Weapon combos

I've been thinking a lot on how some weapons compliment each other. Let's come up with weapons that are hybrids of two different ones. They need not be a gun and a melee hybrid but that's up to you.

A Zweihander with a pole handle, allowing one to use it as a lance.

Razor blades + chainmail = Sea Urchin

Melee weapon. Used with wrestling moves. Used with another protective layer beneath it for the user. Cause of death for those hit by it: Death by a thousand cuts.

Also good to block arrows and stab damage somewhat.

Are we talking modern weapons or historical weapons?

I’ll point out that individuals who carry multiple weapons very rarely use them both at once. It’s basically unheard of in warfare. Some martial arts and fencing styles involve offhand daggers for partying, but it’s uncommon. When it comes to modern weapons, two weapons are never used simultaneously.

Edited by archonspeaks on Aug 7th 2019 at 7:34:26 AM

Both, and this is about fusing two weapons together ala RWBY.

Laser Pointer + Prosthetic Eye = "The Mothman"

Pupil being the on-button, then get eye-contact with the opponent and keep it there.

the opponent will be blind in the matter of seconds as the retina gets burned out for them.

(Hey, a prosthetic can be a weapon of war as well.)

Some Ming-era goodies for you. The "three-eyed gun" was the most common infantry firearm in the Ming army, looking like basically a three-barrelled version of the hand cannons used in Europe. As you could probably guess, these weapons were quite finicky to load, so they weren't used to lay down withering ranged fire like classical bows or crossbows. Rather, they were fired in a single salvo as the battle lines closed, throwing the enemy line into disarray just prior to contact. To that end, the Ming army strapped them to various forms of bladed weapons,◊ allowing the gunners to participate in close combat after firing. Yeah, they looked a tad unwieldy, but socket bayonets wouldn't be invented in the West for another two centuries, so... honestly not that weird. Pavises and protected carts were used to protect the gunners on the occasions where they did need sustained fire.

But wait! There's more. In the mid-16th century, the Chinese coast came under heavy attack from wokou pirates (typically led by Japanese officers, but often with mostly Chinese or Korean crews). The Ming government fought a long campaign to drive the pirates away - the decisive blows were dealt by the general Qi Jiguang, who later wrote a detailed manual on the innovative small-unit tactics employed along the way. Though the raids were mostly over by 1567, the general recognised the need to outgun the enemy in future engagements and commissioned a local engineer named Zhao Shizhen to come up with new firearm designs, which included this gloriously awkward gun/shield thing.◊

The "rapid thunder gun" was a (theoretically) modular weapon consisting of a shield, a matchlock breech, five barrels protruding through holes in the shield, and an underarm rest that was actually an axe for close combat. Every part of the weapon could be taken apart and used individually, and the presence of an assistant loader◊ was supposed to make it the ideal defensive weapon... until you consider that it weighed as much as a sack of rocks, needed a degree of manufacturing standardisation that just didn't exist in the 16th century, and had a whole bunch of complex locking mechanisms that might as well had been alien technology to the average soldier. In other words, it was basically an old-timey OICW. Eventually the Ming army figured out that giving everyone one of those new European-style arquebuses would've been a more efficient allocation of resources, and the gunshield passed into history (though many units held on stubbornly to their three-eyed guns until the Qing conquest in the 17th century).

(P.S.: Zhao later came up with this breech-loading arquebus thing,◊ so you can't say that he wasn't forward-thinking, even considering his other stuff.)

(P.P.S.: See how the guy in the illustration uses the axe to stabilise the gunshield? The Russian streltsy also did that, only they used gigantic two-handed bardiches instead.)

Edited by eagleoftheninth on Aug 7th 2019 at 9:10:04 AM