Suppose the military suddenly had to adjust to fight an enemy that was immune to ranged weaponry, like the shielded warriors in Dune, or the Daemons from Warhammer 40k. What sort of melee weapons and gear and tactics would modern technology encourage?
>>64418969you'd shoot melee weapons instad
No. We discuss wars here. Go to /tg/.
immunity to ranged weaponry makes you immune to melee weapons as well. bullets penetrate tissue by concentrating energy in a small area. that's exactly how knives work. impact weapons like war hammers spread that energy out a little more; so not as concentrated and still easily defeated by whatever makes you immune to bullets
>>64419047In Dune anything going too fast won't penetrate the shield so all projectiles won't work and melee requires slowly inching you blade closer. And in Warhammer 40k daemons only get hurt by primitive melee weapons for emotional reasons.
>>64418969FireGasOverpressureDirected energy
>>64418969In dune there were dart guns that could penetrate shields. I forget the name. The big issue was shooting a shield with a lasgun would cause a nuclear explosion.Shields weren't so common on arrakis because they draw sandworms like crazy.I can imagine pole arms would be pretty popular because pointy stick gives you more reach.So I'd say a poison dart gun with a bayonet.
>>64419189Wasn't there some grenade launchers too, like the rounds were contact fused? Big slow projectile, explodes on impact so it goes off inside the shield?
>>64418969Diving bangsticks, but with HE since your own shields would protect against the blast.Halberds. Arming swords. Daggers.
>>64419169Exactly
>>64419162it would be impossible to kill someone by slowly inching your blade close because all they would have to do is move a little bit out of the wayby war hammers rules you could just through rocks at demons and kill them because rocks are the most primitive weapons. if for some reason throwing rocks doesn't work simply give your soldiers rocks and have them bludgeon the demons
>>64419162.45 wins again
>>64419205I'm not sure, its been years since I read the original book but that sounds like something that would be in the dune universe. I think ornithopters could drop bombs? Particularly when the Harkonnens and Sardaukar took over the capital.I know another big weapon they had were basically short range controlled drones that could penetrate a shield, and inject the target with a poison that would kill them nearly instantly. But these were usually used for assasinations.
>>64419236In all seriousness the FPS would probably be about the speed of a maula pistol (poison dart gun in the dune series) lol
>>64418969>Daemons from Warhammer 40kOP got tired of being told this is retarded in /40kg/ and came here instead. Just so y'all know.
>>64418969In a scenario where ranged weapons stopped working but melee somehow remained viable you would see a return to the melee systems that humanity spent thousands of years optimising prior to the rise of the gunSo pikes squares and columns for the most part, along with armoured lancers on horseback
>>64419169This. I’d like to see that Paul twink knife fight some VX gas or napalm.
>>64419284I don't know where he got the idea that bullets don't work on daemons. They just don't actually die to them
>>64419162chemical warfare, easy, done
>>64419230at least in the dune universe, entire martial arts have been developed that revolve around maximizing the middle zone where your blade is fast enough to kill but slow enough not to trigger the shieldor wrestling them and then going for a killing blow while they are unable to escapebut the most hilarious part is that a good chunk of the dune books feature a lot of conventional gunfights anyways because the planet of dune negates the shields because it causes the worms go into a frenzy, so both lasers and firearms are featured in the book despite the common knowledge that no one can use projectile weapons due to shields
>>64419273Was JMB the true Lisan al-Gaib?
>>64419305The Dune universe is so lame.
>>64418969Clubs and swordspears.
I will slowly penetrate your dunc shield with a live hand grenade, leave it in your pocket, step back, and watch the shield contain the explosion to you only.
>>64419457When the explosion has passed only kek will remain
>>64419491Lmao
>>64418969bump
>>64418969>immune to ranged weaponry, like the shielded warriors in DuneHere's something I never understoodIn both the movies and the books we hear about people getting their shields hit and being hurled to the ground from the impact. Couldn't you batter someone's shields with physical objects until they were concussed on the ground, THEN engage in the obligatory wrestling match?
>>64418969Muh diq
>>64418969>Daemonsaren't immune to ranged weapons. Resistant, yes, but not immune.
>>64418969We're bringing back flamethrowers.
>>64418969running them over with steam rollers
-superior reach over knifes-no need of putting any force to stab once you pass the the tip through shield, just touch any part of enemy body-blast contained inside the shield
fights in dune should have involved doing gun-kata shit with long barreled pistols instead of knives and stuff
>>64419297>I don't know where he got the idea that bullets don't work on daemonsYou can fire a Titan's weapon at a daemon and it will just dissipate the blast into harmless nothingness.
>>64418969The forbidden order.>"Driver, infantry, tracks!"
>>64419261The issue with the Dune lasers/shield was that it didn't ALWAYS produce a nuclear blast. Sometimes it popped the shield, sometimes it punched through, sometimes it went off like a grenade, and sometimes it was a nuke. Essentially a D20 every time it happened and everyone agreed the risk of a Nat1 simply wasn't worth it. As far as the drone darts, they had to be directed in place, so even if you squirmed around a bit, they'd have to 'hone' in on the same spot of the personal shield to get through, the whole time inching closer. Poison isnt an issue with Bene Gesserit training though, as they can control their body's chemistry on the fly and most are trained to handle all known poisons and most mixes of said poison.
>>64419344I like the book... Never watch the movies
>>64418969Parry this, you casual.
>>64419162The Dune shield tech is retarded across the board>shooting it with a lasgun will result in a nuclear explosionGiven suicide troops are a known quantity whats stopping some lone shielded Harkonnen flunkie from throwing himself at a group of Atreides and shooting himself in the chest with a lasgun?>shield barriers are permeable to allow the user to breatheSo no one tens of thousands of years into the future got the idea to just give their troops rebreathers so that their sheilds can just be turned up to "comppetely invulnerable">Actually there exist special dart guns which can poke through sheildsGreat, so the tech is effectively useless against projectile weapons anywayFrank Herbert may have connived an interesting universe but his hamfisted justification for swords-and-sandals fights far into the future will never not be a testament to his shit writing
>>64423794>Given suicide troops are a known quantity whats stopping some lone shielded Harkonnen flunkie from throwing himself at a group of Atreides and shooting himself in the chest with a lasgun?Any House that uses nuke goes immediately on Imperial shitlist and is free game for everyone else.
>>64423794>given suicide troops are a known quantity what's stopping a lone sergeant from launching a Davy Crockett>given 1950s gas capes are not fully enclosed what's stopping nerve gas from being used>actually there exist special bombs which can poke through tanksYou completely failed to understand the mindset of the author's culture. It's a middle of the Cold War era setting. Shields are a device to highlight the extremes of the atomic age without needing to extrapolate about conventional weapons which don't really matter in a nuclear war. Civilized people fight with poison in a politicians' drink, blackmail, and maybe a once-a-generation clash of spies or special ops in a proxy war because the alternative is MAD.>given suicide troops are a known quantity what's stopping a lone sergeant from launching a Davy Crockett>given 1950s gas capes are not fully enclosed what's stopping nerve gas from being used>actually there exist special bombs which can poke through tanksThere was a famous quote by an American Vietnam War officer about knives being the best weapon for a political conflict so it was too bad America was stuck using B52s. That's the mindset. Soldiers don't have real jobs. They aren't real people. The spies are the real fighters and occasionally there's a general as a side character representing the old ways.
>>64423568Pretty sure that's an invuln at play, not immunity.
>>64418969>immune to ranged weaponry>the Daemons from Warhammer 40kSomeone tell Belakor, lmao
>>64423568Daemons eat shit from ranged weapons all the damn time.>>64424221Someone tell the oversized chicken my proud Rogue Trader von Valancius just blasted back into the warp with his trusty lasgun LMAO.
>>64423794For the same reason no one's going around detonating suitcase nukes as level 99 VBIEDs, despite how many nuclear armed states there are.Once you get above sand hut tier culture, you find that no one is actually suicidal enough to yolo their whole country for a minor tactical advantage. Both the commanders and the grunts holding lasguns know full well how the other houses will respond to an epic self detonation attack.
>>64419162>And in Warhammer 40k daemons only get hurt by primitive melee weapons for emotional reasons.Wrong
>>64424379Glory to von Valancius!
>>64419304Shields can be tuned to be airtight. Yes you will suffocate yourself if you do this for too long. Yes it makes even moving difficult because you now experience vastly increased air resistance. Yes herbert thought of literally anything you can imagine to try to cheese the shields, no it won't work, yes they are that good. >>64423723Also worth noting that a lot of complex solutions to the shield problem are prohibitively expensive/difficult to acquire. Thinking machines, and that includes a lot of just plain old computers, are banned. That drone was probably illegal and manufactured by Ix.
>>64423559Why would the gun barrel block the shield effect?
>>64425056why wouldn't it? the shield doesn't pass through things, it surrounds them
>>64424433I see your point and agree in principal but imagine any grunt had the ability to arbitrarily trigger a nuke whenever he pleases. It would happen eventually because someone is fucked in the head or whatever.
>>64425113>someone is fucked in the headThat's not even necessary.Just imagine you're losing a fight, your buddies are already dead you're maybe wounded etc. why not nuke yourself out of spite to take all those sons of bitches with you?
>>64425080The barrel is open on the end. If it could be blocked on the sides everyone would just fight with tubes. Hell you'd stab through a shield by cupping your other hand on it.
>>64424433Good thing I'm a non-state actor and have no problem sending FPV drones with lasguns mounted on them to nuke your troops insh'allah
>>64419162That's bullshit. Daemons die to getting showered with plasma, grenades and demo charges just fine.
>>64424221Lmao
>>64424433also, a lasgun-induced shield explosion is indistinguishable from a nuke, and everyone is obliged to respond to the use of atomics with their own atomics, and no one wants to be scrubbed off the face of the galaxy over a misunderstanding
>anons discussing the reality of fucking dunc shieldsit's a fairy tale.>no but muh hard sci fino, it's a fairy tale, nothing else. it's a pretty cool fairy tale, what with orange coke sniffing jihadist karatekas, but it's still a fairy tale
>>64425282
>>64425288you are right, my bad
>>64423979>Civilized people fight with poison in a politicians' drink, blackmail, and maybe a once-a-generation clash of spies or special ops in a proxy war because the alternative is MAD.Meanwhile we know there are completely uncivilised houses like the Harkonnens - hell its even a highlighted in the book how they were clever for using conventional howitzers on entrenched Atreides positions- so either the people in-Universe are totally ignorant to obvious tactics to work around the shield tech but take no precationa to do so, or Herbert is big dumb who made the literary blunder of creating a solution in search of a problem
>>64423859>>64423979>>64424433My point is that unlike compact nukes, the battlefield is saturated with shields and lasguns - it would be like if, tomorrow, the laws of the universe changed such that a nuclear detonation occurs when a bullet strikes kevlar. Any party who were to exploit this would have plausible deniability because, who's to say it wasnt one of the opposing soldiers who panic-fired onto a shielded unit? Or even did so deliberately to initiate a punitive nuclear bombardment? The tech is so ubiquitous that, realistically, these types of events would happen all the time and the Emperor/House Corrino would have no means of mediation. Personally, I prefer my scifi settings where nuclear small arms are the norm, like Starship Troopers
>>64426176Plausible deniability is why it *doesn't* work: you don't get to unilaterally decide what's deniable. It's a mutual cooperative process. Everyone has spies, is smart, is invested in the status quo, and can into recursion. Herbert makes a minor plot beat out of this with the worm emperor for readers like you who don't get it: when the other factions realize he's omniscient and use that politically to beg for mercy in plausibly deniable ways, he falsely accuses them, so they know he'll lie so they know he can play politics too if they do this.Starship Troopers is the fantasy of dunking on bugs (read: Asian communists) who can't fight back at a peer level. Dune is the reality of peer nations which all have nukes.>>64426140Now you're getting the spirit. The Jihad is the alternate history where Republican boomers overthrow the FDR generation to nuke Vietnam.
>>64419047>bullets penetrate tissue by concentrating energy in a small area.>that's exactly how knives work.That's entirely wrong through.Knives cut. Bullets punch holes. That is NOT the same.But feel free to prove me wrong by letting yourself get stabbed while wearing kevlar.
>>64426258Except until worm-Leto shows up there isnt a know-everything being in the universe who can monitor a chaotic battlespace and know if, as other anons have pointed out, a lasgun-on-shield atrocity was committed by a particular side or even by a panicky soldier who elected to take the enemy's lives along with his.All Frank had to do was say "Lasguns dont work against shields" and leave it at that; its this whole contrivance of "It makes a nuke" that's retarded, especially when theres already a nuclear balance of power with house atomics.This is also why every videogame made in the Duniverse (at least the RTS ones) dispense with shields altogether[Verification not required]
>>64418969There is nothing in the world that is immune to energy, period. Anything we meet that can't be killed by our current small fast moving rock will be met with small fast moving rock v2.0 and it will vaporize them or we will go to v3.0 and onward>>64426466There is in fact. Similar to the Feudal age it is copying information control and knowledge is one of the biggest pieces of maintaining the peace. The reason the strategy you are discussing doesn't happen is that for any house that has it used against them they will report it to the CHOAM and every other house will gleefully respond because it's permission to loot and rise in the ranks. The systems in place are not about perfect monitoring and discipline. They are global nation-state systems that prevent the worse outcome. The Atredies are quite literally the worse outcome and that's what Dune is about, the promise of a Messiah that brings about death so widespread that he himself sheds his destingy.
>>64426466Leto is a steelman of your position, not a counter to it. In the Cold War a common problem was: what if the enemy does something plausibly deniable that could be an attack, and we mistake it for an attack, and thus we spiral into nuclear war. Herbert was elaborating on this: even if we omnisicently know it's not an attack, that doesn't stop us from saying it is and moving a step up the escalation spiral.Being deniable takes mutual consent. If your enemy doesn't feel like helping you that day, it results in the Battle of Khasham (2018) and you get obliterated. Deniability is an extreme disadvantage in conventional war. That's why uniforms exist.
>>64418969Chemical weapons. Extreme heat. Or getting explosives past their shield and then hit them with a 20 psi pressure spike inside the shield. A very small charge could achieve that.
>>64419189You're thinking about maula pistols. And no they cannot penetrate body Shields.
>>64428426Shields stop both the impact as well as the explosive force of a missileThe blastwave travels well above the velocity threshold of the shield Poison gas would work, but its an unreliable weapon in the 20th century already
>>64426708>>64426963But why have all these contrivances to justify something we know realistically would happen to characters with angency in a living breathing universe when, again, the simple answer wouldve just been "Lasguns have no effect on shields" - when (again) "conventional" atomic weapons exist in-setting?And this isnt even touching upon the other things I brought up (like shields being canonically permeable to allow the wearer to breathe- which suggests Frank Herbert never heard of a SCUBA suit)
>>64428660They're direct parallels of a political reality, and throwing in some heightened contrast is what fiction is often about. You're simply ignorant of the cultural details of 20th century atomic strategy, and especially its impacts on the American educated classes of the time. Herbert was a pearl diver with an interest in ecology in the age of Jacques Cousteau (the man who invented and publicized scuba diving) so you can see the cold war isn't the only thing you're wholly ignorant of.
>>64426258>Starship troopers >bugs not peer levelBruh the fucking Arachnids had SUPERIOR technology to the Terran Federation they have full on plasma beams.
>>64425246Tell that to the daemons who shrug off a hit from a naval cannon like it was nothing
>>64428446>Shields stop both the impact as well as the explosive force of a missile>The blastwave travels well above the velocity threshold of the shieldHow come in literally every version of dune people can knock each other down by smashing into their enemy's shield?
>>64428780By that logic Guard flak vests are better than Terminator armor because one time my Sarge made three saves in a row.
>>64428824You can tackle people just fine, but shields do stop explosives
>>64428692"Heightened contrast" is putting it mildly, its more a weasel-worded means of excusing bad worldbuilding by conflating chalk and cheese tech (of the universe) with some commentary on nuclear doctrine.And the fact Herbert did a stint commercial diving only indicts him further, far as Im concerned.At the end of the day he wanted his Feudal Lords in space techno fantasy, needed to wedge in "swords and shields" then had to keep patching the leaky hull that was the concept.
>>64425246It has to do with the fact that demons are psychic entities that have taken corporeal form. It's more like... Sheer physical damage does hurt demons, but it hurts a lot more when there is emotional/psychic intent behind it. A random stray bullet might only annoy a demon, stagger it a bit. But a bullet aimed and fired with hateful intention to destroy the demon will hurt a lot more.And making conflict physical/melee and in-your-face-I-will-stab-you has a lot stronger emotional charge to it. So it often hurts the demon a lot more. Powerful psychic attacks will hurt the demon without even making any physical contact. Being close a person whose sheer emotional righteousness rejects the presense of the demon might be enough to simply banish the demon back into the warp without even touching it. For demons, Steel hurts ...but words hurt more.
>>64418969>immune to ranged weaponry, like the shielded warriors in DuneDune had a lot of contrivances to make shields work and even then IIRC crossbow bolts and/or an analogue were effective weapons. Realistically you could probably just fine-tune something like .45ACP to be slow enough.If you magically make all of the guns disappear then people lose range but militaries would be rocking cutting edge technology and the best modern crossbows can reliably put a lethal bolt into a torso at about 100 yards so IDK how much actually changes. There are a lot of things to consider, like latency. Even slow bullets travel relatively quickly and will generally have a pretty flat trajectory, a 100 yard shot with an AR is going to have a different arc than a 100 yard shot from a crossbow. More realistically (by my estimate) conflicts would take place at half that distance, that's a comfortable range for modern crossbows. I'd imagine armor wouldn't change that much, it might just be a bit thinner.Ultimately this is a "can swords come back?" thread and the answer is no, not really. Even if you magic away all of the guns and any future BP or SP then people are still going to use projectiles and they will continue to be very effective. Blades would probably become more relevant to some degree but you're still going to see the same ~12"OAL blades that are already carried today. You might see modernized fascine knives.
>>64428889>crossbow bolts and/or an analogue were effective weaponsbows and arrows could be stopped by shieldsthe only useful ranged weapon was a dart gun, which had such a low muzzle velocity that it needed poison to be lethal
>>64423794Frankly the only way you could justify "melee weapon only sci-fi" without it having massive glaring plotholes is basically just political, for some reason or other the major factions decided to make projectile weapons a war crime and anyone who uses them gets on the major factions orbital nuking list or something.Like, sure, it's still pretty stupid, but it's stupid in a "yeah, the government's pretty retarded" sort of way instead of a "this shit literally makes no sense" way.
>>64428882
>>64428889Arrows are a lot faster than fists you know
>>64428882>sheer emotional righteousnessWe get it already, a woman on her period is Jesus to you, you weird freak
weirding-style fighting makes no sense. it would basically just be wrestling instead of fencing
