I like The Big Bang’s take on Power Rings – the Golden Age Green Lantern’s ring didn’t work against wood, and the Silver Age’s ring was powerless against yellow
“I don’t like that both superheroes can be beaten by a number 2 pencil”
Now I’m trying to remember the author who had mirror-finished armor as defense against laser pistols. Still Niven?
Regarding Niven, the Kzinti Lesson may be true in real life, but also impractical.
In Star Trek, both TOS and TNG, the pistol phasers had no trigger guards.
Hello, Friend Troubleshooter! Be mindful of any Commie Mutant Traitors around! Praise the Computer!
Explain, please?
Mirror-finish armor sounds a bit like Starship troopers, maybe Harrison’s Forever War.
Also for Niven, the slide-selector on the pistol that went all the way to “nuclear explosion” (The Soft Weapon).
Mirror-finished armor would actually work reasonably well against a laser, so long as the mirror finish isn’t damaged by some other weapon first.
But the problem with just matching colors is that most colors we see are not monochromatic. If you have a shirt that reflects, say, both red and green light, it’ll look yellow, but that doesn’t mean that it’s going to reflect yellow light.
As for bat’leths, I’m fond of the Mimbari traditional ceremonial weapon, from Babylon 5. It’s a quarterstaff. They use some fancy alien technology to enable it to easily collapse down to pocket size or expand to full size for use, but for actually fighting with it, it’s just a good old fashioned stick. You ask me for one weapon that aliens are sure to have actually used, and the stick is it.
I agree about the mirror finish – it’s great as long as it’s perfectly reflecting. The enemy of Perfectly Reflecting Mirrors is DIRT. You get a spot of dirt on it, and it absorbs the energy from the laser and it heats up. The heat damages your perfectly reflecting surface, which starts to absorb itself, so the next shot heats up the dirt and the damaged mirror, which then damages still more mirror, and so on. The process bootstraps, eventually blowing a hole in your mirror.
This isn’t some theoretical idea – I’ve seen high power laser mirrors get destroyed in a handful of shots from just this behavior.
The solution is to use a mirror that either can’t be damaged by heat (HA! Larry Niven’s stasis fields do this. Call me when one’s available) or that self-repairs. I knew a guy who built liquid metal mirrors for precisely this reason.
As for the bat’leth, its fatal flaw is the damned thing has no reach. You hold the thing close to your body, and it’s stable as a rock. It’s clumsy to extend with one hand from one end, though, so a guy comes along with an epee or a foil and pokes you in the eye, because a sword’s got a reach and the tip can move swiftly. The bat’leth is fine for close quarters where your enemy can’t move away (maybe the Klingons used them in tunnel warfare, or something), but a guy with your quarterstaff can stay out of reach and keep bashing Worf over the head.
IIRC, the ‘Soft Weapon’ required some funny jiggery-pokery to get to the really destructive matter conversion mode. The slide just did a number of fairly mundane but useful things, causing the protagonist to speculate that it was a spy’s weapon, but not especially good for a foot soldier. Hence, he tried the jiggery-pokery.
Now when you ASK the spy weapon how to get to the cool setting, that’s when the fun starts.
Ditto for the Sandman guns in the Logan’s Run movie.
At least the book had the good sense to model them after wild west revolvers.
Or, just use something which doesn’t get bounced by mirrors.
Are you kidding? Is there any reason at all that anyone besides R2D2 should be piloting the ship at all?
For that matter, why is there even such a thing as an “astromech” droid? IOW, why would you ever want to take all the avionics out of an X-Wing and let it go on crazy adventures?
Now that I think about it, given we’ve SEEN how slow phasers are…battles have to be close. Photon torpedoes arn’t all that fast either.
Yes, basket hilts could also work. But how are you going to get the blade to curve? 
Also, when you are attempting to stab the other guy, he could grab the blade, force it backwards, and stab you with the other end of it.
No radar for your jamming, no lasers to deflect
Just armor made for ramming, and bullets worth respect
–Leslie Fish, “The Discards”
Which is why it is worthless as a piercing weapon. The concave curve on it actually inhibits slashing. It doesn’t have the range of a quarter-staff.
You might be able to use it like an axe.
Well, really, any robotic sci-fi weapon that misses. Or moves slooowly while croaking “Exterminate, exterminate” or “Kill the Robinsons!”. Granted, once you add higher cognitive functions to something, there’s no reason it would make decisions faster than a human, but the weapons subsystems? Once it decided to shoot something, that something should be dead in a millisecond. The Terminator movies and Robocop got it mostly right – except where the subject was protected by plot armor, they pretty much killed what they aimed for with deadly efficiency.
Same thing with blasters and lasers. Is this the future or isn’t it? I have cameras now that can do sufficient recognition to pick out faces. Why would you build a optical-based weapon if it doesn’t have target recognition and lock? Especially if you’re going to be using those weapons in space ships?
Sharks with freakin’ laser beams.