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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6750826" data-attributes="member: 4937">How often in the modern era do you generally see boarding actions in combat?  Ranged weapons have been steadily eroding the importance of melee weapons in naval combat since the High Middle Ages, and by the mid-19th century they (and the bayonet charge on land) were basically obsolete.   If your ship hulls are as weak as you suggest, then the situation in space is going to be even more extreme, with opponents able to blast ships out of space from ranges of 10's or 100's of 1000's of kilometers with explosives that clear whole cubic kilometers of space of your foes.  The only situations that would lead to boarding actions in such situations amount to police actions - maybe you want to recover a ship from pirates without blowing it up, or rescue hostages.  And even in such cases, it's clear that swarms of drones wielding tasers and tear gas and any number of other advanced weapons I could probably brainstorm up for close quarters work, are much more effective than knives and spears.  Right now we have armor that works fairly well at stopping bullets.  If melee combat was still a thing, just think how well the modern equivalent of plate mail would work if we needed such a thing.  I'm sure that civilizations with enough technology to live and work in space would have things I can't imagine, but I'd much rather be using a 20mm semi-automatic grenade launcher filled with paper shelled flash/concussion grenades, guns shooting heat seeking bladed micro-missiles, tasers, gas launched micro-robots that cling to foes and scuttle about looking for hypodermic needle injection sites (imagine a weapon that covered you with the high tech equivalent of bullet ants), goop guns that fire sticky visor/eye/sensor covering slime, hacking probes that tried to insert malware and turn off ship's life support, low velocity dum-dum rounds that rip flesh and burst your cells like so many balloons but have very low penetration, little high velocity nano-bullets that embed themselves in skin and release cyanide, so forth if I had to take a space ship and disable its crew.  Very likely, you could do all of that with the advanced equivalent of quadcopters and not risk your own crew.</blockquote>

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