Sinta'Unathi Rennaisance of Honourable Combat

[Crozarius]

Lore Impact (Medium)

Team Purview: (Unathi)

Short Description: A new cultural idea in the Sinta'Unathi (Karszekani) zeitgeist that idealizes a return to melee-based fighting where practical, encouraged by new modern technology such as energy blades and personal shields, and heavily influenced by the generational trauma caused by the mass suffering inflicted by the industrialized mass ranged warfare of the Contact War. 

How will this be reflected on-station?: Traditional/Honourable Unathi would have a more concrete IC justification to use melee weapons where practical, and the loadouts of Karszekani-aligned offships/NPCs may have to be tweaked to reflect this change in attitude. 

Does this addition do anything not achieved by what already exists?: Unathi already have something of a reputation for being melee monsters, and this is backed up mechanically. However, what I believe is missing is a cultural reason for them to be so keen on melee; they have been using ranged firearms in warfare since the year 1800CE, so why do they like swords so much even in this modern age? Additionally, this gives another Thing that makes Unathi culturally distinct from Humans. 

Do you understand that the project may change over time in ways you may not foresee once it is handed over to the Lore Team?: Yes

Long Description: I wrote a big manifesto on this earlier on Discord, and if you want to read the thing in its entirety you can find it here. However, I'll try to condense it down into the essence of what I intend in this post:

Essentially, based on already established lore, the Sinta'Unathi have been using ranged warfare since the 1800s CE, and they had fully equipped their collective militaries with ranged warfare by 1950 CE.  Industrialised warfare, basically. There has been a longstanding narrative thread about the pressures put on Warrior Honor by the "challenges" of modern warfare, but that has never really been specifically expounded on. The way that I see it, melee warfare would have fallen largely out of favor in Unathi warfare by the time the Contact War occurred, because it really isn't practical whatsoever to be using melee warfare as a primary tactic in a universe where each side is canonically equipped with machineguns and jet powered aircraft and ICBMs.

What I propose is that the massive cultural shock the Sinta'Unathi experienced as a result of the scale of death of the Contact War has essentially soured their attitudes on the use of ranged weapons in warfare, and in light of new technology that has now been made available to the Unathi over the last few decades - Energy swords, hardsuits, and energy shields capable of repelling ranged weapons entirely - a new Renaissance of  thought has emerged that maybe melee combat CAN be viable again, using these new technologies. This could be specifically a Warrior thing too, a desire to return to "The Good Old Days" where you could face your enemy in honest combat with a sword in your hand, and the victor be determined by the strength and skill of your own body, with only as much bloodshed as necessary. A less wasteful mode of war. 

Now, this isn't a proposal to make all Sinta'Unathi soldiers everywhere eschew ranged weapons in favor of melee, but more of an encouragement that they would use it where it's practical. Obviously in open land warfare it's still not practical to be using melee warfare, save for some niche cases where you might be able to do it (e.g. urban environments)

However, one new MASSIVE frontier of warfare for the Unathi is in space. We're talking narrow hallways, close encounters, ship boarding and wall breaching. A perfect environment for Sinta'Unathi to employ this new melee and shield oriented strategy. As a bit of a tail to this: we all read in the Mudki arc, where the Karszekani successfully used teleporter tactics to directly teleport a bunch of Kataphracts into Izaku's throneroom to gank him. This is fucking awesome and should totally be enshrined as A Thing The Unathi Like To Do^TM because teleporting eight hardsuit-clad melee monsters directly onto someone's bridge is an awesome visual spectacle, and could totally be displayed in a news article somewhere _{(A lot of non-Unathi ICly view Unathi as something of a joke militarily. I'd love to see the Unathi do stuff to prove their capability so that people stop dismissing them as low tech primitives)}

Edited June 16 by Crozarius
forgot to use the word rennaisance in the actual long description lol

[Captain Gecko]

Accepted RIGHT AWAY 🔥

Edited June 16 by Captain Gecko