You may have noticed that because they have kinetic shields which stop things which move fast, they don't use projectile guns. (The slow-darts that almost get SPOILER and do get SPOILER are very expensive and hard to use.) So everybody uses awesome swords and daggers and stuff!
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But wait. They have ray guns. And they are human-portable. Soooooo why don't they use those more? The movie doesn't explain this at all. I guess you could argue that the shields stop those too, but... that can't be right, because people inside a shield can SEE OUT.
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Photons move REAL fast, and shields don't stop them. So obviously ray guns should beat shields. A person who'd only seen the movie would be justified in assuming that the answer is just, "because swords and daggers are awesome shut up." However, the books do explain this.
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In the books, if you shoot a shield with a lasgun something Really Bad happens. Like, super bad. They refer to it as "subatomic fusion," which isn't really a thing, but essentially means that the interaction causes matter to be converted to energy.
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The conversion starts at the shield and follows the beam back to the lasgun. Both the person inside the shield and the operator of the lasgun will almost certainly be killed. But wait!
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The conversion is... unpredictable. The resulting explosion could just kill the shielded target and the operator of the lasgun... or it could be the size of an atomic bomb. No way to know, although it is implied that the bigger the shield the bigger the explosion will likely be.
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So everybody is really, REALLY careful not to shoot lasguns at anything that might be shielded. And Swords 'R Us is the second biggest company in the Empire. (After CHOAM, the company that distributes Spice.)
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At one point in the first book, this is actually used as a booby trap because Duncan Idaho puts a shield behind a door which he knows the bad guys will try to cut open with a lasgun because they don't think there will be any shields there. Adios bad guys.
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So, anyway, it would have taken five seconds for somebody to say, "No lasguns, if we hit a shield it'll kill us all!" or something, and I don't think they did. If I missed it I apologize.
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Replying to @WhippleMarc
In the Dune board game, when there’s a battle you can choose a card secretly to give your side a special advantage. There’s a card for shields, and it’s very powerful. There’s a card for lasguns, and it’s very powerful. If they both get used, everyone dies.
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Rock paper scissors subcritical plutonium subcritical plutonium
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three lefts do however make a right
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