ITT: ideas for sci-fi melee weapons and/or world-building attempts to justify them being in widespread use

>a futuristic or a near-fururistic setting
>body armor technology has gone through a breakthrough
>almost everyone now wears a very thin and flexible full-body suit that greatly diminishes the effect of projectile weapons, the force of impact of the projectile is spread out across the suit's user's entire body
>as a result, traditional firearms are much less useful tools for killing, especially in close quarters, but are still used in great number because of their availability and ability to reliably stun and damage combatants from a distance
>energy weapons are much more deadly, but are very expensive and only really used rarely as a consequence
>high-tech melee weapons also exist, but are more like luxury items because of their impractibility, high cost and high level of skill needed to use them

Also in space, no one can protect you from being launched the other way by shooting a gun, so either you make space bows or you use melee weapons

Maybe you guys can help, im trying to figure out a melee weapon for a one off cyborg npc with super-strength. It needs to be easily stored, I was thinking of just giving him an electric telescoping baton but I was wondering if anyone else had a more fun idea. Its a close to hard sci-fi setting so nothing too crazy.

>what are recoilless rifles
>or gyrojets
>or lasers
The acceleration of a modern gun would not be very much and could be corrected for.

An avenue I pursued was, rather than pursuing technological options for scifi melee weapons, looking into what living things would need to be made of for melee to be more efficient.

Anything highly compressible, say, a creature with alcohol for blood, or some kind of balloon robot, is going to much, much less damaged by a high energy, penetrating attack, compared to what we're used to happening when you shoot a person.

For something like that, you want slashing or twisting weapons, something nearly impossible to do at a distance.

>Also in space, no one can protect you from being launched the other way by shooting a gun, so either you make space bows
>a gun will cause recoil,
>a bow will not cause recoil

Thank you for demonstrating you have no understanding of the laws of motion or physics, you retard. Loosing a bow will cause you to start to move backwards as well.

Also
>swing melee weapon in zero G
>start rotating in the void like a tard, throw up inside your helmet and fly off into the distance screaming because you didn't correct for rotational momentum

From the outside, sure. But assuming we're going with hard Sci-fi, even piercing a small wire could cause catastrophic results inside.

You wouldn't want to spray bullets everywhere. Swords, while still really dangerous, are much more contained and controllable.
I'd think that rapiers, epees, and sabres would be the ideal weapon, precise and doesn't require you to wrestle your opponent.

I've always liked dunes "shields that stop anything moving fast and explode nuclearly when shot with lazors"
as an explanation for melee weapons

Why not >muh honour?

The Predator could easily have just blasted the jungle with lasers, miniature black holes or anti-matter from the comfort of his ship, but he didn't. He went onto the ground, shanked some people, shot some people with a low-tech plasma gun, and fought a honourable melee battle with Billy and Dutch.

Quick rundown on the Legends explanation
>crystal is aligned to the force
>provides power
>saber emits plasma
>plasma is held in a magnetic field, thus forming the blade
They are no light sabers, they're just called that because it sounds cool. Star Wars lasers aren't lasers either, they're plasma weapons. Bigger versions of blasters.

they would just wear something over top of it... its essentially what we do now, just all in one vest

and we'd probably resort to some kind of radiation gun before electric melee weapons

How about "guns were just never invented,gunpowder doesn't exist", then you could have high tech society but with bows and high tech swords

If gunpowder doesn't get invented, bows will just straight up disappear along with crossbows outside killing unarmoured people.

The bow and crossbow were already completely unable to kill plate armoured people around the end of the Renaissance/beginning of the Early Modern period.

If you wanted someone in plate to die at a distance, you'd have an entire squad of gunners aim at that single armoured guy and hope for a lucky shot, or you just shot a cannon at him.

Some sort of retractable blade like pic related?
His fists should be strong enough to maim people if he is super strong
Electrified hands?
Some sort of knuckle weapon
Retractable whips, posssibly electrified

High tech arrows could have electric charges on them

Didn't Dune have some sort of personal forcefield that stopped high velocity projectiles but not swords? If you have the tech to make it happen, it's certainly possible. You need air to breath and you don't want to be protected from a chair when you try to sit down so you calibrate it to only activate when something moving at 60mph or greater comes at you.

This is surprisingly reasonable.

It seems obvious in hindsight, but consider that explosives were discovered completely by accident only 2000 years ago, took over 100 years to see military use, and existed for 1200 years before anyone realised that you could use them in warfare as actual offensive weapons that directly killed people rather than just scaring people with the loud noise and unnatural light they make.

I'd say it is easy enough to imagine a world where we reached electricity, phones and computers without guns, but we'd never make it off this rock without some fairly robust exploration of what is possible with explosives, and that would eventually lead to guns. As a spin-off of the space race mind you, which is actually a really interesting setting in some ways.

Like, the sort of place where cloud computing is an every day phenomenon, but these dangerous new science fiction weapons hitting the streets that can fling iron spikes into people at a distance threaten the safety of the town.

You would just have airguns and (later) gauss/rail guns instead.

Those could be explained to be too large to use by infantry thus relegating them to tanks, battleships and such. Man portable air rifle doesn't have enough velocity to pierce any armor whatsoever which would make it only assassin's weapon of choice

Railguns are pretty hideous to make viable, and would end up being devastatingly powerful muskets really, since they tear their rails apart so much each time, you'd be hotswapping barrels or something. Presumably they would be this universe's Panzerschreck equivalent.

Coilguns or airguns, certainly deadly enough off the battlefield, but man-portable versions today would struggle to penetrate plate, for instance. Guns wouldn't be the insurmountable offence they are today, skirmishing infantry formations could still benefit from shields, full plate etc. and sometimes be in a situation where they are able to assault enemy positions using maces and knives that couldn't have been dealt with using (infantry scale) gunfire.

If you have mechanisation and industrialisation warfare would probably be vehicle focused.

See here's the thing I never understood when we have these armor versus weapons discussions.

Okay, so you make armor that can withstand the forces of an artillary barrage from todays weapons. That's fine for all intents and purposes but I think it should go without saying even in a fantasy sense that level of force should still kill a person unless their super duper armor can also absorb the force of the shockwaves that will liquifiy their organs or just the explosion proper if they get directly hit by a shell for instance.

That said, such armor stopping small arms rounds is fine but getting hit with a grenade or rocket shouldn't be something you can just tank to face outside of a vehicle.

>Find a way to safely and reliably get from where your melee fighter is to where their enemies are.
Super-speed, teleportation, invisibility are all good options here.

>Now that we're in melee range, your weapon needs to be able to deal appreciable damage to said enemies while avoiding or tanking their own attacks.
Easy enough to fluff the weapons as more effective and such. Enhanced reflexes, power-armour, cyberware/bioware, the Force all help explain melee fighters turning into human/alien blenders when in close range.

Rinse, repeat and you should have an attractive reason to use melee in any setting, really.

youtube.com/watch?v=c9lEeKdbQ_w

Fair point, presumably at this point you end up with the LoGH scenario where most armed forces aren't intended for anti-personnel combat at all, but the ones that are just use axes and full plate or some medieval bullshit along those lines and occasionally slaughter their way through dozens of men each prior to encountering resistance in the form of the enemy's knights, in the rare event that they actually get deployed.

This is still a setting where the practicality of melee combat is just barely holding on with white knuckles, since its what the people outside of the (comparatively common) tanks and planes do.

forcefields that stop whatever's trying to harm them

melee weapons that create a counter-forcefield so you are left to deal with whatevery armor that`s left, maybe slap high-frequency shit on it for that

Hell, take your LoGH example and enforce it through laws and (martial) culture.

"Spacy" refuses to touch (manheld) guns, sticking to their nuclear drones and railguns for space encounters, and melee weapons for when the fighting gets tough.
Thinks guns are for groundsloggers, Army goons dropped onto planets walking into horrible droppod massacres, sitting blind in a can waiting to either land or get vaporized by an anti-orbital missile battery. They'd rather enter a spaceship, parley the fight and surrender conditions, maybe have a champion fight, and depending on the conditions that were made, have a melee battle to the death, where one can see their opponent, and their survival depends on skill, not luck.

Not trying to be pessimistic here, I want to find the solution, but it isn't this easy. Every single thing you listed allows people to be much better at using guns than anyone without them.

Better at using guns to the point that they could probably just do a better job than a stabby person with the same stuff.

Super-speed? Fire and reload your weapon super-fast, flank people, etc. Teleportation? Flank people, get away from stabby dudes. Invisibility? Actually one of the only ones that is better for a stabby dude than a gunman, but a gunner would still be much better off invisible, and furthermore the response in a military sense in-setting is probably going to be landmines to catch invisible enemies which then renders gunners most efficient to shoot anyone who tries to cross it with a mine clearing vehicle.

Enhanced reflexes? Shoot at people quicker and more accurately, before they see you. Power-armour: Bring a heavier gun with you. Cyberware/bioware, allowing you to shoot a heavier gun faster and more accurately, or possibly *be* a gun and shoot people behind you with the eyes in the back of your head and the guns on the back of your shoulders.

The Force is a decent one, in that it was a precognitive effect that didn't work so well on living minds, so you knew where bullets were going to be but not where swords were going to be, but at this point it's some real magical bullshit. Furthermore, why not use your precognition to shoot people's bullets out of the air rather than swording them? That way you have a gun and you can shoot at the enemy if they don't have the force, and hit them in the fucking face with it if they do.

I like how Jensen has all of those except for the whip. Maybe if he gets blown up again they'll implant a whip on his crotch or torso or something

Armor tech was not developed by humans, it was discovered from ancient advanced civilization ruins. Ranged weponry hasn't caught up yet, but melee weapons work

Yeah, the swordsman would be less effective than the gunmen in my scenario, but they'd both be leagues beyond anyone without their enhancements. Using a melee weapon or not would come down to personal preference seeing as with a gun or no, you can safely close in to your targets, eliminate them, tank whatever they can dish out and do it all over again.

>humans discover some million year old alien sport gear in a fossilized stadium
>use it for war

I like it!

youtube.com/watch?v=m4yDIcNDAIo
the dune shields seem to cover it, anything moving faster then X is stopped by the shield.
and beam weapons cause a massive explosion (are you a bad enough dude to level a city to kill one guy?)

as a bonus spin-off you get a new martial art centred around stabling slowly

...

If they can kill any number of plebs anyway, their usefulness is distinguished by their ability to destroy facilities or kill each other, which I would argue in those cases is definitely going to be easier for the hypothetical gun-lord rather than the hypothetical stab-lord.

Everybody is a highlander and everybody carries high tech sword of your choice to deal with whatever neck protecting measures you can think of

>to kill one guy?
>implying wars are about killing one guy
Also, how do they prevent desperate enough opponents from exploding cities?
Oh, right, such things don't happen in space operas.

>beam weapons cause a massive explosion (are you a bad enough dude to level a city to kill one guy?)
Imagine if we had this now and just how many cities would be wiped off the map. It's absurd to think this would be any kind of deterrent or that these shields would be seen as anything other than bombs that happen to have a cool side-use, but are mainly just city-destroying bombs.

The explosion happens at any point along the beam's travel path, it could nuke the city or the shooter, or both. If you nuke the city you lose any resources you would be fighting over

Have you heard of nukes?

Warframe comes to mind.
The Tenno are elite mutant ninjas who are usually too fast to gun down.
So what do the Grineer and Corpus do? Create melee weapons like shields, powerfists, rocket-hammers, force staffs, anything with enough raw power behind it to take the Tenno's blows, and stun them long enough to finish them off.

Tenno are the reason both factions use melee.

I mean nukes exist and we (so far) aren't shooting them at each-other

>we'd probably resort to some kind of radiation gun before electric melee weapons

Radiation is stopped by thin layers of cloth, or isn't stopped at all. You'd need to throw out enough gamma rads to cook someone to kill them fast, and that number of rads will kill the user in half a day.

We also don't give them to literally every soldier.

Yeah, and we all know just how regulated they are. In Dune, just how many people have access to these shields and how many have access to beam weapons? Cause that all you need to wipe a city off the map. If we dropped these shields and a beam weapons in Africa and the Middle-East, would they all become melee focused societies or would everything go to shit even faster as cities start disappearing?

You fucking retard.

Shooting a laser at a shield might blow up the other guy in a nuclear explosion, it might blow you up in a nuclear explosion, or it might blow the shield user AND yourself up in two nuclear explosions.

>if I shoot a thing with a beem it explodes I also explode.
yea there will always be that one guy who wants to blow himself up, but most people have a sliver of self preservation
after a 100 years the surviving ones would be

No, you.
You missed point about "desperate enough opponent".

More like, if I put a timer on this beam weapon to shoot this shield, then I have a pretty fucking awesome bomb.

At that point they would just use nukes, which exist in Dune, They don't use it for the same reason we don't use them now, if you nuke someone everyone else nukes you

It worked in dune because basic things like timers and shit were practically illegal due to thinking machines trying to kill everyone.

Except that was also retarded, but ah well.

If a *country* nukes someone, everyone nukes that *country*. If every fifth chucklefuck you meet is walking around with half the components necessary to wipe the city off the map and every fourth is walking around with the other half, cities are going to blow up. It's either that or no one gets to walk around with shields or no one gets to walk around with beam weapons. The fact that anyone would view these things as shields first is fucking insane. These are bombs and they would always be seen as such. That they can be used for something else would be irrelevant when faced with the capacity to wipe cities of the map. We could use missiles as coffee tables too but that's not what everyone associates missiles with.

Actually, this is kind of wrong. The Tenno are quite strong and fast, and thus able to swing weapons pretty hard, and so are the factions. The factions are much less strong and fast, and so their melee weapons are pretty ineffective against Tenno.

However, they're still much pretty devastating when equipped with ranged weapons.

The reason that melee weapons are so prominent is that most battles are to take enemy ships intact and inhabit them with your own side's personnel, taking place in close quarters and also that the ultra-powerful civilisation that preceded them was in a pitched war with an enemy that could near-instantly hack or borg-adapt to anything more complicated than a mid-1900s gunpowder weapon in a setting where weapons technology was nearly at 'free planet killers for everyone'.

The amount of lost technology lying around for the modern day factions to excavate that is the culmination of essentially a post-human civilisation trying to forge the perfect sword or the best of all possible bow and arrows is absolutely staggering, allowing them to create devastating melee weapons, yet they still choose to use guns for most of their frontline troops.

So, you drop a bomb consisting of the smallest shield generator and laser. Or you drop a regular nuke with a shield.

Serious question: do timers exist in Dune? I know computers don't, but really, what's the most complex electronic device in the books?

One thing really bothered me in that movie.
>Only decapitation will kill an immortal
>All immortals carry swords to kill other immortals
>Slashy, choppy, cutyourheadcleanoff swords
>Iman Fasil has a fucking rapier

It's a beautiful weapon, but I doubt it's easy to decapitate anyone with it, even if you are superhuman.

>timers and shit were practically illegal
I know they didn't have calculators in Dune®, but mechanical timers exist and aren't really that high tech.

I can kinda imagine this in a trans-humanist setting where the only way to incapacitate a threat for sure is to lop off their head, or all their limbs.

My space opera setting has shielding which functions by having a cloud of nanites floating near your skin (presumably anchoring themselves with nanothread) which can fire lasers at eachother which create hyper-dense vacuum energy between them. Hyper dense vacuum energy being handwavium for "space that nothing can pass through".

The problem is that each "fire" of this point-defense system expends a massive amount of energy, which is ok when you are dealing with bullets that only have to be blocked once and then all their kinetic energy is gone, but isn't very effective against melee weapons where the user will just keep pushing or drawcutting against the target (chopping attacks are pretty ineffective though)

And obviously, like all ways of making melee weapons viable, ranged weapons are still superior if you have enough money to afford ammunition which can self-propel and correct its course back onto its target after deflection. But it is still highly practical to have a sword as you won't have much of that ammo, if you even have the legal permission/contacts/money to possess it.

In the series, one dude has a shotgun in the hilt of his sword so that he can shoot them in the fucking chest to distract them with pain while he chops off their head.

I couldn't help but wonder why none of them thought to do this until like, 1970?

What if the setting simply lacks sufficient quantities of the main elements of gunpowder? Cellulose in some form seems to come up in the production of many bullet propellants. How about a dystopian future world where cellulose is somehow a rare resource ? Ran out of trees Easter Island style, perhaps earlier in history and hence altering the trajectory of weapon developments?

How bad was the series?

Cellulose is not really a *super* critical element of propellants, not enough to prevent us making guns, and any world deforested hard enough to have no capacity for cellulose production would also be completely uninhabitable for human beings unless we had already reached a state of high technology.

About 3 or 4 times better than the Vampire the Masquerade series, so hovering around "tolerable".

It had a decent number of genuinely good scenes each episode, but the writing had me wondering why the fuck anything was happening most of the time. Honestly much less shittier than the movies than you would expect for a TV spinoff of that era.

>what are tasers: the post

Look at all these dumb niggas not enjoying the benefits of malleable flesh.

I'm not clear how biological power armor solves any of the problems already raised in the thread.

Is that a concept from Dune, or the somewhat more comedic Rats, Bats & Vats?

Because I loved the flamethrower workaround in that latter book, and found the Slow-Shields interesting enough to introduce into my own traveler-based homebrew.

>Vampire the Masquerade series
What the fuck?

Everyone in the future has literal immortality based on super-advanced technology. They cannot be reasonably damaged by any weapons that a person could carry.

So how do factions wage war? How do people kill each other? Hacks. It's all electronic. You may not be able to kill anyone but if you can wrestle them down and break into some security thing, which maybe is on their body or maybe is at some central hub requiring lots of muscles or stealth to get to. You have some people who wrestle and some people who hack and sometimes people are nice and only bring wrestlers because they just want your stuff.

cellulose is in literally every plant, so unless said society can completely exist without vegetables, fruits, or vegetation of any kind then that wouldn't really work.

why not the evangelion method?

ballistics and explosives are blocked by forcefields, but forcefields/resonance frequencies/someshit technobabble emitted from another entity effectively cancels out the forcefield of the first, enabling damage to be done in close quarters.

Look, take the worst possible thing that could mean to you, now imagine if the script for that was given to someone who had no idea what the fuck Vampire the Masquerade was, allow them to make some minor edits for their own personal flair, and then have them produce the script on unbelievably shoestringed technical budget with The Room tier acting.

Not really, the proscription covered more advanced computational electronics. They need enough electronics to build space ships, so it seems pretty reasonable shit like timers would be around.

You don't even need a timer, just a reliable mechanical trigger for the laser. Put a shield in front of it, make sure that falling down from an appreciable height triggers the gun 100% of the time, load it all into a crate and drop from a flying vehicle.

Cheap nukes without any radiation.

Hell I'm pretty sure they actually used buried stationary shields as a massive landmine of sorts in Dune.

This is hard. Best bet would probably be humanity cleaned it's shit up to extent that guns and bullets are hard to come by and most gang activity has returned to knife play. Like Japan and the Yakuza. Really hard to get a gun and the punishment for having one is absurdly high.

>>The rest of you idiots

Flamethrowers would be the stop gap for magic armor that stops bullets but not blades.

This is honestly one of the best ways to approach this. It's basically the Dune method without the unimaginably retarded nuke thing.

>There are energy shields capable of stopping anything harmful to the user
>Energy weapons are simply ineffective and do *NOT* turn into fucking bombs when used against them
>There exists melee weapons capable of ignoring these shields whether by moving at a certain speed or because of resonance frequencies or whatever

They specifically state that the explosion size was effectively impossible to predict. You could get a firecracker when hoping for a blockbuster, or vice versa. This made it extremely impractical as a weapon, only used by those who had nothing better.

Honestly the list of shit you can use is huge in a universe where projectile weapons are a thing.

Chemical weapons, temperature weapons, radiation weapons, sound weapons, electricity weapons, dropping big rocks on people, a bunch of other shit.

What I mean is that I'm seeing a lot of talk about standard scifi, but none about the more interesting variants and how they can be explained or used.

Because biosystems are pretty dumb, the flesh is a weakness. Shred it.

>"the slow blade penetrates the shield"

Cyberpunk.
All ballistics have been confiscated by the World Inc.
The only ones that exist are on drones and peacekeeper mechs.
Even MP goons only have super tasers and a "literally cook your brain-stem" button for the average joe.
Unless you're literally in a situation where you're playing out the events of Neuromancer, you're doing the most damage with improvised ballistics and some amazing biotech that mutates you or data-slinging to fuck up people on the level of having "psychic" powers.
You *can* find older guns that aren't encoded with World Inc., but the calibers for them are wildly out of data and the World Inc. Surveillance System is automatically attuned to the sound and damage made by old ballistic weapons, so you'll have a swarm of drones on your ass unless you can figure out how to shoot and hide from literally 30 drones set to "Kill the motherfucker" mode as it wipes out the surrounding 5 city blocks to make sure the shooter is dead.

Its really not. Biological materials have shown themselves to be better in every way than mundane ones. Why do you think we're actively trying to genetically engineer spider glands for use in military applications and similar shit? Spider silk is stronger than steel, organic filtration systems are more efficent than any inorganic one, and bioprocessors are more compact and powerful than any computer we can build today. The difficulty is engineering it; but once its made, organic can be just as good if not better than inorganic in many capacities.

Gyrojet weapons become very popular for 0-g combat but their short range performance is so lackluster that if you want to storm a position it's better to use mono-edged blades.

Flamethrowers need oxygen to work properly. Also, a sealed and armored space suit would be able to handle the temperatures for some time. Modern space suits already need temperature controls just to deal with direct sunlight.

Awful, so convoluted and made for DM to abuse the players

Except, you know where we used nukes against a civilian population for no military purpose.

Sounds like every Shadowrun campaign I've ever played

>Unless you literally use to work for the Longhorns, they have fingerprinted all guns, know if you fucked with it, and have to find literally a gun from WWII to use against SF SWAT gear
>Unless you literally worked for this particular company, you have to make crit successes on your rolls to not be automatically discovered and have you brainstem cooked
>Unless you put all of your build points into augmentation, you body will reject anything larger than the most basic wetware implant, and even then, you have to make sure every day its not infected

Then again, my GM was an asshole.

In all honesty you'd be hard pressed to decapitate anyone cleanly with any kind of sword. Vertebra are no joke.

>THEY MADE A GUN THAT SHOOTS SWORDS!
Best possible choice of OP image.

In Blazing Spear (a big sword & sandals weird fantasy setting I'm helping develop), Almechany stores & directs energy via rasa circuits, which can be drawn on anything but burn out after one use UNLESS the "battery" section of the circuit is tattooed on living skin. The circuits can transfer energy across distances, but the there's an exponential decay in the percentage of the energy that makes it to the output.

In other words, a magitech melee weapon gives you the most bang for your buck.

Pic related, he says. What pic, says person reading the post.