Weapons are an integral part of many spec-fic stories, from ancient swords forged in the fires of creation to high-tech space weapons that can dematerialize a good-sized asteroid from half a parsec away. But most writers aren’t experts on weapons, so mistakes tend to creep in. The good news is that we don’t need to be experts to fix most of these issues; we just need to be aware of them. After exhaustive research (complaining about the weapons in my favorite books and TV shows), I have compiled a list of the most common errors.
1. Forgetting Physical Space
Fight scenes require authors to keep track of much more information than usual, so it’s no surprise that weapons are often treated like incorporeal ephemera that only solidify when they finally land a hit on the enemy. I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve read about a greatsword-wielding hero effortlessly swinging their four-foot blade in the cramped confines of a witch’s cottage or a dagger-wielding enemy that seems to teleport past the hero’s spear.
This gives the impression that the hero’s world isn’t solid, as though they’re fighting in an environment made of foam and cotton candy. Weapons should feel like solid objects that take up space, and that means thinking about how much space they need to swing and how long their reach is. Movies and TV have a leg up here, since the problem is more obvious when a physical actor is holding a prop weapon, but prose writers need to up their game.
The good news is that I’m not just adding another chore to your list of things to remember in fight scenes – being consistent about physical space can actually make your fight scenes much better. A common problem with fight scenes is that they feel like little more than static exchanges of blows until one combatant falls over.* Using physical space is a great way to spice things up and make the action feel alive.
If your hero wields a two-handed sword, but now they’re trapped in a narrow corridor, that limits how they can move. Instead of the big swings they’re used to, they’re limited to stabbing attacks. If your scene is about a knife fighter attacking a spearman, you can add extra excitement by illustrating the difficulties of getting past a much longer weapon. Or you can reverse the situation and have your spear hero try to keep a vicious knife enemy at bay.
Physical space is also an excuse for one of my favorite underused tropes: a character who carries more than one type of weapon. They might have a bow to use at range, a war hammer for big open spaces, a long sword for urban streets, and a dagger for cramped alleys. Not only does this stand out from all the heroes who focus on a single weapon, but it also makes your protagonist seem resourceful!
2. Overly Elaborate Tech
Storytellers face a conundrum when designing fantasy or scifi weapons: there are only so many ways to efficiently kill someone, and most of those have been explored pretty thoroughly in the real world. We want our advanced aliens and mysterious elves to have cool and unique weapons, but it’s often difficult to make a weapon novel without also making it silly.
In hand-to-hand, this usually manifests as weapons with so many edges and spikes that you’re not sure how to even hold them. Also whips. Spec-fic writers really love creating super deadly whips, for some reason. These can fit okay in pulpy settings like the MCU or surreal stories like Madoka Magica, but it quickly detracts from any tale that’s supposed to feel grounded.
With ranged weapons, the problem is usually what they do rather than how they look. Modern firearms are already incredibly efficient when it comes to killing people, so making scifi weapons even more deadly creates plot problems. It’s difficult to have recurring characters if every fight scene results in 100% casualties. At the same time, making scifi weapons that are too similar to real-life guns can be really boring, so what’s an author to do?
Sometimes they add a bunch of features that sound impressive at first but, in reality, don’t help. Designing weapons to be especially painful is a common one. While that’s scary, it rarely holds up to scrutiny. Horrifying deaths are a common feature in weapons across history, but this is almost always a side effect of trying to incapacitate the enemy as efficiently as possible.* Some writers have even weirder ideas, like weapons that infect their targets with slow-acting nanites rather than fast-acting bullets. I can imagine some niche uses for that tech, but it’s hardly a battlefield weapon.
Alternatively, some scifi weapons rely on flashy aesthetics to disguise how ineffective they are. Star Trek’s phasers and Stargate’s staff weapons* fall into this category. Staff weapons lose out to modern MP5s. Meanwhile, I’ve lost track of the number of circumstances that phasers do not work in, whether it’s due to some techno-interference or the local wildlife being energy-proof.
Unfortunately, there’s no simple solution to this problem. Designing new weapons is difficult, even if prose authors have a slightly easier time than screenwriters because we don’t have to worry about a special-effects budget. The best advice I can offer is to fully consider the implications of what you’re designing. While a 15-bladed crystal sword is unquestionably novel, it’ll also have readers scratching their heads over how the hero can possibly swing it, which is probably not a worthwhile trade.
3. Ignoring Stun Settings
Storytellers love adding highly efficient stun weapons to their worlds. In scifi, this is usually a literal stun setting on phasers or blasters. In more modern settings, these take the form of tasers and tranquilizer darts.* Fantasy stories can also get in on the action; everyone in the Avatar setting is armed with bolas, even the airplanes.
No matter what form they take, these stun weapons can easily render a person unconscious with zero risk of serious harm. Suffice to say, that’s a bit far-fetched. In terms of modern tech, even supposedly “nonlethal” weapons often cause serious injury or death. Tasers can cause heart attacks, and tranquilizers need to be carefully calibrated so they don’t kill the target.* And needless to say, they’re much less efficient as weapons than firearms are, which is why soldiers still go into battle with assault rifles rather than stun guns. We can’t say for sure that this dynamic will continue with future weapons, but it seems likely.
Narratively, the main benefit of these weapons is that the characters can easily capture their enemies alive and the author doesn’t have to put much thought into it. The downside is subtle but critical: a lot of dramatic situations depend on the characters not wanting to escalate to violence, since violence usually hurts people. If your characters have perfect stun weapons, that tension goes away.
Think of every scene you’ve watched or read where two or more characters are pointing guns at each other in a standoff. The premise of that standoff is that no one wants to be the one who escalates to violence, either because they don’t want to hurt whoever they’re facing off against or because the risk of being hurt in return is too high. With a perfect stun weapon, there’s little reason not to pull the trigger first. Similarly, the main reason not to open fire on unknown intruders is that you don’t want to kill someone for the crime of trespassing, but now your character can stun them all and let the captain sort it out.
Storytellers generally deal with this by pretending stun weapons don’t exist or by finding contrived excuses why they can’t be used. Both solutions will hurt the story, so in most cases, the better option is simply to avoid perfect stun weapons in the first place. If your action heroes need to capture someone alive, let them do it the old-fashioned way. It’s harder than using lethal force, but solving difficult problems is what protagonists do.
4. Selective Melee Combat
If years of analyzing stories have taught me anything, it’s that some stories simply require that we pretend guns don’t exist. Or at least that we pretend they’re way less effective than they are in reality. Urban fantasy is the most prominent example, in which sword duels against vampires are commonplace, but there are plenty of other cases. Superhero stories don’t generally ignore guns, but they do pretend that guns are less effective than Thor’s hammer and Iron Man’s latest gadget. Star Wars does the same thing, pretending as hard as it can that no one would think of shooting at a Jedi from more than one direction at the same time.
This game of pretend is standard for spec-fic fans, but it gets a lot harder to accept when a story includes guns or gun-like scifi weapons but only some factions use them. This is usually done to create a sense of “fair play.” In urban fantasy, human hunters can compete on the same level as supernatural beings because the humans have guns. In space opera, the various “warrior races” are super strong and resilient, but they politely nerf themselves by eschewing energy weapons. In superhero stories, the scrappy street hero competes with the flying titans by throwing grenades.
Sometimes this is directly stated in the story. An alien or vampire will proudly proclaim that they don’t need guns because they already have superstrength. In other cases, it’s simply an implicit assumption of the story. I don’t think Thor ever says out loud why he doesn’t use a rapid fire projectile weapon; we’re just supposed to assume he doesn’t need one.
Either way, the premise breaks down once we actually see guns and other high-tech weapons in action. In Teen Wolf, hunters open fire on hostile werewolves, driving them back. The werewolves retreat to heal from the bullet wounds, but if they’d also had guns, the hunters would all be dead. In Star Trek, Klingons routinely throw away the advantage of superior numbers and surprise by charging into phaser fire, bat’leths held high. In Infinity War, we’re supposed to believe that Wakanda has the strongest army in the world, but we can see that War Machine is doing way more damage to Thanos’s forces with bullets and bombs than the Dora Milaje can with their vibranium spears.
All speculative fiction requires some suspension of disbelief, but the requirements increase every time a story points out its own contradictions. If your story can only function when characters ignore some obviously exploitable advantage, the best path is for everyone to ignore it equally. That way, you’re not constantly reminding the audience that what they’re seeing or reading makes no sense.
This does require reexamining certain genre tropes. If you want something that makes the human hunters special in a world of supernatural creatures, consider introducing a special type of magic that only humans can use. If you need an alien species that’s physically more powerful than humans, balance them out with weaknesses that humans don’t have, like less-developed immune systems or lower stamina. Both options are a lot easier to explain than one faction giving up the obvious advantage of high-tech weapons.
5. Unsafe Sparring
Everyone loves a good sparring session. It’s a great way to show your characters improving with their chosen weapon and also a chance for you, the author, to practice your fight-scene description. What’s more, these scenes are a great excuse for characters to reveal glimpses of their inner drama. It can feel a bit forced if the hero discusses their deepest insecurities unprompted, but sparring gets everyone tired and sweaty enough to lower their inhibitions a bit. And since these scenes aren’t real fights, you don’t have to worry about the love interest getting stabbed in the middle of their confession.
At least, you shouldn’t have to worry about that. But then authors go and make their training scenes absurdly unsafe. The most common iteration of this is having the characters spar with fully sharpened blades while not wearing any protective gear, but it manifests in other ways. Blunt and crushing weapons are also extremely dangerous without proper padding, and in scifi settings, we often see characters practicing with energized laser swords. In most of those stories, no amount of protection would make that safe.
From an in-universe perspective, there’s no justification for this. If the characters are fighting like normal, there’s a very good chance that one or both combatants will take serious injuries. It would be pretty awkward if the hero missed their final battle because of an easily avoidable training accident. If the characters hold back to avoid hitting their sparring partner, that is placing a lot of faith in their precision. Perhaps worse, it means they’re training not to hit their opponent, which is presumably the opposite of what they want. Inexperienced novices might imagine training works this way, but not anyone with the level of experience most protagonists and mentors possess.
From an audience perspective, the story is telling us that violence isn’t serious. Weapons aren’t deadly tools of destruction; they’re fun toys to play with. Even stories that aren’t particularly grounded or realistic don’t generally want this dynamic, as it reduces the chance of audiences taking the real action scenes seriously.
I can give visual media a tiny bit of slack for employing this trope, as a proper sparring session would require different costumes and props, but there’s no excuse for it in a prose story. Just narrate that your characters got out some practice weapons and donned training armor; it’s a single line of description! I promise that your characters can still reveal their inner truths while not maiming each other. Plus, it gives you the option for a character to dramatically remove their mask while making an important point. Who doesn’t want their characters to do that?
If you’re intentionally setting out to create a dangerous training sequence, there are ways to do that, but it requires more thought than the characters being reckless for no reason. You’ll need to set up a situation where a safer training routine isn’t viable and where the rewards outweigh the risks. Since most authors are just looking for an excuse for their characters to cross blades without the risk of death, such measures aren’t necessary all that often.
So long as your story has fight scenes in it, it’s important to understand how your weapons work and what implications they have. Even if you don’t have any fight scenes at all, chances are that weapons still have some effect on your setting through the possibility of their use. If your story has no weapons in it, then I hope you enjoyed nerding out about them anyway!
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I guess we have a new rule here at Mythcreants now – mention “Soon I Will Be Invincible” … or die.
I agree with all things on the list.
There is a reason, for instance, why the spiral staircases in old castles are usually winding clockwise – this gives the person fighting from above advantages, as they have more space to use their right hand, which was the hand they usually wielded their weapon with. For a defender in the castle, who is more likely to be the one higher up, that means more manoeuvrability, whereas the attacker, being the one lower down, has their right hand at the inside of the spiral and is at a disadvantage.
I admit that using guns can be challenging for a story, but one easy way to avoid it is not ‘imagine there’s no guns’ but something like ‘set your story in a surrounding where guns are less likely.’
When it comes to sparring, I do have a few fights like that in my stories, but most are unarmed and the one which is not has them use training weapons, aka. blunt weapons. This means there’s much less of a chance for serious injuries (and a few bruises don’t count).
And if you don’t want your monsters to use guns, then just make them allergic to the metal, or something. It could be a plot point if you have the monsters devise a gun that they can hold.
I think having people in a setting with stun weaponry still be hesitant to fire on sight still makes a degree of sense if proper firearm safety training is in account. I’m not a gun person myself, but I have friends who are, and one thing I’ve learned is that in proper gun handling, the first thing you do whenever you pick up a gun is check the chamber to see if it’s loaded. Doesn’t matter if you just set it down yourself a moment ago and no one else has touched it, you check the chamber every time you pick up a gun, because if you become lax in the habit, it only takes missing that check the one wrong time to make a tragedy. Likewise, you never point a gun at something you’re not prepared to kill.
Unless lethal weapons are completely phased out of the setting and totally replaced by stun weapons (unusual, in my experience – more often “Stun” and “Kill” are different functions of the same weapon), training programs would still teach soldiers, police, etc., never to open fire immediately, because you might NOT be set to Stun. If you train someone to reflexively pull a trigger, that’s what they’re going to do regardless of which setting they’re on, which means only a trainer who doesn’t care if their students kill someone by accident is going to teach that.
So, maybe your evil empire’s soldiers, but probably not anyone you want to be uncomplicatedly heroic.
This actually reminds me of another problem with stun settings for otherwise lethal weapons. Modern police officers already have problems drawing the wrong weapon when under stress, leading to handguns being used instead of tasers. If both options exist on the same weapon, how likely is it that they would make this problem far worse?
I would assume that a major part of the professional training regime in such a setting would be to always ensure the weapon is on stun before putting it away (because in a tense situation where a fraction of a second can make all the difference, they might not have the luxury of double checking every time they draw it, so the next best thing is making sure they know what it’s on when they do).
If weapons with ‘kill’ and ‘stun’ settings exist, a holster that automatically sets the weapon to ‘stun’ each time it’s holstered would be a reasonable precaution.
The biggest problem with Stun weapons is that they aren’t reliable. To stun someone you need to disrupt the cerebral activity of the target, which is inherently risky.
Be it a chokehold or an anesthesic or a bludgeon to the head, it will cause damage to the brain (hopefully a minor one).
Miyamoto Musashi demonstrated that one can kill someone even with a training bokken (wooden sword) when he did just that to Arima Kigei .
The best non-lethal weapon i know is from Ringworld, where an advanced alien species have the TASP, that stimulates the pleasure center of the brain for as long as ten seconds, inducing a state of pure ecstasy. Of course a prolongued exposure develop into an addiction and the target ending up doing anything for another “shot”.
I know of a story where the author went put of their way to make sparring sessions safe(ish) and it is… Eragon.
What a plot twist for this blog, lol.
In the first book, every time Eragon and Brom sparr, they enchant their swords to blunt the edges. Brom even points out that they should still be careful, because the swords are still capable of breaking bones in this enchanted form.
I don’t think this is mentioned again in later books, but I always assumed they were still blunting weapons before sparring.
Make your sparring sessions safe… or die.
Really upping the “… or die” game around here.
Up your “or die” game… or die.
Hahahaha!
I love it when an old meme makes so much sense.
The old Star Wars EU also gave two different methods of sparring with lightsabers: Training Blades used by Jedi Initiates, which were heavily underpowered to the point that one could hold the blade in their bare hand and only get superficially burned, and Sith Training Blades, which had metal rods for the blade covered in poisoned barbs that caused numbness where they hit (and still had all the kinetic force of a metal rod).
If your hero wields a two-handed sword, but now they’re trapped in a narrow corridor, that limits how they can move. Instead of the big swings they’re used to, they’re limited to stabbing attacks.
This gives you the chance to show off their half-swording skills. I don’t think half-swording was designed to make large swords more usuable in close quarters, but it seems like it would be a knock-on effect.
Plus, it gives you the option for a character to dramatically remove their mask while making an important point. Who doesn’t want their characters to do that?
A lot of trouble might have been spared if Darth Vader had done it while making the important point that Princess Leia was a member of the Rebel Alliance and spy.
Half-swording is tragically underused in spec fic, probably because it’s really hard to describe.
Guns in narrow spaces, anyone? Damage potential is really high, even with an accurate aim. Best to have those be smaller firearms, I’d suppose.
Do you really want to risk putting holes through your space ship’s hull? Or shooting out the power junction for the life support systems?
Just have the hull be bulletproof
That way the bullet ricochets around in a small room or hallway
This… might not be much safer for the people in the immediate area…
I’m reminded that some of the old Star Wars stories mentioned that Wookiees were incredible powerful fighting machines, but using their natural claws as weapons was considered a sign of insanity and those who did were labeled “madclaws’. Always wondered why a warrior species’ natural weapon would be shunned like that, especially if it gives them an advantage in mano-a-mano combat.
Didn’t pick up on that. Is that in the expanded universe?
Started out in the Thrawn Trilogy and then was part of the plot of Knights of the Old Republic. Check out the “Behind the Scenes” section: https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Madclaw
Humans natural weaponry are teeth, but biting someone is almost taboo and we have a kind of mental block to avoid it.
Humans natural weaponry is very weak, compared to that of other animals. Biting is not as efficient for us as using a club – not to speak of any more developed kind of weapon. Little kids bite all the time, though, we are taught not to bite because it’s considered bad behaviour. We’re not refraining from it by instinct.
Wookies, on the other hand, are really strong, have powerful claws, and sharp fangs. They should be using their natural weapons in close-quarter combat.
While I only skimmed the lore, the Wookiee disdain to clawing others seems to be mostly cultural thing. They believe that the claws should be used as tools, not as weapons and see clawing as the dishonor. What about verisimilitude? Well, the idea that the culture of super strong bearmen decided that, for sake of civility, you shouldn’t use your hand daggers to gut others isn’t the craziest thing. The lack of tolerance for using them in close quarters combat is a bit sketchier.
I mean, should we mention the wands in Harry Potter?
“Welcome to secondary school! Here’s your lethal weapon; please note our utter disregard for anything even approximating to a health and safety regulation.”
“What’s a gun good for? It just throws lethal bits of metal at speeds which are near enough instantaneous at close range for our trained reactive defensive magic to stand a chance, and certain faster than any spell travels.”
“And then I will make a provocative speech until one of the highly-trained police wizards forgets all of the nine hundred spells he could use to incapacitate a twitchy civilian and goes straight for something lethal and super illegal.”
The difference between a gun and a wand, though, is that a wand has other uses than just to injure or kill. It’s a tool that can be used to fight – like a hammer, for instance (and it is interesting that Thor, for instance, is wielding a weapon which can destroy, but also be used as a tool to rebuild).
Guns should be more of a topic in the series (especially now that they’re going in a much darker direction), because there should be little to nothing which wizards can do against them.
All these mistakes annoy me, but the 4th really makes my blood boil sometimes. The reason is that it shows such a laziness in world building. There are so many ways you can make guns and melee weapons coexist in a setting.
For example, in an urban fantasy world, if you want to justify the use of melee weapons just say that only melee weapons can be enchanted, which makes them way more dangerous against the supernatural, or even the only option to deal lethal damage to them. This doesn’t mean guns have to become useless, just less effective.
As for not giving supernatural beings guns…now that’s something that always made me roll my eyes. I can buy the excuse of not using them out of arrogance in specific situations, but not using them ever just doesn’t make sense. Just make the human hunters less fragile.
Following the previous example, maybe the human hunters wear enchanted armor under their clothes that work better than regular bulletproof vests, or they have magical talismans that allow them to heal from critical injuries. We can also say that only their order knows how to make them, and they have spells in place, so only the hunters can use them.
My point is, I really don’t think this particular point should be that difficult to solve, and I wish more urban fantasy shows would take it into account. It just takes a little bit of extra work.
Editor’s note: I have removed a comment because it went beyond discussing firearms availability and started labeling only certain sections of the world as “civilized.” While I hope there was no ill intent, that is not acceptable here.
You mentioned fantasy, but I think space opera would be an area where melee weapons would be easy to justify despite, or rather because of, advances in technology. For two reasons.
Tactically, a gun in a space ship is as likely to kill you as it is to kill anyone else–space is a hostile environment, after all, and unless the ship is built to withstand interior assaults, bullets are likely to rip through rather critical systems (air, temperature control, gravity, the hull itself, etc). This would restrict weapons to either things that don’t hurt ships but do hurt humans (microwave guns, maybe?), or melee weapons (which probably won’t cause enough damage to ship structures to matter).
From a strategic/larger-scale perspective, the fact that objects in motion stay in motion comes into play. Any bullets that don’t hit their target in a battle will keep moving, meaning each battle will remain an expanding bubble of danger until it’s either cleaned up or passes outside the boundaries of inhabited space. Lasers would be similar. It wouldn’t take many civilian casualties from centuries-old battles before this sort of thing was looked upon as a war crime, the same way we view land mines today (and for broadly the same reasons).
So there’s your logically consistent justification for having armor-clad knights riding in ships that consist of giant sword-wielding robots!
(This would also be an excuse for random disaster in sci-fi stories–stray bullet from an ancient battle ruptures a critical ship component, because physics exists.)
Melee in zero gravity would look and feel stupid. Imagine underwater melee but up to eleven. Much better a “point and click” laser to turn someone’s flesh to 200ºC, not enoug to melt steel but enough to burn someone. You can also blind the enemy with them, no matter how strong their armor is.
On the other hand, micrometeorites faster than bullets are a current threat to spacecraft, if they don’t develop a way to aviod them space travel won’t be possible, if they do, a lead bullet would be laughable.
If you’re referring to melee combat onboard ships, I was presuming there was artificial gravity. If you don’t have that–if you’re in a microgravity environment–yeah, melee combat is going to be very different to that of today. I imagine a civilization that conducts war in microgravity environments will have some sort of work-around. I suppose whether it looks and feels stupid is going to depend on the writer and the situation. The person fighting for their lives is going to be a tad too distracted to worry about aesthetics.
I don’t like the idea of lasers–again, the whole “it doesn’t stop until it hits something” issue–but there are examples of weapons like you describe. As I said, microwave guns are an existing technology that’s known to cause damage to living things but not equipment. Sound/compression/vibration weapons would be another good one, as they require a medium through which to travel, making vacuum a hard barrier. But again, you need to make sure that whatever you’re shooting has a reasonable chance of not destroying the ship you’re on, otherwise every boarding action becomes a suicide mission.
As for the last paragraph, it depends on whether you’re inside or outside the ship. There’s a reason fortifications keep people out–the insides are where the stuff keeping the ship operational are. Even if you have a shield that prevents micrometeors (meteorites are when they hit the ground, because geologists like to make up terms [for the record, I’m a geologist; it’s office humor]), it won’t do you much good if someone shoots a critical component of your life-support system from inside the shield. Imagine shooting guns inside a submarine at crush depth–unless you’re willing to die to take out the other person, it’s a stupid idea.
If you’re talking guns outside the ship, it gets complicated, because now we’re talking about things moving at significant fractions of c, which involves nuclear physics. Short version: as something moving near the speed of light hits matter its leading edge (and the matter it hits) are ablated in a series of nuclear fission reactions, releasing a tremendous amount of energy. You’re detonating a nuclear bomb where it hits, and continuing to do so as the thing travels inward. xkcd’s “What If?” goes into detail if you want more. But there’s still a world of difference between random bits of stuff floating through space, and a projectile manufactured for the purpose of causing death and destruction. For one thing, the isotopes are going to matter–the physics gets pretty heavy, but different isotopes release different amounts of energy when they undergo fission due to different processes, and knowing what processes they’ll be undergoing (ie, what stuff is going to be hitting them) will allow armies to design projectiles to take advantage of this. Unfortunately, as I said before, there’s the fact that these things will continue to travel until they hit something–again, creating a humanitarian crisis that expands rapidly around literally every battlefield where these weapons are used.
My last bit about sword-wielding robots was mostly joking. There are ample other options, including historical ones (triremes, for example). I just like the idea that the iconic “ridiculous thing in fiction” can sort of have legitimate justifications. The reality would probably be more drones/manned fighters with short-range weapons designed to incapacitate the ship. Something that would limit the range of dangerous leftovers, at any rate.
Wether you like lasers or not don’t make any different on it being an ideal space weapon. Your reasoning on “don’t stop until hit something” is an error. A laser in space will lose power the further it travels, even if it isn’t colimated to give it an optimal range (yes, you can design a laser gun that only “kills” in a given range, basically three low powered lasers that converge in a given point where all the power concentrates and separate once more the further you go). Also, gravity affects light as it will affect anything, so missed bullets won’t travel in a straight line but orbiting the nearest gravity pit. People in fiction use melee over long range weapons to show how “cool” are, because everyone knows that range weapons are better. Despite the “6 meter rule” on handling an atacker who wields a knife, a gun will always be more “efficient” than a knife. Longer range means that you can disable the attacker sooner and be less likely to be hit.
I don’t know what a boat with three rows of oars would do in the outher space, but it would surelly carry a ballista to sink other space boats from afar.
From someone who takes on martial arts, there is a difference when we are sparring and fighting someone for real. We know just the amount of strength and skill we should use to keep the sparring competitive, but not potentially dangerous for anyone involved. Of course, the same could be applied to melee sparring. If they are masters training with swords, I am under the assumption that they have enough skills not to kill each other and to dodge anything that comes their way. In The Untamed, the two main characters spar a lot, but none of them have the intention of killing the other and they are skillful enough to dodge blows.
Plus, even when wearing protective gear, it is possible to potentially kill someone. Especially when you’ve mastered those skills.
Yes, when two experienced fighters spar, they should be able to judge their attacks and make sure not to do anything that might injure or kill the other person. Accidents might still happen, though – albeit not in a story, unless the author wants them to.
It’s more of a problem when people who are not yet experienced are sparring.
A little off topic: “The Untamed” is based on “Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation” if I remember it right. Love that one…
You’re absolutely right on The Untamed, and it’s very lit. If you’re into Chinese Drama, I also recommend Word of Honor, where we can see two characters sparring to test their abilities and a major event happening because one guy decided to take in 5 guys at the same time while sparring.
I’ve just dived into Chinese literature, so thank you for the tip, I’ll definitley look into it.
I think there’s room here for a secret #6 here which is ‘Opressed Mages Still Don’t Work’ since magic is so powerful compared to almost all other spec fic weapons that when mage characters lose to non-casters it can often feel contrived, or like the mages are choosing not to use their powers for whatever reason.
For the record, the coolest weapon in any spec fic story is, in my opinion, the psycho-pass gun from the Psycho-Pass anime. Society has developed this ‘crime quotient’ that quantifies how likely a person is to commit a crime, and the gun assesses the quotient and decides whether the target should be stunned of killed without the input of its operator. It’s a super cool action-y way of questioning what justice is or what criminality is.
I mean… not necessarily, at least depending on your definition of ”mage.” In a straight fight, I’d take an SMG over firebending powers any day. That said, I agree that the oppressed mages trope doesn’t work for the various social reasons discussed many times on this blog.
One of Oren’s frequently repeated points when discussing the “oppressed mages” trope is that there’s no logical reason why someone with firebending powers couldn’t ALSO get themselves a machine gun.
Sure, if mages somehow were incapable of using guns, guns might be more powerful than the kind of magic that exists in a given setting, but it’s just hard to justify that limitation.
Not to mention what would happen if those fire-slinging mages could also enchant that machine gun, so the bullets would be encased in flames.
The cops in Alastair Reynold’s Dreyfuss books actually have whip-like weapons that I think make sense, but that’s precisely because cops in this society are forbidden from using guns unless under very special circumstances (in which a quick referendum via the population’s brain implants determine whether the situation is serious enough to warrant unlocking the gun cabinet).
Their “whips” are actually a kind of robot with AI (not anything like human-level intelligence, but capable of somewhat autonomous action). They can swiftly slither along the ground like snakes, and be sent out as advance scouts sending info back to the cop before they enter someplace. They can also, of course, go in through thin cracks etc where a human or anything bigger couldn’t enter. They can give people an electro-shock like a tazer, or coil themselves around someone to restrain them.
I think they’re pretty neat non-lethal weapons in a sci-fi setting. Also, it’s aknowledged in-universe that they’re not perfectly SAFE just because they’re not meant to kill or seriously injure.
Agree, though, that super-deadly whips is a silly idea.
They sound a bit like the amphistaff from the now defunct Star Wars EU – animals which fuse with their owner and can take on different shapes and, to a degree, make decisions.
It’s a cool and interesting idea – and one you could do with magic as well, if you wanted.
Regarding #2, my advice would be that if you want fantasy weapons that aren’t generic, make your aim obscurity, not novelty. From the day we realised we could hit things with rocks to the day the hydrogen bomb was developed, finding ways to fight and kill each other has been a key pastime in virtually every culture across all of history. Some weapons were designed by people with effectively unlimited resources or advanced scientific knowledge, while others have been hastily cobbled together from farming equipment. The point is, if it’s possible and if it’s even remotely practical, something very much like it almost certainly already exists. There is a big exception to this – if you’re dealing with species with significantly different anatomy, or even just significant differences in size, then it’s time to get innovative to figure out how existing weapon concepts would be modified or new ones invented to suit them. It would make perfect sense for a 4-armed being to make effective use of something a human wouldn’t even be able to hold.
As far as sci-fi weapons go, consider justifying sophisticated technology with a reason it’s necessary, and unusual effects with a specific purpose. For instance, I have heroes who carry phaser-like weapons, which realistically are less effective against most combatants than simple firearms would be. However, in addition to them having a reliable, generally safe stun setting and the heroes wanting to avoid lethal force whenever possible, most antagonists are an exotic, partly energy-based species against whom almost any kind of kinetic weapon is useless. Another antagonistic faction uses antimatter-based weapons which agonisingly disintegrate their victims over the course of several seconds. The dramatic effect is because these aliens singlemindedly seek to break down and repurpose all matter they can for their own purposes, and these weapons enable them to break down their targets into a form of energy they can readily harvest. The seeming cruelty is not a necessary effect, but is also not arbitrary; it reflects the cold, robotic way these beings operate – they use the smallest charge possible to ensure complete disintegration because it’s the most efficient use of their resources, and there’s no disadvantage since their weapons remain fully lethal and since the suffering of their victims is of no concern to them. In both cases, simpler, more standard weaponry would probably work better as a battlefield tool, but it wouldn’t be able to accomplish the unique things it needs to do.
Just a couple of things for you to take into account.
The amount of energy to create antimatter is more than the energy obtained from the matter/antimatter anihilation, unless they have a source of antimatter that you should explain.
Also, for a matter/antimatter anihilation, any normal matter would suffice, there is no need for the gun to hit a living thing for it to work. That would make the weapon unsuitable for anywhere outside the vacuum of space, as any atmosphere is made of ordinary matter.
I don’t care about the weapon itself as you can make them using magnetic fields to handle the antimatter, but as soon as the weapon is fired BOOM!, like firing a gun underwater. They would need enormous weapons, as matter/antimatter anihilation is “one on one” each particle anihilating their counterpart. So to disintegrate a 60kg person you’d need 60kg of antimatter.
If their plan is to “repurpose” the matter, using an antimatter weapon is the worst possible option, as the matter is anihilated and turned into high energy photons and gamma rays (unless they have a technology that lets them to condense photons back into matter, which cost more energy and wouldbetter used to condense available photons).
It’s aimed at younger audiences, so I intentionally compromise scientific accuracy for the sake of entertainment or the “cool factor” in many cases. However, some of these points can be addressed; these creatures come from a dimension where antimatter is naturally abundant.
They do use it on any and all matter, to the point that, in sufficient numbers, they have been recorded stripping away all trace of an Earth-sized planet within days. They just prioritise living things due to the potential for interference (historically, they did not, and it led to the temporary defeat).
Although realistic antimatter is sometimes presented, the stuff they use creates a cascading reaction, with the initial annihilation event triggering a series of destructive energetic reactions of gradually decreasing magnitude. Since it’s blatantly unscientific, no explanation is offered for how they get it to do this, although the presence of that question is used to explain why no one else has invented or made use of it.
They are able to capture and condense photons easily, as they themselves are composed of an exotic form of matter which interacts strangely with our universe, including having “backwards” properties with regard to the laws of time and entropy. Their technology makes heavy use of it, and it is a hotly sought-after resource in our universe due to its versatile, physics-bensing properties.
As to why it doesn’t simply react with the atmosphere, I don’t know. Presumably it’s somehow kept contained in a vacuum-filled electromagnetic field until it’s released on impact with a target.
Again though, the overall thing isn’t very scientific, so I’m not too concerned. The main character is a young girl whose father is a superhero, she travels around with literal star people, there’s a diminutive nuclear-powered robot, a dingo who’s been modified to talk, an alien turns out to be a mutated lost cosmonaut, ships are powered by what are essentially perpetual motion machines… I doubt kids are going to latch onto an unrealistic portrayal of matter-antimatter reactions. My initial point was simply that the unusual weapons portrayed are all given logical, if not necessarily realistic, reasons why they need to work the way they do.
Regarding number 3
I wrote a fantasy steampunk story in which a perfect stun weapon exists, but is restricted to only be used by the police of a city of powerful mages.
It had been invented recently in the world’s history and no one but a select few mages has any clue as to how to make it.
The mage city considers having its police force equipped with a perfectly non-lethal takedown weapon an absolute must and guards the weapon’s secrets ferociously, lest anyone figure out a workaround, or counterspell.
The reason for this is because the mages have figured out the secret to perpetual rejuvenation.
Having ready access to what is practically unlimited youth and vitality, the mages are very, very concerned about the possibility of violent death, even (or especially) in case of accidental crossfire when the cops go after criminals. Thus, they have very strict weapon controls (all weapons are taken from new arrivals, only mages may carry them, etc.) and personal shielding sorcerous technology is all the rage.
Even the city’s cops are only armed with the stun weapon, self deploying restraints and signal equipment.
The police force is made up of volunteers who agree to be enslaved with obedience collars for the duration of their contract (in exchange for lots of silver and other perks upon completion of the contract) and getting these cops to give up the secret of the sorcerous stun weapon is impossible, as well as for them to miscount their inventory etc.
Also, anyone trying to obtain the secret by whatever means risks having the City declare war on them and wipe them off the world map with ease.
So, you can have a world with perfect stun weapons which are impossible for the commoner protagonist to obtain and use.
One case where better weapons should exist, but don’t, is most vampire stories. The vampire hunters may have access to any form of firearm from a flintlock pistol to a modern submachine gun, but when it comes to dispatching their target, it’s back to the old pointy stick.
Vampire movies came up with the idea of loading pointy sticks into a crossbow, and a couple of stories have used wooden bullets (not very effectively) but I’ve only come across one book that even mentioned the obvious (in my opinion) anti-vampire weapon that should be developed in any setting where vampires roam and sufficiently advanced technology exists – the Sungun. A weaponised sun-lamp, it should be capable of single-shot flashes, a continuous beam, or even illuminating an area. Ammunition is no problem – simply recharge from the nearest wall-socket. Best of all, it can be fired into a crowd, destroying vampires while leaving humans with nothing worse than mild sunburn or a tan!
In case of emergency, switch on the anti-vampire flashlights!
Wouldn’t work against book-Dracula, though – in the novel, Dracula walks around in sunlight, he only doesn’t have his full set of powers. The whole ‘sunlight turns vampires to dust’ is first seen in Nosferatu and has been used ever since. It’s an impressive thing and allows for the special-effect team to shine.
I feel like I’ve encountered a fantasy character with a bow, a war hammer, a long sword, and a dagger before. And he also carries around three dungeons’ worth of unsold loot and a dozen cheese wheels.
For real though, just because you can carry your whole armory doesn’t mean you can fight well with it strapped to you. And think of the training time involved when you’re not an automatic expert with whatever you happen to pick up.
For the “Selective Melee Weapons” trope I’d recommend actually having an explanation. For instance, in one of my own works, cielite armor is the new phlebotinum, a unique mineral that can only be damaged by extreme heat or other cielite weapons. Cielite is extremely rare, as in there is only one asteroid containing it. So it’s much more efficient to use a cielite melee weapon than to have to make lots of cielite bullets or arrows, which is impossible anyway because of the extreme cost and rarity. So I can have sword duels (more accurately, mace duels) in a Space Opera. Having my cake and eating it too!