Making Melee viable vs future weapons.

[Novembermike]

The easiest solution is always political. There's no reason to allow people to carry weapons openly, and in a futuristic society they might use some kind of a hard object scanner that can scan your body for anything hard and compare it to a database of weapons. It's pretty easy to detect guns with this since they generally have to follow a certain shape due to their function, but a melee weapon might be anything from an eight-ball to a baseball bat to a bottle. Then you have the police be people in lightweight anti-gun armor that doesn't protect against cutting and/or crushing with tasers and there's a legitimate reason to know a martial art.

[jeff_wilson]

Originally Posted by Anders Gabrielsson

If ranged weapons are mainly energy and the best defense against that are force fields you could have a situation where people wear little or no armor against melee weapons. Though you'll need to do something about projectile weapons.

For some futuristic super-spy action, I made it so that Niven-style superconductor cloth cut energy weapon damage by 90%, but the remaining 10% was applied to the each protected location. This led to some layered energy cloth/ballistic cloth Kung Fu outfits with hoodies worn over light body armor, Hand-to-hand was essential to be able to stop the baddies without unacceptably dangerous firepower, and the baddies typically weren't heavily armed either, unless you count taking over civilian vehicles.

[sabanknight]

I already have measures in place to make melee 'viable' from most of the standpoints listed.

Spaceships are cramped and full of exposed/weak armor and you wouldn't want to be sucked into vacuum.

And I mentioned I didnt want to make the weapon(or armor) better, but have a way to make the players do more damage with them without raising ST to insane levels

[jacobmuller]

Wrestling - forget trying to find a realistic way to punch a sword through rigid DR100, just Sumo him into a wall/ off a building.
PS the latest pyramid has a special on grappling skills - haven't had a chance to read it yet.

[Verjigorm]

Vibro axes with swing rockets make a mess of anything. :)

[Bruno]

Originally Posted by verjigorm

vibro axes with swing rockets make a mess of anything. :)

Rocket crowbar. SJG Forums hates allcaps apparently

[Lamech]

Seems like a place for psi-tech and plus shamelessly stealing from Evangellion.

Everyone has a piece of psi-tech that lets them access their AT field. An AT field can survive pretty much any assault, plus everyone has one even in civilian situations in case of an accident. The only way to beat an AT field is with another AT field, and they don't extend very far. Hence if you want to hurt anyone you need to be in melee range.
Of course people would still wear extra armor for combat because if people are limited to fists plate mail rocks. Which means weapons still get used. Then you just need to let melee weapons have some advantage over ranged. More damage, perhaps letting the AT field extend down them (so melee weapons would have a longer range than a gun) or whatever.

[RyanW]

Originally Posted by sabanknight

Spaceships are cramped and full of exposed/weak armor and you wouldn't want to be sucked into vacuum.

That gets stated so often, but anything that can survive a micrometeor strike isn't going to be terribly inconvenienced by a bullet, and as Mythbusters showed, standard air pressure does not create enough force to push someone through a bullet hole. This has been (accidentally) tested with a partial suit failure during a shuttle mission. The injury was mistaken for chafing until the hole in the glove was found.

What is an issue is exposed equipment. You don't want a bullet passing through a vital part of your life support system. Also, ricochets can be inconvenient.

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by RyanW

That gets stated so often, but anything that can survive a micrometeor strike isn't going to be terribly inconvenienced by a bullet,

Whipple shields probably don't work right against subsonic/low supersonic projectiles. And such protection is outside the pressure hull anyway.

Originally Posted by RyanW

and as Mythbusters showed, standard air pressure does not create enough force to push someone through a bullet hole. This has been (accidentally) tested with a partial suit failure during a shuttle mission. The injury was mistaken for chafing until the hole in the glove was found.

Yeah, vacuum is not as bad as people think.

[Bruno]

You CAN get a pressure differential high enough to shove a human through a hole not normally big enough to accomodate them. But it takes way more than a single atmosphere of difference to do it.

There was an accident in a diving bell involving a pressure differential of 9 atmospheres that may be the seed to this myth. It was pretty horrific and probably inspired a lot of retelling that distorted the story after a while.

But humans are never going to be in the habit of pressuring their spacecraft (or aircraft) to eight to ten atmospheres, so this will be a hazard restricted to space-faring Venusians and similar highly pressurized species ;)