Battle ready swords

It’s interesting to see how much we romanticize swords. There’s some serious John Henry-type romanticizing of the issue going on in this thread. Most of it appears to be an unwillingness to separate the clearly scientific/engineering/materials side of the equation from the artistic side.

As Tin Wisdom mentions above, there is a highly objective materials side of the equation. For a sword, I’d argue that this part of the equation dominates the effectiveness of a sword, as a tool. There’s certainly a lot of artistry and empiricism in the design of the sword (e.g., ideal length, curve, weight, etc.), but once you decide on a design, it becomes engineering. Given some other, less romanticized instrument, would we be sitting here debating whether a sword made with all of the benefits of modern material and manufacturing science be superior? Did they make better nails, horseshoes, or hammers in the pre-industrial age?

One can admire the craftsmanship and artistry of the ancient swordsmiths, without falling into a trap of thinking that the artistry can transcend the limits of the materials. We like live music and handcrafted things not because they’re necessarily more objectively perfect, but because they show the hand of man. But there’s no need to deceive ourselves into saying that a smith could build a better car (or sword) by hand.

The whole discussion reminds me of when Bjorn Borg tried to make a comeback with a wooden racket in the graphite racket age. Nostalgia can only take you so far.

Swinging to the other side to something that focuses more on artistry, vintage violins are an example of something where many people think that modern manufacturing can’t match ancient crafting techniques, on an objective basis. Even there, there’s evidence that its really just in the mind of the listener. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/10750846/Stradivarius-Youd-be-better-off-with-a-modern-violin.html

I don’t want a lightsaber, whatsoever. Those sound INCREDIBLY fucking dangerous.

Heh, yeah. I purchased a Spyder III Arctic Blue laser from Wicked Lasers when they had it on sale. The safety precautions for a simple 1 watt blue laser are daunting. You can simply, permanently lose your eyesight if you fuck around with it. The thought of a light-saber is just too much. Lose an arm? Cut a leg off? No thanks. At least the laser has a safer low power setting and filters that cut down the output even more. Not to mention always wearing safety glasses.

Obligatory. Plus Skall rocks.

LOL yeah, I was actually thinking of that specific video when I posted my comment, but I was too lazy to dig it up. :) Thanks!

I think you’re over-analyzing it a bit. This started because I mentioned that I had read, in a book on medieval weaponry and warfare, that some examples of medieval swords were at least as good if not better than what modern day swordsmiths can make. I don’t think anyone was ever claiming that, from a materials standpoint, modern technology couldn’t make a billet of steel that would be technically superior to anything made by hand. The only caveat that really came up was that, no matter how good something is in theory, you can’t really be certain unless you use it for the task for which it was designed. In this case, as no one actually whales on armored people with broadswords any more, there’s really no data on how well a modern sword made with modern tech and machines would actually work. I guess it would work exceptionally well, but then, there are a lot of factors that go into whether a weapon is the right one for the task I suppose.

And yes, we do romanticize swords. Actually, we as a people pretty much romanticize (or fetishize) most everything, particularly weapons. The same thing happens with guns, though there, technology is more key because we are indeed shooting people still.

But yeah, if we suddenly decided we needed a legion of people armed with longswords, I’m pretty sure we could make really bitchin’ blades that would be super sharp, durable, and effective. Of course, medieval blades worked well enough too, so after a certain point it really doesn’t matter except aesthetically. And swords have always been aesthetic artifacts as well as tools, from day one.

This comment literally ignores advances in material and manufacturing sciences. With modern techniques, we can ascertain relevant properties such as tensile strength, yield strength, hardness, etc., with extreme precision. It’s not trial and error for every sword made. At best, it’s about collecting data (from practitioners) to determine the properties that you want for your ideal sword. Even more importantly, with modern manufacturing, we can make nearly the exact same piece of hardware, over and over again, avoiding most of the variance you get with hand-smithing.

Again, assume that the ancient blacksmith literally perfected the art of hand-smithing-- that you can’t get any better by hand than they were. That’s the best that your book could claim. They would still fall far short of modern materials and modern manufacturing. Again, that’s some serious John Henry, steel driver, romanticizing of what amounts to manufacturing a piece of hardware.

Yeah I’ve been reading this from the beginning and I have one question:

If I use modern technology to build the best sword possible, do you think that I haven’t used prototypes on the best armor that we have today? Metal, Kevlar, Dragon any type? I would be an idiot not to test it, wouldn’t I? If I am not building for show, I test it, don’t I?

[QUOTE=TheWombat;3610815 I don’t think anyone was ever claiming that, from a materials standpoint, modern technology couldn’t make a billet of steel that would be technically superior to anything made by hand. [/QUOTE]

You realize old swords aren’t really magical right?

Because modern steel is vastly superior to the old stuff in just about every measurable metric. Making things by hand isn’t sorcery, it’s science. Imperfect science without accurate measurements and a great deal of trail error and guesswork.

Well you could… walk outside and beat on an armored test dummy with a million sensors on it. Not that people actually hit people in plate armor with swords anyway (unless they wanted to waste their time and then die).

I don’t understand where you think that we can’t test things in the modern age. It isn’t hard to make a sword and a suit of armor and hit it. Hell you could make a computer program that did it and told you more info than any ancient testing could ever hope to. And you could do millions of iterations on top of it. Just because we aren’t stabbing people doesn’t really mean anything. Human beings die the same way today they did back in 1432, only now we actually know more about how they work. I mean any large chunk of sharp metal is going to be about the same, but saying we can’t make better pieces of sharp metal today seems kind of silly. It isn’t like old swords are magical, they’re just pieces of sharpened steel.

Gah, no one, not I, nor anyone else, said you couldn’t make better pieces of sharp metal. The question was whether people THEN could make, on occasion, pieces of sharp metal as good as what we generally make today. No one is denying that modern tech could, if someone wanted to, make the BEST SWORD EVAH. But no one does. That’s the point, really; there is neither market nor need for swords today, other than for aesthetic or historical collection purposes, and thus it’s really a moot point.

The whole discussion was started because people were pondering whether modern technology without cultural need trumps strong cultural need with lower technology. Definitely the consensus is technology wins, and it’s hard to argue against that given what’s been brought up. I’ll concede that. But I still remain skeptical that any amount of dummies, sensors, modeling, and non-combat testing for any weapon will give you as good feedback as actual use. Hell, our modern weapons just as often end up performing oddly in real-world situations, contrary to all of their testing. I’m not so sure swords would fare any better, even if they are certainly more simple.

But it’s a rather silly discussion I’ll admit. If I really need a super sword, I’ll get one from the technocrats!

I think the point that Wombat’s book was making was about tested in combat. Yeah, we can do the science and the manufacturing but in the absence of use our knowledge is theoretical, and our testing is based on our knowledge of how we think a sword would be used.

I remember how much our understanding of the topic has changed. We used to think swords weighed alot more (back in the 70-80s), the better to batter through the opposition, until people realized you could not fight with such heavy weapons. Now we better understand the reasons behind the different designs of historical swords and thier uses. I think with more people involved in re-enactments of western martial arts, our understanding is better but still theoretical. Its why alot of the guys doing this always go back to the source materials: The fight books written back when the sword was still used in combat.

Shifting topic, I have a rapier, bought many years ago. If I had it to do over again, I would have not bought it. It just sits there. I could have gotten a bow and learned archery. I could have gotten a training sword and taken up fencing or western swordplay.

It’s much more complicated than that: what qualities are required in the metal and what shape and structure a weapon should take, depends a lot on the fighting style it’s going to be used with. And there are no fighting styles nowadays, they’re all defunct (completely defunct in the West, for centuries, more recently defunct but still preserved somewhat in some parts of Asia). Even with the fight books, it’s extraordinarily difficult to reconstruct these things from drawings and descriptions. There’s a hell of a lot more to it than “slash or pierce?” So some nerd cluelessly hacking away at a dummy with sensors is pretty useless really. And most supposed “experts” aren’t really all that much better.

I eventually discovered that my initial pick, and the Canadian forge that crafts it, is actually the best choice in the end, and will order it towards the end of the year.

I’m sort of hemming/hawing over purchasing it - it would be cool, but I could do a lot of more interesting things with the money, too. I’ll see if I’m still interested early next year!

We of course will expect pics. Lots of 'em. Preferably with you whacking watermelons or something.

If the fighting styles are defunct and non-reconstructable then how can you state with authority that the properties of the metal matter to the fighting style? I also think history demonstrates that fighting styles will adapt quickly to available weapons so to a certain degree the weapon manufacturers can just do their best within simple categories like “light as possible while still acceptably strong/sharp.”

I also think that going on about fighting styles sort of misses the point. A serious weapon doesn’t get a fancy art developed around it. Fancy arts are for aristocrats with too much free time. A serious weapon has be mass deployed to infantry and learned quickly. Infantry need a basic drill they can master in a few months of training tops. For the last few centuries prior to rifles making all melee obsolete, the sharp metal weapon of choice for infantry was the bayonet. That’s not a complex weapon with subtle metals. It just needs to be reasonably strong and pointy for thrusting.

They’re defunct as living arts, but we know enough to know that they were extremely sophisticated - wrt to Western MA, from the mediaeval/renaissance fight books, and wrt Eastern MA from still-twitching remnants like the koryu in Japan, and family/clan martial arts systems in China, India, etc.

I also think history demonstrates that fighting styles will adapt quickly to available weapons so to a certain degree the weapon manufacturers can just do their best within simple categories like “light as possible while still acceptably strong/sharp.”

How should it taper? At what point along the blade to taper? What curvature, if any,and what type of curve? Should the cross-section be an I-beam (wide runnel) or a wedge (with a smaller runnel)? What kind of hilt?

Or do you think manufacturers just randomly made weapons of various shapes and sizes, and people had to adapt or die? ;)

I also think that going on about fighting styles sort of misses the point. A serious weapon doesn’t get a fancy art developed around it. Fancy arts are for aristocrats with too much free time.

I don’t think so. In a time when people killed each other with cutlery, and killing people that way was the main way to kill people, people practiced a lot, even commoners. The idea of clueless, skilless idiots being conscripted doesn’t match the reality of what one glimpses in the fight books - and even earlier, going right back to the ancient Greek city states; or looking to the East, the way the civil service system in China included military lore, and military training of locals was part of the responsibility of civil servants, particularly the aristocratic ones.

To take an example I’m familiar a bit with the detail of. What’s generally known as Tai Chi, or Taijiquan, is a martial art that originally comes from a village called Chenjiagou in Henan, and was originally the property of the Chen family/clan that lives there. For several centuries, the clan was locally famous for producing bodyguards for merchant caravans, and contributing heavily to bandit defence in the locality. This was a simple farming village. People did all the hard farm work, but still found time to train - and still do.

Now, originally, the “hand form” (the slow training movement form generally known as Tai Chi) was part of foundational training to be able to use weapons with an extremely unusual set of body skills. And there are a few weapons forms in Taijiquan. However, there doesn’t seem to be much paired practice or combative training for their use left (unlike the koryu in Japan). But at one time, the whole point of the hand form training would be to lead up to being able to use weapons skillfully. This general kind of scenario is repeated through a lot of the obscure Chinese MA - they are localized remnants of what were once things people living in villages used to stay alive.

No, as I understand history and from what I’ve read, when melee was common, people of all walks of life trained as much as their interest and spare time would allow. Because if your chances, as an adult male, of being conscripted or dragged into some form of melee combat or battle was quite high, as it was in all times and places prior to the 19th/20th century, there was a high ROI in even a bit of training.

Obviously, the more free time you had, the more time you had to hone those sorts of skills, and that would favour aristocrats to some extent. But that can be exaggerated. Being an artistocrat during most times in history in most cultures has had duties as well as privileges. So some level of skill was common to most males. Even the equivalent of “sport” fighting was common for youth in many cultures - kids learning basic wrestling styles, etc., as a foundation for more military forms of combat (in Chenjiagou, as in many villages in China, kids commonly learn Shuai Jiao, kind of like generic Chinese wrestling, in the same way that in the early to mid 20th century, many British kids would know a bit of wrestling or boxing - but those kids who learn Taijiquan go on to learn a different from of Shuai Jiao that’s incorporated into Taiji).

A serious weapon has be mass deployed to infantry and learned quickly. Infantry need a basic drill they can master in a few months of training tops. For the last few centuries prior to rifles making all melee obsolete, the sharp metal weapon of choice for infantry was the bayonet. That’s not a complex weapon with subtle metals. It just needs to be reasonably strong and pointy for thrusting.

The bayonet isn’t used in a context where melee is the main form of combat, it’s a fallback, a vestige. (I can’t remember where, but I recently heard a comment from a soldier who served in Vietnam talking about how soldiers often used rifles as clubs in melee, as much as they used the bayonets :) )

Again, while of course it did sometimes happen that militia would be untrained, or unskilled relative to aristocrats or professional soldiers, or had to be trained from scratch, I think it was probably quite rare - in fact, usually when you see that, it’s in the context of a lament that they’re not better prepared, with the implicit expectation that they ought to have been (as in “this country’s going to pot, wasn’t like that in my grandfather’s day”, etc.).

Think of it like keyboard skills today. Because people have to type and text, they either gradually learn to hunt and peck fast, or they invest a little bit of time to learn how to type properly; of those who learn to type properly, some go on to be extremely fast and accurate. But most people know how to use a keyboard; some level of keyboard skill is pretty much ubiquitous in our society. That’s because that skillset is necessary to learn in order to survive/thrive in our society.

It isn’t necessary to learn how to use melee weapons in our society, in order to survive or thrive. But it once was - and in parts of Asia, the time when it once was is much more recent.

Another way to look at it is: why did guns become popular? The main reason is that, relative to the level of proficiency in melee weaponry needed to kill efficiently on demand, training for proficiency in firing a gun well enough to kill efficiently on demand, is much easier and quicker. Unless one is talking about something like a mugger with a knife against an unarmed civilian, melee skill (weapon vs. weapon) involves the whole body, and requires a high degree of fitness in the whole body, and persistence in training for several years. Not so with guns. (Of course there’s skill involved, and plenty headroom with guns too, but you get the point.)

Not quite correct. I would agree that today the bayonet is a vestige, but we are less than 200 years removed from a time when it was a primary infantry weapon. The invention of Muskets did not make melee obsolete. Far from it. It took modern rifles to do that. I believe the first war in history where the shooting deaths first gained the ascendancy over the melee deaths was the American Civil War. The reason it took rifles so long to catch on was because the long muskets with bayonets attached made decent pikes and infantry commanders were really hesitant to give that up. It’s also part of why the whole period of the rifles rise to battlefield dominance, from the Crimean War to the American Civil War, had such bloody pointless battles. The infantry commanders of the time were still rooted in melee and formation fighting ways of thinking and artillery+rifles just slaughtered armies who tried that crap.

So I apologize if I was unclear, but the point I was trying to make is that we don’t have to go that far back in history to find examples of people using sharp metal things as a primary weapon. Looking at the variety in designs present for bayonets or cavalry sabres in the 1750-1850 period, all of which seems to have been roughly effective on the battlefield, doesn’t leave me convinced that there are intricate design considerations that would require deep consultation with masters of an art to really understand. A few days studying some classic designs and I bet a modern engineer could design a pretty damn good sword.

I’d respond in detail to the rest of your post, but I’ll just boil it down to this. I think it’s really cool that you’ve studied history and other cultures to that degree, but I think you are over-romanticizing the culture of martial arts and weapons.

I’m just going to pick this snippet out of your excellent post (i’m Feng Shou trained along with a few other arts), as in relation to all our fairly recent historic past, the time you were able to spend on training was all important. From my personal background with archery, i know exactly how important training was for the Longbow men of medieval britian, and in particular (due to the bows cultural significance) how prized the Welsh were for this. Their bodies were ‘deformed’ by the large musculature they developed through training from childhood, and these were just ‘peasants’ that also had to do all the other work in a feudal society, so it seems likely their whole lives would be dominated by the art.

Also for the nobility, that ability to pretty much spend time in constant training for battle (if they liked it off course, and that often made the difference in having a ‘warrior’ king or not, as who was going to ‘force’ a ruler to train if they didn’t care for it?!) was what helped shaped many countries of today. So IF the nobles of a realm were serious and gifted about the ways of war, that was the path to dominance, in this ancient, less ‘civilized’ era. We also need to add ‘wealth’ to the extra time and quality of training the aristocratic class could use. As wealth got you the best armour and weapons which further increased your ability on the battle field.

It’s not so different today really, but instead of individuals it is more about the outlay a country puts into it’s military. Thus the Americans are the most capable of destruction in our time.

But getting back to the ancient past, I completely agree that everyone, from the most lowly peasant to the highest of nobility (the King/Queen(in some context, generally pre-Christian)) would invest quite some time and effort in training for war duty, as in that feudal society it was expected as part of the way people lived.

I can understand your point, but I don’t think I am making that mistake. I’m aware of the dangers of over-romanticizing, but there are also dangers to over-simplifying based on a limited dataset, and thinking you’re being scientific ;)