This week, time for something a bit silly: we’re going to think about the plausibility of the warfare in Frank Herbert’s Dune! In particular, I want to approach the question in two parts (I, II) : first asking if the model of warfare among the Great Houses we’re introduced to in the first book of Dune (that is, in the first third of the book) makes sense given the fantastical technology and social structures Herbert has created to enable it. Then, next time, we’re going to return to ask, given that model of warfare, if the success of the Fremen jihad, occurring in the space between Dune and Dune Messiah actually seems plausible. Could a military society like Dune‘s Great Houses exist given their technology and if they did, could the Fremen have conquered them?
I should note here that while I am going to use a few images from the recent film adaptations, I want to focus here strictly on the combat model as presented in the books. Villeneuve’s film adaptation gets closest to replicating Herbert’s system of warfare – the other adaptations succumb to the temptation of simply introducing lots of guns of one kind of another – but there’s enough small changes or variations that I want to stick just to the books and the ‘pure’ expression of Herbert’s vision of futuristic warfare.
But first, as we’re going to cover below, equipping a fighting force with Dune’s version of modern military power – shields, ornithopters and frigates – is expensive. If you want to help me equip a Great House of trained fighters to challenge the Imperium, you can support this project over at Patreon. If you want updates whenever a new post appears or want to hear my more bite-sized musings on history, security affairs and current events, you can follow me on Bluesky (@bretdevereaux.bsky.social). I am also active on Threads (bretdevereaux) and maintain a de minimis presence on Twitter (@bretdevereaux).
Warfare Under Shields
Of course for those who know books (and at least the Villeneuve film), the fundamental technology shaping warfare among the Great Houses of Dune is shields. This is a production of the fictional ‘Holtzman effect’ which is the (again, fictional) physics principle in the Dune universe which enables the folding of space for faster-than-light travel (but not the safe navigation thereof), ‘suspensors’ that allow objects and people to be levitated and finally the operation of energy shields which would repel any object attempting to pass through above a certain minimal speed.
Now I’ll note that Herbert’s physics here is actually a bit dodgy. We’re told that the reason for the minimal speed is to allow air-flow into and out of the shield, but my understanding is that even in room temperature air that feels quite still to us, the individual gas molecules move very fast (something like c. 450m/s), so a velocity-lower-limit wouldn’t work effectively as a ‘filter’ to let in air but not, say, bullets. But I am prepared to just accept that the shields work the way they are described, permitting slow-moving objects (and also air, for some reason) but repelling faster moving objects.
Of course in a way, the reason shields work this way in Dune is that it produces the fighting system that Herbert wants: shields effectively nullify missile weapons and explosives of all types, leading to a return to contact weapons, particularly knives. That has all sorts of knock-on effects on the structure of armies in this universe which we’ll get to below, but let us stay focused here on individual combat. We’re repeatedly told that the fighting style that results from this near-total emphasis on shields is unusual and to a degree artificial, demanding combatants keep their offensive movements slow enough to penetrate a shield.
So we might first ask if this fighting system, at the individual level, makes sense given the fantastical constraints Herbert’s shields impose. And I guess my answer is…sort of? I think the idea of a return to contact weaponry in this context works in the main, but with two main exceptions, which is that the style of contact weapon fighting that dominates is not what I would anticipate and second that the way Herbert also excludes laser weaponry strikes me as perhaps not fully thought out.
When it comes to style it is important to separate the various film adaptations – particularly Villeneuve’s (which features a lot of armor) – from the books. In the books, the strong impression is that body armor is not a typical supplement for shields: we never hear about heavy armor and instead hear about shields being attached to fabric uniforms (such as when Duke Leto’s uniform is torn where the shield attachment was ripped off). Meanwhile, the contact weapons of choice seem almost invariably to be short blades, described as daggers or knives. The most common weapon of the Great Houses was the Kindjal and it is described as having a 20cm blade, which is quite short, very much a dagger rather than a sword (the smallest of swords generally still have blade-lengths upwards of 45cm).
That is great for producing lots of cool, dramatic knife fights, but honestly doesn’t make much sense to me given the constraints. The main factor in the decline of body armor was, quite famously, the fact that it became increasingly impossible to armor against firearms without massively thick armor that was impractically heavy. But shields remove this problem: the velocity (and thus energy delivery) of any strike is now strictly limited, meaning even relatively thin and light armor will be effective. Under those conditions, a combatant wearing armor could render most of their body’s surfaces functionally immune to contact weapons without a serious loss of agility, forcing an opponent to aim only for things like joints that cannot be armored easily with solid (if articulating) plates. Whatever agility is lost would be more than offset by being able to target all of an opponent’s body while only offering a tiny portion of your own in response.
People in Dune are often super-humanly intelligent, fast and agile, but they do not appear to be super-humanly strong to the point that they’d be able to, say, drive a knife through a millimeter of steel (or whatever exotic science fiction equivalent might be furnished). In short, I would expect armor to dominate formal combat in things like open battles or duels where fighters had time to put it on.
That in turn is going to mean that combat is going to consist of a lot of grappling, because to actually get a weapon through the relatively small gaps offered by that armor – or for that matter to slide a dagger at relatively low speed through a shield – it is going to often be necessary to get an opponent on the ground and to some degree pinned. Knives would be useful in that context, but speaking historically so would many polearms, designed for hooking and levering attacks that do indeed occur at speeds sufficiently slow to function through shields, in order to throw opponents to the ground. Alternately if for some reason body armor does remain rare, then the obvious optimal choice for combat is the spear, given the tremendous advantage that reach poses and the fact that a spear’s pin-point piercing attack has no problem penetrating a target even at low speeds.
The related problem is the relative lack of formation fighting. Now I want to be clear, there is some formation fighting in the books, particularly the note that the Sardaukar can be recognized in combat because they split into groups of three fighting in a triangle back-to-back when pressed. But we don’t see mass formation fighting in groups larger than three. But of course in the real world we’ve had a lot of experience with societies where close-combat fighting was core to military success and those societies almost without exception formed up their armies in large blocks of soldiers fighting together. Spacing and such might differ, but formation fighting was a near constant for armies that expected to do most of their fighting hand-to-hand. So while upper-elites might be trained mostly in a dueling culture, I would expect the common soldiers to be trained to fight as units. Those needn’t be massive units, but something less like the Sarduakar in their trios and more like a Roman maniple (120 men), with enough men to present a clear ‘front’ to an enemy that is hard to get around.
As an aside, this is one point where I think the Villeneuve adaptation really pushed the source material. We see the Atreides fight in armor, using long polearms and with a clear formation fighting technique, particularly the scene in the fall of Arrakeen where the Atreides soldiers are defending the stairs – and appear to be succeeding until the Sardaukar drop in behind their formation. All of which is to say, instead of being dominated by ‘swordsmen’ fighting unarmored with knives built for cutting attacks, I would expect this system of warfare to be dominated by armored fighters wielding primarily polearms, supported by thrusting daggers (something like a rondel dagger), whose primary method of fighting mostly consisted of formation fighting in groups and grappling when fighting alone.
The one oddity is how precisely coordinated these fighters’ motions seem to be, but that makes sense in the context of the fiction where training in the far future can achieve things impossible to do with training now.
The second problem I see is the laser weapons of the setting, ‘lasguns.’ I honestly find it strange that Herbert felt the need to even include militarized laser weapons, given that they seem to me to create pretty substantial problems that he only imperfectly resolves. The limitation imposed on lasguns is that if they strike a shield, the result is ‘sub-atomic fusion’ (the fiction’s term) which immediately produces a nuclear explosion, which occurs at a random point anywhere from inside the shield to at the lasgun or along the beam between the two. The idea is that this creates a powerful weapon which in the fiction can only be used against enemies without shields. In the context of the first book (the only one of the originals in which the military systems of the Great Houses are really functioning), that mostly comes up in the use of lasguns against the Fremen, since they do not use shields. The idea being that using a lasgun against an opponent with a shield is simply too dangerous.
And the problem here is that there are just obviously a lot of military targets which might be protected by shields where it would be worth risking the destruction of what is, I must stress, a man portable weapon-system in order to destroy through a shield. The most obvious would be the main palace of one of the Great Houses: it is very important that the Atreides residence in Arakeen is protected by a powerful shield generator, but why wouldn’t an enemy take the risk of sneaking a lasgun close to the shield and discharging it? Your soldiers needn’t even be present (nor must you use some sort of ‘thinking machine’): a simple egg-timer attached to the trigger of a concealed laser weapon would be enough to ensure your team had time to retreat out of the blast radius. Even if the explosion didn’t emerge within the shield, triggering an untraceable nuclear blast in the middle of an opponent’s capital or in the middle of their field army would be a really effective tactic and so one would expect ‘suicide’ lasgun attacks all the time. Especially in a society that engages in “wars of assassins.”
Now I cannot find if it is ever made clear if lasgun-shield explosions fall under the Great Convention’s ban on atomics (nuclear weapons) in the setting. I suppose if they do this is a partial fix: no Great House could openly use the above tactic without breaching the convention. But then of course the problem becomes the deniable or surreptitious use of these tactics, because in most cases the very act of a lasgun-shield attack is going to obliterate all evidence one might use to determine the perpetrator and given that all of the houses have both lasguns and shields, any such explosion could have been an accident.
It always seemed to me the storytelling solution here was curiously simple – just make the lasgun-shield interaction detonate just the lasgun and do so rather less intensely than a nuclear blast and you achieve the same results in terms of the story.
All that said, moving forward in this bit of silly analysis, we’re going to assume that the fighting system works as advertised: shields make basically all projectile weapons largely useless, reducing combat to contact warfare. Lasguns are powerful and reasonably readily available, but too risky to use in an environment where shields might be common.
What kind of warfare does that produce among the Great Houses and does it make sense?
Armies of the Great Houses
The in-universe term for the society of the Great Houses has never made it into any of the adaptations and so may be unfamiliar but it will be useful to us: it is the faufreluche system, with the plural, ‘the faufreluches’ used to mean the whole of imperial society.
What we see in the societies of the faufreluches is that they are intensely stratified and rigid, to the point of nearly being a hereditary caste system. This system is rules over in turn by the Great Houses who are responsible for enforcing it in their domains. They do that with their armies and the sense we get from the Great Houses that we see is that these are intensely militarized social institutions, wholly bent around the provision of violence in society. They are, in practice, military aristocracies.
They’re also small. Really small. House Atreides is the government for a planet (initially Caladan, then Arrakis), but it’s decision-making core is perhaps a few dozen people, as small or smaller than Alexander’s companions or the war council of a Roman general. Administrative capacity is also clearly severely limited: Duke Leto’s best response to having functionally no knowledge or control over the ‘Deep Desert’ that covers most of his planet is to send one guy (Duncan Idaho) on a mission to go check it out. We get no hint of the sort of vast administration we might expect from a modern administrative state governing even a mid-sized county, much less a planet.
The other bit of evidence we have is that their armies are also really small. We get a sense of what the largest sort of offensive operation the setting might generally see with the Harkonnen invasion of Arrakis. We get in snippets that the Harkonnen committed “ten legions” (which required something on the order of 2,000 ships), along with two legions of Imperial Sardaukar. The latter we may assume is a relatively small portion of the emperor’s total forces, but I think we should assume that the Harkonnen force represents essentially their entire offensive military potential. Thufir Hawat is utterly shocked by the scale of the assault and Vladimir Harkonnen notes that the cost of it meant burning through House Harkonnen’s considerable reserves of cash.
Now nowhere in the core text is the size of a standard legion ever stated, that I could find, but the broad fandom generally accepted – I believe from the Dune Encyclopedia – that a Dune legion consists of 30,000 men, divided into ten brigades. It would have to be a fairly standard unit size across the houses in order for it to be useful for both Hawat and the Baron as a tool to think with, so I think we can assume this is a more-or-less standard unit size for major operations.
That would make the sum total of offensive Harkonnen power around 300,000 troops. Presumably some further forces were held back on Geidi Prime or couldn’t be transported, but this force had to represent the lion’s share of Harkonnen forces simply because it expected to outnumber the Atreides defenders, which was all of the Atreides troops and House Atreides is a peer competitor to House Harkonnen and both of them are in the top rung of Great Houses in terms of military power directly behind the emperor himself (to the point that the emperor is threatened by the rising power of House Atreides and later by that of House Harkonnen).
I want to stop here and answer a key objection I know is coming which is that it is only the artificially high costs the Spacing Guild charges for transport that keeps armies small. The problem with this is of course when the Harkonnen attack Arrakis, while Harkonnen offensive power is limited by guild transport costs, Atreides defensive power is not: The Atreides gave up Caladan to come to Arrakis, so they are all there, the entire military force of a first-rate Great House. And yet the Harkonnen still expect to outnumber them. That suggests not that these Great Houses have huge mass armies they can’t transport, but rather that the Harkonnen, with a heavily industrialized homeworld, can build marginally more shields than most opponents and so have an unusually large army (which they can only move, because it is so large, by burning off a generation or more’s worth of wealth gained through the exploitation of the most valuable planet in the universe). So it is not just the Spacing Guild that keeps armies small – evidently these societies cannot reliably raise much larger armies even for domestic defense.
(That said, I do think a factor in the durability of the Great Houses is likely that few houses can do as the Harkonnen did – transport a large fraction of their overall military power for an offensive operation – because of Guild costs, leading to a strong ‘defender’s advantage’ in warfare in the setting. Of course the Atreides do relocate under this same regime with – we are told directly – the entire House, but we might assume that for such an ’emergency’ measure (which is actually a trap with the Guild complicit) those heavy costs were reduced or perhaps supported by the emperor.)
So I think we may say this is a military system in which 300,000 men is a lot for a ‘first tier’ Great House (excluding the House Corrino) to have as its military. Most Great Houses would have had smaller armies, presumably.
Which might sound big but these are the militaries of entire planets which are actively on a war footing. The Red Army in the Second World War reached a frontline strength of over ten million and it represented only one (very large and powerful) country. If Great House armies were similar in structure even to modern peacetime standing forces, we might expect their total strength to be in the tens of millions, just to match the level of militarization we have here on Earth during a period of relatively low warfare. These armies are very clearly not that large. The fact that an Atreides force trained by Duncan Idaho – a single person – is understood to be a potential threat suggests how small they are and how impactful relatively small bodies of troops are understood to be.
I actually think these elements fit together fairly well in suggesting a certain sort of society. It certainly isn’t that this is a depopulated universe – Arrakis is treated as an underpopulated, resource-poor wasteland and yet Arakeen is clearly a major city (and there’s another even larger center, Carthag, we hear about but do not see). Geidi Prime is described as a heavily industrialized world as well, implying a substantial population. This is a populated universe, but one with very weak states, which control relatively little of the real day-to-day activity.
We actually get one of the strongest suggestions of this with the scale of the Guild Heighliner that takes the Atreides to Arrakis: the whole of House Atreides fits within a relatively small portion of its interior. But presumably these ships were not built comically large because it was funny, rather much of the rest of that space is going to be taken up by regular commercial traffic – the movement of goods and private persons – which would then dwarf the size of the movement of the entire Atreides military. Which again, implies that there are a lot of people and production happening below the level of the Great Houses.
And that in turn fits with what we are told about the nature of the faufreluches as a social system: it is rigid, hierarchical, and stratified, with limited mobility under the motto “a place for every man and every man in his place.” Under that sort of system, we might expect the lower classes to be systematically de-militarized and indeed it seems like they mostly are. Local magnates might have access to small amounts of armed force, but mostly it is only the Great Houses that wield large amounts of armed force, with which they rule over their planets.
So what we have are relatively large societies ruled over by quite small Great Houses which as a result cannot reach or effect most of what people are doing, akin to the very weak states one often sees in the pre-modern period: the state can enforce tax collection, but it doesn’t really provide services (except violence) or have much of a role in regulating the day-to-day interactions. Given the strong sense of hierarchy in how the fraufreluches are described, I think we should probably understand that the common person is instead ‘ruled’ on a day-to-day basis by smaller local Big Men (probably substantial local property owners; in-universe the term for this class are the richece) who wield force notionally in the name of the Great House but in practice do so with minimal interference from ‘the state’ such as it is.
That structure enables the personalist, patrimonial sort of rule the Great Houses seem to exert, but also inhibits severely their ability to actually mobilize the resources of their society. House Atreides very evidently lacks even just the basic administration to, say, put all of Arrakis on a ‘war economy’ footing. If 300,000 men was the best the Harkonnen could do from an entirely industrial planet, they too lack this sort of administration (this even after building a war chest harvesting spice on Arrakis for years!). Instead, with weak administrations, the Great Houses survive by siphoning off only a relatively small portion of overall economic activity in order to perform their primary purposes: continuing to extract that small portion and using what of it they can to wage their petty wars.
Does It Work?
I actually think this more or less works given what we’re told about warfare. The key factors that seem to support a society being structured this way are the sharp limits to how many fighters a society can produce and the specific kinds of industrial military power available.
To simplify, there are basically four components of military power for the Great Houses as a result of their technology: trained fighters, shields, aircraft (ornithopters) and frigates (the term for the standard space-going warship/transport of the setting, capable of surface-to-orbit flight, but requiring a Guild Heighliner for interplanetary travel). We’re going to set aside the latter two for now except to note that they exist and matter quite a lot.
What the system needs to work is that shields are expensive and fighters are hard to train, but without both, a military in this technological setting is extremely hard to make and keep functional.
First, shields are an expensive piece of equipment. This is repeatedly stressed: the Fremen do not use shields because they enrage the sandworms, but also they cannot afford them. Duke Leto assumes it will take a long time, even with the massive income of Arrakis, to accumulate the wealth necessary to equip the Fremen with shields (which he assumes is necessary to use them militarily). So the cost of shields is going to shrink armies.
And it is going to shrink armies a lot. Again, the implication of the setting is that the armies of entire planets consist of perhaps a few hundred thousand shielded fighters, which certainly implies that shields are massively expensive. The normal counter-argument here is that it is in fact the cost of guild transport that keeps these armies small, but we’ve dealt with that already. I have a hard time imagining exactly what sort of man-portable device could be so expensive than an entire planet could field only tens of thousands of them, but we might imagine the effect to be something like a supercharged version of the way national air forces have changed as the cost of aircraft (and their capabilities) have risen. Despite being enormously more productive today than it was in the 1940s, the United States maintains only a few thousand modern fighters (the world’s largest fighter fleet) compared to the several hundred thousand far cheaper fighters the United States built during WWII.
Evidently in the Dune universe, even a man-portable body-shield seems to be an economic expense on the scale of something like a modern fifth generation fighter, so whole planets can afford only small numbers of them.
The other aspect, of course, is the supply of trained fighters. Of course one of the fantastical elements of Dune’s universe is that human training and learning is capable of producing far greater results than in the real world, a result of the refinement of human learning and training after the abandonment of ‘thinking machines’ in the Butlerian Jihad. As a result, the gap between a trained fighter and an untrained one in close combat (a distinction that will matter a lot for next week) is very large. The Baron Harkonnen observes that the two Sardaukar legions that accompanied his army to Arrakis might well be able to overwhelm them, despite being outnumbered five-to-one. Now what we see of the Harkonnen does not suggest their warriors are well trained – the Harkonnen military is a quantity-over-quality military, attempting to leverage its industrial capabilities to the degree it can to make up for what seem like poorly motivated and trained soldiers – but the fact that such performance gaps are possible is notable.
But it is also clear that training good fightiers in this society means demanding decades of focused effort. So not only do these societies need to support the production of what seem to be extremely expensive weapon-systems (shields), the fighters who use those shields are also really expensive, demanding an enormous amount of training in order to be fully effective.
Which then results in a military environment in which a small number of shielded warriors could dominate a very large ‘weekend warrior’ militia force. Shades of heavily armored knights on horseback: expensive weapon-system, difficult and rare training, leading power to concentrate in the relative handful of individuals (in Frank Herbert’s universe, seemingly always men) who possess both. I can see such a system, more or less, emerging under the conditions set out.
The problem I see, such as it is is that this system does not strike me as stable and the one thing we are told quite clearly in the text is that it is extremely stable. The basic structure of the Imperium under Corrino rule, we’re told, persists for ten thousand years and Leto II’s entire baroque plan (the ‘golden path’) has to be calibrated to in part to break the tremendous inertia of society under the faufreluches.1
The problem with this system being stable is pretty simple: these small noble houses are perched atop very large, complex societies, which are capable of supporting a modern administrative state. As noted, we don’t seem to have such a state apparatus: House Atreides arrives to Arrakis almost entirely as an army, to the point where they have to hire local housekeepers. Likewise it is notable in the banquet scene, the major local notables are “a stillsuit manufacturer […] an electronics equipment importer, a water-shipper […], a representative of the Guild bank […], a dealer in replacement parts for spice mining equipment” and so on (Dune, 128). What we don’t see are the heads of major bureaucracies – the Minister for Spice Refining or the Secretary for the Transportation and Orbit Administration, that sort of thing – because there don’t appear to be any.
Instead, the Great Houses are basically ‘all army’ and forced to contract out or delegate other functions to the local notables, the ‘richece.’ Which again, above, explains why these Great Houses can only siphon off a relatively small portion of the productive capacity of their worlds: there’s a wealthy upper-class that is essential to their administration which can resist extraction.
The problem for stability is that these societies have the technology (rapid communications) and the ability (large surplus population, capacity for mass education) to create a modern administrative state and the first Great House to do so would massively improve its economic and military position. Moreover, the richece themselves almost certainly are running large, administration-heavy bureaucratic organizations – those stillsuit factories and electronics importation operations do not run themselves – and so are actively building the class of educated bureaucrats that the nobility could harness (or the wealth to displace the nobility and rule themselves). So I would expect this system to be unstable, either tipping over into the emergence of modern, high-capacity administrative states or – if the importance of that training remained high enough – with repeated conflict between the richece (with their wealth and administrative capacity) and their Great House overlords (with their armies of trained fighting men) leading the rule of the Great Houses over their own planetary fiefs to feel profoundly precarious.
Either way, the setting ought to proceed quite rapidly from the somewhat ‘medieval Europe’ feel of its governing structures into an ‘early modern Europe’ feel of instability, political foment and fragmentation, potentially leading to the emergence of far more capable states (some under their old hereditary monarchies, some under the richece as republics). But in-universe that doesn’t happen: the social system is instead presented as extremely stable, only able to be disrupted by a major impact from outside of it: the Fremen.
And that’s where we’ll head next week: how do the Fremen fit into this? Could they disrupt the system? Would they win?
> a simple egg-timer attached to the trigger of a concealed laser weapon would be enough to ensure your team had time to retreat out of the blast radius. …
>
> Now I cannot find if it is ever made clear if lasgun-shield explosions fall under the Great Convention’s ban on atomics (nuclear weapons) in the setting. I suppose if they do this is a partial fix: no Great House could openly use the above tactic without breaching the convention.
As I recall, this possibility is explicitly broached in the first book: someone suggests that the Harkonnens might leave a timed lasgun pointed at Atreides house shields, and Duke Leto’s rejoinder is “but who could tell afterward that the explosion was not caused by atomics?” It seems the implication is that the Great Houses, at least, greatly fear even being accused of violating the Convention, such that this kind of attack is categorically avoided.
I agree this is fairly flimsy reasoning.
I couldn’t remember the exact situation, but I remembered the same conclusion: No, a lasgun detonation “isn’t a nuke” for purposes of the convention, but the “you can’t prove it” aspect makes it thorny to deal with under any practical circumstances. (Incidentally, my memory is that the lasgun and the shield *both* detonated whenever they intersected, but it really doesn’t solve the egg-timer problem that is raised here.)
I must admit that I never really considered that explanation to be convincing, though, for two reasons.
Firstly, a “you’re in trouble if you can’t prove it wasn’t you” situation makes it ridiculously easy to frame others. The Harkonnen couldn’t use a lasgun with an egg timer against the Atreides, but the emperor probably could, and get rid of both the Atreides and the Harkonnen in a single strike.
Secondly, we see in the book that great houses do not use nuclear retaliation in response to debatable violations of the ban on atomics. Paul uses nukes in his attack on the Harkonnen, with the flimsy justification that he’s using them against terrain, not directly against the Harkonnen. He predicts (and seems to be correct in this prediction) that the great houses will do nothing.
That lack of response is obviously at least in part due to the fact that Paul is winning at the time, and no one wants to be his enemy. But the same would almost certainly have been true if the Harkonnen used a lasgun on the Atreides palace and then declared it wasn’t them.
Promises to use nuclear retaliation against anything other than a direct attack on yourself are very fragile (as Dr. Devereaux has pointed out previously). Doing it may well see you completely destroyed, so you have a strong incentive to accept any reason why you would not have to.
I don’t think the situations are quite the same. By using atomics to destroy terrain features that were quite a distance removed from any Harkonnen forces, he enabled a purely ‘conventional’ attack on those forces. It’s not surprising that people react to this differently than they react to a nuclear decapitation strike directly against a Great House’s palace.
Using atomics to blow up an inconvenient ridgeline where nobody lives is not fundamentally an existential threat to the other Great Houses, since most of them don’t live or die based on the presence of random ridges of rock many miles from their centers of power.
Smuggling an atomic bomb up against the very walls of a Great House’s palace and blowing the place sky-high does present an existential threat to essentially any Great House.
Now, that doesn’t mean that a Great House which uses atomics directly against the centers of another Great House will face immediate nuclear retaliation from third parties (as distinct from any surviving diehards with access to the House atomics of the House that was just targeted). But it does make it much more likely that the equivalent of “sanctions” will be put into place.
Sustaining a Great House requires a lot of social legitimacy. They are dependent on a very broad base of local magnates supporting them, magnates who would probably be little or no worse off if the Great House disappeared. And without very expensive and intricate personal shields to equip their troops, a Great House’s armies are essentially just random men standing around with butcher knives waiting to die as soon as someone starts shooting at them from ornithopters.
So to me, it’s very plausible that any known or strongly suspected instance of a nuclear attack on a Great House turns out in the long run to result in the Great House in question being ostracized and withering away, regardless of how much they seem in the moment to gain by the destruction of their enemy.
And yes, it’s implausible that a social order, even one that is stable within the timespan of a few human lifetimes, could be stable for ten thousand years, based on what we know of history. That’s a separate issue.
plus it’s worth remembering the location is arrakis.. the most valuable planet in the universe to the humanity. Paul strongly suspects the other houses will bend the rules because he knows that they don’t want to hurt the planet, just pacify the unruly populace that is making the place unprofitable and threatening the supply of the spice. because the alternative is rendering the planet a nuclear cinder and destroying spice production entirely.
if the final confrontation was occurring on say, caladan, i doubt the houses would be quite as quick to overlook the use of atomics, even if only on a terrain feature.
this is the case. there is a scene in the book where, while paul and hism other are escapingthe palace, Duncan idaho hid a personal shield in some rocks, and sardukar in an ornipthopter who were using lasguns to fire into the rocks to flush people out of them hit the shield and it goes off (not long after Idaho remarks he left some surprised for the sardukar). Jessica freaks out that Duncan used an atomic in violation of the convention. and Duncan then explains about the shield, which calms her down. so yeah, shield/lasgun interactions aren’t technically covered by the convention, but apparently it’s almost impossible to tell them apart from actual atomics.
another factor that keeps the use of ‘timed lasgun’ attacks minimized is the fact that the yield isn’t fixed.. we’re told that when the two interact both ends explode, but the yield can range from “just enough to kill the person” to “able to destroy whole cities.” so for something like shooting at the palace shields on arrakis, the end results would be either what looks like an atomic strike.. or the assassination team dies and the palace is barely scratched. bad results either way.
there is also cultural reasons involved too.. ‘Kanly’ is considered an artform in the empire, especially by the great houses. with very intricate forms to the point that they have specialist words for all sorts of different ways to kill people with poisons and assassins. and recruiting spies and assassins and contriving plots to kill someone secretly seems to be practically a sport. to the point that the Baron’s plotting for a ‘fake suk doctor’ to betray his house and allow the assault is considered a masterwork. in such a culture, something like a massive explosion would be seen as crass and beneath notice. they don’t just want to kill their rivals, they want to do it in such a way that they can then brag to all the other houses about how they did it. (and thus get those houses worried that similar plots might be occuring against them.) i’d imagine that houses that resorted to brute force methods, especially high collateral damage brute force methods like explosions, were weeded out of the society very early on as being far too dangerous.
We know Atreides (and many of the Great Houses, presumably) have a sizeable number of diehard and fanatical supporters, perhaps indoctrinated or perhaps just very hardcore about their loyalty. It is plausible that the main reason not to launch an apparently nuclear decapitation attack against House Atreides (as an example) is the fear that the surviving supporters, with access to the “House atomics,” will engage in campaigns of nuclear terrorism against whoever they believe to be responsible for the attack.
While this does make it relatively straightforward for a hostile third party to destroy two warring Great Houses with a single timed-lasgun stroke (e.g. the Emperor decapitating House Atreides with an attack and then relying on Atreides partisans’ retaliation to cripple or destroy House Harkonnen), the part where this results in a bunch of unpredictable nuclear-armed guerilla fighters running around the empire might well give pause to many factions in the setting, including House Corrino itself.
Jessica and Paul, at least, also slept deep underground as a countermeasure against just that.
I actually had the impression (although it’s been some time since I read the books) that the system was in some part unstable. That part and parcel of being a Great House was putting down periodic revolts on your worlds; certainly the fighting experience that Duncan Idaho and Gurney Halleck both obtained themselves and are using to train the Atriedes cadre of ‘around as good as Sardaukar’ guys came from *somewhere*; and I at least had imagined it fighting down the Caladanian natives.
I would also add in that there’s that one scene where Leto is going over his self-disgust at the compromises necessary to function as a duke. Let me copy it out:
“My propaganda corps is one of the finest,” the Duke said. Again, he turned
to stare out at the basin. “There’s greater possibility for us here on Arrakis
than the Imperium could ever suspect. Yet sometimes I think it’d have been
better if we’d run for it, gone renegade. Sometimes I wish we could sink back
into anonymity among the people, become less exposed to . . . ”
“Father!”
“Yes, I am tired,” the Duke said. “Did you know we’re using spice residue as
raw material and already have our own factory to manufacture filmbase?”
“Sir?”
“We mustn’t run short of filmbase,” the Duke said. “Else, how could we flood
village and city with our information? The people must learn how well I govern
them. How would they know if we didn’t tell them?”
That sort of interaction with the populace doesn’t entirely fit the notion that they’re just a small, almost self-contained microcosm only weakly interacting with the larger society. But I suspect that none of the answers really lead to a society that quite fits. Oh well.
The most obvious problem here is it doesn’t seem like the propaganda corps ever appears on-screen? Like we never meet the Duke’s Minister of Propaganda.
There’s literally a line in the books where it says that the Atreides’ propaganda corp is one of the best in the imperium.
And yet it contains no one notable enough to even have a name, IIRC.
When an entire galactic empire is reduced to a hundred or so names, you’re not going to touch every job. That propaganda even gets a mention marks it out as receiving special attention. For better or worse, Frank Herbert wasn’t so interested in world building for its own sake, only to the extent that it was necessary to support the story and themes he was writing about.
As I recall, Frank Herbert was fairly economical about having only the number of named characters he considered relevant to the plot, and the plot isn’t really centered on the planetary administrative apparatus that makes it possible for the Atreides to rule on Caladan, Arrakis, or anywhere else. I think we just have to accept that there are important institutions whose members we do not see “on camera” but that are nonetheless existent, good at their jobs, and significant to the overall worldbuilding.
I would not want to read a novel that includes an exhaustive list of every profession required to keep society running, with a named character from each of them. Even if the novel depicts a society simpler than ours (e.g., Game of Thrones), we shouldn’t expect a character from every profession.
I also always interpreted the books as describing a crab bucket situation: any house that actually implemented the modern administration and increased its military capacity would become a target for all the other houses (and the emperor) in the early stages, and after a few such experiences no one tries.
Add to this the pervasive influence of the Bene Gesserit who have obviously created a religion that supports this entire system, and you get the macro-stability that’s observed.
The problem with all of the balance-of-power theories is that the Imperium has lasted 10,000 years. That’s insanely long for power not to become unbalanced. Certainly an actor outside of that balance of power would benefit from those inside it remaining balanced. But that means that the real action — and actor — is hidden.
I think it is the guild, but there are other possibilities.
It’s the Bene Gesserit. A collapse of the balance of power would threaten their breeding program.
They have the motive, but not the means. The guild has both. But the sisters could have been contributing to the guild’s system of stability (without common planning or coordination). Ironic that the sisters’ success ended the guild’s stability.
The Bene Gesserit have considerable means to enforce a balance of power, because they are (loosely speaking) a secret order of quasi-psychic ninja women with enormous amounts of influence over a large fraction of the setting’s ruling aristocrats at any one time. While their power to enforce stability might not be sufficient to impose stability for millennia by itself, they are certainly a strong enough force to make maintaining stability easier.
One may imagine that the Bene Gesserit and the Navigators’ Guild are working together towards similar goals, and that each might fail to achieve these goals alone, but that together they are strong enough.
House Corrino itself also has similar incentives, as they benefit significantly from the situation and would likely suffer if it changed.
I don’t think the Bene Gesserit had enough to assure 10 millennia of stability. They clearly have advantages in knowledge and connections, but they don’t have any raw-power assets like the guild or the emperor.
House Corrino has considerable incentives to disrupt the balance of power in their favor, though they also have considerable incentives to not get caught trying. In theory they could pick the Great Houses off one-by-one like how they destroyed Atreides, but this is a well-known fact so the Great Houses will unite to punish them and the Guild will give them transport discounts if House Corrino moves openly and without an adequate reason. They had to loop Harkonnen in on the Atreides plan to make it look like it wasn’t the Emperor’s fault, despite comfortably having the financial and military resources to do it solo.
They don’t personally possess hard power assets*, but they have a great deal of influence with the people that do, to an extent that the people with hard assets don’t fully realize. They can’t beat down a Great House that’s starting on the process of rising to a point where it can destabilize the system, but they can realize it’s doing this very early and nudge the other Great Houses to do something. This wouldn’t be enough if the system were too militarily unbalanced, but it’s currently in a position where none of the participants can comfortably crush the others and the Bene Gesserit can exert influence to keep it that way. And the Reverend Mothers think on much longer timescales than the other participants in the system.
Yeah. Again, the Bene Gesserit do not have to be “enough,” they just have to be major contributors to stability, alongside other factions with similar incentives. And since the Bene Gesserit excel at predicting what is going to happen and applying social leverage at critical points, they can often ‘swing’ power blocs that might otherwise be indecisive about intervening in the direction the Bene Gesserit desire.
A lot of the rules of how we expect social and political developments to play out begin to bend, soften, and reshape themselves in fictional worlds where institutions like the Bene Gesserit and their abilities exist.
I am going to make the bold prediction that next week our host will argue the Fremen could *not* pull it off.
The boldest part of that prediction is “next week”.
My money’s on “in a series of sub-instalments over 3-4 weeks”
The boldest part of that is to call it a “prediction”. The relevant series (parts I, II, IIIa, IIIb, interlude, IV — may the Professor’s habit be as stable as the Imperium is written to be).
Agreed! although I’ve always been curious about what the “Jihad” supposedly looked like, especially the early days. (I’m sure Brian Herbert covered it but we never really saw what it looked like in Messiah, just the post-war consolidation by the Atreides Dynasty.)
Honestly, with the assumptions taken here it actually strikes me as more plausible than I would have initially thought, assuming they can be supplied with shields and fight effectively within them, and we grant the explicitly stated fact that Fremen are the most elite soldiers in the galaxy.
Paul has the Spacing Guild by the balls with his threat to obliterate spice and thus kill all the Navigators, which they take as plausible, so he can demand they suspend the transport of troops that are not his, so he only has to deal with one planet at a time. Whatever impact transport costs have is nullified because Paul can pay in not killing all the Navigators. There are millions of Fremen, and all of them are trained in combat, so assuming they have enough shields they can comfortably outnumber the inferior troops of the Great Houses, which is a recipe for pretty quick victory. For shields, Paul presumably seized all the shields of the forces that surrendered on Arrakis, which gives him a generous starting supply.
I think even so it’s likely you’d wind up with a Yuan Dynasty situation, where the Fremen knock over the Great Houses but have limited impact on the lower-level administrative structures of the richece just because they have no bureaucratic experience and relatively limited numbers.
The thing, though, is that according to Paul’s later accounting, billions of people died in the jihad, which shouldn’t be necessary given everything laid out in the post.
Agricultural disruption? Or disruption of the transport of agricultural goods?
If the various planets of the Faufreluches are specialised to the extreme, and thus the majority of them are reliant on the transport of vast amounts of food from specific agricultural worlds, then disruption to that system (intentional or unintentional) may well kill billions through starvation.
You’re quite right, although I can think of ways for mass deaths to still occur.
First, the disruption of interstellar commerce (primarily blockades on worlds that are not self-sufficient in food, as an attempt to coerce holdout Great Houses) could result in mass death.
Second, driven to desperation, some of the Great Houses might have started to innovate in ways that might make the Fremen infantry combat advantage irrelevant, or at least threaten that advantage by imposing more attrition than Paul’s very finite supply of Fremen could survive as an effective force. Raising mass planetary levy armies, for instance, even if many of those soldiers did not have shields. Or investing in poison gas weapons, or the ever-popular “shielded bulldozer” idea, or something else I haven’t thought of. And then that could really result in mass death, as Paul and his Fremen are ‘forced to’ make examples of the opposition that tried to get clever.
You don’t even need to fight most places. ‘I am Emperor now. Hand over your shields for use by my forces for the duration of the emergency. Would you like to participate in interstellar commerce ever, ever, ever again? Or should the Guild interdict you permanently? Ah, thanks for coming on board.’
Move on to next planet.
IMO, winning on Dune is plausible, winning in the whole Imperium is kind of silly. Even occupying a single planet against a hostile population would be an attritional and logistical nightmare, doing that everywhere in a single generation would require an occupation force one or two orders of magnitude lower than the entire human population. Which is why it almost entirely takes place “off page”, between the end of Dune and the start of Messiah; the interesting thing is how Fremen society reacts to winning the Jihad, not how it happened.
The society of faufreluches being described here makes it somewhat less silly. Because if you can destroy a Great House and claim rule over the planet, you are not really in the position of “occupying a planet against a hostile population.” The bulk of the population doesn’t much care and has little invested in the old regime, as long as their taxes do not increase and you are in a position to guarantee their security against foreign military attack.
Bret sinking his teeth into a fictional universe is always my favourite type of post! I had never really noticed on my reading of the books the value of the shields themselves. It makes one think, by wiping out the Atreides, did the Harkonnens come into possession of hundreds of thousands of extremely valuable shields? I recall they used explosive artillery to seal and bury a lot of Atreides but if the shields are worth so much, it would likely be worth digging out the bodies. When you destroy your rival’s 5th generation fighter you do not get any loot, but most knife kills in the book would leave the shield unharmed.
>> It certainly isn’t that this is a depopulated universe – Arrakis is treated as an underpopulated, resource-poor wasteland and yet Arakeen is clearly a major city (and there’s another even larger center, Carthag, we hear about but do not see).
That an entire planet seems to have only a two noteworthy cities rather suggests to me that it’s rather depopulated? There are only a few million Fremen, spread out over more than half of an entire planet, and everyone find this a shockingly high number. Obvious less hostile planets might be more densely populated but, apart from a few worlds (such as Ix), the general impression seems to be of very low population density in mostly rural conditions. IIRC, the books are vague about colonial expansion during the Corrino years, but it’s possible that there’s just so much land always available that it looks more like the American wilderness in the 18th/19th centuries than late medieval Europe. Would this lead to a different type of bureaucracy emerging? Is it even compatible with a tiny hereditary military elite?
If I swapped my Watsonian hat for a Doylist one, I would say that the self consistency of the world is only of secondary importance. As a work of literature, the context is what it is so that the reader focuses on a small (well, not that small, it’s a complicated story) number of elite charismatic leaders, while the themes of the book are telling us that we shouldn’t fall for elite charismatic leaders. This dissonance is what makes the books so captivating: we’re rooting and admiring characters while slowly realising that we shouldn’t. Messiah is exceptionally blunt about this, for all of those who didn’t get it in the first book. Of course, the whole purpose of blogs like this is teach history via a Watsonian look at fiction, so this is really just an aside that there’s more to stories than their realism.
I second this. The various contradictory details of the setting make most sense (though still not complete sense, as you point out) make most sense if you presume that the overall population is low despite covering hundreds of planets, probably only a couple times larger than modern Earth at max.
Every planet has one decently big directly controlled by the ruling house, a large hinterland of rural lands and smaller cities kept on a long leash, and large swaths of more-or-less undeveloped wilderness.
The closest analogs to Dune society is ironically the modern developed world- industrialized, but with increasing social inequality and limited class-mobility; nominally democratic but with increasing authoritarianism and nepotism- which could easaly devolve into something Faufreluche-esque in another generation or two. While overpopulation was a mass panic source around the time Dune was published, these societies actually tend to have birthrates at or below replacement. Spice counters aging, but it’s also stated that stated that even commoners live moderately longer than modern humans from millennia of genetic engineering, which would partially counteract this- women having more childbearing years, and the availability of already-adult siblings, reducing the proportional economic and opportunity cost of having and raising children- but only partially.
There is some evidence for this in the text, across the series, though no explicit attention is drawn to it. Paul is (initially) an only child, as are most other named characters through most future books, maybe excluding some of the eugenics projects. Fremen are (if I recal correctly) explicitly stated to have more children to counter the high fatality rate of their environment, but even they don’t seem that much higher.
Drawing a line from now to then, I would model that each newly settled planet would have a demographic cycle- two to three generations (longer than modern generations, bear in mind) of high immigration from new settlers and a relatively high birthrate (tfr in the 2.5.-3.5 range) followed by a gradual tapering off of new settlers, and a few generations later a decline in birth rates to the 2.1-1.9 range- approximate even, but in practice a slow decline across generations.
Because new planets must eventually spawn their own noble houses (one house, one planet, remember), the Great Houses have a strong disincentive to finance such expensive projects, and the disincentive would get stronger over time as populations- and thus the pool of surplus commoners who can be gambled on a new colony- dwindles. Thus producing the pre- Leto II dynamic, a settled pocket of humanity with a wider universe that they have the technology to explore and colonize but just can’t be bothered to. Leto’s restricting of interstellar travel, after the initial chaos, would actually probably create a baby boom on most planets, as the new isolation forced them to develop fallow resources closer to home in order to be more self-sufficient, breaking the demographic trap.
Obvioulsy, none of this is explicitly stated, but interpreting is fun.
Thematically, this also works well with the stable-to-the-point-of-stagnation Dune society, which was Herbert’s whole point.
> There are only a few million Fremen, spread out over more than half of an entire planet, and everyone find this a shockingly high number.
Yeah, but that was not considered shockingly high, becasue millions was such a big figure. It was shockingly high, because the general assumption was, that carrying capacity of the land south of the Shield Wall mountains was a rounding error from zero.
“A rounding error away from zero” times the area of a planet is still a great many people. If the entire surface of the world (including oceans – because all of Arrakis is land) had the same population density as the Sahara has today (less than 1 per square mile), there would still be ~500 million. Which means that despite all their technological innovations and social adaptations, the Fremen have a population density less than 1/100th of one of the harshest deserts on Earth. And the “civilized” population in the north of the planet is hinted as being smaller (though denser) than this. Assuming Dune is about the same size as the Earth, I don’t know if that’s covered anywhere but it having similar enough gravity that that isn’t mention suggests so.
> times the area of a planet is still a great many people.
Not a rounding error per square mile. A rounding error. It is more then 20 years since I read the books, but iirc in the official imperial material Paul is taught about Arrakis the whole southern hemissphere is considered to be uninhabitable. There is no water except what you bring with you, and trace amounts in the athmosphere, the storms are strong enough to strip flesh from bone.
The equator is considered to be completly impassible.
Yeah. Arrakis is worse than the Sahara; there’s a reason that the only population which can survive out in the deep desert has to develop all these weird customs surrounding water retention that real life Sahara natives do not have.
I’ve read a history of early China that took the view that the Zhou dynasty’s rule was fundamentally based around the king’s ability to bestow grants of more or less unsettled land. Eventually the virgin land was gone and, by coincidence, the king turned into a figurehead.
Ok, the Villeneuve films are good, but do they have a cat-milking scene? No. And what is Dune without a cat-milking scene?
Why milk a cat when there’s that weird Harkonnen human-spider thing just hanging around?
Regarding deliberate use of the lasgun/shield interactions being against the Great Convention, I’m confident they’re not.
When Duncan rescues Paul and Jessica in the desert, their conversation is interrupted by an explosion. Jessica assumes it was the family atomics (a cache of old nuclear weapons held by the great houses just in case). Paul twigs on that with the Harkonnens using lasguns freely, Duncan left a shield behind as a booby trap.
If I recall, it can be a risky move because it can be hard to distinguish from actual atomic use, and violating the Convention means every House unites to eradicate you. For the Atreides in that moment, they’re pretty well eradicated anyway so the downside is low. But to use it as a regular tactic under more normal circumstances would be inviting disaster.
fun concept, I really want to see you muck about with Star Wars and Star Trek next, although they are intimidating decades spanning Franchises with alot of very, very different writers, settings and mediums. Some who had better handles on the how and why then others.
How the fighting works via Movies VS Tv Shows VS books VS Comics VS Video Games would be insane.
still, having you poke fun at say, the OG trilogy V the prequils would be fun.
but hell, any fantasy series or scifi, you having fun poking it would be very entertaining.
anyway, wish you well.
Since we are talking about “how big is an SF legion” here, I’m going to pipe up with something that always annoyed me about “Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back” is that the Endor ground station is defended by “an entire legion” but the shield generator commander thinks that sending “two squads” is a meaningful amount of help.
To be fair, they were told “the rebels have been routed and are fleeing into the woods.” So they may have thought only two squads were neccessary to pursue a defeated enemy.
If the legion outside needs *two squads* to help pursue the enemy, it’s not a very big legion.
We definitely see signs of the stormtroopers having armed and fortified installations (like that landing pad and whatever facility the hoverbike patrols fly from) which are not in the immediate vicinity of the shield generator. Not within walking distance, anyway. It is likely that the stormtroopers are dispersed and holding a sizeable perimeter, rather than having literally the entire force camped out on top of the shield generator bunker.
At which point, yeah, the officer on duty underreacts to a rebel attack on the bunker, because one big message of Episode VI (where this happens) is that the Emperor’s power to foresee events is less impressive than either he or others make it out to be. He keeps getting tripped up by details he didn’t expect and being preoccupied with the idea that big powerful things (a legion of troops, Death Squadron, the second Death Star itself) are unstoppable obstacles to his enemy’s attempts to strike at him.
As much as I’d enjoy it as well, I feel as if SW is such well-trodden ground there’s plenty of analysis to go around! And Star Trek, frankly, has never depicted ground combat in much detail (at least in the TV and film canon), leaving little to go on, and not a lot of it seems particularly compelling. DS9 had a few episodes, but those were mainly about classic “horrors of war” themes rather than the nitty-gritty of what ANY eventuality of “ground combat” would look like in a society with sensors capable of detecting and teleporting specific life forms from orbit and phasers that can carve out chunks of whole planets.
For Star Wars, I suggest the “Angry Staff Officer!” https://angrystaffofficer.com/2015/12/15/star-wars-reading-list/
Taking it up a notch, Iain M. Banks’ Culture has “effectors”, which are sensors capable of detecting individual atoms in the next solar system and **rearranging** them. That really changes ground war, as in, cultures playing at that level don’t have ground wars. (Espionage and special forces missions are another matter.)
The Culture does sometimes have space battles, but since the ships are run by Culture Minds, the battles don’t last long. I recall in one book, a Mind is reviewing a battle it just finished, and thinks “Hmm, eleven milliseconds. Seemed longer.”
I seem to remember that there was a peer-conflict of ‘Level 8 Involved’ civilisations in the history of the Culture, between the Culture and the Idirans. Or perhaps between the two when they were lower levels of Involved (the timespan of the novels and their history is expansive). The co-option of some old warships held in cold storage was a plot point in one of the novels.
My understanding is that it was truly biblically destructive.
That was the war that saw the destruction of multiple planets and Culture Orbitals, and ended with the “Twin Novae Battle,” so I’d say beyond biblically destructive.
” Iain M. Banks’ Culture has “effectors”, which are sensors capable of detecting individual atoms in the next solar system and **rearranging** them”
If I remember, effectors weren’t quite that powerful – they’re described as the descendants of electronic countermeasures, and in the books are able to do things like hacking into computers, producing “sensing fields” that can pick up light, burning out electronics, and so on. But they aren’t mentioned as being able to affect matter.
I swear they could be used much more offensively. Not quite rearranging matter, but certainly manipulating electric fields inside people’s brains (though we know this is a taboo among Culture Minds).
Yes, they can definitely be used for that – as the GCU Grey Area does (though it is a taboo as you note). And they can “effectorise” some electronic equipment, basically burning it out with an EMP-like effect.
So, the thing I want him to consider about Star Trek is how the absolute ubiquitous availability of a functionally perfect (putting aside random aliens/oddities of the week it doesn’t work on) stunner ought to change warfare/conflict? Like, if you genuinely can ‘shoot first and ask questions later’ how does that change things? Similarly, how would the ‘laws of war’ change around such a technological advance?
One problem, touched on in the recent BlueSky thread about heavy infantry is that if the other side is using stunners people can be way more aggressive. So the side that uses lethal force has an enormous psychological advantage.
The Vorkosigan books by Lois McMaster Bujold touch on it. In civilian police contexts, stun them all and ask questions later is often a viable method of conflict resolution. They notably fall short when things get hairy, lacking the authority to stop a mob from rushing the stun armed person and beating them to death.
Is that the case if, as it seems to be, that phasers are capable of being switched from ‘stun’ to ‘kill’ fairly trivially. What’s to stop our hapless stun-armed dude flicking it over to ‘kill’ and making an example of one or two of his would-be attackers?
Of course, it could be that the phasers we see in most of the episodes are special equipment for interstellar exploration, with the regular police-grade versions being stun-only. That would certainly fit the idealism of the Federation in Trek much better than ‘smoke a couple of folks to make an example of them’.
Assuming that mass stunning is routine practice, how come riot control doesn’t have as standard issue some large-area version of it? Here’s your stun-only phaser (handgun), and small AoE stun projector (grenade launcher), and non-projecting large AoE stun device for emergency use only (nonlethal analogue to explosive vests).
There is a mortar type weapon in one TOS episode that looks like it might be a wide area phaser stunner. And in “A Piece Of The Action” a ship’s phaser is used to stun people over a wide area from orbit.
Over in Bujold’s Vorkosigan stories I suspect that stunners are just the same technology as lethal nerve disruptor with the intensity turned down. Both seem to use a magic physics ray that only effects nerve tissue.
An additional method of control for the Great Houses might be a monopoly of dealing with the Spacers. If the Great House could blockade any local big man from interplanetary trade, and we somehow thread the needle of ‘expensive interplanetary travel’ with ‘dependence on interplanetary trade’ then there is another tool besides violence to keep the locals in line. If Planet X makes half the shield parts, and Planet Y makes the other half, anyone without access to X and Y doesn’t have shields.
“send one guy (Duncan Idaho) on a mission”
“The fact that an Atreides force trained by Duncan Idaho – a single person – ”
You can say many things about Duncan Idaho, but focusing two different times on him definitely being one singular person, is very funny.
Yeah, he is perhaps the person to whom that qualifier least applies.
(To provide some clarifying context on this, in the later stories that follow the millennia-long rule of Paul Atreides’ successor, Duncan Idaho is repeatedly cloned and so persists across the ages, very much being “the man there were hundreds of,” albeit sequentially rather than in parallel)
He is only one person *at a time*
There is only one Duncan Idaho in the novel called Dune. There may be others in the later fanfiction, but that is a different matter, even if the fanfiction was written by Herbert himself.
If it’s written by the author, then I’m not sure it’s fanfiction. The hint is in the word: fiction written by a fan.
I’m sure Herbert was a fan of his own works. He did write them after all 😉
> Now I cannot find if it is ever made clear if lasgun-shield explosions fall under the Great Convention’s ban on atomics (nuclear weapons) in the setting. I suppose if they do this is a partial fix: no Great House could openly use the above tactic without breaching the convention
My recollection is that it’s not banned as such but the aftermath of a lasgun-shield interaction is indistinguishable from an atomic detonation, so anyone who causes such a detonation is at high risk of being misidentified as using atomics.
Given the stakes are total nuclear annihilation, I can see people being reluctant to use them when there’s a chance it might be traced back to them, or simply guessed with a high enough degree of certainty that they’re targeted. If the Atredies palace goes up in a nuclear explosion people are going to assume it’s the Harkonnens.
But then anyone who wanted to get rid of both Harkonnens and Atreides would have an easy solution: trigger an untraceable nuclear attack that decapitates House Atreides, then watch as Harkonnens get blamed and annihilated by a coalition of other Great Houses.
In a society with Truthsayers, Mentats, and others with what we would consider superhuman abilities, “untraceable nuclear attack” is not going to be “easy” at all.
Human beings, especially rich and powerful ones, do tend to be risk-averse rather than following game-theory logic and in this case “what’s the worse that could happen to us?” is really, really bad.
To slightly amend this: In recent years we have seen various examples showing that there ARE certain types of rich, powerful human beings who will behave in risk-embracing ways. Typically, you get this by raising a rich, powerful person within a rich, privileged environment, and raising them badly, so that they become narcissistic or megalomaniacal. Such a person will behave much more audaciously, even recklessly, than we might expect, because they do not have a normal and realistic ability to evaluate risk or learn from their own mistakes.
Yikes.
Eerie.
Regardless of whether a particular planet can afford a million fully trained and equipped warriors for its own defense, why absorb that expense when it’s only necessary against the emperor himself? Why not just budget to comfortably fend off the sort of attack a typical Great House could afford, with a small expeditionary force on the side whose main cost would be transportation, and call it sufficient?
IIRC, this is explicitly mentioned in the first book. The balance of forces is roughly even between the Landsraad, all the Great Houses combined, and the Emperor. What the Great Houses fear is the Emperor picking them off one by one, and in turn the Emperor is wary of Duke Leto because he would be capable of uniting the Landsraad against the Empire.
So yeah, a Great House doesn’t have to stand off the Empire alone, just enough to stand off another Great House alone.
Exactly that.
The Pedant dismissed too easily the aspect of “transportation costs drive the army size”.
Considering that one may have to relocate their whole army (as the Atreides apparently did), and that building an army is extremely costly, it makes sense to build only the army you could transport.
Having your fief changed does not appear to be a regular thing (and would also appear to be you doing a job for the Emperor, at least on paper). Given that, it would absolutely make sense the Emperor covers the cost of transporting you there.
The odder bit is…who had Giedi Prime while the Harkonnens had Arrakis? Do the Atreides actually still have Caladan, just it is no longer the seat of their power?
One planet for each Great House isn’t universal. Before the transfer, the Harkonnen held Geidi Prime and Arrakis at the same time. After the transfer they held Geidi Prime and some other planet at the same time.
Arrakis is an exception, it was a quasi-fief and the governor of Arrakis was rotated through other noble houses with the understanding that the appointment was temporary. Then the Emperor changed the rules by offering Arrakis as a real fief to Leto, which obligated him to give up Caladan to maintain the one fief per ruler rule.
the transfer of arrakis was labvlled as “fief entire” meaning the planet now belonged to the Leto’s house, instead of belonging to the emperor (and held by count Fenring) and just administered by the harkonaans (with piter de vries as the administrator/governor)
most houses had multiple worlds under their purview, that the Atreides only had caladan was presented as a bit of an oddity. which actually part fo the worldbuilding about politics.. the Atreides were the more politically powerful house because of their blood ties to the imperial house and pull with the landsraad, but the harkonnans were a politically small but economically powerful house due to having multiple worlds feeding into their coffers including management of arrakis’s spice mining, and as a result as a larger chunk of CHOAM stock. which is what made their expenses in moving their army viable, though they downplayed just how badly it depleted their wealth (and had Hawatt not arranged a sabotage strike on the baron’s hidden spice reserves, the expense would not have hurt them as bad as it did)
part of the shock at the size of the baron’s invasion was just the fact that spending that much to move an army would be ruinous to a great house. which is part of why the atreides suspect that the Emperor was secretly backing the whole affair. i got the impression that the spacing guild actively discourages open warfare on the scale we see directed against Duke Leto’s house, by charging a premium for transport on that scale. which would help contribute to the perceived stability of the society.. it would be very hard to just hammer your rivals into the ground militarily without either resorting to atomics or expending all of your house’s economic wealth in the process. which would leave you weak to retaliatory attacks by coalitions of other houses (which i suspect the guild would adjust their prices to enable to transport enough troops for the job.)
so instead warfare shifted to a more special operations work focus like conducting raids on rival house holdings, and into political conflicts with dynastic alliances, Landsraad voting blocs, and cloak and dagger operations involving spies, saboteurs, and assassins.
I’m thinking that a lot of Great House control of the vast planetary population is the threat that anyone getting too uppity finds their non-shield militias are suddenly facing the non-shield militias of the other factions on the planet, who also have the support of the Great House elite shielded troops. Sort of like how the US thinks it can do regime change in other countries by just giving air support to whatever faction in the country favors US interests. Except for the Great Houses it works.
The other thing to remember is that Great Houses have off-planet nukes. Indeed getting such nukes is the last step to becoming a Great House, I suspect. (Which is a thing that can happen, it is mentioned in the books.) Though per OGP’s theory here, getting a supply of shields may be the step before that.
The Great Houses use their hidden nukes to maintain a Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) standoff with the other Great Houses, which is why the losing Great House gets sent to sanctuary on Tupile instead of being executed after show trials or dying in tragic freak dental floss accidents.
But now I wonder if the the threat of nukes is also part of keeping the planetary populations in line. Yes, that is forbidden by the Great Convention, but maybe the GC is more of a guideline than a rule…
I would also add in that they seem to have methods that don’t involve conventional occupation to deal with uppity yokels. To quote again from Dune itself:
Again, the Duke faced his son. “Arrakis has another advantage I almost
forgot to mention. Spice is in everything here. You breathe it and eat it in
almost everything. And I find that this imparts a certain natural immunity to
some of the most common poisons of the Assassins’ Handbook. And the need to
watch every drop of water puts all food production–yeast culture, hydroponics,
chemavit, everything–under the strictest surveillance. We cannot kill off large
segments of our population with poison–and we cannot be attacked this way,
either. Arrakis makes us moral and ethical.”
Which implies that if the planet is sufficiently unruly, you can thin down the population by large scale chemical warfare as a distasteful if effective option.
Also implicitly suggests that Great House control of food production may be typical (and that just growing stuff with farms is not). Which is another obvious mechanism of control for the Great Houses.
One thing Herbert mentions, but doesn’t elaborate on, is the role of sea and air power. We know both exist (they are apparently the backbone of Atriedes power on Caladan), but I don’t see how either could really fit into a society where the primary weapon is the knife
I’m imagining that Silver Age Superman cover with Lex Luthor flying a plane, with two giant robot arms, which are punching Superman. Except with a knife.
Shields will stop aircraft and ships from being able to shoot at each other with guns and missiles, but your soldiers still need to move around. Ornithopters have the same role as transport helicopters, and presumably a planet like Caladan with lots of ocean will need a lot of ships.
Sinking a ship is generally a matter of letting the water in. Mines and torpedoes work by delivering a shockwave through the water to the targets hull. No fast-flying projectile need strike the target.
Since a shockwave is fast moving atoms, whether air or water, a shield will protect just as well against the shockwave as against the original projectile.
Get a mine that clamps on and slowly tears a hole in the hull. Done.
The question of how well shields protect against shockwaves gets us into that same shaky ground as “how do shields permit breathable air to pass through.” Honestly, I prefer to just not worry about it and avoid making firm assertions about what they can and can’t do.
In Dune the Harkonnen’s surprise weapon in the attack on Arrakis is artillery with explosive shells, which they use not against Atreides solders, but to collapse the (unshielded) caves that the Atreides soldiers retreat into.
I’m very certain that if shockwaves from explosions killed people even through shields, the Harkonnen use of artillery 1. would be firing directly at Atreides soldiers and 2. not a surprise.
To be fair, they say ‘sea power’. They don’t say ‘ships’.
It could be 100,000 dudes on canoes rowing in close and stabbing each other.
I mean, it’s unlikely. But it could be.
It’s a shame that Dune didn’t really explore the conquests of the “Jihad”, even in the form of a in-universe historical narrative like Irulan’s commentary on politics and philosophy. Was the Guild’s capitulation so complete that Paul could simply load legion after legion of Fremen and airdrop them into the Great Houses’ core fiefs before major resistance was even organized? What Clausewitzian friction (*drink!*) would have slowed down that initial blitzkrieg? What houses were successful in stalling the initial attacks, what planets became vicious street-fights, what ripples would that cause through the galactic economy?
The Atreides priesthood in Dune Messiah seemed to be forming a theocratic bureaucracy, perhaps proving Dr. Devereux’s point that a more consolidated / organized state would immediately out-compete the Imperium’s Great Houses. Perhaps with the greater organization and penetration of society, as the priesthood seems to have a significant lay ministry given the pilgrims that show up on Arrakis, the theocratic Atreides regime could rapidly raise larger armies with greater tax revenues?
If the Guild is on Paul’s side, all he needs to do is threaten interdiction on anyone who doesn’t come on board and mop up the few worlds that can survive independently on short notice.
One would assume total cooperation from the Guild given he controls the spice. The weird bit is that there was any resistance at all.
One wonders if the Guild did not take their supplication entirely lying down…though necessarily in such a way as to avoid too obvious of a confrontation with Paul.
IIRC they were an important part of the conspiracy to murder him.
Re: return to contact weaponry: it’s a bit weird that, with all but the most basic kinetic weapons off the table, we don’t see more non-kinetic weapons in situations where they ought to work. Even if lasguns aren’t an option, a fighter with a flamethrower or a poison dart gun seems like he’d have an advantage over one with a knife, especially since there’s nothing stopping him from also carrying a knife as a sidearm. Other options border on slapstick- caltrops, tripwires, lassos and giant nets could probably incapacitate a lot of Great House warriors before they got into knife range. Artillery may not be able to force infantry out of position with explosives, but it could with napalm or poison gas. Even water might do the trick- a man with a knife can’t really defend himself while up to his shins in mud.
If there were an “Early Modern” foment of the kind suggested in the conclusion, it would probably involve weapons and tactics like these giving us a Dune version of the Battle of Golden Spurs.
I don’t think these are flaws in Dune, because ultimately you have to let a sci-fi author do their thing- if Herbert wants shields to work in such a way that his characters have no choice but to engage in a series of cool knife fights, that’s his decision- but it is hard for me to think of a reason why knives (or swords, or spears) should dominate the battlefield at the expense of all these alternatives.
Maula pistols firing poison darts are mentioned in the books.
maula pistols are just the fremen word for them. in the early chapters we get mentions of ‘slow pellet stunners’ which apparently are low velocity dart guns firing tranquilizer darts through shields. they’re probably the same sort of ‘dartgun’ that yueh used to disable Duke leto in the book. the fremen build their own versions, using more lethal toxins. given how shields can’t be used safely outside the cities on arrakis, i suspect the fremen ones are designed with less precise control of projectile velocity.
Shields protect against poison gas to an extent; saves the Baron’s life when Duke Leto breaks his false tooth. Though I’d say the surer protection is that NBC gear is way cheaper than shields, so if someone did invest in poison gas it’d be trivial to counter.
Considering that the shields appear to protect against poison gas, perhaps their function is a lot more sophisticated than the ‘they just stop things moving too fast’ explanation we’re given.
Frank Herbert himself recognised that the Imperium style of fighting is artificial and limited. In Heretics / Chapter House of Dune, some 4_500 years after the original Dune trilogy, warfare has changed dramatically. Shields and swords are obsolete, it’s much more industrialised and high tech.
And yet somehow, if I’m remembering correctly, a single man manages to wipe out most of a major assault with a single lasgun and a position on high ground. (Admittedly, it was a last stand, and I think he might have expected to get got by the lasgun-shield interaction somewhere along the way, but still…)
Only because the assaulting force was not firing, they had been ordered to capture their targets alive at any price.
Transport costs only limit the size of an attacking army. If you expect an attack on your holdings, it makes sense to field a large defensive army that you couldn’t afford to transport, so you have a decisive If we assume the Atreides brought their entire army and didn’t abandon a large chunk to the Great House taking over for them, then transport costs aren’t the limiting factor. The Atreides having to transport the entire house and abandon their homeworld is extremely irregular, apparently even for those taking over Arrakis as the Harkonnen held Gedi Prime simultaneously.
If transport costs limit the size of armies, and state capacity is limited (thus limiting tax revenue) the equilibrium position is to maintain an army large enough to counter that limited invasion and no larger, because to maintain an excessively large defensive force would stretch tax revenues and state capacity too much.
That would at least match the in-universe logic.
Eh, I’d say that depends on both the relative cost of equipping/training/paying a soldier vs. transport costs for a soldier and your threat environment. You want to maintain a large enough army to guarantee victory, because if you have the same size army as the attacking force it’s pretty much a coin flip, while if you have an army that’s large enough you can outnumber the enemy three-to-one at the point of contact (bearing in mind they pick where they land on your entire planet and likely have the element of suprise) you can be comfortably certain of victory assuming they aren’t Sardarkar. So if troops are much cheaper than transport you probably do that. If salaries are a concern you can use a levy or national guard model, because the big issues with offensive deployment are irrelevant if you can’t afford to transport them anyways.
Oh, and you might be worried about being ganged up on by three houses sending their entire transportable force, which is another reason to develop an army beyond what you can transport.
But that does seem to be the case. The Atreides had an army they seemingly couldn’t have afforded to transport to Arrakis on their own dime. And only Harkonnen were rich enough to transport an army that could overwhelm the Atreides army. And Arrakis was the only planet worth that expense. At any time Harkonnen could have transported their army to Caladan and wiped out House Atreides, but Caladan would simply not have been worth the expense. You need to harbor a great personal enmity against another house to attack any planet other than Arrakis.
It is specifically stated that the Guild charges an *extremely* large premium for combat transportation, due to “risks” etc. So troops can move between friendly planets relatively cheaply.
The whole system is rigged to keep it stable, by the Imperium and its ally the Guild. Which makes sense – it’s their system.
In regards to state institutions – I think the key piece to the puzzle here is CHOAM. The Great Houses aren’t really the “state” – CHOAM, and the people it interfaces with within each planetary economy, is the state. The Great Houses can best be seen as activist investors living off of the proceeds of their stake in CHOAM and fighting for a better position within the entity, with a side role in ensuring, where necessary, that their fief remains within the CHOAM system through the deployment of violence.
This makes a lot of sense.
It would be interesting to explore the relationship between CHOAM and the Spacing Guild a little more. Are they actually equals? Or is the Spacing Guild the violence-arm of CHOAM? Deploying not physical violence, but complete exclusion from interplanetary travel and trade.
Actually, on second thoughts, CHOAM being the state and the Great Houses being activist-investors makes quite a lot of sense.
Take the complete and total lack of administrative capacity among the Great Houses.
1. CHOAM is described as an interstellar monopoly on trade and economics. If you have any ounce of bureaucratic skill, I’m sure your services would be useful there.
2. Monopolies being monopolies, they can afford to do some pretty self-sabotaging things in the name of avoiding competition…like ensuring anyone beneath them has zero ability to draw on administrative support.
3. So where does all the monopoly money go? Space travel, one assumes. It’s described as being beyond ruinously expensive.
4. This system chugs along just fine until someone hits it where it really cannot afford to be hit: the ability to do space travel.
So the Great Houses are basically nuclear-armed Parish Councils/HOAs while the real business of state happens in Westminster/Washington.
Does it fit perfectly? Not really. Is it potentially plausible? Perhaps.
This seems on track. There’s are references somewhere to guild bankers. And there’s a single galactic currency. That says to me that CHOAM or the guild is the central bank.
If it is a monopoly, think about how it enforces that. There’s a decent academic argument that the Roman empires’ attempts at assuring tax revenue contributed some of the defining features of feudalism. Specifically, they tied men to their fathers’ place in life. You inherited his land, his profession, his debts, and his tax liability. That could result in the semi-feudal aspects we see in Dune: simple organizational greed leads to increasing structuring of society in order to extract CHOAM’s due.
Fantasy is when you overestimate how big armies can be. Sci-fi is when you underestimate.
Galactic scale sci-fi almost always makes planets absurdly “small” with one climate biome, one culture, and rarely more than a couple of noteworthy sites. Presumably to give the story some reason to go to another world: if each had the internal complexity and diversity of the earth (or even a middling nation), then there’d be so much to do and describe on the Ground that it would never make it to space.
It is oft mentioned all over the place that sci-fi — especially space opera, but not limited to it — is (mostly consciously) drawing an awful lot from Age of Sail adventure stories. Both that planets are islands (homogeneity, one port city, etc.), and almost everything about how combat and ships work. (E.g. the starship you encountered is listing, therefore it is distressed — wait, listing relative to what?)
It is sometimes mentioned on this blog that fantasy (unintentionally) draws a lot from Bronze Age Scale, in things like marching times and the resulting ease of logistics, “general points sword” sufficing as command&control, etc. On rare occasion (as with the Numenorean royal expedition in Rings of Power) this extends to army sizes (and does not make them sci-fi).
I was under the impression that the small armies were also partially due to two different effects that tend to inhibit large-scale war in this setting. First, all the Great Houses are (nominally) part of the same polity and subjects of the same emperor. As a result, open large-scale war between Houses is heavily frowned upon and risks uniting the rest of the Houses against you.
And second, every Great House has a reserve of atomic weapons, which they are prepared to use at uttermost need. So, unless you pull off a sudden coup de main like what the Harkonnen/Corrino alliance managed against the Atreides, you can’t ever actually take down a Great House by military force, because a House that is on the verge of defeat will fire off its atomics and you’ll end up with massive losses on both sides.
So both of these effects strongly push Great Houses to fight in the Kanly style, with assassins and saboteurs the primary means of combat and open deployment of large armies extremely rare.
“because a House that is on the verge of defeat will fire off its atomics and you’ll end up with massive losses on both sides.”
Which is why the Guild has the sanctuary planet(s) of Tupile. What happens to the Atreides is atypical because they had Yueh, a traitor inside the House. Normally what would happens in wars between Great Houses is once one side has clearly won, there is a truce and the losing ruler and his immediate family* get evacuated by the Guild to Tupile, where they are at least alive. In return for this they refrain from pushing the Big Red Button.
Baron Harkonnen explicitly mentions this, saying he will claim that the Duke and his family had accepted such a deal, but sadly died in a tragic accident.
* And senior staff, maybe?
Back when Dune was first discussed on ACOUP I thought and wrote far too much about the style of combat and why it worked in universe. There’s not too much else on the ‘Net about Dune combat AFAIK, so if you’re the kind of person who reads the comment section of ACOUP, I assume you might find it interesting.
https://laranzu.id.au/writing/whyDuneWarfare.html
There’s a passage in Dune where the possibility of “lasguns with timers aimed at house shields” is explicitly considered as a threat. The Duke discounts it on the grounds that nobody could tell after the fact that the blast hadn’t been (banned) atomics.
The other way to look at the cost of shipping an army is rather than the guild and/or emperor subsidizing the Atreides move to Arrakis (and don’t forget removing Harkonnen forces from there) that instead the Guild simply levies astronomical surcharges for *offensive* military deployments — while charging regular shipping rates for any other movement of Great House personnel and equipment.
In that alternate model you’d even be able to send some of your army to an allied House’s world (with their explicit invitation) for cross training or whatever for little more than you’d spend shipping pundi rice from Caladan. Similarly if you needed to shuffle military around between your home world and any minor agricultural, mining, or industrial planets you had control of[1] it’d be affordable.
But don’t show the Guild that you have the planetary owner’s permission to move troops, frigates, etc. into the system and now you’re paying many times the normal shipping rates.
—-
[1] Arrakis under Harkonnen control couldn’t be the only non-homeworld in the universe under a Great House’s control.
I think the physics of the shields works out; while the average speed of air molecules is 450 m/s, the distribution of the speeds is determined by the Boltzmann distribution, which has a fatter lower end than upper end. About 1 in a million molecules are moving at 5m/s, or slower, with the upper end of human knife strikes being 15m/s.
Call the shield a sphere of 1m radius. So in each second, the air molecules that are candidates to go through the shield are the ones within 5m of the shield. (There will be some bouncing and changes of velocity but it evens out.) The proportion of rays that point at a sphere of 1m at the origin of a sphere of 6m is a bit less than 2%.
Humans inhale about 0.5L of air with every breath, and a moderately exercising knife combatant will be breathing about 20 times a minute, or inhaling 0.16L every second. There are about a million litres of air in a 6m radius sphere, so the “air flux” across the shield will be 0.02L every second.
This puts a shield breather at a deficit of 0.14L/s, but there are about 4000L of air in the shield. Hypoxia symptoms appear at 15-17% – let’s say when oxygen is a quarter depleted from 21%. So that gives our knife fighter about 2 hours of exercise before hypoxia even begins to set in – and even then they can completely replenish their “air tank” by turning their shield off, running back 10 meters, and turning it back on. Hypercapnia (high levels of CO2) isn’t a problem; more CO2 molecules than O2 molecules, proportionately, are moving slowly, giving a constant egress of CO2 from the shield.
If 5m/s seems high, you can halve the shield “speed filter” and still give a fighter 20 minutes of air.
I’m wondering what would happen to temperature and pressure within the shield. Since the faster molecules can’t exchange their kinetic energy freely with the outside, it’d have an insulating effect. Radiative transfer would of course get through.
Since no-one is reported to die of heat exhaustion in the shield I’m going to assume the shield absorbs the incoming (and outgoing) excess kinetic energy as vibration or radiation and that keeps the overall temperature in check. But that implies that if you hammer the shield hard enough it’ll start heating up the inside air as well.
Air has a volumetric heat capacity of around 1.2 kJ/m^3*K, so for the 1 m shield sphere that’d be about 5 kJ/K. For comparison, an assault rifle bullet has about 1 kJ of kinetic energy; after a few hundred hits the inside would get pretty toasty for a human.
(would be interesting if a suitably physics-oriented person could calculate the heat transfer and its effects, these are all first order back-of-the-envelope estimates)
I wonder if the vector of the molecule matters. I didn’t find a good explanation on how the shields work, but based on the movies it seems they have a “stiff” surface with a less “dense” inner volume. I could imagine an air molecule that is travelling almost parallel to the shield surface barely skimming it and passing through. This could increase the permeability of the shield to molecules considerably.
I see we’ve had basically the same thought.
Do the books give a definitive answer to how shields work for objects approaching at an angle? Are they blocked/permitted based on the object’s total velocity, or just its velocity perpendicular to the shield’s surface? The latter seems much more intuitive to me, but I guess sci-fi can make up whatever rules it wants, and I don’t think we ever hear of using “glancing” blows as a way to get through a shield.
If it is indeed only the perpendicular velocity that matters, that would allow a significantly greater amount of gas flow while keeping a relatively low speed threshold.
Perpendicular could make sense, since a “glancing” molecule hit would just hit some other molecules inside the shield and become part of the randomly moving air again, but a “glancing” bullet would have to travel close to parallel with the shield and would likely miss completely, so it still provides protection. Angled blows would obviously become part of knife/other close combat training.
Now I’m wondering if a shield would deafen you to everything outside the shield, or if sound waves could be effectively carried solely by molecules moving under the speed limit. It seems to me that shields would have to block sound, as otherwise shielded troops would be vulnerable to shockwaves from various explosives (which would greatly diminish the value of shields).
OK it appears someone else has had the same thought as me — after thinking about it for a bit I’m a bit skeptical of the amount of surface area”skintight” model of sheild portrayed afford but it should be fine
The 10,000 years of stability had to be attributed to the guild.
– They navigators have prescience, so can predict threats to the guild’s interests … until Paul.
– The timing is right. Society doesn’t change much from the first jihad to the second.
– CHOAM is a galactic corporation that has enough income to subsidize the nobility to some degree. It is present pretty much everywhere, and conflicts within it could be handled through bureaucracy.
– We hear of the guild bank. If the guild acts with respect to banking as it does to interstellar transport, it has some monopolies. Since we only hear of one currency, I assume it is guild-issued.
– we hear of the guild providing arbitration. If this indicates a deeper capability, the guild may also effectively be the courts.
– Controlling the courts and a central bank were two of the distinctive features of early modern states. Perhaps the guild used its monopoly on transport plus its limited prescience to continually protect itself against all comers, with the effect of eliminating most sources of real change. Any institutions that generate the kind of power that the administrative state does would become a target because it would threaten guild interests. The guild doesn’t need an actual plan to create stagnation — it just aggressively defends its short-term interests.
So why doesn’t the Guild rule?
1. The Guild doesn’t want to rule.
2. The Guild wants, more than anything, to maintain the supply of melange. And they can see any future where they try to exercise direct political control, of Arrakis in particular but I think any sort of broader direct political control, threatens the end of the supply of melange. I think this is mentioned at the end of Dune, when Paul confronts the Guild representative.
3. The Guild seems smaller than even one Great House. There aren’t many Guild navigators. There certainly is not a Guild army or Guild bureaucracy sufficient to govern. So while they can exercise a great deal of economic/soft power they don’t have anything close to the logistical capability to rule.
“The Guild wants, more than anything, to maintain the supply of melange.”
And in Dune don’t the people who can see into the future and control all travel between the planets of the Imperium do such a fine job of guaranteeing their supply of melange?
Of course, the Spacing Guild is Herberts excuse to not have any space battles his knife-wielding Fremen would be disadvantaged in; and no one in the ten thousand years Before Paul discovering the Guilds need for spice another excuse to stop previous holders or Arrakis from holding the Guild hostage as he does.
But even granting both absurdities, the most valuable planet in the universe should be an imperial possession. Anyone without enough power to acquire and control the most valuable planet in the universe, is without enough power to stay Emperor.
“And in Dune don’t the people who can see into the future and control all travel between the planets of the Imperium do such a fine job of guaranteeing their supply of melange?”
Yes, they do. It works very well indeed for 10,000 years.
Then the Bene Gesserit breeding program breaks their prescience monopoly by producing Paul who has Prescience 2.0, which works for him and jams the prescience of the Guild Navigators.
The Empire is a balance-of-power structure. The Great Houses collectively have the power to match the Emperor, but they’re mostly disunited. The Emperor directly controlling Arrakis would upset that balance, as would a Great House controlling it permanently, so it rotates between the Great Houses. If they tried holding the Guild hostage by suspending exports, the Guild would transport a retaliation force.
Paul is in a unique position in that he threatens to destroy the spice, which would kill him, the fremen and the Great Houses through spice withdrawal, and convinces the Guild he’s not bluffing.
I always thought it odd that the guild didn’t simply take over Arrakis directly. They can prevent the emperor from going there. Is there an explanation in the hronologicay earlier books?
If the Emperor takes Arrakis for himself, he’s going to far and the Guild and the Landsraad will unite to depose him. The empire is a tripod power structure.
If the Guild takes Arrakis for themselves, they foresee that this will lead to disaster, their dependence on the spice will get exposed and humanity will revolt and find replacements for them.
So the stable system is that Arrakis is a quasi-fief, handed out by the Emperor for century long terms. The Emperor deliberately destabilizes this arrangement by granting Arrakis as an actual regular fief to Leto, which obligates Leto to leave his seat of power in Caladan rather than managing it while holding his power base like the Harkonnens did. Arrakis is a trap for Leto because its an opportunity he can’t pass up without a fatal loss of face that will put him in an exposed position.
“humanity will revolt and find replacements for them”
I feel like a little unreliable narrator really hammers home this as the Guild’s fear.
We hear that the only way to travel the stars is with the spice…and yet, humanity quite clearly did not arise on Arrakis in the Dune universe…but they still got there.
It is possible to do interstellar travel without it. If I remember rightly, this was one of the uses for those ‘thinking machines’.
Now, who might benefit from the interstellar perception that the only way to do interstellar travel is with the spice? Who might benefit from the utter demonisation of those thinking machines?
The Guild. And CHOAM.
You’re right. In the early-chronology books, humans spread to the stars on ships that must actually be faster than light. They take months between stars — rather than the years it would take at just under light speed. Once the technology to fold space is discovered, the loss rates are very high. Well over 1 in 10. That means that no one uses it in mass, except in a desperate moment of the Butlerian Jihad, where the army of humanity just decides to take the losses in every jump in order to nuke every overmind-controlled planet to a cinder. Years later, another company tries to compete with the nascent guild (a Venport venture), but their losses are terrible. The guild ruthlessly puts them down, effectively cementing its monopoly.
You *can* travel the stars without a guild navigator IIRC: that must have been how it was done initially and the Ixians eventually discover a way to do it again.
Arilou @ March 2, 2026 at 11:27 am:
Yes, but you are at great risk of running into a rogue planet, or a dust cloud, or being eaten by a giant mutant space goat.
Guild Navigators can pick the futures where none of those things happen. As you note, eventually the Ixians come up with another way to make FTL safe. And I think someone figures out how to synthesize spice also.
“Then the Bene Gesserit breeding program breaks their prescience monopoly by producing Paul who has Prescience 2.0, which works for him and jams the prescience of the Guild Navigators.”
Then they should have taken advantage of their period of farsightedness to take control of the one planet they need before they are blinded.
“Then they should have taken advantage of their period of farsightedness to take control of the one planet they need before they are blinded.”
They know that if they do that they’ll eventually get overthrown. And the point is they’re already blinded from the start. *They can’t precognize Paul*.
“They know that if they do that they’ll eventually get overthrown.”
How can they know what will happen AFTER they have been blinded?
In one of the old movies (not the current series), the Guild pretty blatantly pushes the Emperor around, which I think makes a lot of sense.
The Guild has roughly no manpower. They can interdict a world, but not invade it without the assistance of the Great Houses. That said, they’re one of the major poles of the balance of power, along with CHOAM, the Great Houses collectively, and the Emperor.
And the Bene Gesserit. All of the most important men have mothers and wives in the Bene Gesserit, who have super-perception, mind control, and somehow better kung fu than the military aristocracy, and somehow none of the men in the story figure out that the Bene Gesserit are one of the great powers.
I was thinking about listing them, but they’re more a power-behind-the-throne thing. They don’t have the same degree of direct power as the listed four, and the Empire could recognizably continue to exist if the Bene Gesserit went on strike, at least temporarily. Granted, it is quite possible and I’d say likely that they’re a big part of why the Empire lasted more than a few generations, never mind ten thousand years.
Curiously, in all those millennia not one of those Bene Gesserit ever taught her own sons any of the super-perception, mind control, and better kung fu than the military aristocracy. Except the protagonists mother.
Maybe they did, but if he wasn’t the upcoming kwisatz hadarach that would just make said son unusually intelligent and powerful, but still operating within the limits of a system that reverts to normal once he goes away.
“a system that reverts to normal once he goes away.”
By the time he goes away you should expect him to teach his own kids if his mother doesn’t do that for him.
Its interests are those of its navigators. The one thing they cannot tolerate is a threat to the spice. The guild absolutely capitulates when Paul makes a clearly suicidal threat to destroy the spice forever. As an institution, it cares about little else.
This is discussed at length in the books.
Firstly, the Guild is prescient and has seen the future where they take control directly. They rule for a while and their rule produces a counter-reaction and humanity develops alternatives to Guild transport and they get overthrown.
Secondly, the Guild function best as parasites, they need human industrial society to fulfill their needs and the biology of Guild Navigators makes them hyperspecialized and dependent on others.
So, the Guild has engineered a balanced stable system where humanity has expanded to the size they can service through spice-based transport and no further and then remains in stasis for generations upon generations, with the Guild enjoying a comfortable monopoly while the Empire is ruled by an Emperor that understands that they are effectively the Guild’s designated agent, with the other Great Houses keeping the Emperor in check.
“Firstly, the Guild is prescient and has seen the future where they take control directly. They rule for a while and their rule produces a counter-reaction and humanity develops alternatives to Guild transport and they get overthrown.”
So what happens to them in the future in which they do not take control? As I recall, exactly the same. Apart from the bit in which they are blackmailed by Paul and his heirs, for the thousands of years of Leto II’s Golden Path.
In that future they saw, they thrived up until the point someone else had superior prescience which threw off their predictions. Paul, having the advantage of perceiving their thought process, mentally criticizes their unwillingness to take risks and prefer stagnation.
I feel like the stability of Dune has a lot to do with the Guild. All interplanetary travel depends on the Guild. It is like medieval Europe where only a small group of prescient mutants could pilot a boat so they control all water travel. Which would include the transportation of food, metal and wood. If some planet rebelled against the Imperium and created a democracy or communist government the Guild could cut the planet off from every other planet. I don’t remember how many essentials of Dune life are only found on some planets besides melange, but getting cut off from melange would mean planetary elites go through withdrawal and have their life span shortened significantly.
I believe post-Leto II the Guild loses its monopoly on interplanetary travel, which would eliminate the embargo threat. But getting the details would require I reread the last three Dune books.
Paul’s Jihad has always seemed totally implausible to me (less than a million Fremen inevitably conquering thousands of worlds), so I’m excited to see if Brett’s analysis matches my belief.
The part that makes it somewhat plausible is that low state capacity societies run by tiny elites are rather vulnerable to having the tiny elite replaced by another tiny elite, with little disruption to the rest of the society.
“If some planet rebelled against the Imperium and created a democracy or communist government the Guild could cut the planet off from every other planet.”
By that argument the Guild rules, not the Emperor or his cronies/Great Houses.
The Guild does rule. They just prefer to let the Great Houses and the Emperor think that they do instead, because they cause less trouble that way.
The Guild rules in the highly specific sense that nothing important can happen without their permission, but not in the broader sense of “they are the ones actually making the laws, administering the territory, and extracting revenue by right of rulership rather than on a fee-for-service model the way private citizens get their money.”
We see a similar dynamic in some democratic states, where millionaires and billionaires may have immense political power and the ability to stall or roll back reforms that might threaten their wealth, but do not actually try to outright overthrow the government or install overtly puppetized minions. At least, they don’t always do that.
“ they are the ones actually making the laws, administering the territory, and extracting revenue by right of rulership rather than on a fee-for-service model the way private citizens get their money”
Maybe. If CHOAM is effectively guild-controlled, it seems like they are doing all three of these things while setting up the great powers as the apparent rulers (and certainly beneficiaries of lots of CHOAM money). CHOAM seems to control regular people’s everyday life. That seems like it would be making the laws and administering territory. And the great houses revenue seems entirely to originate from CHOAM holdings. Except maybe the Arrakis quasi-fief.
The system is pretty much described as a three-way balance of power between the Emperor, the Guild, and the Great Houses. The Guild has a monopoly on space travel but very little planetary control; they don’t even control the planet that makes highliners. So the Guild can blockade a planet, but not invade it. And they’re in the delicate position of not controlling or being able to directly seize Arrakis, which is the sole source of the drug they’re all dependent on with fatal consequences for withdrawal, and it isn’t until late into Leto II’s reign that a synthetic substitute is developed.
Wouldn’t the Atreides have also had to pay the Guild to move all their assets to Arrakis? Maybe they could only afford to relocate their top tier troops, and left behind most of their defensive power on Caladan. That would also fit with the idea that the move with to Arrakis was a trap the whole time.
The problem with this are Duke Leto’s statements about how the whole house could fit in just a small corner of the Heighleiner, suggesting they have, in fact, brought everyone. They have, notably, left no administration or loyal forces behind on Caladan.
The comments by others about how the guild presumably just charges you extra if it’s transport for combat, and otherwise you pay normal freight rates, make this bit make sense.
I have wondered if maybe there would have been a better way to get unarmored knife fights as main combat: The shield takes a small amount of time in adjusting its shape during movement, leaving small gaps where after the movement it suddenly has a larger area to cover. The best way to stab through these gaps would be to grapple to actively produce these openings by moving the opponents body, and using a knife for superior blade control to get to these openings fast. Then add some technology to the knife that allows it to cut through most physical material easily, and armor under the shield is useless.
As with Herbert’s system this is of course starting from the kind of combat one wants to see, and then creating fictional technology to justify this. It seems there is a common desire to see feudalism with melee combat in space, and various fictional settings try to cater to that need. I wonder which is most successful in making it plausible. There are probably be stories where this kind of worldbuilding is superior to Dune or Star Wars.
“The basic structure of the Imperium under Corrino rule, we’re told, persists for ten thousand years”
I blame Asimov. Fictional Giant Space Empires tend to last for a really, really long time and I think conscious or unconscious influence from Foundation is why.
And then there’s the Instrumentality of Mankind series by Cordwainer Smith, which spans a great length of time as well, where there is a desert planet, Norstrilia (Old North Australia is NOT New South Wales – get it?!?), supplying the Instrumentality and the richer parts of the galaxy with stroon, a life-lengthening drug.
Authors like Big Impressive Numbers for the same reasons that Isaac Asimov, an author, did.
Que our hosts rants about scale in A Song of Ice and Fire.
Minor bugaboo: The Fremen don’t use shields. The Atreides do. Paul has been trained to knife-fight against shielded opponents. The Fremen style of knife-fighting is going to be MUCH faster – so why is Paul any good at it?
This is something I want to discuss in Part II, because I think it would obviously matter once the Fremen are fighting off Arrakis.
Yeah, the huge problem with the entire Fremen jihad is that it’s made very clear that shielded fighting requires a different set of learned reflexes to unshielded fighting, and the Fremen are superlative at the latter but aren’t even aware of the former. Anywhere that’s not the open desert of Arrakis, they’d get run over by any other military, by Herbert’s own explicit rules. You have to retcon some fairly critical narrative beats to make it work.
Paul gets to cheat and backfill in skills he learns in alternate realities through his prescience. And it does take him some time to learn regardless; his fight with Jamis is dragged out precisely because his reflexes are keyed to shielded combat, and Jamis is fast and fighting unshielded.
Also, now that I think about it, don’t forget that Paul and Jessica teach the Fremen the ‘weirding way’ of fighting. We’re never exactly told what that is and how much of it is Bene Gesserit stuff vs how much is House Atriedes stuff; but I think the knowledge flow goes both ways.
Don’t forget that while the Fremen are damn tough, their invincibility is relatively recent; and I think a product of Atriedes influence. The raw material was always there, but their society is organized around running and hiding from the Harkonen, not just kicking the crap out of them whenever they fight. That implies that they can’t beat the Harkonen in a stand up fight, or at least couldn’t before Paul came along and started training and arming them.
We see that in one of the appendixes to Dune, which talks about Liet-Kynes’ father Pardot Kynes, who found some Harkonnen bravos mugging some Fremen youth, killing the very resource he was intending to use to change the planet, so he switched on his shield and waded into the fight behind the Harkonnens and killed at least one, and saved the life of one Fremen youth who was bleeding from a cut artery or vein.
I’d also add that when Thufir is sort of working for the Harkonen, he goes over some casualty ratios from claimed kills in the Harkonen pogroms and the later Sardaukar ones. Now, I realize there’s a hell of a lot more to war than a KDR like some kind of shooter, but Hawat has this to say:
“By your own count,” Hawat said, “he killed fifteen thousand over two years
while losing twice that number. You say the Sardaukar accounted for another
twenty thousand, possibly a few more. And I’ve seen the transportation manifests
for their return from Arrakis. If they killed twenty thousand, they lost almost
five for one. Why won’t you face these figures, Baron, and understand what they
mean?
Just before in that passage, talking about Rabban’s earlier pogroms, they were suffering two casualties for every Fremen they killed.
Now again, KDR is a crude measure, but given the enormous disparity in quality between Sardaukar and Harkonen levies, it implies that the Fremen got massively tougher right around the time Paul shows up for them to underperform the earlier Harkonen activities.
““By your own count,” Hawat said, “he killed fifteen thousand over two years while losing twice that number. You say the Sardaukar accounted for another twenty thousand, possibly a few more. ”
I think there is also a strong suggestion here that Rabban has been inflating his kill counts. That’s why Hawat says “by your own count” – it’s like “even if you believe what he tells you, WHICH YOU SHOULDN’T, he’s losing two for one.”
And also, yes, they get tougher and more aggressive and capable. The film squeezes down into a few weeks a period of five years in the book – five years in which Paul and Jessica are hiding out with the Fremen and training them. The conversation between the Baron and Hawat is after this period.
Paul is TE Lawrence, remember (as is Gandalf of course), and like Lawrence he is turning a society built on raiding and theft and evasion into an army that can fight pitched battles.
I mean, he isn’t, right? We have the duel scene where he’s really good at defending himself but can’t attack effectively, and the Fremen think he’s toying with his opponent and get angry about it.
Fun! typo:
1st picture caption: makes a very logistical addition -> makes a very logical addition (lol your auto-correct knows you too well)
> I have a hard time imagining exactly what sort of man-portable device could be so expensive than an entire planet could field only tens of thousands of them
I’m picturing something that requires such exacting tolerances that only a handful of manufacturers can produce them, kind of like how there’s only a handful of factories in the world that can do 2 nm computer chips. Or perhaps the defect rate of the process is very high, so even if you churn out millions of them only a small number are good enough to be used in the military.
With computer chips, often the “defective” chips simply have the defective parts turned off and sold as a less powerful chip (e.g., selling a defective 8-core CPU as a 4-core CPU). You could imagine a setup where super-high-quality Holtzmann emitters are used for personal shields, and the lower-quality ones are used for suspensors or large shields. That would justify the widespread civilian use of shield and suspensor tech, while still limiting the number of shielded soldiers.
I can’t help but feel that some parts of Herbert’s worldbuilding were shaped in part by the previously mentioned perception that the medieval world was static in general as well as some general lack of knowledge of pre-industrial statecraft that could allow the Great Houses to get more resources from their fiefdoms.
Given how often one of Herbert’s themes or ideas blatantly undercuts one of the others, and how often stuff doesn’t make sense, him being wrong about history would be totally unsurprising.
Given that trained shield fighters are very expensive (like medieval knights), why wouldn’t there also be larger forces of cheaper, less well-equipped soldiers? The same way that a medieval polity could field both expensive armored cavalry, and peasant foot soldiers?
Probably because unshielded soldiers are vulnerable to industrial firepower, and there’s certain types of explosives that can be fired by the aircraft and frigates, slow launches that pass through shields. The explosion itself obviously doesn’t so they’re not effective against massed shielded infantry, but can take down unshielded troops. They’d not be worth fielding in a properly contested battlefield, so it’s not worth the salary and training time to make them effective in contact fighting with shielded troops.
Mind, I do vaguely recall the Harkonnen deployed unshielded troops with lasguns for suppressing insurrection, where they’d be fighting people without shields. Lasguns are tremendously effective in that role.
Sure, but isn’t the whole point that the Fremen eventually take down the shielded forces of the great houses, despite being unshielded? Guess I have to wait until next week.
Medieval knights and their well trained retainers would normally slaughter much larger numbers of rebellious / revolutionary peasants without much trouble, why most such attempted revolutions failed.
Plus your cheaper less well-equipped soldiers, like medieval peasants, will be well aware that against the expensive troops they don’t have much hope for survival. Which leads to a certain lack of enthusiasm in battle. Even if the noble commanders want to use them as sword-fodder, they can run away at the first opportunity.
I think that they do have personnel effectively. But they are not military manpower. I am pretty sure that CHOAM is Combined Mercantiles, a Venport company, 10,000 years later. Letting the houses buy into it extend the guild’s monopoly from transport to almost everything. And it lets the guild balance out resources to prevent threats from arising. “Go kill off this administratively capable republic and you get an extra directorship.” This lets them supposedly be neutral because they have no military. But they have lots of room to manipulate. Would you rather lead the guild or be the emperor? Well. Apart from having to become a navigator!
The great houses/lower level planet dwellers vaguely sounds like the Armstrong version of early Rome (recommended on this blog a few years ago), with (in theory for the Dune universe) mobile rich family/clan type things that fight and the fixed in place city/planet dwellers that includes most of the population and does most of the economy. Though at that point the similarities might disappear, but “mixed governments of powerful planet dwellers and great house members, with some separate rules for both” does add another alternative if someone is doing some storytelling or setting creation with any of this.
Somewhat tangential, but I seem to recall that there’s an incident in one of the first three Dune books in which A’s knife penetrates B’s shield, even though their relative speed would be too high to allow penetration were A’s knife moving at that speed and B stationary; Herbert explains that this could happen because it was B moving rather than A. The physicist in me had to resist the temptation to sling the book across the room over that one…
One possibility discussed elsewhere in these comments is that shields are actually quite sophisticated and include automatic self-regulating functions. It would kind of make sense if normal combat shield generators are designed to NOT actively interfere with the user’s movements, and as a result may ‘soften’ somewhat when the user is themselves moving rapidly.
I found myself thinking of an incident mentioned in the book “The Bible Unearthed”, about archeology in the southern Levant, where the king of a particular Bronze Age city-state under Egyptian overlordship, requested 50 or so soldiers to help defend against a neighbouring city-state which was casting eager eyes on his territory. That’s how I reconcile the population aspects of the Dune series – most planets have relatively low populations in spite of the time between their discovery and settlement and the current Dune-world day. Or put it another way, most planets for some reason or other, have found themselves in a similar situation to Earth around the time of Lapita – parts still unsettled, because they haven’t got the technology to make them liveable, or because they’ve had various plagues that cut back the population – I mean, it’s not everybody that gets to use the ultra-high-priced medication known as melange, just as people in the wealthy “North” have to subsidize institutions such as the Fred Hollows Foundation to get cataract surgery and the like out into the Pacific Islands.
Could it be that polearms are less effective than kindjals because if you run yourself upon them your shield protects you and now you’re in knife range.
First, you have to do that without getting stabbed on the way in.
Second, even if you can do that, nothing stops the other person having a pole arm _and_ a kindjal.
No mate, you don’t get stabbed, because he wrote that quote “your shield protects you” endquote.
Which makes the polearm an ornament you carry into combat to look cool. A heavy ornament.
I wonder whether very low literacy but skill transfer by rote learning, even among the sophisticated tradespeople, could resolve the instability question and lead to the critical vehemence of Leto’s complaints about the missing refinery materials and crews. Plus it would explain the criticality of propaganda.
So about the size of the armies being small. We never learn how big the Atreides army actually is, only that the Great House is moving to Arrakis. It’s reasonable to assume, given the nature of the move (It was sorta thrust upon them and they didn’t have a lot of time to get it done) they might have left a lot of their formal military behind DUE to the shipping costs imposed by the Spacing Guild. It’s mentioned again and again that Atreides is vulnerable moving to Arrakis, perhaps the reason being that they have to abandon most of their aircraft, ships, any armored vehicles they might have, etc. I haven’t read Dune Messiah but it seems to me that we might not see a lot of administrative capacity in the Atreides house precisely because they felt threatened, and rushed, moving to Arrakis and literally just focused on bringing as much firepower as possible so as to protect themselves in the short-term. Case in point Duke Leto’s first priority was to try to recruit the Fremen as auxiliary troops. I think it’s fairly reasonable that the Houses might have relatively large combined arms armies but at a militia level quality with a relatively small core force that is more highly trained and well equipped. And that core force is what Duke Leto moved to Arrakis, and that’s what the Harkonnens used to attack Arrakis as well. The size of these being limited by the Spacing Guild’s costs. I also think it might be reasonable for them to have quite a lot of admin personnel as well that we don’t see due to the abrupt move to Arrakis and the invasion happening not to long after that before the Atreides House is fully established.
Of course large local planetary militia armies doesn’t quite jive with the Medieval Europe vibe that Herbert was clearly going for so as the blog post says it’s quite fitting for armies to be small. I do perhaps think there’s reason for that not to be the case though given at least the first book. Using the first book as a guide for normal operating procedure doesn’t quite work because a major part of the book is that everything happening is very much not normal.
Stupid terminology question: Is there a meaningful distinction between a “house” and a “clan” (besides the former also referring to a building)?
Massively oversimplifying…
A “house” is a single aristocratic family, at any time there’s a designated head of the house, their consort, and (usually) children who will inherit the position according to some rule such as eldest son.
A “clan” is a larger, more loosely related group of people, in theory all with the same common ancestor at some time in the distant past. A clan might have a ruling house, might not.
Heuristic that often works: the members of a House probably won’t be marrying each other. (Yeah yeah Egyptian royal families are an exception) Clan members often marry each other.
Quibbles about the floating Sardaukar picture.
While the movie scene is indeed very cool, the inspiration may have come from the passage in Dune where Gurney Halleck and some Atreides survivors, plus a few Fremen guides, are taking shelter in hilly country. They get ambushed by Sardaukar from above, using suspensors to float down a rock face onto them.
Suspensors seem to be anti-gravity devices, but they just make things float, like a balloon. Transports (not ornithopters) using suspensors would still need props or jets to move around.
So firstly, if shields are really that expensive, and bullets are not in widescale use, then it might make sense to use some much cheaper, unshielded soldiers. Maybe the equilibrium involves an occasional spray of bullets, just to catch anyone who had a shield malfunction. Maybe the equilibrium involves a whole modern system, cover and concealment style war taking place without shields, around the shielded soldiers.
But also. There are various things that an industrial society can make that should be highly effective against these medieval knights + shield generators.
This includes various large pieces of construction equipment. The shields limit objects to the speed of a human, not to the force of a human. A giant hydraulic steel claw (of the sort used to disassemble old cars for scrap) would be highly effective against an armored human. Low-ish speed, superhuman force.
Also, poison gas weapons. WW1 era poison gas artillery should be effective against troops with shield generators. Assorted incendiary weapons like flamethrowers and airdropped napalm should also work. Razor wire could also be fairly effective.
This does get into questions of exactly which technologies they do and don’t have in Dune.
The more generally high tech they are, the harder it is to believe that they don’t have Something that would be better than medieval knights with shield generators.
The answer would be that bigger shields are even more expensive and rare than smaller shields. The Atreides palace, which is the most important building on the planet, has a shield, but that’s it, and the palace is immobile and the shield is a huge hunkin piece of machinery in the basement. The Frigates, the biggest spaceships that can land on planets, also. Anything else is apparently not worth the expense.
Anything dangerous and unshielded, such as artillery and giant claws, will get blown up in short order or at least sliced by lasguns.
Ornithopter bombing runs? Again, lasguns.
Flamethrowers? Turn some suspensors horizontally, watch the stream of flame returning to sender.
The most realistic outcome for Paul with his Fremen to actually win. Is to exploit the Political weaknesses of the Imperium and induce infighting and in battles to induce morale collapse in enemy armies to destroy them as they rout. Using his prescience.
The infighting is what would cause the vast majority of Imperial casualties.
Did anybody else notice that the explanation for a return to hand to hand combat, from Dune died the last few years with advent of mass quadcopter suicide drones?
The net is full videos of people getting hit by charges moving slower than 62km/h. And once an explosives denonates on the inside of the shield, I guess the effect of the explosion would be far worse, as the energy can not escape.
No computers.
They do actually have drones that can penetrate a shield, but they’re exceedingly rare and only used for assassinations.
They already have something like that with the hunter-seeker assassin tool. The seem to be extremely expensive though due to technological atrophy.
“Moreover, the richece themselves almost certainly are running large, administration-heavy bureaucratic organizations – those stillsuit factories and electronics importation operations do not run themselves – and so are actively building the class of educated bureaucrats that the nobility could harness (or the wealth to displace the nobility and rule themselves).”
Wouldn’t the upper levels of the richece tend to intermarry with the minor branches of the local Great House?
“We’re told that the reason for the minimal speed is to allow air-flow into and out of the shield, but my understanding is that even in room temperature air that feels quite still to us, the individual gas molecules move very fast (something like c. 450m/s), so a velocity-lower-limit wouldn’t work effectively as a ‘filter’ to let in air but not, say, bullets. But I am prepared to just accept that the shields work the way they are described, permitting slow-moving objects (and also air, for some reason) but repelling faster moving objects.”
Note that inside any solid object, atoms undergoing thermal movements move at velocities similar to air molecules.
The most obvious explanation is that the Holtzmann shield stops collective motions over certain size. Whereas individual molecules fly “below the radar” for the shield and pass through unhindered.
Wonder what the “mesh size” of the shield is.
“the velocity (and thus energy delivery) of any strike”
Please note that the energy is square of velocity times mass.
If the velocity of the strike is limited, one obvious way to increase the energy delivery is increase the mass. Such as employing clubs, warhammers and sledgehammers to try and crush the armour, or do damage under armour. Like Pyrrhos – he was wearing a helmet all right, but he got hit with a heavy tile. The helmet protected his skull, but did not stop his neck breaking.
If small objects can penetrate that does a poor job projecting against projectiles. My granddad used to use blanks for killing snakes, air can still transmit lethal amounts of kinetic energy and you dont need to worry about the ricochet. It wouldn’t be very hard to make a bullet that operates similarly to an anti tank shell; once the bullet slams into the shield it’s payload of small metal fragments (or even fluid if you need molecular size) shoots out of a nozzle due to inertia, penetrating the armor at a small point then emerging as a spray of death within the armor.
What does the shield actually do with projectiles that breach the speed limit?
Slow them to the speed limit?
Slow them to below speed limit, or even to stopping or bouncing?
Break them?
“This system is rules over in turn”
-> is ruled over
“I think makes a very logistical addition to the warfare described.”
Possibly “logistical” is meant to be “logical”, although I’m not sure.
Regarding lasguns versus shields, there are quite a lot of video games in the Dune setting, and to the best of my memory only one of them even tries to represent the interaction, and even then only very partially.
In Emperor: Battle for Dune, using a laser on a shield won’t cause a nuclear explosion, but will destroy both the shooter and the target. And this immediately made suicide attacks using lasguns a pretty good tactic. It’s effectiveness is somewhat limited by the (lore-inaccurate) fact that very few units actually use shields and the (lore-accurate) fact that not many units use lasguns, but where it works it works quite well.
Restricting this kind of use really requires some kind of (very heavily enforced) social taboo, and I’m skeptical about how well that would work.
Does it ever explicitly state whether they carry grenades to deal with any unshielded troops?
If they’re essentially avoiding lasguns because even a couple of scattered shields would make their use suicidal then it seems like conventionally armoured soldiers would actually stand a chance against the shielded troops that are restricted to using bladed weapons.
I think that the ‘normal’ situation in the setting is that there are so many different kinds of things that can kill unshielded soldiers but not shielded ones that very rarely do you see an unshielded army going “I like our chances” against an army known to have personal shields. All it takes is for some of the shielded soldiers to be carrying any of the things that work well against unshielded soldiers (machine guns, lasguns, having an armed ornithopter on call for support) and the whole thing turns into a disaster very fast for the unshielded force. Nobody wants to take that gamble.
But, of course, *digging trenches* is almost as good as shields against most of that arsenal. You lose mobility, but the difference in cost!
Digging trenches works in modern era warfare because the troops in the trenches are protected, **and** can more easily kill any enemy troops nearby who aren’t in trenches themselves, either by shooting directly with their own rifles and machine guns or calling down artillery fire.
Trenches in pre-modern warfare are used as obstacles, not protection, because without firearms there isn’t much someone in a trench can actually do to the enemy.
In the case of Dune warfare, sure the unshielded troops in a trench can’t easily be lasgunned or whatever, but they also can’t do anything to any shielded troops other than make offensive gestures with their swords / spears. The shielded troops can either laugh at them from a few metres distance or just walk / drive past the trench line.