40
Good generals study tactics and strategy. Great generals study logistics.
Forget about the tactical value of this gadget and appreciate its logistic value.
Medieval armies did not encounter most of their losses during battle. Most losses were due to disease and starvation. If you can avoid that, then you can join every battle with more soldiers than you ...
24
Water doesn't penetrate armor. Your flail would be roughly as useful as trying to throw tubs of hot water at your enemy. Except you'd also get hot water on your own allies.
Use an enclosed space with a nozzle
Place your water making magic thing inside a sealed metal box, and punch a small hole through it. Water is generated at 0.1 L/s, which mean 0.1L/s of ...
22
Suction Weapons as described are not all that effective
The only reason a pool drain can kill like that is because you have the weight of all that water behind them. In general, a 1 atmosphere of pressure difference is not enough to kill a person and the actual pressure gradient caused by a suction means you have a pretty short range on what ever weapon you ...
15
One of the most common misconceptions about vacuums is that they create some sort of sucking force. This is exactly wrong. A vacuum is simply a low pressure area. The force that acts on the air, water or what have you into the low pressure area comes entirely from the pressure of the air/water/whatever around it, not from the vacuum itself.
Since all of the ...
14
There are several approaches to this problem.
Hand weapon: Probably not worth it
There is a history of pouring hot water and other substances over the heads of attackers during sieges, but that requires having the high ground. You mention that your world is flat. You can't throw water as far as a solid aerodynamic object, so an enemy with an atl-atl could ...
11
The Jet engine Suction Tank
If you aren't worried about being practical, you could create a suction weapon by putting a high bypass jet engine on top of a tank. This would have a suction range of around 10-20 feet, which would be smaller than the length of the tank itself. The exhaust would be dangerous up to around a hundred feet- a more effective weapon ...
10
They guy with the scythe is toast.
Yes, it does terrible damage when it connects, but the required swing is too long and the weapon too heavy to recover quickly; someone with a properly balanced sword (lighter than a full greatsword), who isn't disabled by sheer bad luck on the first scythe swing will cut the scythe wielder to pieces before they can recover ...
10
Suppose this rune can create boiling water at 0.1 liters / second on a particular spot. To kill a person with that, that spot must be near, or inside the body of that person. The temperature would be unbearable and when water is materialized inside the body, e.g. while penetrating, pressure inside the body would cause havoc, killing the enemy very quickly.
...
6
Step 1. Get the guns and vehicles there.
By smuggling, having people on the other side make them or buy them, there are lots of options. You're about to kill a bunch of people so you want a load of expendable weapons you can blast away with and cars you can burn. You do this before the big crime, because it's best to not do two crimes at once, crossing the ...
5
The BugZooka is such a weapon!
source
BugZooka is a fast, simple, and clean way to rid bugs from your home
The innovative and light weight new BugZooka lets you keep your distance and avoid bug squish and splatter
It's unique patent pending design creates 10X the instant suction of heavy battery powered devices
Bugs are sucked instantly into a removable ...
5
Armor. Body armor worn by human soldiers is limited by weight, which is why they wear vests instead of covering their whole body. Kevlar practical for humans to carry around is only bullet-resistant, not bullet-proof. Ceramic plates take one hit and are then useless. If you could carry around double-thick Kevlar everywhere on your body, you'd be well ...
5
The answer to this question is, sadly, not so very straight forward. There are so many variables to consider that the answer will always be up for debate. It is never a "yes/no" question, but one of probability and stacking advantages. Someone can always "get lucky" when it comes to fighting, especially when you introduce weapons into the ...
4
Looking around my larger hand tools, I would chose any of them as a weapon over the scythe. It's heavy and awkward....even a flimsy fan rack would have more chance of being effective!
4
No.
The strength of the pike in ancient warfare was in part due to its length - which kept opponents at a distance. But the secret to its success lay in the density of the formations using it.
Take 1000 men and form a traditional phalanx. This gives you a formation that's aprox. 100 paces wide and 10 deep (as an example). Inside that space are 1000 spear ...
4
The method depends on the goal.
If I want to infiltrate your house and steal your magic pants, I want subtlety. I do not want you to even know they are gone until you are rooting around in your closet, pantsless, and cannot find them. But if I want to teach you a life lesson, I drive your car thru the wall of your house, let your (many!) cats out into the ...
4
Carbon dioxide
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrVW7uNecHo
Your gun is loaded with compressed CO2. It is the future so a lot of it fits in the cylinder. You can let it out in a measured way and make solid chunks of dry ice which is what they are doing in this video. Those are your bullets. You can use the same compressed CO2 to fire your rifle - it is ...
3
Steam Age:
This is likely to be a frustrating thing to use for attack, but as a defensive tool, I suspect it will be quite useful.
One problem with boiling water as an attack is that you need to carry around un-boiled water with you to generate boiling water. This is a lot of mass to drag around, and unless your folks have a legitimate reason to be dragging ...
3
The process is done slowly. Take, for example, the drug gangs running over the US-Mexico border. At first organization, the gangs were within one country and had business dealings with another gang over the border. Over time, the gangs infiltrate members over the border till they have enough on the other side. (In this case, it is mostly moving north of the ...
3
Suction weapons exist in nature, octopuses and squids use them (suckers).
Problems
You seem to be interested in something that acts at range, and in air. These seem like problems. Firstly, as others have said, the air pressure (1 atmosphere on Earth) sets the upper limit to how hard you can ever suck with air. In this extreme case you extort zero pressure (...
3
It depends on the type of particle beam.
If the particle beam uses charged particles (protons, ionized atoms, etc., then it's affected by the magnetic shield in the same way as plasma is, since plasma is itself charged particles (ions).
If the particle beam uses neutral particles (neutrons or neutral atoms), then the magnetic shielding has no effect and you ...
3
Amateurs think tactics, professionals think logistics
There are two groups that really want new, different and exciting firearms available for troops - gun fetishists (because new guns are COOL) and firearms manufacturers (because new guns mean big contracts). What the military actually needs are reliable weapons that are easily maintained and resupplied.
...
2
Mounted weapons could instead be carried by the giants.
https://www.military.com/equipment/m134-gau-17-gatling-gun
https://avp.fandom.com/wiki/Old_Painless
A fine example is the use of the M134 gatling gun or "minigun" as a handheld weapon in the movie Predator. The real M134 is mounted to absorb the recoil, and requires huge amounts of ammo as ...
2
Make a hurricane
While all other answers were correct in a sense that a vacuum device have to rely on surrounding atmosphere to do any actual damage, they did not took into account factor of inertia. Make air move fast enough and it'll create large force (dynamic pressure). An atmospheric pressure difference of merely ~10% over a country-sized region is a ...
2
A blacksmith's bellow seems like the perfect weapon assuming you could modify the accordion to withstand boiling water and can wait long enough for it to fill up between attacks. I think leather would work.
2
The Info Age Collapse will not Happen Everywhere
10% of the current world population is still a lot of people. Basically, you've sent the world population back to the 1700s which was enough people to support the early industrial revolution. This means you still have enough people for factories, major shipping companies, etc. as long as someone is able to ...
2
There is a German fairy tale of the Seven Swabians, who fought this way. They are depicted as bumblers whose monster opponent turns out to be a harmless rabbit. A fairy tale is a fairy tale, but this should tell you that it wasn't considered a very practical notion.
Pikes or a phalanx depend on a formation for mutual protection. They also depend on mass to ...
2
Consider that not everything will switch to alternative energy at the same time. Some things, that are better suited to it, will switch before others.
Given that, it seems to me that fighter jets are just about the worst possible case for alternative energy. It hurts them more than any other technological artifact whatsoever. As you observe, they will be ...
1
Pressurized Air Guns
Fill a tank of air at ambient temperature, seal it tight. Then activate the rune, which applies heat externally to the container, likely through direct contact with the boiling water or indirectly using just the steam. The air inside the tank expands, creating a pressure within the tank.
Then you pull the trigger, opening the valve, ...
1
No
Humans are amazing at throwing. It could be considered a specie-unique skill we have. This study shows why we are so good at throwing.
We found that humans are able to throw with such velocity by storing elastic energy in their shoulders. This is accomplished by positioning the arm in such a way that the arm’s mass resists motions generated at the torso ...
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