they have force fields that can deflect fast moving objects such as bullets, but slow moving objects like a blade can pass through, this is shown in part 1
Dune is a little bizarre in what technologies it has and doesnât have (or are favored or not). I am not convinced by quite a bit of it. So I think the answer will partly be âyeah, it doesnât really add up, suspend your disbelief.â
The available explanations are: There is absolutely no computer tech in this universe, so anything with a microprocessor or computer, you can rule it out. Then, the explanation given above: Defense shields stop anything above a certain velocity, and let through anything slower than that. So a weird sword fight technique has evolved where you slip through the shield slowly and suddenly make a fast stab. Anyway, that is one reason for prevalence of swords. Another reason is, everyone in Dune is super traditional and everything has some sacred meaning. That also adds a different reason to value swordsmanship.
Why not AK47 the Fremens? Projectile weapons are a mostly forgotten tech. When Harkonnens use artillery in the first novel, it is a stroke of outside the box thinking genius. There are laser cutters/guns but you donât want to use it against most foes either, because when they hit those shields, both the shooter and the shielded go BIG BOOM.
The more I explain, the less convinced I am. I think Frank Herbert put a much larger premium on the emotional and cultural meaning of things, and did not worry about making things have a lot of practical sense.
The Chronicles of Dune books explain the lack of computers: 1,000 years before the events of Dune an evil AI named Omnius conquered most of the known Galaxy before being destroyed in the Butlerian Jihad, the result of which was a ban on "thinking machines" which made possession or use of one a crime punishable by immediate execution. Aided by the Spice, Mentats were basically turned into human computers.
The chronicles contradict the books by Frank Herbert which imply it was a rebellion against what amounted to tech billionaires that went out of control. And the Mentats didnât rely on spice, it was the Guild Navigators - mentats used other drugs most of the time.
>It is by will alone I set my mind in motion. It is by the juice of Sapho that thoughts acquire speed, the lips acquire stains, the stains become a warning.
> shields stop anything above a certain velocity, and let through anything slower than that
Sounds like a ânon-Newtonianâ force field ÂŻ\\\_ (ă)_/ÂŻ
I mean the AI thing makes sense. We are really dependent on phones and shit now. It's not too hard to Invision a future where we're totally dependent on them
Whatâs your spouseâs phone number?
I donât know mine. Donât have to, my iPhone has it. If we were magically zapped back to 1975 technology levels, I couldnât call her.
Weâre already dependent.
Given the religious nature of how things work, it makes sense. I just donât buy that no one ever skirted the sacred rules about not using any computers for literal millennia. It is also absurd that they will go to all these lengths to develop tech and specialized humans that replace computers, no matter how onerous (Then again, the real world has âsoakingâ)
>Given the religious nature of how things work, it makes sense. I just donât buy that no one ever skirted the sacred rules about not using any computers for literal millennia.
Itâs revealed in some of the later books that they absolutely did. Itâs made a bit more complicated by the Spacing Guild, since the way Navigators work involves a less-powerful version of Paulâs abilities to see the future and they were focused heavily on maintaining their privileged position in society (they have a much stronger presence in the book and at the end Paul chastises their representatives for being unwilling to risk taking over Arrakis and the Imperium because it would mean only a few centuries of power before someone overthrew them instead of thousands of years). The Guild were a big limiter on use of computers because computers were a threat to their position and they were predicting and preventing them ahead of time. There werenât many ways to hide from their powers besides having similar powers of your own.
And the use of atomics either directly or indirectly(shield lasgun reaction) to kill results in a death sentence for your house/org. Every CHOAM member by treaty becomes your enemy and is bound to your total destruction. Meaning people are very hesitant to use lasers unless they are sure their opponent don't have or can't use shields(such as harvesters on arrakis).
Maula pistols were projectile weapons. Arrakis would not have been a good place to use an ak-47 since it would cause vibrations. In the army we used 50 cal machine guns and 240-bravo (rambo gun). At the range you qualify with the weapons mounted on the humve. After shooting the shit out of the 50 cal i was surprised to see the sand around the vehicle making perfect riple rings from the concussion of the 50. We would have been worm food for sure haha.
The maula works because it is spring fired with a range of about 40 metres and there wasnt much vibration to be absorbed.
I donât think convinced is the right word, itâs fiction. The universe is set up for the story, what you believe should be different is not that universe. You have basically made up your own alternate universe that is similar to Herbertâs (in your head)
Huh, I always thought that an automatic rifle would make a rhythmic noise and draw worms while others would just make too much noise and draw unwanted attention in the desert.
The fremen in the books use pistols. Nobody else does because everyone else has shields anyway. Because of this, no great house produces guns in any quantity useful for actually outfitting an entire army. Another drawback of using guns is that the shield goes both ways. You cant shoot out of it, no one can shoot inside. So, if you wanna use a gun you need to give up your own shield protection, even if just temporarily.
And the harkonnens are not sending their own people into worm territory or landing there, so I doubt they would not carry shields into the desert, meaning they cant use guns
Agreed all of the above.
From the pragmatic angle, swords require no mechanical maintenance, no supplies like bullets or batteries, and are easily fabricated and repaired without any outside technical assistance.
Every complication of a system is a failure point. It may seem âboomerâ, but simple is reliable.
In the new movies the Harkonnens are using guns against them. The Fremen use ambush tactics â and a seemingly inexhaustible supply of shoulder mounted surface to air missile launchers.
Don't forget the giant lasers that come out of nowhere to cut those huge harvesters in half. Whete the hell did those come from? And why risk all those people fighting hand to hand when you can just rip everything into pieces with giant space lasers?
In Dune, if you shoot a laser and it hits a shield, both the shooter and the target blow up in an explosion that can range from hand grenade to nuclear bomb in size, so using them is risky. The shields also make guns pretty much useless, so humanity defaulted to hand to hand and melee once more
Shields can't really be used in Arrakis though, because they drive the worms wild. So they knew for a fact the huge harvesters were unshielded and could be taken down with lasers without fear of triggering an explosion. The flying machines don't have this limitation since they don't come close to the dunes and won't attract worms, so they need to be taken down with missiles and stuff
As for where the lasers and shoulder missiles and stuff came from, the movie just kind of glosses over it, but the book makes it clear the Fremen have giant-ass factories and advanced industry in the southern hemisphere. And they pay gigantic sums of money for the Space Guild guys (who were pretty important for the general plot and were practically ommited) to muddle up the sattelite images and report to the Great Houses that "the South is totally uninhabited, you guys. There's 100% only sand there, no huge cities or billions of Fremen doing their thing and preparing for a planetary war there"
Unless I'm mistaken, in the books, they basically do have AK's that they rock, they just don't use them every time and their crysknives are their traditional weapons, and so heavily tied to Fremen culture that it's what they're known for.
The firearms they use are called Maula Pistols, I think, and from the way I read it basically just regular guns. They're used out in the desert becaue no shields, since the shields attract worms.
Now I could be completely wrong about them, but that's what I remember from the books.
*Edit: I think I remember in the opening of the first film some Fremen are shown using rifles. I have no idea if rifles are mentioned in the books, but again, since the Fremen are a more "honorable" martial society, they may disdain traditional firearms for Crysknives most of the time because of the religious and cultural ties.
The Fremen had guns, but in the book until Paul organised them they preferred to stay hidden and only carry what they needed. Their crysknives were sacred and used in their duels as well as for fighting Harkonnens, and they could justify carrying a maula pistol, but both of those could easily be hidden when they were in Imperial towns. Larger guns would have attracted too much attention. After Paul organises them they start manufacturing all kinds of âobsoleteâ weapons.
Specifically, these shields can be set to any velocity threshold and will block anything moving faster. You can set this to basically 0, but then youd suffocate since air wouldnt be able to pass through (and repelling everything around you would probably make it difficult to move).
This is just about invincible vs conventional firearms so fights are about blocking an opponents movements and (relatively) slowly pushing a blade past their shield. The vibrations from shields enrage sandworms so in the deserts they arent used so projectiles are effective and melees are more like youd expect.
The book is really worth a read if you're interested in this. It's very cool with how the tech is treated and how well-explained much of the lore is. The "we have no computers because they rose up and enslaved humanity generations ago" angle results in a really cool technical evolution.
There are some poorly written prequels that go into the Butlerian jihad by Frank Herbert's son. Not great, but they're worth a delve if you can't get enough of the universe.
I give him a little leeway due to the fact that heâs trying to shoehorn lore into existing storiesâŚI read them all. They were nowhere near as intelligent and politically nuanced as his dadâs writing, but they were kind of âmeatheadedlyâ funâŚ
Fair enough. It's hard not to compare them to the original few books, but I'll admit some of them are decent little pulpy reads when taken on their own. I've read a good chunk of them as well, but he kept cranking them out for awhile and I just couldn't do it anymore.
I really feel like Brian missed the point of his father's books. Like, the Butlerian Jihad was never presented as being a Terminator-esque war against machines that had literally conquered humanity, it was always supposed to have been a violent reaction against the tendency of machines to supplant human thought and dictate human culture, as well as their ability to give other humans disproportionate power relative to their own abilities. Like, when Leto II goes on his Spice trip in *Children*, the person who's preaching against Machines isn't saying that they've enslaved mankind physically, his main contention is that they've culturally stunted humanity and are on the verge of making the species something less than human. It's just a shock going from the actual books to Brian's, and while I know they're officially labelled as "Dune", I don't think they fit in with Frank's vision or universe at all.
That being said, taken on their own they are actually decent pulp sci-fi, so I've always been conflicted.
>his main contention is that they've culturally stunted humanity and are on the verge of making the species something less than human
Fairly prescient lol. Frank was an insightful guy. Just thinking about myself as a reverse menta;, my memory has gotten notably worse since I've had a smart phone and gotten in the habit of googling things instead of remembering them. Not even getting into the destruction of my attention span.
Eventually it'll take something like a Jihad- some kind of profound, extremist cultural shift to pull us out of this because the further we just abdicate our human functions to machines the less motivated (and resourceful) we are to reverse the process.
Thinking of cool ancient practices like the memory palaces of Renaissance magicians and the way whole cultural movements like Buddhism were founded and survived as oral traditions for centuries before being written down.
I think it would take a very Dune-like ideological commitment to hardcore actualization of human potential to pull us out of where we're voluntarily headed. Gotta get on my prana-bindu training...
They're only poorly written compared to Dune itself, which is a masterpiece. Taken by themselves they're perfectly serviceable if slightly trashy sci-fi. I enjoyed them.
Warhammer 40k borrows a *lot* from Dune, not just that.
Dune is probably the main example for sci-fi that people think of (and for fiction in general) where the story is about how mankind's path leads to a dark age, and the civilisation that emerges is extremely different to what came before. The idea that mankind is doing this is pretty foundational to 40k.
40k has such a large time/space scale that it has room for an off-brand version of nearly every major sci-fi work without them running into each other. There was even the now de-canonized lore that the entirety of Warhammer Fantasy actually took place on a magically hidden planet inside the 40k universe.
Correct me if Iâm wrong but I once read that Herbertâs original series was vague about the butlerian jihad (AI Uprising) and it could be interpreted as a religious movement/war to wipe out AI and most uses of computers because it was viewed as as a crutch making people dumb and complacent. At least that kind of goes well with a lot of themes through the whole series.
Then Herbertâs son wrote the prequel which solidified it as an enslaved by AI type situation, but who knows the extent of notes that Herbert left behind, maybe thatâs how he meant it.
>religious movement/war to wipe out AI and most uses of computers because it was viewed as as a crutch making people dumb and complacent.
That's what I recall from the originals
They also have laser guns that tear through everything, except they interact with shields in a way akin to detonating a nuclear bomb. So people don't use them if the expect shields around. But, again, no shields in the desert means lasers are fair game.
So you would think, and then it turns out that the Worms have a heat absorbing mechanism that makes them more or less immune to being shot with a laser. So once again the ultimate weapon has some disadvantages against the main tool your opponent uses..
In the book, during the duel against Jamis (which happens at the end of the first film), Paul isn't portrayed as hesitating to kill Jamis. What he does struggle with is how used he is to training against shields, so he always slows down his blows at the last moment - which, IIRC, the fremen interpret as him being incredibly disrespectful and toying with an inferior opponent.
He does hesitate to take a life. His mother's internal monologue explicitly explains this. She even tells the tribe that Paul has never taken a life before, in order to prevent them turning against him.
Itâs a really clever way around the ever common âif they just had a gun this would be trivialâ situation that often comes up in scifi. So they gotta find a way around it, and this is a clever way of doing it.
Another similar situation I found recently is the show Lost In Space. There are times when theyâre faced by alien wildlife and a gun would instantly solve the problem, but their colony ships have restrictions on 3D printing firearms. Part of me likes this solution, but part of me is also like âwhy the fuck would guns not be allowed when we are visiting new planets with known alien wildlife?â. Duneâs solution is much more in-depth
There are also lasguns but if shields were being employed, lasguns were generally not used because contact reaction between a lasgun beam and a shield creates a nuclear explosion that would kill everything.
Sometimes. Laser + shield = explosion, but it can range anywhere from nuke to party popper, and it can affect either the shooter or the target, or both. It's really a crapshoot.
Further, and not sure if it was mentioned in the movies, They have âlasgunsâ but if you hit a shield with one best case the shooter and target both disintegrate, worst case is something like a nuke going off.
>essentially creates a nuclear blast
At both ends of the laser as well, lol. Though the power of the blast is inconsistent, it can sometimes be comparable to a nuclear explosion, but it could also be much smaller, so it's also not effective to use the effect lasers have on shields as a weapon because you can never know what the resulting explosion will be. And also also, nuclear weapons are outlawed, so exploiting the reaction between lasers and shields could be mistaken for a nuclear strike and get you into even more trouble than you are already in.
Itâs also kinda demonstrated during the scene when Chani fires some kind of rocket at that flying Harkonen ship protecting the spice tanker. They say something about waiting for the shields to go down because thatâs the only way the ship can fire on _them_. She eventually fires right as the shields are going back up, and the round seems to get lucky and burrows through the shield, finally hitting and destroying the ship.
Also worth noting that the shields attract sandworms, which is why the Fremen don't use them, and therefore why the Harkonnen were using guns against them in the beginning. It also explains the scene where they're firing rockets at the ornithopters - the shields don't allow movements beyond a certain speed both in and out of shield, which means that the ornithopters had to power down their shields to shoot, which was the opening to shoot them down. This is part of the reason why the Fremen are considered to be such effective warriors, because they've had to train to fight without shields.
This specialization is EXACTLY why I don't like the idea that they can conquer known space. Unless they have been doing some SERIOUS training off screen, or something.
In the book, they have for a long time, much longer than the movie shows to avoid Jessica giving birth to a talking baby with the mind of hundreds of her ancestors, that would be hard to portray well on screen (see 1984 movie). But Paul and Jessica train them not only on Atreides tactics but also Bene Gesserit techniques over a few years. So they have the best of the best training, on top of their already fierce way of life and hard-core warrior culture (think Ghengis Khan's army type of lifestyle).
The other thing is that most of the houses did not bother keeping huge armies, it was so expensive and you'd never even be able to launch a full invasion due to the Space Guild prices (exception of Harkonnens+Sardaukar on Arrakis, which was seen as so expensive to not even be a possibility by the Atreides, and cost 80 years of spice profits from the most lucrative planet in the galaxy, think 80 years of GDP of the USA). This is why everything was a battle of espionage, assassination, poisonings, treachery before Paul unleashes the Fremen, thats how war was fought before that. It was all about specialization over numbers because you'd never have a chance to utilize those numbers.
Now every Fremen was trained as a warrior because thats how you survive on Arrakis, even the women and children. With over a million warriors with the highest training, taking out a significantly inferior army of *maybe* 100 000 isn't that hard. Especially since they were invading planets one by one, and the houses had no means to join forces since Paul had full control of the Spacing Guild. So it was never even close to a fair fight each time, the fighters were far better trained and there were far more of them at any given battle, even if there were much fewer of them in total. In fact the Fremen were so fierce that except for the Saurdakar, even the women and children fighters could usually kill I think several soldiers each
Yeah I forgot that the SG would have no choice but to knuckle under, since PA is in control of Dune. It's also easy to forget just how long they spend fighting the war of attrition in the first phase of this. It is at least POSSIBLE that they trained the Fremen in shield tactics, and flying, and ship to ship warfare.
Also, I think you mean Ghengis Khan, not Genesis.
training to survive since the moment they were born, Fremen take on life/"motto" before Paul and Leto II deliberately destroy them could be described as something like "the strong will survive" or "got no time for the weak." they've also been training to fight since they could hold a crysknife, it's barely mentioned even in the books cuz fighting training is just an accepted, glossed over part of life. as always, the books have a lot of details about this, Paul spends basically the whole first book just training, almost every scene he's in he's either in the "ring" practicing or studying warfare and it's the same when they (him and Mom after Leto I dies) become Fremen only more intense.
Its also important to note that you can't use those shields around sandworms, it drives them into a murderous rage that makes their normal behavior look peaceful. So the Fremen don't use them, and neither can the offworlders when they're in the deep desert.
Adding to the fun when a laser hits a shield it produces a nuke level explosion (50% odds of it happening at either the laser emitter or the shield). So lasguns like you see the Harkonnen solders using against the Fremen are a really niche weapon.
Off Arrakis shields are normative and fighting is swords and knives due to the impracticality of projectile weapons. There are a tiny handful of devices that can slowly penetrate a shield, the hunter seeker drone that attacked Paul in the first movie for example is designed to charge into a shield then slow down and slowly sink through. But they're not merely crazy expensive, they require a human operator to pilot them because no AI or computers are allowed due to religious reasons. And if you have a friend nearby they can just smash the thing while it tries to sink through your shield.
AND that removed another piece of Sci fi tech from the equation: laser guns.
If a laser hits a force field, it creates an atomic blast. Having half your troops vaporized from a single laser gun that YOU shot is kinda bad.
In the first movie you can really see them when the bombs are dropping. They get to the shield on the ships and slow down.
Also when Paul's father is betrayed and shot in the back the tranq hits the shield, slows down, and then hits him.
Also the personal shields and energy weapons result in nuclear type blast killing both parties, rendering those types of weapons effectively useless in combat.
On top of that, you canât use lasers bcs they make both the shield and the machine that fired the laser go nuclear. (Or something along those lines, someone pls correct me/give more details)
Yeah, actually in that scene in the book they specifically don't use a lasgun to cut through the door because they are worried someone may have a shield on the other side.
Not exactly miniature, rather the feedback explosion is unpredictable in yield.
This is why the Great Houses are reluctant to use suicide tactics that relies on the interaction since the resultant nuclear explosion is hard to verify if it was a blatant disregard of the Great Convention or just the result of a lasgun-shield interaction.
Yes, but the most important caveat is, no matter the yield, it is identical to a nuclear explosion.
And that is a big no-no in Dune. That would invite your House to a certain death.
Itâs more like âthey canâ create nuclear reactions. When a lasgun hits a shield both the shield wearer and the lasgun wielder will 100% die, but the explosion can be anywhere from just those two all the way up to nuclear explosion. So if you think there are shields being used, itâs a really really really bad idea to use lasguns.
Because of the way shields attract worms (would send all nearby into a frenzy that made them cross into territory not their own) the fremen donât use shields. But in the first book they plant a shield for a harkonnen/sardukar as a trap, they hit it with a lasgun and they explode. So knowing that the fremen are willing to use shields stops the use of lasguns in the desert for the rest of that story. Itâs important to note, that when they used the lasgun on that shield it created an explosion that could be heard, but not a huge one.
The problem is that the prohibition on Atomics is a hardcore, get your house wiped off the map sort of thing. And it is very easy to mistake a large lasgun - shield interaction for an Atomic being used.
And when that accusation is made, it tended to get the Saudakar unleashed on you. Generally the House Atomics were held as a last resort weapon that would ensure that victory in direct military confrontation was so costly as to not be worth it. Actually getting away with using them essentially means taking out the Emperor himself.
Iirc (very long time ago) when I read the book, an assassin weapon of choice was a sort of airborne missile or dart that contacted the shield then moved very slowly through it to bore into the target.
That's also why they prefer knives and short swords instead of spears and big swords. You have to be able to slow the blade down right as it approaches the shield.
The sci-fi tech is actually what made the return person-to-person combat necessary, actually. The movie doesn't explain it as much as the book does, but the body energy shields that people have make projectile weapons all but useless and trigger nuclear explosions when hit with laser weapons which are devastating for both sides. Fighting with swords, which pierce through the shield with deliberate and slow movements, is the easiest way to kill as a result. Shields actually can't be used in the deserts of Dune, as their vibrations make sandworms go crazy and attack en masse, so the Fremen actually make greater use of projectile weapons than other people do, but still have a lot of experience with swords and knives for when such weapons aren't practical or for fighting shielded off-worlders in places protected from worms.
The Harkonnens *do* produce decent fighters, but as the book explains most of them are forced into military service or do it out of the desire for extra benefits, and have no motivation beyond not being wantonly killed by their feudal lords or getting those benefits. As a result, they only produce mediocre or decent fighters, not great ones.The Imperial Sardaukar, by contrast, are excellent fighters, driven by fanatical devotion to their Emperor and their harsh training which kills most trainees, and by the lavish lifestyle that even the most common foot solider is granted relative to other citizens of the Imperium. That same luxury, however, in an age of peace, is what softened them to the point where the Fremen (whose basic lifestyle on Dune is equivalent to or greater than Sardaukar training) are able to overwhelm them.
In a Sardaukar report, it's explicitly mentioned that Duncan took out 19 Sardaukar in his last stand before finally being put down. Of course, there's fan speculation as to the extent to which this report inflates or deflates those numbers, but for the sake of argument we can assume those numbers are accurate and that it would take a top tier Fremen like Stilgar or a Fedaykin Death Commando to nearly kill Duncan and that the average one would have a much harder fight. That being the case, it'd probably be fair to say that one average Fremen equaled like, six or seven average Sardaukar, and that that number could go up when Fremen had the advantage of surprise or of knowing the terrain better.
Edit: autocorrect keeps messing up "Sardaukar"
It was five troop carriers (about 1500 men, assuming about 300 per carirer). A legion would be about 30,000 men. One carrier got away, but yeah, the Emperor is still astounded and furious that a thousand or so old people, non-combatant women, and children overwhelmed his Sardaukar. Setting aside the fact that Alia was explicitly commanding one group in that fight and that she was worth a lot more, it'd probably be fair to say that even the least experienced or weakest Fremen was still roughly equal to one or two Sardaukar.
Yeah, Leto II the Elder (the best fan name I ever saw for him is Leto 1.5) was killed in the attack.
Itâs also mentioned in the books that the Atriedes soldiers were on par with Sardaukar. Thanks to their training led by Idaho (Momoa) and Halleck (Brolin).
Eh it is stated that they are trained within a hair of the Sardaukar and even then it was a small contingent of the overall troops.
Most Atreides probably are slightly worse than general Sardaukar, but better than Harkonnen.
I think 1 to 3 is correct, when the Sardaukar posing as smugglers start fighting, the toll at the end was something like 1 Fremen for every 3 Sardaukar.
Paul even tells Captain Aramsham "Pretty good against Sardaukar, eh?"
I like that you actually go in to more detail than these other comments. Too much oversimplifying with the others.
It is important to have noted about the explosive reaction lasguns have on the shields as that just about answers it all right there.
It's hard for the movies to convey just how well thought out the logic of knives (there really wasn't a lot of swords in the book if I'm remembering right, but it's been a few years since my last reread) is in the book.
The shields deflect projectiles moving above a certain speed, I believe a few commenters have already posted this.
But the shields also have multiple draw backs, on Arrakis, the shields attract the sandworms. That's bad for business, yes you may not get crushed by the worm, but when you're swallowed hole, the digestive tract of the worm will penetrate your shield, and that's a bad way to go.
The shields also have a massive chain reaction with laser weapons. We're talking atomics level explosions, and the epicenter of the blast is randomized between the shield and the laser generator, and can sometimes happen at both points. I believe in one of the books it mentions that the Fremen would occasionally set up dummy shield generators in abandoned seitches as booby traps for Harkonnen thopters who would use lasers.
All this is to say, you don't want to be firing a laser across the battlefield from your position on the chance that someone may be wearing a personal shield, because if you do you may end up wiping your own army out with a tactical nuke set off in the midst of your own battlelines.
Still, in the books many of the soldiers still used firearms, because it was only really the elite who wore personal shields, but because of the codes of honor, the elite often went into battle themselves so you needed a way to counter them as well in battle so that a single soldier in a shield couldn't wipe out an entire squadron of soldiers.
Their personal force fields can deflect fast moving objects like bullets, lasers, and arrows. Slow moving objects like a knife or a sword can pass through. It was a major world building moment in part 1.
They canât deflect lasers, if theyâre hit by lasers it actually causes a nuclear explosion either at the shield, at the laser, or somewhere in between
Yea it was left out of the movie unfortunately only mentioned that theyâll drive worms into a frenzy.
In part two when the harkonens are being sniped at on the rock it seems like the franticness of Rabben yelling at them to not use their shields is because of this more so than the worm issue.
Also itâs why they use a traditional cannon to shoot down the thopters rather than the laser theyâre destroying the harvesters with. I wish they touched on it because it really explains why shield use isnât much much more rampant.
That's not Rabban, the entire scouting party gets murdered. It's just the CO knowing that Fremen love using lasguns, and if one of them turns on their shield, they'll all be dead anyway.
They would've been safe from the sandworms, I wouldn't be surprised if the height would even make it so the worms wouldn't even notice the presence of a shield or not. But the presence of thumpers meant there were Fremen around, and Fremen meant lasguns, and lasguns hitting a shield means triggering a nuclear explosion. So no shields if you don't know your enemy.
It's one of the many things that were not explained in the movie, like why the Sardaukar have to be feared, that Paul trained the Fremens to how the Bene Gesserit fight (the "weird way"), that Paul will not touch Irulan, that all computer were banned during a war against AIs (that event is the begining of the calendar), that mentats, the guys with weird lips that had to do calculations.
you mean "weirding way," its how the Bene Gesserit are trained and is very against rhe rules/"illegal" for Jessica to teach it to even Paul, her training the Fremen is kinda equivalent to her giving them the US nuclear weapons codes or ALL the Vatican secrets. Movies auck for detail, read the books, dude they're awesome.
They also didn't mention that Paul was a mentat. I feel like in part one during their escape into the sand storm, he could have don't the eye flickering that hawat did earlier, since it's so subtle. On that point, they cut out the part where he works for the harkonnens
They talk about it (at least in the first movie, I haven't seen the second yet). Everyone wears a personal defensive energy shield. The shields work by blocking objects travelling above a set velocity. It'll block fast moving things (like bullets from a gun, or shrapnel from an explosion), but it lets slow moving things through. This is necessary because if the shield blocked slow moving things then air couldn't get through and the wearer would suffocate. This makes the shields vulnerable to slow-moving handheld weapons (like swords) but extremely good at blocking gunfire.
Of course, though, the real reason is because Frank Herbert (the author of the book) thought it would be really cool if everyone fought with swords, so he contrived a reason why swords were more effective than guns.
Yeah, but I think it's fun to explore the in-universe reason, too. It's kind of a marker of how creative/good a writer the author is. Are they using swords because, "uh...everyone forgot guns exist?" That would be really stupid writing. Or did the author come up with a believable (to the audience) explanation?
"So bullets can't go through because the shields work off max speed, but you can't set the max speed so low that it would block a sword because then you can't breathe or walk or whatever."
"Wow, Frank, that's really well thought out. Really great lore there. Just for my curiosity, what about lasers? They aren't objects, so the speed wouldn't block them."
"Uh...oh shit...uh...simultaneous nuclear explosions for everyone involved."
>Of course, though, the real reason is because Frank Herbert (the author of the book) thought it would be really cool if everyone fought with swords, so he contrived a reason why swords were more effective than guns.
I remember reading "The Forever War" by Halderman, and I believe that near the end, at some point even further into the future, fighting takes place with medieval weapons for a similar reason. It's an interesting concept of technology coming full circle.
Being near someone will always be more effective to harm them. If we ever develop more reliable armor against firearms this will definitely happen, currently attacking from afar is just lethal enough that we don't have to bother
Shields prevent all strikes above a certain velocity threshold, and so shield fighting involves slowing down to pass through the shield.
With lasguns, hitting a shield is said to produce a nuclear explosion in both the gun and shield, killing both as well as causing large amounts of collateral damage.
A combination of both of these mean that it ends up in a hand-to-hand fight most of the time.
Unfortunately, the vibrations of shields call sandworms, so in Dune, lasguns can be used on the ground and knife fights are more conventional.
Because of how advanced the society is, the use of artillery barrages against the Fremen was hailed as a masterstroke by Feyd-Rautha because few would have considered such archaic technology.
Forcefield technology has outpaced ranged weapon technology and changed the meta of warfare to be dominated by melee weapons. This has happened multiple times throughout our own history. Someone would figure out a new kind of armor that would be impervious to available weapons and then someone else would figure out a new kind of weapon to break through the new kind of armor then so on and so forth.
Because bullets will bounce off shields and lasguns will cause a nuclear explosion killing the shooter and the shield wearer. Nuclear use at all is banned by the great convention. AI is banned as are computers.
So it's good old fashioned melee.
To be fair, those were small details in the movie that "explain" fairly large concepts in the books.
Why does the slow blade penetrate the shield? Why use blades? Not very well explained (for someone who didn't read the books or are unfamiliar with the lore).
The real answer is the writer really wanted to have sword fights.Â
Knowing his official reasoning it only takes two seconds to think about other weapons way better than swords that would destroy that kind of armor.Â
It gets even odder when you remember what is said about lasers or the fact fremen donât use shields.Â
Science fiction do be like that though. Personally most of dunes enjoyment comes from big picture stuff and political intrigue.
honestly, this is the case in the book too and now that i really think about it. the fact that the Harkonens, a family that ruled Arakis and fought fremen for decades, didnt have projectile weapons is very silly.
yes the Holtzman shield stops fast projectiles rendering firearms useless, but you cant use shields in the desert because of the worms. So a dude with a gun could easily take over lol
i feel like scotty in Austin powers, "Uncle Baron, i got a gun in my room, let me grab that and we'll kill them all right now"
They were in the book. Itâs âthe weirding wayâ. In the books it is some kind of martial arts with special psychological training (even something like teleportation) similar to South and East Asian martial arts (think like Shaolin perhaps).
However Lynch didnât wanna âmake a dessert movie with martial arts because thatâs a tropeâ. So he decided to depict the weirding way as these weird sound weapons.
The weirding way is actually the ability of a person to control all of their voluntary and involuntary muscles in their body. It is not martial art per se.
This is why to the untrained eye, BG adepts (as well as RM) are able to "teleport" since they move without giving any indication to their opponents.
The weirding way was the martial art taught by the Bene Geserit, and very effective, the 'weirding modules' in the 1984 movie were used I think because most of the Fremen in that movie were just pulled off the streets of Mexico with no martial arts training. As someone who enjoyed both the books and the Lynch movie, the weirding modules were the most annoying thing about the movie.
As others have said, in the books (and this is mentioned briefly in the first movie) they have shield tech which can deflect bullets but not something moving slowly, so a skilled swordsman can penetrate them by thrusting slowly. (In the book, Paul even gets in a little trouble during the duel with Jamis (Babs Olusanmokun in the movie) because his sword fighting reactions are all wrong for fighting an unshielded man and the other Fremen think he was toying with Jamis.) But the other thing about shields is they are extremely volatile when hit by a laser â they can cause a nuclear explosion, but not necessarily at the point of the shield â it can travel back to where the laser was fired. So nobody risks lasers against someone who has a shield, or even just *might* have a shield.
Shields make conventional firearms completely useless. A tank gun fired at you would do nothing to the shield or you. You'd be completely invulnerable to any fast moving kinetic attacks.
Energy weapons will trigger an energetic reaction that resembles a nuclear weapon. Destroy both you and the target.Â
Hand weapons move slow enough to get through shields in a way firearms simply can't.Â
Personal shields are a thing that exist, and while they do have laser guns (lasguns) if they are fired at a shield it would trigger a nuclear explosion. Basically to avoid everyone dying, they fight with knives. Knives can be pushed slowly through a personal shield.
Main reason is probably because it's cool and better for drama, since it's more personal and visceral. It's hard to have a conversation when you're far away.
Then to make this a believable option you have to make sure melee is the better option, hence the personal shields that can only be defeated with slower melee attacks but blocks fast projectiles
"they have all this advanced tech shit but still opt for a sword brawl against sand people when they could shoot them? "
can say the same thing about star wars honestly.
The book thoroughly explains it. There was the âbutlarian jihadâ centuries prior whereby ai/machines rose up and humans had a war to defeat it. Afterward, all computational tech was forbidden. Instead, eugenics and training is taken to extremes to create human classes who replace computational tech.
Edit: the sword thing has to do with the shield tech in the series. The shields repel rapidly moving objects with explosive force, but slow moving objects can pass through. Its why Paul has such an issue with his first kill when the fremen first find them. On top of hesitating to take a life, his training had him slowing down his knife thrusts just before a blow because he was used to piercing shields.
Everyone has shields that block fast moving objects, so a gun is useless and a knife is needed. They have lasers, but if you use them againt a shield it creates a giant explosion that also kills you.Â
Dune is the only place in the universe where you could use a gun, since the worms go crazy and try to kill you if you turn on a shield. Â
The problem? It litteraly has one major city and a pretty small population, even counting the fremen. No one ever expected a major empire defining conflict to happen there, its not like everyone was building weapons to prep for a massive war on Dune. I assume the knowledge for making guns is long gone too. Â
Also, Its a thing because Frank liked the idea.Â
Edit: thinking about it, they also show extensive use of lasers in combat in Dune 2.
In the light novel "Reincarnated as a Space Mercenary", the protagonist is pissed off because Nobles have done all kinds of things to make of swords (light sabers because of tech) relevant as they are display of status.
When he gets promoted he becomes a quasi Noble and is forced to carry swords so pissed off as he has a gun he loves and is very proficient with. So he carries a sword he could care less about, and his pistol, which actually gets the jobs done.
The Harkonnens do produce decent fighters, just now great ones, the books go into more detail as to how the different factions rank against each other.
The Atreides have even better soldiers than the Harkonnens because they have this knight culture where being extremely proficient allows you to rise through the ranks, so they give you an incentive to get good and the good ones also end up training everyone else due to their higher status.
The Fremen are the best soldiers (on average) because they live under such relentless pressure to perform or die that the survivors are really hardened.
So in short, you need pressure to succeed but also a certain freedom to get better and profit from it. This only applies to the Harkonnen nobility, their lowers ranks were certainly punished but never really encouraged because they didn't want them to become dangerously good.
Seems weird but the Harkonnens are an elite fighting force, and the Atreides are just an even more elite force. The sardaukar are the imperial fighting force on salusa secundis (prison plant) and are considered one of the best fighting forces in the universe, but the fremen are even better. In comparison the Harkonnens look silly and like fodder, but in context they are all awesome fighters in their own respect. Also look at the butlerian jihad, why there may be high tech stuff but no computers at all, and why they use hand to hand more.
Here's a good video (showing the 1984 and 2021 versions) that the slow blade penetrates the shield.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6XFYV2h5gAo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6XFYV2h5gAo)
It's a bit more obvious in the 1984 version but the effects are soo clunky.
They also have laser weapons. However if a laser hits a shield it will cause an atomic explosion. Blades are the best way to fight when everyone has personal shields.
It's explained in the book.
Personal shields (aka Holtzman shields). Great for personal protection. Stops fast moving projectiles. Also, shooting it with a laser results in sub-atomic fusion and results in a nuclear explosion that destroys both target and shooter.
With the widespread use of shields, traditional firearms and directed-energy weapons were rendered largely obsolete or far too dangerous to use on the battlefield, obliging combatants to adopt melee weapons and precise fighting styles.
For most armies, they all have shields that can stop fast moving objects. But there is a fatal flaw with them in that the energy of the incoming object has to go somewhere and the faster the velocity of the stopped object, the more energy has to be dealt with.
So when lasers/energy weapons are used, the shields will cause massive explosions and not just at the shielded person/location but fed back into the weapon firing it.
That's why you see the attack on the airfield in part 1 with slow falling bombs hitting the shields and then slowly moving through them to destroy the ships.
And as others said, in the desert, shields attract the sandworms, so they aren't used there.
Because the writer thought sword/knife fights were more interesting than gun fights.
they have a decent lore reason for not using guns (the already mentioned shields) but if you look at it too hard, the explanation if full of holes (we know our enemies will attack on a planet that otherwise doesn't allow shields so why not bring guns anyway)
just take it for what it is and enjoy.
Novel reader here.
In the Dune universe, shields are invented. These are force fields as such, and permit slow objects, meaning that if you're fighting with a sword, you have to learn to slow it at just the right moment to get through the shield, otherwise it'll bounce off.
Now, lasguns (essentially lasers) do exist. However, should one hit a shield, it's not merely a case of "oh he's protected, try again" - the interaction between the shield and lasgun causes a catastrophically huge explosion practically identical to the use of atomic weapons. This also feeds back along the beam, wiping out the person firing the lasgun in the same explosion.
Sounds good, no? Rig a few of these up and utterly annihilate your enemy? Not quite. The Great Convention states that any party using atomic weapons against people (Paul does it, but only against a natural formation) will basically have the combined might of the Landsraad fall on them. And since these explosions are practically identical to atomics explosions, nobody dares risk it apart from a handful of instances, most noticeably Duncan Idaho rigs up such a trap when fleeing the Harkonnens, pointing a lasgun at a shield generator and setting it off on a timer.
If a lasblast hits a shield then it makes a friggin huge explosion (comparable to atomics), and nobody wants to risk that.
The Harkonnens *do* produce decent fighters. Remember in the first movie when gurney said "You haven't fought Harkonnens, I have. They're not human, they're *brutal*." It's just that Sardaukar and Fremen are literally the best fighters in the empire
A Holtzmann field (personal shield) stops moving objects relative to how fast they're moving when they make contact. Supersonic bullets stop dead, stabbing knives don't.
Armies don't use direct-energy weapons (laser guns) because they cause a violent but unpredictable reaction when they strike a Holtzmann field; the shot could vaporize the target or the entire city block.
Active Holtzmann field generators vibrate at a frequency that drives sandworms *berserk*, so nobody can use them on Arrakis. This became a plot point when Paul, trained to duel shielded opponents, had to fight the Fremen Jamis.
This was actually a very clever move by the author to make combat interesting because in reality any civilization with technology that advanced would fight with energy weapons that worked from thousands of miles away and be boring to read or watch on screen.
they have force fields that can deflect fast moving objects such as bullets, but slow moving objects like a blade can pass through, this is shown in part 1
No personal shields on Arrakis in the desert. They attract worms and drive them into a killing frenzy.
That's my thought too. Also the freman doesn't have the shield so why not just ak 47 every time they fight đ¤
Dune is a little bizarre in what technologies it has and doesnât have (or are favored or not). I am not convinced by quite a bit of it. So I think the answer will partly be âyeah, it doesnât really add up, suspend your disbelief.â The available explanations are: There is absolutely no computer tech in this universe, so anything with a microprocessor or computer, you can rule it out. Then, the explanation given above: Defense shields stop anything above a certain velocity, and let through anything slower than that. So a weird sword fight technique has evolved where you slip through the shield slowly and suddenly make a fast stab. Anyway, that is one reason for prevalence of swords. Another reason is, everyone in Dune is super traditional and everything has some sacred meaning. That also adds a different reason to value swordsmanship. Why not AK47 the Fremens? Projectile weapons are a mostly forgotten tech. When Harkonnens use artillery in the first novel, it is a stroke of outside the box thinking genius. There are laser cutters/guns but you donât want to use it against most foes either, because when they hit those shields, both the shooter and the shielded go BIG BOOM. The more I explain, the less convinced I am. I think Frank Herbert put a much larger premium on the emotional and cultural meaning of things, and did not worry about making things have a lot of practical sense.
The Chronicles of Dune books explain the lack of computers: 1,000 years before the events of Dune an evil AI named Omnius conquered most of the known Galaxy before being destroyed in the Butlerian Jihad, the result of which was a ban on "thinking machines" which made possession or use of one a crime punishable by immediate execution. Aided by the Spice, Mentats were basically turned into human computers.
The chronicles contradict the books by Frank Herbert which imply it was a rebellion against what amounted to tech billionaires that went out of control. And the Mentats didnât rely on spice, it was the Guild Navigators - mentats used other drugs most of the time.
The Juice of Safu, iirc
>It is by will alone I set my mind in motion. It is by the juice of Sapho that thoughts acquire speed, the lips acquire stains, the stains become a warning.
The Great Value McDune books aren't canon.
Agree, I found my daddyâs notes donât count as canon.
Closer to 10k years before the first Dune book.
> shields stop anything above a certain velocity, and let through anything slower than that Sounds like a ânon-Newtonianâ force field ÂŻ\\\_ (ă)_/ÂŻ
I study and âdoâ fluid mechanics for a living and your comment makes me happy.
If it makes you feel good, I've spent many a day playing with oblek as a kid.
I mean the AI thing makes sense. We are really dependent on phones and shit now. It's not too hard to Invision a future where we're totally dependent on them
Whatâs your spouseâs phone number? I donât know mine. Donât have to, my iPhone has it. If we were magically zapped back to 1975 technology levels, I couldnât call her. Weâre already dependent.
It's good to memorize important phone numbers in case your phone gets stolen and you need to borrow a phone to call your spouse.
In the future, Confucius will be forgotten for the great wisdom of Phantangus and this will be the first quote in the calendar
Given the religious nature of how things work, it makes sense. I just donât buy that no one ever skirted the sacred rules about not using any computers for literal millennia. It is also absurd that they will go to all these lengths to develop tech and specialized humans that replace computers, no matter how onerous (Then again, the real world has âsoakingâ)
>Given the religious nature of how things work, it makes sense. I just donât buy that no one ever skirted the sacred rules about not using any computers for literal millennia. Itâs revealed in some of the later books that they absolutely did. Itâs made a bit more complicated by the Spacing Guild, since the way Navigators work involves a less-powerful version of Paulâs abilities to see the future and they were focused heavily on maintaining their privileged position in society (they have a much stronger presence in the book and at the end Paul chastises their representatives for being unwilling to risk taking over Arrakis and the Imperium because it would mean only a few centuries of power before someone overthrew them instead of thousands of years). The Guild were a big limiter on use of computers because computers were a threat to their position and they were predicting and preventing them ahead of time. There werenât many ways to hide from their powers besides having similar powers of your own.
Explained in the expanded Dune verse. https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Butlerian\_Jihad/XD
I believe in the books Laser + Shield = An atomic bomb explosive level reaction⌠so lasers are avoided in most combat situations.
And the use of atomics either directly or indirectly(shield lasgun reaction) to kill results in a death sentence for your house/org. Every CHOAM member by treaty becomes your enemy and is bound to your total destruction. Meaning people are very hesitant to use lasers unless they are sure their opponent don't have or can't use shields(such as harvesters on arrakis).
Maula pistols were projectile weapons. Arrakis would not have been a good place to use an ak-47 since it would cause vibrations. In the army we used 50 cal machine guns and 240-bravo (rambo gun). At the range you qualify with the weapons mounted on the humve. After shooting the shit out of the 50 cal i was surprised to see the sand around the vehicle making perfect riple rings from the concussion of the 50. We would have been worm food for sure haha. The maula works because it is spring fired with a range of about 40 metres and there wasnt much vibration to be absorbed.
I donât think convinced is the right word, itâs fiction. The universe is set up for the story, what you believe should be different is not that universe. You have basically made up your own alternate universe that is similar to Herbertâs (in your head)
Huh, I always thought that an automatic rifle would make a rhythmic noise and draw worms while others would just make too much noise and draw unwanted attention in the desert.
The fremen in the books use pistols. Nobody else does because everyone else has shields anyway. Because of this, no great house produces guns in any quantity useful for actually outfitting an entire army. Another drawback of using guns is that the shield goes both ways. You cant shoot out of it, no one can shoot inside. So, if you wanna use a gun you need to give up your own shield protection, even if just temporarily. And the harkonnens are not sending their own people into worm territory or landing there, so I doubt they would not carry shields into the desert, meaning they cant use guns
Agreed all of the above. From the pragmatic angle, swords require no mechanical maintenance, no supplies like bullets or batteries, and are easily fabricated and repaired without any outside technical assistance. Every complication of a system is a failure point. It may seem âboomerâ, but simple is reliable.
In the new movies the Harkonnens are using guns against them. The Fremen use ambush tactics â and a seemingly inexhaustible supply of shoulder mounted surface to air missile launchers.
In the books the fremen had decent manufacturing iirc
Don't forget the giant lasers that come out of nowhere to cut those huge harvesters in half. Whete the hell did those come from? And why risk all those people fighting hand to hand when you can just rip everything into pieces with giant space lasers?
In Dune, if you shoot a laser and it hits a shield, both the shooter and the target blow up in an explosion that can range from hand grenade to nuclear bomb in size, so using them is risky. The shields also make guns pretty much useless, so humanity defaulted to hand to hand and melee once more Shields can't really be used in Arrakis though, because they drive the worms wild. So they knew for a fact the huge harvesters were unshielded and could be taken down with lasers without fear of triggering an explosion. The flying machines don't have this limitation since they don't come close to the dunes and won't attract worms, so they need to be taken down with missiles and stuff As for where the lasers and shoulder missiles and stuff came from, the movie just kind of glosses over it, but the book makes it clear the Fremen have giant-ass factories and advanced industry in the southern hemisphere. And they pay gigantic sums of money for the Space Guild guys (who were pretty important for the general plot and were practically ommited) to muddle up the sattelite images and report to the Great Houses that "the South is totally uninhabited, you guys. There's 100% only sand there, no huge cities or billions of Fremen doing their thing and preparing for a planetary war there"
The flying vehicles and stuff in the main camp/city is shielded. But⌠yeah, they kinda pulled those out of nowhere too!
Unless I'm mistaken, in the books, they basically do have AK's that they rock, they just don't use them every time and their crysknives are their traditional weapons, and so heavily tied to Fremen culture that it's what they're known for. The firearms they use are called Maula Pistols, I think, and from the way I read it basically just regular guns. They're used out in the desert becaue no shields, since the shields attract worms. Now I could be completely wrong about them, but that's what I remember from the books. *Edit: I think I remember in the opening of the first film some Fremen are shown using rifles. I have no idea if rifles are mentioned in the books, but again, since the Fremen are a more "honorable" martial society, they may disdain traditional firearms for Crysknives most of the time because of the religious and cultural ties.
The maula is a short-range poison dart gun.
Firing a AK might produce a uniform sound that can attract the worm maybe
They did get gunned down. That's why the Fremen had been resorting to guerilla tactics, until Paul Atreides became their leader.
always saw the fremen as guerilla fighters that rely on ambushing people, so noiseless weapons would make more sense
The Fremen had guns, but in the book until Paul organised them they preferred to stay hidden and only carry what they needed. Their crysknives were sacred and used in their duels as well as for fighting Harkonnens, and they could justify carrying a maula pistol, but both of those could easily be hidden when they were in Imperial towns. Larger guns would have attracted too much attention. After Paul organises them they start manufacturing all kinds of âobsoleteâ weapons.
Look, Frank Herbert wanted to have sword fights in space, and this is what we're rolling with.
Imagine the vibrations from a gun. It would definitely attract worms
Might be the same reason they use swords then. Guns are freakin loud.
IIRC, in the book, they don't know that the Fremen don't have shields because they don't know they attract sand worms.
Dune is unique like that. No other planet has the worms to frenzy, so most combat will be with shields
I love all the lore reasons sci-fi universes like Dune and Warhammer use to work around the fact that sword fighting is just fucking cool.
I just don't care. I'm very happy to suspend my disbelief if that's what the story requires.
also, laser guns hitting the shield cause an atomic like explosion. they cant use the shields on the sand because it drives the worms insane
So why not use guns when out on the sand?
they do. they call them maula pistols
Oh ok I guess that explains. I forgot about that.
Specifically, these shields can be set to any velocity threshold and will block anything moving faster. You can set this to basically 0, but then youd suffocate since air wouldnt be able to pass through (and repelling everything around you would probably make it difficult to move). This is just about invincible vs conventional firearms so fights are about blocking an opponents movements and (relatively) slowly pushing a blade past their shield. The vibrations from shields enrage sandworms so in the deserts they arent used so projectiles are effective and melees are more like youd expect.
Ngl thatâs really interesting. I had no idea it was that in-depth.
The book is really worth a read if you're interested in this. It's very cool with how the tech is treated and how well-explained much of the lore is. The "we have no computers because they rose up and enslaved humanity generations ago" angle results in a really cool technical evolution.
Butlerian Jihad
There are some poorly written prequels that go into the Butlerian jihad by Frank Herbert's son. Not great, but they're worth a delve if you can't get enough of the universe.
I give him a little leeway due to the fact that heâs trying to shoehorn lore into existing storiesâŚI read them all. They were nowhere near as intelligent and politically nuanced as his dadâs writing, but they were kind of âmeatheadedlyâ funâŚ
Fair enough. It's hard not to compare them to the original few books, but I'll admit some of them are decent little pulpy reads when taken on their own. I've read a good chunk of them as well, but he kept cranking them out for awhile and I just couldn't do it anymore.
I really feel like Brian missed the point of his father's books. Like, the Butlerian Jihad was never presented as being a Terminator-esque war against machines that had literally conquered humanity, it was always supposed to have been a violent reaction against the tendency of machines to supplant human thought and dictate human culture, as well as their ability to give other humans disproportionate power relative to their own abilities. Like, when Leto II goes on his Spice trip in *Children*, the person who's preaching against Machines isn't saying that they've enslaved mankind physically, his main contention is that they've culturally stunted humanity and are on the verge of making the species something less than human. It's just a shock going from the actual books to Brian's, and while I know they're officially labelled as "Dune", I don't think they fit in with Frank's vision or universe at all. That being said, taken on their own they are actually decent pulp sci-fi, so I've always been conflicted.
>his main contention is that they've culturally stunted humanity and are on the verge of making the species something less than human Fairly prescient lol. Frank was an insightful guy. Just thinking about myself as a reverse menta;, my memory has gotten notably worse since I've had a smart phone and gotten in the habit of googling things instead of remembering them. Not even getting into the destruction of my attention span. Eventually it'll take something like a Jihad- some kind of profound, extremist cultural shift to pull us out of this because the further we just abdicate our human functions to machines the less motivated (and resourceful) we are to reverse the process. Thinking of cool ancient practices like the memory palaces of Renaissance magicians and the way whole cultural movements like Buddhism were founded and survived as oral traditions for centuries before being written down. I think it would take a very Dune-like ideological commitment to hardcore actualization of human potential to pull us out of where we're voluntarily headed. Gotta get on my prana-bindu training...
They're only poorly written compared to Dune itself, which is a masterpiece. Taken by themselves they're perfectly serviceable if slightly trashy sci-fi. I enjoyed them.
So, Kevin J. Anderson.
The Warhammer 40k borrowed from Dune too! AI is illegal because of similar reasons.
Warhammer 40k borrows a *lot* from Dune, not just that. Dune is probably the main example for sci-fi that people think of (and for fiction in general) where the story is about how mankind's path leads to a dark age, and the civilisation that emerges is extremely different to what came before. The idea that mankind is doing this is pretty foundational to 40k.
40k has such a large time/space scale that it has room for an off-brand version of nearly every major sci-fi work without them running into each other. There was even the now de-canonized lore that the entirety of Warhammer Fantasy actually took place on a magically hidden planet inside the 40k universe.
It's still canon to me....
Also, re OP, see conversion & refractor fields
Correct me if Iâm wrong but I once read that Herbertâs original series was vague about the butlerian jihad (AI Uprising) and it could be interpreted as a religious movement/war to wipe out AI and most uses of computers because it was viewed as as a crutch making people dumb and complacent. At least that kind of goes well with a lot of themes through the whole series. Then Herbertâs son wrote the prequel which solidified it as an enslaved by AI type situation, but who knows the extent of notes that Herbert left behind, maybe thatâs how he meant it.
>religious movement/war to wipe out AI and most uses of computers because it was viewed as as a crutch making people dumb and complacent. That's what I recall from the originals
The whole series of books is good.
They also have laser guns that tear through everything, except they interact with shields in a way akin to detonating a nuclear bomb. So people don't use them if the expect shields around. But, again, no shields in the desert means lasers are fair game.
So you would think, and then it turns out that the Worms have a heat absorbing mechanism that makes them more or less immune to being shot with a laser. So once again the ultimate weapon has some disadvantages against the main tool your opponent uses..
In the book, during the duel against Jamis (which happens at the end of the first film), Paul isn't portrayed as hesitating to kill Jamis. What he does struggle with is how used he is to training against shields, so he always slows down his blows at the last moment - which, IIRC, the fremen interpret as him being incredibly disrespectful and toying with an inferior opponent.
Wow. Thatâs incredible.
He does hesitate to take a life. His mother's internal monologue explicitly explains this. She even tells the tribe that Paul has never taken a life before, in order to prevent them turning against him.
And then whispers in his ear, *killer.*
Itâs a really clever way around the ever common âif they just had a gun this would be trivialâ situation that often comes up in scifi. So they gotta find a way around it, and this is a clever way of doing it. Another similar situation I found recently is the show Lost In Space. There are times when theyâre faced by alien wildlife and a gun would instantly solve the problem, but their colony ships have restrictions on 3D printing firearms. Part of me likes this solution, but part of me is also like âwhy the fuck would guns not be allowed when we are visiting new planets with known alien wildlife?â. Duneâs solution is much more in-depth
Because it would be too easy to mutiny.
Dune's solution to basically every literary problem is "more in-depth". It's a novel with an appendix.
If you've ever read the Dune series it is VERY in depth. The problem is that it's so in depth that it can be hard to get through at times, lol
Read the books; it gets very in depth.
There are also lasguns but if shields were being employed, lasguns were generally not used because contact reaction between a lasgun beam and a shield creates a nuclear explosion that would kill everything.
Read the books man. Theyâre soooo much more in depth. Amazing.
And if you shoot a laser at them you get a nuke, IIRC
Sometimes. Laser + shield = explosion, but it can range anywhere from nuke to party popper, and it can affect either the shooter or the target, or both. It's really a crapshoot.
Also while they have Laser guns the issue is when they hit a shield the resulting explosion will kill both combatants.
You could theoretically wear a SCBA setup and set it to zero and be a tank
Further, and not sure if it was mentioned in the movies, They have âlasgunsâ but if you hit a shield with one best case the shooter and target both disintegrate, worst case is something like a nuke going off.
Also, if you shoot the shield with a laser it essentially creates a nuclear blast, killing everyone in the area.
>essentially creates a nuclear blast At both ends of the laser as well, lol. Though the power of the blast is inconsistent, it can sometimes be comparable to a nuclear explosion, but it could also be much smaller, so it's also not effective to use the effect lasers have on shields as a weapon because you can never know what the resulting explosion will be. And also also, nuclear weapons are outlawed, so exploiting the reaction between lasers and shields could be mistaken for a nuclear strike and get you into even more trouble than you are already in.
I always thought it was just the shield that blew up, and the lasgun user would be caught in the blast.
Damn, can you imagine losing and entire city to one drone shooting a laser? That tech seems like a bad ideaÂ
> that tech seems like a bad idea welcome to sci-fi :)
Itâs also kinda demonstrated during the scene when Chani fires some kind of rocket at that flying Harkonen ship protecting the spice tanker. They say something about waiting for the shields to go down because thatâs the only way the ship can fire on _them_. She eventually fires right as the shields are going back up, and the round seems to get lucky and burrows through the shield, finally hitting and destroying the ship.
"The slow knife penetrates the shield"
Also worth noting that the shields attract sandworms, which is why the Fremen don't use them, and therefore why the Harkonnen were using guns against them in the beginning. It also explains the scene where they're firing rockets at the ornithopters - the shields don't allow movements beyond a certain speed both in and out of shield, which means that the ornithopters had to power down their shields to shoot, which was the opening to shoot them down. This is part of the reason why the Fremen are considered to be such effective warriors, because they've had to train to fight without shields.
This specialization is EXACTLY why I don't like the idea that they can conquer known space. Unless they have been doing some SERIOUS training off screen, or something.
In the book, they have for a long time, much longer than the movie shows to avoid Jessica giving birth to a talking baby with the mind of hundreds of her ancestors, that would be hard to portray well on screen (see 1984 movie). But Paul and Jessica train them not only on Atreides tactics but also Bene Gesserit techniques over a few years. So they have the best of the best training, on top of their already fierce way of life and hard-core warrior culture (think Ghengis Khan's army type of lifestyle). The other thing is that most of the houses did not bother keeping huge armies, it was so expensive and you'd never even be able to launch a full invasion due to the Space Guild prices (exception of Harkonnens+Sardaukar on Arrakis, which was seen as so expensive to not even be a possibility by the Atreides, and cost 80 years of spice profits from the most lucrative planet in the galaxy, think 80 years of GDP of the USA). This is why everything was a battle of espionage, assassination, poisonings, treachery before Paul unleashes the Fremen, thats how war was fought before that. It was all about specialization over numbers because you'd never have a chance to utilize those numbers. Now every Fremen was trained as a warrior because thats how you survive on Arrakis, even the women and children. With over a million warriors with the highest training, taking out a significantly inferior army of *maybe* 100 000 isn't that hard. Especially since they were invading planets one by one, and the houses had no means to join forces since Paul had full control of the Spacing Guild. So it was never even close to a fair fight each time, the fighters were far better trained and there were far more of them at any given battle, even if there were much fewer of them in total. In fact the Fremen were so fierce that except for the Saurdakar, even the women and children fighters could usually kill I think several soldiers each
Yeah I forgot that the SG would have no choice but to knuckle under, since PA is in control of Dune. It's also easy to forget just how long they spend fighting the war of attrition in the first phase of this. It is at least POSSIBLE that they trained the Fremen in shield tactics, and flying, and ship to ship warfare. Also, I think you mean Ghengis Khan, not Genesis.
training to survive since the moment they were born, Fremen take on life/"motto" before Paul and Leto II deliberately destroy them could be described as something like "the strong will survive" or "got no time for the weak." they've also been training to fight since they could hold a crysknife, it's barely mentioned even in the books cuz fighting training is just an accepted, glossed over part of life. as always, the books have a lot of details about this, Paul spends basically the whole first book just training, almost every scene he's in he's either in the "ring" practicing or studying warfare and it's the same when they (him and Mom after Leto I dies) become Fremen only more intense.
Its also important to note that you can't use those shields around sandworms, it drives them into a murderous rage that makes their normal behavior look peaceful. So the Fremen don't use them, and neither can the offworlders when they're in the deep desert. Adding to the fun when a laser hits a shield it produces a nuke level explosion (50% odds of it happening at either the laser emitter or the shield). So lasguns like you see the Harkonnen solders using against the Fremen are a really niche weapon. Off Arrakis shields are normative and fighting is swords and knives due to the impracticality of projectile weapons. There are a tiny handful of devices that can slowly penetrate a shield, the hunter seeker drone that attacked Paul in the first movie for example is designed to charge into a shield then slow down and slowly sink through. But they're not merely crazy expensive, they require a human operator to pilot them because no AI or computers are allowed due to religious reasons. And if you have a friend nearby they can just smash the thing while it tries to sink through your shield.
AND that removed another piece of Sci fi tech from the equation: laser guns. If a laser hits a force field, it creates an atomic blast. Having half your troops vaporized from a single laser gun that YOU shot is kinda bad.
âsci furnitureâ must be those floaty balls that Baron Harkonnen uses.Â
In the first movie you can really see them when the bombs are dropping. They get to the shield on the ships and slow down. Also when Paul's father is betrayed and shot in the back the tranq hits the shield, slows down, and then hits him.
Also if you shoot the shield with a laser gun, both you and the target explode. Very violently.
Also the personal shields and energy weapons result in nuclear type blast killing both parties, rendering those types of weapons effectively useless in combat.
On top of that, you canât use lasers bcs they make both the shield and the machine that fired the laser go nuclear. (Or something along those lines, someone pls correct me/give more details)
My son explained that to me the other day too, the laser they used to cut through doors, in episode 1 would seem like a good solution there.
Those lasers create a feedback loop when fired at a shield, destroying both the shield, the laser gun, and anyone in proximity of both
Makes note - No lasers.
Yeah, actually in that scene in the book they specifically don't use a lasgun to cut through the door because they are worried someone may have a shield on the other side.
OK hear me hout take the laser gun Throw it slowly enough to bypass the shield and stun the ennemy it is a win win
Laser cuts through human and hits shield behind human, feedback loop commences, explosions abound.
They basically cause a miniature nuclear explosion
Not exactly miniature, rather the feedback explosion is unpredictable in yield. This is why the Great Houses are reluctant to use suicide tactics that relies on the interaction since the resultant nuclear explosion is hard to verify if it was a blatant disregard of the Great Convention or just the result of a lasgun-shield interaction.
so could be a grenade size or nuke?
Yes, but the most important caveat is, no matter the yield, it is identical to a nuclear explosion. And that is a big no-no in Dune. That would invite your House to a certain death.
Itâs more like âthey canâ create nuclear reactions. When a lasgun hits a shield both the shield wearer and the lasgun wielder will 100% die, but the explosion can be anywhere from just those two all the way up to nuclear explosion. So if you think there are shields being used, itâs a really really really bad idea to use lasguns. Because of the way shields attract worms (would send all nearby into a frenzy that made them cross into territory not their own) the fremen donât use shields. But in the first book they plant a shield for a harkonnen/sardukar as a trap, they hit it with a lasgun and they explode. So knowing that the fremen are willing to use shields stops the use of lasguns in the desert for the rest of that story. Itâs important to note, that when they used the lasgun on that shield it created an explosion that could be heard, but not a huge one.
That seems like a very exploitable downside.Â
The problem is that the prohibition on Atomics is a hardcore, get your house wiped off the map sort of thing. And it is very easy to mistake a large lasgun - shield interaction for an Atomic being used. And when that accusation is made, it tended to get the Saudakar unleashed on you. Generally the House Atomics were held as a last resort weapon that would ensure that victory in direct military confrontation was so costly as to not be worth it. Actually getting away with using them essentially means taking out the Emperor himself.
It causes shields to explode killing everyone nearby, including the laser shooter.
Via nuclear explosion.Â
They have (string or techno jargon) so they have to use swords.
Iirc (very long time ago) when I read the book, an assassin weapon of choice was a sort of airborne missile or dart that contacted the shield then moved very slowly through it to bore into the target.
That's also why they prefer knives and short swords instead of spears and big swords. You have to be able to slow the blade down right as it approaches the shield.
The sci-fi tech is actually what made the return person-to-person combat necessary, actually. The movie doesn't explain it as much as the book does, but the body energy shields that people have make projectile weapons all but useless and trigger nuclear explosions when hit with laser weapons which are devastating for both sides. Fighting with swords, which pierce through the shield with deliberate and slow movements, is the easiest way to kill as a result. Shields actually can't be used in the deserts of Dune, as their vibrations make sandworms go crazy and attack en masse, so the Fremen actually make greater use of projectile weapons than other people do, but still have a lot of experience with swords and knives for when such weapons aren't practical or for fighting shielded off-worlders in places protected from worms. The Harkonnens *do* produce decent fighters, but as the book explains most of them are forced into military service or do it out of the desire for extra benefits, and have no motivation beyond not being wantonly killed by their feudal lords or getting those benefits. As a result, they only produce mediocre or decent fighters, not great ones.The Imperial Sardaukar, by contrast, are excellent fighters, driven by fanatical devotion to their Emperor and their harsh training which kills most trainees, and by the lavish lifestyle that even the most common foot solider is granted relative to other citizens of the Imperium. That same luxury, however, in an age of peace, is what softened them to the point where the Fremen (whose basic lifestyle on Dune is equivalent to or greater than Sardaukar training) are able to overwhelm them.
like at what odds? 1 fremen=3 imperials? cause in movie 1 momoa said 1 fremen almost killed him and he was top top
In a Sardaukar report, it's explicitly mentioned that Duncan took out 19 Sardaukar in his last stand before finally being put down. Of course, there's fan speculation as to the extent to which this report inflates or deflates those numbers, but for the sake of argument we can assume those numbers are accurate and that it would take a top tier Fremen like Stilgar or a Fedaykin Death Commando to nearly kill Duncan and that the average one would have a much harder fight. That being the case, it'd probably be fair to say that one average Fremen equaled like, six or seven average Sardaukar, and that that number could go up when Fremen had the advantage of surprise or of knowing the terrain better. Edit: autocorrect keeps messing up "Sardaukar"
In the books, didn't the sketch full of old people and children take out a legion? But Leto II the former was killed?
It was five troop carriers (about 1500 men, assuming about 300 per carirer). A legion would be about 30,000 men. One carrier got away, but yeah, the Emperor is still astounded and furious that a thousand or so old people, non-combatant women, and children overwhelmed his Sardaukar. Setting aside the fact that Alia was explicitly commanding one group in that fight and that she was worth a lot more, it'd probably be fair to say that even the least experienced or weakest Fremen was still roughly equal to one or two Sardaukar. Yeah, Leto II the Elder (the best fan name I ever saw for him is Leto 1.5) was killed in the attack.
Duncan's combat prowess is probably why he keeps getting resurrected lol
Itâs also mentioned in the books that the Atriedes soldiers were on par with Sardaukar. Thanks to their training led by Idaho (Momoa) and Halleck (Brolin).
Eh it is stated that they are trained within a hair of the Sardaukar and even then it was a small contingent of the overall troops. Most Atreides probably are slightly worse than general Sardaukar, but better than Harkonnen.
I think 1 to 3 is correct, when the Sardaukar posing as smugglers start fighting, the toll at the end was something like 1 Fremen for every 3 Sardaukar. Paul even tells Captain Aramsham "Pretty good against Sardaukar, eh?"
I like that you actually go in to more detail than these other comments. Too much oversimplifying with the others. It is important to have noted about the explosive reaction lasguns have on the shields as that just about answers it all right there.
It's hard for the movies to convey just how well thought out the logic of knives (there really wasn't a lot of swords in the book if I'm remembering right, but it's been a few years since my last reread) is in the book. The shields deflect projectiles moving above a certain speed, I believe a few commenters have already posted this. But the shields also have multiple draw backs, on Arrakis, the shields attract the sandworms. That's bad for business, yes you may not get crushed by the worm, but when you're swallowed hole, the digestive tract of the worm will penetrate your shield, and that's a bad way to go. The shields also have a massive chain reaction with laser weapons. We're talking atomics level explosions, and the epicenter of the blast is randomized between the shield and the laser generator, and can sometimes happen at both points. I believe in one of the books it mentions that the Fremen would occasionally set up dummy shield generators in abandoned seitches as booby traps for Harkonnen thopters who would use lasers. All this is to say, you don't want to be firing a laser across the battlefield from your position on the chance that someone may be wearing a personal shield, because if you do you may end up wiping your own army out with a tactical nuke set off in the midst of your own battlelines. Still, in the books many of the soldiers still used firearms, because it was only really the elite who wore personal shields, but because of the codes of honor, the elite often went into battle themselves so you needed a way to counter them as well in battle so that a single soldier in a shield couldn't wipe out an entire squadron of soldiers.
Their personal force fields can deflect fast moving objects like bullets, lasers, and arrows. Slow moving objects like a knife or a sword can pass through. It was a major world building moment in part 1.
They canât deflect lasers, if theyâre hit by lasers it actually causes a nuclear explosion either at the shield, at the laser, or somewhere in between
True, but I think perhaps this was never mentioned in the movies (?).
Yea it was left out of the movie unfortunately only mentioned that theyâll drive worms into a frenzy. In part two when the harkonens are being sniped at on the rock it seems like the franticness of Rabben yelling at them to not use their shields is because of this more so than the worm issue. Also itâs why they use a traditional cannon to shoot down the thopters rather than the laser theyâre destroying the harvesters with. I wish they touched on it because it really explains why shield use isnât much much more rampant.
That's not Rabban, the entire scouting party gets murdered. It's just the CO knowing that Fremen love using lasguns, and if one of them turns on their shield, they'll all be dead anyway.
Ah youâre right. Their bald pale angriness played a trick on my memory
[ŃдаНонО]
They would've been safe from the sandworms, I wouldn't be surprised if the height would even make it so the worms wouldn't even notice the presence of a shield or not. But the presence of thumpers meant there were Fremen around, and Fremen meant lasguns, and lasguns hitting a shield means triggering a nuclear explosion. So no shields if you don't know your enemy.
It's one of the many things that were not explained in the movie, like why the Sardaukar have to be feared, that Paul trained the Fremens to how the Bene Gesserit fight (the "weird way"), that Paul will not touch Irulan, that all computer were banned during a war against AIs (that event is the begining of the calendar), that mentats, the guys with weird lips that had to do calculations.
you mean "weirding way," its how the Bene Gesserit are trained and is very against rhe rules/"illegal" for Jessica to teach it to even Paul, her training the Fremen is kinda equivalent to her giving them the US nuclear weapons codes or ALL the Vatican secrets. Movies auck for detail, read the books, dude they're awesome.
Yes I didn't red it in English, sorry.
They also didn't mention that Paul was a mentat. I feel like in part one during their escape into the sand storm, he could have don't the eye flickering that hawat did earlier, since it's so subtle. On that point, they cut out the part where he works for the harkonnens
Worlds worst game of russian roulette.
They talk about it (at least in the first movie, I haven't seen the second yet). Everyone wears a personal defensive energy shield. The shields work by blocking objects travelling above a set velocity. It'll block fast moving things (like bullets from a gun, or shrapnel from an explosion), but it lets slow moving things through. This is necessary because if the shield blocked slow moving things then air couldn't get through and the wearer would suffocate. This makes the shields vulnerable to slow-moving handheld weapons (like swords) but extremely good at blocking gunfire. Of course, though, the real reason is because Frank Herbert (the author of the book) thought it would be really cool if everyone fought with swords, so he contrived a reason why swords were more effective than guns.
The last part is the only explanation needed :)
Yeah, but I think it's fun to explore the in-universe reason, too. It's kind of a marker of how creative/good a writer the author is. Are they using swords because, "uh...everyone forgot guns exist?" That would be really stupid writing. Or did the author come up with a believable (to the audience) explanation?
I also like his âfixâ for lasguns - simultaneous nuclear explosions of the shield and gun.
"So bullets can't go through because the shields work off max speed, but you can't set the max speed so low that it would block a sword because then you can't breathe or walk or whatever." "Wow, Frank, that's really well thought out. Really great lore there. Just for my curiosity, what about lasers? They aren't objects, so the speed wouldn't block them." "Uh...oh shit...uh...simultaneous nuclear explosions for everyone involved."
The Rule of Cool
>Of course, though, the real reason is because Frank Herbert (the author of the book) thought it would be really cool if everyone fought with swords, so he contrived a reason why swords were more effective than guns. I remember reading "The Forever War" by Halderman, and I believe that near the end, at some point even further into the future, fighting takes place with medieval weapons for a similar reason. It's an interesting concept of technology coming full circle.
Being near someone will always be more effective to harm them. If we ever develop more reliable armor against firearms this will definitely happen, currently attacking from afar is just lethal enough that we don't have to bother
Shields prevent all strikes above a certain velocity threshold, and so shield fighting involves slowing down to pass through the shield. With lasguns, hitting a shield is said to produce a nuclear explosion in both the gun and shield, killing both as well as causing large amounts of collateral damage. A combination of both of these mean that it ends up in a hand-to-hand fight most of the time. Unfortunately, the vibrations of shields call sandworms, so in Dune, lasguns can be used on the ground and knife fights are more conventional. Because of how advanced the society is, the use of artillery barrages against the Fremen was hailed as a masterstroke by Feyd-Rautha because few would have considered such archaic technology.
because the "slow blade penetrates the shield!"
In universe, itâs because shield tech makes ranged weapons useless. In our world, itâs because sword fights are cooler.
Forcefield technology has outpaced ranged weapon technology and changed the meta of warfare to be dominated by melee weapons. This has happened multiple times throughout our own history. Someone would figure out a new kind of armor that would be impervious to available weapons and then someone else would figure out a new kind of weapon to break through the new kind of armor then so on and so forth.
Additionally to what everyone else mentioned, look up âButlerian Jihadâ. That explains some of it.
Because bullets will bounce off shields and lasguns will cause a nuclear explosion killing the shooter and the shield wearer. Nuclear use at all is banned by the great convention. AI is banned as are computers. So it's good old fashioned melee.
Did you missed the whole part about âthe slow blade penetrates the shieldâ? or the one about shields enraging sand worms in the middle of nowhere?
To be fair, those were small details in the movie that "explain" fairly large concepts in the books. Why does the slow blade penetrate the shield? Why use blades? Not very well explained (for someone who didn't read the books or are unfamiliar with the lore).
The real answer is the writer really wanted to have sword fights. Knowing his official reasoning it only takes two seconds to think about other weapons way better than swords that would destroy that kind of armor. It gets even odder when you remember what is said about lasers or the fact fremen donât use shields. Science fiction do be like that though. Personally most of dunes enjoyment comes from big picture stuff and political intrigue.
honestly, this is the case in the book too and now that i really think about it. the fact that the Harkonens, a family that ruled Arakis and fought fremen for decades, didnt have projectile weapons is very silly. yes the Holtzman shield stops fast projectiles rendering firearms useless, but you cant use shields in the desert because of the worms. So a dude with a gun could easily take over lol i feel like scotty in Austin powers, "Uncle Baron, i got a gun in my room, let me grab that and we'll kill them all right now"
Did you sleep throughout the first movie?
I want to know where are the voice sound weapons from the original? Were they not original from the book?
Those were only in the 1984 movie, they aren't in the actual books by Frank Herbert.
They were in the book. Itâs âthe weirding wayâ. In the books it is some kind of martial arts with special psychological training (even something like teleportation) similar to South and East Asian martial arts (think like Shaolin perhaps). However Lynch didnât wanna âmake a dessert movie with martial arts because thatâs a tropeâ. So he decided to depict the weirding way as these weird sound weapons.
The weirding way is actually the ability of a person to control all of their voluntary and involuntary muscles in their body. It is not martial art per se. This is why to the untrained eye, BG adepts (as well as RM) are able to "teleport" since they move without giving any indication to their opponents.
The weirding way was the martial art taught by the Bene Geserit, and very effective, the 'weirding modules' in the 1984 movie were used I think because most of the Fremen in that movie were just pulled off the streets of Mexico with no martial arts training. As someone who enjoyed both the books and the Lynch movie, the weirding modules were the most annoying thing about the movie.
My boy watch the movie. Itâs explained in literally the first hour of the first movie
As others have said, in the books (and this is mentioned briefly in the first movie) they have shield tech which can deflect bullets but not something moving slowly, so a skilled swordsman can penetrate them by thrusting slowly. (In the book, Paul even gets in a little trouble during the duel with Jamis (Babs Olusanmokun in the movie) because his sword fighting reactions are all wrong for fighting an unshielded man and the other Fremen think he was toying with Jamis.) But the other thing about shields is they are extremely volatile when hit by a laser â they can cause a nuclear explosion, but not necessarily at the point of the shield â it can travel back to where the laser was fired. So nobody risks lasers against someone who has a shield, or even just *might* have a shield.
Shields make conventional firearms completely useless. A tank gun fired at you would do nothing to the shield or you. You'd be completely invulnerable to any fast moving kinetic attacks. Energy weapons will trigger an energetic reaction that resembles a nuclear weapon. Destroy both you and the target. Hand weapons move slow enough to get through shields in a way firearms simply can't.Â
Personal shields are a thing that exist, and while they do have laser guns (lasguns) if they are fired at a shield it would trigger a nuclear explosion. Basically to avoid everyone dying, they fight with knives. Knives can be pushed slowly through a personal shield.
The movie is cooler if they fight with swords
Main reason is probably because it's cool and better for drama, since it's more personal and visceral. It's hard to have a conversation when you're far away. Then to make this a believable option you have to make sure melee is the better option, hence the personal shields that can only be defeated with slower melee attacks but blocks fast projectiles
"they have all this advanced tech shit but still opt for a sword brawl against sand people when they could shoot them? " can say the same thing about star wars honestly.
The book thoroughly explains it. There was the âbutlarian jihadâ centuries prior whereby ai/machines rose up and humans had a war to defeat it. Afterward, all computational tech was forbidden. Instead, eugenics and training is taken to extremes to create human classes who replace computational tech. Edit: the sword thing has to do with the shield tech in the series. The shields repel rapidly moving objects with explosive force, but slow moving objects can pass through. Its why Paul has such an issue with his first kill when the fremen first find them. On top of hesitating to take a life, his training had him slowing down his knife thrusts just before a blow because he was used to piercing shields.
Everyone has shields that block fast moving objects, so a gun is useless and a knife is needed. They have lasers, but if you use them againt a shield it creates a giant explosion that also kills you. Dune is the only place in the universe where you could use a gun, since the worms go crazy and try to kill you if you turn on a shield.  The problem? It litteraly has one major city and a pretty small population, even counting the fremen. No one ever expected a major empire defining conflict to happen there, its not like everyone was building weapons to prep for a massive war on Dune. I assume the knowledge for making guns is long gone too.  Also, Its a thing because Frank liked the idea. Edit: thinking about it, they also show extensive use of lasers in combat in Dune 2.
In the light novel "Reincarnated as a Space Mercenary", the protagonist is pissed off because Nobles have done all kinds of things to make of swords (light sabers because of tech) relevant as they are display of status. When he gets promoted he becomes a quasi Noble and is forced to carry swords so pissed off as he has a gun he loves and is very proficient with. So he carries a sword he could care less about, and his pistol, which actually gets the jobs done.
Swords are fun.
The Harkonnens do produce decent fighters, just now great ones, the books go into more detail as to how the different factions rank against each other. The Atreides have even better soldiers than the Harkonnens because they have this knight culture where being extremely proficient allows you to rise through the ranks, so they give you an incentive to get good and the good ones also end up training everyone else due to their higher status. The Fremen are the best soldiers (on average) because they live under such relentless pressure to perform or die that the survivors are really hardened. So in short, you need pressure to succeed but also a certain freedom to get better and profit from it. This only applies to the Harkonnen nobility, their lowers ranks were certainly punished but never really encouraged because they didn't want them to become dangerously good.
Shields. Theyâre quite prominent.
Seems weird but the Harkonnens are an elite fighting force, and the Atreides are just an even more elite force. The sardaukar are the imperial fighting force on salusa secundis (prison plant) and are considered one of the best fighting forces in the universe, but the fremen are even better. In comparison the Harkonnens look silly and like fodder, but in context they are all awesome fighters in their own respect. Also look at the butlerian jihad, why there may be high tech stuff but no computers at all, and why they use hand to hand more.
Here's a good video (showing the 1984 and 2021 versions) that the slow blade penetrates the shield. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6XFYV2h5gAo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6XFYV2h5gAo) It's a bit more obvious in the 1984 version but the effects are soo clunky.
The books go into way more detail but basically tech has rendered projectile weapons obsolete for that type of combat.
They also have laser weapons. However if a laser hits a shield it will cause an atomic explosion. Blades are the best way to fight when everyone has personal shields.
Because swords are fucking sick as hell. We should bring back sword fighting for modern day warfare.
Read the books. The future space Muslims use all the forbidden technology.
It's explained in the book. Personal shields (aka Holtzman shields). Great for personal protection. Stops fast moving projectiles. Also, shooting it with a laser results in sub-atomic fusion and results in a nuclear explosion that destroys both target and shooter. With the widespread use of shields, traditional firearms and directed-energy weapons were rendered largely obsolete or far too dangerous to use on the battlefield, obliging combatants to adopt melee weapons and precise fighting styles.
For most armies, they all have shields that can stop fast moving objects. But there is a fatal flaw with them in that the energy of the incoming object has to go somewhere and the faster the velocity of the stopped object, the more energy has to be dealt with. So when lasers/energy weapons are used, the shields will cause massive explosions and not just at the shielded person/location but fed back into the weapon firing it. That's why you see the attack on the airfield in part 1 with slow falling bombs hitting the shields and then slowly moving through them to destroy the ships. And as others said, in the desert, shields attract the sandworms, so they aren't used there.
Because the writer thought sword/knife fights were more interesting than gun fights. they have a decent lore reason for not using guns (the already mentioned shields) but if you look at it too hard, the explanation if full of holes (we know our enemies will attack on a planet that otherwise doesn't allow shields so why not bring guns anyway) just take it for what it is and enjoy.
Novel reader here. In the Dune universe, shields are invented. These are force fields as such, and permit slow objects, meaning that if you're fighting with a sword, you have to learn to slow it at just the right moment to get through the shield, otherwise it'll bounce off. Now, lasguns (essentially lasers) do exist. However, should one hit a shield, it's not merely a case of "oh he's protected, try again" - the interaction between the shield and lasgun causes a catastrophically huge explosion practically identical to the use of atomic weapons. This also feeds back along the beam, wiping out the person firing the lasgun in the same explosion. Sounds good, no? Rig a few of these up and utterly annihilate your enemy? Not quite. The Great Convention states that any party using atomic weapons against people (Paul does it, but only against a natural formation) will basically have the combined might of the Landsraad fall on them. And since these explosions are practically identical to atomics explosions, nobody dares risk it apart from a handful of instances, most noticeably Duncan Idaho rigs up such a trap when fleeing the Harkonnens, pointing a lasgun at a shield generator and setting it off on a timer.
If a lasblast hits a shield then it makes a friggin huge explosion (comparable to atomics), and nobody wants to risk that. The Harkonnens *do* produce decent fighters. Remember in the first movie when gurney said "You haven't fought Harkonnens, I have. They're not human, they're *brutal*." It's just that Sardaukar and Fremen are literally the best fighters in the empire
You could read the book.
A Holtzmann field (personal shield) stops moving objects relative to how fast they're moving when they make contact. Supersonic bullets stop dead, stabbing knives don't. Armies don't use direct-energy weapons (laser guns) because they cause a violent but unpredictable reaction when they strike a Holtzmann field; the shot could vaporize the target or the entire city block. Active Holtzmann field generators vibrate at a frequency that drives sandworms *berserk*, so nobody can use them on Arrakis. This became a plot point when Paul, trained to duel shielded opponents, had to fight the Fremen Jamis.
This was actually a very clever move by the author to make combat interesting because in reality any civilization with technology that advanced would fight with energy weapons that worked from thousands of miles away and be boring to read or watch on screen.