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Standard disclaimer on fantasy weapon nonsense, all that jazz...

That aside, I recall a conversation I had with one of my room mates a number of years ago. His father, a mechanical engineer, had been having some conversation or other with him about sci-fi settings. Somewhere in there, probably because a book was nearby, the subject of 40k came up. This guy's dad looks at the image of a space marine there, wielding a chainsword, points to the weapon in the picture and says:

"You know, I've been thinking about how to make something like this work..."

I need to follow up on that guy sometime.

sides chainswords are far from the only issue out there with regards to realisim in 40k. Tyranids have a whole ton of physics relating issues with them.

 Iron_Captain wrote:
Science fiction weapons never make sense.

Nah, something from so-called "hard" scifi would make sense (and a well thought out fantasy setting would also have weapons that make sense in the setting). You extrapolate from stuff we already have, or stuff scientists theorize about, instead of writing up magical armor/guns/swords.

40K is not scifi in any sense, it's just as much space magic fantasy as Star Wars (or Star Trek, which uses technobabble to sound sciency but is still fantasy).

 Kawauso wrote:
His father, a mechanical engineer, had been having some conversation or other with him about sci-fi settings. Somewhere in there, probably because a book was nearby, the subject of 40k came up. This guy's dad looks at the image of a space marine there, wielding a chainsword, points to the weapon in the picture and says:
"You know, I've been thinking about how to make something like this work..."
I need to follow up on that guy sometime.

As a mech. engineer i can tell you that it would not be a practical or even properly functional weapon in the real world (see my earlier reply). Forces too high to be durable, Motor unit too small to deliver the power necessary, base principle of function very inefficient, wear high.
It would end up beeing a very unwieldy metal club with spikes that move on their own when there is no resistance

Thorax Abdomen wrote:
Well diamond can cut diamond, right? Steel can cut steel.

When steel cuts steel its only superior steel cutting lower grade steel.
Materials of the exact same quality cant cut each other... Well they can but the blade/cutting edge becomes dull so quickly that its a useless exercise - unless your blade has infinite length effectively (e.g. how they cut silicon wafers).

Spetulhu wrote:
40K is not scifi in any sense, it's just as much space magic fantasy as Star Wars (or Star Trek, which uses technobabble to sound sciency but is still fantasy).

The Imperial Guard stuff is not all that bad/ handwavey (if you excempt the weapon technology like energy weapons, plasma and laser weapons), as i've found over the years on my realism project.

That's an awesome project, are we eventually going to see an Arma 3 mod out of that?

The answer is in the last few posts, or my signature here

Aaaaah

I will keep an eye on you and your project