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curved it is
(lemmy.world)
Well it's no 1896 pattern light cavalry saber...
InFeRiOr ErOpEaN WeApOnS!1
Sword but very curved and yet not very famous
(Ethiopian shotel)
Have you seen those warriors from Hammerfell? They've got curved swords.
Curved! Swords!
Damn, I want to go back and replay it now
While you were out there whacking your straight stick, I spent years studying the blade...
Katana snaps in half after first swing
The whole "Japanese steel was really weak" thing is as much of a myth as the whole "katanas are super powerful superior weapons" thing.
They're all just swords, and don't make that much of a difference either way.
According to whom?
The reason why Japanese iron is inferior is because of the source of the iron itself, they utilized iron sand instead of rock ore. Rock ore can be made up to 90% ferrous material while the iron sand contains as little as 2%.
This means when you smelt your source material into blooms of iron and slag, the blooms made from sand iron were much smaller. Instead of utilizing a single bloom to make a sword, the Japanese had to work several blooms together. Which is much more labour intensive, and can lead to a lot of imperfections in the final product.
This is why katanas were made out of so little material, and had to be handled with care. They were much more fragile pieces than similar swords made in Korea and China at the time.
Plus, the Japanese developed their iron working much later than their mainland contemporaries, as they never independently invented furnace technology. The technology for furnaces was imported, most likely from the Korean peninsula.
Katana's are weak on the flat side. They aren't really meant to be used for parrying. In fact, most sword fights in Japan would be over after the first or second swing. It was commonplace to hold the grip of a katana but not draw it in such a way so that your enemy has trouble judging how long your katana is and what is a safe distance to be from you. Once your opponent is in range, draw it quickly and kill them in one blow, ideally.
The act of killing your opponent in a single blow is called "nukitsuke" from "nukiuchi" meaning "to cut down an opponent" and "tsuke" meaning "to stop an opponent's attack before it begins".
The Sekiro and popular media image of extended katana fights didn't really happen, but if they did, there would almost certainly be some broken katanas.
I imagine it like a hockey match where when a stick breaks they just go get another one and continue on like nothing happened
I'm not into swords at all but I imagine it's a lot easier to rake the edge of the blade across a surface if it's angled away like a scimitar and more likely to just thwap something perpendicularly with a straight blade. 'Papercut theory' of sorts
Yeah they're a bit better at slashing whilst a straight sword is slightly better at thrusting. Typically a curved sword is a bit better whilst on horseback or whilst fighting unarmoured or lightly armoured opponents and straight blades are a bit better whilst fighting one-on-one and against somewhat more armoured opponents.
But these are slight differences and sword styles are also varied in each region, so the Japanese did develop swords which were more adapted to thrusting with reinforced tips and Europeans did develop swords which were more effective at slashing.
I think some people obsess over what swords are the best and the worst. In reality the style of sword was unlikely to be the major deciding factor in a one on one fight. The amount and quality of armour and the skill and capacity (Size and strength) of the fighters themselves are much bigger factors.
I've been watching a japanese sword master on YT demonstrating moves. It's very interesting how they decide when they pull it out which side of the curve they lead with, a choice they make in a split second, and the different attacks each method would have. Even European swords weren't just sharp hammers, they had practical moves and defenses lost in the movies.
most members of the warrior class were little more than brutish thugs. A handful would have taken the strategy of individual combat seriously and they would have done quite well.
The majority of the people they were fighting were lightly armored at best and they could get away with just swinging the sharp end at the unfortunate peasant conscripted to try to stop them.
There are plenty of examples of knights and samurai alike, falling for just the most obvious trap you could imagine. Templars charging in to open gates, samurai rushing to duel a guy who insulted them, in both cases blood drunk and stupid, children of privilege and in armor by accident of birth.
The Last Duel is a decent example of what happens when guys like that and up fighting each other.
We tend to have a romantic view of the past, but we have a great Instagram filter between us and then. Reality is ugly and violent. Few people are artists, even fewer are talented artists. This is true whether they're painting or drawing blood.
I worked with a super nice weird guy. He was always bringing in his 3d printed warhammer sets to the shop. Respect. One day he was talking about his sword. I was like, did you buy the sword in a mall? And he said yes, he bought it in a mall. I should have let it go. Anyways I am not friends with that guy.
The same guy would write a five-page essay about how much similar curved swords like scimitars and sabres suck, and might actually die if he is shown a khopesh or a shotel.
Japanese soft power funded by US is doing its job
this post was submitted on 27 Sep 2024
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