[Ultra Tech] Shortening Range

[Mailanka]

So, I've been thinkin'.

The beauty of Ultra-Tech lies in exploring the natural evolution of technology: faster, better, stronger, and what that means. If the developments of today naturally play out, the future of war lies in distance and power. Weapons grow increasingly accurate, powerful and with longer ranges (You can get quite some mileage out of TL 12 portable railguns with antimatter rounds). Sensors gain the same benefits. And soldiers move farther and farther from the battlefield. We already use drones extensively. One can easily imagine an era where we remotely pilot human-shaped or otherwise land-based "infantry" drones, what THS calls "cybershells." Beyond that, we might begin to upload coipes of ourselves into our cybershells, or simply give them AI and command them to attack. The future of warfare might be a nuclear-powered RTS, with a human directing dozens or hundreds of drones against another human's drones until one side wins, gets to the command post and slays the human within.

A fascinating possibility.

Space opera typically looks different than that. Whether we're talking 40k, Star Trek, Star Wars or Andromeda or Farscape or Firefly or Dune, ranges are generally very short. I'm not saying that they remove ranged combat in favor of melee. No, I mean that you can see your enemy. You don't send robots to fight your battles for you. You don't fire missiles over the horizon to the enemy you detected with your satellite system. You don't snipe someone from 4 miles away. He stands right in front of you, at wild west ranges. The question of melee vs ranged is a choice between whether you draw your blade and try to approach him, or you draw your gun and keep your range. It's not a fool's errand to attack at melee range because doing so wouldn't involve hopping into a car and driving 10 minutes down a road to get out and hit someone with your sword. Likewise, pistols still make sense. Rifles still make sense. There's a difference in ranges and people consider these worthwhile: Rifle = sniping (from a few hundred yards away). Pistols mean shooting people from a few dozen paces away. And blades mean closing that distance and hitting someone.

Weapons remain profoundly powerful. In fact, space opera weapons are often very dangerous, sometimes instantly lethal (such as in the case of Star Trek), or they defeat arbitrary armor or shields. In fact, weapons often have neat tricks to express how awesome and advance they are, but they often still involve fighting at closer ranges than modern warfare does.

These two concepts don't fit well together. I don't MIND the former, but it creates different assumptions that invalidate the latter, and sometimes, I want the latter. I've seen many a discussion about making melee an ultra-tech viable thing. I'm not interested in that (or not JUST interested in that). I'm interested in shortening ranges to a personal range. That means short-ranged pistols and "long" ranged rifles still make sense, but we're thinking of ranges like what you saw in the Wild West or the swashbuckling era (which often serves as an inspiration for space opera).

What remotely believable suggestions do you have for keeping ultra-tech combat to visual range? Bonus points of the option already exists within UT or a Pyramid article.