[warellis]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

That depends. Do you want to retain melee weapons as a viable combat choice? Then you need ranged weapons to be kind of naff.

Melee weapons in the novels are generally used at extremely close range during boarding operations, or for specialized assault marines. And various other species use equivalents like teleportation or superscience crazy biology to allow them to get in close enough that a pistol & melee weapon can be useful.

Powerfists are generally used during boarding operations to make new doors for example. They're heavy enough that Terminator armor is used with them during boarding operations because both armor and powerfist are generally considered too sluggish outside of really close quarters.

Terminator armor sensors are sort of interesting:

Master of Sanctity by Gav Thorpe

He had fought in zero-gee vacuum, whirling from one starship to another on a grav-line, and taken the battle to enemies amidst swirling dust hurricanes and in the collapsing core of a hive, but Telemenus nevertheless had to fight back a wave of deep nausea as more data signals, targeter relay reticules and situational analysis symbols swam across his vision. The sensorium of the Terminator suit was even more sophisticated than his power armour’s auto-senses, feeding information not only via sight, smell, sound and touch, but directly interfacing via his black carapace implants to provide a three-hundred-and-sixty-degrees impression of the battlespace around him for up to half a kilometre. Added to that was the feed-link to the armour of his fellow Terminators, sub-displays showing their view, micro-channels conducting what came to their ears.

It was like two extra sets of eyes capable of radar, infra-red and ultraviolet; ears that could detect the sound of a bolt shell dropped onto cloth at fifty metres, powerful enough to use the reverberations for echo location; taste sensitive enough to pick up one part in a million for chemical and biological traces; boosted kinaesthetic and proprioceptors alerting him to the physical position of his armour as an outer skin and the relative attitude of his storm bolter and power fist; all combined with an artificial form of extra-sensory perception that tracked millitorrs of static and dynamic pressure differences as well as fluctuating luminosity, temperature and electromagnetic readings.

And if this sensory overload was not enough to contend with, making Telemenus feel as though he was blinded, disorientated and deafened whilst constantly and gently vibrating from head to toe, the tactical analysis data feeds and vox-network made it seem like there was a thousand counsellors alternately whispering and screaming at him with a host of occasionally relevant but often obscure or nonsensical advice.

Closing his eyes didn’t help this time, it simply made the neural feeds boost the other sense signals to compensate; a nice sub-doctrine of the armour to account for the fraction of a second whilst blinking and to allow him to fight whilst blinded. Telemenus desperately wanted to ask if there was some way to turn off some of the systems, perhaps filtering out half of them to allow his mind and body to adjust. He couldn’t ask, not without showing weakness in front of the others. He was mindful that Grand Master Belial had appeared on the observation gallery above the practice range moments before the Techmarines had activated the armour’s full suite of augmented systems.

Armoured for battle he could crush a man's skull in his fist and punch through the armour of a tank. Hundreds of relays within the armour bolstered his already acute senses, feeding him a constant stream of information from extra senses, his specially developed brain assessing them all subconsciously as a normal man might look with his eyes and hear with his ears.

Boreas paused for a second and looked at the villagers who were gathering close by, the auto-senses of his skull helm casting a red tinge on the proceedings. Olfactory filters allowed him to identify the contents of the atmosphere - mostly oxygen and nitrogen, but with heavy traces of sulphur, carbon from the fires, the sweat of the villagers; all of this he took in without conscious effort.