what was the pressure of getting fucked up like during a sword fight?
The best swordsmen were defeated by run-of-the-mill archers.
>>29287361
While slightly less pants-on-head retarded than knife fights, swordfights were plenty dangerous for all those involved. You couldn't seriously expect to get out without at least one nasty wound.
>>29287361
I'd imagine it was pretty intense, until the real player, the dirty ashigaru with an arquebus blows you away.
>yfw knights bitched about arbalests and tried to have them banned from war
The argument was that a knight who trained for a lifetime shouldn't be murdered by a guy who picked up what basically amounted to a big crossbow that same day. They got slaughtered.
>>29287621
And people wonder the European left (and right) is so anti-gun.
>>29287621
>hurr durr what is plate armor
The guy that trains for a lifetime is also the guy who can afford plate armor. He's not that worried about bolts or arrows.
>inb4 crossbows reliably penetrate plate and mail and aketon
Stop playing so many video games
>>29287669
>Witcher
>Dark Souls
While certain older games portrayed crossbows as a dedicated anti-armour weapons, recent ones have gone and used them as the .22 of the late middle ages.
>>29287669
>He's not that worried about bolts or arrows.
laughinglongbowmanatAgincourt.tapestry.
>>29287562
See>>29287669
And stop getting your history from the history channel
>>29287669
Wrong, Junior High student. Arrow tips were made to penetrate in response to whatever armor they faced. They didn't just give up because the other team had better protection.
Educate yourself, Stosh Polanski.
>>29287691
Do you really think arrows were punching through plate at Agincourt?
Here's a little documentary for you, you ignorant ass wipe.
https://youtu.be/ukvlZcxNAVY
>>29287669
you're so full of shit
>>29287669
what is a needle bodkin point, alex?
>>29287711
>grabbing at straws
>>29287703
Bodkin points weren't even hardened. They were meant to go into eye slits and gaps and wear the enemy down with percussive force and by forcing them to wear armour, not by going through hardened shaped steel plus tight hardened steel mail plus inches of padding. Maybe you should have stayed in junior high. Here is a curator of a museum telling me how retarded you are. Follow up parts add to it.
https://youtu.be/ukvlZcxNAVY
>>29287711
>>29287735
So is that why the French won Agincourt?
Oh wait.
>>29287722
>>29287725
>>29287732
Samefag is strong in this one.
>Posts video of worldwide respected medieval historian and museum curator accompanied by well known medieval historian and martial arts expert giving well thought out and evidentially based arguments on why they think arrows didn't just go through armor and about what really happened at Agincourt.
"You're full of shit. You're grasping at straws. Hurr durr."
Alright then, kid.
>>29287755
Watch the video series linked and you might learn something new.
>>29287755
Tripfags gonna tripfag.
>>29287755
The English won because of terrain (narrow stretch of knee deep mud with forest on either side), preparation and French disorganization. The majority of the French got trampled or drowned, the rest were killed or captured by foot soldiers and knifhts and executed when the battle was over. The longbowmen caused this happened with their constant barrage of arrows forcing the French to manuever like this, but not by magically going through plate armor. Very few people were actually killed directly by arrows, the arrows forced them to behave in a way that caused them to be killed.
Everyone fucking knows this by now, it's old news, why are you idiots arguing over it?
>>29287755
Motherfucking Civ 5.
>>29287809
No shit the terrain was muddy as fuck but to say "oh lol it's raining arrows i'm totally ok" is hilarious.
>>29287825
They didn't you moron. He just said the arrows caused them to maneuver sloppily.
>>29287831
So arrows can defeat plate armor is basically what you're saying?
>>29287847
Can they? Absolutely, but not directly. They have to find gaps, arrows just don't have the energy and velocity to punch through plates. They can ride up the plate INTO gaps, but unless the armor has some kind of structural failure, it won't punch through.
That doesn't mean you're going to sit there as arrows are being fired at you mind you, and it was these redirected movements that sapped the energy of the soldiers on the field. Most of the kills were not directly due to archers.
>>29287825
"Oh it's raining arrows best keep all this heavy armor on and look straight down so none find their way into my eye slits and march straight forward om this sticky, slippery knee high muddy field protecting my armpits and... Oh hey... It's an English knight with a pollaxe. Wait. There's a lot of them. Where are my guys? PIERRE GET OUT OF THAT MUD THESE GUYS LOOKED PISSED LIKE THEY'VE BEEN SUFFERING FROM DYSENTRY ALL WEEK OR SOMETHING"
Meanwhile French fuck up and send more people into the muddy stretch causing a massive trampling of people, trapping everyone from retreating, ending up with a bunch of armored people stepping on a bunch of other armored who have fallen on knee high mud (lie down in knee high water and you will drown, no imagine it's sticky mud and you're wearing heavy armor that only lets you breathe out of a few of small holes in a helmet that doesn't let your neck turn, meanwhile there's like 50 people and a horse stepping on you)
Arrows were only the catalyst for that situation.
>>29287621
Could I have source about this ?
And you better not say the Second Lateran Council which may have talked about javelins and bows and we aren't even sure.
Knights were the one to pay, use and arm arbalests people, simple reminder.
>>29287879
I get a great mental image of some Frenchman yelling merde as they get hit by a ragged peasant with a billhook screaming eat shit frog in a field of mud and arrows.
>>29287938
Few peasants at Agincourt though.
Everyone on the English side was a professional archer, man at arms or knight.
>>29287755
>helicopters ever flying in the range of a bow
fucking japanese faggots
>>29287995
The archers are shooting on the wrong side as well.
To answer OP question, look at videos of Swordfish. Look how quickly a point is scored.
>>29287938
Yeah, correct that to some burly, bar brawler type motherfucker with a big fucking hammer/mawl/point shit, peasants mostly took part in uprisings etc
>>29287361
Its like a lot of the close combat martial arts.
You're tracking their movements, both offensive and defensive, processing where they will move, where you will move and try to counter their offence and defence with your own. It is extremely hard to do well, when I was in the army we did a bit of knife/close combat stuff with effectively a taser built into a rubberised training blade- which really fucking hurts by the way.
So then you're dealing with physical pain, while still trying to stay cool enough to both protect yourself and deal damage to the opponent.
A lot of success also comes with tempering raw aggression as well, you have to tap into some dark shit to mess someone up in a melee, but at the same time, you need to stay focused and do your best to make the other guy lose his. Being aggressive is a big part to surviving as well, if you can sufficiently hurt or outmanoeuvre someone in a fight, they will make mistakes you can take advantage of. About the only really sure thing to keep in mind when going into some kind of fight, is that you will probably get hurt, but you need to hurt the other guy more and hopefully take him down before he does it to you.
Its different I guess to some of the other martial arts as well, there are no rules.
You can kick a guy in the stones, tear an ear off, bite their nose, hook out an eyeball with your fingers or any other kind of 'cheap shot'- you fucking do it.
>>29287361
>>29287577
Probably true for equally skilled fighters. Being superiorily skilled and trained, having a superior weapon in the situation or superior numbers will allow you to win unharmed reasonably well. Unlike with a knife, you can defend yourself very well (by parrying or simply stepping out of the way) if you're skilled.
>>29287562
>>29287621
>>29287669
Plate armour will not be defeated by bows or crossbows unless at very short range or by very heavy crossbows. Mail armour with padding will still keep off light-weight bows. Shields will keep off almost anything.
The reason longbows and crossbows were still used and useful is that not every spot on a man is armoured the same, not every man is armored the same and not every horse is armored at all.
>>29288235
No shit sherlock, having lots of advantages on your side minimises risks?
And yes you can parry, and sometimes - when the stars align - even dodge a strike, but if you want to get out a swordfight intact you have to do those while simultaneously preventing any follow-up attacks AND hitting your opponent.
I'd argue that that leaves plenty of room for error and injury.
>>29288166
I think a big difference between knife or unarmed fighting and sword fighting is range. If you look at unarmoured sword sparring (sabre, rapier, the likes), they're usually standing at standoff range trying to score a hit without being hit themselves. The situation of a sportive duel may be contributing to this kind of fighting, but a very similar way was taught in a time when these were actually applied, so it must have worked.
>>29288279
Watch some sabre sparring. Some hits fail simply because the supposed receiver was out of range. It's not about dodging so much as retreating slightly, something that is not actually hard to do.
And yes, a however advantaged swordsman will defeat his inferior opponent unharmed far more often than a knife fighter will in a similar situation.
>>29287669
> He doesn't know why shitty plate and chain mail became obsolete
Oooooo to be young and naive again. Read a book that doesn't have pretty pictures on its cover to lure you in
>>29287669
it's not that they were unable to penetrate plate, they certainly had enough power to do so. It was because plate was designed to deflect arrows more then just out right stop them. If they guy is wearing mail however he is pretty much dead if someone has an arbalest and a good eye. Lighter bows however will most likely not penetrate all the mail and padding or at least not enough to cause serious harm.
>>29288288
Range is a huge deal in close combat, as does the design of the weapon itself.
Some weapons are far more suitable to helping in terms of defence- such as the sabre or rapier which have quite large hilts to protect the hand. When it comes down to something like a knife, machete or tomahawk in close combat its often a case of timing more than the longer weapons as you have to position yourself to strike at the time the enemy has found themselves to be vulnerable.
Often an inexperienced fighter will leave their hand and arm at risk of being sliced up as my instructor said, strike which will offend you most- that is the hand with the weapon in it.
Course, having your arm being sliced up is never good, but its preferable to having your chest, throat, face or groin sliced up. But if it causes you to drop your weapon, then you're pretty much fucked unless you're some kind of super unarmed combatant, one of the worst things you can do really is carry a knife and not actually know what you're doing with it. Because if you do come up against someone that does, your fingers are going missing, I'll now have a second weapon and you'll have none.
Plus its important to remember, knives and swords are sidearms (just like a pistol), they aren't primary battle weapons.
Primary battle weapons are gear like spears, polearms and other nasty, pointy/choppy/bashy stuff which has the advantage of range to strike someone down often in a multiple amount of ways, than the sword or knife does.
>>29288326
Yes, I do. Because of firearms. Not crossbows.
Nobody actually used swords in warfare except casual men at arms. Formal soldiers used shields and spears, swords were merely a secondary, and we're carried when not at war. You can look at it like a spear being their primary and a sword being their secondary/EDC. Guards (who were essentially cops) carried swords as well and were trained in their use more than soldiers (they were almost always ex soldiers).
Bows/crossbows/arbals were a whole different story. You had to be on your toes for that shit just like you have to keep your eyes open for people with guns. Shields and armor became a necessity in war because of arrow fire.
>>29287684
but in Witcher at least the master craftsman quest for the Dwarf/Skelliger woman duo included a nobleman placing an order for armor that could withstand a crossbow bolt, and the shitty armor failed.
>>29288453
That's silly by the late Middle-Ages, 14th century and later, pretty much every soldier had a sword of some sort (either an arming sword, falchion, messer, etc). They were carried in battle and most likely used, sure, not as the same rate as polearms but still, if they weren't useful, they wouldn't have been massively worn. Everybody had an arming knife in early Middle-Ages, regardless of the main polearms that they were using, later on, the technology made the sword cheap enough for anyone to have one. Most people had two to four weapons for battle, it's not like you're going to choose between a sword and a spear when you can have both.
op to get back on topic, it is really a hard thing to do and you have to be properly triained, both mind and body. Those of us who choose to live the life of a modern samurai do so knowing full well that someday we will (not might, will) die at the blade of another. The knowledge that we are already dead allows us to strike with cold blooded precision with no though of our own safety.
>>29288458
Separation of plot and gameplay, I guess.
>>29287755
>Helicopter gets hit in random spot on the chassis
>Explodes
Accurate
>>29287755
waaaaaaait.. Wouldnt the downdraft from the rotors.. wait.. armor plating.. wait
fuck it everything about this makes no sense
>>29288616
quick sell the Japanese some a-10's their getting pretty damn obsolete here
they'd kill a dragon dead though. dead as fuck
>>29287755
>people actually watch this weeb shit
>>29288359
Spanish Conquistadors wore plate
>>29288616
The amount of anal devastation to the Jap psyche is not to be underestimated
Its not like the Krauts where they went on a whole self-loathing thing for 70 years feeling sorry for themselves, the japs where so broken in the head by the sheer amounts of fuck laid down on them in WW2 they don't even teach it in high school.
>>29287361
well, when we look at various illustrations of sword fights (not fencing manuals, I mean medieval manuscripts that show two guys actually fighting) we frequently see both guys covered in small cuts before one of them lands a killing blow. One I can remember in particular has them with tons of little cuts on their arms.
>>29287669
this
>>29287725
again, stop getting your history from History Channel. Bodkins were not for piercing plate armor. They were for poking through mail, or going in gaps. There's actually some theories that suggest they weren't even war arrowheads anyways, that they were used for hunting small game.
>>29288453
pretty much. Swords were like the handgun of the modern day, or the revolver of the "wild west".
>>29288711
fun fact, the term "bullet proof" comes from "proofing" a breastplate to show it could stop bullets. They would fire a musket or pistol at the breastplate usually in the bottom corner, and the "proof" would be the round dent left from the pistol/musket ball. So the buyer would know that the breastplate could stop a bullet.
>>29288785
yeah the japs got fucked up hard by WWII. I mean, look at their porn these days.
>>29288711
No they didn't you jackass, they wore steel cuirasses and helmets, not full suits of plate armor covering every inch of their bodies. And the native south and central americans didn't have firearms so your point would be moot anyway.
>>29288839
>yeah the japs got fucked up hard by WWII. I mean, look at their porn these days.
Japanese porn was fucked up way before WW2. Google Shunga.
>>29288839
>>29288915
Yeah but sneaky Uncle Sam inappropriately touched them in places they weren't meant to be touched and the Aussies did very... very bad things to them in Papua.
>>29288933
>the Aussies did very... very bad things to them in Papua.
I don't think anyone cares about what the aussies did. Other than aussies i suppose. All the japs care about is muh nuke.
>>29288940
Well for what its worth they where the first land army to stop the Japanese dead cold in WW2 and had been beating on them since 1939
>>29288949
Yeah but no one really cares about that when looking back at WW2.
>>29288958
You do if you study military tactics and history, there's a lot to be learned from past successes and failures. Course for most of the modern generation, this means hitting the books and not watching the History Channel so much.
>>29288971
We're talking about impact on popular culture here. In this case it's nonexistent.
>>29288982
Guess we can be thankful pop culture isn't taught in military academies :)
>>29287640
I wonder how did you come to that conclusion.
>>29287732
>grabbing at straws
wut
>>29287691
It wasn't the arrows that was killing rhe knights, though.
>>29289058
Bro, you literary just had a conversation with a normie. He let you know right from the beginning he didn't care about what you said because its not popular, as important as it may be.
>>29288523
Only a blade folded over a thousand times could have as sharp an edge, be careful
>>29288453
While swords were rarely primary weapon (take a quick look at a pike/random polearm formation and you'll know why), there were swords that were meant for battlefields, and they were used because they worked fine. Not everybody could afford to encased himself in metal. Pic related.
>>29292845
*encase
Also, have a chick with big sword.
>>29287361
There never were any real sword fights, except for duels and small non-war skirmishes, like a viking raid for example.
Real battle between knights was exclusively from horseback. Thats why medieval Europe developed the feudal caste system.
Horse warfare changed everything. In no time, the longbow defeated knights and then eventually the dane axe/halberd/spear go reintroduced to warfare.
Its important to remember that real battles involves hundreds of soldiers, all depending on each other.
Swords were mostly a tool of status and superiority over the lower feudal caste.
>>29293943
I can assure you, swords were perfectly fine weapons, ask pic related. Also, a sword would be a vital part of a knight's equipment (and not only), regardless if he fought on foot (happened, a lot) or mounted, and they were used extensively.
>>29293943
>There never were any real sword fights
>except for duels
>small skirmishes
Those are 'real' sword fights.
>exclusively from horseback
no
Swords didn't magically appear in the 1100 you know. Nor are they limited to western Europe. They were as much tools for combat as anything else that saw use in warfare. They had their niche and were used when necessary.
>>29293943
>The second most common form of weapon of all time was only ever ceremonial
>Hundreds of different cultures over thousands and thousands of years just made useless metal sticks for shits and giggles.
Nope.
>>29288616
my favorite part is that the helicopters are just flying forwards, at near ground level, when they could approach them from,you know,a few thousand feet up and then lower themselves down while behind the archers. and that they're not even trying to use their missiles.
were they planning on using their rotors to chop at the archers?
I genuinely want ot know why anyone would find this remotely cool.
>>29294956
>I genuinely want ot know why anyone would find this remotely cool.
Because they're not autists
I have a sword question.
Usually I see /k/ shitting all over katanas because of how inferior Japanese metal is compared to European metal in general; katanas are extremely easily chipped or even broken.
How much more usable would katanas be if they were folded as many times as they are traditionally, but with European steel rather than shitty nip metal?
>>29294974
the irony of this post hurts
>>29293943
Are you stupid or baiting?
>>29296201
If we're talking about 15-17th century, they're roughly as good as one another really, but the 'shitty metal' requires a lot more of the smiths work to reach the quality of the other in terms of hardness and flexibility.
Part of being comparatively isolated culture I guess, as opposed to say the route of the old Silk Road that ran from China to Turkey, through the Sub-Continent, Middle East and Near-East- a lot of metallurgical development came out of those countries as they traded, fought and swapped knowledge over a few 1000 years. Even today there's quite a lot of generational smiths in places like India and Pakistan who produce a relatively large industry of quality blades.
Once that hit the end of the Silk Road into Europe, the Europeans adopted a lot of the metallurgy from them and further developed it up until the advent of gunpowder, then they put a lot of effort into making barrels. Which is slightly different to blades, but still borrows from one another in a lot of ways from a chemical, smithing and engineering viewpoint.
The difference with a weapon such as a Katana, compared with a European sword like the Rapier or Sabre, is mostly in terms of technique.
Katana's have fuck all in the way of both reach and defence, so you have to have the sword + your hands out of swinging distance of the enemy so they don't lop your arms apart- much like knife fighting in a lot of ways, just with more reach.
Gear like the Rapier and Sabre are a little longer, have defences on the guards, so you can have a defence zone further between yourself and the opponent. A 'sword forward' means of attacking/defence which keeps the blade and guard between you and them, they want to hit you, then they have to come within striking distance of the Rapier, which is around 39-44" blade, compared to say the length of the Katana which is about 28-30"
Basically, you'll be cut to ribbons by the rapier before you can get into striking distance with the Katana
