Titanium Swords Redux: If Guns No Longer Worked Today

Redux edition, since this was originally in Literature, and that is the improper place for this. :)

I'm participating in Nano Wrimo, and also vaguely trying to get my ass back into gear with this website.

One of the things I've done is a modern setting without guns; magic works, and a bunch of people got together and spelled guns out of the way, removing them and their absurd killing potential from people's lives. Whether this was good or evil is a bit of a debate in-universe, but for our purposes it's irrelevant; guns don't exist, so how does mankind respond?

For example, what materials do we make the weapons out of? My knowledge of science is limited and strange; and now I'm wondering how we'd deal with this issue. It's primarily a military issue, for obvious reasons, but I'm pretty interested.

For those curious, the specific things banned are crossbows, guns, bombs, rockets, and missiles no longer work. Technology is no more ahead than our own time, so railguns and laser beams aren't the answer- and there is a substantial chance that the spell will affect them too.

(While magic exists, it is used as a supplement to their tech, and so humans are still at basically the same level.)

Some discussion occurred in the other board on the original thread, but this is the better place for it. :)

David beat Goliath with the classic slingshot in The Bible so...you're gonna basically have to magic away all ranged weapons whatsoever for swords to do everything.

Now modern materials? Look at the stuff they use today for bow hunting.

I don't mind ranged weapons so much as I don't like guns. I find them difficult to write. Now slings and modern material!... that's interesting to me. :)

And as for bows, I do have an idea that anyone who was a bow hunter pretty much got drafted in the first few years after the event.

Frank Herbert wrote a short story covering that scenario once...somebody invented a device that could cause any explosive to spontaneously combust from a distance, rendering most firearms, missiles and even combustion engines rather...unsafe in warfare. It led to militaries largely switching to chemical and biological warfare, along with swords and crossbows (usually poisoned). The implication was that it was a far nastier world than the Forever War scenario the device had been invented to end.

That's fascinating! I'll have to look that up.

This isn't intended to make a "peace and love FOREVER~" scenario, it's more because I don't like writing gunfights, and I like the idea of massive societal changes. So this fits both neatly.

A fantasy novel series called Dies The Fire covers this as well but takes it a step further. If it is modern combustion or relies on anything higher then medieval tech it doesn't work. Folks have to learn to do things old school.

If you are going modern materials in medieval weapons. Look into advanced polymers, metal alloys, and ceramics for your materials. Carbon fiber materials would also be handy.

Ceramics as both weapons and weapon coatings are good. Look at modern high end cutlery for some interesting examples of modern tech with blades.

Modern body armors can work against medieval style weapons but you will have do some tweaking to the designs. Kevlar is good at absorbing kinetic energy. However it is vulnerable to piercing and even slashing. What makes modern body armor most effective are the hard components. This would be your Ar-500^note Modern Armor Grade Steel, titanium alloy armor inserts, and Ceramic inserts. There are also vests specialized to absorb kinetic force like blunt force or vests designed to resist penetration by stabbing or slashing^note Often referred to as stab or knife vests Where the tweaking comes in is how you do your layering and where you place the hard sections of armor. Look up the late medieval and Renaissance Munition Armors, quarter plate, and half plate for an idea of how that might work.

For projectile weapons you have a variety of materials including metal alloys, fiber glass, carbon fiber, certain polymers and other materials, plus simple mechanical systems capable of producing powerful bows and crossbows.

For weapons that need poles. You can use light but strong metal alloys for the poles. Which would be lighter then the late medieval all metal pole arm shafts.

Tueful Hunden, this sounds like the start of a beautiful friendship.

Higher tech works; the spell's very specific about what don't function.

Crossbows don't work because the spell's designers viewed them as a possible loophole (they viewed them, with their trigger and overtly mechanical components, as "quasi-guns", and included them in the spell), but they didn't bother with bows, viewing them as too primitive.

Stab vests... now isn't that fascinating.

THANK YOU! Seriously, all of this is helpful!

Problem is, we're almost at a stage where coil-guns are viable, and shutting them down is going to do some nasty things to the rest of the world, as suddenly nothing electric works. Mind you, shutting crossbows down isn't really possible either, the physics screw-up will make life very difficult.

edited 4th Nov '14 8:40:23 PM by MattII

What's a coil-gun?

A weapon that uses electromagnetic coils to launch a projectile made of ferrous materials, actual natural magnets, or more complicated electromagnetic coils.

A railgun, you mean! Well, as mentioned above, the spellcasters took magnetic weaponry into account; there is a substantial (above 60%) chance that railguns won't work at all, as well as laser beams; the spellcasters looked ahead as well as back. They tried to cover the bases; while there are loopholes (flamethrowers being a prominent one), for the most part, guns and things that work like guns are gone.

What about IED's? Is all explosive material gone or does commercial still go? And what if it is and you use it for an Improvides Bomb?

Also, I kinda imagine Bio-weapons to make a fun comeback with swords.

Assume you can now safely lace a blade with EHEC (which is by no stretch difficult to make in a modern lab.

Or some fun Resistant Streps.

Forget poisoned blades...

Another thought: Assuming ICBM's are out by that, but normal rockets (surface - orbit) are still working...I can see some nations trying to put some Rods from God into orbit to replace their WM Ds

edited 5th Nov '14 2:09:03 AM by 3of4

Nitpick: A coilgun isn't exactly the same thing as a railgun. Both use electromagnetic forces to accelerate a projectile but that's all they have in common in terms of operating principles.

In sci-fi settings that bother to make the distinction, coilguns tend to be known as "gauss" weapons. If you see a rapid-firing electromagnetic weapon anywhere...chances are that if the world's creators gave any thought to it at all, it's meant to be a coilgun rather than a railgun.

Aren't there some plans about how some coil guns rotate the magnets as they fire?

Anywho you can't simply get rid of ranged weaponry without a massive cultural shift. When the arrow and ranged weaponry became common war and culture itself changed, for one thing, Armies instead of sending men to die in close quarters could feasibly train their soldiers to use ranged weaponry and kill at a distance.

Explore some of the implications about the removal of said weaponry, such as new ways being explored of killing each other, how we are trying to make them faster and such.

Also now Tanks are fundamentally just rolling metal boxes. Without a turret to use a Tank cannot fire back, and it does not need to worry about artillery or missiles so to send them out into the field becomes a bit of a waste of resources.

Actually, Missile Weaponry wasn't that much a gamechanger until later (Muskets/Rifles). Archers still needed a buttload of training to properly work, and even crossbows remained support to close combat troops for a long time.

And for the tanks.

Add a ramming-prow and roll over all those pesky swordfighters :D?

(No joke, a Leo 2 or a Abrahms are fast enough to run them down)

edited 5th Nov '14 8:16:40 AM by 3of4

My understanding is that at least some ranged weapons still exist—bows and slings, for example, and I would imagine spears (but what about spear-throwers?).

As to tanks: Hmm... I do wonder whether we'd still see a differentiation between tanks and APCs, however: why not just fit the prow to an APC, and have your vehicle also ferry in some swordsmen of your own to mop up the survivors?

edited 5th Nov '14 8:18:32 AM by ArsThaumaturgis

I assume spear throwers would work like with the romans. Basically give your average swordfighter a few spears to throw before it comes to bladework.

I actually wonder if at some point there won't be a fight between a free-charging movie-like swordfighter company and a legion-drill-styled swordfighter company (at which point I assume the former gets owned)

edited 5th Nov '14 8:19:49 AM by 3of4

Gyro jet weapons might make a comeback. You really render rocketry useless without rendering satellites worthless and quite possibly destroying aviation as a whole.

It's almost impossible to remove explosives from the equation while leaving internal combustion intact. So no explosive, no cars.

Did someone cast Summon History Nerd?

The availability and relative training level of missile troops has varied greatly over time, obviously, but it's worth noting that warbows in the Late Middle Ages, at least if we're talking Western Europe (parts of Eastern Europe as well as Turkey and the Middle East had a different approach to missile warfare) were relatively difficult to train with. If you wanted something that could reliably penetrate heavy plate armor, you needed archers with at least a decade of training drawing huge 120 pound warbows.

Even then, through most of the medieval period archers were not a very substantial portion of an army. The same thing with crossbows. The reason was fairly simple: Usually these people were either peasants (in the case of archers) or mercenaries (in case of professional crossbowmen, though many were also members of a citizen's militia.)

The profound cultural shift started around the Late Medieval Period, at least in England, with a law that decreed that all yeomen (farmers with a certain amount of land) were required by law to own and train with a longbow. This ensured that England, at any given time when a campaign was going on, had a solid core of archers to fall back on - something which, otherwise, had not really been seen in Western European warfare.

And even when archers started to become a common component of medieval armies, it was usually in a support role to the infantry. Most archers from this same period would start the fight with a mass-bombardment, usually to disorient the enemy and throw them from their horses (keeping in mind that a lot of medieval warfare was decided by cavalry,) before they'd run in to join the fight as light infantry, which they were also equipped for.

Ranged warfare has been a part of history for a long time, but it isn't really until the age of line infantry that we start to see an organized movement towards armies not, fundamentally, focused on close combat.

Again, combat on the Asian continent is a little different. The Mongols, for example, were famed for their combination of archery and horsemanship, as well as their skirmishing tactics, but as far as Western European examples go, that's how it goes.

edited 5th Nov '14 8:25:14 AM by math792d

I think the issue is more that the magic works on a Conceptual Level, not a "meddle with physics" level.

The Magic recognizes "Guns, Bombs, etc" as a Concept, not how they work. A gun is a gun, no matter how the bullet is accelerated. A bomb is a bomb, but an commercial explosive is not a bomb, unless used as such, at which it fits the Concept of a bomb.

The spell, as described, seems to be an ongoing reactive force, not a Emberverse style event that altered the laws of physics. Magic Big Brother Is Watching You, so to speak.

I'd assume there is a lot of "lets see how far we can go before the spell hits us" experimentation at the beginning.

edited 5th Nov '14 8:26:24 AM by 3of4

B It how does the spell recognize a gun as a gun? If it's by people's conception of guns then the spell is on a time limit. Since guns don't work the perception of what guns are will drift as people don't remember what guns did. If the spell has a set of rules to define what a gun is then either the weapon designers will lawyer their way around the spell ( and trust me there isn't a force in the world that can't resist human ingenuity and time) or you'd have lots of false positives that knock humanity back by several decades.

Regardless, using magic to declare no guns in a modern setting is rife with plot holes.

Only if you go Hard Magic on the spell. Soft Magic though...

And how the spell works seems to be intentionally vague, which fits pretty well with Sandersons first law:

An author’s ability to solve conflict with magic is DIRECTLY PROPORTIONAL to how well the reader understands said magic.

edited 5th Nov '14 8:45:23 AM by 3of4

Ah, so you embrace the Belisario Maxim and declare it works Because I Said So which only preserves suspension of disbelief if the audience doesn't want guns to begin with.

Then again, this is your work so go nutz, I guess.

That works, just be careful not to break the suspension of disbelief, keep the internal story rules consistent and the story should be fine.

Maybe, and I'm just spinning around here, go with a semi-two-tiered magic system. A Mundane Functional Magic for general use and whatever they used in the backstory, which is a "higher" form which is even mysterious for the magicians still around. A Magic Gamechanger so to speak

(figuring out what it is exactly could be an important motivation?)