While Dune is certainly famous for swords and knives (with or without shields), there are a few handheld weapons that can do some damage from a distance.
Herbert being Herbert, there’s not much in terms of technical specifications. There’s plenty of scenes across his books where a character would be described holding “a gun” or a “a pistol” without so much as a caliber, let alone a manufacturer.
But we do get some that are described in a little bit of detail.
Heads up: today’s edition will be one for the purists, meaning we’re only focusing on the core canon and skipping the chandler pistols and cellguns of the expanded universe and the weirding modules (do we consider those guns?) of the 1984 movie.
Explore the lore - what we’re covering today:
SPOILER WARNING
Includes content from the core canon.
Lasguns
Fremen lasguns vs Harkonnen harvester in Dune: Part Two (2024)
Lasguns are the do-it-all energy weapons of Dune, firing white hot laser beams to cut through anything and everything. Except of course, shields.
LASGUN: continuous-wave laser projector. Its use as a weapon is limited in a field-generator-shield culture because of the explosive pyrotechnics (technically, subatomic fusion) created when its beam intersects a shield.
Fire a lasgun at someone wearing a personal shield, and you get subatomic fusion at both the shield and the lasgun itself. The result? Two explosions, unpredictable yield, and a very dead everyone within blast radius.
Sometimes it's a firecracker. Sometimes it's a nuclear bomb. The uncertainty is the main deterrent.
We know that (just like shields) they have adjustable intensity settings, from narrow cutting beams to broader, more destructive blasts.
Setting his lasgun on maxibeam, Teg pressed the trigger. A fiery arc swept across the slope below him. Trees burst into flame and crashed. People screamed. The weapon would not perform long at this discharge level but while it did the carnage produced its desired effect.
And while they’re the only energy weapons on this list, there’s a surprising amount of variation to them.
In Heretics alone we get long lasguns, large lasguns, small lasguns, bulky lasguns, armored lasguns and a lot of field-style lasguns - whatever that might mean, since we don’t get really get a description of their differences.
The battle beyond the buildings grew louder. He heard hoarse shouts, the high hissing of burners and the lower buzz of large lasguns mingled with tinny zip-zips of hand weapons.
🔒 In the full article:
Fremen weapons
Stock-standard military fire arms
Assassin shooters
One that sounds like a weapon but isn’t
One that isn’t a weapon but totally could be
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