Force Knife
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Force Knives
First mentioned in the second story of the Swarm Universe, 'The Mercury Incident' by Thinking Horndog.
"It was clear that approaching a Sa'arm unit directly was dangerous and tended to get you nothing but killed from the data we had already," he explained, waving at the display, which showed a couple of Sa'arm units advancing through a horde of frozen Tulaki, wielding some kind of force-field knives to hack a path through the little beings, whose instinctive answer to the 'fight or flight' dilemma was to freeze in place, "so the initial mission was to collect and extract a dead unit for dissection."
These knives use two or more force fields set parallel to each other and vibrated much like an electric carving knife. Since the force fields are non-breakable and approximately molecular in width, they will slice through any physical material in time. The knife consists of just the handgrip and a simple hilt guard. The power source is included in the grip along with the force field generators.
Typical swarm units weigh almost a kilogram and have a 'blade' length of 60 to 90 centimeters. Blade length is not adjustable, but is set when the unit is designed. Human versions are generally smaller in the grip area to accommodate smaller Human hands.
There is no mass component to the blade area, so there is little inertia to the weapon. Getting used to the speed and the lack of mass can be tricky.
When two force blades collide, they will not pass through, but they also do not nick each other and thus are less likely to 'bind' the enemy blade. The hilt guard will not stop another force blade. It's purpose is to keep the hand from slipping onto the blade. Confederacy designers are working on a version with a selective blade, allowing it to pass through a Swarm blade or not, at the users option.
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