If it's about sending a message, then the item itself is the conveyor of the message, not an unrecognizable but more efficient substitute. The guillotine is a recognisable symbol of people rising up and seizing power from the criminal ruling class. It is a warning and a threat.

If you plan on actually executing people, then sure - optimize all you want, or just go with a bullet to the brain.

But as a symbol, the guillotine is powerful.

I like your approach here of making a clearly wrong statement just to get more activity on this important topic

I will add yet another comment that guillotines are neither complicated nor require much material. you could make a sturdy one with less than a dozen 2x4s, some screws, a scrap piece of rope, and whatever junk metal you have lying around that's around 24x8 (which you need regardless of how fancy the frame itself is)

that said, mobile ones seem like they would also have a purpose

Ton of materials?

It's just a large frame to hold a big knife dropped by letting go of a rope. The hardest thing to get would be the blade, and the whole thing could be constructed in under 2 hours.

Guillotines are too tame for modern audiences. Wood chippers are fresh and exciting.

Because we don't see what real, actual, guillotines do.

I accidentally saw a guillotine-execution on DuckDuckGo ( they used to be much worse than they are now, for including stuff you don't want to see )

and .. it's kinda hard to communicate how WRONG that is, to chop a human-life to that degree of .. to just-now-dead..

interesting: I can't communicate how wrong/horrible it was, through words!

Anyways, there's some German word, looks sorta like schedenfruede or something like that..

it means "finding enjoyment in other people's suffering", and old-people don't find it funny, generally, because old-people have experienced enough diversity-of-suffering to be able to understand other-people's perspectives..

The more one sees what people mean, the more one has to choose a self-defense-for-one's-psyche strategy:

either sensitivity, in which case one has to avoid the coarser & worse stuff in life, systematically .. XOR

de-sensitization, in which case one can joke about it, push it, even do it, because one is making one's essence become mechanical/dead to what one's engaging.

There's a story of Hinduism, during the British rule of India..

Some privileged people got together to do some hunting..

1 of those was Indian, he'd used guns, before, he just hadn't destroyed someone's life, before..

After he shot a naturally-magnificent animal, & saw it dying as a result of his bullet, he put down his rifle, & left, never returning to that kind of culture, again..

IF sensitivity is one's path, like making oneself into a combination microscope+telescope, spiritually, THEN .. this kind of reaction becomes inevitable.

You just can't accept what a real guillotine-execution is.

Joking-about such stuff is fine until you actually understand what it means .. & then .. you can't joke about it, anymore.

Like Ukranians are unlikely to be able to joke about what Russia did to Mariupol, you know?

It's too live-wire fresh a wound..

Having seen what a 1-to-2-second long video of a guillotine-execution looked like, I'd now say that only the evil could do them, repeatedly.

_ /\ _

Same reason we still "hang up" the phone.

Who is joking?

You can make them modular, with telescoping rails, for portability. The blade needs to be weighted, but the weight can consist of a stack of weights, like on gym equipment. In fact, you could probably repurpose a bench press machine into a guillotine with a few minor modifications.

Use a log splitter with a different blade, higher capacity valance and an accumulator for faster action. Strengthen the frame and maybe add a dampener for the end of stroke so things last longer. Reloading ca be controlled by smaller hoses.

Nobody is wanting to build a guillotine. it's simply a symbolic reference to the French Revolution.

if it were up to me, i would use a chainsaw