic and unable to accelerate at high speeds.

Lets build guns with enough power that they can overpower the shield. Or we just cover the area with something to prevent the shield user from moving. If he can't move, his melee weapons aren't a threat to us.

6. Camouflage is disabled when using range weapons but not to move melee weapons.

Only useful if you are trying to sneak around. For example, a powerful rifle will be louder than carefully killing someone with a kinfe.

7. Force field manipulating the probabilities around a subject, making the chances that range weapons do not shoot are 100 percent, but melee weapons are unaffected because they lack mechanical parts.

If it's got enough range to affect someones gun, it's got enough range to affect the person trying to hit you with a stick. Fall over because they put their foot down wrong, random muscle spasms, maybe even vomiting or something that causes sudden death. Fights between people using the devices you describe are going to be rather pathetic to watch.

Meanwhile a sniper shoots you from outside the range of your probability shield.

[Haruhi]

More energy being stopped easier would favor extremely high velocity low mass gunfire, not swords.

But high-speed projectiles with low mass have a lot of energy, being stopped by the shield. Maybe energy is replaced by speed.

I don't see how that would make guns not useful. Guns work point blank and they will destroy enemy melee weapons. You can slice a bullet in half with the end of a sword but both halves are just going to hit you anyway, and from any other angle the weapon will most likely be shattered. Certainly you won't be able to keep holding it in your hands without yet more magic powers.

If your opponent is not precog, it is true that it is preferable to a range weapon, but if your opponent is also precog, then a melee weapon is imposed so I argued.

Invoking 'precog' doesn't mean you can physically get out of the way of an aimed shot.

Nor does it imply the opposite. And these ways are not exclusive.

If these people can move that fast they probably don't need real weapons in most cases, as the sudden acceleration of their movement would induce a pretty strong blast wave in the air.

That assumes that super speed is achieved by mechanical acceleration, but it does not have to be so, because super speed can be achieved by manipulating the space-time itself, without side effects such as friction, sound, release of energy, etc.

Teleporters would overwhelmingly favor ranged combat on all kinds of levels. Why send yourself with a knife when you can send a bomb?

Because the bomb is teleported and not the carrier of melee weapon.

Arbitrary Magic in other words. Why even care? Do you have a plot that requires this?

I like it, but it seems that you run out of arguments.

That would be helpful but it'd not solve the problem of the person being mowed down by a machine gun sweeping an open field ect... very situational how useful this would be. Also it'd still probably make sense to shoot the person point blank, or rather with the gun pressed into them because we can armor someone pretty damn well against bladed if we want still.

But melee and camouflage is still more stealth friendly than leave the camouflage, shoot and camouflage again.

Melee weapons require a shitload of mechanical parts in the user to move to function, while a rocket gun could be made in which only the rocket bullet moved, at which point I fail to see any difference that is not totally arbitrary magic.

No, a melee weapon can be just a block of material without mechanical parts. A range weapon is always a machine instead.

[Sea Skimmer]

But high-speed projectiles with low mass have a lot of energy, being stopped by the shield. Maybe energy is replaced by speed.

A lot of energy compared to what? 1 grain at 3,200m/s is about 333 joules. A 1.5kg sword swung at 25m/s would be 470 in the sword, but this is a direct extension of the energy in the swinging arm and body. And your arguments to try to make these two different things have no remotely scientific rational which is why I question the sci fi part of this thread. You want fantasy go ahead and all, but that's kind of the point of the distinction.

If your opponent is not precog, it is true that it is preferable to a range weapon, but if your opponent is also precog, then a melee weapon is imposed so I argued.

That's you just declaring author fiat again. This is the SCI FI forum in case you missed it. Take this to fantasy if your just going to suggest ways god like magic can make a sword better.

Nor does it imply the opposite. And these ways are not exclusive.

No, but they are what we tend to view as magic if you've got both at once. If you can avoid ranged attacks you know where the enemy is long before he could ever get you with a melee weapon, and your arguing below that acceleration doesn't apply. Combat should be impossible in the first place.

That assumes that super speed is achieved by mechanical acceleration, but it does not have to be so, because super speed can be achieved by manipulating the space-time itself, without side effects such as friction, sound, release of energy, etc.

If you had that kind of fine control of such high power then why would a sword ever be able to infringe it? You should be able to slip round around the other person to an endless degree.

I like it, but it seems that you run out of arguments.

Na its more like I get tried quickly because I know nothing useful is going to come of it. It seems like you want an explanation for fantasy and this is not a forum for cross posting.

But melee and camouflage is still more stealth friendly than leave the camouflage, shoot and camouflage again.

And attacking the enemy at point blank range makes you absurdly vulnerable to an ambush and requires more time for the act of attacking, and incapable of dealing with more then one enemy at a time. But whatever man.

No, a melee weapon can be just a block of material without mechanical parts. A range weapon is always a machine instead.

Magic argument yes, thank you for repeating.

[Khaat]

Why are you shopping for a debate on "teh science" if your answer is going to be "it's magic!"? If physical science isn't going to apply, we're done here.

[quote=""Sea Skimmer"]If these people can move that fast they probably don't need real weapons in most cases, as the sudden acceleration of their movement would induce a pretty strong blast wave in the air.

That assumes that super speed is achieved by mechanical acceleration, but it does not have to be so, because super speed can be achieved by manipulating the space-time itself, without side effects such as friction, sound, release of energy, etc.[/quote]
Aaaaand... we're back to "MAGIC!!!one!1!"

Or you could throw out the technobabble explanations and lay it at "setting conventions". I'd recommend Star Guard by Andre Norton: Terrans can only go to the stars as mercenaries.

Archs, who fight with relatively primitive weapons, are organized into Hordes, which fight on underdeveloped barbarian planets, and Mechs, who fight with more modern weapons, are organized into Legions, which fight on advanced, civilized worlds.

Poof! Reason to fight with swords instead of guns! And in a sci-fi setting!

But if you are going for "Magic!" call it that and stop there.

[Haruhi]

Any human movement to dodge a bullet at typical combat ranges needs to start before the bullet is fired. Meaning the bullets path is still under the control of the precog holding the gun, and thus precog cancels precog.

Combat precognition can be combined with super speed.

Lets use a ranged weapon with a blast radius large enough that it can't be dodged. Have a super speed user aim it.

No such weapon especially if the precognition is added. No matter that the gunman be a speeder, because the speed of the projectile would remain the same.

Lets build guns with enough power that they can overpower the shield. Or we just cover the area with something to prevent the shield user from moving. If he can't move, his melee weapons aren't a threat to us.

No guns with enough power that they can overpower the shield, because it is not on power but on psychic. The shield user can be contained, but not forever and it is a way to the efficiency of melee weapons over range weapons.

Meanwhile a sniper shoots you from outside the range of your probability shield.

No such weapons because the range of the probability shield is broader. The only weapons broader are ballistic missiles that are machines that are turned off when approaching the target with the probability shield.

[Haruhi]

A lot of energy compared to what? 1 grain at 3,200m/s is about 333 joules. A 1.5kg sword swung at 25m/s would be 470 in the sword, but this is a direct extension of the energy in the swinging arm and body. And your arguments to try to make these two different things have no remotely scientific rational which is why I question the sci fi part of this thread. You want fantasy go ahead and all, but that's kind of the point of the distinction.

Shields become more resistant when projectiles impacting them have more speed.

And science-fiction is a subtype of fantasy.

Combat should be impossible in the first place.

No if your opponent has similar powers to yours, which prevail melee weapons.

If you had that kind of fine control of such high power then why would a sword ever be able to infringe it? You should be able to slip round around the other person to an endless degree.

If your opponent has similar powers to yours, which prevail melee weapons that need not be normal swords.

And attacking the enemy at point blank range makes you absurdly vulnerable to an ambush and requires more time for the act of attacking, and incapable of dealing with more then one enemy at a time. But whatever man.

More vulnerable to an ambush if you turn off the camouflage. And a shooter is usually able to deal with not more that one target at a time.

Magic argument yes, thank you for repeating.

It's not magic (and I tired of the derogatory use seems that you give to this word). I was just saying that melee weapons may not have pieces and range weapons have pieces.

[Korto]

But my experience has been nearly every single time this comes up, and more then one person has started up a PM conservation over it with me, the author simply 'wants melee' and hasn't done much work on a plot or any reason why melee combat should or needs to be important to make this plot work. The understanding of how combat would work also tends to be on anime lines too rather then a real battle, at which point why care about details? Saying in the future we use swords is good enough, all the more so if combat is on an interpersonal level, and not actual warfare.

Hi, Skimmer!

Yeah, I'm one of them, and if you're interested, and Skimmer doesn't mind, I could send you the conversation I had with him, because it was about pretty much exactly this. In fact, I even recognise a lot of the arguments you're making as stolen directly out of my mouth.

However, if you're prepared to use magic (unfortunately, I wasn't, which made my life very difficult), you would seem to have some easier options. Have you considered this?
* There are 'warlocks' who are able to generate a skin-tight magical field. NOTHING harmful can penetrate this field--not bullet, blade, gas or rude gesture--EXCEPT for something completely covered in this field. Which is another warlock's skin. So they can punch each other (Yay?) BUT there is a magical material (let's go all exalted, and say it's jade. Magical jade) which the warlock can extend the field over, but only as long as the jade is in direct firm contact with the warlock's bare skin, and the object is homogeneous, one-piece, with no moving parts.
As a last resort, any other problems can be dealt with by saying "For magical reasons, that doesn't work", and then get on with the plot and characterisation. Good plot and characterisation forgives many technical sins.
Now, if the warlocks make up only a small proportion of the fighting force, guns could still exist as a way of dealing with everyone else.

Personally, I ended up with a Dune-style force field combined with super-strong physical armour as protection, and the only people considering melee an option now are a bunch equipped with alien super-tech swords, and an unrelated fuck-off strong alien race (who can't actually penetrate the armour, but the concussion is enough to shatter bones--there's a theoretical limit to padding depending on the distance it has to act). Even then, those aliens have an armoury of missiles, grenade launchers, rifles, etc, etc.

[Patrick Ogaard]

Going with the magic option, or the psychic option, how about auras and charms?

Everyone and everything has an aura, strong for living beings but weak for inanimate things, which only extends slightly beyond the skin of the living being generating it, but extending to envelop anything the person has firm physical contact with (but with plot-appropriate limits on the length of the weapon grasped). A simple magical charm provides sovereign protection against the puny unliving auras of bullets and arrows, and the charm can be worn as a simple piece of jewelry, as embroidery on clothing, or as a snazzy tattoo. Thus, combat becomes an issue of punching or chopping your enemies really hard.

One could even say that the charms have limits based on materials incorporated into the charm and the physical size of the charm, and a city wall protected by colorful ivy and moss pruned into the proper charm configurations could stop cannon fire cold but be helpless in the face of a heroic attacker sort with a hedge trimmer.

[Zwinmar]

People want swords because swords are romantic, and our perception of swordsmanship is that a hero with a sword can take on innumerable mooks in melee because of their skill. The idea of a hero with even a really nice firearm taking on 30 guards with guns is much more difficult to justify in the heads of those who grew up on fantasy novels and books.

That the Romantic notions of melee combat don't match the reality of ancient, dark age, middle age, Renaissance, or early modern melee combat is a fact, but isn't particularly relevant. It is about feelings, not logic.

And then I think of Audie Murphy and realize 30 guys being taken by one with a gun is nothing.

[Simon_Jester]

I like to discuss ways in which melee weapons can be more efficient than range weapons in fantasy / science-fiction scenarios. Some ideas are as follows.

1. Shields become more resistant when projectiles impacting them have more energy.

The problem then being that almost anything low-velocity enough to bypass the shield can be stopped by armor. Moreover this has some interesting side-consequences.

For example, they have this kind of shield in Dune (blocks high-velocity things like bullets, explodes when shot with lasers, with such violence that it's suicide to use lasers against shields). Brian Herbert figured that this would lead to sword fights becoming a major part of warfare.

Another poster here, Sea Skimmer, pointed out that the most obvious solution is to build armored, shielded bulldozers that drive around at low speeds crushing your enemies.

2. Combat precognition allow dodge or reject most of the projectiles, but the precognition is canceled if the enemy is also precog and melee combat happens. Ordinary range combat never cancels the precognition because once fired, the projectile is always predictable, but melee fight between precogs cancels the precognition because they never separated from their weapons and they can always vary the movement of their swords according to their precognitive experiences.

The window of time during which the projectile's flight path is predictable and cannot be altered by the shooter's actions is only a fraction of a second wide, and is contingent on the precognitive's actions.

This has some side effects. It implies, for example, that I can always foresee what a precognitive will say (because the words are fixed in the form of sound waves in air as soon as they leave the mouth), where they will go (because their footprints are fixed as soon as they move their foot off of them), and so on. Indeed, basically the only unpredictable thing a precognitive can do is punch me in the nose while already standing close enough to do so- or refrain from thus punching me, I suppose.

3. Super speed that allows dodge or reject most of the projectiles, but if you can dodge a shot, you can dodge a blade stroke. But no, because the sprinter also moves the blade at high speeds and usually a blade stroke travels less space than a shot, so it is still preferable that the sprinter carrying a melee weapon than a range weapon.

Works if there are no futuristic weapons such as lasers or hypervelocity mass drivers, and specifically if you want duels between speedsters.

4. Shields teleporting any object within a range of size that approaches to the shielded, then any projectile fired on the shielded disappears, but not the air nor one who attack with a melee weapon for being too big.

Presumably, individual molecules do not disappear (or the shield sucks all the air out of a room very quickly). The big problem here is figuring out the dividing lines- depending on what they are the shield may have exploitable weaknesses.

Also, any weapon that disperses a cloud of gas or a very fine mist or powder might well get through, so things like thermobaric grenade launchers would be a viable counter to shielded opponents. There are other defenses against that, but then there are other defenses against melee weapons.

5. Psychic shields that can only be pierced with something physically contiguous to psychic beings, that is, melee weapons carried by psychics. Psychic projectiles can not be obtained because the psychics are macroscopic and unable to accelerate at high speeds.

Viable.

6. Camouflage is disabled when using range weapons but not to move melee weapons.

This only matters if you care more about not being seen than you do about firing at the enemy. Moreover, if you jump out of the bushes and attack someone with a sword, your camouflage is pretty well lost by default, so you're still opening yourself up to detection.

7. Force field manipulating the probabilities around a subject, making the chances that range weapons do not shoot are 100 percent, but melee weapons are unaffected because they lack mechanical parts.

This doesn't work because there is always a nonzero probability of the melee weapon breaking, or rusting away into nothing, or for that matter of the guy using it suddenly having a heart attack and falling over dead. If you can manipulate probabilities far enough away, and far enough in advance, that a gun fired at you will predictably jam... you're basically a god, and nothing can affect you unless you want it to, unless they have equally capable probability manipulation. In which case it's a race to see who can kill the other with a hilariously unlikely accident triggered from long range first.