Quote:
Originally Posted by Turhan's Bey Company
IIRC, the magic explanation for Niven's monofilament blades is that they were surrounded by a stasis field. The one-atom-thick object was, for all practical purposes, encased in an absolutely unbreakable force field.
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The "variable sword" weapon was indeed that, but Niven also mentions "Sinclair molecule chain" as separate, un-stasis-fielded stuff, and claims it's "fantastically dangerous", and that you can cut off various extremities if you're incautious about it. The stasis field on a variable sword seems to be mostly about making the monowire blade easy to control, rather than making it somehow sharper or more resilient.