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Post by Lancelot Chan on Apr 15, 2007 16:57:58 GMT
Recently, some of my customers have reported that my sparring swords were broken under forceful sparring. Today I've seen it first handed that a foreign customer came over to spar and broke his new sparring sword in 75 rounds. Thus I've invited him to do some test with me with real swords and made a video to investigate how hard does one have to hit in sparring to inflict effective damage. The partner that held the katana for me to show the real sword clashing effect was the customer. He participated in test cutting afterwards and has since established a new understanding of swordsmanship. I wish to share this knowledge with the community and may everybody enjoy.
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Post by Deleted on Apr 15, 2007 18:52:55 GMT
Well done. The strike/cut at the very end (the one that cuts the jacket) was a work of art.
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Post by Deleted on Apr 15, 2007 19:40:59 GMT
The answer is a factor of Speed, the Mass of the weapon, Where you on the blade you make contact, who your fighting, where you hit them and how much armor they have on. That is a lot of variables. I will try to expand on them...but in anycase a cutting sword should be able to handle your hardest strike because sometimes you will have to give it your all. Kantans and Rapiers are excluded from this, I will come back to this later. Lancerlot, it is convinent that you sell sparring swords, because I also train with sparring swords. So we are comparing simmilar products. The differences are mine are wood (1.5 inch thick rattan), yours are synthetic. A significant difference is that I am hitting people in hard armor, your fighter only have head protection. Hitting people on their body where they have no armor should be less stressfull on your swords. I bet your swords break on head strikes, because that is where ours usualy break too. I have never seen a rattan sword break on bodyarmor. They may only break on hiting other swords at speed or hitting the edge of sheilds. Sheild edges should be covered with a rubber hose. Hitting anything on the edge of a sheild that is not protected will chip or break very quickly. By covering the sheild edge we rarely see breaks due to shield edges. Breaks are rare, but they do happen. So back to the question of how hard to hit. Well the is a mater of Mass x Velocity = Momentum (edited). Your thicker swords should stand up better. Heavy swords can have a great impact with less speed. Their thicknes will naturaly keep them together. The same result can be acheived with a lighter sword moving at greater speed. The impact will be the same, but the lighter sword is more at risk of breaking. This would explain why you may have two people hitting equaly hard, but one with a lighter sword that is breaking and one with a heavier sword that is not. Historicaly different levels of armor where used in different places on the body. An area like the side and the top of the head would require great force, if not to kill, to stun or unbalance. A thrust to the face does not require much force because foot soldiers often used open face helmets. A thrust under the armpit might require more force because mail was oftern worn there to close the gap between plates. Thrusts through mail always require force. Cuts to the forearm historicaly required great force because at the very least they had leather bracers there. Also the arm is more likly to give to the blow, hence great speed is required. The upper arm (bicept) was usualy not protected for more flexibility, so less force can be effective there. Legs were usualy protected in the front but not the back. The point I am making with all this is that you might have any combination of armor. A strike might be made for the purpose of shock. A simulator or a real sword should be able to inflict a great number of blows to a hard helmet without breaking. No sword is expected to last forever, but it should last a long time. One side note: thinner blades like katanas and rapiers where not ment to hack. Katanas slice and Rapiers thrust. I have seen people on your videos hacking with these simmulators. They will break just as the real one would. Instuct you custumers how to use these weapon or if they want to hack recommend to then to get thicker swords ment for hacking. Here is a picture of my simmulator: Now check out my leg armor. Most of it is just leather. It is thick cowhide almost 1/8 an inch thick. It has an inch of padding on the inside. This would have been accessable to even peasents. A gentle cut is not going to go through that. Acctualy even a hard cut is probably not going to go all the way through, but the shock of the impact to the muscle from a hard hit may send me straight to the ground. I get bruises through the armor with rattan swords, if they had a sharp edge to focus the energy I would probably not get cut through an inch of leather and padding, but my form and defense would come appart from the pain.
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Post by Deleted on Apr 16, 2007 2:41:48 GMT
Actually I don't believe that that is quite accurate, Tsafa. Mass x Acceleration = Force. Mass x Velocity = Momentum. Acceleration is defined as a change in velocity, whether positive(increasing velocity) or negative(decreasing velocity).
Anyway, about your leg armor and getting hit there... for the purposes of your rattan swords, what your armor does is two things. The Leather outside spreads the force of impact over a wider area, decreasing the impact / square inch. The inch of padding increases how long it takes for the full momentum of the blow to be transferred into your leg. While it's still a very quick transfer, we're talking changing it from hundredths of a second to a few more hundredths of a second, in theory, potentially doubling the time it takes for the sword to decelerate completely into your leg, which effectively HALVES the force behind it. That's with your rattan stuff.
Now, a sharp edged sword obviously strikes with less surface area than your rattan weapons(which means more impact / square inch), but the leather would still do an effective job of spreading the force over a much wider area, that is, given that it doesn't cut. I don't think the effect would be that different between your rattan weapons and an actual sword considering how well good cured leather spreads force. BUT... let's examine a couple other things...
One, distribution of mass. Now most would say this is a sword handling issue, but let me explain. A sword is much thinner near the tip than near the cross(due to varying degrees of distal and profile taper). Your rattan weapon appears to have the same thickness throughout. If a sword had a similar distribution of mass, it would handle very poorly, i.e. be blade heavy. This is not merely an issue of CoG. Mass distribution is more subtle than that. More mass near the tip of the sword, regardless of CoG, means that there is far more inertia up in that portion of the blade. As we all know, inertia is the phenomenon described by newton's first law of motion: "An object at rest tends to stay at rest, and an object in motion tends to stay in motion, unless acted upon by an outside force". When we look at Einstein's theory of relativity, we learn that 'at rest' and 'in motion' are more or less the same from a physics standpoint, but that's neither here nor there.
What this means is that the more mass further away from the cog(regardless of where the cog is) will proportionally increase the amount of force necessary to accelerate the sword to a good speed, and consequently, also the amount of force required to decelerate it. This must seem very obvious to most of you, but let's explore that a bit...
If it takes more force to decelerate a sword of such a balance, that force comes into effect when striking something, as the struck something is what's applying the force to decelerate the object(either rattan or steel). This force comes from the mass(inertia) and or muscles of the target. This force will therefore be subsequently felt by the targets. Which means: A sword heavier out towards the tip will hit far harder than a sword lighter towards the tip.
To conclude that spiel, what I'm trying to say that rattan swords, by their very nature, hit harder than actual balanced swords would... given that NO CUTTING is occuring. Of course, any good hit with an actual good sword will have SOME amount of cutting action. Now let's explore what that does:
Let's say that a cut with an actual sword cuts HALFWAY through just the leather armor, but none of the 1'' pad. To a casual observer, this will look exactly the same as our above situation, with the exception that now there is a slight cut in the armor, where before there was not. What does this mean from our physics perspective though?
Well, if the leather was cut halfway through, obviously that first half of the leather failed in its goal of absorbing the impact and spreading it over an area. This effectively HALVES the amount of spread that force underwent, which DOUBLES how hard it feels. Now, leather is hard stuff to cut, especially when properly cured, and i'm no expert on how thick or cured or how hard to cut, authentic leather armor is, so my analysis of that ends there.
But I've seen an actual good quality european style sword, when used with good techique, perform some very impressive cutting ability with very little force(i mean, look at lancelot's video, he proves it right there... plastic is hard stuff...as is BONE, and that sword diced it up). I don't think it's unreasonable to say that leather armor, while nice, was FAR from impervious to cutting.
Now, I don't know about you, but whenever I've done cutting exercises, even when i was trying with my best technique, whenever I hit as hard as I could, it never gave me as good results as when I controlled the force more. What I'm trying to say is, not only does good cutting NOT REQUIRE heavy, muscled blows, but even moreso, heavy muscled blows DETRACT from good cutting potential.
That's the conclusion i've seen anyway. Take it for what you will.
Lastly, concerning 'thinner' blades like rapiers and katanas. Believe it or not, most, if not all rapiers and katanas, are actually THICKER than standard european cutting swords. Also, how much cutting or 'slicing' potential a katana gains from it's curve is up for debate. i don't think it gains that much, considering that when you look at that very small section of blade that actually makes contact with the target, it doesn't exhibit a significant amount of curve(over that small area of blade). The earth is round, but at any given point on it, from our perspective, it appears flat. Same kindof principle with a katana edge.
What the curve DOES do is 1: Increase the total length of sharpened edge and 2: facilitate 'drawing' the blade slightly more than with a perfectly straight blade. It's still not much. ALL good cuts need some amount of drawing, whether it is a retractive draw(as is commonly though) or an expansive one(i.e. pushing outward with a cut so it shears away from you rather than towards you). Katanas cut in exactly the same fashion as european swords, which definitely requires a more refined motion than merely a 'hack'.
Again, take it for what you will.
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Post by Deleted on Apr 16, 2007 4:33:36 GMT
Actually I don't believe that that is quite accurate, Tsafa. Mass x Acceleration = Force. Mass x Velocity = Momentum. Acceleration is defined as a change in velocity, whether positive(increasing velocity) or negative(decreasing velocity). Your right. That was just sloppy on my part. Mass x Velocity= Momentum. High momentum is what we want. Corrrect again. In the case of Lances simulators, they themselves are padded and bend more to absorb the impact. So far I aggree perfectly. Hence, my comment that a real sword hitting my armor would most likely not cut through to my skin, but the impact would cause great pain and adversly affect my ability to fight. The difference is the concentration of force on an edjed weapon. The basket hilts on the rattan act as pommols. We further screw large washers into the back of the rattan to bring the balance further back if we want. We also add more tape towards the tip to bring the weight forward if necessary. We really fine tune the balance. The problem I have with rattan is it allows people to get away with sloppy edge alignment. This is the bane of any cutting enthusiast. No doubt a sharp sword gets better panetration, and even dents metal armor. Dents might serve to restrict movement if made at articulating points between the joints. The point I was trying to bring out is that, in those cases were full penetration can not acheived, if the hit is hard enough it can be effective. The question is "how hard does a hit have to be". My answer primerily was that it depends where you are hitting. If your only feasable target is armored, you may still have an effect if the blow is hard enough. I agree, cutting is different from fighting. For one thing in cutting you want to follow through and even draw the blade. Beter to just let the blade do the work then force it. In fighting you are kind of throwing the blade at the target and recovering just as fast, not following through. In fighting not getting hit is more important then hitting the other person. Our moto is DEAD IS DEAD. No good killing the other person if you are dead or maimed yourself. You're comments are all well founded. I don't want to comment on the katana because it is not my area of focus. The rapier started out as basicly a onehanded longsword (Cut and Thrust) and it did a lot of cutting. Eventualy it moved to a thinner blade in favor of the thrust. From there it got even thiner as it progressed to the Smallsword which did almost no cutting. There is a lot of variation in rapier blades and the shift from Cut and Thrust and onto smallsword is often not clear. Sorry if I missed anything or garbelled anything up. Its 2 am and my girlfriend is screaming at me to stop making typing noise.
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Post by Lancelot Chan on Apr 16, 2007 5:43:46 GMT
My comment was based on a "total unarmored" environment, and our swords break usually on sword-on-sword hitting instead of hitting the body. That's because people believe in crashing through the opponent's swords. Also our sparring swords have exactly the real sword weight and balance, which if the same thing happened to real sword, the real sword would break way earlier than the sparring sword did due to the thinner cross section.
Armored combat isn't the concern of the video here. I hope this clarify something.
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Post by Deleted on Apr 16, 2007 5:55:01 GMT
In unarmoured combat, I don't think much force would be required at all. Just seeing the pig arm test shows that a debilitating cut can be made using not much more than the momentum of the sword itself. Also, it is often said that full power strikes, should they fail to connect, are much harder and slower to recover from, and leave you more open to your opponent's blade.
In fact, Anthony DeLongis, in his saber fighting dvd series for Cold Steel (which is geared toward unarmoured fighting), stresses that minimalism is one of the most important factors in a fight, both in movement and force.
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Post by Lancelot Chan on Apr 16, 2007 6:02:23 GMT
And I would like to acknowledge the fact that slightly armored combat or fully armored combat are of totally different breeds. I just wanted to make it clear. Big cuts has a lot more value in the slightly armored combat, where the fully armored combat may break the sword upon big cut's contact, thus thrusts were used dominantly.
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Post by Deleted on Apr 16, 2007 13:35:01 GMT
Hmm, you are talking about cuts here but against armour the most effective technique is a controlled thrust at the weak points. I really enjoyed this video and that was a very clever move at the end. It really takes no effort to hurt someone with a sharp weapon, controlled cutting with minimal force does alot of damage. Armour is a different kettle of fish and i don't believe cutting against armour does anything other than to blunt the blade or to shock the opponent. If you want to get at a man in armour, thrusting is the only way it really works. As to breaking through the guard with a sword, i think we can blame hollywood for that one. It is very very hard to break through a set guard and even a semi set guard will give you problems. The true technique, depending on the sword, is to go around the sword. Having said that however bulling can work and the way it works is if you can force your opponent to set his guard and then do something unexpected so his guard is no longer solid and then a good solid strike will break through depending on how badly you telegraphed it.
The interesting thing however is that certain techniques work with certain swords and using the wrong technique with the wrong sword would get you skewered. For example the only way you can go around your opponent's sword is with a long bladed sword or a rapier. Depending on how your opponent sets his guard you can set it up so that you can slide in under or over the warding blade.
About blade control, when talking about controlled strikes whether thrusting or cutting a controlled strike is like a controlled punch, it travels a very short distance very quickly with an enormous amount of force. This means that you don't use excess energy and so tire less quickly and also that kind of rapid strike is very hard to anticipate. These wide swinging blows that they like to bombard us with in hollywood are silly. A controlled strike or thrust would reach your opponent long before a sweeping blow ever could.
I am not an expert and have no professional training. What i know i have taught myself either from reading about it or by studying the way a sword is and then working out movements and things that work. If i have said anything incorrectly i would appreciate your corrections.
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Post by Deleted on Apr 16, 2007 15:34:35 GMT
I agree that in unarmored combat tipcuts and thrusts are adequet. I am a decent rapier fancer. You want to maintain maximum distance and keep your sword between your and your opponent (point in line). A large swing that winds back will open you up to a quick thrust from your opponent. Also if you swing hard, you will likely swing past your opponent in the other direction again opening you up to attack. If you want to move your opponets blade to the side, you want to catch your opponents tip with your forte.
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Post by Deleted on Apr 16, 2007 16:42:14 GMT
Firstly, what I was trying to say, and my conclusion later on I think was clear, was that because the leather and padding do an adequate job of spreading the force of a blunt(read: non cutting) impact, the sharpened sword would feel the same as rattan; again, given that NO cutting occurred, and the sharpened sword had a similar DISTRIBUTION OF MASS as the rattan waster. What I further went on to say was that the position of the CoG has relatively little to do with good handling characteristics. It has some, but it's not as important as some think. I"m SURE that many people here have used swords of proper dimensions with proper weight, and properly placed CoG that still handled poorly. It's very good you mentioned basket hilts. My cold steel basket hilt was one such sword. It weight in at about 2 lbs 14 oz. It's CoG was about 3 inches from the guard. The close CoG was due to the heavy basket. The blade still handled very poorly however, because of the absence of any distal taper, i.e. the distribution(placement) of mass(material in the blade) throughout the blade of the sword was very far off. I've handled rattan swords before, presumably well balanced ones... at least, the 'knight' from the SCA was very proud of them... and they were not as magnificently balanced as he would have you believe. That's the problem with trying to balance something like rattan... the only way to go about it is just to add more mass to the end of the sword(either tip or pommel) in order to place that CoG where you want it, when really, all that extra mass at the Poles(read: Ends) of the sword increase the sword's polar moment(read: torque at the ends of the sword) which increases the inertia of those poles, which inherently increases the amount of force necessary to accelerate(read: move or change the momentum of) by a lot. Anyone who has any experience with levers will tell you that mass positioned further out from a pivot point applies more force on the other end of the lever than a mass of the same weight applied closer to the pivot point. The same principle holds true with swords. This is why Angus Trim's 'Low Polar Moment'(again, in physics, moment = torque) swords handle so well. For more information, please read this article: www.thearma.org/spotlight/GTA/motions_and_impacts.htmNow this article has been picked apart by SFI members, and even me over at Tinkerswords forum. We've basically come to the conclusion however, that a lot of good material was touched upon in this article, primarily the handling characters of swords. Here is a link to the thread on Tinker's forum regarding the issue: www.tinkerswords.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=627 Basically what i'm trying to say is: rattan swords <> real swords when it comes to balance, not even close. They simply CANNOT because of the non-tapering nature of the medium used to create them. I understand their use for safety(sortof...I'd personally rather have some of Lancelot's Realistic sparring weapons, but whatever), but the techniques encouraged by the fighting practices of the SCA, while with good intention, have led them further off the road than most SCA guys i've spoken to have thought. Cutting leather armor is a reality. Even mail armor was primarily cut against(see swords of Oakeshott Types X- XIV). Plate is a completely different matter. When it comes to fighting plate, there are 2 sets of techniques that are used 95% of the time. Half-Swording thrusts, and Grappling Throws/Breaks. The intent was definately NOT to just hit them harder with the goal of stunning them. Which leads me to my conclusion that, in armor, or out of armor, the goal of a swordsman was NEVER to hit as hard as he could. Or even to just hit hard.
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Post by rammstein on Apr 16, 2007 19:42:18 GMT
I wouldn't be so sure that leather armour is easy to cut. From what I've seen, a good thick sheet of leather made excellent armour that was very hard to cut. I'll see if I can work out an experiment with my ritter (appropriate time period for a sword). I'm under the impression that maille was easier to cut only because you could smash apart individual links as opposed to cutting one large side of thick cow hide.
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Post by Deleted on Apr 16, 2007 21:31:54 GMT
I didn't mean to say cutting leather armor was easy, only possible. I'm sure it happened a lot on the battlefield. If leather armor was so difficult to cut as to make it nearly impossible, then there would have been no need to upgrade to the heavier, more expensive, harder to make, plate armor. Clearly leather armor had to have been lacking, as plate was indeed developed.
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Post by Deleted on Apr 16, 2007 22:43:39 GMT
No doubt a real sword is better then any simulator... but even historical knights trained with simulators. Steel blunts are best but limit you practice options. You have to stay out of range, not thrust hard, not hit hard, half speed, etc.... each group has its own safety restrictions. Wooden wasters and rattan also have their share of limits as do padded weapons. No matter how you approach practice you will run into some unrealistic aspect. My thinking is that if your train with different simulators and different armor conditions you will be able to bridge some of those gaps in your mind. Example in SCA rattan no hits bellow the knee. In my rapier practice (steel rapier with buckler) we do allow hits below the knee. A conclusion one might draw from experience is that if a "stop thrust" is an effective defense in rapier against leg strikes, it might be an effective defense with rattan. Likewise we don't allow hacking cuts in my rapier practice. The blunt edges can still break small bones. However in my mind I can picture the effect that cuts would have. We allow for slices instead.
The distilled taper is predominantly a late 14 th and 15 th aspects of swords. Swords with parallel edges were in use long before the period, during and after. A distilled taper has advantages and disadvantages. It makes for better thrusting naturally and is also quicker. Its has less of a bite during a cut. A Norman or Viking sword has a better chance of cutting through leather then a 15 th century highly tapered sword.
15 th century tapered swords were usually thin in the distilled taper but also thicker in the profile taper. This made them better stabbers and less likely to fold. The thicker profile also meant they had to move more material aside during a cut. Hence more friction. So as far as cuts go, they had less mass at he tip and they were thicker in the profile to further hinder good cuts. Modern reproduction often do not have the thicker profile. That is why they often bend into "U"s if you try to thrust anything semi-hard.
Regarding the move to plate armor, I have often suspected that the rise of the longbow had a lot to do with that. By forming front plates into a giant wedge shape, they could deflect arrows. The smooth nature of plate armor allowed for deflection. Leather, however lacks the smooth quality. Even if you managed to make a wedge out of leather, the arrow would still penetrate it.
p.s. it took about 30 minutes with a brand new razor box cutter to cut out the leather for my armor. Granted, I was going slow and cautious but it was still tough. A razor is as effective as it is because of its thinness. It has little material to move aside. A sword is many times thicker.
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Post by rammstein on Apr 16, 2007 23:26:03 GMT
I think it was restrictive and very prone to thrusts whereas maille was almost form fitting and quite a bit stronger in reesisting the thrust. By that I mean, even a round pointed type XI could pose some probelsm to leather armour where the same sword would have a MUCH harder time with maille.
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Post by Deleted on Apr 16, 2007 23:36:08 GMT
yeah... I can see the point of my G2 Lucerne going through my leather armor like its a cupcake. It goes through the sidewall of my tires which are harder. None of my sharps can really cut my tires, I have had the same target tire from day one. However that is an issue of Thrusts vs. Cuts.
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Post by Deleted on Apr 16, 2007 23:39:04 GMT
I think you've got profile and distal taper mixed up. A lot of distal taper is BAD for thrusting and GOOD for cutting, as it means a sword is thinner near the tip while still remaining broad in profile. this is a good cutting geometry. More taper in the profile of a sword meant it comes to a more acute point... i.e. Type XIV, XV, and XVI swords all have a lot of profile taper. more profile taper means you can have a more acute point, while retaining a thicker spine(i.e. less distal taper) to keep the point stiff and rigid for thrusting.
While a sword is many times thicker than a razor blade, you have to remember the incredible advantage a sword has in mass, and also speed when swung. Note that 'speed' does not equate to hitting with as much muscle as possible.
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Post by rammstein on Apr 17, 2007 0:26:35 GMT
Adam, then how is the type XIX a good thrust if it has no profile taper? I'd have assumed that distal taper is just as important as profile taper.
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Post by ShooterMike on Apr 17, 2007 0:57:24 GMT
Adam, then how is the type XIX a good thrust if it has no profile taper? I'd have assumed that distal taper is just as important as profile taper. Rammstein, Did you mean Type XXI? I see no reference anywhere to an Oakeshott Type XIX. If there is one I would like a reference or pictures. If you mean Type XXI, they had both significant profile taper and some distal taper. But they were meant as backup weapons, or even dress weapons, whereas earlier swords were primary weapons.
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Post by ShooterMike on Apr 17, 2007 1:03:29 GMT
... He participated in test cutting afterwards and has since established a new understanding of swordsmanship. I wish to share this knowledge with the community and may everybody enjoy. Lance, I would like to say a huge "thank you" for posting this video. You inspired me to rethink some aspects of sword handling (though I am still an untrained novice) and experiment with different cutting strikes. WHAT A HUGE DIFFERENCE IT MADE!!! Thanks again for doing this "sword community service" video. It really helped me see aspects of sword handling in a different way.
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