Close Shave

[RabidVargr]

Trip wires made outa this stuff would be nasty. especially strung at about 2' or so?

RV

 

[Uncle Bob]

Originally posted by RabidVargr:
Trip wires made outa this stuff would be nasty. especially strung at about 2' or so?

RV

In "Thin Edge" the protagonist warns against going though doorways, between any two solidly anchored objects, or into a bathtub.

 

[far-trader]

Am I just getting so old that I forgot or was it never explained (by the authors) exactly how you solidly anchor this wire that cuts through anything like a laser through warm butter to make all these nasty weapons and booby traps?

Dan "far (too old today) - trader" Burns

 

[Uncle Bob]

From "Thin Edge" by Johnathan Blake MacKenzie (Randall Garrett, © 1962, published in Analog 3 (AKA A World by the Tale).

Used to break out of jail. This will help answer your queston, far-trader.

Carefully, he caught a thread in the lapel of his jacket and pulled it free. Except for a certain springiness, it looked like an ordinary silon thread. He looped it around one of the bars of his cell, high up. The ends he fastened to a couple of little decorative hooks in his belt-hooks covered with a shell of synthetic ruby.
Then he leaned back, putting his weight on the thread.
Slowly, like a knife moving through cold peanut butter, the thread sank into the steel bar, cutting through its one-inch thickness with increasing difficulty until it was halfway through. Then it seemed to slip the rest of the way through.

On its use as a booby trap to catch a burglar

There was always the chance that the occupant of the suite had rigged up a really old-fashioned trap.
He looked carefully at the hinges of the door. Nothing. There were no tiny bits of paper that would fall if he pushed the door open any further, no little threads that would be broken.
It hadn't really seemed likely, after all. The door was open wide enough for a man to walk through without moving it.
Still grinning, the man reached out toward the door.
He was quite astonished when his hand didn't reach the door itself.
There was a sharp feeling of pain when his hand fell to to the floor, severed at the wrist.
The man stared at his twitching hand on the floor. He blinked stupidly while his wrist gushed blood. Then, almost automatically, he stepped forward to pick up his hand.
As he shufl1ed forward, he felt a snick! snick! of pain in his ankles while all sensation from his feet went dead.
It was not until he began toppling forward that he realized that his feet were still sitting calmly on the floor in their shoes and that he was no longer connected to them. It was too late. He was already falling.
He felt a stinging sensation in his throat and then nothing more as the drop in blood pressure rendered him unconscious.
His hand lay where it had fallen. His feet remained standing. His body fell to the floor with a resounding thud! His head bounced once and then rolled under the bed. When his heart quit pumping, the blood quit spurting.
A tiny device on the doorjamb, down near the floor, went zzzt and then there was silence.

 

[far-trader]

Originally posted by Uncle Bob:
This will help answer your queston, far-trader.

Thank you very much Uncle Bob, you have saved me a trip to the basement to root through my stack of boxes of oft read (ages ago) paperbacks, the fog is clearing

Dan "far-trader" Burns

 

[vegascat]

If memory serves, Niven had his shadow panel wire made out of scrith, the same stuff as the hull of the ringworld. Have yet to see scrith in Traveller, nor would I allow it.

---------------------------------
In the end, Murphy will rule

 

[PapaGolfWhiskey]

The most evil and munchkin use of Mono-wire or it's effective equivalent that I ever heard of in a personal weopan was:

A handle and hoop with 'monowire' strung inside the hoop in a square grid like the gut of a tennis racket.

there are reasons given in other poster's posts why this device just wouldn't work but assuming you were crazy enough to allow it....

Opponent Juliene Anyone?

GARF.

 

[ACK!!]

Yes, its just ACK resurrecting an old thread.

How munchkin is it to have a monofiliment edge sword in the campaign?

I want to keep the Traveller idea/emphasis on blades but...

Is there a decent way to "update" the weapon without becoming instantly munchkin.

I think energy blades don't reflect the gritty nature of Traveller but I can also understand how someone would say that monofiliment edged blades are too Cyberpunk/Shadowrun for a Trav campaign.

What about the vibra or electro blade concepts?

I understand the idea for boarding actions but even then I almost prefer the concept of shotguns over swords but I have a guy with a katana fixation (if you know that I mean) worse than a damn pirate always going to his quarters to sharpen his cutlass.

What do you do?

How does T20 or GURPS handle the anachronism?

 

[Morte]

Originally posted by ACK:
Is there a decent way to "update" the weapon without becoming instantly munchkin.

Perhaps you could build some sort of Taser into the sword, so that it stuns the target if it hits right. The user would have to be protected, and the weapon definitely needs a custom fumble table.

I saw a combat knife with a "collapsed crystal" edge mentioned in a PBEM. Maybe with a suitable handwave (i.e. don't say how it works) you could come up with a sword with some armour penetration. It's really valuable, people keep trying to steal it, and the Solomani/Imperial/Zhodani boffins want their prototype back.

 

[Zutroi]

I've allowed "sinclair monofilament" IMTU for decades, generally used as a tool rather than as a weapon. It has a nicer 'scifiness' than making tripwires from nylon. And don't forget, if YOU have a spool of it with you for making doorways unfriendly, there's always the chance that someone ELSE might have gotten there first with the same idea.