Combat-Writing Thread

I'm writing a scene where a guy gets attacked by a swordsman in a farm. He gets almost killed, but turns the tide around by countering with a bull whip.

Question: Would it be possible to rip out someone's eye with a whiplash to the face? I've seen some pictures of injuries from whipping, and hoo boy, seems pretty plausible to me.

Not sure about "rip-out" but crushing certainly.

I see.

I just wrote an action scene, a fight involving a mage and an archer. In a nutshell, a mage threw an attack powerful enough to both knock out the archer and break her bow. But she didn't quite go unconscious, instead playing dead. So when the mage get distracted, she picks up her broken bow and kills the mage by strangling him with her bowstring.

I must say, with all the burial, strangling, drowning, stuffing throat, I'm growing very fond of kills via asphyxiation.

Would an archer be a good assassin during medieval times?

It's just that I've never heard of anyone being assassinated by an arrow. King Ahab and Harold II were allegedly killed by arrows, but that's more of a death in battlefield.

The problem I see is that a bow is not a very subtle weapon. It's big, heavy, and expensive. If you shoot someone with witnesses around it's pretty obvious what happened and a bow is not something you'd use as a throw away weapon. Trying at night is even worse, the medieval times were not lit well and getting an accurate shot would be almost impossible, especially at a distance.

Also arrows are also not quite as lethal as media would lead you to think. Compared to a high velocity weapon like a bullet it doesn't have the temporary cavity that causes most of the damage in gunshot wounds. An arrow can kill almost immediately if you hit the heart or the upper brain or spinal cord. But you'd have to be a hell of a shot to hit something that small, even on a stationary target on a range. Hitting a major blood vessel or organ would cause severe bleeding that could be fatal in a few minutes, but that gives the victim a lot of leeway to get medical attention during which time he can finger you.

Even in straight out combat, bows were mostly meant to whittle and harass the enemy, not mow them down like machine guns. Better yet since being wounded effectively took them out of the fight, even more since supplies and manpower are needed to tend to the wounded.

Long story short, bows can kill as a precision weapon but there were many more reliable ways to suit an assassination approach.

That's a good point.

The character in question is originally a hunter tribe woman located in a mountain filled with extremely dangerous predators, so I'm pretty sure she should be good at more than just archery.

I'm going to ask an exceptionally stupid question.

In a world that is mostly filled with higher end of Type 1 and Type 2 in Super Weight, how plausible would it be to have someone get punched so fast that he hears getting punched first before feeling the punch?

If I remember correctly, sound is the fastest human sense.

edited 23rd Jan '16 3:26:19 PM by dRoy

Depends on the sense, Pain impulses travel exceedingly slow depending on what type of nerves they travel on. My searching has been frustratingly imprecise generally saying between 0.5-30 m/s. All are still much slower than sound though at 343.2 m/s.

In certain games I've seen soldiers hold pistols, submachine guns and carbines canted to the side while engaging in close quarters battle. Is this a real technique? What are the advantages of doing this?

Could be Center Axis Relock. It's a technique for close quarters gun fighting. Supposedly it's great for absorbing recoil and bringing the weapon around quickly.

It's the signature style of Sam Fisher.

It also provides easier acquisition of sights for close quarters. They're bigger in your visual field due to being closer, which makes the gun less accurate at long ranges, but easier to line up for a nearby target. And you can easily choose which eye you sight with, which can be helpful for people with a dominant eye opposite the dominant hand.

Looked it up, seems about right. Thanks.

I have a particular weapon in my story and I'd like to know how implausible it is.

It's a grenade launcher. But it fires a special type of grenade: basically a grenade-sized capsule of compressed super-heated liquid. When the capsule hits a surface, it detonates, and the liquid contained instantly turns into steam resulting in a large explosion. Instead of shrapnel, the vapour that is dispersed by the explosion is hot enough to melt steel, essentially serving the same purpose.

Is that a totally ridiculous weapon? Or is it possible with enough phlebotinum/magic/etc?

edited 31st Jan '16 1:28:17 PM by gameknight102xx

It's possible, but the real problem is that it wouldn't do the job any better than a chemical explosive would, while probably costing more.

Yeah, what's the point?

and

The ingredients required to make conventional explosives are few and far between in this setting. So he had to get creative. He also has access to a quick and easy way to make this ammunition, to the point that he can make it even while in the field.

edited 31st Jan '16 7:07:45 PM by gameknight102xx

Sounds like a thermite charge to me (which can be homemade), but in liquid form for some reason. Feasible, but I wonder if it's possible to improvised a means of ensuring the grenade sticks to the target instead of liquid contents.

Or else the old "Plasma in a magnetic bottle" trope would get the job done.

Thermite and plasma? So if the liquid in question was, say, water, would it be totally implausible then?

What's heating the water? How hot is it? If you heat it enough, it becomes nuclear plasma.

edited 2nd Feb '16 4:59:58 PM by DeMarquis

The heat source is a gizmo inside the launcher itself. There's no real-life equivalent, but the closest thing is a nuclear reactor.

As for the temperature, the steam from the immediate blast is hot enough to melt steel, so around 1500-2000 degrees celsius.

edited 2nd Feb '16 7:58:27 PM by gameknight102xx

Do any of you folks have good information about what the day-to-day functioning of an independent mercenary company is like?

I figure that using mercenaries for protagonists in military fiction permits a greater degree of creative freedom in how they're depicted because of the looser structure compared to official militaries. Is this plausible?

Whatever their corporate structure looks like at home, mercenaries tend to form up in military-style organizations when in the field. That's assuming the "traditional" Western PMC, though; less formal paramilitaries may not have that same level of discipline.

Given that most modern PMC's are drawn from former military personnel, they would usually form some semblance of a military unit with similar "ranks".

However there are PMC's that have a lot of rejects: dishonorable discharged troops, fired police, random people hired to fill up the ranks, former military fleeing from those not nice states you hear about on the news. They would have a looser structure.

I was wondering how I write stealth for an over the top series like Kingdom Hearts?