Getting all the pieces together for melee combat in a space setting.

I made a thread here a long time ago which discussed melee combat in a projectile combat enviroment and how to get it sorted, link:
https://www.writingforums.org/threads/melee-combat-in-a-massive-projectile-combat-environment.53846/
(You do not need to read that thread to discuss in this one, I just linked it for those interested.)

Now I think I have it the way I like it.

Setting:
A billion year old civilisation that has been destroyed and reborn many times. Spanning many galaxies. Technology that is like magic. Dragons in the form of wyverns. Space ships the size from small houses to large stars. The largest space ships are often not allowed in the vicinity of star systems because they could interfere with the orbit of planets. Some star systems have artifical planets and stars that can allow large space ships in them due to artifical means of providing starsystem-wide stable gravity.

In all this grandeur I want people to still fight people, (and aliens) with melee (projectile and other weapons can work as well, they aren't useless.).

Basics:
-Blades able to cut through almost any matter or energy when enough force is used. These blades can transform from swords into spears.
-Energy fields that reduces the effectiveness of projectiles and other dangerous enteties. They work better the tighter the formation is. Hence shield walls and tight formations.
-Full body light weight armor that in combination with the energy fields can stop light speed projectiles.
-Normal shields in front of the armor to soak up most impacts.
-Full body heavy armored battlesuits able to soak up weaker hits from the blades.
-A very strong person could basically cut off the pipe of a modern battle tank with a blade. If they had the energy and time, they could also start to cut the tank into pieces. They would perhaps not be able to do the same to a tank of their timeline.
-Boarding action is very common in space battles. The ships uses tractor beams to lock a target in place, then slams into it with a large bladed ramming edge, then opens passages to the enemy ship.
-Space battles that can last for weeks and months.
-Energy depletion technology that sends high-tech enemies back to the stone age for a certain time.
-Melee combat will have been used for a good portion of the billion year old civilisation.
-Massive melee and projectile weapon clashes that can span an entire planet.

What do you think? I know I know... it depends on how I do it, right? Well tell me what I might be missing, give me some ideas as to how I could improve upon this, please.

 

Only thing I’d suggest is consider the effect of zero gravity in the hand to hand combat. Even if there is artificial gravity, you can have moments where the gravity is not active or disabled. I think Enders Game had some 0 G combat in training.

 

Thank you for the comment, good point.

I have some low/zero gravity scenes in the book already. Here soldiers are equipped with something I call the mobility pack, it is sort of like a jetpack only without the jets. The mobility pack allows the user to navigate zero gravity and other environments. It also allows them to have a stable point in zero gravity from which to amass force to strike an enemy.

Spoiler: Clutter

I also have a zero gravity ball sport, though it didn't make it into the first book.

 

I like the idea of a space combat system where shields have become dominant to the point where melee combat is necessary. It reminds me a bit of Dune and the personal shields that were used when fighting hand to hand. Puncturing ships' hulls using rams to bypass shielding also could work well, though the force of impact needed might really smack about the occupants of both ships. But you can always explain it away with "inertial dampeners" or some such. The show The Expanse had some neat demonstrations of realistic space combat. Before engaging the enemy, the crew would don spacesuits and depressurize the ship to ensure that there would be no explosive decompression when the hull was penetrated. Ramming a depressurized ship and then boarding it to engage in zero gee hand to hand combat sounds fun. Very space pirate-like.

 

Good feedback!

I read somewhere that in Dune, if you shoot at an energy shield with a weapon, it could cause a huge explosion and that is why there is so little use of ranged weapons. Don't know if that is true, never did read the books. In my universe it will be a bit different, ranged weapons will still work, just that the energy fields will soak up most of the impact and danger from them.

Regarding decompression, I have something called habitability or life fields, that extend in and around a space ship. This field allows people to survive and breathe even on the outside of the hull of the space ship. These can of course be deactivated.

Regarding inertia, I'm pretty much a layman or complete ignoramus when it comes to physics, so I will try to keep things simple in the books. But yeah inertial dampeners, though I don't know how they work, or something like them, will exist. Maybe the "life field" will allow people to travel at great speeds and also slam into things without too much hazard.

Thanks for the posts, would love to hear from more.

 

I'd also imagine extremely advanced genetic engineering alongside equally advanced cybernetic technologies. Since these wars could take hundreds or thousands of years and churn through billions and possibly trillions of lives (significantly less if they have backup technology), I'd imagine there could be something like a soldier caste forming in many cultures, where they could be loaded down with all the best augmentations available, allowing absolutely staggering feats. A good example is maybe one could juggle five M1A2 SEPv3 Abrams, while riding a unicycle, on a tight rope, while holding five deep philosophical conversations, and while not breaking a proverbial sweat. This Clarktech (technology sufficiently advanced it is indistinguishable from magic) could add even more bonkers factors to it, and then give the dragons proportional augmentation, and you now have something that makes Warhammer 40K look tame and subdued. Now how you'd keep these mad lads in line, would be something.

It would also be wise to expand on other things that I have thought of in the time since I made this post. With the existence of these super-cyborg demigods on space meth (unless that isn't what you want), and the fact that in warfare, restraint is the norm, I'd imagine instead of just having a planet-sized craft turn on their reaction drive and reduce all of the infrastructures in that system to ionizing radiation, they'd instead deploy these aforementioned super soldiers to get what they want, likely what is on that planet/station/ship.

Though on the note of reaction drives, I'm assuming that they use some sort of gravity drive or some other sort of handwave to eliminate the drive plume problem, this does bring up one question; can your average joe get their hands on a craft like this and kinetic kill a planet? It does seem that you are playing pretty fast and loose with physics, so maybe you can do something with shield interactions and relative velocity that makes this impractical. I guess having this established limitation would make it clear why this isn't a viable tactic.

Final questions, how does FTL work? Could some small craft with access to a big computer jump into the hull of a significantly more massive craft and wreak havoc, does it travel through normal space, or does it go through some sort of hyperspace? Is there FTL radio and/or radar, and if so, what can they do? Many of these questions can change these dynamics. And the final most question, what is the primary type of ranged weapon and does it vary by the scale?

 

I want to say that in Dune it says that since hitting a shield with a lasgun causes an atomic reaction, it would be considered a violation of the Convention against use of atomics and could result in the rest of the Landsraad (not sure if I spelled that right) waging war against the lasgun user.

But it seems that any group in a last stand situation wouldn't care about that, especially considering the cruelty of some of the Houses.

 

This gave me a lot of imagery, hehe.

Regarding paragraph one:
I will have abilities toned down a little. The common soldier will just have basic combat stims, age extension tools, and life preserving biological tools. There will be super soldiers, but energy depletion tech will keep them from being able to do insane feats, most of the time.
There will be demigods, immortal shape shifters, and gods.

Regarding paragraph two and three:
You brought up a good concern that I've had to think about a bit, that ships could just smash into planets and such. But here maybe there will be some tech built-in to prevent such maneuvers. Though there could always be skilled hackers to bypass such safety protocols. But then I'd imagine that populated planets have some sort of defense system in place for kamikaze attacks.

Regarding the last paragraph:
There will be various means for FTL depending on the civilisation. The main civilisation will use three means of FTL. One where they enter another dimension, mostly used for military operations, since it will be hard to track and spot things in that dimension. Another that is sort of like a phase drive, that phases the ship out in a bubble and lets it travel through objects. And the last that is an instant jump to where ever you need, reserved for the small elite of society. There will be FTL instantaneous communication throughout the universe.

The primary weapon is a kinetic recoilless type that propels projectiles forward, mostly via the barrel. It's still a work in progress. But the basic iteration is that you have your standard magazine with ammunition (with casings that drop out, because it is cool), then a sort of gas canister that injects explosive matter into the bullet before it leaves the barrel. You can select how much is injected and such. Or leave it empty of injection as well. There are many settings to the standard rifle, but there is also a panic button that resets it to default firing mode. There are also special magazines that you can fill with dirt or stones or other matter, and it will transform the matter into ammunition. These weapons scale up to warship and moon sized weapons for the planetary and or star sized space ships.
The projectiles are very high speed. Maybe not light speed because that would mess with things, but still, many times greater our own weapons of today.

Then there is also laser weapons and many other sorts of weapons that you could imagine.

I need to add that there will be small nanorobots or nanomachines that will be able to do a lot of things in the universe.

 

I have a few ideas on the specifics of their operation. You mention that they are recoilless. There are many ways to achieve this using a projectile weapon, which is even further expanded by space magic. There are two weapons that come to mind, the KRISS Vector and the AK-107 (Warning: Gun Nerd about to info dump).

The KRISS Vector uses the Super V recoil mitigation system, which directs the recoil down the mag well, allowing for prolonged deceleration and putting the recoil in a more manageable direction. The Super V is pretty straightforward, but the Ak-107 is interesting. All of the AK pattern rifles are gas operated, using the expanding gas from the cartridge to shove a metal bar backward and chamber another round. This causes a lot of felt recoil, but the AK-107 has an innovative solution, having a counter force from another bar. This reduces the felt recoil by such a massive margin that one can accurately use its full auto mode at decent ranges. Now with real-world solutions out of the way, we can do space magic. Since there are reactionless drives in the universe, by application of this technology and decent sensing apparatus, they can completely negate recoil, allowing for Rambo levels of akimbo shenanigans.

TL;DR: Counterforce, change the direction of recoil, reactionless drives.

You also mentioned variable fill for bullets, and this is where things get wacky. Let's say for the sake of simplicity our default bullet is volumetrically identical to .50 BMG, and our fule is Deuterium and Helium-3 (If you use other fuels, like anti-matter or some sort of magic material, things get extra wacky). Assuming these capsules containing the fuel are spherical, so we can pack them into the bullet at around 62% efficiency. We also assume there is 100% fusion burnup since there is likely some sort of force field generator to make it so. Running the numbers, we get the equivalent yield of 221.9 kilograms of TNT. Yeah. Guns are powerful. And my calculations ignore kinetic energy, which gets big fast. By the fact that these force fields are casually eating this kind of yield is quite astounding.

(And for the more physics-minded people, this likely means that they don't follow Newton's 3rd law, meaning they are synching their received energy somewhere else.)

Autisitc rambings over.

 

@Luigikinesis
I love your ramblings, they show how out of proportion my universe setup is. I will be have to just go "oh well" and use a lot of handwavium to fix all these problems. Even though I must admit I do not understand some of it, you highlight the issues well, thanks.
The energy fields must be able to soak up a lot of punishment, which suggests that they have quiet the energy source, which could make for an interesting target.

The recoilless rifle needs to be such in order to be able to be used in zero gravity effectively. So, preferably there is no recoil in any direction.

 

For shields, they can operate somewhat similarly to Void Shields in Warhammer 40,000. Void Shields open small holes in reality that lead to the Warp, the place where FTL is possible and where all of the space deamons hang out. Since there are dimensional drives kicking around, something that can open small dimensional portals could work quite nicely.

Recoil can be handled in three ways: Thrusters in the gun, Thrusters on the person, or individual artificial gravity.

A final comment; I do absolutely love the unbridled insanity that is the scale of the universe, I find it quite enjoyable.