Super-swords. Any metallurgist-types here?

My on-the-fly guesstimation gives me a weight of about 50 lbs, based on the density of normal steel. Although, you might enchant it to be lighter, if you're going to be using magic anyway.

A 5 foot sword made of anything is already super heavy. Have you ever tried to lift a claymore? I did and the damn thing almost dislocated my shoulder, although I am pitiful and weak.

Fifty pounds would be more than heavy enough. You might consider tungsten-steel with something else added. Four inches wide, an inch thick, and five feet long, including a full tang. That would be a large sword. The weight would be something around fifty pounds.

The good thing about fantasy is that you aren't bound by reality (hence the name). If you can't find a metal that suits you in reality, why not make one up. Tungsten-steel or tungsten carbide would be the modern day equivalent of what you are trying to achieve I suppose, but there's a reason tungsten wasn't a material used for weapons in medieval and renaissance eras... it has a melting point of more than 6000 degrees. That makes it near impossible to work without without modern means.

Chuck Jones said:

tungsten wasn't a material used for weapons in medieval and renaissance eras... it has a melting point of more than 6000 degrees. That makes it near impossible to work without without modern means.

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Or with modern means.

Nova had an interesting show on the making of Samurai swords. Turns out, the manufacturing process that makes the steel is at least as important as the actual sword making. The harder the steel, the sharper the edge it will take. However, the harder the steel, the more brittle the blade will be.

So the best blades were a composite of different grades of steel, with different amounts of carbon, to provide the best balance of flexibility and hardness. Here's a link:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/samurai/

I'm not much into fantasy, but if they're building the swords better with better metal, won't they use the same stuff in the amour? We roughly tend to develop offensive and defensive weapons at the same time.

Best of luck,

Jim Clark-Dawe

So I recently attended a meeting of the local blacksmith's guild. (I am not a blacksmith, I just find it interesting) and one of the speakers spoke about medieval swordmaking. He said that a steel sword blade averages about 20-22" in length for every pound of steel. This of course varied by blade shape, though interestingly a rapier didn't weigh much less than a knightly sword of the same length. The guard and hilt would add another pound or so.

So if you want a sword that's ungodly heavy, you have 3 options:

make it out of a denser metal.

beef up the cross section of the blade..kind of like those enormous ass cleaver blades you see in those anime cartoons. Do you know the ones I'm talking about?

make the sword really long: 1000 inches!

Or some combination of the three.

I don't know anything about heavy, magically-enhanced swords, but the science and art that goes into making a real samurai sword is fascinating. You might want to find a good website or video that shows the process (I've seen a couple of documentaries on making them); it might help with your description even though the sword you want to use is of a fantasy type. A samurai sword has a flexible inner core and a hard steel outer layer, so that it's not brittle, yet extremely sharp.

eh? whats with this 50lbs number being thrown around? That would be so thick that it would just be a solid pole, more than a few inches wide to be 50 pounds at 5 feet.

To the OP, are you sure you really want the swords to be extremely heavy? Weight didn't do a lot for the sword, but add inertia that made it take longer to swing. Too big and it might even be destroyed by its own momentum, as it loses some of its ability to flex as it gets bigger.

Historically accurate blades weighed on average between 3.5 and 5.5 lbs.
To cut through sufficient steel armour (an average of 3 to 4 millimeteres) you would need stronger steel, not heavier. Your super soldiers are incredibly strong, so the extra weight would probably slow them down. The tungsten carbides would work, as would mithril or bologinum. Magically enhanced steel would work too.

If you want them to be able to just kill anyone inside of any armour, a really big flail works better. Armor was designed to turn any blow that didn't land at a right angle to its face off of the body, and the armor is shaped weird to stop right angle blows. So a good suit of steel is going to turn away a great deal of sword strikes, no matter who is swinging them.

Now stepping off of the soap box.

I'm in the planning-stages for a fantasy trilogy, which features among other things a group of magically-enhanced soldiers with super-strength and enormous swords that no ordinary human can wield. Now I'm wondering just how big and heavy to make them.

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People used five foot swords easily, normally when they super size a solider they make him bigger so give him a bigger sword, so that he would have more reach against his enemies.

The idea is that the swords are created with a combination of metallurgy and magic to be super-dense and nearly unbreakable, so as not to snap when wielded with inhuman strength, or lose their edge when used to cleave armor. Can someone suggest to me, theoretically, how heavy a 5-foot steel blade would have to be, to be nearly indestructible?

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Sword often did not break because of how they were made. Normally they would flex and twist to avoid breaking, this was due to a spring action given to them by the fullers and the ridges. To not break while being used with superhuman strength the blade would probably be much wider, to encompass more fullers and ridges. Nothing you do to normal steel will stop it from loosing its edge as it tries to cut through steel, or even bronze, armor. That will have to come from the magic.

So, in total. I'm giving the sword I'm thinking of a weight of 6 to 7 pounds.

hey, he wants a heavy sword, we give him a heavy sword.

Osmium and Iridium are the densest and hardest naturally occurring metals. Osmium is about three times denser than iron, and almost twice as hard. If it oxidizes, its oxide is poisonous. It is also very rare. Also it takes very high temperatures to work.

efreysson said:

I'm in the planning-stages for a fantasy trilogy, which features among other things a group of magically-enhanced soldiers with super-strength and enormous swords that no ordinary human can wield.

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I think I've played this game already...

Plutonium is heavy. So why not plutonium swords?

Oh wait, if you faced off against a similiarly armed soldier as soon as you crossed swords you'd have a critical mass, a fission explosion and there goes the neighbourhood.

Mike Martyn said:

Plutonium is heavy. So why not plutonium swords?

Oh wait, if you faced off against a similiarly armed soldier as soon as you crossed swords you'd have a critical mass, a fission explosion and there goes the neighbourhood.

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Hell, why not just equip the super-soldiers with kanabo or huge sledgehammers instead of insisting that they wield swords?

If the character has a really cool sword, with an absurdly sharp blade you might as well name it.

"What in Odin's name IS that thing? You could decapitate an ox with it if you could lift it!"

"Actually that's how this inn got the name the Ox Head."

"But the bloody thing must weigh as much as a plow!"

"I believe a plow was what it started out as, and then the Valkyries started hammering on it. Loki himself was supposed to have put a few spells into it too. There was a frost giant that used it in the battle of Frigga's Fiord, hacked the moorings of a dock and let the ships drift away. Then there was no escape.

"But nobody could lift it!"

"I said Valkyries made it for a frost giant, didn't I?"

That would be about 75 pounds, based on the calculations that I did for a 4 inch wide sword.

Chuck Jones said:

there's a reason tungsten wasn't a material used for weapons in medieval and renaissance eras... it has a melting point of more than 6000 degrees.

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Not to mention that tungsten metal wasn't even discovered until 1783.

caw