>>5662871>The slow knife thing is always a bit awkward,My headcanon for this was that it wasn't "slow" like in the movies. It's only "slow" when it comes to objective movement, like the speed of bullets and explosions; a fast knife strike is still going to get through the shield, but it's only going to be as fast as a human can roughly swing it, no poison darts or flechette guns. It is also depicted somewhat inconsistently in the DUNE novels, with later books saying that the shield "slowed down" blows without directly blocking them, implying a level of resistance as opposed to a binary block or pass-thru state. As such, in my DUNE quest I did that with the shields, just implying the shield is basically a energy-field version of carbon nanotubes, which gets harder or more stiff the faster the approaching object is. So a fast sword stab feels like its trying to pass through thick leather to actually get at the target, where as a slower strike has only a slight breeze as resistance.
>The way I tried to explain swords and knives in my space dynastic setting was actually just stolen from something I saw from /tg/...I'm pretty sure I saw the direct greentext you're talking about, lol. As for me, I don't really care for forcing melee combat in science fiction worlds except for DUNE since its kinda the point. I have directly referenced and lampshaded this several times in my most popular quest, Monke Quest, where as the entire concept of knife dueling is inherently ridiculous in their level of technology and is a decadent piece of artificial "culture" the Jaxtians adopted as part of their ideals of "noblesse oblige", especially due to the culture autism of their founder. I somewhat dislike the sci-fi excuse of "not wanting to breach the ship hull" for melee weapons or not using guns in a ship because presumably if the ship's hull is that weak on the inside it would be equally weak on the outside and would break when getting hit by microasteroids- fictional shielding technology notwithstanding.
