After rule of cool of course. I'm just pondering how you all justify melee combat maintaining relevance in space and futuristic universes. In Dune it was fields where a gun could cause a nuclear explosion.In LOGH it was an explosive gas ignited by laser shot.In Star Wars to me lightsabers were more symbolic weapons of a more civilized time.
I know in 40k it is a bit all over the place for why melee combat remains due to power armor.
>Minovsky Particles
>>98669542Cyberpunk 2020 of all things had a very good explanation in the deep space sourcebook about spaceship hulls being very thin so the only viable munitions in space were frangible safety rounds like they use on airplanes. That on top of spaceships being rather cramped and confined spaces, and it being such a hostile environment that having your suit punctured is basically a death sentence.
>>98669542>In LOGH it was an explosive gas ignited by laser shot.Why didn't they just use regular guns?
>>98669869you know how a regular gun works right?
>>98669542Asian Landladies!
>>98669874If it's just invisible gun powder then just about anything could set it off. Like two axes striking each other can create sparks.
>>98669869>>98669874It seems a bit optimistic to think that you can all dress up in heavy metal armour and swing giant metal axes at each other without creating any sparks that can set off this extremely sensitive explosive gas that can be ignited by a small detonation.But even if you overlook that, the solution isn't to run around with axes. It is to equip everyone with military air guns. A technology that dates back to the age of sail, and that could easily be modernized to give soldiers a pistol caliber equivalent weapon that produces no muzzle flames.>>98669818This line of thinking falls apart when you realize that anything which can't easily penetrate a tinfoil hull also won't be able to penetrate a moderately armoured suit.The threat of a puncture is also overblown. Space suits have been punctured in real life, and small holes just end up getting plugged by the flesh of the occupant. It still greatly complicates stuff like treating bleeding gunshot wounds, and a hole through the fragile bits of an astronaut's life support system is going to lead to bad times, but an astronaut taking a round through a limb that isn't bleeding too badly is likely to be able to keep fighting for a few minutes before the need for treatment becomes critical, and even an immediate life support failure is going to give 90+ seconds for someone to get the victim to get to an oxygenated environment before death is a serious possibility.
>>98669542Most combat tends to take place in confined spaces where small arms and combat knives/clubs/hatchets work best.Combined with greater physical strength as well as the assistance of exo frames and muscles suits allows soldiers to fight and operate at enhanced levels where you can quickly be brought into melee combat.This is also not including the various forms of creatures, formally human and non-human, that have been created that can withstand small arms and close the distance quickly.
>>98669934All this to say the conventional combat favors long arms and range while the sort of combat that sees more extensive need for melee combat specialty is the sort typical soldiers are not going engage in typically.
>>98669542I don't bother; it's easier for me to just make a futuristic/space fantasy game, so I can put in whatever I want.
>>98669542Posthuman physiology requires posthuman martial artsAfter genetic or cybernetic enhancement close physical conflict returns to the forefront of combat doctrine, especially in confined Ships, Space Habitats and Planetary Outposts
>>98669934>>98669943>confined spaces Like space ships due to boarding for the sake of capturing might work?Wasn't expecting to see Hetza's work pop up.Hope he's doing alright.
>>98669542"We have treaties that banned guns, artillery & modern weapons in this AO to minimize the risk of escalating unauthorized engagements into actual shooting-wars between our factions, but apparently cqc and melee fighting is A-OK and does not count."
>>98669542
>>98671263what even happened to him?
>>98671280Latest danbooru post is from 3 months ago so hopefully he is fine.
>>98669542Setting wise I dont, guns are the general choice for most fighters and the mechanics I use (dark heresey) support this.But when designing encounters its easy to set up situations where a melee weapon is effective, such as establishing heavy cover and chokepoints. If a player has to charge across an open room of gunfire to attack it will make melee unatractive. But if they can get the drop on the enemy in tight quarters it makes for more dynamic fights.
Ironically, I feel like Traveller has the most sensible rationale for this: If you bothered to board a ship, that means you probably want to capture it. Otherwise, it'd be safer to poke it full of holes with shipboard weapons. If you want to capture it, you probably want it to be in operable condition. So do the crew you're trying to steal it from. So neither of you wants to fuck up a bunch of wiring and computers and pipes, especially if you're a pirate and want to drive your prize away under its own power, without spending days repairing it. Thus, melee remains relevant.
Almost all of zzz is about melee combat in urban fantasy environment, even if I don't think they said why that is so, beyond the implied rule of cool. I guess that's how you fight ethereals, using the W-engines and discs to armonize ether and then using close combat weapons to transfer the frequency? But not everyone does that, most ranged agents use ether weapons so you can totally weaponize it at range, and there's some ranged agents that use other elements like grace. Plus this all falls flat when you deal with other humans or mechs. This is even more strange when armed forces use assault rifles for their mooks, and not only to keep order against other humans, because they fight against ethereals like that as well (results may vary, and they have melee specialists as well, but the common assumption is that they are at least somewhat effective, soldier 11 used a recovered ballistic shield to approach a firing line-it is notable that she is able to parry bullets from automatic fire from one source)What probably makes more sense in the setting is, the W-engines use ether to power the super-human feats agents do, and that makes melee viable, like cyborgs in metal gear.
>>98669542It's only relevant in boarding actions. Firing high energy weapons inside a ship is a good way to fuck it up such that you may as well have just shot it down, instead. Personal weapons carried by boarding parties are 'shredders,' which use soft frangible rounds which'll pulp light vac suits and unprotected personnel but are ineffective against hardskins. So marines (on both sides) carry melee weapons (boarding axes, usually) to chop at weak bits of one another. Fairly easy to get to grappling ranges because sightlines on a ship are for shit.
>>98669542I usually end up creating a super material that requires psychic/soul control to use (make strong enough). You could keep shooting, it will damage the material, but using melee weapons made of that material shaves right through them. Thats why drones still exist, but mechs exist and need human pilots.I dont have a non-magic answer.
A battle axe isn't going to blow through the wall and fuck up your bathroom.
>>98669902It's more that everyone wore power armor and used vibro axes, so the kind of firepower you'd need to punch through that (lasers, usually) would set off the incendiary particles in the atmosphere.
>>98671474If you're willing to look, you can find a lot of worldbuilding in publicity materials of ZZZ, and one of those worldbuilding blocks is the fact that a lot of their weapons are made of, or include, Porceloy, which is their fantasy anti-ether material.Another of those little worldbuilding things is how the weapons work, and once you do you realize a lot of their weapons are more sciency than elemental or magical., pic related. For another example, since you brought up Soldier 11, her whole thing with the fire sword is just coating her sword in a flammable material, and causing sparks to light it up, which you do see in her ult animation, she grinds her sword against her backpack.
>>98669542>In Star Wars to me lightsabers were more symbolic weapons of a more civilized time.You're not wrong, except for the civilized time part. Back in the days of the OG trilogy, probably a day when your parents were more preocupied with dolls and toy trucks instead of bringing you into the world by fucking, the entire point of the lightsaber was it being a ceremonial weapon, it was meant to be the equivalent of the sabre US marines get to wear with their fancy uniforms.The entire point of lightsaber duels was a physical way to visualize an argument of philosophies, because George Lucas is a drama bitch, and what's more dramatic than two space monks fighting with weapons that were never meant to be used?Then the Star Wars fandom, at that point in life made up of little boy with the occasional weirdo adult, only saw laser swords and thought COOOOOOL!!!!!And this is how we ended up with Jedi who were meant to be space buddists, and Sith who were meant to be manipulators and behind the scenes evil guys, flipping around like 4.8 chinese gymnasts in the olympics and twirling laser swords like a baton on a marching band.
>>98671828Yeah, but the thing is, it's all made possible, or at least more effective, because of W-engines and the discs inside them. Granted, there's a lot of stuff that is more sciency than magical in the setting, and it makes sense internally. The only thing resembling magic at the moment are probably astra and yixuan, and there are explanations for them as well.
Make it so logistics in space are slow and unreliable so ammo based weapons are used sparingly, make strong shielding tech widely available, rendering the use of those weapons even more situational. And dont put any small scale energy weapons at all since they would require a huge power source or something like that.
>>98672364this only makes sense from a strategic perspective when planning a military campaign with multiple battles expected.From the viewpoint of an individual fighter the priority is going to be win fights not conserve resources, since a full magazine in your backpack isnt going to do you much good if you charge an opponent, he shoots you and then just takes your ammo.
>>98669542I consider melee weapons as sidearms for close-quarters fighting. When you're boarding a ship or storming a bunker, combat will often occur in confined spaces with no clear lines of sight, so fighters will often end up in melee range of each other and having a close combat weapon can be advantageous over a larger an bulkier gun. Plus in boarding actions you're either defending your own ship or presumably want to capture the enemy ship, and in both cases throwing around a lot of heavy firepower in confined spaces will likely lead to damage to the ship. Vibroblades and power armor battle-claws can also be used to cut through sealed bulkheads during boarding.Also, ranged weapons tend to be quite loud or flashy, and sometimes you just want a squad of stealth-armored cyber-ninjas to quietly sneak up to enemy guards and slit their throats without making a sound.
>>98669542decompressionalso blade works in field condition that kills every gun (mayby except AK), needs no ammo, near no maintnance and is relatively silent
>>98669542>In Dune it was fields where a gun could cause a nuclear explosion.Yeah and that was the stupidest part of Dune and I really wish I could delete that from the book more than any other section from any other book.>LOGH Never read it but that sounds Dune-esque so terrible. >Star Wars>muh symbolismYeah and if you were force sensitive you could use them to deflect blaster bolts and shit. They were an absolutely viable weapon if you were a jedi.>How do you have melee combat retain relevancy in your Sci-fi Universes?The answer is in The Forever War where they have that energy field that vaporizes anything that moves too quickly, used to deflect gunshots and laser bolts. As a result, all the enemy can do is move in and swing swords, meaning that to defeat an army inside a dome shield, you need to get into melee combat. Simple as that. I have yet to see a flaw in this and in fact using that shield would have a lot of tactical advantages (such as not getting shot). Also, Dune should have copied this with its own shields. Gunshots are too fast and too high-energy to break through a shield, which can respond to high kinetic impulse, but a thrust from a dagger or spear gets through no problem. Thus, "the slow blade kills" and it still makes sense to have your shields on if you're not a poor-af conscript (who gets rekt by everything).Any questions?
>>98672458>From the viewpoint of an individual fighter--From the viewpoint of the armorers, the individual fighter can blow it out their ass. They get what they are assigned, if a bullet costs 700,000 crebdits to fire at the enemy, we're handing it off to the ranged specialists that infantry dumbfuck over there has been assigned to protect from aproaching forces. They'll get their crossbow, they'll get their bolts, they'll slap a good sword onto their hip and then they'll say "thank you" and fuck off.
>>98669542Unironically "muh honor">Humanity expands across galaxy as loosely aligned planets with biggest military force being a neutral arbiter space army/cops with knight vibes>Because of knight vibes love dueling with melee weapons>Eventually a bunch decide "hey we have the biggest military in the galaxy by a massive margin and don't benefit lets conquer it and rule like kings">Eventually get halted after decades of war through mass conscription, economic mobilization of almost all of humanity, and planets being nuked, poisoned, or diseased into oblivion>Settle into a cold war between neo-feudalistic former space cops and the rest of humanity, far more militarized but still with space cops as arbiters between worlds and a threat if one planet acts out too much (even if their proportional power is massively reduced)>Space cops/former space cops still love dueling and smaller fights will generally be "hey lets not waste the lives of peasants/innocents, you get a sword, I get a sword, our elite space cops fight in a melee and winner gets what he wants"Sometimes it breaks down but the fear of conflicts escalating helps keep things under control for the most part, first you start shooting, then they start dropping bombs, then you start firing nukes, then they start releasing genetically targeted viruses that can infect billions
>>98673018>Also, Dune should have copied this with its own shields. Gunshots are too fast and too high-energy to break through a shield, which can respond to high kinetic impulse, but a thrust from a dagger or spear gets through no problem. Thus, "the slow blade kills"That is literally how shields work in Dune. The whole reason lasguns hitting shields causes a bigass explosion is because the laser beam is so fast and high-energy that when the shield attempts to bleed off the energy it causes a nuclear fusion reaction.
>>98673018>>98673483The films kind of biffed the shields though. They really seem like they fail by being overloaded rather than being bypassed by slower strikes. I get that it would be difficult to choreograph a slow knife fight but it would have been worth it.
>>98673483And it's unpredictable. The explosion may happen at any point between the shield and the lasgun, and can be anything from a firecracker to a fucking nuke. And because it may look indistinguishable from a nuke, and nukes are banned, using it means everyone else jumps you.That being said, I vaguely remember Frank Herbert saying the interaction was a mistake and he regrets putting that in the books.
>>98669542In my homebrew cyberpunk game, there's two ways for elite troops to mitigate ranged damage. One is through armour, and one is through energy shields. An energy shield is excellent at stopping energy weapons (i.e massless projectiles/beams that have momentum), while armour is bad at it. Because armours are almost entirely built to stop projectiles travelling at high speeds (by using, for example, non-newtonian fluids), they are not as good at stopping other kinds of weapons travelling at slower speeds, including melee weapons. Some troops, especially fighting in jungles/urban, arm themselves with melee weapons to bypass enemy defences.For non-elite troops, it's usually a question of money, and what you aim to achieve. Some people (often raiders and scavengers and similar outside the mega citties) simply don't have access to guns. In the cities, the gang wars in run down blocks in mega cities usually don't aim to kill their enemies, they want to force them into subjugation. But also, lots of places have mach-detectors. When something breaks the sound barrier, security is called automatically. To ensure that security forces don't interfere in fights, gangs sometimes go for melee.With all that said, guns still dominate all sections of combat. But there's plenty of times when it's more practicaly with melee.
>>98673018I forget wasn't the Taurans bad at melee which is why the humans are so gun-ho about fighting in melee?
>>98673848I think the scifi channel one did the best job of showing shield knife fights, but they don't come up much in the novel anyway, the entire idea was shields aren't a functional defence on Arrakis so everything was more brutal and primitive. https://archive.org/details/dune-2_202407/Dune1.mp4knife fight's at 08:34 and has a good mix of slow, fast, style changes and adjusting shields to compensate in a way that gets across the story beats, characters and content that is mirrored in the final knife duel, its more about immobilizing an opponent and getting to the point you can slowly push a knife through.
>>98669542I set my world mostly underwater. Bullets lose force quickly, torpedos are slow and too expensive to use on human sized targets, harpoon guns need time to be reloaded. They DO work, but more often than not, you're going to want to prioritize maneuverability underwater and use something capable of brute forcing water resistance, like a pile bunker or explosives.
>>98671730>Personal weapons carried by boarding parties are 'shredders,' which use soft frangible rounds which'll pulp light vac suits and unprotected personnel but are ineffective against hardskins. So marines (on both sides) carry melee weapons (boarding axes, usually) to chop at weak bits of one another.No crowbars or other prying weapons?
>>98672458Soldiers will do what they are allowed to, we had ship guards with magazines wrapped in plastic because of retarded ROE and the whole "nothing more than three-rounds bursts for the grunts because they just spray and pray if they are allowed to".You can totally manipulate the end result by acting on the logistic side.
>>98669542gun shortage
>>98669542In our game, ammunition is sparse because the fighting is taking place across facilities built around earth's orbit. Mankind has some localized space travel, but not actual "combat" style space fleets; mostly orbital defense grids, things like that. But the rebellion was formented from mining guilds and prison colonies, sa well as some habitats built in outer orbit. Earth is basically a ruined mess, the environment is fucked beyond repair, population decline is ongoing, manufacturing has poisoned the earth, and so on. So things aren't exactly in abundance anymore.Actually it's quite possible humanity goes extinct in our campaign, we'll see.
>>98673483>The whole reason lasguns hitting shields causes a bigass explosion is because the laser beam is so fast and high-energy that when the shield attempts to bleed off the energy it causes a nuclear fusion reaction.Yeah and it's still retarded because it leads to "uMmMm wHy dOnT tHeY jUsT uSe sUiCiDe bOmBeRs" (sorry for insufferable zoomer alternating caps mockery) and then you have to explain all the ritualization that surrounds warfare in Dune which clashes with the realpolitik plotting but still leaves a lot of plot holes that are explainable but difficult to explain.It would have been much easier if it was just "shields work on laser bolts and guns but not on knives" and left it at that.>>98673848It's not that the knife strikes are slower, it's that even a fast knife strike is slower than a bullet. >>98674085I think so yeah. Which is funny because I kept thinking of minotaurs, bigger and stronger than humans, while I was reading.
>>98669542Effective legislation to combat the rampant gun crime throughout the galaxy has made firearms outside of law enforcement/military use very difficult to come by, leading to a resurgence in the use of melee weapons and martial arts among civilians and criminal gangs.
>>98671263Space ships, houses, alleyways, whatever building. Any situation where close quarters is possible the distance will be crossed.The PCs and the people they deal with are the sorts who have the training and strength to engage that way.
>>98669542I don't.
>>98674687>made firearms outside of law enforcement/military use very difficult to come byOnly the reliable, readily available mass produced stuff...
Augmentations increase human speed and durability dramatically, at typical engagement ranges, the aggressor will be able to close in seconds and the projectiles you're able to send their way in that time will be unlikely to disable them.
>>98674619>It's not that the knife strikes are slower, it's that even a fast knife strike is slower than a bullet.In the book they say the shields are calibrated to stop a fast knife strike but not a slow knife strike. They can dial them into different speeds too, not sure why they don't just set it to stop even slow knife strikes (maybe this would stop air getting through?).
>>98673284>unironically "muh honor">Sometimes it breaks down but the fear of conflicts escalating helps keep things under control for the most part, first you start shooting, then they start dropping bombs, then you start firing nukes, then they start releasing genetically targeted viruses that can infect billionsI kind of like this really. Now I envision a culture where melee combat is emphasized heavily across futuristic/feudal culture and disputes are solved by 1v1 of best fighters in an arena. Also there's a huge gambling culture there where gamblers place bets on which sci-fi melee space man is gonna win the duel for his tribe/clan/nation to solve the dispute.Think Bionicle Glatorians but in space and the gladiators are humans.
>>98669542Some people are genetically incapable of using ranged weapons
>>98669542cosmic horror if you use guns cutulu rapes you.
>>98674088It annoys me that despite how brutally the mini-series mogs DUNC, zoomers refuse to watch it because of muh silly costumes and bad CGI.
science 2 has been discovered and fighting to the death with swords is just a very effective fuel for the super tecnology that is used with science 2.
>>98673159>>98674264>soldiers>armorersYou are describing people governed by strategic constraints. This goes out the window with anyone not part of a chain of command, such as most player characters. My point is that if you have bullets you use them first or the other guy does. Obviously taking the bullets away stops their use, but anyone with the option to shoot is acting against their own self preservation if they choose not to.
>>98676154But how many clips can an individual carry and how effective would it be against a power armored+shielded specialist, let alone several of them, they would probably shoot you back from behind their shields and everyone runs out of ammo without killing much and then its back to melee, then at that point if its gonna come to that, may aswell save the weight and space, drop guns altogether, skip the ranged part, and develop a melee doctrine for power armor.
>>98676154Anon, if you don't have a logistic chain behind you you are responsible for your own supply, so you definitely have to consider when to shoot and how much.>You are describing people governed by strategic constraintsEveryone is.
You can also have programmable bullets with mini thrusters that can chabge direction mid flight, go around the shields and into the armor joints, but the cost of that ammo and weapon would be astronomical. Then super high powered rifles that go through all the shielding would also be an option, but such a thing would also bore holes through ship hulls and equipment, so it would be reserved only to very highly trained individuals who know when to use them if at all.
>>98674282I do wonder how effective a Home Guard/People's Storm/Conscripts with Spears and Nades against an WW2 era army? Like give them all a few cheap flashbangs, maybe give them a single sticky firebomb. Train them to throw the flash in before charging in with the spear. Shit how would something like that even work in a sci-fi setting? The Local PDF needs more bodies but their printer factories don't have enough mats to make the guns and the ammo for the guns but it can sim some dangerous flashbangs and has enough cheap metals to make simple spears, the local gov AI gen a training video.
>>98676372It can work if you want it to work, you can pick and choose any relevant factor. A charge against a gunline can succeed if the line doesn't have enough firepower to stop it in its tracks, due to protection, or the use of concealment that prevents the line to fire effectively in the first place. You can say the enemy charging has an advantage over the firing line due to leveraging doctrine, for example. Let's say you have a western firing squad IN SPACE, precision fire by small arms is the killing blow while the high rof weapon is the pinning element. If you are proof against that fire you are free to move forward. But the same wouldn't work in the case of an eastern doctrine firing line where small arms provide pinning and the support weapon is higher caliber to provide the killing. These are very simplified examples that don't take into factor a lot of other elements and fancy toys modern squads can have, just to illustrate the point.Personal protection is also a very important element that influences doctrine. Our whole way of war is designed around the fact that you don't want to be seen, because then you'd be shot, it hurts, and you can't hope to protect yourself effectively at a certain point.
>>98676083Its my favourite of the lot for sure. The costumes should be silly, they're a baroque space empire, making everything look tacticool military scifi is a let down given the new one's budget but not unexpected. Having more than one visual theme isn't a thing Villeneuve has ever been up to. It apparently worked looking at the numbers. That said, its an entirely different marketing approach. The new movies are not made for people who read the books. The idea of recreating a scifi or fantasy series for the reader is more or less dead. Has been at least since GoT. Makes sense, impossible to please, low audience count, no real point trying to get them. If you do, bonus, but not a financially worthwhile target audience. I sure as fuck am not paying to see it in a theatre, they lost me at the trailer.
>>98676227>effective would it be against a power armored+shielded specialist.Probably not very effective, but even if in all likelihood your shots will not be effective it is just plain logical to try. Try this scenario.>you are engaging an opponent who you assume is equally or better armed than yourself, you have a gun, a sword and a shield. The shield renders guns innefective 75% of the time.>if you assume your opponent will not shoot, and charge across the room without shooting first. You have now presented them with a golden opportunity to fire at you, even with the shield that gives them a 1 in 4 chance of killing you without having to risk engaging in melee.>logically you can assume all fighters know this, so unless the circumstances of the fight (cramped, poor visibility) make melee a nessesity. Shooting first and leaving melee as a second option stays the best tactic.Once again though I am referencing fighters that arent constrained by the strategic cost of ammunition, civilians practicing self defence, criminals in a bad deal, player characters who might only engage in combat once every few sessions, not soldiers conserving ammo across a campaign.>>98676234If you are a civillian practicing self defence for the first time in their life in what may be the only violent encounter you ever experience, logic dictates you go all out and spend every resource available on self preservation, not reserve it just in case another fight happens down the road.
>>98677015Oh I know that, that's why I'm asking about WW2 era warfare and sci-fi stuff. Like what if it's just alien raiders, and you're a leader of a colony. You don't have the advance machinery to make the future weapons but making cheap throwable bombs and spears is pretty damn easy. So when the raid is happening all of your people would be a risky chance to the alien raiders.
>>98678113are you the OP? because OP was talking about justifying having melee in a sci-fi setting in general, but you seem to be moving the goalpost. But Ill give you a quick one, regardless of armies or individuals. make power armor so good that bullets are useless against it, but melee has some phase tech that can cut through it, so it is ranged vs unarmored and melee vs armored
>>98674619>It would have been much easier if it was just "shields work on laser bolts and guns but not on knives" and left it at that.I imagine the thought process was>I want melee combat to be prevalent>Let's have shields that stop bullets but not slow melee weapons>It's the future, they probably should have lasers or something>But wait, lasers are just light, if the shield stops light, you can't see anything, and if it's transparent, lasers can just shoot straight through it>Fuck it, lasers make it explode because too much energy or something
>>98669542Melee gladiator fights in science fiction futuristic settings might be a good excuse to have melee combat remain relevance. Especially for betting and cheering masses.
>>98679221True and another reason why lasers are retarded and should be removed.
>>98676154>My point is that if you have bulletsThat's a really big 'if' holding your idea together. Reread the post slowly.>>98672364>logistics in space are slow and unreliable so ammo based weapons are used sparinglyThis is the most important part of the post. You don't have bullets. Every ounce of copper used in the bullet casing is an ounce not used in the wiring of a ship's life-support system. Every chemical primer or propellant is a chemical not used in an artificial habitat's fertilizers, the plants that make your air breathable and put food on your plate. Every bit of lead is a million bucks worth of transportation costs not spent on moving the previous materials to where they need to go. And that's assuming you even have the machines to make bullets! That shit may be on another planet, months away, waiting for the shipping route to clear up so that your shipment isn't intercepted and used by the enemy against you.You don't have bullets. You have what your poor-ass colony can make on its own. And if that means crossbow, sword and buckler, that means you're getting an crossbow, sword and buckler.
>>98674968Presumably you need to be able to reach out of your shield to kill the other guy.This is why I loved the introduction of House Ordos in the videogame series and their basic foot trooper just being a dude with a poison gas sprayer in Emperor: Battle for dune.
>>98678814>moving the goalpost.No im not op, but i think I took the context of OP's post differently.Being that they didnt specifically mention military settings, the cost of space travel or scarcity. Just a general question of "sci fi" settings. My responses were intended to discuss the proposed idea of limiting ammunition and whether it would stop anyone with acess but not ordered to conserve it to do so.With power armour I look at real life parallels, throughout history its been pretty clear that we are generally capable of producing projectiles that can defeat whatever the finest armor of the day is. In contrast melee is reliably defeated by centuries old technology, of course with things like "phase tech" this becomes irrelevant but also starts falling into high tech fantasy.
>>98680176>Reread the post slowly.Reread my response.>Obviously taking the bullets away stops their use.My point is that in a life or death scenario, IF you have bullets, even If they cost an arm and a leg and might be the only ones you ever see, and even if they might not be effective, it makes no sense to conserve them at the potential cost of your life.Strategic constraints such as the logistics of space travel you meantioned make sense to why an army in the setting would avoid firearms. But in a setting where firearms exist and are limited in distribution, wealthy independent people (such as most player characters) start seeing guns as expensive automatic win buttons. Your sword and buckler might be practical, but spend a million or so on a 9mm and you are now the most dangerous person in town, as long as you are willing to use it.
>>98669542Decadence.
>>98669542In our world, weapons have advanced to such a degree that armor can only mitigate, not fully protect, the wearer from the forces involved. Just have the opposite in your setting; everyone is running around in power armor, and the only way to deal with it is to equip everyone with artillery and heavy weapons, or use melee and CQB to physically tear the armor off of them. It's not very realistic, but who cares? You get your swords in space aesthetic, without requiring any sort of asspull.
It's a dark forest scenario where extremely powerful FTL radar and FTL travel exists, and the only way to cloak yourself also requires anything around you to be moving within ~50m/s of your velocity vector, so the main method of combat is a form of ambush where you sneak around until you spot someone within the range where cloaking doesn't work, getting extremely close, then sending in your guys to eliminate via melee combat before a distress signal can be sent. Like in eve online, 2X v 1X is a near-guaranteed defeat for the smaller and you have more enemies than allies (there are hundreds of alliances who mostly hate each other), so if you shoot before getting in range all of your enemies will zoom towards you while cloaked, and one is practically guaranteed to find you since they will surround where you were last detected. Unless one alliance was a majority of the entire population and had no internal civil wars (extremely unlikely), not only would using guns be suicide, but everyone else would be incentivized by game theory to eliminate you without using guns themselves.
>>98669542I'm not sure if this is as good of a reasoning as I think it is but the idea of a weapon that will never run out of ammo or need reloading will forever remain useful. Especially when logistics and supply chains are extra complex in any sci-fi setting. Its also the kind of weapon that if one party has and uses to effect, everyone else will also need to use it to adapt.
>>98669542Space ships in space. Sci-fi often ignores this to let characters go pew-pew in a ship corridor, but with how advanced weapons would be, boarding a ship and firing guns seems like a surefire way to fuck yourself and whatever you boarded the ship for. Equally the crew of that ship likely wants to keep it intact. So melee combat it is.
it's not a sci-fi world but all I did for my setting was drastically increase what's possible at baseline fitness for a human (or equivalent thereof), though mostly only in bursts. the armor of the setting is also more reliably bullet resistant, especually heavy armor. a trained soldier can semi-reliably dodge a bullet once or twice, and rely on his breastplate to take a shot or two that he failed to dodge. ranged combat is still generally the king of most engagements, but if armies get scrunched up on eachother, which does happen a lot for reasons omitted for brevity, melee suddenly becomes really important.
If you really think about it. Guns are just Knife Launchers, and everything is now in Melee ranges.
>>98669542By tying melee proficiency to other skills. Memetics are king and it's far more instinctively visceral to bash someone's head in with a rock than the fine coordination and maths of setting up a sniper shot. For most purposes guns win out but when your forebrain is being rented out as an Eldritch insanity interpreter or gibbering violence is the message fists (and the odd knife if you're feeling fancy) work wonders.>>98669934Partly because sprawling corridors offer a home field advantage, there's an incentive to build even bigger ships this way (function allowing, labyrinthine holds are bad for stevedore business). Attackers can of course blow open longer sightlines but if you're boarding a ship where the crew may be a threat instead of blowing it into space-hulkdom first presumably you don't want it depressurised. >>98671322 with a Viet Kong twist.Incidentally a lot of the capital in the setting above is human (memes are king and they run on neural wetware). Hand to hand lets you be more discriminate about who you butcher relative to auto fire (again, boarding presumes value is a priority).>>98674145Nice. Like how it'd effect melee too with a predominance of thrust weapons over slash. Bringing weird stuff like suction feeding into melee would be neat, there's a lot you could do with a cloak of "smart" fabric (key among it's abilities would a low-drag portability mode, maybe even a sort of undulating DPV).>>98675944Metal. Pairs well with transhuman should a twisted sense of honour be one of the few remaining unifying factors.>>98676257Feels like a nice way to introduce pseudo-mystical "named bullets" to SF where advanced tech has become the stuff of legends.>>98682052I can see that working at the ship level to guarantee ordinance knife-fights but the density of dudes seems harder to apply outside of a seething hive. In boarding for instance are there not always going to be just two main factions at play?
>>98679876Traditional gladiators also had a cultural component in that combat re-enacted some historical or mythopoetic component of Roman culture.
>>98675944I was thinking more like maybe mutually assured destruction and while combat might be ritualized it isn't always explicitly 1v1. As an example.>Space pirates decide to attack ship>Both ships can easily obliterate each other and have no real means to survive an attack by the other (too much munitions moving too fast to evade and one nuclear missile will kill everyone on the ship hit)>Pirates launch attack craft and manually board the ship>If pirates break conventions of war the ship can just flash halls with radiation to give every pirate a lethal dose of radiation so pirates stick to melee>If the crew decide to use guns pirates will shoot back with their guns and their ship could just cut losses, fire a payload of nuclear missiles and try to dipSo kind of like a cold war situation where you don't want to escalate too much. However the core driving factor of melee being allowed is still the neo-feudalistic order as it empowers the upper classes who could afford superior weapons, armor, and a lifetime of training in melee combat while real soldiers have to train with guns and stuff just in case the situation escalates. Nobles tacitly allow violence within those restrictions, if not outright than through greater punishments for escalation.>Mugging with a knifeImprisonment>Mugging with a gunExecution>Murder with a knifeExecution>Murder with a gunGruesome and painful public execution>Self-Defense killing with a swordFree to go>Self-Defense killing with a gun against a gunFree to go>Self-Defense killing with a gun against a knifeExecutionSo even at the lowest levels melee combat is endorsed, and while the pirates in the prior example would probably be executed if captured if they started using guns and got captured they'd all be publicly hanged, drawn, and quartered and their next of kin stripped of all rights and enserfed.
>>98683902Huh. The mythopoeic aspect actually seems pretty relevant to >>98683363. All starships function with a bare minimum of certain interlocking, standard template techno-cults (advanced tech requires transhuman savantry, cults are the supporting infrastructure).So while melee boarders are outclassed by guns (restraint for seizing value and memetic compromises aside) they may "slot in" to broad spectrum cultic roles and so be better able to infiltrate the ship without triggering certain countermeasures. Starships are borderline genius loci infested and running on barely-sane AI so there are elements of MAD at play too (though for things to have reached boarding the situation has to have degenerated severely already)."Muh honor" enforced less by tacit shared consent (still an influence but massively outweighed by anarchic desperation) than interoperability (you can alter your mythic OS to brook no infiltration but handicap your ability to assimilate foreign human capital in doing so).Nice reason for the redacted caste of transhuman I'd had knocking around, they were warrior-mink translators who spoke the universal language of Ultraviolence. Already knew they were purged because for all the screaming and bloodletting they were borderline hive-mind hyperempaths, now they have a (discontinued) role as proxy duellist / infiltrators as well as translators (flying fists speak where all other languages fails) to justify their pre-purge abundance. Yes, they are Jedi as stone-age LARPers.
>>98683902>Pokemon CircusI guess they also had dozens of different names for the bread.
>>98683957>Self-Defense killing with a gun against a knife>ImprisonmentFixed that for you.
>>98684300Triumphs included what amount to "it's a small world" displays on wagons. The average Roman pleb knew sweet fuck all about the wider empire unless they joined the military. Gladiators grew from funerary games but also took on the Triumph's edutainment (IE thinly-veiled propaganda) aspect. Plus, look at WWE today. Everyone loves to see national stereotypes duke it out so long as the home team wins (on second thought it seems like another discredited use for these >>98684187 psychos...).
>>98684309Potentially, and probably would vary based on the realm's specific laws, the point is that escalation itself is a grievous crime, at least past the point of melee weapons (where the highly trained nobility have an advantage over plebs). Also weapon laws would probably be a thing too.
I feel dumber for having read many posts in this thread. Melee doesn't need to be justified. The more mental gymnastics you put behind justifying whats basically a law of nature the more infantile and divorced from reality you sound. Many, many people carry and use melee implements today. They would still do so a billion years from now.
>>98685457If guns exist in your setting, the assumption is characters have access to them, legitimate or not. Main reason for carrying a melee weapon when there's an intention of harming a fellow human stems from not being able to procure a far superior alternative. If I had to kill a nigga I'd pick my gun over a knife ten out of ten times.
>>98685457>mental gymnasticsProjecting>Many, many people carry and use melee implements todayYeah, when there's a justification, for example Yakuza and Britbongs using swords and knives because guns are difficult to legally acquire and rare in those countries, this is what is known as a justification.Guns will be taken over melee weapons by default, if you want melee to be relevant in a game you need a justification whether force fields, laws, muh honor, or power weapons/lightsabers.
>>98673018I haven't read the Forever War but I've always thought Dune style shields were by far the best way to make melee combat relevant in a high tech setting, albeit with a few tweaks like removing the silly laser nuke thing. Depending on exactly what limitations you decide to give the shields you could keep ranged combat relevant too, it's a really versatile concept.
>>98686032its a good idea but the way frank pervert applied it was fucking stupid and nothing any of the factions did on arrakis in the books or the films made sense with regards to shields lasguns or conventional guns
>>98685859Its an incorrect assumption rooted in the convenience of hollywood magic, video games and some tabletop games where guns always have exorbitant amounts of ammo, always work, never lose the zero even after being dropped thrown or used like a baseball bat, don't missfeed when fired at ridiculous angles while moving, are laser accurate even in full auto at ludicrous distances, bad guys always go down in 1-3 shots, no ones smart enough to grab it or get around and surround the hero and the authorities mysteriously never show up even after thousands of rounds were fired. >>98685868I'm trying not to be mean but unironically touch grass man.
>>98686289>Its an incorrect assumption rooted in the convenience of hollywood magic, video games and some tabletop games where guns always have exorbitant amounts of ammoEnough for a fire fight generally if you're equipped for it. How often do police run out of ammo? Regardless if you run out of ammo you're better off retreating or surrendering than being a retard and charging in with a sword.>always work, never lose the zero even after being dropped thrownIf anything guns jam far too frequently in fiction. A modern military rifle can fire tens of thousands of rounds before jamming and even then most jams can be easily cleared in less than a second.>or used like a baseball batWhy would you use your weapon like a baseball bat? Are you retarded?>don't missfeed when fired at ridiculous angles while movingMaybe if you're using the least reliable firearm ever.>are laser accurate even in full auto at ludicrous distancesSo the solution to this instead of firing more slowly over ludicrous distances is to run across ludicrous distances to stab them?>bad guys always go down in 1-3 shotsMore reliable than stabbing a guy 1-3 times.>no ones smart enough to grab it or get around and surround the heroSounds more like a way to defeat a guy in melee>and the authorities mysteriously never show up even after thousands of rounds were fired.Doesn't stop criminals from using guns or doing drive bysNone of your thoughts are solved by switching to or specifically using melee.
>ERA allows a unit to tank multiple shits from ranged weapons>but melee weapons are either massive enough to cut through ERA or precise enough to target uprotected areas
>>98686350>Regardless if you run out of ammo you're better off retreating or surrendering than being a retard and charging in with a sword.Against cannibal space pirates while the Solar Marshals are still several light-minutes out?
>>98688236Suicide is also an option, it's a lateral move compared to running at guys with guns while wielding a sword since the end result is no different. Also who does an entire ship not carry enough ammo to resist a single boarding action? A ship should be able to carry 2,000 rounds of ammo per crew member.
>>98688402Ideally the ship should be made out of ammo.
Nobody in these (for some reason recurrent) threads has ever been able to explain to me WHY I would keep melee relevant in a sci fi game.
>>98669934>Confined space>HatchetI want to stab you
>>98691026Rule of cool. That's it. If you disagree about what's cool that's fine, doesn't change others liking it and wanting to include it more believably.
>>98691055That's literally it? Jesus. I think I object most to the have-cake-and-eat-it part. Ok, you like swordfighting, fine. You have to graciously surrender your claim to realism.
>>98691118Realism isn't a strict binary you retard. You can toss things in you enjoy while retroactively finding ways to partially justify them. "Because I like it" remains the ultimate cause (as OP and anyone sane says) but you can expand on that to suit whatever veneer of realism you prefer. This is 99% of how make-believe works.
>>98691118>You have to graciously surrender your claim to realism.Well, I dunno if you noticed, but you're in a thread about space combat. Space combat that could never happen because space travel as envisioned by most tabletop games, videogames, TV shows, and movies is outright impossible because it breaks the laws of reality. So, kindly fuck off with your realism talk, and let the people who care talk in peace.
>>98691026RPG combat systems evolved from medieval wargames with heavy emphasis on melee combat. The emphasis on individual characters and dungeon-crawling adventures in an RPG aligns well with close-quarters, hand-to-hand combat systems. These systems usually exploit trait differences between characters, where a character with high strength may be good with axes while the character with high dexterity uses the bow&arrow. Guns are famously "equalizers" that neutralize advantages in size and strength, exactly the opposite of what RPG systems originally evolved to emphasize. Of course guns aren't total equalizers, there can still be relevant traits distinguishing characters from each other (shot accuracy, draw quickness, etc), and athleticism isn't totally eliminated, but the point is you still have to make the choice: Either adapt your RPG to make fully gun-oriented combat interesting, or adapt it to limit their effectiveness so traditional melee combat still functions. You're making an adaptation either way, because the default is medieval weaponry.
>>98669943I agree with this>>98669934>Most combat tends to take place in confined spaces where small arms and combat knives/clubs/hatchets work best.But not this. Mostly because I think "work best" is ambiguous. Pistols are very effective at close range. Standing 6-10 feet apart, one guy with a knife the other has a pistol, bet on the guy with the pistol. But "work best" as far as what makes for a compelling turn-based combat sequence? Yes the melee weapons work better.
>>98686289>Its an incorrect assumption rooted in the convenience of hollywood magic, video games and some tabletop games where guns always have exorbitant amounts of ammo, always work, never lose the zero even after being dropped thrown or used like a baseball bat, don't missfeed when fired at ridiculous angles while moving, are laser accurate even in full auto at ludicrous distances, bad guys always go down in 1-3 shots, no ones smart enough to grab it or get around and surround the hero and the authorities mysteriously never show up even after thousands of rounds were fired.Most of these points are basically downstream of the part where he said:>not being able to procure a far superior alternativeIn other words, if you run out of ammo or gun jams critically, you'll want a melee weapon to fall back on. (Of course, in the real world, if you run out of ammo your survival is out of your control whether you have a backup weapon or not)>bad guys always go down in 1-3 shotsThis is the same with melee weapons. "Bad guys" don't go down after a single stab wound. Even a fatal stab to the neck aorta will take time.>no ones smart enough to grab it Pulling guns out your opponents hand in the heat of combat IS hollywood ninja BS.
>>98692443>adapt your RPG to make fully gun-oriented combat interestingBut this is the obviously correct thing to do if your game is set after the invention of the repeating rifle.
>>98692661>But this is the obviously correct thing to do if your game is set after the invention of the repeating rifle.No, it's not. You have creative freedom to choose either one.
>>98669542Power armor has made firearms less effective, but melee weapons are much better against it. Also futuristic pistols aren't much worse than rifles so having a melee weapon in one hand and a gun in the other is a viable way to fight.
>>98671276The Indians and Chinese are doing this RIGHT FUCKING NOW.
>>98697717Yes, that's why he posted a picture of it Captain Retard. I swear to God this site is becoming more and more retarded every day.
>>98696879>Power armor has made firearms less effective, but melee weapons are much better against it.Unless your melee weapons have some special property this doesnt make sense, at least in the form of traditional weapons. Ranged weapons traditionally need to get bigger to crack harder armor, which if the power armor is enhancing strength enough to damage other suits in mellee it should allow for.So either the weapons have power fields or some other effect, in which case. Why cant guns also have these effects?Or potentially mellee has become two guys trying to exert enough continued force on each other to crack the others armored shell, making hydraulic jaws/giant nut crackers the peak weapons of the day.
>>98669542Scifi guys are fighting in spaceSpace is big and hard to move a lot of people through who you have to pay and feed for a long time, so you can move relatively few for a given amount of resourcesSo relatively fewer can be enlisted productively compared to the population of e.g. modern dayThen to make militaries more competitive it's more efficient to equip them better, variably investing in power armour, jetpacks, forcefields, cybernetic enhancement, stealth, teleportation, electronic warfare, esoteric powers or whatever else, all working to push longer ranged weaponry back to a supporting role by limiting a military's ability to detect a soldier and the damage they may cause upon doing soPlus as they're deploying from space they're spread out fighting largely autonomously over entire regions, or even worlds, so ammunition resupplies will be rare as it's rarely worth using spacecraft to resupply you that could be deploying more troops somewhere else, and you don't often have coherent battlelines to gather critical masses of firepower behind, or consolidated targets for that mass to destroy
>>98696879>>98698426In any futuristic setting, as soon as you come up with a reason to use a sci-fi magic blade or whatever over a gun, your first question had better be "why don't I just make a projectile launcher that shoots magic knives".Given the hydraulic nutcracker example, I'm now imagining soldiers in power armour carrying bazookas that launch comically large mecha crab claws at each other. Given that the jaws of life do not benefit in the slightest from having a human form behind them, it would honestly be pretty effective if somehow that was the only way to kill a power armoured soldier, and the range advantage would be overwhelming compared to a bunch of guys in suits waddling up to you with those same mecha claws in their hands.
>>98669542The answer is speed.Once person moves fast enough, it becomes uneconomic to try and shoot him.
>>98669886Hovercats. I'm going to use that somewhere.
