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If we think about the aim of combat, a basic sword may be more practical against a Moose.

Because first and foremost, you want to cut down your opponent without them doing you over in return.

With a basic sword, you have one or two sharp edges depending on the type of sword. They’re typically well balanced, and the associated stances include movement - getting your blade into them whilst avoiding their own.

If it’s sufficiently sharp, against an unarmoured target, you can inflict relatively shallow cuts whilst staying on the move. Against an animal such as a Moose, you could go for its limbs to disable it, allowing a killing stroke at your leisure.You can also dodge it’s antlers and hooves, because the sword only needs a fraction of a second to do some damage.

A chainsaw? Well. For a start it’s not balanced for combat, and requires a firm, two handed stance. You also need some pressure to keep the chain in contact with the target, and not be bouncing back into you.

Now, for butchering the carcass a chainsaw is definitely going to have advantages, especially if you’re not too worried about excessive wastage.

And I doubt you could sneak up on the beastie with a Chainsaw.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
A Chainsword of course is balanced for combat, and are typically portrayed as only having one side of the chain exposed, the side closest to the wielder with a cowl or similar to better protect the wielder.

We also have canonical examples where the blade can go from off to combat speed very, very quickly - and without a petrol driven motor.

It's less the passive balance and more the torque of a chainsword that gets me.

If it has enough torque to saw through ceramite (or hell, even flak or carapace) armor, it's going.to be very strange to use when spinning.

If I had to choose a melee weapon to fight a moose with it would be like a halberd or poleax or the like. Something I could use to keep my distance and inflict pain, and actually has a lot of oomph behind it once the moose is wounded and unable to come at me.

Boar Spear would seem the toy for the job. Crossbar stops it going in too far and getting stuck. And even if it does get stuck, it hinders the beasties movement, and may cause further damage as it gambols about.

Boar swords were also a thing. But nowadays, people use guns

I like how you made a separate thread to stop this thread being off topic but it's now back on chainswords

It's mostly on fighting a moose.

If you've ever had one charge you, I think you would take anything you can get.

So thankful for this thread that I made an account when I read it.
Shurkin cannons always confused me, defintely one of the silliest weapons in 40k. Like I can get handwaving away plasma or other extreme sci-fi weapons but very fast thin discs just don't hold up.
And even if they somehow worked, imagine what the battlefield would look like afterwards! Billions of razor sharp discs and their splinter sticking out EVERYWHERE, you couldn't walk a step without stepping into the shards and at the wrong angles you couldn't even see them because they're so thin. I mean, sure not that the Eldar are fighting for turf and intend on settling the places they conquer but they can't even take the position they just cleared out because everything is essentially blocked b barbed wire.

They use various wraithbone constructs like warp spiders that can consume anything. No reason to think they couldn't use those.

Other than that a bone singer could summon them all back together and remould them.

 Hellebore wrote:
They use various wraithbone constructs like warp spiders that can consume anything. No reason to think they couldn't use those.

Other than that a bone singer could summon them all back together and remould them.

Yeah when the battle is over but I doubt every squad has a cleaning lady in tow to mop up the trench they just cleared of enemies in an ongoing battle. Would really slow down their advance...
Now that I think about it, they probably should be specialist space weapons because in a vacuum they would at least fly straight and there's usually no ground to occupy. One last saving grace might be if the ammo stick had some kind of payload at its core so each inner circle of the discs had some additional way of dealing damage, so just getting them stuck in the enemey would suffice to deliver some elf magic mini explosion or so.

Racerguy180 wrote:
If you've ever had one charge you, I think you would take anything you can get.

In 1993's Yukon Quest sled dog race, musher Jeff Mann killed a moose with his axe. He came in 6th place. I was living in Alaska at the time. Pepperidge Farm remembers.

Is Moose killing a fixture of the race?

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Is Moose killing a fixture of the race?

No. It's just a sled race. He encountered the moose on the trail and the moose attacked his dogs.

There are guys who go Wild Boar hunting with just a Bowie knife, spear hunting barracuda and other crazy gak.

I would venture to guess your average gaunt would be significantly more deadly than either of those. Now if you've been enured to the horrors of the 41st Millennium, charging a couple of them with a chainsword sounds perfectly rational.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Is Moose killing a fixture of the race?

Given us Canadians enjoy some maple syrup on our moose I would have to say yes.

Wyldhunt wrote:
Can someone explain the theoretical nuances of how eldar shuriken weaponry impacts a target works?

With real physics? It's difficult because we don't yet have definitive experimentally validated proof of how conservation of momentum interacts with general relativity on masses greater than subatomic scale. Assuming that 1) muzzle velocities from a shiruken weapon are approaching C,and 2) that actual mass of an accelerated object increases proportionally in relation to its fraction of C as given by a simple substition of the law of conservation of momentum p→=mrelv→ where p is mass at 0G and mrel is mass at actual G and v is velocity, then a miniscule amount of mass accelerated to near 1C would have a relative mass approaching or exceeding that of a gravitational singularity.

I'm not well versed in the state of human metallurgy in this timeline, but applying these forces to a mononolecular disk which somehow, by magic or something doesn't immediately disintegrate due to tidal affects at near C to armor plate would invariably, as in 100% of the time, inflict terminal behind armor affects on the target. I mean truly invariably. Without warp powers or magic or whatever there would be zero way of surviving even a glancing hit from a weapon like that.

Given that the Eldar haven't effortlessly dunked on all other races, the best assumption is that their weapons fire at some very reduced fraction of C. Still, there is a logical framework supported by our best modern understanding of General Relativity and Relativistic Conservation of Momentum to make these weapons as deadly as you imagine the Eldard ability to accelerate the shirukens to be. At the top end, a guardian defender would be shooting 3000+ projectiles a minute, each with the mass of galactic supercluster but only a few angstroms wide along the cutting face, and accelerated so such tremendous velocities that time dilation eliminates any possibility of dodging, and the eldar would be personally safe from the mind boggling effects released by their weapons. It's actually a pretty perfectly thought out weapon design for the "fill in the blank with whatever you want" style of description favored by GW when it comes to Quant hardware stats.

Thanks for the question, was interesting to think about.

If it’s going anywhere near the speed of light it doesn’t really need to be sharp…

https://what-if.xkcd.com/1/

 Flinty wrote:
If it’s going anywhere near the speed of light it doesn’t really need to be sharp…

https://what-if.xkcd.com/1/

he makes a good point about aerodynamics. If the shuriken is travelling fast enough the atmospheric molecules are stationary, but the disc is also so thin it might even miss hitting most of them, given how low pressure the atmosphere is and thus how far apart the molecules are from each other.

But the disc would also need to be resilient enough to not disintegrate when hitting those molecules (or the surface of the target for that matter). And firing so many of them one after the other in virtually the same plane means the first few will take out whatever molecules are in the way, leaving the ones behind to travel through the near vacuum tunnel left behind, giving them a straight line to travel with no drag.

We know wraithbone is one of the strongest substances in the galaxy, and is routinely used as armour to protect eldar vehicles from lascannons, meltaguns etc. So It can survive impact with high energy weapons, it should be able to survive impact with a few molecules fusing to its surface as it travels through the atmosphere.


So as a result, the shurikens will travel in straight lines, very fast, avoiding most of the atmosphere, and transfer their acceleration into kinetic and heat energy on impact to the target. Enough of these hitting you at once could easily cause structural failure in materials as they're shock heated in tiny spots, causing expansion and shrinkage cracking until some of them burst through into the person underneath.