Need opinions on the weapons available in my world

Lhun · Apr 9, 2009

l_clausewitz said:
Only applies to styles that haven't been used in mortal combat for a considerable amount of time.

I'm pretty sure there's no swordfighting style to which this does no apply.

You can stab even with deeply-curved blades against well-armored opponents. I was pretty much untrained and rather clueless when I tried thrusting with a scimitar against a dummy clad in mail and padding, but I managed to get a full three inches of the point in. Somebody specifically trained in dealing a curved thrust would probably have been able to achieve even better results.

The problems with a curved blade are that you do not get a direct line of force from the grip to the tip when thrusting, the curve means more material has to be sheared away to penetrate deeply, and it can get stuck easier.
Is it still possible to thrust? Yes. But it is significantly less effective. You can also pierce chain with a rapier, but it is not the weapon of choice to use against an armored opponent. It's a question of priorities. Having a curved blade makes it noticeably less effective against armor, and at thrusting, if you don't have a good reason for using a curved blade, well, don't use one.

Only if the wielder is trained in the techniques of the rapier! Don't be silly about this.

You are, actually. I have no idea how you got the impression that i'm talking about people using unfamiliar weapons and compare the people using weapons they're trained for.

However, if you give the man the proper weapon for his training, he would probably have had a fair chance even in a dissimilar-weapon match.

I've seen matches between a fighter with a rapier and one with a Katana, as well as heard some expert's opinions on them. (well, people who i'd consider experts)
Anyway, from what i've seen and read, the fighter using a katana has a chance, but is noticeably disadvantaged. His advantage is that the katana allows for much more powerful blows than the rapier, which doesn't matter for injuring the opponent, but means he can't reliably parry. However the rapier has a signifcantly longer reach (mostly due to the one-handed style it is used) and is faster than the katana. The speed difference isn't that great, the katana isn't a slow and heavy cavalry sword after all, but it is slower.
I should note that with rapier i mean a straight, dual-edged sword with a stiff blade a few centimetres wide. The names of weapons from the renaissance are even more ambiguous than the names of medieval weapons.
Anyway, not an Epeé with only the tip sharp enough to injure.

Remember that Europeans also made much use of the short, curved, single-edged Messer,

Messer(plural) were cheap weapons, as even the name indicates (knife). There isn't even a real common design, pretty much anything with one edge was a Messer.

and that George Silver (among others) took the bother of teaching specific techniques for use against the rapier by a man armed with a shorter cutting sword.

Yes, especially in tight places, a rapier (of any kind) is too long to be used effectively. Which is not an argument for a similarly long but heavier sword though.
And with enough space, even allowing for all the expertise of Silver himself, it is incredibly hard to get past the point of a rapier without getting skewered, or cut if you managed to get close but couldn't block the blade or swordarm.
And additionally, many rapier fencer used a second short blade in the offhand for exactly such a situation. (and for parrying)

Which the Japanese didn't face--much. And when they did during the invasion of Korea, they had things like pikes, naginatas, bows, and arquebuses....

So what? I'm not arguing that the japanese were incompetent at weapons design, i'm arguing that the katana is not a good design. There are many example of stupid european designs as well, and there are many examples of good japanese weapons. The japanese bow for example is a very interesting weapon design, probably not quite as good as the mongolion (or parthian) bows, but a very interesting solution to the problem of trying to use a longbow on horseback.

(I find this fixation on sword and shield a little odd. The only people I know of who fought primarily with sword and shield and would be relevant to this discussion are Roman legionaries (who also made much use of spears and javelins), late-medieval and Renaissance European targeteers, and Chinese broadsword-and-shield men (both of which were fairly specialized rough-terrain troops, not the kind of men who formed up the main lines of battle). So why such a big fuss over it?)

Because it is extremely effective as the romans demonstrated. The probably biggest problem is that it requires a professionally trained military, with good logistics to provide standardized equipment, something that didn't really reappear until about the napoleonic wars.

l_clausewitz · Apr 11, 2009

Lhun said:
It is possible to do it, but it is still in the way. And you really can't put a handguard on a two-handed grip.

You can. The crossguard on medieval swords is already a very effective handguard in and of itself. But if you mean complex hilts . . . the Swiss did just that with their Schweizersabel. Which was a curved, single-edged two-handed sword to boot.

There is no actual medieval definition for any of the names for european weapons.

Nonsense. Existing medieval manuscripts, such as the manuals of Hans Talhoffer and (pseudo-Hanko Doebringer) are quite explicit in defining the longsword as a two-handed weapon.

Hell, it's even impossible to translate those from one language into another precisely. (Try that with Rapier or Morningstar for example. The weapon which translates as longsword in my language best is a straight, single-handed sword. What you call a Longsword would translate literally as two-handed sword.

What language? I've never, ever seen the term "longsword" used in a serious medieval or Renaissance martial-art context to refer to a single-handed sword, which was almost always called "sword" without further embellishments except in infrequent cases where there was a specific need to distinguish it from other forms.

Yeah well, have to ask the OP for that. I just assumed as logical that undead that are immune to pierced or cut organs are also not affected by concussions.

If damaging their central nervous system is the way to disable them, then the concussion delivered by a strong blow can still be a very effective way for bringing them down.

"Langmesser" actually not "Langes Messer" the second would be a description, not the name of a weapon, meaning any long knife.
Langmesser were commonly straight, double-edged, and weapons for war, i.e. not intended for use in tight places. These are some examples.

Please read some book that gives actual scholarly information about European edged weapons. Aside from the second sword on the left, all the swords in that picture are longswords, bastard swords, or even two-handed swords, not the Langes Messer--which is perhaps best represented by Albion Armorers' modern reproduction

You need to keep the big picture in mind. In the Napoleanic wars, armor was pretty much out of fashion already. Only Cuirasses were used, and even those pretty much only for cavalry and of weak quality. Somewhat effective against swords, not at all against muskets. This allowed the swords to be optimized for use against lightly armored opponents. If your main purpose is to strike in passing from horseback, against an unarmored target, a relatively light, and curved blade is a good choice. Unarmored means cutting works, wich works better with curved blades (cut better, don't get stuck as often), and horseback means you don't really need a second edge. However, the sabers most commonly in use in the napoleonic war were not heavy enough to reliably pierce medieval armor. (Which they didn't have to pierce, but which would make them poor weapons in a medieval fantasy setting)

You must be joking. Many 18th-century and Napoleonic cavalry swords--both straight and curved--were heavier and had a more tip-heavy balance than medieval swords of comparable length and breadth.

Yeah, but so what? If you want to compare swords you need to assume that all wielders are about equally trained in their use. I wouldn't claim the katana is a worse choice for unarmored combat than a rapier if all the reason i had were an olympic fencer winning against a first-year kenjutsu student.

Which is exactly why I disagree with the simplistic dismissal of the katana's qualities.

l_clausewitz · Apr 11, 2009

Lhun said:
It's not so much the techniques, horseback archery was common in many parts of the world. Persian archers are another famous example.

It is a matter of technique as well. The Asian thumb-draw technique with the arrow resting on the thumb side of the bow hand (to the right of the bow for a right-handed archer) makes it much easier to nock an arrow, keep it in place, and shoot it off while the horse is moving at speed.

An english longbow is simply impossible to use from horseback, it's too long.

Not impossible. It can be used on horseback with a shortened draw, though definitely this would prevent the archer from extracting the full power of the bow. There was one rare incident in an English battle (perhaps during the Wars of the Roses? I'll have to dig this up further) where mounted longbowmen actually shot from horseback while they were crossing a stream.

Properly choosing and working the wood is not very easy. But just coming up with bone composite as a material is an incredible feat.

I'm not dismissing the skill required to build a self bow. Building a composite bow, however, requires not only skill but also enough patience to kill a man. At least with an English war bow you wouldn't have needed to wait for the right time of the year to even start gluing the bow's components together. The only comparable kind of waiting in the construction process for a self bow is the seasoning of the wood.

I'm not qutie sure which bow you mean by asian composite, the mongolian bow and the japanese bow for example don't have too much in common.

I'm using the term "Eurasian composite bow" as a general term to cover the various horn-wood-sinew composite designs found in continental Eurasia, from the Magyar bow to the Turkish to the broad-limbed Crimean-Tatar to the Mongol and even to the Chinese and Korean designs. This category doesn't include the Japanese yumi because it's a laminated (not strictly composite) design and it doesn't have some features (especially static-recurve ears) that are commonly found among the continental Eurasian designs. However, it covers a very broad variety of designs, and avoids the problem of talking only about the "Mongol" bow (which, if any such definite type existed, was certainly only one among the many designs in use by the armies serving under the medieval Mongol empire--and almost certainly wasn't identical to the Manchu/Chinese designs that dominate nowadays in the Mongolian traditional archery scene).

Stringing a short recurve bow isn't all that compliated, i use one myself, though it's wood, not bone composite.

No, it isn't that complicated when your bow is just laminated wood. But an actual Asian composite bow, made of several different components (horn belly, sinew backing, wood or bamboo core, and a different kind of wood for the ears) held together by a climate-sensitive glue, requires an obsessive amount of maintenance to prevent it from twisting out of true or explosively disassembling itself at the most inopportune moments. This observation doesn't only apply to modern archers and bowyers who have used such bows; surviving archery manuals like Taybugha al-Ashrafi's 14th-century work also mention ways of (re)balancing a bow in great detail and keeps pounding the point about checking the bow again and again and again and balancing it as soon as anything goes the slightest bit skewed.

l_clausewitz · Apr 11, 2009

Lhun said:
And you make my point for me by pointing out the histrorical background of the katana. Not given those specific circumstance, it makes no sense to use one, and with all the millions of katanas appearing in fiction nowadays, they pretty much never appear in setting that is similar to ancient japan.

Sure, I agree with this point. The katana as such would be rather inappropriate in a setting without the necessary (faux-)Japanese background, especially when it is apparently used to do things that the actual katana was never meant to do.

l_clausewitz · Apr 11, 2009

Lhun said:
I'm pretty sure there's no swordfighting style to which this does no apply.

Olympic fencing, anyone? Mensur? 16th-century and later German Dusack combat?

I've seen matches between a fighter with a rapier and one with a Katana, as well as heard some expert's opinions on them. (well, people who i'd consider experts)
Anyway, from what i've seen and read, the fighter using a katana has a chance, but is noticeably disadvantaged. His advantage is that the katana allows for much more powerful blows than the rapier, which doesn't matter for injuring the opponent, but means he can't reliably parry.

Can't reliably parry? How come? Of course a katana isn't meant to parry in the same way as a rapier, but its associated swordsmanship styles include a great deal of deflection and counterattack techniques that would have been quite effective against a thrusting weapon. This is why I have continued to insist and will continue to insist that fighting style does matter; some Japanese swordsmanship schools have more realistic combative techniques than others, and some are better at handling dissimilar matches against thrust-oriented weapons. Similarly, while Italian and Spanish rapier schools mostly taught how to fight against similarly-armed opponents, some provide the practitioner with a better theoretical basis for facing dissimilar match-ups. Unless we know the training backgrounds of the people in those katana vs. rapier matches, we can't judge the validity and generalizability of the comparison.

And with enough space, even allowing for all the expertise of Silver himself, it is incredibly hard to get past the point of a rapier without getting skewered, or cut if you managed to get close but couldn't block the blade or swordarm.

Only if you're not experienced in fending off thrusting attacks. There was one dissmilar sparring match I watched where someone with a Dusack--essentially the training weapon for the Messer--was able to fend off and even counterattack against a rapier's thrusts despite having the shorter (and curved, and single-edged) weapon. The rapier fencer fell especially often to pretty nasty applications of the Schielhau and Krumphau mastercuts, obviously helped by the Messer fighter's excellent footwork.

So what? I'm not arguing that the japanese were incompetent at weapons design, i'm arguing that the katana is not a good design.

Then I'm afraid that we'll have to agree to disagree; while the katana isn't my weapon of choice, I still hold that it (or at least its most highly-developed form) was a highly efficient weapon for the close-quarters unarmored urban combat situations that it was optimized for.

Lhun · Apr 12, 2009

l_clausewitz said:
You can. The crossguard on medieval swords is already a very effective handguard in and of itself. But if you mean complex hilts . . . the Swiss did just that with their Schweizersabel. Which was a curved, single-edged two-handed sword to boot.

Ah, didn't know that design. Still, i wonder how well it worked.

<snip>What language?<snip>

German and French. The language problem isn't even hardest when names are used differently, the main problem is that most of them are not directly translateable.

If damaging their central nervous system is the way to disable them, then the concussion delivered by a strong blow can still be a very effective way for bringing them down.

That was asked in relation to the usefulness of spears for safely stabbing the heads. The only thing really working for the OPs undead is apparently severing the head and burning them. The undead, not just the heads.

Please read some book that gives actual scholarly information about European edged weapons. Aside from the second sword on the left, all the swords in that picture are longswords, bastard swords, or even two-handed swords, not the Langes Messer--which is perhaps best represented by Albion Armorers' modern reproduction

Kriegsmesser are a different thing. As you'll sure notice, the article you linked does not even mention your name "langes messer" even once.

You must be joking. Many 18th-century and Napoleonic cavalry swords--both straight and curved--were heavier and had a more tip-heavy balance than medieval swords of comparable length and breadth.

Not according to my information. The french infantry saber was at around 1kg the cavalry saber somewhat heavier (about half). Which is at the lower end of medieval cavalry swords. Want to compare sources?

Which is exactly why I disagree with the simplistic dismissal of the katana's qualities.

Fine. Go ahead. If you think the discovery that someone trained in kenjutsu does worse with a rapier than a katana is even worth talking about, be my guest.

Lhun · Apr 12, 2009

l_clausewitz said:
It is a matter of technique as well. The Asian thumb-draw technique with the arrow resting on the thumb side of the bow hand (to the right of the bow for a right-handed archer) makes it much easier to nock an arrow, keep it in place, and shoot it off while the horse is moving at speed.

If you use a hip quiver on your right side, yes. You don't have to though, that's not the main problem with using a longbow on a horse.

Not impossible. It can be used on horseback with a shortened draw, though definitely this would prevent the archer from extracting the full power of the bow. There was one rare incident in an English battle (perhaps during the Wars of the Roses? I'll have to dig this up further) where mounted longbowmen actually shot from horseback while they were crossing a stream.

Yes, i admit "impossible" was hyperbole, it is techincally possible. The biggest problem is that the horse gets in the way of the bow, you have a seriously limited shooting arc, and most people indeed can't fully draw. Which also plays hell with accuracy.

I'm using the term "Eurasian composite bow" as a general term to cover the various horn-wood-sinew composite designs found in continental Eurasia, from the Magyar bow to the Turkish to the broad-limbed Crimean-Tatar to the Mongol and even to the Chinese and Korean designs. This category doesn't include the Japanese yumi because it's a laminated (not strictly composite) design and it doesn't have some features (especially static-recurve ears) that are commonly found among the continental Eurasian designs. However, it covers a very broad variety of designs, and avoids the problem of talking only about the "Mongol" bow (which, if any such definite type existed, was certainly only one among the many designs in use by the armies serving under the medieval Mongol empire--and almost certainly wasn't identical to the Manchu/Chinese designs that dominate nowadays in the Mongolian traditional archery scene).

Well, when i mention mogol bow, i mean the basic design of a short, composite recurve bow which probably originated in that area. (difficult to tell unfortunately since bows decompose faster than swords) While there are many different designs, i'd argue that most are at best minor differences, at least until the invention of high-tension bows.

No, it isn't that complicated when your bow is just laminated wood. But an actual Asian composite bow, made of several different components (horn belly, sinew backing, wood or bamboo core, and a different kind of wood for the ears) held together by a climate-sensitive glue, requires an obsessive amount of maintenance to prevent it from twisting out of true or explosively disassembling itself at the most inopportune moments. This observation doesn't only apply to modern archers and bowyers who have used such bows; surviving archery manuals like Taybugha al-Ashrafi's 14th-century work also mention ways of (re)balancing a bow in great detail and keeps pounding the point about checking the bow again and again and again and balancing it as soon as anything goes the slightest bit skewed.

This is mostly true for high-tension bows, these are more dangerous for the user than the target if not in perfect condition. Other composite bows aren't quite that fragile. Yes, they are very moisture and fracture sensitive, but so are wooden recurves and even self bows such as the english longbow. Not quite as much as bone composite, but you don't want to get your wooden bow wet either.

Lhun · Apr 12, 2009

l_clausewitz said:
Olympic fencing, anyone? Mensur? 16th-century and later German Dusack combat?

You misread. I said that no school of fencing today has not been disused for a long time. 150-200 years are a long time.

Can't reliably parry? How come?

Ah that was a grammatical fuck-up on my part. I wrote about the biggest advantage of the katana wielder, which was meant to say that he can't reliably be parried by the rapier wielder, since the katana allows quite powerful strikes, which will not help in injuring an unarmored opponent (a rapier is enough for that) but are too powerful to be parried reliably by a light, one-handed weapon.

Unless we know the training backgrounds of the people in those katana vs. rapier matches, we can't judge the validity and generalizability of the comparison.

Then simply pick which school you think would fare best, and we can try to dig up some matches, or at least do a dry comparison if we find none. If you want to compare weapons, you have to remove the human factor from the equation. Pick the best suited school for both with equally well tried fighters, and see where the limites of the weapon are. Not where the limits of the fighters or the styles are.
[/quote]Only if you're not experienced in fending off thrusting attacks. There was one dissmilar sparring match I watched where someone with a Dusack--essentially the training weapon for the Messer--was able to fend off and even counterattack against a rapier's thrusts despite having the shorter (and curved, and single-edged) weapon. The rapier fencer fell especially often to pretty nasty applications of the Schielhau and Krumphau mastercuts, obviously helped by the Messer fighter's excellent footwork.[/quote]Proving that Silver was not totally wrong, no doubt. But a single match isn't too much to go by, and it's not as if a a different choice in blade weapon such as this would determine the outcome of a match. Heck, fo the weapon choice to totally determine the outcome, you'd at least go to gun vs. sword, and even then it's not a totally sure conclusion if they're not far apart.

rondori · Apr 13, 2009

waylander said:
Elemental phosphorus isn't exactly easy to get hold of in a pre-science world.
How how about field artillery? Ballistae, catapults etc

You ever hear of concentrating Urine? (cavalry have tons of the stuff) I believe the discoverer of the stuff used the royal horse barracks as his source.

As far as one vs. two handed swords I offer my own katana made in Yamada prefecture in the 13th century. It is light enough and balanced well enough to be used with one hand because Samurai then fought primarily from horse back. It was only after wars had been eliminated by the Tokagawa Shogunate that Samurai began carrying longer blades with the weight closer to the tip because then the main use afterward was for dueling on foot.

As far as sword vs. shield, I believe Miyamoto Musashi (the master of the two sword school of fighting) stated in the 'Book of Five Rings' that the properly used single edge sword forms it's own shield.

Ballistae and it's one man equivalent, the sling can be very effective. Both Alexander and the Persians used slinger units capable of accurately hitting a man with a fist sized rock at two hundred yards. The main problem was in training time so both used mercenary units drawn from the same region of the middle east. The movie 'Kingdom of Heaven' has some excellent Ballistae use.

The crossbow is only limited by the materials and the winch used to draw it. A friend of mine made one out of a model-t axle spring and a woven steel cable. We put an unsharpened carriage bolt (machine threaded) a foot into an oak tree at a hundred yards.

Need opinions on the weapons available in my world

Lhun

New kid, be gentle!

l_clausewitz

l_clausewitz

l_clausewitz

l_clausewitz

Lhun

New kid, be gentle!

Lhun

New kid, be gentle!

Lhun

New kid, be gentle!

rondori