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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6750796" data-attributes="member: 4937">I don't know about the believable part.  One of the weaknesses I find in Dune (one of my favorite books nonetheless) is that the military aspect of it is so wholly unbelievable and so obviously reliant on the author's intervention to achieve a particular effect.   The whole universe uses shield generators which render (magically) you immune to not only missile weapons but apparently the law of conservation of momentum, such that a 155mm artillery shell exploding near you doesn't kill you with sheer concussion.  Do shields also protect you from falls of any distance?.  Likewise, these shields appear to selectively keep out say napalm (which would you think just drip through them slowly) and shield you from the thermal effects of being coated in it.   And why is no one employing gas weapons or fuel air explosives?In theory all these 'primitive' weapons are obsoleted by advanced energy weapons - lasguns.  But all these advanced energy weapons aren't actually employed because they cause nuclear scale explosions when interacting with shields.   Which to me says that it's not lasguns that wouldn't be employed, as it was in the books, but shields!  If your defensive technology can be 100% sabotaged into a mass self-destruction mechanism 100% reliably just by shooting 1 lasgun at it, then 1000's of years ago that technology would have been abandoned as a crock or at the least been used as a rare special purpose sort of thing in a non-military environment.  And of course, this is exactly how it plays out in the books, with the 'primitive' modern weaponry - artillery, rockets, bombs, machine guns - absolutely wrecking the advanced science fiction stuff - rather like machine guns being more useful against the Borg than phasers, or every second episode of Stargate: SG1.  In practice, the melee weapons don't actually have a lot of military practicality even in Dune, and the only time they are really important is as dueling weapons or means of assassination.    That's generally one of the more balanced ways of doing armor as DR.  Personally, I think armor as DR is a great way to deal with science fiction weaponry and the problems of heroism in an age when offensive weaponry is capable of flattening whole cities.  If I was doing this, I'd do rather the reverse of what you are doing.   I'd have armor with 'soak dice' against attacks of all sorts, then create special melee weapons ('vibroblades', 'lightsabers', whatever) that had the special property of ignoring all or part of the armor or at least most kinds of armor.   Thus, you'd have weapons which weren't necessarily more potent than missile weapons, but which were relatively more effective against armor.</blockquote>

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