This sci-fi setting uses swords and other melee weapon instead of firearms because there is a sever lack of resources

>Is this believable enough reason for using melee weapons in a setting with firearms?
No.

If you use a simple action with minimal features, you can make a gun and a lot of bullets for the same amount of metal. The gunpowder and strikers are a little bit more tricky, but not by much.

I love MGR as much as anyone, but that is the setting where the samurai guy's inherited speshul katana was more powerful than any other HF blade because reasons. Any justification is very much tertiary.

I dunno, "everyone is a superhuman cyborg who can dodge and parry bullets" is a pretty good justification

>b-but how do I play a scrappy mundane guy
Without plot armor or Batman-worthy planning, you don't.

Even when they get hit, they don't seem to take fatal damage, due to their cybernetic organs being able to stabilize and self-repair alot better than the squishy fully organic equivalents. A chopped off limb is alot harder to patch up than a tiny bullet hole.

Just make it so your setting has augmentations that makes getting from point A to a relatively close point B trivially easy while turning you into a blender against anyone in range. Being able to laugh off shots from others while murderfucking their pals with a sword is also desirable.

There, melee is viable in your setting. You're welcome.

Yes.

I was at work when I made the thread hence why OP is only two lines.

It is an apocaliptic setting where humans are fighting demonic invaders similar to BETA from Muv Luv (pic related). The humans are using power-armors and weapons (both melee and ranged) that are hand-me-downs from several generations ago. They are highly advanced but humans have lost the knowledge to make new ones and can only maintain them.

Because mankind is forced into several safe zones, the access to various metals is severely limited and what little they can scrape they use to maintain the existing infrastructure, tools and weapons. They can't afford to make ammunition for firearms because they are seen as irrecoverable waste. On the other hand they are very serious about recovering the equipment of fallen soldiers, even having dedicated task forces meant to go behind enemy lines to salvage what they can. What little surplus supplies of metals they manage to scrape they use for to create artillery ammunition and only use them when shit hits the fan (the war is largely small-scale skirmishing with occasional huge offensive by the demons).

The setting came before the desire for melee combat, I just thought it wasn't far fetched in a civlization strapped for resources (and it would be cool).

>this sci-fi setting uses swords and other melee weapons instead of firearms because YOU'RE FUCKING INSANE

Maybe if it's post-apocalyptic survival setting, like a Mad Max-esque wasteland where any remaining resources have already been used up.

But OP's pic seems to suggest otherwise.

seems fine.

If you want, you could make the demons vulnerable to only certain metals (silver, or cold iron or some other shit) so you can have the non-expendable metals thing without gimping your setting's use of iron

That's not the half of it. Those guys that Sundowner decapitates in the first level? They not only lived, they went back to work.

The finer the sword before its turned into a high frequency blade, the better the resulting HF blade is. Sam's sword is some ancient Muramasa shit that was probably forged deep in the mountains by some old retired masters ghost.

I had a similar question come up on traditional ballistic weapons vs. lasers and plasma in a space setting.

In the end had it where military and paramilitary tech had gone so far toward laser weapons and ablative armor that mercenaries and pirates were going back to boarding crews with slug loaded shotguns and future AK's with bayonets or side axes as a response to the softer ablative/reflective stormtrooper-esque armor that was in vogue. This ended in space serbians tearing things apart.

>this Scyfy
>has swords alongside guns because teleportation has become reliable but volatile with explosive substances

i mean even just asking such a silly question you yourself have to know the answer... no no its not a good enough reason. Make it because projectile weapons will breach starship hulls, or maybe the atmosphere has a strange gas in it that would be ignited by energy weapons, at least put SOME kind of effort into the reasoning you lazy dumbass

Thanks, I'll think about that.

No, I don't see how "lack of access to necessary resources" is any more stupid than the thing you and anyone else in this thread mentioned.

>The finer the sword before its turned into a high frequency blade, the better the resulting HF blade is. Sam's sword is some ancient Muramasa shit that was probably forged deep in the mountains by some old retired masters ghost.
Which really doesn't make much sense. A sword that's built to be a high-frequency blade would work better than a sword that has HF stuff tacked onto it in any other universe. At that point you're running off rule of cool.

You certainly can have it as a reason.

I've always imagined a setting with high-tech armour that defeats most modern projectiles, and the only effective way of dealing with it (other than railgun levels of brute force) is to hit it with something like an super-high powered electro-spike to disrupt it while damaging it, and it's a lot more effective to strap a micro-generator to a person and have them stab the shit out of the enemy rather than use highly charged capacitors to hit fast moving targets.

Boarding actions on spacehips, last thing you want to do when trying to capture a ship is laser a hole in the wall, or something similar to dune with personalized sheilds

honestly the best answer

>something similar to dune with personalized sheilds
Only if you ditch the ridiculously retarded idea of having it fucking explode if shot it with lasers. THe idea sounds solid until you get to that part, then it's just monumentally idiotic.

archive.4plebs.org/tg/search/text/ firearms 15th century/type/op/
archive.4plebs.org/tg/search/text/gunpowder/type/op/
archive.4plebs.org/tg/search/text/firearms/type/op/

Fuck off, OP.

Well, in Dune that was the critical element of the resurgence of nobility and the warrior class. Without it rendering fast projectiles and lasers into nukes there's no reason for the personal combat focus.

Starfinder seems to set it up well. You can carry more than one weapon, tight quarters can make going to melee an easy choice, and effective armor is fairly cheap.

>Which really doesn't make much sense.
Welcome to the Metal Gear series in general, where our motto is "Nanomachines son, I ain't gotta explain shit!"

No U

>this gun has infinite ammunition
>why?
>what, because the mag is shaped like the infinity symbol, of course!
Fortune also comes to mind.
The Metal Gear universe is very interesting for this particular reason. It can be taken seriously despite being incredibly over the top and exaggerated.

Ill admit i've never read dune and just know about the series not having guns cause everyone had shields of some kind

The shields block fast-moving projectiles, thus making kinetic guns useless. Laser guns interact with the shield in a peculiarly violent way. The field destabilises, and it creates an explosion in the megaton range at the shield's location, the gun's location, or both.

The shields rely on something called the "Holtzman effect", and work entirely based on Tio Holtzman's theories and equations. Nobody, not even Holtzman, knows why the Shields, Suspensors, and Foldspace Drives work using them, just that they do and the numbers resolve.

And the Butlerian Jihad shut down the kind of technological advancements needed to understand it.

Knights of the Old Republic had "every soldier had anti-blaster shields but those shields are worthless against physical weapons and lightsabers"

Well if resources are so scarce that the 20th century era technology that are modern firearms cannot be built, then the overall tech level of your setting wouldn't be really high enough to be called sci-fi, would it ?

It takes a lot whole more resources and logistics to build a computer than a rifle.

See The tech that exists is ancient and modern civilization is just reusing it and maintaining it to the best of their ability.

And it is not the rifle that there are no resources for, it is the ammunition for that rifle.

He's never going to, not while people keep taking the bait. Maybe we'll get lucky and he'll finally work up the courage.

No because melee weapons also need maintenance.

My excuses for sword fights in sci-fi is:

- High-density materials allowing bullet-proof vests to become extremely effective.

- Electro-magnetic shielding that partially deflect and/or slows down bullets.

- Blood-injected nano-machines that can fully regenerate flesh wounds in minutes.

- Mechanically-augmented soldiers that can either move very fast and avoid bullets or carry a lot of heavy armor and avoid being damaged by bullets.

But these are all very expensive, so you still see normal people using normal weapons in warfare. But besides those there are also high-explosive gyrojet guns and cyborg soldiers wielding high-tech blades that can cut through high-density metals like meat.

It can block swords.
What it can't block is objects that enter the shield very slowly. Thats why they teach people to fight using knifes.

Legend of the Galactic Heroes justification was basically "fucking shit dude if we shoot in here we run risk of blowing up the ship"

>Thats why they teach people to fight using knifes.
A kindjal's a bit big to call a knife.

> Sir, the enemy is deploying a wave of little expendable robots with laser guns.
> DEPLOY THE SHIELDS!

derp

One of the weapons deployed around Gammu in Heretics was a little sphere with a shield and a lasgun. Bump it a bit and the lasgun fires and booms against your ship.

>No because melee weapons also need maintenance.

Are the resources needed for maintenance of the melee weapons the same as those needed to create hundreds of bullets?

>- High-density materials allowing bullet-proof vests to become extremely effective.

Ehm, gold armour isn't the shit, it's shit. (And thus we show the main pitfall of trying to justify this shit instead of just saying "this is how it is", you're likely to just fuck up even more while drawing extra attention to the ludicrous nature of it all.)

>It can block swords.
>What it can't block is objects that enter the shield very slowly. Thats why they teach people to fight using knifes.
You can swing and poke slowly with swords too you know, and they do talk of swordsmen every now and then. No reason is ever given for why people are so fond of knives.

why not just make bullet-proof armor?

I think miles teg might have used the las shield combo offensively too?

Or didn't Paul even when he was taking fine back in the climax?

Derp, I forgot what book teg was in. I assumed heretics was nudune

Nope, Heretics is book 5, with old Teg and young Duncan Ghola. Chapterhouse is book 6, with with early 20s Duncan and Ghola kid Teg.

>Is this believable enough reason for using melee weapons in a setting with firearms?
sure
there is an even more believable reason though
are you ready?
people use melee weapons because they want to

>Thats why they teach people to fight using knifes
or, yknow, they train people to fight using knives because knives are fucking useful and versatile close combat weapons even in a setting where firearms exist
I swear it's as if people think guns completely invalidate melee combat completely, it's the same kind of autism as people hating guns in fantasy settings

not good enough reason user, you have to justify them being viable

if you can be killed in a distance then your training is worthless

Interesting device i read in orson scot card:

Guns aren't used because there is a robot manipulating your brain so you literally can't conceive of using a gun against a man. You might have super laser rifle 9000 with auto tracking and heart beat sensors... For hunting animals.

But you would never turn it on a man be cause you literally can't think of it.

The major source of conflict in the series is people not listening to the robot/the robots hold weakening so it can no longer force compliance, and only make suggestions instead.

this had better be bait

What if melee weapons circumvent personal energy shields? Where bullets would be stopped a blade can sneak through.

explain

>let me reply with this failsafe argument

>No, I don't see how "lack of access to necessary resources" is any more stupid than the thing you and anyone else in this thread mentioned.
Problem with the resource reason is that means there also aren't any resources for anything else that uses the same materials. It leaves the question of "which resource is so scarce?" Couldn't be a lack of metal because then you couldn't make swords either. That leaves a lack of propellant. But if there aren't resources to make chemical propellants or energy weapons then what the fuck are you powering your vehicles and machinery with?

that's the most retarded argument ever
"if you can be killed from a distance your training is useless"
what if you end up in a fist fight you complete retard? what if you end up in a knife fight?
>hurr durr if you can just get shot any training related to not getting shot is useless

>let me just reply with an argument that invalidates all arguments in the thread and answers the premise of the thread
these threads are aids anyway

>you have to justify them being viable
No, you don't. You probably outright shouldn't. The odds that you're making a fully consistent, logical and functional world are quite frankly very small. And you probably don't have a brilliant grasp on all the science you'd need to fuck around with to maybe, perhaps actually create a scenario where melee weapons are indeed the thing to go with. Instead trying to technobabble your way to something will do two things, it'll add even more absurdity and logical fuckups to it all (like the guy above who has very strange ideas about what density does), and it'll draw attention to the problem.

>Those guys that Sundowner decapitates in the first level? They not only lived, they went back to work.
This makes me feel good for some reason.

>Instead trying to technobabble your way to something will do two things, it'll add even more absurdity and logical fuckups to it all (like the guy above who has very strange ideas about what density does), and it'll draw attention to the problem.
"justify x" threads in a nutshell
the chances of a player asking "why do melee still thing" is small to begin with, and the chances that they won't be satisfied with "because" is even lower

STANDING HERE I REALIZE

If they're using whatever they can get their hands on, then carrying some sort of melee weapon would make sense. What if there's a shortage of ammunition? What if there's just more BETA than you brought bullets? What if swords are much more efficient than guns, such that it's a tradeoff between safety and effectiveness? What if fights invariably turn into a melee, as the sheer number of BETA swarm you and chew through the hull and eat you alive

YOU ARE JUST LIKE ME
TRYING TO MAKE HISTORY

>Problem with the resource reason is that means there also aren't any resources for anything else that uses the same materials. It leaves the question of "which resource is so scarce?" Couldn't be a lack of metal because then you couldn't make swords either. That leaves a lack of propellant. But if there aren't resources to make chemical propellants or energy weapons then what the fuck are you powering your vehicles and machinery with?
The issue can easily be "you need man-portable generators to make the power needed to penetrate this armour".

So something you can shove in a backpack, and is fairly expensive, but impractical to make thousands of bullets out of.

Just fucking do this and quit bitching and moaning.

>Capable of reaching your target near-instantly or better yet, instantly
>Highly skilled with chosen melee weapon, enough so that you're a human blender
>Can tank shots for a good long while
These are the necessary conditions for a setting to 'justify' melee as a go-to option in a non-retarded fashion. Fluff them however the fuck you want and stop turning around in fucking circles every fucking time this fucking topic comes up.

This, this, this. The best "justification"for this is always that you have to kill fast and bullets are too slow, don't waste time wringing your hands over the small details.

Doom does it pretty well, even if the chainsaw is actually a bad melee weapon