Or, similar with Familiar Of Zero wand-sword, by treating the wand as magical lightsaber. Or magicsaber. Whatever.
Basically, by having the blade generated by your magic to encompassing the wand, so that wand doesn't to make physical contact with... well, anything that can break magic wand.
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In my setting some people use the handle of an axe or war hammer as the wand. At range you can use the wand component. At close range you give enemies a taste of the hammer/axe bit of your weapon. The magitech firing mechanism and the ammo stored in the base.
I am planning to use a benevolent title for an antagonist faction. Which title do you think sounds the best? Federation? Confederation? Commonwealth? Republic? Alliance? Got any other suggestions?
The Voice, The Heart, Will of God(dess?)....
Heck, even before Sulla makes a mess out of things, dictator was seen as honorable title.
edited 25th Aug '16 5:52:49 AM by RBomber
A setting where all the gamebreaking elements of D&D exist. Arseplomancer
anyone? Let's make this thing a T-Rex for fun.
edited 26th Aug '16 10:29:58 PM by Matm
The age of the flamethrower.
Flamethrower technology takes off and man portable, mass produced flamethrowers fed by a backpack tanks are created. There are enough flamethrowers for one in 5 soldiers. Other than the flamethrowers everything else is still in the swords and shield stage of development. Battles are great masses of soldiers spewing flame at one another.
edited 30th Aug '16 11:04:14 PM by matti23
If you're fast enough, you can close the gap.
Come on! Let's bless them all until we get fershnickered!Flame throwers don't kill by heat alone. The victims often inhale dangerously heated air that sears the lungs, the fire consumes oxygen immediately around the victim, and it gives off a lot of carbon by products from burning fuel which are also inhaled. Basically your lungs get royally fucked and you begin to rapidly suffocate long before the heat causes sufficient injury to kill you. To make matters worse the burning fuel is typically made into a gel which clings to the victim so you can't escape it. Even if you were protected against all of that being coated in burning material would make it difficult to see through the smoke and flames clinging to you. So no simply wearing heat resistant suit wouldn't quite fit the bill.
It would make more sense to remember the limitations of flame throwers. Which is weight, limited range, and very limited fuel supply. The man portable flame throwers only had enough fuel for less then a minute of firing usually 15-20 seconds. They are also fairly sophisticated devices to make especially compared to other weapons. In all reality they would quite likely fall into the same roles as flamethrowers already have. That is used against fortifications and entrenched enemies and as nasty defensive measures. They would still be backed up by the regular troops and other weapons.
edited 9th Sep '16 4:19:26 PM by TuefelHundenIV
Who watches the watchmen?That's... kind of bad idea, for simple reason: the nature of fire makes it very powerful weapon, with effect similar with WMD. Do it on siege and you get particularly bad name and dead, burning city of little value.
Islam declares fire as forbidden weapon (among other things) for this reason.
Except incendiary weapons were used against cities, towns, and forts all the time especially against fortifications because a lot of the construction even when it was stone used a lot of wood that was directly exposed. Incendiary weapons are one of the oldest weapons and have been used extensively through out the ages. The Byzantines made extensive use of incendiaries for both defense and offense and there are numerous accounts of incendiary weapons use including early incendiary rockets.
The smaller fortifications were just as likely to be built of wood as anything else and even larger stone castles often built additional wood galleries and parts on the walls during a siege called hoardings to make it easier to attack enemies at the base of the walls and allow the defenders to drop materials on them from above.
A flame thrower would be amazingly handy for splashing burning material through openings like murder holes, arrow slits, and similar gaps that allow defenders to attack their enemies.
The Muslim ban on incendiary weapons sounds suspiciously like the Catholic ban on crossbows. On paper only. Especially given they were well known for their "naffatin" or fire archers and made glass and ceramic fire pots to be slung over walls into cities or against fortifications.
Who watches the watchmen?
...I think I just tell that why using fire tend to give you bad name?
Also, yeah, on paper they're forbidden for various reason (humane, religious ("only God himself has privileges to punish with fire") and practical reason (not chopping trees because, well, it's arid region, and not poisoning well or other water source because it'll ruin everyone's life, not just your (current) enemies)), but same thing can be said on chemical weapon in today's war. Or phosphorous shells. Or using mercs.
Suffocation is usually more lethal than actual burns but you can still hold your breath or exhale slowly. Sticky incendiary agents (e.g. napalm) can also be dangerous but you can resist those by catching them on a cloak or something and discarding it.
So you could defeat someone with a flamethrower with a sword. You just need the proper equipment and Nerves of Steel.
Still, the best use of flamethrowers is against fortifications. Confined spaces chokes the oxygen supply and barriers that prevent that's difficult to get into is often difficult to get out off. You could clear a castle wall as easily as a earthened pillbox. Outside of a siege weapon a flamethrower is mostly a weapon of terror and not a particularly effective one. You could outrange a flamethrower with thrown rocks in some cases and an arrow to the wrong part could be disasterous.
You could always use the flamethrowers for less violent purposes. Destroying plague infested corpses and materials, for example. Pre-industrial societies had a pretty hard limit on population due to chronic outbreaks of plague.
Bel; Most people can hold their breath in maybe tens of seconds maybe even a few minutes but they aren't running around doing heavy physical exertion like you would on a battle field either. Even then going by the old incendiary solutions, they burned for minutes at best your delaying something unpleasant unless someone can find a clever way to help you and you are of course still on fire.
You aren't going to be rubbing off Napalm even with a blanket. You might achieve something if all you get just a small bit of spatter but the typical use of a flame thrower isn't exactly gong to be something you can casually wipe away. It is one of the things that is always tried and typically fails because a lot of the target is spattered in burning fuel. Depending on how sophisticated the proposed flame throwers are some of the ones used in war could first shoot a stream of un-ignited fuel at the target to more thoroughly coat it in fuel and then ignite with a burning stream of fuel as it seeped into spaces.
They most certainly have a strong psychological effect but that is really true of pretty much all incendiary weapons including fire pots and the ancient incendiary hand bombs. Incendiaries are one of those weapons that not only have the benefit of a strong psychological effect but are actually rather nasty and destructive. There are several accounts of defenders successfully destroying besiegers siege engines and weapons with incendiary attacks and vice versa.
As for piercing the tanks contrary to the popular myth that rarely resulted in any sort of fire ball. It did happen but it wasn't common. Typically it resulted in fuel spraying out and draining the tank and ensure the operator really didn't want to ignite anything or if it hit the pressure tank a now useless and heavy back mounted fuel supply. Unless you puncture it with something like a tracer or incendiary bullet in the fuel tank specifically or in this case an incendiary arrow or bolt it won't actually be that bad. You wouldn't want that tank to be fire though.
They could be pretty potent in the defense as well as the offense. You could make a good argument that defenders would have an advantage in using such weapons because you could use not only large fuel containers but afford more powerful pressure tanks to shoot the fuel further. There was even a type of defensive mine like weapon called a flame fougasse that was basically tripwire or command fired flame thrower that would spray approaching attackers within an arc with burning fuel and for as long as the fuel is burning make it harder to get by that area. Large and heavier flame throwers found on vehicles and in static positions like the Livens large Gallery Projectors had decent range compared to the backpack units. Some of the vehicle mounted units could launch burning fuel out to around 200m.
They would be handy for plague control especially if you had to keep your distance from the corpses and torch the infested housing. If farmers needed to burn stubble off of a field you could cover a field more quickly as well.
Who watches the watchmen?They'd only need to hold their breath for a couple seconds. Flamethrowers, man portable ones at least, have very short ranges. The M2 had a maximum range of 40 meters which could be run in under ten seconds by a fit man.
Yes, which is why you should strip off any piece of clothing with even a whiff of incendiary. Take it all off and cover it in dirt. As long as you don't get any on your skin or hair you should be alright.
Mind, this does require a very particular outfit, Running in with a t-shirt isn't going to work.
Why do you assume I mean an explosion? Napalm is a sticky mess when it's heated. It's even thicker cold and housing down a housing down every man within ten feet with the stuff would be terribly good slapstick up until the operator fumbles the pilot light.
Their limited range hurts their effectiveness, though. If an enemy is trying to over run a position that's one thing but if they're just getting into shooting range then you've got a problem. You could try setting fires as an area denial tactic, though.
Best used in pre-industrial times when everything is made of wood. Although you could probably cause an artillery shell to cook off if you can hit one.
Fit men or not your not doing casual exercise your running around and fighting on a battlefield. The more you exert yourself the shorter that duration gets you can hold that same breath. You still have to cross to the enemy lines to possibly be set on fire and while on fire try and desperately hack at the other lunatic with a flame thrower. You might get lucky and succeed before something bad happens to you but the odds are not really in your favor. Better to have a ranged weapon and just make the rotten bugger a pincushion.
I can picture slick gelled fuel causing prat falls to funny trombones.
The stripping off of your clothes if you get doused doesn't usually turn out very well either. Your just as likely to spread burning material to things you don't on fire mucking about with being doused. Again unless your only getting some minor spatter or are lucky and say caught on the edge of a spray your probably unpleasantly coated in burning material and everything on you and likely in your immediate vicinity is quite likely on fire. That might not be the best time to be putting on an impromptu strip show. Though some guy ditching his burning trousers to charge in skivvies is an amusing picture.
200m is pretty good range especially if you consider the enemy is using bows and crossbows and even early guns. That would be for the heavy units the backpack stuff of course not quite as useful. Remember it was common to just simply dump rocks over the wall as well as boiling oil and water. A weapon that can throw splattering burning nastiness around 100-200m would be reasonably useful. Especially for hosing say escalade parties, groups at the base of the wall, even siege towers would get an unpleasant surprise. Even hide covered rams damped with vinegar would not do so hot if you splashed them in the burning fuel. The other advantage of projecting the burning fuel streams is they can splash around or under obstacles something that is difficulty to do with say burning oil poured over the wall. Which of course makes them really nasty to say fire into enclosed spaces as you can splatter burning fuel around corners and down stairwells.
Who watches the watchmen?A line of armored men with flamethrowers is pretty much never going to get taken down by dudes with swords. If your guys really have material that flame resistant, can hold their breaths that long, and see through the smoke and flame of their own clothing, the flamethrower guys could just walk backwards or move around them. If they're organized the line falls back just enough to let them rush in and die before they get close to anyone. You could have some pikes here too. A line of pikes behind the flamethrowers to stab anyone who manages the mad dash would be useful too. And I'm pretty sure cavalry is useless, good luck getting a horse to charge a wall of fire (unless its like a flame resistant lizard horse or something). I see a sort of pike and shot situation set up, but with a lot of longbows, crossbows, and probably sophisticated siege weapons. You're going to need pretty good ranged weapons and tactics, because flamethrowers charging flamethrowers is going to be a lot of fiery death on both sides.
Swords will still be useful in civilian contexts, though. Much like they were in our own history after they were mostly relegated to sidearms on battlefields.
edited 13th Sep '16 2:02:48 AM by elvesknowbest
Flamethrowers vs Longbows- fight! I don't see this ending well for the flamethrowers. A flamethrowers range is about 20 or 30 meters tops, right? A heavy longbow's is more like 200. And the longbowmen will have far greater mobility. There is a reason no one ever tried to use Greek Fire this way.
I'm done trying to sound smart. "Clear" is the new smart.The heaviest man portable flamethrower I could find is the WW 2 US M2 flamethrower with a maximum range of 40 meters. Most had a maximum range of maybe 30 meters, well within hand grenade distance never mind bow shot. The 200 meter flamethrowers were all vehicle based and most of those could barely make 150 meters.

For that reason, most wand swords have their cores either embedded within the wand or pointed in opposite direction of the blades. Some advanced designs has the core covering the wand or incorporating the core into the blade itself.
edited 12th Aug '16 5:32:09 AM by murazrai