In common usage, I think that'll pass as simply "warhammer", which would indeed be a decently good weapon to use against someone heavily armored. I've no doubt dedicated armor piercing one-handed melee weapons can penetrate plate armor with a good swing.

mfb: Related to that, I'd like to know exactly how sharp a well-sharpened cut-and-thrust sword's edge should be when it's not expected to get a lot of contact with metal. I wouldn't be very surprised if you'd actually get a duller sword with a monowire thick enough to handle that kind of use.

I realize that. On the other hand, in order for monowire to handle being whacked between metal and bone, it too has to be somewhere around the thickness of the human hair or even thicker.

This is how I always figured it. Else there'd be no way the wire wouldn't snap when you swing it at something rigid.

wow a straight from the book answere, this is why i don't help much, just genral comments.

It doesn't have the damage of a monowhip because it's got a big, thick sword behind it. Even if the edge is very sharp, the entire sword has non-negligible width.

As for why the hack saw wouldn't work, (and please remember this is all just my interpretation of the stuff) is that while monowire is very sharp and very strong (for it's size) it is neither infinitely sharp nor infinitely strong. It can't, CAN'T be all that strong at that width. The reason a monowhip doesn't break is because it either encounters negligible resistance while cutting through things, or when it encounters something that it can't cut, there's only a teeny tiny weight on the end providing minimal strain, so it just wraps around. IMO if you were to grab the handle and the little weight at the end of a monowhip such that your fingers didn't all fall off, you could break the line as easily as snapping a sewing thread (maybe a little harder, but you get the idea). With monowire bonded to the edge of a sword, there's no problem. It's sharp, but nothing is really straining the wire in a way that would snap it when you're cutting things. Now, if you suspend the wire on a hack-saw, you're fine as long as you never encounter anything that the wire can't easily cut. Except of course, even after you cut your near-infinitesimally thin cut in someone, two inches of swing later you're just hitting them with a bar, so it doesn't cut any deeper than the width of the "hack-saw". You then cut a nasty notch as you pull the weapon away, but still no sweet, sweet severing. While the monowire is very sharp, the metal pole it's attached to prevents deep cutting. Plus, if the wire ever hits anything that it can't easily cut through, it's got the full force of your swing behind it, and since it's held tight from both ends it has no give, so it just snaps.

And this says nothing at all about the balance issues of trying to fight with something shaped like a hack-saw. Possible, but an awkward weapon at best.

So, the way I see it, the hack-saw-mono-sword is do-able, just not that great as a weapon. A mini-version would be a GREAT accessory on a swiss army knife, though

I believe the vernacular is "can opener".

I usually call it a "Holy crap look what that psycho has! Run like hell!"

They only ever made one Highlander movie.

AND NEVER SAY OTHERWISE. NEVER!

Amen to that.

I can see the issues with the hack saw style mono-whip sword, but heres an idea:

Using a whip as a basis, make the tip and the pommel be magnetically oppistie each other, so it would straighten out and be sword-like. I use magnettically, but I am sure there are cooler ways to make things repel from each other in SR4, I am just not coming up with anything better. But anyways, if you can achieve that, then it should work as I mentioned....maybe?

IIRC such heavy armor did exist, but it was not combat armor it was for parades, jousting, or decorating your castle. Only an idiot would have worn it to battle.

Because, IIRC and I'm recalling this from earlier editions, monowire is described in the book as being monomolecular.

Thanks, mfb!

Keep in mind, that's a comment that refers to the monosword. The description of the monowhip from the SR1 core rulebook did specifically call it out as monomolecular.

In short, they were trying to present the monosword as something that was marketed as being the monowhip in sword form, when really it was using slightly inferior tech.

Not to disregard your opinion, but I see it rather diffrently. In my games mono-wire is both infintesimally small (<10nm) and incredibly strong (>100GPa). Thus such thread is both incredibly sharp and deadly as a cutting tool IF you have some momentum behind it to cut with. It is also all but impossible to break by conventional means. I would call for at least Strength (6) test at least to try and break it by hand. Such a strong and sharp wire is not likely to break during any typical combat use, characters, even cyberenhanced Trolls, simply do not have enough strength to apply the necessary amount of force.

Which is not to say that the mono-wire will cut through everything it comes into contact with. Although it posses deadly sharpness, it's mass is virtualy non-existant, so it can be hard to connect with enough momentum to properly utilise that sharpness. If you were to just gently lay the mono-wire down on a table it wouldn't automaticaly slide through it, because it lacks the momentum.

For a good example of what I envision a monowire to be like in practice you should see the film Johnny Mnemonic, one of the bad guys uses one quite promently there. In my Shadowrun games the damage it does is not generaly so devestating, but can be pretty close. 8P+success versus 1/2 armor can be pretty nasty. Certianly worse than most blade wounds except those weilded by the very strongest of characters. I typicaly depict mono-wire wounds as nasty incisions (like the "notch" you talk about) into a characters flesh if non-fatal, or more grahpic decapitations and the like for fatal wounds. Armor typical is only able to mitigate, wounds as the monowire either cuts through it (while losing some more momentum) or wraps around/aside it (losing some momentum).

As for the hacksaw "monosword" I agree that it could be an unwieldy weapon. Most criticaly it would lack the mass that is associated with most cutting weapons. While you could certianly add mass to it, to me that takes away from some of the "flavor" of the weapon. What the monosword lacks in mass it makes up for insane sharpness. I visulise the support bar as being very thin and beveled to aid penetration. How deaply you are able to cut is a matter of hard you swing (strength) and how well (success) with strength mattering less. It's not hard for me to imagine the support bar following through to sever a limb or head, it did have an uber-sharp mono-wire to pave the way for it.

That said a hacksaw like "monosword" is certianly less deadly than the mono-wire whip. Again the reason is momentum, the light weapon cannot generate the same amount of force as the twirling lashing whip can. That's not to so say it is a joke. A typical wound might carve a "noch" into someone as you say, lacking the momentum to penetrate deep enough to complely sever a body part. But a "notch" can still be quite nasty. A 2 or so inch "notch" would sever and completly remove a good chunky of muscles, nerves, and arteries. Try and imagine such a block of flesh carved from your arm, such a thing would not pleasant.

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Of coures as a disclaimer this is my own view and pretty disregards "cannon" on somepoints. In fact one of my favorite shadowtalk quotes from SR comes from the entry on this one.

BTW, after a secound look the picture in SSC looks more like a broadsword or straight edged cutlass than the longsword I said earlier.

However, you should disregard the one scene where the character in question loops his monowhip and slices through a door with it, removing the portion that contains the knob and lock. Swinging a loop of this virtually massless monowire against a flat surface like a door would not provide enough momentum to let it slice into the surface.

You'll have to adjust the numbers quite a bit if you want that to make sense. With a diameter of 0.00000001m that means you have a cross-section of 0.00000000000000007853975m^2. Even at 100GPa (single-walled carbon nanotubes have been tested to have a tensile strength of 63GPa) that'd mean you'd only need a force of 0.000007853975 Newtons to snap it. That means a hanging mass of 0.00000080061kg (0.8 micrograms, to put that in perspective, a common house fly would be something like 2000 times too heavy to be supported by it). That's not "impossible to break" -- that'd mean it'd be completely incapable of supporting the weight that's supposed to be hanging at the end of a monowhip.

If you want it to be extremely difficult to break, still assuming 100GPa (which doesn't seem likely with carbon nanotubes), you'd have to make it far thicker. For example, at 0.00008m in diameter (about average for dark brown human hair), it'd snap under a tensile force of 502.65N, which translates to a hanging mass of 51.239kg -- you could easily snap it with a tug if you could get a good grip of the counterweight or if you could arrest it around something solid. Yet if it's as large in diameter as a human hair, then you can forget about the magical "cuts everything" properties (well, you could anyway, but you get the point).

So either you have to completely disregard math and physics, or you to accept that monofilaments/monowires/monowhips/monoswords don't make particularly scary weapons.

Ah, the old stand-by. I have nothing against magical monowire, as long as you realize that you are indeed talking about magical monowire.

not really (but see below). no matter how many different ways you alloy it or fold it or quench it in whatever crazy sword-quenching materials you want to try, there's a limit on how well thin metal will stand up to hard impacts.

now, with dikote, you can get a little sharper with less fear of edge-chipping. how much sharper, i don't know; Cray74 would be better able to tell you than i, but i'm given to understand that the difference is significant.

What about the various plastics? We can already make plastic as hard as some steel (granted we can't sharpened that well yet), but given 70 years, it doesn't seem out of the question that we could make plastic harder and more resilent that steel.

I'm not a metallurgist/engineer or anything, that is why I am asking.

How does dikote work? Does it make your item look like a diamond, or is the coat thin and clear and not change the appearence? Something in between? The thing I've always hated about SR was the lack of artwork for the weapons. Thankfully, that changed in SR4.

I didn't start playing in SR3 (In 2000, actully), so I missed alot of the good books it seems :\

You could get around the strength issue by encasing the thinnest possible line in a slaver stasis field, which is nigh indestructible. You'd end up with a rigid, ultra thin blade with a small knob on the tip to cap off the line/field. You could even adjust the length of this "varisword" by reeling the line in/out. Fully contracted, it would be the size of the handle, small enough to fit inside a haunch of rotting meat.

Scream and leap. The monkey-boys will never know what hit 'em.

Above and beyond the old saw that katanas are 'brittle' (What katana? From what smith? From what time period? It varies a hell of a lot)...

Please, please, please, stop repeating the statement that Katanas are for cutting unarmored opponents. They are for killing people in and out of armor. I don't care what you heard, the Japanese had and used armor. This was not consistently 'light' armor. This armor ran the gamut from 'pretty much nothing' to 'my god, that's like wearing a pot.'

Contrary to popular beliefs, this armor was not made of wood or paper. It was made of hardened leather with a laquer coat, or chain and cloth, or metal plates. Sometimes, they would even pull a full breastplate.

So please. Stop saying the katana is for unarmored opponents.