About Weapons

     In the Star Trek original series episode Amok Time, Captain James T. Kirk has to fight Spock with a Vulcan "lirpa," a spear-sized weapon with a heavy weight at one end and a fan-shaped blade on the other.  It's a nasty-looking thing, but consider: the weapons used by most cultures are hunting and farming tools, adapted for war.

     What good is a gadget with a hammer or bludgeon at one and and a slicer at the other?  Clearly, it's for a creature like a mussel or an oyster, but much larger: Spock's ancestors would hunt the dry and dusty bottoms of the dead seas of Vulcan until they found the buried lair of the Giant Vulcan Clam, dig down to it, give the beast a sharp rap on the shell with the heavy end and it either cracks or opens up to see what all the fuss is, at which point the hunter's helper pours in a bucket of salt and hot sauce (or possibly Worcestershire) while the hunter reverses the lirpa and scoops the thing out with the sharp end: dee-lish!

     Of course, Star Trek's Vulcans are vegetarians, and per the fictional future history, they have been for thousands of years.  The huge molluscs the lirpa was invented to hunt are probably extinct.  But once upon a time, long ago...!