What are some ways to work Melee combat into a Sci-fi setting? Is it even viable?

>You can dodge bullets too
done.

/thread

>muh shields

Please off yourselves.

In fact, make here be a nuclear explosion if someone does shoot at a shield.

Give me something better, faggot

Augmentation allow people to punch harder than a puny blaster does, while also giving them enough speed/defence to close the distance.
Another reason that also solves the problem is the risk of damaging a ship while boarding action due to firefight and creating a decompression. Because of that, the melee fight is favoured while fighting inside the ship.

>close combat in cramped ship interiors
>space kung-fu
>can't risk shooting through ship's hull

Also i assume it's not (you) because it's an actually good idea, but this paragraph in :

>Or bets of all you can just stop being such a wet, worried little fart and just fiddle around with damage values, movement abilities and so on until melee is a viable choice in your system, and don't give a fuck about coming up with some explanation for it. Because odds are that all your attempts will ever achieve is to draw further attention to the whole issue, and whenever you plug one gap there will be two new, greater ones in your explanation.

Do it like Dune: only objects travelling sufficiently slowly can pass through a personal shield, this excludes pretty much all projectile weapons from use against elite troops, or any variation of the above, like how KotOR just has melee weapons ignore most shielding while blaster fire has to wear through it. Alternatively, widespread personal stealth tech allows units to close the distance very frequently.

The market is flooded with relatively cheap augmentations that let people dodge bullets, phase out of the way, or straight up ignore anything short of anti tank rounds.

This has been done intentionally by a cabal of augmentation worshipping supercorps in order to force people to upgrade themselves

Powered armour. As in any decent combat armour has a fusion or some other reactor that strengthens the material it is made of to such a degree that you need anti-tank+ weapons to beat through it. On an ideal shot.

The only way to win is to use weapons with disruptor fields that mess with the armour strengthening. You could mount them on melee weapons but for projectiles this means that they need to be big enough to house their own batteries and disruptor field generators. And they have a pretty hefty price.

So you will get guys in power armour whacking each other with different melee weapons and occasionally specialists and officers would use their pricey ranged weapons to kill high value targets.
___

Same armour could be used for spaceships. This way most lasers and missile barrages would go the way of the Dodo. Because all your weapons will need to bear disruptor fields. So main guns would be close range high calibre kinetic guns and oversized and over-designed missiles that would probably be around the size of the fighter craft to be able to house their own defensive generators - to counter simple PD lasers.

>setting isn't in space
Now what?

>have to assassinate some schmuck
you can either:
a) barge into his home and have a HONORABRU duel on chris-knives or whatever
b) tell some suicidal fundie 72 virgins will wait for him in heaven and give him laser pistol, no survivors in 1km radius

But of course, such shields are a GREAT IDEA

Boarding actions.

>close combat in cramped interiors
>non-space kung-fu
>Metal Gear Rising route: most combatants are augmented Sonic-fast, Car-throwing, Train-suplexing superhumans (this approach can be mixed with kung-fu one if you still need meaties performing superhuman feats).

Find the stats for melee combat.
Now make the numbers a little bit bigger.

Congrats, melee is viable now.

>setting contains no interiors or martial arts
Now what?

Shields from Dune make no fucking sense since you could just blast them with a damn railgun and overload the generator.

The forcefield argument for melee only works if the person is actively avoiding mass firepower.

>Setting is a featureless white plain with two armies on each side of it

Oh no, i'm in "historical" warfare thread.

>nucanon
>doing it right
really nigga

>setting contains no exteriors or the concept of triangles
Now what?

If you just do it and make it clear that it is done in universe only the most autistic of players will question it seriously instead of just going with it.

>setting contains no matter or energy
Now what?

Holtzman shields severely limit airflow, so nobody is going to go around with one on in their daily life. As for laser-shield interactions, whenever someone says that gives you a nuke, you know you're talking to someone who ahsn't read the books. The interaction is highly unpredictable, and while it can give you a massive explosion, it can also pretty much just wreck the shield and the laser. This makes it hard to get any practical use out of laser-shield interactions, though it does happen in the first book.

Add them? Pick some other option of those here presented?

So bullet proof vests are useless since you can just blast the guy with an RPG? And where in the books does it say this?

>So bullet proof vests are useless since you can just blast the guy with an RPG? And where in the books does it say this?
That's simple physics.

It's harder to stop something than it is to move it since you need to deaccelerate faster than it had to accelerate. And any power source for the shields can be used to power dozens of the same guns.
Shields are basically high end armor, they reduce damage a lot, but they're going to let you wade through an army of guns.

First you need to tell us exactly what you think "sci-fi setting" means, because that's about as vague as "fantasy setting" and we don't take kindly to trolls implying every fantasy setting is the same.
Protip: the category "sci-fi" does not mean "futuristic", and even being set in the future doesn't mean technology keeps improving.

>prequel trash AND disney trash
wow you're pretty far gone, aren'tcha

user, shiving a cunt in the gut will never get out of fashion, no matter how futuristic your setting is.
In fact, the more futuristic, the better a melee weapon will be.
Think Shadowrun. With Wired Reflexes you kill fast, and bullets too slow. Slicing and dicing people with a chainsaw is as effective as firing bullets or lasers.

But that's just making a lot of assumptions that aren't necessarily true. Even just saying 'It's physics' doesn't justify it. A lot of sci-fi is predicated on different ways of interacting with or using physics, or even cases where our current understanding is wrong. What you assert is not necessarily true in the context.

>still being this mad over the prequels
I can understand Attack of the Clones, that is pure garbage, but you should at least be over Phantom Menace and Revenge of the Sith by now.

>damn why the fuck won't you just like terrible movies!!!!

They're not great films but there are good bits of them, here and there. The Phantom Menace lightsaber duel, along with Duel of the Fates, are fucking fantastic.

Starships are full of volatile components that make using ranged weapons foolish aboard them. If you want to blow up the ship, you can do that with a torpedo from afar. You don't want to puncture a line full of drive plasma while you are ten feet away from it.

There are a number of ways to kill or incapacitate people using weaker ranged weapons, like needleguns or tazers or gas, but armored spacesuits force the issue: if you can puncture the armored space suit, you risk damaging the ship and getting yourself killed.

This leads to fights between armored-suit wearers devolving into high tech melee, designed to slash open the suit or pulp the guy wearing it without risking overpenetrating a wall, hitting the grav plating, and flattening everyone on the deck on a brief spike of 150 G.

I'm not saying you have to like them, but you should at least have stopped being butthurt about them by this point.

Why should we stop thinking they're shit when they haven't stopped being shit? Sure, you may have fond memories of growing up with them, but while there's no taking that away that doesn't really change what the movies themselves are.

>why the FUCK won't you stop mentioning things related to images in the OP!?!?

Really, really available regeneration, trauma implants and nanotech everywhere. Putting holes in the professionally violent doesn't stop them, you have to open them up wider.

So nothing but you trying to be a smartass then. Meanwhile in the books they have FTL without funny time paradoxes, so obviously they can do things our understanding of physics tells us is outright impossible. I even seem to recall that the shields and the FTL are supposedly applications of the same base physics, so their ability to screw over time as we know it would be relatively well founded.

Anti-blaster armor worn by elite troops because this material is very rare

Viable != necessary. Provide reasons for melee to be necessary.
General possibilities include needing more weight behind a blow (superhuman capabilities that out-compete bullets in relative force), systems in place that make beam or ballistic weaponry irrelevant (point defense lasers or supermirrors), the silent vs impact ratio not existing for melee (ballistics tend to get louder as force is increased, shivs have no such issue), close combat becoming a necessity (ship boarding, oh my), so on and so forth.

>or martial arts
>Doesn't know what "martial art" means
user, any form of combat training or metod of fighting is a "martial art", as they are all "the arts of Mars". Everything from MMA to HEMA, Kung-Fu, Fencing, Spear-fighting, or any other form of "use weapon or body to kill person", including proper combat techniques for use of bayonet. Even if there's no current codified system, the needs of being able to defend oneself physically will necessitate the formaiton of some manner of martial art, whether its a basic form of street-sighting or CQC, or some other more esoteric field.

Son, you just went full retard

Drum up an excuse to make more powerful melee weapons with a tech that can't apply to projectiles, and/or an armour or protection type that's more effective against projectiles that melee. It's pretty simple.

The Luna series is set on the moon in the not incredibly distant future, so resources need to be conserved and everyone lives in vacuum sealed structures. This means that the vast majority of fighting, which is mostly corporate conflict or gang wars, happen using swords or knives made out of high tech alloys. People don't use coilguns or gunpowder most of the time because the risk of blowing a hole in the structure is too high when you can just shank them.

Do you wanna be the guy that killed everybody in your spaceship with a single bullet hole?

My opinion of the prequels has gone up substantially since the Mouse bought star wars. After watching The Last Star Wars Movie, I walked out of the theater thinking "WTF I like Jar Jar now."

>Your space ship isn't compartmentalized. A single small hull breach will decompress the entire ship.
At that point it's the whole damn crew's fault for flying in that deathtrap in the first place, not the guy who fired the bullet.

The whole point of lightsabers was that they werent viable, it was a self handicap. Not a tool for mass killings, it got who it needed to and that was it. Notice how sith use armies, star destroyers and wmds like the deathstar more.

If it's a space based game, simply make space ships so rare, expensive, and impossible to produce that simply shooting another ship to slag is a massive waste, so ship combat instead becomes about boarding actions to take over the ships.

And since guns and the like are going to fuck up ships on the inside just as much as they are on the outside, your boarders have to be experts in melee combat in order to avoid too much damage.

Have energy weapons need time to put enough heat into a target to fry them, so yes you can focus on a missile for several seconds and take it out, or maybe some guy caught unaware, but once the fighting starts you're reliant on weapons that deal damage the moment they impact. Slugthrowers can certainly fill this role, but when things drop into cramped starship interiors it's better to just go melee then try to draw a bead on someone that keeps moving around so much.

wth, 4th and last one don't fit the rest

Soft SciFi sure. Hard SciFi? No.

>Star Wars
>Scifi

This. The lightsaber was a weapon for a more civilized age, a tool used to awe others and function as a sign of authority.
The only reason why those who used them didn't die horribly is because they had magic ninja powers. And then they came up against an organized army of well-trained clone supersoldiers, and got wiped out.

Defensive tech outstripping ranged offensive tech, or movement speed outstripping target acquisition capacity.

Every heard of the 21 foot rule? It's the principle that states that if a dude with a knife is within 21 feet if you, he will probably close the distance and open your guts before you can draw your gun and fire. This is assuming a trained shooter ready to draw. Now give the guy with the knife cyber-legs.

Lol

Is this bait?

But if cyber legs are a thing, why not cyber arms and eyes that allow equally-fast aiming?

>Luna

Good taste. Also, there are tasers, armor, explosives, bow-launched EMP...and most of all various assassin-bots that "beat" manual human-operated guns for fighting. So giving up guns is not losing out on a god-mode button, it's merely one link on a ladder of force.

The way I did it was through context. Everyone lived on an isolated space station that was so old most of it could not be maintained or repaired. The place was big enough that a section could be sealed off when it became unusable but real estate was a priority.

Factions fight over control of parts of the station but found that using guns causes too much collateral damage. You hit a gas pipe or crack a window and everyone gets spaced, or you damage a critical life support system. Since there is nowhere else to go people all agreed they need to make the place last. When people need to fight, they do it with blades and spears, sometimes bows. It gets ugly.

The BlazBlue series has barrier technology/magic that every character uses. Barrier guarding reduces all chip damage to zero.

I always understood this to be the reason everyone fought hand-to-hand. You could easily make it so that the only things that can break through barrier shields are beam swords, power fists, grabbing the person and slamming them on their neck, etc.

Maybe something like Halo, where transhumans can one-shot in melee enemies who would take multiple bullets to kill because they punch with much more force than a bullet.

Guns just aren't that deadly for some reason. Maybe puncture wounds don't really bother the relevant combatants because they're robots with distributed systems or whatever. Maybe armor got really good all of the sudden and the armor-defeating gizmo can fit in a battleaxe but is not currently miniaturizeable to fit in a reasonably-sized bullet.

The second thing about melee in ships is actually a really good reason (in the right setting) that sees irregular use. Part of the argument against it could be that ship hulls are armored to hell and back, so small arms fire will never endanger the hull's integrity. This is true in settings where ships don't have shields and either brute-force space debris or have point defense systems that shoot it down/fracture it into pieces the hull can manage. When shields are present it could be argued that they line both sides of the outer hull so again, hermetically sealed and little danger of small arms fire causing problems. However, in hard-scifi settings where ships are made from resources gathered planet-side and shuttled to orbit, you're not going to want to spend the dosh on a ship with heavy ass armor except in key places. So the threat of internal damage is greater, and melee would be preferable to risking a hull puncture. Of course, it could be that boarding marines might use puncturing the hull as a tactic to easily clear an enemy ship; they have suits and the crew of the victim vessel doesn't. Simply breech any and all bulkheads you come across and you have a cleanly cleared ship on your hands with little fuss.

>six panels of build up
>and then marey sue
The Mouse must die

There's no reason why crew wouldn't wear suits in combat situation. Boarding or shots, you would want to be prepared for hull breach.

>Is it even viable?

No, guns are just better than meele weapons, any reason you can come up to justify meele combat is necessarily arbitrary and basically magic, not that there's anything wrong wit that but there's not a "right" way of doing it.

Armor & shields can reliably protect againt energy bolts or slugs, but still has gaps or is weak against melee.

The problem with limiting guns in sci-fi is that it often comes across as special pleading. "Guns arn't used because of X, Y, and Z, but we're never going to mention X,Y,Z again so its obvious its just an excuse for cool swordsfights." Dune gets away with because it thinks through its ideas and makes shields an important part of the universe. More importantly, it doesn't get rid of guns all together, but pushes them to different types of combat where shields aren't used.

In short, if you want to demphasize guns with technology, make sure you think about the logically consequences everywhere else, instead of focusing on the pretty sword fights.

Some people like to hit things more than they like to shoot things.

Exactly!
That's why everyone whoever gets attacked in the modern era is shot by a gun, and never gets punched or kicked or stabbed, or hit with a baseball bat, or...

Guns are just better, so nobody will ever use anything else.

It'd probably be a good idea to remove the atmos in combat anyway to reduce the risk of fire.

In LoGH boarders often pumped an explosive gas into vessels they attacked to keep defenders from just drowning them in gunfire. Then there was fighting in power armor space suits with two handed battle axes. Both sides used guns when they could though.

That would be a Martin art, retard

I think you mean Martian Art. Or Margin Art if your from the Mars of the Wild West.

Why use a gun when explosives exist?

Allahu Paul

As far as I see it there are two routes you can go.

1. You have a world where the armies have very aggressive doctrines and very tough armour. Meaning that hand to hand combat is almost inevitable. (ie Warhammer 40K)

2. You have a society which is so traditional that they either have never invented projectile weapons beyond a certain point or they invented them but discarded them out of respect for traditions. (ie The Last Samurai in space)

Personally I prefer option 2 simply because there is just an abundance of story and lore that could be made in that option that hasn't already been done to death (W40K has been around so long that most good ideas have already been done).

what about using the guns AS a form of martial arts

"Shields detect and deflect anything faster than a thrown rock"

I don't understand this need to make melee balanced or viable. Just have your character be the one who's just skilled and lucky enough to go medieval on their asses on even though everyone else is loaded up on guns and bombs.

Worked for Dune you moronic faggot.

That whole system just opened up a can of worms. Drones with lasers not even big drones or big lasers, every guy important enough to have a shield on is a walking nuke.

>what are cultural factors

That's all covered. Dune is praised for a reason.

Muh honour
Really there's very little you can do to justify why guns are no longer useful while swords suddenly are, so don't try to come up with a practical explanation and come up with a sociological one, like society has split up into tribes and guns are seen almost universally to be in poor form, the few that actually use them being highly shunned and frowned upon.

Nanomachines

We are not talking about modern era you inbred retard.

>Comparing getting jumped by some nigger on the street to genuine combat

And yet it still worked. Even if you don't like it.

boarding actions.

There's so much shit to shoot at you WILL run out of ammo at some point

Sometimes a firefight isn't a good way to do things. Like on a spaceship, where a stray shot could damage the hull and kill everyone.
Sometimes it's better to just chop the faggots with an axe