Got a Real World Weapons or Armour Question? Mk XII [Archive] - Page 2

Brother Oni

2013-06-01, 12:04 PM

Crossbows are very interesting with a lot of variation. I've often heard it claimed that crossbows are more accurate than bows -- possibly because it's easier, i.e. less strenuous, to aim. However, I've also heard the exact opposite! That the large diameter crossbow bolt, and the uncontrolled way that it is "slapped" into flight by the cord greatly reduces accuracy -- however, this view is in the context of a heavy military crossbow vs. a recurve or longbow -- and specified that this didn't apply to a finely made hunting crossbow.

Which is understandable - with a military crossbow you often have lots of available targets for an extended period of time, thus penetration and rate of fire is far more useful.
Compare to a hunting crossbow where you only get one shot, thus you have to make that shot count, making accuracy far more important.

In modern terms, it's be like a PDW, a battle rifle, a sniper rifle and a SAW. All essentially work in the same way, but each is intended for a different role thus they emphasise different traits.

As for accuracy, I feel it's important to highlight the difference between accuracy and precision, (people who shoot regularly can ignore this):
http://academics.wellesley.edu/Chemistry/Chem105manual/Appendices/AccuracyPrecision.gif

Accuracy is when you can hit the target, while precision is when you can get the same result over and over again. Obviously you want both, but if you're accurate but imprecise then you end up taking lots of shots to hit the target. If you're inaccurate but precise, often all you need to do is to adjust your sights.

Of the two, precision is far harder to learn.

In the case of a bow, inconsistent power output affects both your accuracy and precision (and was also a common issue with early firearms when their shooters put in varying size powder charges due to the stress of combat). Getting this right will make you very precise, thus becoming accurate is a comparative easy aim adjustment.

Crossbows fix the issue of consistent power output, but the flight characteristics of a bolt are inferior to an arrow's, thus at longer distances a bow is more likely to be on target.

I suspect fusilier's sources are both correct, it just depends on the distance to target (the closer, the more accurate and precise the crossbow is).

As far teaching people to kill goes I sort of feel that the psychological resistance to killing tends to be overemphasized quite a bit. Truth is a lot of people do seem to like violence quite a bit, and it probably wouldn't take a lot of "they're different/bad" to turn the average joe into a murderer.

I think it depends on the time period: I know during WW1 and WW2, it took a fair bit of training to overcome the aversion to killing.

In modern times, it's been found that new recruits have noticeably less aversion to kill. There are a number of theories on why this is, but they're all very hot button topics.

That's why it's generally perferred to stay as far back as you can with a really long spear,

I think it's more because for the same mass of metal in a single sword, you can make multiple spears instead, thus arming more men with the same amount of comparatively expensive metal (wood was generally cheap back then).

This not including the preference for long weapons (pikes, spears, etc) in mass combat as they allow more men in a unit to fight effectively at once.

Spiryt

2013-06-01, 12:50 PM

Crossbows fix the issue of consistent power output, but the flight characteristics of a bolt are inferior to an arrow's, thus at longer distances a bow is more likely to be on target.

I'm not really sure about it. Stiffness is generally huge advantage, in both receiving, conserving energy and stable flight.

Assuming roughly the same mass, bolt will usually be a bit thicker, so air will drag it more, obviously.

On the other hand, in all kinds of arrows fletching is anyway biggest 'slower', much bigger than differences in shape.

and the uncontrolled way that it is "slapped" into flight by the cord greatly reduces accuracy

I've also read it somewhere, but realistically, the contact between the cord and arrow is actually easier to control with crossbow, when you don't have to actually hold the string... So it's hard to tell.

Mr Beer

2013-06-01, 02:34 PM

The fact that the late teens and early adulthood period is also the one where young men are most likely to engage in warfare, all the while having had little training or monetary means to equip themselves properly, probably also contributed somewhat to the skewed balance in that part of life.

Yes agree.

It's not something I've ever looked into but I remember reading that, all else being equal, 25 year olds make significantly superior soldiers to 18 year olds, at least partly because they make better decisions under pressure.

Mr Beer

2013-06-01, 02:40 PM

As far teaching people to kill goes I sort of feel that the psychological resistance to killing tends to be overemphasized quite a bit.

It's significant enough to be a concern that modern armed forces attempt to address in their training.

Incanur

2013-06-01, 02:59 PM

The weight of the evidence indicates greater accuracy for crossbows over bows, though of course this depends on the specifics. Late-sixteenth-century firearm advocate Humphrey Barwick explicitly ranked the crossbow as more accurate than the bow. (He ranked the gun as more accurate still.) Being able to aim at one's leisure and without the exertion of holding back 80-180lbs makes a notable difference.

It's my understanding that if anything bolts tended to have less drag than arrows because of their shorter length and greater density.

The idea of crossbows as weapons of the common man isn't completely off, depending on what you mean by the common man. Various medieval town inhabitants practiced the crossbow with greater or less dedication. It was considered the Swiss national weapon before the rise of the halberd and then pike. In the fifteenth century and early sixteenth century you repeatedly find crossbows in the hands of dubiously effective infantry. (One fifteenth-century source (http://books.google.com/books?id=H7VFJAK8LSUC&pg=PA44&lpg=PA44&dq=%22shower+of+rotten+apples%22&source=bl&ots=Ox_MzgX8Xy&sig=o7euY-wbfzKjUiHg04yO8f4Kn-o&hl=en&sa=X&ei=9lCqUaDEI7D1igLA2ICYDw&ved=0CC4Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=%22shower%20of%20rotten%20apples%22&f=false) hilariously describes a volley from over a thousand crossbows as doing no more harm than "a shower of rotten apples.") In China, you have crossbows as the most common infantry weapon for certain periods.

Speaking of China, Chinese crossbow designs had the best names (http://www.chinahistoryforum.com/index.php?/topic/1760-song-steel-arbalest-aka-divine-armed-crossbow/). Who doesn't want to shoot a divine-armed or enemy-vanquishing crossbow?

warty goblin

2013-06-01, 03:21 PM

Yes agree.

It's not something I've ever looked into but I remember reading that, all else being equal, 25 year olds make significantly superior soldiers to 18 year olds, at least partly because they make better decisions under pressure.

I've also read that modern armies prefer drafting eighteen year olds though, as they're much easier to emotionally and mentally control than older men. Maybe one aspect of older people making better decisions under pressure is them being more able and willing to say 'screw you' to the entire war.

fusilier

2013-06-01, 05:49 PM

I'm not really sure about it. Stiffness is generally huge advantage, in both receiving, conserving energy and stable flight.

Assuming roughly the same mass, bolt will usually be a bit thicker, so air will drag it more, obviously.

On the other hand, in all kinds of arrows fletching is anyway biggest 'slower', much bigger than differences in shape.

I've also read it somewhere, but realistically, the contact between the cord and arrow is actually easier to control with crossbow, when you don't have to actually hold the string... So it's hard to tell.

It has to do with the "release" (or so the theory goes): On a bow, the bowstring is in contact with the arrow, and the manner in which the archer releases the string is more smoothly controlled by the archers fingers (not necessarily more consistent). The arrow is being accelerated more smoothly as it is in contact with the bowstring the moment it is released. On a crossbow, the cord is released mechanically, and it does not begin it's movement already in contact with the arrow. So the arrow doesn't begin accelerating when the cord does, and is struck (or "slapped") into motion by an already moving cord. The more powerful the crossbow, the more serious this problem. So a lighter hunting crossbow, wouldn't suffer this problem to nearly the same degree as a military crossbow hoping to puncture plate armor. Also, the more powerful the crossbow the thicker the bolt has to be, which affects it's aerodynamics negatively. (Was it Payne-Galloway's research where they shattered a normal arrow trying to launch it from a heavy crossbow?)

fusilier

2013-06-01, 05:54 PM

It's my understanding that if anything bolts tended to have less drag than arrows because of their shorter length and greater density.

My understanding is that arrows have lower drag, because they have a narrower cross-section. Their longer length means that the mass per cross-sectional area is greater than a bolt!

Incanur

2013-06-01, 09:14 PM

fusilier

2013-06-02, 12:37 AM

I guess I've heard it both ways. In wind tunnel tests published in Scientific American 252:1 (January 1985), the tested crossbow bolt experienced lower drag than the tested longbow arrow. If bolts really are less aerodynamic, I want to know, because that would make the crossbow Payne-Gallwey used to shoot a bolt approximately 450 yards even more powerful.

Hmm. I just reported what I had heard. I wonder if also depends upon the kind of head used on the projectiles? I'm sure there are ton of other design factors to consider too.

Brother Oni

2013-06-02, 03:05 AM

In China, you have crossbows as the most common infantry weapon for certain periods.

I know that during the Three Kingdoms era (~3rd century AD), ability to shoot a bow was so important that there was a rank of horse archer (albeit a low one).

Speaking of China, Chinese crossbow designs had the best names (http://www.chinahistoryforum.com/index.php?/topic/1760-song-steel-arbalest-aka-divine-armed-crossbow/). Who doesn't want to shoot a divine-armed or enemy-vanquishing crossbow?

Yeah, most traditional Chinese names tend to be rather flowery and grandiose. I just wished they kept the tradition up - driving the All Under Heaven Conquering War Vehicle sounds better than Type-99 MBT.

It has to do with the "release" (or so the theory goes): On a bow, the bowstring is in contact with the arrow, and the manner in which the archer releases the string is more smoothly controlled by the archers fingers (not necessarily more consistent).

Oh yes. :smallsigh:
Spent an hour yesterday trying to stop myself torquing the string on release, still doing it. :smallfurious:

I guess I've heard it both ways. In wind tunnel tests published in Scientific American 252:1 (January 1985), the tested crossbow bolt experienced lower drag than the tested longbow arrow. If bolts really are less aerodynamic, I want to know, because that would make the crossbow Payne-Gallwey used to shoot a bolt approximately 450 yards even more powerful.

The article is archived, but subscription only - do you remember whether they used a traditional crossbow or a modern pulley one, and what the draw weight was?

Starshade

2013-06-02, 04:47 AM

OK, I'm not sure that this is appropriate for this thread because it's about something that's only sort of a weapon.
What I've noticed is that in rural areas, especially on farms, workers will often carry knives with them, generally decent-sized and single-edged. I think some people call them "chore knives." In older times I know that they were sometimes made out of whatever metal was available, for example my great-grandfather used one made out of an old saw blade, I've also seen them made out of old kitchen knives.
It seems to me that medieval peasants would use something similar just because they're so useful. That said I've not been able to uncover any information about what they looked like, how they were made or anything. Most information I can find is about daggers and stuff meant for actually fighting.

There is Pictures of actual medival pesant knives out there, as this link:
http://www.google.com/search?q=medieval+peasant+knife&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=PxOrUarNLOe34AS7noGACw&ved=0CAcQ_AUoAQ&biw=1766&bih=977#facrc=_&imgrc=eY-DkbfcxGKIoM%3A%3B0r2lOFt_1bf4TM%3Bhttp%253A%252F%2 52Fwww.cullodenantiques.com%252Fimages%252F9_relic _medieval_knife.jpg%3Bhttp%253A%252F%252Fwww.cullo denantiques.com%252Fpages%252Funder750.html%3B500% 3B125

Mr Beer

2013-06-02, 05:38 PM

I've also read that modern armies prefer drafting eighteen year olds though, as they're much easier to emotionally and mentally control than older men. Maybe one aspect of older people making better decisions under pressure is them being more able and willing to say 'screw you' to the entire war.

Makes sense. Also, I suppose that those 18 year olds will mostly become 25 year old soldiers so it's not like the army misses out on any age-based sweet spot.

Knaight

2013-06-02, 05:43 PM

warty goblin

2013-06-02, 08:52 PM

I've got a question about bows.
In composite bows, are there any issues with temperature extremes? I'm wondering if differing thermal expansion rates could pose a problem, particularly if you took a bow made in somewhere particularly warm to go penguin hunting or something.

The Inuit seem to have used bows of wood, bone or antler backed with sinew cabling. These cordage backed bows probably count as a form of composite. Obviously such a weapon would have to work fairly well in the cold to be worth the considerable bother of making. This suggests that the components of a composite retain their material properties in serious cold. This page (http://primitiveways.com/cordage_backed_bow.html) gives some details.

I don't know how extreme cold would effect the glue for holding the layers together - which in temperate climates can take on the order of two years to set fully. I could see being repeatedly frozen during that time causing issues, but really have no hard evidence. Since a cordage backed bow can be made entirely with knotwork, unfortunately the Inuit designs just don't offer any insight here.

Avilan the Grey

2013-06-03, 03:27 AM

Crossbows being weapons of common man is also somehow problematic - even very simple crossbow would be costly, cumbersome (heavy or/and large, with bow being often quite long and stock being long in perpendicular direction as well), and somehow specialized.

Again it depends. In the late middle ages (15 century + at least) and the renaissance crossbows were the most common ranged weapon in Sweden. it was the main hunting weapon for nobles (as a hunting weapon it was even preferred up through the 17th century, since it could be loaded much quicker than the rifles and muskets, and much more quiet as well) as well as the populace and also a common symbol for rebellion (because during the late middle ages and later it was illegal for the farmer class to carry weapons outside knives and hunting gear). So one of the things farmes armed themselves with during rebellious uprisings against local lords as well as the crown, was crossbows (and pitchforks and spears and clubs of course).

Anyway, of course these crossbows were not the really big ones. They needed to be loadable by a single person without help and only take a limited time doing so. The huge purely military crossbows with cranks and stuff to load them is well... purely used by the military and professional soldiers.

rrgg

2013-06-03, 06:01 AM

I think it depends on the time period: I know during WW1 and WW2, it took a fair bit of training to overcome the aversion to killing.

In modern times, it's been found that new recruits have noticeably less aversion to kill. There are a number of theories on why this is, but they're all very hot button topics.

You have the same issue with guns though, a soldier needs to be willing stick his head up and make a loud "here I am" noise long before he needs to worry about his willingness to kill. There were a number of studies during WWII which found a significant number of soldiers never actually fired their weapons in combat, but in an era when suppressive fire is a thing I don't think the "resistance to killing" conclusion really fits with occam's razor.

Sometimes battlefield statistics just don't tell you as much as you think they do. There's the famous case from WWI when the British army began to issue helmets for the first time and the number of reported head injuries suddenly shot through the roof.

Galloglaich

2013-06-03, 12:37 PM

A lot to say on the crossbows, I'll try to post a useful overall summary, but I'm a bit swamped with work right now, I'll try to do it tonight in the hotel room.

G

Galloglaich

2013-06-03, 05:21 PM

I guess I've heard it both ways. In wind tunnel tests published in Scientific American 252:1 (January 1985), the tested crossbow bolt experienced lower drag than the tested longbow arrow. If bolts really are less aerodynamic, I want to know, because that would make the crossbow Payne-Gallwey used to shoot a bolt approximately 450 yards even more powerful.

Are those with medieval / Early Modern type crossbow bolts or today's hunting type bolts (really arrows) because they are totally different.

Antique bolts, though they tended to be short and thick, also varied quite a bit in terms of how the fletchings were made and what kind of bolt head they had.

G

Knaight

2013-06-03, 07:27 PM

The Inuit seem to have used bows of wood, bone or antler backed with sinew cabling. These cordage backed bows probably count as a form of composite. Obviously such a weapon would have to work fairly well in the cold to be worth the considerable bother of making. This suggests that the components of a composite retain their material properties in serious cold. This page (http://primitiveways.com/cordage_backed_bow.html) gives some details.
Sorry, let me clarify. I'm less concerned with how they work in the cold (quite well, as we see) and more of what happens if you take a bow made in a very warm place to the gold, or for that matter try to take one of the Inuit bows mentioned to something like the Sahara. It's the change in temperature that I'm wondering about, not the temperature itself.

warty goblin

2013-06-03, 10:09 PM

Telok

2013-06-04, 01:04 AM

Sorry, let me clarify. I'm less concerned with how they work in the cold (quite well, as we see) and more of what happens if you take a bow made in a very warm place to the gold, or for that matter try to take one of the Inuit bows mentioned to something like the Sahara. It's the change in temperature that I'm wondering about, not the temperature itself.

You can acually test this at home relatively easily. Gather information on glue (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glue#History) and make a couple simple ones in your kitchen. Stick some bits together and put half of them in your refrigerator and half by your boiler or heater (be sure to keep a couple out for your coltrol group). Let the bits cure for a week or two and then switch them around. After another week or something take them out and test them.

You can check this (http://books.google.com/books?id=Du7S2qjEoRgC&pg=PA166&lpg=PA166&dq=glue+bower+bow+making&source=bl&ots=JeW6O0JP5d&sig=JNHscOvsiYTlBysm183APJP3XDM&hl=en&sa=X&ei=m4OtUcmkBomiigL_xIG4Dg&ved=0CEwQ6AEwBQ#v=onepage&q=glue%20bower%20bow%20making&f=false) out. And it might not be the temperature so much as the humidity that limits your bow.

GnomeFighter

2013-06-04, 04:35 AM

Sorry, let me clarify. I'm less concerned with how they work in the cold (quite well, as we see) and more of what happens if you take a bow made in a very warm place to the gold, or for that matter try to take one of the Inuit bows mentioned to something like the Sahara. It's the change in temperature that I'm wondering about, not the temperature itself.

Not allot. Kind of.

You will notice the bow will perform differently dependent on temperature and humidity. The temperature difference will not be so much that it will really effect the bow to a dangerous extent. The worst effects on bows comes from change in temperature. I.e. if you quickly take a bow from a warm place to a cold place without letting it adjust it can cause problems, mostly to do with different bits expanding/contracting at different rates. This can cause problems with modern bows (mostly screwing up your tune rather than damage). Better to let a bow stay at the working temp or at least give it a gentle warm up before shooting.

My biggest worry would be humidity. I would worry a trad composite bow would not perform well in high humidity. Water could get in between the laminates and cause all sorts of problems. I have no evidence of this, but it would be something I would avoid.

Galloglaich

2013-06-05, 12:10 AM

A few quick thoughts about crossbows.

First for context

100 years from now, when everyone has lasers and particle beams, someone will ask, "Were rifles accurate? Did they cause damage? Did they have long range?"

And the person who knows the answer, if there is one, will first wonder. Do they mean this .22 Marlin bolt-action?

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-1ffy6O_MDkE/TxjT7Pyw4EI/AAAAAAAABkE/5wHfetoWPQ0/s1600/marlin%2B22.jpg

or this Ak-47

http://www.enemyforces.net/firearms/ak47.jpg

or this .358 big-game hunting rifle?

http://www.coreth.com/~mpearce/firearms/collection/images/BrowningABolt-728x243.jpg

The range of crossbows are similarly diverse. They were in use for at least 2500 years .... long enough for a wide range of varieties. Some similar to the .22, were light and suitable mostly for target practice or very small game, like the skane lockbow (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sk%C3%A5ne_lockbow).

Others were used for fast shooting, like the Chinese repeating crossbow (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repeating_crossbow).

By the high medieval period you have a range of military and hunting types. Many were used for both activities more or less interchangeably (like a musket during Colonial American times). The most specialized hunting weapons were the slurbows, like this one, which shot pellets:

http://www.christies.com/lotfinderimages/D55098/a_fine_german_slurbow_dated_1657_d5509843h.jpg

the most specialized for warfare were the windlass crossbows and other similar types, which tended to be large and powerful. Mostly used for siege warfare. These were also called "English Winders"

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-dRy3FcMZ4a8/T5NBFMhhXTI/AAAAAAAAAA0/aYM3vwE6hzs/s1600/crossbow-3.jpg

While longbows were popular in Wales, England, Burgundy, Scotland and Scandinavia (more or less in that order), the crossbow gradually became the preferred military weapon in Central and Southern Europe.

Though the kind of standard crossbow, with a stirrup, often spanned by a belt-hook, a bit stronger than a typical bow but not much, (and slower to shoot, maybe 60% as fast) remained popular for both war and hunting. Like this replica.

http://www.wolfeargent.com/crossbow/crossbow-side-550.jpg

The later medieval period saw the rise of very powerful composite prod weapons like this antique

http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/images/h2/h2_04.3.36.jpg

These were made of composite materials (wood, horn, sinew and so on) and they were definitely susceptible to moisture. All bows were, especially their strings, but crossbows couldn't be unstrung easily. So they tended to be kept in covers, like the guy this one is carrying on his saddle:

http://www.codexmartialis.com/download/file.php?id=79

For some reason I haven't been able to figure out yet they almost always kept bolts in very sturdy, solid wood quivers lined with fur, like this one

http://i66.servimg.com/u/f66/14/66/56/18/11971510.jpg

Not long after (early 1400's) you began to see steel prod crossbows which were also very strong.

Both the composite prod and the steel prod could be very strong, up to 1,200 lbs draw or more, and at least 10% (probably more like 30% or 40%) more powerful than any self-bow.

Accuracy

Crossbows were generally more accurate at shooting at individual targets than bows - a better 'sniper' weapon if you will. Bows with their high rate of shots could be a bit more 'spray and pray' at close range and something almost like light artillery or mortars at long range. English longbowmen even used to train for this with something called 'clout shooting (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clout_archery)'.

Though total range could be over 200 or 300 meters, period records from Germany and Poland mention a rough range to hit an individual person at around the equivalent of 50 meters for a bow and 80 meters for a 'standard' crossbow. There were also always stories about some guy who could shoot a birds leg off at 400 meters as well, but the sober military records (such as from the Teutonic Order) usually quote numbers like the above. Bows may have been more accurate for 'area-shots' which is how they were used a lot. To extend range, both crossbows and bows were used with 'fight arrows' (or flight 'bolts') which could shoot farther but did less damage (that might be the explanation for the 'rotten apples' anecdote shot by Dutch militia in that book about Philip the Good; I have a hard copy of that book and they also mention many other incidents in which crossbows used by the Flemish militias especially, were far more dangerous)

The really powerful crossbows were more accurate than the 'standard' type, but we don't really know how much due to the lack of really good quality replicas around today. The very powerful (800lb draw or more) steel prod crossbows are very hard (and extremely expensive) to make and pretty dangerous to use. The composite prod weapons are even more expensive and have only been made with very limited success (they start to fail after a few shots) they basically aren't within the grasp of the replica making industry yet. We also aren't sure which kind of bolts go with which kind of crossbows (some tests have shown that crossbow replicas of this level can shoot bolts up to 125 grams in weight at roughly the same speed as 40 grams)

Almost all period sources claim the late medieval crossbow was more accurate than both the bows (longbows and recurves) and the early firearms of the time (hand-gonnes and early arquebusses, mainly). By the time you get muskets and especially early rifled guns (which were not common until very late but which we know were around as early as the 15th century because they were being banned from shooting contests because they were considered cheating) at least with expert marksmen, the best guns were finally equaling and surpassing crossbows for accuracy by the mid-16th century, though a top-end military crossbow was still more accurate than the run-of-the-mill matchlock arquebus or caliver.

In addition to inherent accuracy for whatever reason, crossbows could also be held in readiness indefinitely like a gun (but unlike a bow), and unlike a bow, could be steadied against something like a wall, the nook of a tree, a window frame, the side of a wagon, etc. If you have any experience shooting rifles you know what an advantage that is for accuracy. This is probably why crossbows were so often used with wagons, or in sieges (from behind walls) or with special shields (pavises) which had a flat spot on the top just for resting the crossbow on.

Like these two

http://www.greydragon.org/trips/Oct-D&E/ingolstadt/shields100.jpg

Unlike a gun (from that period) crossbows did not require the maintenance of a lit match, did not make a plume of smoke, and made only moderate noise compared to firearms (they were not as quiet as sometimes claimed though).

The Cliche's
Most of the clichés about crossbows comes from mixing up the different types. Something like a Skane lockbow is similar to a .22 that even a child could use pretty effectively. Modern documentaries typically refer to something like this in terms of ease of use. But we know from replicas and surviving antiques that the more powerful weapons, even the middling grade military ones, are not so easy or safe to use, and the top end ones are positively dangerous to the untrained. This is probably why surviving records show crossbowmen were paid quite well. The records may only show guys who were shooting the 'strong' crossbows.

Strong doesn't mean big though, a lot of the late medieval and Early Modern era crossbows of the most powerful types were rather small.

Crossbows in this range of power could reach quite far (a researcher named Payne Gallway famously shot an antique over 400 meters nearly a century ago) probably farther than any bow.

Crossbows could also definitely be used from horseback and were used this way extensively especially in the 15th century.

How to make them into 'superhero' weapons.

This is where my expertise dies off quickly, but probably the simplest thing to make an 'uber' crossbow was already covered in the original DnD; take a regular (upper end in terms of power) military crossbow and just make it instant spanning (cocking). This would be a very scary weapon equivalent to something like a powerful lever action rifle or something.

Crossbows were also used with special ammunition. Slurbows shot lead pellets as I already mentioned, these could at least theoretically be substituted for glass or ceramic globes containing pyrotechnic substances, acid, or drugs, or poison, or something more far out. Fire-bolts were also in common use, they undoubtedly wouldn't shoot as far but they are common enough in the archeological record that it's safe to assume they were effective.

G

fusilier

2013-06-05, 04:40 AM

Not to stir things up too much, but I thought I would provide a counter view to the argument that crossbows were more accurate. This is an excerpt from Gunpowder and Galleys, by John P. Guilmartin, which is difficult to find, although the chapter on weaponry is available on the author's website and can be found here:
http://www.angelfire.com/ga4/guilmartin.com/Weapons.html

Having first been published in 1974 it is certainly a bit dated by now (although there was an updated version published in 2005 -- I haven't been able to get a copy of it). Most of the information references Payne-Galloway, but nearly everybody does -- a hundred years ago they got away with doing things that couldn't be done today; like going into museums and firing their 400 year old crossbows!

However, this is, so far, the most technical analysis of crossbow accuracy that I've read, so I wanted to present it --

The reasons for the crossbow’s inaccuracy are somewhat involved. They begin with the mechanics of the release mechanism (see Fig. 4). Where an archer, by precisely controlling his release, could ensure that the energy in his bowstring was smoothly transmitted to the arrow, the crossbow release mechanism released the cord abruptly and somewhat erratically. Instead of being smoothly accelerated in a carefully controlled direction, the crossbow bolt began its voyage lying loosely in its trough, and was then ‘slapped’ into flight with enormous force. Crossbow bolts had to be made short and thick with a flat base in order to prevent the tremendous impact of the cord from reducing them to splinters.12 In view of the need for strength and the basic inaccuracy of the crossbow, war bolts were often very crudely made, having a single leather fin set into a slot sawed across the base of the bolt. The aerodynamic inefficiency of the resultant shape sharply increased drag and therefore reduced the maximum range. This was aggravated by the considerable and unpredictable vibration which the impact of the cord imparted to the bolt. By further and inconsistently increasing the aerodynamic drag of the bolt this vibration additionally reduced both range and accuracy.

I am not claiming that this is necessarily the case, just that it seems fairly convincing on the surface. If Guilmartin is correct, then why do historical reports make the opposite claim about crossbows versus bows? I'm willing to speculate a little:

1. Perhaps the authors weren't as trained in the use of bow as they needed to be? It is generally agreed that learning to use a bow effectively was basically a life-style, something begun at childhood. On the other hand, the crossbow was something that could be trained in a comparatively short amount of time. If your "example" bowman was lacking the background of the former, then we could expect a crossbowman to out perform him.

2. An agenda, or embellishment, or both. Most writers from that era don't seem to have been too objective (even if they wrote as if they were).

3. A practical assessment, instead of a measure of the intrinsic capabilities of the weapon. We can tie this point with the other two in a very logical way --> if I give three weeks of bow training (point 1) to one soldier, and three weeks of crossbow training to another: the crossbowman will be more accurate with his weapon, therefore crossbows are more accurate than bows (point 2). ;-) This isn't necessarily a deliberate attempt to misinform, it's a practical statement, and in my opinion it's very important. But it can provide confusion if we are interested in the intrinsic potential of the weapon.

Or perhaps Guilmartin's analysis overloooked some counterbalancing factors? Or maybe he was just wrong? :-) I don't know, but he writes pretty convincingly!

@Incanur -- you mentioned a Scientific American article from 1985, where they conducted drag tests on actual crossbow bolts. Unfortunately, I do not have access to that magazine. As that would be more recent, and probably pretty scientific, testing, I would love hear more about it. All I could find out about it by poking around online, was that they tested ancient Roman crossbow bolts. My understanding is that most Roman "crossbows" were largish siege weapons? And such a bolt might have had considerably different dimensions from a medieval one?

Avilan the Grey

2013-06-05, 06:25 AM

I must say that I have never heard that a crossbow would be more accurate than a musket as much as it was just easier to handle, cheaper, had quicker reload time and less sensitive (no fire nor dry powder to maintain).

Edit: The only time the accuracy comes up in the sources I have read is when compared to bows for untrained or not-as-trained people. Basically a bow is a superior weapon, if you spent your childhood training for it. If you haven't, you can learn how to kill both prey and enemies after a 1 week crash course with a crossbow.

Spiryt

2013-06-05, 07:06 AM

I guess that in some cases that 'impact' could matter, particularly in some very crude mechanism....

But the problem I see here, that during that first 'impact' string can really transfer rather tiny amount of it's energy to arrow, and even if there was some 'shock' caused, then string still has a majority of it's energy, and time to transfer limbs energy in 'straight' direction.

How big would be the difference from bow be - arrow pushed 'instantly' vs few millimeters of string traveling on it's own.

Hard to say.

1. Perhaps the authors weren't as trained in the use of bow as they needed to be? It is generally agreed that learning to use a bow effectively was basically a life-style, something begun at childhood. On the other hand, the crossbow was something that could be trained in a comparatively short amount of time. If your "example" bowman was lacking the background of the former, then we could expect a crossbowman to out perform him.

I would suspect that simply no matter how trained bowman is, the very nature of bow shooting is somehow more erratic than situation where one doesn't need to hold that string.

fusilier

2013-06-05, 02:10 PM

Edit: The only time the accuracy comes up in the sources I have read is when compared to bows for untrained or not-as-trained people. Basically a bow is a superior weapon, if you spent your childhood training for it. If you haven't, you can learn how to kill both prey and enemies after a 1 week crash course with a crossbow.

Thanks for the update. Much of the anecdotal evidence that I've heard would support this (I was recently reading Spanish accounts of Chichimecs use of the bow -- wow!). However, I'm going to briefly play devils advocate to the theory -- If one person has spent their entire life training with a weapon (a bow), wouldn't you expect them to be more proficient at it's use than someone who hadn't (a crossbow)? Regardless of the intrinsic capabilities of the weapon?

Also, even if (historical) crossbows are inherently less accurate than bows, there's a good argument to be made that they were *practically* more accurate than bows -- depending upon the circumstances.

I would suspect that simply no matter how trained bowman is, the very nature of bow shooting is somehow more erratic than situation where one doesn't need to hold that string.

I see what you are saying here, mainly, that the crossbow mechanism helps ensure a consistent amount of force is applied to the bolt each time it is shot (although in reality it would probably be effected by atmospheric conditions), but you should reread the quote from Guilmartin carefully. There are several other factors that would make it more erratic, and those would override the benefit conferred by a consistent amount of force.

I'm also not entirely certain, that a very experienced bowman, wouldn't be able to provide sufficiently consistent force either -- possibly even better than a crossbow, as he may be able to sense changes due to atmosphere (or at least be able to adjust elevation to compensate for a perceived change in force).

Something I forgot to mention earlier, is that I think crossbows are generally believed to "flatter" shooting, which most people would associate with greater accuracy -- it makes it easier to hit a vertical plane (like someone who is standing up).

AgentPaper

2013-06-05, 02:43 PM

There's also a difference between "easy to aim" and "accurate". A crossbow could easily be easier to aim, meaning it takes less skill to hit a target, while a bow could be more accurate, meaning it can hit a target more accurately and reliably assuming you're very well trained in it's use.

So essentially if you had two random schmoes one with a crossbow and one with a bow, the crossbowman would be more accurate than the bowman, but if you then took a master bowman and a master crossbowman and gave them their respective weapons, the bowman might be more accurate than the crossbowman.

In game terms, the bow would have a steeper learning curve but a higher skill ceiling, meaning you start out bad at it but can get really good, whereas a crossbow has a shallow learning curve and a low skill ceiling, meaning you start out OK and can only get a bit better.

This is only a theory, but it would explain the varying reports on accuracy.

Storm Bringer

2013-06-05, 03:14 PM

I think their has also been a fair amount of cherry picking that has gone on, with different sides to the debate digging through the surviving texts and dragging up quotes that support their view.

ps:
just to be clear, I am NOT accusing anyone on this forum of this, merely saying that their sources might have done so.

Spiryt

2013-06-05, 03:18 PM

Something I forgot to mention earlier, is that I think crossbows are generally believed to "flatter" shooting, which most people would associate with greater accuracy -- it makes it easier to hit a vertical plane (like someone who is standing up).

I mentioned theories about it few times - way less visible archer paradox and bolt flexing in general, causes less energy waste, both on bending and due to air resistance.

Thus, bolt preserves it's velocity better, especially at 'flat' trajectories.

Dunno how true it actually is for 'most' applications, would need checking.

Theoretically, velocities possible with crossbow, might be, all other things being roughly equal, greater than with 'long' bow, because both arms have way less road to cover.

Mathis

2013-06-05, 03:50 PM

Quick question regarding the bow and crossbow accuracy thing going on. Weren't bows fired in mass volleys anyway, making their accuracy, or their ability to hit the exact point you want to on the battlefield a very minor part of the weapon. I mean, the arrows travelled in an arc and only needed to fall in great numbers in a general area. The ability to pinpoint a specific soldier on the battlefield doesn't seem like a major advantage unless you are fighting someone who leads from the front such as we see in the American war of independance where American rebels singled out British officers to cripple the chain of command?

Also, was small ranged arms accuracy really an important aspect up until world war one, or when we see an end to the old style of warfare than I have no idea what to call except large units marching up to one another and unleashing volley after volley of either arrows or musketfire?

AgentPaper

2013-06-05, 03:55 PM

Quick question regarding the bow and crossbow accuracy thing going on. Weren't bows fired in mass volleys anyway, making their accuracy, or their ability to hit the exact point you want to on the battlefield a very minor part of the weapon. I mean, the arrows travelled in an arc and only needed to fall in great numbers in a general area. The ability to pinpoint a specific soldier on the battlefield doesn't seem like a major advantage unless you are fighting someone who leads from the front such as we see in the American war of independance where American rebels singled out British officers to cripple the chain of command?

You still need to be accurate enough to hit that general area from a long ways away. Unless you're in a really huge battle, that area isn't likely going to be as large as you think, maybe 50 feet square for a hundred men. When shooting an arc shot especially, it takes skill to be that accurate, since things like wind speed and direction can have a huge impact on where your arrow goes.

Spiryt

2013-06-05, 04:14 PM

You still need to be accurate enough to hit that general area from a long ways away. Unless you're in a really huge battle, that area isn't likely going to be as large as you think, maybe 50 feet square for a hundred men. When shooting an arc shot especially, it takes skill to be that accurate, since things like wind speed and direction can have a huge impact on where your arrow goes.

Pretty much.

We have plenty of accounts of both arrow and gun 'fire' being horribly inaccurate. Doesn't take much to miss, especially if you're aiming at something say, 200 yards away.

fusilier

2013-06-05, 05:32 PM

I mentioned theories about it few times - way less visible archer paradox and bolt flexing in general, causes less energy waste, both on bending and due to air resistance.

Thus, bolt preserves it's velocity better, especially at 'flat' trajectories.

Dunno how true it actually is for 'most' applications, would need checking.

Theoretically, velocities possible with crossbow, might be, all other things being roughly equal, greater than with 'long' bow, because both arms have way less road to cover.

A couple of things:

1. Doesn't the arrow stabilize fairly quickly (i.e. stop bending), although I understand that the bending would take off some of the initial energy.

2. If I recall correctly, somewhere in a previous incarnation of this thread, crossbow bolts became unstable in flight as they lost energy. So the result was a fairly flat trajectory, then the projectile fell somewhat abruptly due to it becoming unstable. So it's flight didn't have a typical parabolic arc?

Spiryt

2013-06-06, 11:55 AM

A couple of things:

1. Doesn't the arrow stabilize fairly quickly (i.e. stop bending), although I understand that the bending would take off some of the initial energy.

How and how quickly arrow stabilizes depends on how well is it's spine matched with the bow, as far as I understand... And simply, on how stiff arrow in general is.

Longer lenght for the weight = more bending even with lighter head.

And on the bow itself in general too.

There are plenty of instances of slower bow sending x arrow further than faster one - slower arrow had less velocity initially, but were loosing it slower.

In any case, arrows bending back and forth well after they left the bow are very common.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96KGWC0PB6s

2. If I recall correctly, somewhere in a previous incarnation of this thread, crossbow bolts became unstable in flight as they lost energy. So the result was a fairly flat trajectory, then the projectile fell somewhat abruptly due to it becoming unstable. So it's flight didn't have a typical parabolic arc?

Well, I would have to read, sounds interesting.

Anyway, bolts can easily have pretty nice parabolic arc, Payne Gallaway was sending bolts at well over 400m.

Theoretically, they will tend to 'dive' faster and more abruptly, because they center of gravity will tend naturally tend to be closer to the head, I believe (?).

Kinda like with olympic javelin redesign.

Yora

2013-06-06, 12:57 PM

In the new Army rules in Pathfinder, all the costs for maintaining troops are reduced into a single Consumption score that includes wages, training, equipment, supplies, and so on. Also, for the sake of simple rules, any new troops you create become ready for deployment at the beginning of the next month and they simply cost their monthly consumption rate for the first month of service without any recruitment and training costs being accounted for as special "creation" costs.

Now in such a system, mercenaries would be really good. You don't have to wait until the beginning of the next month (since they are already trained, equiped, and ready for battle), they already come with battle experience (which comes in the form of a few special tricks the units know), and you only have to pay and supply them for the duration of the campaign.

Now based on historic accounts, how much more would the monthly "rent" for a unit of mercenaries be, compared to the monthly "maintainance costs" of having a standing army unit of comparable "combat power" (how much use they are in battle). Now, standing armies have not been that common during history, from what I know, but what would you say would be a good monthly cost for hiring a mercenary unit? Three times the cost for standing troops? Four times?

AgentPaper

2013-06-06, 01:07 PM

@Yora:

I don't know the answer, but I can tell you for sure that this is something that will have varied widely over time, so you should probably try and narrow down your question to a specific time period, if possible.

Yora

2013-06-06, 01:14 PM

I'd rather have answers regarding any period and region that anyone knows something about. :smallbiggrin:
It doesn't have to be a universal answer. Some info of how it roughly was in some specific cases would already be helpful.

fusilier

2013-06-06, 03:38 PM

Well, I would have to read, sounds interesting.

Anyway, bolts can easily have pretty nice parabolic arc, Payne Gallaway was sending bolts at well over 400m.

Theoretically, they will tend to 'dive' faster and more abruptly, because they center of gravity will tend naturally tend to be closer to the head, I believe (?).

Kinda like with olympic javelin redesign.

It was only something that I vaguely remember reading -- I was hoping that someone else would remember it better than me. :-)

Anyway, Payne-Gallaway was using a heavy siege style crossbow for those tests.

For comparison, the maximum range of longbows has been estimated at 400 yards (a reproduction of one from the Mary Rose reached about 360 yards), and for a turkish bow, I've heard estimates of a range of about 500 yards. That's absolute maximum -- NOT effective range. [W.F. Paterson believes that a turkish bow, with an experience archer on a good day, could hit a target the size of a man on horseback about 1 in 4 times at 280 yards]

Given the differences in force applied (although, there are probably some other factors involved too), the ranges of arrows launched from bows seem pretty impressive compared to crossbows. Which implies, to me, that arrows were more aerodynamic than bolts (and probably more stable in flight).

fusilier

2013-06-06, 03:55 PM

Now based on historic accounts, how much more would the monthly "rent" for a unit of mercenaries be, compared to the monthly "maintainance costs" of having a standing army unit of comparable "combat power" (how much use they are in battle). Now, standing armies have not been that common during history, from what I know, but what would you say would be a good monthly cost for hiring a mercenary unit? Three times the cost for standing troops? Four times?

From knowledge of 15th century Italian "condottieri" contracts, the difference per soldier wouldn't actually be that much. The main differences would be the various perks that were delivered to secure the services of the captain. These were often hidden, and not standard.

The standard additional pay, over the norm for just the lance, included the caposoldo which was one additional ducat per lance (a lance being paid between 8-15 ducats/florins a month). The caposoldo was to help pay the junior officers of the company, which weren't usually given a lump sum in the contract (so it's something that a standing army would also have to pay). The other common "extra pay" was the paga morta, similar to an English Blynde Speare, it was pay for lances that didn't actually exist. This proportion could vary and seems to have been seldom fixed (I thought I had read an extra 10% somewhere, but I'm not finding that at the moment).

A provisione could also be specified for a senior captain; it was a lump sum payment that was to go directly to him. The point of most of these extra pay was to handle the overhead costs of running a company.

Permanent troops were also employed in Italy at this time. They would be paid and employed directly by the state, but the rates were basically the same as the mercenaries. The state would save a little in overhead, but probably not much. Primarily, they gained a bit more stability, and the ability to retain troops that they thought were valuable, even if their mercenary leader had passed away.

Spiryt

2013-06-06, 04:25 PM

It was only something that I vaguely remember reading -- I was hoping that someone else would remember it better than me. :-)

Anyway, Payne-Gallaway was using a heavy siege style crossbow for those tests.

For comparison, the maximum range of longbows has been estimated at 400 yards (a reproduction of one from the Mary Rose reached about 360 yards), and for a turkish bow, I've heard estimates of a range of about 500 yards. That's absolute maximum -- NOT effective range. [W.F. Paterson believes that a turkish bow, with an experience archer on a good day, could hit a target the size of a man on horseback about 1 in 4 times at 280 yards]

Given the differences in force applied (although, there are probably some other factors involved too), the ranges of arrows launched from bows seem pretty impressive compared to crossbows. Which implies, to me, that arrows were more aerodynamic than bolts (and probably more stable in flight).

Actually, record Turks archery records are believed to be well beyond 800 yards, and modern attempts seem to confirm it (http://www.hungarianambiance.com/2011/10/introducing-world-record-holder-long.html).

Such flight shooting is only sport, obviously.

But the point is that your premise that force applied has any direct connection with arrow range is misleading.

Most important thing as far as range goes, is obviously velocity. Any (cross)bow can only send missile as fast, and any additional energy will go to waste, if projectile mass won't change.

So more energy can be used by sending heavier missile fly at roughly same velocity.

So Payne Gallway using heavy crossbow doesn't in any way imply that arrows are 'more aerodynamic'.

Very heavy bolts would have better cross section to mass ratio, so would fly further at given velocity, but that's not that big gain.

fusilier

2013-06-06, 05:36 PM

Actually, record Turks archery records are believed to be well beyond 800 yards, and modern attempts seem to confirm it (http://www.hungarianambiance.com/2011/10/introducing-world-record-holder-long.html).

Such flight shooting is only sport, obviously.

But the point is that your premise that force applied has any direct connection with arrow range is misleading.

Most important thing as far as range goes, is obviously velocity. Any (cross)bow can only send missile as fast, and any additional energy will go to waste, if projectile mass won't change.

So more energy can be used by sending heavier missile fly at roughly same velocity.

So Payne Gallway using heavy crossbow doesn't in any way imply that arrows are 'more aerodynamic'.

Very heavy bolts would have better cross section to mass ratio, so would fly further at given velocity, but that's not that big gain.

Ok I think I see what you are saying.* What I challenge is the assumption that crossbow bolts all have better cross section to mass ratio. Something like a ballista bolt -- I wouldn't doubt. Those could be very big. But crossbow bolts, seem to have generally been thick and short. Whereas an arrow could be very long and narrow.

As Galloglaich points out there are many different types of crossbow bolts, and how they were used, and which were used with particular types of crossbows is still unknown.

*Getting back to the physics:

Are you claiming that an arrow from a longbow is propelled with greater velocity than a bolt from a heavy crossbow? (The only stats that I can find show them being about the same ~55 m/sec, but I'm not sure if I can trust them).

--EDIT--
Just stumbled across this webpage:
http://www.thebeckoning.com/medieval/crossbow/cross_l_v_c.html

It claims that bolts were typically lighter than arrows (significantly so). So that an arrow would certainly have a better mass to cross-section ratio! At anyrate, there seems to be a lot of contradictory data out there. ;-)

Avilan the Grey

2013-06-07, 04:09 AM

It claims that bolts were typically lighter than arrows (significantly so). So that an arrow would certainly have a better mass to cross-section ratio! At anyrate, there seems to be a lot of contradictory data out there. ;-)

Indeed. As I understand it bolts are lighter, but has a higher "mussle" velocity than arrows.

Spiryt

2013-06-07, 12:37 PM

Ok I think I see what you are saying.* What I challenge is the assumption that crossbow bolts all have better cross section to mass ratio. Something like a ballista bolt -- I wouldn't doubt. Those could be very big. But crossbow bolts, seem to have generally been thick and short. Whereas an arrow could be very long and narrow.

Uh, no all I was saying that Payne Gallaway was shooting heavy crossbow, with heavy bolts.

Heavier bolts, will have, comparatively, better flight characteristics than light ones.

Are you claiming that an arrow from a longbow is propelled with greater velocity than a bolt from a heavy crossbow? (The only stats that I can find show them being about the same ~55 m/sec, but I'm not sure if I can trust them).

--EDIT--
Just stumbled across this webpage:
http://www.thebeckoning.com/medieval/crossbow/cross_l_v_c.html

It claims that bolts were typically lighter than arrows (significantly so). So that an arrow would certainly have a better mass to cross-section ratio! At anyrate, there seems to be a lot of contradictory data out there. ;-)

They don't claim that bolts were typically lighter, they just quote someone who used very light bolt for rather hefty crossbow.

There's no actual data here.

Experiment doesn't have any real details either.

All I can see that someone had used very heavy arrow for bow draw - about 16 grains per pound of draw, so achieved rather sluggish 40 m/s.

And achieved similarly sluggish result with crossbow with very light bolt, so probably something was low grade here, because results are very poor.

Are you claiming that an arrow from a longbow is propelled with greater velocity than a bolt from a heavy crossbow?

Well, no, nowhere did I claim something like that.

55 m/s is fairly typical for traditional bows and crossbow alike.

Exact performance depends on many things, beyond just 'longbow' and 'crossbow'.

Generally though, I think that crossbows could be pretty fast, because short lenght and thus pretty short distances to cover for arms, string etc. As far as maximal velocity goes.

Here those guys (http://www.historiavivens1300.at/biblio/beschuss/beschuss1-e.htm) actually made somehow scientific experiments.

Their crossbows doesn't seem particularly successful, they admit that they don't really know enough sources, they quickly took significant set.

But they still achieved rather respectable 61 m/s or 200 feet/s.

Knaight

2013-06-07, 03:31 PM

Spiryt

2013-06-07, 03:45 PM

The big difference is that flight shooting uses flight arrows, which are built very differently. The highest range I've seen for a hunting or combat arrow is three hundred odd meters, which is still quite high.

Which is precisely why I wrote "sport".

As far as 'differently build' flight arrows - there was obviously huge variety here as well - from 'just light' arrows trough very thin ones with 'target' points... That could be most probably still used in fight to pepper enemy lines from large distance.

To minimally fletched short sticks weighing less than some bullets, that couldn't be shot without sipers because they were too short.

http://leatherwall.bowsite.com/tf/pics/00small38632860.JPG

Those were obviously used to set all those fantastical range records.

fusilier

2013-06-07, 06:23 PM

Heavier bolts, will have, comparatively, better flight characteristics than light ones.

I don't disagree with you there. There are certain "economies of scale" that take place, the main problem being that as the projectile gets heavier, it requires more energy to accelerate it in the first place.

Galloglaich

2013-06-07, 09:29 PM

European crossbow bolts which have survived from the 15th and 16th centuries are around 80-90 grams in weight on average, though in most cases this is without the fletching. I know of one collection in Austria which had about 400 of them from throughout Germany, Austria, Hungary and Czech.

Longbow arrows were around 50-60 grams, most of the Steppe recurve arrows were around 40 grams, flight arrows were lighter.

Crossbows also had 'flight' bolts though which were lighter.

They definitely did use crossbows for arched shots.

Leo Todeschini of Tod's stuff managed 48.5 m/s shot last year with a 125 gram bolt. Not great but it's about the same as he managed with much lighter (60 gram) bolts.

As for the accuracy issue, I can't say. Most hunters I know say that modern crossbows are more accurate than bows. Every historic account I've read from the 13th-16th century summarized the crossbows as being more accurate than bows-including the Mongol and Turkish.

G

Incanur

2013-06-08, 10:39 PM

Note that the bolt Payne-Gallwey shot 440ish yards weighed 3 ounces (85g). No hand-drawn bow can send an arrow of that weight so far. While the Mary Rose arrows appear to have been in the 45-65g range and another surviving arrow is around 50g, Matthew Strickland and Robert Hardy in The Great Warbow argue that heavier arrows - up to 4 oz - were common. Various extant Manchu war arrows are 100g and over, so this isn't hard for me to believe.

As far as accuracy, in addition to Humphrey Barwick's claim, I'll mention that Fourquevaux gave a specific account of a single crossbower a siege in the 1520s who killed more of the enemy than five or six of the best gunners. Unlike Barwick, Fourquevaux considered both bows and crossbow more accurate - or at least more reliable - than guns.

Galloglaich

2013-06-09, 10:51 PM

This might be of some interest here: a first-hand account of a knightly duel in Germany in 1481

http://talhoffer.wordpress.com/2011/12/20/1478-a-knightly-duel/

G

Yora

2013-06-10, 01:23 PM

That's real gold there. :smallbiggrin:

Though given that the lord had 600 men prepare the battlefield, it must have been an impressive crowd. Which likely means it was a rather rare event.

Brother Oni

2013-06-10, 05:57 PM

That's real gold there. :smallbiggrin:

Though given that the lord had 600 men prepare the battlefield, it must have been an impressive crowd. Which likely means it was a rather rare event.

Given that they had been petitioning for 4 years to have this duel, you might as well make the most of it and turn it into a grand spectacle.

I figure that their lord thought 'if I'm going to potentially lose two landowning knights which would completely mess up my power base and internal political structure for some time, I might as well let people watch and bloody well enjoy it'.

Galloglaich

2013-06-10, 06:49 PM

These two 'knights' were also more than mere knights, they were both obviously pretty bad-ass warlords, more than capable of causing trouble. They both showed up with over 200 supporters, (which was a number very likely agreed to in advance) so the 600 guys the lord had there may have simply been to keep the peace.

I know Rosenberg in particular was from a very powerful family.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Rosenberg

Their ancestral home castle, in the is one of the most impressive I've ever seen, in the beautiful town of Cesky Krumlov

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ro%C5%BEmberk_Castle

G

Mr. Mask

2013-06-16, 11:44 PM

Rhynn

2013-06-16, 11:52 PM

Ring forts (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_fort) were common iron age forts. Hill forts (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hill_fort) go even further back.

You may need to definite "primitive," though. If you're talking Neolithic, there pretty much were no fortifications. (Although tribes thousands strong were probably not common either.) However, the Maoris apparently did build fortifications with prehistoric technology. (Of course, chronologically, that would be conciding with hill forts, but the technology levels were different.)

Note that the tribe wouldn't live in the fort - they'd live around it and shelter in it during raids, etc. Things would get damn cramped, especially when they're going to bring in their animals, too.

warty goblin

2013-06-17, 12:20 AM

Could anyone tell me a bit about some very primitive fort designs? I was thinking of one which would be a construction of trees and rocks, crudely fashioned together with clay. The fort would be for a tribe about a couple of thousand strong, who aren't well organized nor skilled with the construction of defences.

One thing to note about historical constructions and creations: they tend to be very far from crude for the most part. This is particularly the case for largescale constructions requiring the input of much of a tribe - hill forts for instance are very well designed defensive works.

Remember, for most of history most people spent most of their time working with their tools and hands, and would have been extremely skilled at what they did. Even if a tribe doesn't have previous experience building fortifications, they probably are quite familiar with the tools and materials they're working with, so there's no reason for the standards of construction to not be excellent.

Rhynn

2013-06-17, 12:24 AM

In fact, some ancient / prehistoric construction is so damned good that half the History Channel is now about how aliens had to have helped build it. :smallsigh:

Mr. Mask

2013-06-17, 12:48 AM

Rhynn: The examples given in the hill forts article are very inspiring, thank you :smallsmile:.

It is as you say about living in forts. The conditions would become very bad with so many people and animals living closely together, unable to stretch their legs outside of the ramparts (unless they'd like an arrow somewhere between the shin and thigh). I'll have to do some research into how bad health issues would become in how much time based off how much population density, later on.

As for the aliens... yeah, a lot of people don't give enough credit to people who lived in ancient times. "OMG, they don't even have smart phones, everyone from fifty years ago was retarded!" I suppose is the line of thought.

Goblin: Reflecting on your point, I see where I erred. If it were a case of say, a tribe trying to build a Roman fort--then you'd start to see some pretty crude construction, as they weren't sure of the tools or what they were doing. So long as they work with familiar tools and concepts, I guess only a lack of manpower, time or resources would result in crude construction?

While there are problems of the latter's nature, I still thought too strongly of poor fortifications, I feel.

Brother Oni

2013-06-17, 03:01 AM

While there are problems of the latter's nature, I still thought too strongly of poor fortifications, I feel.

Even if they weren't too sure of what they were doing, there's a difference between poor construction and poor design.

You could have the best quality construction but if the design is poor, then the fort is still going to get over-run.
Poor design could result from anything like a crappy architect (structural flaws and/or poor layout), to being unable/unaware to adapt to technological advances (the change from square to rounded towers with the advent of cannon for example).

An Iceni hill fort, designed to hold off infantry and chariots, is going to look particularly crude to a Roman legion, who would probably do their equivalent of 'LOL' before cracking it open with catapaults and other siege weaponry.

warty goblin

2013-06-17, 08:03 AM

An Iceni hill fort, designed to hold off infantry and chariots, is going to look particularly crude to a Roman legion, who would probably do their equivalent of 'LOL' before cracking it open with catapaults and other siege weaponry.

I vaguely remember reading about a Roman assault on a hill-fort at one point. My recollection is that the work was rather speculative, but the authors concluded that the fort posed a significant obstacle, one that required a risky and difficult assault.

Hill-forts, being giant earthworks, would be pretty close to catapult proof for one thing. Catapult stones do OK at breaking wood and stone, but they don't really remove that much dirt. It would take a long time to worry a hole in an earthen rampart, and many hill-forts had multiple rings.

Rhynn

2013-06-17, 08:17 AM

Hill-forts, being giant earthworks, would be pretty close to catapult proof for one thing. Catapult stones do OK at breaking wood and stone, but they don't really remove that much dirt. It would take a long time to worry a hole in an earthen rampart, and many hill-forts had multiple rings.

Yeah, actually, thinking on it, an earthen hill/ring-fort could be pretty enormous compared to stone castles, couldn't it? You don't need to move enormous amounts of stone - move this earth over here, and you've got a high earthen rampart... easier to fit in your animals and people.

warty goblin

2013-06-17, 12:54 PM

It is as you say about living in forts. The conditions would become very bad with so many people and animals living closely together, unable to stretch their legs outside of the ramparts (unless they'd like an arrow somewhere between the shin and thigh). I'll have to do some research into how bad health issues would become in how much time based off how much population density, later on.

A lot of hill-forts were very large, large enough that they could (and apparently did) house permanent or semi-permanent settlements at the top.

As for the aliens... yeah, a lot of people don't give enough credit to people who lived in ancient times. "OMG, they don't even have smart phones, everyone from fifty years ago was retarded!" I suppose is the line of thought.
To be far more fair than alien theorists deserve, there's a lot of really weird stuff from early antiquity and pre-history. Stonehenge for instance is legitimately strange; as is the way that the cultures that built it turned everywhere they lived into a sort of giant extended landscaping project. Apparently making giant piles of dirt to pile on dead people, or dragging around ridiculously large rocks, was something of a pastime.

Goblin: Reflecting on your point, I see where I erred. If it were a case of say, a tribe trying to build a Roman fort--then you'd start to see some pretty crude construction, as they weren't sure of the tools or what they were doing. So long as they work with familiar tools and concepts, I guess only a lack of manpower, time or resources would result in crude construction?

The advantage of a hill-fort is that your resource is a hill, and all you need is a bunch of shovels. Sure they would take quite a while to make - digging trenches is hard work - but this is true of all fortifications. And unlike a stone or even wooden fort, there's no need to transport raw materials any significant distance.

While there are problems of the latter's nature, I still thought too strongly of poor fortifications, I feel.
Digging through the mental closet, I recall some interesting details of some British/Irish hill-forts, that were clearly put there to make them a real beast to assault. The earthwork rings for instance were often connected, particularly next to gateways, which would force any assaulting force to continue up a set path to the next gateway, instead of being able to attack multiple points at once and disperse the defenders. These connecting works often left short dead-end passages on one side of the gate, so anybody coming through the opening could be assaulted from all sides. Attackers would also have to make several sharp turns while pressing upwards, leaving their flanks exposed to enemies on the earthworks above. Caches of slingstones have apparently been found at various strategic locations in many hill-forts as well, suggesting that they were well prepared for an assault.

They may seem simple, but fighting uphill is hard work. Fighting uphill while people throw rocks and spears and arrows at you from all sides has got to be pretty unpleasant.

Yeah, actually, thinking on it, an earthen hill/ring-fort could be pretty enormous compared to stone castles, couldn't it? You don't need to move enormous amounts of stone - move this earth over here, and you've got a high earthen rampart... easier to fit in your animals and people.
Apparently some of the hill-forts in Ireland are so big people think they were used as cattle pens. Although given the cattle-raid intensive nature of warfare described in, say, the Ulster Cycle, a dual use hardly seems inappropriate. Not only does it keep your cows in, it makes it easier to kill the people trying to take your cows out.

Brother Oni

2013-06-17, 02:21 PM

I vaguely remember reading about a Roman assault on a hill-fort at one point. My recollection is that the work was rather speculative, but the authors concluded that the fort posed a significant obstacle, one that required a risky and difficult assault.

Hill-forts, being giant earthworks, would be pretty close to catapult proof for one thing. Catapult stones do OK at breaking wood and stone, but they don't really remove that much dirt. It would take a long time to worry a hole in an earthen rampart, and many hill-forts had multiple rings.

As far as I'm aware, the angle of catapults is adjustable (if all else fails put them on a slope), thus making it easier to launch stuff into the fort itself. Showers of small stones (the equivalent of grapeshot), flaming oil or dead animals would soon make the inside of the fort extremely unpleasant for the defenders.

As with any siege, if you can't breach the walls, then the main assault is going to be focused on the gates. I know the celts had an alleged trick of throwing hornet nests into roman formations to break them up, but without those, I'd think a tetsudo would allow the Romans a better chance to clear out each ring of the fort, a layer at a time.

I'll admit that I exaggerated their response, but I'd think a fully supported Roman legion would have an easier time of it compared to a rival Iceni tribe. If all else fails, they could build their own fortifications around the fort, ala the Battle of Alesia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Alesia), making any sally by the defenders a strange sort of counter siege.

warty goblin

2013-06-17, 02:56 PM

As far as I'm aware, the angle of catapults is adjustable (if all else fails put them on a slope), thus making it easier to launch stuff into the fort itself. Showers of small stones (the equivalent of grapeshot), flaming oil or dead animals would soon make the inside of the fort extremely unpleasant for the defenders.

Is there any evidence of people actually shooting loads of pebbles from catapults? Gravel has crappy aerodymanics, being small, light and having lots of irregular shapes. I'd think the range you could get from such a load would be really quite low, low enough to put the crew well into the range of unfriendly people with bows. Particularly if one fires the gravel on a highly parabolic trajectory.

I'm aware of onagers firing ~four or five inch diameter rocks certainly, but that's a very different thing than showers of small stones. That's one fairly big stone shattering shields and rib cages like twigs.

As with any siege, if you can't breach the walls, then the main assault is going to be focused on the gates. I know the celts had an alleged trick of throwing hornet nests into roman formations to break them up, but without those, I'd think a tetsudo would allow the Romans a better chance to clear out each ring of the fort, a layer at a time.
The testudo has always struck me as a horrible formation to actually fight from. There's no space for anybody in it to fight, move, or even see all that well. If one uses the variant with the flanks covered by shields as well, any advance must be painfully slow. IIRC the general Roman deployment was about one man every five feet or so, and the testudo was really only used in very specialized circumstances, which is to say when the goal was to protect the army from missiles, and not to immediately carry the fight to the enemy.

I'll admit that I exaggerated their response, but I'd think a fully supported Roman legion would have an easier time of it compared to a rival Iceni tribe. If all else fails, they could build their own fortifications around the fort, ala the Battle of Alesia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Alesia), making any sally by the defenders a strange sort of counter siege.
The Romans were clearly perfectly capable of breaking a hill-fort, since they did it. I never denied that, merely that it was a laughable obstacle rendered obsolete by siege engines.

fusilier

2013-06-17, 04:43 PM

I know that "stone" mortars were used to throw a shower of stones contained in a basket set in the mouth of the mortar -- the stones wouldn't be as small as pebbles, but good sized stones. Of course, the range would be a lot less than a solid projectile, but it was used as a close range anti-infantry device, to break up a charge.

I would suspect that a defensive catapult would be able to launch something similar -- probably being used when the enemy was just on the other side of the wall.

Brother Oni

2013-06-18, 06:56 AM

The testudo has always struck me as a horrible formation to actually fight from.

Having been in one (we were using kite shields rather than scutums though), I agree that it's very difficult to fight from and very slow going.

It's very good at getting you close to missile troops though, thus they can approach the initial gate in relative safety.

Looking up some more information, the Romans appeared to have employed an armoured wheeled battering ram of some sort also called a testudo:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d7/Roman_siege_machines.gif

From what I know of later versions of such siege engines, they can be very to stop without some sort of boiling/flaming liquid, unsuitable terrain or the defenders sallying out to kill the crew.

The Romans were clearly perfectly capable of breaking a hill-fort, since they did it. I never denied that, merely that it was a laughable obstacle rendered obsolete by siege engines.

Alas without more detailed records of battles, we're limited to what we can replicate in computer games and experiments by rich crazy people eccentrics.

Speculation time - what type of siege weapon in your opinion would render hill forts obsolete?
I'm thinking trebuchets, although I'm inclined to think that the much later mortars would be required based of fusilier's comment.

According to wikipedia, it seems the societal changes prompted the demise of hill forts rather than military obsoleteness.

warty goblin

2013-06-18, 01:30 PM

Having been in one (we were using kite shields rather than scutums though), I agree that it's very difficult to fight from and very slow going.

It's very good at getting you close to missile troops though, thus they can approach the initial gate in relative safety.

Your experience clearly exceeds mine on this point. All I know is that I don't do all that well when I can't move my elbows.

Looking up some more information, the Romans appeared to have employed an armoured wheeled battering ram of some sort also called a testudo:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d7/Roman_siege_machines.gif

From what I know of later versions of such siege engines, they can be very to stop without some sort of boiling/flaming liquid, unsuitable terrain or the defenders sallying out to kill the crew.
Isn't there a medieval source that suggests lowering essentially a mattress on chains in front of the ram, to cushion the wall?

Alas without more detailed records of battles, we're limited to what we can replicate in computer games and experiments by rich crazy people eccentrics.
Totally there, but for the lack of funds. Well, that and living in East Central Nowhere.

Speculation time - what type of siege weapon in your opinion would render hill forts obsolete?
I'm thinking trebuchets, although I'm inclined to think that the much later mortars would be required based of fusilier's comment.

My gut feeling is that the hill-fort isn't the sort of problem that's best tackled by large and complicated bits of machinery. It's hard to move dirt around by slamming rocks into it. Even a really big trebuchet doesn' (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1EAA7pkEJ4)t make that big of holes in the ground. Even to the extent it does, it really mostly just pushes dirt out around the projectile. Drop another shot in next to the first, and I suspect you don't get twice as big a hole, you just push dirt back into the first one.

Now you may be able to make life sufficiently unpleasant for the folks up top that they surrender via trebuchet bombardment. But this requires a lot of bombardment, and the hope they don't have a catapult to chuck stuff right back at you, with a significant range advantage.

I think you solve a hill-fort by having enough men to storm the thing. Unlike a traditional stone wall fortification after all, you can literally just walk up the sides. The gateway isn't the only point of access that doesn't require something cumbersome like a ladder or tower, just a point where walking in is a lot easier.

In some cases the fort might be built on a crag or other bit of terrain that really is essentially unclimbable from most approaches. In this case a siege ramp might not be a terrible notion. Such ramps had a long history of (eventually) successful use in Greece and the near East during antiquity.

Monss Meg

2013-06-18, 03:57 PM

Brother Oni

2013-06-19, 03:31 AM

Your experience clearly exceeds mine on this point. All I know is that I don't do all that well when I can't move my elbows.

Hence why spears are so popular for such tight formations as you don't need much room to move back and forth with your back hand. With enough ranks of spears, you don't actually need any space since you're presenting so many sharp pointy bits of metal, simple co-ordinated walking into your opponents is sufficient.
In the later English Civil War, I think Oliver Cromwell referred to this as 'the terrible push of pikes' when two opposing units of pikemen met on the battlefield.

Isn't there a medieval source that suggests lowering essentially a mattress on chains in front of the ram, to cushion the wall?

I do vaguely remember something about this, but I'm a bit dubious about its effectiveness given the sheer weight of a siege engine ram (a recovered cap of a battering ram used for mining weighed 150lbs, so the wooden part must have weighed at least that to keep balance).

There's also nothing to stop the crew trying to disable the countermeasure.

Now you may be able to make life sufficiently unpleasant for the folks up top that they surrender via trebuchet bombardment. But this requires a lot of bombardment, and the hope they don't have a catapult to chuck stuff right back at you, with a significant range advantage.

True. By the time that trebuchets were in vogue, warfare was generally a lot less asymmetric than the original scenario in question (Romans versus ancient Britons), so simply chucking stuff back is a viable option.

Long time lurker, first time poster here. And the thing that strikes me about the ring forts. is how simaular thay resemble the western front of WWI. So to ancerar Brother Oni, O would say eather the pick, or aircraft

Welcome!

I think I should have worded my question a bit better - what's the earliest siege weapon that would have rendered hill forts obsolete?
These days, almost any type of fixed fortification is vulnerable to artillery or airstrikes, but you don't really need to advance that far when simple gunpowder siege weapons triggered a massive change in fortifications.

While undermining the walls of a hill fort is a possibility, I think the difficulty of doing so makes simply storming the fort a better option. As warty pointed out, the walls of most of these type of forts are piled up earth rather than stone walls, thus that's a lot of earth you need to move.

Eorran

2013-06-19, 08:36 AM

I think I should have worded my question a bit better - what's the earliest siege weapon that would have rendered hill forts obsolete?
These days, almost any type of fixed fortification is vulnerable to artillery or airstrikes, but you don't really need to advance that far when simple gunpowder siege weapons triggered a massive change in fortifications.

Didn't the advent of powerful, mobile siege cannons bring fort design back towards a hill fort, in a way? The tall, vertical stone walls were generally replaced by sloped stone or earthen walls to protect against cannon fire. Granted, they were also built with towers to return fire and shoot down/across the slopes.

Thiel

2013-06-19, 11:59 AM

Long time lurker, first time poster here. And the thing that strikes me about the ring forts. is how simaular thay resemble the western front of WWI. So to ancerar Brother Oni, O would say eather the pick, or aircraft

I realise I'm off on a bit of a tangent here, but aircraft did not make the trenches of WWI obsolete, this guy did.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ec/Bundesarchiv_Bild_101I-303-0554-24%2C_Italien%2C_Soldaten_auf_LKW_Opel-Blitz.jpg
It made it possible to move reinforcements and supplies forward fast enough that large scale entrenchments became untenable.

Brother Oni

2013-06-19, 12:12 PM

Didn't the advent of powerful, mobile siege cannons bring fort design back towards a hill fort, in a way? The tall, vertical stone walls were generally replaced by sloped stone or earthen walls to protect against cannon fire. Granted, they were also built with towers to return fire and shoot down/across the slopes.

I know it significantly influenced the designs of towers (moving from flat to curved surfaces to help deflection) and made more use of overlapping fire arcs, particularly with enabling enfilade fire by the defenders on attackers gathered underneath the walls.

Spoilered for pictures:

Deal castle is a great example of the effect of gunpowder on fortifications, designed to both take and deliver cannon shot - it was estimated to originally have 145 gun ports scattered over its five levels.

http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/content/properties/deal-castle/deal-header-3

St Mawes was a coastal defence castle so was fairly squat (ship cannon tend to be bigger than their land counterparts). During the English Civil War, it was taken fairly easily by Parliamentarians from the Royalist defenders as it's fairly indefensible from land.

http://wedadvisor.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/50.jpg

Your description sounds like they intentionally reduced the effective height of the castle's walls, which doesn't sound right to me.

St Mawes castle was built on a slope with additional earthworks on the sea side - could this be what you mean?

hamishspence

2013-06-19, 12:16 PM

Your description sounds like they intentionally reduced the effective height of the castle's walls, which doesn't sound right to me.

St Mawes castle was built on a slope with additional earthworks on the sea side - could this be what you mean?

Ir may be polygonal forts that's being talked about:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polygonal_fort

Joran

2013-06-19, 01:34 PM

Ir may be polygonal forts that's being talked about:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polygonal_fort

Maybe trace italienne AKA star forts?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_fort

fusilier

2013-06-19, 06:09 PM

I realise I'm off on a bit of a tangent here, but aircraft did not make the trenches of WWI obsolete, this guy did.
. . .
It made it possible to move reinforcements and supplies forward fast enough that large scale entrenchments became untenable.

I think that increased mobility did help prevent a repeat of WW1 style stalemate -- but I'm not sure I would argue that it made large scale entrenchments untenable. Trenches show up whenever you have stalemate (and I'm guessing insufficient "room" to maneuver), so you do see them used quite a bit in the Korean War. Some sectors in WW2 also involved them quite a bit.

Interestingly, one of the theories for the development of trench warfare on the Western Front in WW1, blames aircraft -- in the opening stages of the war the armies had such good knowledge of each other's positions, thanks to aerial reconnaissance, that they couldn't make any surprise moves -- leading to stalemate and trench warfare. I think it's more complicated than that, but aerial reconnaissance could have been a major contributor.

Brother Oni

2013-06-20, 02:06 AM

Ir may be polygonal forts that's being talked about:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polygonal_fort

That type of fortification seems a bit late for the design modification that Eorran seems to be talking about.

Maybe trace italienne AKA star forts?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_fort

Thank you! I was looking for a picture of a castle that showed how the design enabled enfilade fire by the defenders.

Interestingly, one of the theories for the development of trench warfare on the Western Front in WW1, blames aircraft -- in the opening stages of the war the armies had such good knowledge of each other's positions, thanks to aerial reconnaissance, that they couldn't make any surprise moves -- leading to stalemate and trench warfare. I think it's more complicated than that, but aerial reconnaissance could have been a major contributor.

Even so, there were a couple of close shaves.

One story I heard during WW1 was during the race to the sea (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_to_the_Sea). There was heavy fighting around some woods between the British and Germans, with the British putting up an extremely spirited defence.

Eventually the attack was repulsed and since this was still in the comparatively friendly phase of the war, a captured German officer asked what was in the woods to warrant such a desperate defence. A British officer answered 'Regimental HQ', to which the German replied 'Mein Gott'.

For those who don't realise the significance, Regimental HQs are usually sited far away from enemy lines because of their importance: the Germans almost broke through the British lines entirely plus in the capture of a major command post, potentially undermined the entire BEF.

Fortinbras

2013-06-20, 02:06 AM

Avilan the Grey

2013-06-20, 02:06 AM

I know it significantly influenced the designs of towers (moving from flat to curved surfaces to help deflection) and made more use of overlapping fire arcs, particularly with enabling enfilade fire by the defenders on attackers gathered underneath the walls.

Spoilered for pictures:

Deal castle is a great example of the effect of gunpowder on fortifications, designed to both take and deliver cannon shot - it was estimated to originally have 145 gun ports scattered over its five levels.

http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/content/properties/deal-castle/deal-header-3

St Mawes was a coastal defence castle so was fairly squat (ship cannon tend to be bigger than their land counterparts). During the English Civil War, it was taken fairly easily by Parliamentarians from the Royalist defenders as it's fairly indefensible from land.

http://wedadvisor.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/50.jpg

Your description sounds like they intentionally reduced the effective height of the castle's walls, which doesn't sound right to me.

St Mawes castle was built on a slope with additional earthworks on the sea side - could this be what you mean?

These are some examples or 17th century advanced fortification designs, built to handle top of the line 17th century artillery as well as allowing protection against storming with artillery and troops:

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_kQWVBsP_dPU/TBqxwoKuJYI/AAAAAAAABws/wwp80btiN8U/s1600/castillo-de-san-marcos-aerial-view.png

http://www.fortified-places.com/roses/image11.jpg

http://www.whereongoogleearth.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Elvas-fort.jpg

Note that the "walls" are lower, but especially so thick, that they look low. They also are angled, like modern tank armor on the strongest forts. Also, it might be wrong to call them walls at all, since they are more like bunkers with men in, and on top, not behind.

This was the last big push of fortification design btw, after the explosive grenade was invented, fortresses were more or less abandoned. The classical fort never became more modern than this, they were replaced by other kinds of "fortresses", aka underground bunkers and the like.

Rhynn

2013-06-20, 02:17 AM

There was some discussion a little while ago on this thread about what medieval "boot camp" was like, and it seems that conclusion was largely that it was non-existent. People seem to have learned to fight from their fathers, uncles, and in the local fencing hall, if they lived in a large enough community and had the time and money.

However, I have hard time believing that any of these sources of training are going to produce the kind of soldier who can march and fight in a disciplined schiltron or similar formation. Even a less disciplined shield-wall seems like it would require practice with lots of other guys with similar kit.

Does anyone have any ideas, or just educated guesses about the training environment for the Swiss and Scottish pikemen and halberdiers who fought in the schiltrons that stood against knightly attacks in the 13th and 14th centuries?

You practiced those things, say, yearly at a moot or market, and probably as part of games (very popular for teaching military skills). There were usually laws and customs in place for regulating and mandating this sort of armed practice. No boot camp, just "reservist training," if you will.

It took my batch all of an afternoon or so to learn to march in formation, and re-enactors don't undergo bootcamp to learn to move in pike formations.

Brother Oni

2013-06-20, 06:34 AM

It took my batch all of an afternoon or so to learn to march in formation, and re-enactors don't undergo bootcamp to learn to move in pike formations.

Indeed. On the shield wall front, it takes about 5 minutes to show how the shields interlock, then probably half an hour's practice of marching for everybody to get the hang of moving in this formation.

I admit that actually holding the shield wall in combat takes more training, but that's often solved by repeated commands of "STAND FIRM!" shouted at drill sergeant volume levels.

Rhynn

2013-06-20, 06:38 AM

Also, professionals like Swiss mercenary pikemen probably did drill together while on the job but not marching or fighting. (Although, of course, such professionals were usually part-time professionals, signing up for a tour of duty of a year or a few years in length, AFAIK.) I have a hard time imagining them not doing this.

Also, it's not that such intensive training wouldn't have been useful: warrior elites probably did receive more formalized training. It's that it requires centralized infrastructures and control of the military. For most of the ancient and medieval period, a military force was not the state's military, it was composed of the militaries of separate nobles. And most nobles couldn't afford to take out peasants for several months straight to go train at some central camp; they could arrange a day of training every month or the like.

Also, I've read some indications that ancient/medieval Chinese armies did provide basic training; possibly because they did not have the decentralized militia training much of Europe did?

Mr. Mask

2013-06-20, 07:11 AM

I don't guess anyone knows what Medieval Chinese Bootcamp was like...?

I recently found this gem: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-lDtCHFmvg

I'm guessing most of you know this one already. A video warning the police about knives from the 80s.

Was wondering if anyone else noticed the questionable elements of the video? Mainly the defences they recommend.

Brother Oni

2013-06-20, 09:12 AM

Also, I've read some indications that ancient/medieval Chinese armies did provide basic training; possibly because they did not have the decentralized militia training much of Europe did?

Drawing on some rusty memories of the Three Kingdoms (~2nd Century), I would also possibly assign it to the fact that Chinese warfare revolved around tactics and army formations more. I remember two stratgeists were having a semi-friendly competition between their armies and were shifting the units of men around to adapt to the opposing army's formation.

The earlier Art of War (5th Century BC) has the phrase "Those skilled in doing battle do not raise troops twice, or transport provisions three times", which typically translates to "get it right the first time" or "don't hang around waiting for reinforcements", which may have influenced the decision for having well trained troops available initially, which is significantly better than having half trained troops, suffering greater casualties because they're not very good thus requiring a second round of conscription.

That said, it very much depends on the period - Song dynasty (10th -13th Century) training was reputed to be fairly poor despite having nearly a million soldiers at its height, while the later Ming Dynasty (14th - 17th Century) supposedly had units of soldiers whose training solely consisted of being able to stand in formation and shout war cries.

I don't guess anyone knows what Medieval Chinese Bootcamp was like...?

The Hollywood version has singing in it. :smallbiggrin: (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSS5dEeMX64)

On a more serious note, a professional (full time) soldier's basic training (boot camps are for marines) would probably consist of PT, martial training, a bit of fieldcraft, equipment maintenance plus drill, so not much has changed.

Rhynn

2013-06-20, 09:36 AM

The Hollywood version has singing in it. :smallbiggrin: (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSS5dEeMX64)

The Chinese version (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mulan_%282009_film%29) made me cry.

Brother Oni

2013-06-20, 01:03 PM

I recently found this gem: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-lDtCHFmvg

I'm guessing most of you know this one already. A video warning the police about knives from the 80s.

Was wondering if anyone else noticed the questionable elements of the video? Mainly the defences they recommend.

This video looks quite old and I suspect a lot of it has already been incorporated into police procedure.

The reactionary gap corroborates several sources on the subject: ~20' of space required to draw your weapon against someone charging you with a knife is something I heard before and making space by putting obstacles between you makes plain sense.

The control of troublesome subjects using wrist locks is very similar to aikido techniques, although British police don't use that type of handcuff anymore:

http://www.featurepics.com/FI/Thumb300/20070530/Modern-Police-Handcuffs-334293.jpg

These incorporate a bar for easy manipulation and applying pressure to uncooperative prisoners. From a friend who's been arrested, they're also very effective at it.

I'm not sure what else you find questionable about it.

Rhynn

2013-06-20, 01:28 PM

Galloglaich

2013-06-20, 03:57 PM

I thought this was covered pretty well before (you might want to go back and read that part of the thread again since it will provide a lot of good, well sourced details to add to this) but I'll try to paint a broader picture for you to compliment what was said earlier.

In a word, there is no "Medieval Boot Camp" because medieval armies were made up of people who knew how to fight. Boot Camp is for very quickly training people who have no idea how to fight - originally in fact it was for training conscripts, i.e. untrained civilians who are forced into the military and must be rapidly made to learn how to take orders, do simple things like march, and to use, maintain and carry their weapons.

In the middle ages in Europe, there were no true civilians. There were free people, protected people, and slaves. Free people by definition could fight. Free people owned and carried weapons, and by carrying them they were required to fight when necessary. Carrying a weapon in the middle ages was like wearing a Hells Angels vest or 18th Street Gang tattoo's today - if you are wearing it, you better be able to back it up. Today, most of us are not warriors like Hells Angels or 18th Street gangmembers have to be - the State has a monopoly of force, in the medieval world there was no State really, you had to be able to protect your own life and property- or at least participate in this protection. In towns for example, all citizens had to do duty as police (and firemen) every few weeks something like jury duty, because they couldn't trust anyone else to do it.

Protected people were people like Priests and Monks, and free women (among others), who were not required to carry weapons. If you were caught hurting one of these protected people, your punishment would be extremely harsh, usually meaning death.

Training was gradual and took place over a lifetime. It was not an individual thing where you were taught by an uncle or your father (though that was undoubtedly part of it) but it was usually a communal thing done in small and large groups. It's like, everyone was at least a little bit something like a gang banger or a Hells Angel. What that training consisted of varied by your estate. So knights an their buddies were horsemen. They would perform complicated hunts in large groups to practice many of the techniques of warfare. They were members of the tournament circuit which was the medieval equivalent of professional sports today, just as physically demanding (we can see the physiques of some of these guys are really impressive) and just as rough, actually a bit more rough since people routinely died and you could also get captured and lose a ton of money (though the rules varied a great deal from one tournament to the next). They also exercised and trained with weapons on a daily basis if possible. Finally they routinely participated in raids, small fights, and battles as part of their jobs administering an estate or acting as bodyguard to a rich noble.

Townsmen (burghers) fought as heavy infantry or (most often) marksmen. They practiced shooting regularly, nearly every town had a shooting range, initially for bows and crossbows, by the 14th century for guns as well increasingly. They participated in shooting contests which were expensive to enter (cost the equivalent of hundreds of dollars to enter) but had huge payouts (equivalent of 50 or 100 thousand dollars in some cases for the winners and runners up). They participated in fechtschuler, fencing tournaments, which also included staves, grappling, saber (dussack) fighting, pollaxe fighting and so on. And they all had to work in the town watch (municipal police) on a routine basis. The town watch operated as a small unit and carried halberds while inside the walls, pikes while outside, and basic drill was part of the job. They had to do this every few weeks. And some towns had formal drill training - Venice more than most.

Finally, like the knights, townsfolk had to pretty routinely get involved in skirmishes, raids and fights while keeping the peace (landfrieden) in their towns territory. It was very common for example for towns to destroy the castles of so called 'robber knights', and to capture outlaws, bandits, robbers and brigands to be judged by the town's magistrates. Burghers also participated in hunting in forests owned by the town. They protected these hunting preserves every bit as aggressively as the nobles did, for example the town of Greifswald in Pomerania went to war with their own Duke (captured his whole entourage and nearly killed him) when he went hunting in their forest without permission in the 1456

Free Peasants also participated in shooting and fighting contests (grappling, fencing, and staff fighting particularly) during events like kermesse festivals and we know that they also systematically did pike and halberd drill, we have evidence of the Swiss doing this but also in Bohemia, Saxony, in a place called the Dithmarschen, and others. It was the Swiss in particular who were the inspiration for the formally organized professional mercenaries called Landsknechts in the late 15th Century. They imported Swiss sergeants (feldweiebel) to train German peasants, mostly Swabians originally I think, who themselves were half-trained at least, but were taught specific Swiss fighting techniques. These Swiss were either burghers (from towns like Bern, Solothurn or Zurich) or peasants from the forest cantons like Uri, Schwyz, or Innerhoden. Condotierre companies in Italy and the Balkans also had systematic training regimens.

Slaves of course were serfs, who had lost the culture and tradition of fighting and usually made terrible soldiers, regardless of training or equipment, and actual chattel slaves, who were usually not allowed to fight (though there were exceptions - in a lot of Muslim countries the best troops in their army were slaves).

All this stuff started to change in the Early Modern (1500's - 1800's) era when pike drill was gradually systematized into something which could be trained to unskilled, non-warriors (i.e. serfs) and guns became simple enough to use and cheap enough to make that they could also be equipped to unskilled troops. Armies became much larger as a result, less individually skilled or effectively equipped, but often more effective simply due to the scale.

G

Galloglaich

2013-06-20, 04:25 PM

I should add the caveat that as usual I'm referring to Northern and Central Europe here, (the regions of Germany, Saxony, Flanders, Holland, Scandinavia, Poland, Silesia, Bohemia, Hungary, and so on) Northern Italy was similar in most of the Middle Ages but changed by the late Medieval, you could say they went into the Early Modern period a bit quicker as professional mercenary companies took the role of security more and more. France was similar to Central Europe but had something more like a professional army earlier, the vassals of the King acted as national police to some extent, though you still did have town militias and armed peasants. Same for England, though they also had a huge, State sponsored training program for longbow archers (mostly designed around contests and so on like in Central Europe with the crossbows and guns). Scotland was a bit like Switzerland in certain respects (esp. the rural areas). Spain was in a more or less permanent war through most of the Middle Ages.

G

warty goblin

2013-06-20, 04:51 PM

In the earlier parts of the middle ages, aren't there also some other oddities. I seem to recall the Knights Templar having some sort of fighting arm in addition to inventing banking and providing grist for conspiracy theorists. Do we know if they trained to fight in some sort of (regionally) centralized fashion?

In the pre-Christian Viking era, there were also the possibly only legendary Jomsvikings, who were some variety of sworn military brotherhood available for hire. If they existed, they seem to have had required significant demonstration of fighting talent for entry, and held to a very strict code of conduct. Since they supposedly lived all together in one location, and fighting was pretty much what they did*, it's reasonable to suspect they trained together.

*That and deadpan one-liners about people getting their hands chopped off.

Mr. Mask

2013-06-20, 07:45 PM

That's a whopper to watch! 84m21s

Can you summarise what you find questionable about it Mr. Mask ?

Basically, any unarmed defenses against knives are going to be bad, because you're unarmed against a knife. There's a reason people use weapons. But you have to do something to defend yourself. You might die, and you're probably going to get at least cut, but you better fight as hard as you can.

Any time an instructor is showing you a theoretical defense against a knife, they're showing you a really ideal case. If they're any good, they started by telling you the best defense is to run. Of course, for the police, that may be less of an option. That's actually a pretty good summary of what I found questionable.

It just seemed like they passed over some of the more dangerous aspects of knives. They mentioned a story where the knifer swapped his knife between hands, but didn't bring it up when recommending the wrist lock. They mentioned how knife attacks were sometimes lead with the empty hand, a few pictures and accounts describing that--but their recommended defence was only for a very telegraphed stab. They also skimmed over the fact you should hold the attacker's wrist rather than their arm, because they have more control with the blade--but I felt they should've elaborated more on how easy it is for a knifer to twist their wrist and cut a would-be disarmer if done incorrectly (admittedly, that might be a necessary bit of propaganda leaving that out, so police aren't scared of disarming people--most cases are just angry people fooling around with knives, rather than killers, after all).

The advice they gave, while showing off a sketch where someone runs screaming with a machete, was one of the main inconsistencies which bothered me. "Create a reactionary gap through verbal commands," was how they put it (they didn't even mention defence in that part). That works well for when you have the guy with the knife at a healthy distance, who seems a lot more bark than bite--a lot of them do seem to give up if you talk to/bark at them a bit.

There were some other details. They recommended slamming the assailant's hand against nearby walls... but I can't see how you can do that without getting your own fingers, if you're double-gripping someone's hand well enough to stop them from cutting you. The example they gave was holding onto the edge of their wrist with their fingertips, while gently touching the woman's wrist to the wall (I don't fault them on that last part--you don't want to hurt the actress). The best I could come up with is turning your body into them and thrusting your elbow into their arm, to try and smash their arm/elbow against the wall. There could be better possibilities, of course, like perhaps smashing them in the side of the head with your elbow, and hopefully get head-wall-contact as a result (that might still be inefficient, by a long way). They didn't mention the possibility that your opponent would use their free hand and legs to their advantage, either (still need to give them props for recommending knee strikes to the abdomen, though at least one in the groin is probably handy in case they're the type to go down from that).

Those are the elements I considered questionable. There might've been some other minor stuff as well, but my goal isn't to b picky and over-critical. This is, after all, a gem; probably the best video about knives I have seen.

G: I agree that the efforts you and others made sated my question quite thoroughly. Rather glad it got brought up again, though, since it brought to light the point of the Chinese possibly having boot-camps of a sort (with their own popular musical numbers). Your extension on the matter is also a benefit.

Goblin: The Templars had a truly impressive fighting arm. Banking was an accidental effect of the order's attempt to guarantee the well being of pilgrims, was the gist of it.

fusilier

2013-06-20, 08:13 PM

To add a little bit to the "boot-camp" issue -- most of the time, you didn't have a huge influx of totally "raw" recruits. So a new member would be joining a formation that already had a fair amount of experience. New members would train with the rest of the formation, maybe getting a little extra one-on-one training from a more experienced comrade or drill sergeant. They would probably be placed in the rear ranks or something, until they gained more experience. This wouldn't be too much different from how a knight learned his skills, as a page then squire . . .

As a result, the training that a new recruit would receive was basically the same as the drill that all soldiers received. There wasn't really a separate school for new recruits. If you did have a lot of new soldiers, they would need *more* training, but their training wasn't really any different.

Read one of the manuals used by soldiers during the American Civil War. They expect a drill instructor to train ideally one, and at most three, soldier(s) in the basics (how to stand, face, march, handle his weapon), then throw him in with gradually larger units: platoons, companies, battalion, etc. Training individual soldiers was totally unrealistic during the war, but they didn't have any prescribed methods for training a large group of new soldiers; the manuals were written before the war for the professional army. Even at that time, there was no thought given to something like a boot camp. They would just spend more time drilling, until the officers felt confident or conditions forced them into action. They might set up "training camps", but these aren't quite the same as "boot camps".

Brother Oni

2013-06-21, 06:13 AM

Those are the elements I considered questionable. There might've been some other minor stuff as well, but my goal isn't to b picky and over-critical. This is, after all, a gem; probably the best video about knives I have seen.

As Rhynn said, any knife defence techniques are going to be taught in optimal conditions for well telegraphed attacks. In an ideal situation, the officers watching the training video would then have practical knife defence lessons to follow up their classroom tuition.

From my own training, any open handed knife defence techniques are strictly a last resort - running and/or talking to defuse the situation takes priority.

For untrained attackers, telegraphing is actually quite common; with trained attacks intend on hurting you, the only real defence that works is a double tap, centre of mass.
I feel that even if verbal commands also don't stop the assailant, anything that buys time to draw your weapon is worthwhile. In the UK, shouting out "Stop! Armed police officer!" often makes people think twice, or at least buys valuable moments for the officer to draw his weapon.

As a final thing, I'm not sure how common it is in the US, but UK police officers these days typically patrol with body armour (stab proof vests primarily) so it gives them a bit of defence.

Rhynn

2013-06-21, 07:38 AM

For untrained attackers, telegraphing is actually quite common; with trained attacks intend on hurting you, the only real defence that works is a double tap, centre of mass.

And in many real situations with such an attacker, you'll never have a chance to. You won't know it's an attack until the guy walking past you is suddenly stabbing you.

Knowing how to defend yourself is always better than not knowing, but the sad truth is, knife attacks are very, very hard to defend against for many, many reasons, a big one being surprise. Knives are very concealable; I remember a buddy of mine hiding a kitchen knife with his bare arm and giving everyone a nice surprise by suddenly screaming and stabbing it into the table we were sitting at... :smalleek: Smaller knives are still quite deadly. Your standard prison-yard-style shanking is pretty hard to defend against, if you don't know to expect it right then.

Matthew

2013-06-21, 08:43 AM

Oh! That reminds me, there is an instance of untrained peasants showing up to a muster and having to be "shown how to use their weapons". As I recall, it was during the reign of King John (or maybe Henry I) when all men who were not "nothing" were called out in response to the threat of an invasion. Have to look it up! Must have been an impromptu boot camp. :smallbiggrin:

Mr. Mask

2013-06-21, 06:15 PM

As Rhynn said, any knife defence techniques are going to be taught in optimal conditions for well telegraphed attacks. In an ideal situation, the officers watching the training video would then have practical knife defence lessons to follow up their classroom tuition.

From my own training, any open handed knife defence techniques are strictly a last resort - running and/or talking to defuse the situation takes priority.

For untrained attackers, telegraphing is actually quite common; with trained attacks intend on hurting you, the only real defence that works is a double tap, centre of mass.
I feel that even if verbal commands also don't stop the assailant, anything that buys time to draw your weapon is worthwhile. In the UK, shouting out "Stop! Armed police officer!" often makes people think twice, or at least buys valuable moments for the officer to draw his weapon.

As a final thing, I'm not sure how common it is in the US, but UK police officers these days typically patrol with body armour (stab proof vests primarily) so it gives them a bit of defence. That's the general idea of the video, yes. If someone believes this stuff without having those caveats you mention... they will unfortunately be destroyed.

And in many real situations with such an attacker, you'll never have a chance to. You won't know it's an attack until the guy walking past you is suddenly stabbing you.

Knowing how to defend yourself is always better than not knowing, but the sad truth is, knife attacks are very, very hard to defend against for many, many reasons, a big one being surprise. Knives are very concealable; I remember a buddy of mine hiding a kitchen knife with his bare arm and giving everyone a nice surprise by suddenly screaming and stabbing it into the table we were sitting at... :smalleek: Smaller knives are still quite deadly. Your standard prison-yard-style shanking is pretty hard to defend against, if you don't know to expect it right then. Anyone who knows how to use a knife will be very good at surprise attack. Keeping alert of possible danger is the most important line of defence, since it allows you to evade dangerous encounters all together at times, and you're helpless regardless of your skill if you're killed before you realize there's danger.

As for concealing the kitchen knife, here's a funny example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hfBRbKyzUCE
Not sure if he could actually walk with those.

Prison-yard shankings are difficult to defend against even if fully prepared and armed with a sword. The sword brings it from near impossible to quite feasible, at least.

warty goblin

2013-06-21, 08:55 PM

Brother Oni

2013-06-22, 02:55 AM

Is this a likely use for a larger spear, or is some sort of mix-up with smaller throwing spears?

Define 'larger' spear. I doubt even Achilles could throw a sarissa like a javelin. :smalltongue:

A javelin is weighted towards the tip to help it being thrown. Melee spears are more balanced, so it makes them a bit 'light' to be thrown as effectively and personal experience with 6ft re-enactment spears seems to corroborate this.

The peltast's throwing javelin ranged from 1.25 - 2.25 m in length apparently, which places them in the one handed melee spear to a short two handed spear range.

I would think you could throw a melee spear in an emergency, although the lethal distance would be shorter than a javelin's (peltasts could reach 25m+ with a throwing strap).

Fortinbras

2013-06-22, 09:14 AM

Slight change of topic. My vague poking at all things bronze age continues, which naturally leads to a vague poking at the Iliad.

A frequent activity in Homer is throwing spears at enemies. These are apparently the same spears the heroes use in hand to hand combat, so presumably they're fairly large, fighting spears and not javelins. Is this a likely use for a larger spear, or is some sort of mix-up with smaller throwing spears?

That's something that always bugged me. It gets even worse in the Aeneid when, depending on the translation, you might find the words spear, lance, javelin, and shaft used interchangeably.

Mathew, do you know if King John (or Henry) went to much expense to arm his peasants. More generally, does anyone know if kings or lords spending much on arming or upgrading the kit of their peasant militias ever happened much?

Spiryt

2013-06-22, 09:56 AM

That's something that always bugged me. It gets even worse in the Aeneid when, depending on the translation, you might find the words spear, lance, javelin, and shaft used interchangeably.

Then, sadly, sources will bug you a lot. :smallbiggrin:

Words like Lancea, hasta, spicaetc. for example, tend to be used pretty interchangeably, and it's pretty hard for us to know exactly what they describe.

A javelin is weighted towards the tip to help it being thrown. Melee spears are more balanced, so it makes them a bit 'light' to be thrown as effectively and personal experience with 6ft re-enactment spears seems to corroborate this.

Hmm, what javelin and what spear? Do you have sources?

We have really few actual hafts preserved from the period when javelins were actually widely used in Europe, so it's hard to say anything for sure.

Fortinbras

2013-06-22, 10:02 AM

Polybius and Plutarch seemed to make some distinctions between the different types of spear.

warty goblin

2013-06-22, 11:26 AM

Define 'larger' spear. I doubt even Achilles could throw a sarissa like a javelin. :smalltongue:

There certainly are spears in the Iliad specifically called out as being of unusual size. Ajax defends the Argive ships with a sort of pike, described as being so long the shaft is jointed together. Achilles' Pelian ash spear - a weapon that has its own epithet - is apparently of such a stature that none of the other Achaean warriors can handle it. Patroklus, when arming for his last and only fight, takes two spears but not the Pelian ash.

Later, when Patroklus fights Sarpedon, he kills a fairly random Trojan with a spear thrust to the chest over the rim of the shield, then Sarpedon with a throw, apparently of the same spear. Or at least there's no indication that he changes weapons. One of Sarpedon's missed throws - a lot of spear casts miss - kills one of the horses pulling Patroklus' chariot.

Achilles, in his duel with Hektor, makes a spear cast, but it's not clear if he throws the Pelian ash spear in particular, or any other. Since the Pelian ash spear is repeatedly described as 'the death of heroes' and Hektor is the greatest hero Achilles kills in the Iliad though, it seems a not unreasonable assumption. Whatever sort of spear it is, it's certainly usable in close combat, since he later kills Hektor with it.

A javelin is weighted towards the tip to help it being thrown. Melee spears are more balanced, so it makes them a bit 'light' to be thrown as effectively and personal experience with 6ft re-enactment spears seems to corroborate this.

Interesting, I did not know this. I knew pilums were forwards weighted, but not whether this true of javelins in general.

I would think you could throw a melee spear in an emergency, although the lethal distance would be shorter than a javelin's (peltasts could reach 25m+ with a throwing strap).
Most of the casts in the Iliad seem to be over very short distances, short enough that after a missed throw a combatant can quickly close the distance with his sword. Even if a fighting spear isn't very optimal for throwing, it may be easier to manage than carrying two kinds of spear, particularly when supporting a large shield, and in combat that moves from striking distance to longer ranges very frequently and quickly.

Vitruviansquid

2013-06-23, 06:58 AM

My friends and I had an argument about swordfighting the other day, and I want to see the playground's opinion on this.

So gist of the argument is this. My friend asserts that modern fencing, like the kind you would watch at the Olympics, is objectively the best way to use a sword that mankind has come up with, and that a good fencer today, if he was armed with an actual sword instead of blunt sports equipment, would kill any other swordsman in history. Furthermore, studying any other way to use a sword is irrelevant if you could learn fencing. This, he says, is because fencing is nothing less than the latest state in the evolution of swordsmanship - it is better than any other way swordsmanship has been practiced because modern fencers considered every lesson discovered from swordsmanship in the past in coming up with modern fencing techniques. As proof, he says there is a youtube video out there where a "relatively good" fencer has matches against historical reenactors using other styles and handily defeats them all.

My argument was that modern fencing can't possibly be considered the "best" way to use a sword for multiple reasons. Chiefly, swords were used for different things at different points in history. A Viking probably used different functionality from his sword than a mounted Crusader than a landsknecht with a zweihander. I am, for instance, skeptical that a fencer could have an advantage over a fully armored knight who might have fought in the War of the Roses, though my friend claims that a sharpened version of the fencer's epee or saber could easily pierce any armor (edit: I'm sure he meant "defeat any armor," as in the fencer would be able to either go through it OR around it). At the very least, the way a landsknecht used his sword would be much more useful in the battles a landsknecht would fight in, as compared to the way a fencer would use his sword. As well, I would expect modern fencing (as well as modern kendo) to lose some of its deadliness because it's taught not to help people kill each other, but to help people win at a game with set rules. As a result, I doubt a modern fencer is prepared for an armored opponent that also understands grappling martial arts, like Judo.

To recap:

1. Would a modern fencer, using a sharpened epee or saber, have a problem against any kind of armor worn in history?
2. To actual competitive fencers: how useful would modern day sport fencing be for a kill-or-be-killed situation?
3. To what extent, if at all, could we say modern day fencing "obsoletizes" other swords and styles of using swords?

Spiryt

2013-06-23, 07:24 AM

I would say that your friends are mildly delusional, which is probably not unheard of among proud students of almost any art. :smallbiggrin:

Sport with area you cannot leave, various, various arbitrary rules about no hand attacks, no covering your body, any sort of grappling or even colliding with opponent, grabbing your opponent blade is hard to compare even to 19th century fencing with similar weapons, let alone all other things.

1. Would a modern fencer, using a sharpened epee or saber, have a problem against any kind of armor worn in history?

Yes, against all of them. And 'problem' is probably very mild way to put it.

Mr. Mask

2013-06-23, 08:46 AM

I have heard many times from my friend, a history professor, about what a bad weapon the rapier is--and that's when you're using it properly, not like a sport fencer. Recently, he pointed out that while it was a lousy sword, it was still a sword, so it does a lot of damage to unarmoured flesh. Not a useless weapon--just far from optimal among its warlike brethren.

For more details, look up George Silver's "Paradoxes of Defence".
"For, you honor well knows, that when the battle is joined, there is no room for them to draw their bird-spits, and when they have them, what can they do with them? Can they pierce his corslet with the point? Can they unlace his helmet, unbuckle his armor, hew asunder their pikes with a Stocata, a Reversa, a Dritta, a Stramason or other such tempestuous terms? No, these toys are fit for children, not for men, for straggling boys of the camp, to murder poultry, not for men of honor to try the battle with their foes."

Starshade

2013-06-23, 08:50 AM

1. Would a modern fencer, using a sharpened epee or saber, have a problem against any kind of armor worn in history?
2. To actual competitive fencers: how useful would modern day sport fencing be for a kill-or-be-killed situation?
3. To what extent, if at all, could we say modern day fencing "obsoletizes" other swords and styles of using swords?

1.
Well, noone CAN demonstrate they can beat modern fencing exept by fencing With something like a blunt sword or a federfechter, which are ludicous. The other way around is impossible due to ethics and moral, though an Viking would simply Challenge Your friend to a bout of Holmgang to prove his view (duel, aim is hacking apart the enemy SHIELD, not bloodying enemy. both get 3 Shields, using one at a time, not needed to actually hold it, from reading icelandic saga's I assume some stood in front of it ,with their sword/Axe in two hands, guarding it like an Soccer goal).

3.
It's a efficient and great sport, and makes styles as the gladiator combat style obsolete, since modern fencing is an great sport for the current age. It's not aiming for defense, or war, thus not usefull for any military drill (probably never was, though that's my pow).

warty goblin

2013-06-23, 10:01 AM

1. Would a modern fencer, using a sharpened epee or saber, have a problem against any kind of armor worn in history?

You might be able to stick the point of a fencing weapon through mail, but any form of solid or lamellar metallic armor is going to be completely impenetrable. Which they were for pretty much all swords in history as well. However most swords through history are also capable cutting weapons with enough mass and rigidity to deliver some percussive force to armored parts or hew effectively at unarmored extremities.

2. To actual competitive fencers: how useful would modern day sport fencing be for a kill-or-be-killed situation?
3. To what extent, if at all, could we say modern day fencing "obsoletizes" other swords and styles of using swords?
Modern fencing is a sport. It has rules. Even if at some level an epee or fencing saber could be used in a fashion superior to other swords, modern sport fencing is not that style because the modern sport fencer will neither anticipate nor know an appropriate response for attacks that violate those rules.

And pretty much anybody is going to violate rules like not using their off hand, and strike to illegal targets using illegal methods.

Storm Bringer

2013-06-23, 11:58 AM

To recap:

1. Would a modern fencer, using a sharpened epee or saber, have a problem against any kind of armor worn in history?
2. To actual competitive fencers: how useful would modern day sport fencing be for a kill-or-be-killed situation?
3. To what extent, if at all, could we say modern day fencing "obsoletizes" other swords and styles of using swords?

1. yes, any solid armour would stop a epee thrust or a sabre slash with ease, which is why people wore armour. "soft" armours, like a gambeson, might be penetrated, but that's about it. Rapier Fencing is in essence a "civilian" combat style, intended for self defence, and is based on the assumption that both you and the foe are not wearing armour.

2. better than no training at all, but not a patch on medieval or early modern era training, simply because it's a "limited" form of combat. A modern day fencer would be fine as far as his training and experience goes, but he has never fought someone who can move to the side, can circle around, can make off hand stikes, can grapple, etc.

compare the moves sets of Kendo, Japanese "sport" fencing, and Kenjitsu, the actual combat style that kendo is derived form. Kenjitsu has every move in Kendo, plus others, which give the kenjutsu user a wider choice of moves that the kendo user has no experience in and no counters for.

For a modern day example, compare the difference between a Police officer using his pistol and a soldier in Afghanistan using his rifle. sport fencing is derived form the civilian side of things, and drawing conclusions form modern fencing and applying it to historical combat styles is like drawing a conclusion based on a cops experience and applying it to a soldier. their may be some overlap, but the soldier has to deal with a much greater range of problems and threats.

3. none. modern sport fencing is basically derived form a limited subset of "Historical" fencing styles and knowledge, specialised for a specific purpose ( originally civilian self defence, then formalised honour duels), and leaving out things that a soldier on the battlefield might need to know, but a civilian fencer fighting in a back ally would not. things like how to deal with spears, how to fight cavalry, etc.

Then, as the intended use shifted form self defence to duelling, things like fighting multiple opponents, weapons other than swords, or fighting in anything but a straight line, and so on were also dropped form training, as they were no longer needed. the result is a more limited, more focus skill set that was well suited to the conditions of formal duelling and not very suited to other situations. And is this style that modern sport fencing is derived form.

to argue that modern fencing is an evolution of past styles is, strictly, correct. The flaw is to equate "evolution" to "better in every way", rather than "better in the current situation".*

Modern fencing has "evolved" by trimming out excess elements no longer needed. to put a modern fencer back into a situation where he must face those elements is disadvantage him. a modern sport fencer, armed with a sharpened version of a epee, would get his arse handed to him by any historical fencer of similar skill, simply because the historical fencer isn't fighting by the same, limited rules set the sport fencer is used to.

* it's a pet hate. evolution only runs in one direction: forewords. even when you change back to something you had before, it's still evolution.

SiuiS

2013-06-23, 12:05 PM

This video looks quite old and I suspect a lot of it has already been incorporated into police procedure.

The reactionary gap corroborates several sources on the subject: ~20' of space required to draw your weapon against someone charging you with a knife is something I heard before and making space by putting obstacles between you makes plain sense.

Yeah, I've been joking about that for years. It's nice to see that someone, somewhere, put it to use.

I thought this was covered pretty well before (you might want to go back and read that part of the thread again since it will provide a lot of good, well sourced details to add to this) but I'll try to paint a broader picture for you to compliment what was said earlier.

In a word, there is no "Medieval Boot Camp" because medieval armies were made up of people who knew how to fight. Boot Camp is for very quickly training people who have no idea how to fight - originally in fact it was for training conscripts, i.e. untrained civilians who are forced into the military and must be rapidly made to learn how to take orders, do simple things like march, and to use, maintain and carry their weapons.

In the middle ages in Europe, there were no true civilians. There were free people, protected people, and slaves. Free people by definition could fight. Free people owned and carried weapons, and by carrying them they were required to fight when necessary. Carrying a weapon in the middle ages was like wearing a Hells Angels vest or 18th Street Gang tattoo's today - if you are wearing it, you better be able to back it up. Today, most of us are not warriors like Hells Angels or 18th Street gangmembers have to be - the State has a monopoly of force, in the medieval world there was no State really, you had to be able to protect your own life and property- or at least participate in this protection. In towns for example, all citizens had to do duty as police (and firemen) every few weeks something like jury duty, because they couldn't trust anyone else to do it.

Protected people were people like Priests and Monks, and free women (among others), who were not required to carry weapons. If you were caught hurting one of these protected people, your punishment would be extremely harsh, usually meaning death.

Training was gradual and took place over a lifetime. It was not an individual thing where you were taught by an uncle or your father (though that was undoubtedly part of it) but it was usually a communal thing done in small and large groups. It's like, everyone was at least a little bit something like a gang banger or a Hells Angel. What that training consisted of varied by your estate. So knights an their buddies were horsemen. They would perform complicated hunts in large groups to practice many of the techniques of warfare. They were members of the tournament circuit which was the medieval equivalent of professional sports today, just as physically demanding (we can see the physiques of some of these guys are really impressive) and just as rough, actually a bit more rough since people routinely died and you could also get captured and lose a ton of money (though the rules varied a great deal from one tournament to the next). They also exercised and trained with weapons on a daily basis if possible. Finally they routinely participated in raids, small fights, and battles as part of their jobs administering an estate or acting as bodyguard to a rich noble.

Townsmen (burghers) fought as heavy infantry or (most often) marksmen. They practiced shooting regularly, nearly every town had a shooting range, initially for bows and crossbows, by the 14th century for guns as well increasingly. They participated in shooting contests which were expensive to enter (cost the equivalent of hundreds of dollars to enter) but had huge payouts (equivalent of 50 or 100 thousand dollars in some cases for the winners and runners up). They participated in fechtschuler, fencing tournaments, which also included staves, grappling, saber (dussack) fighting, pollaxe fighting and so on. And they all had to work in the town watch (municipal police) on a routine basis. The town watch operated as a small unit and carried halberds while inside the walls, pikes while outside, and basic drill was part of the job. They had to do this every few weeks. And some towns had formal drill training - Venice more than most.

Finally, like the knights, townsfolk had to pretty routinely get involved in skirmishes, raids and fights while keeping the peace (landfrieden) in their towns territory. It was very common for example for towns to destroy the castles of so called 'robber knights', and to capture outlaws, bandits, robbers and brigands to be judged by the town's magistrates. Burghers also participated in hunting in forests owned by the town. They protected these hunting preserves every bit as aggressively as the nobles did, for example the town of Greifswald in Pomerania went to war with their own Duke (captured his whole entourage and nearly killed him) when he went hunting in their forest without permission in the 1456

Free Peasants also participated in shooting and fighting contests (grappling, fencing, and staff fighting particularly) during events like kermesse festivals and we know that they also systematically did pike and halberd drill, we have evidence of the Swiss doing this but also in Bohemia, Saxony, in a place called the Dithmarschen, and others. It was the Swiss in particular who were the inspiration for the formally organized professional mercenaries called Landsknechts in the late 15th Century. They imported Swiss sergeants (feldweiebel) to train German peasants, mostly Swabians originally I think, who themselves were half-trained at least, but were taught specific Swiss fighting techniques. These Swiss were either burghers (from towns like Bern, Solothurn or Zurich) or peasants from the forest cantons like Uri, Schwyz, or Innerhoden. Condotierre companies in Italy and the Balkans also had systematic training regimens.

Slaves of course were serfs, who had lost the culture and tradition of fighting and usually made terrible soldiers, regardless of training or equipment, and actual chattel slaves, who were usually not allowed to fight (though there were exceptions - in a lot of Muslim countries the best troops in their army were slaves).

All this stuff started to change in the Early Modern (1500's - 1800's) era when pike drill was gradually systematized into something which could be trained to unskilled, non-warriors (i.e. serfs) and guns became simple enough to use and cheap enough to make that they could also be equipped to unskilled troops. Armies became much larger as a result, less individually skilled or effectively equipped, but often more effective simply due to the scale.

Neat. Will reas again, later.

As a final thing, I'm not sure how common it is in the US, but UK police officers these days typically patrol with body armour (stab proof vests primarily) so it gives them a bit of defence.

Depends on beat, I think. I see police officers come in, usually in pairs, with full long-sleeve coats and obvious vests. I also see sheriffs come in in what amount to t-shirts and havier armaments - one gentleman carries a baton thats a two inch thick shaft of plain wood, at least a cubit long, and I've seen several speed loaders in a special holster, even when they're in their civvies.

And in many real situations with such an attacker, you'll never have a chance to. You won't know it's an attack until the guy walking past you is suddenly stabbing you.

Well, yeah, but that's not really germane. The first thing anyone ever says about "knife fighting" is you will get cut, you will bleed, you will get hurt. "Knife defense" is always about a situation which escalates into someone grabbing a knife. An assassination is so far outside the scope of self defense as physical action that it shouldn't need a foot note. That belongs in the "Keep your wits about you, stay vigilant, don't look for trouble" section of self defense.

Brother Oni

2013-06-23, 01:46 PM

Hmm, what javelin and what spear? Do you have sources?

I'm using a couple of second hand sources regarding javelins (link (http://home.exetel.com.au/thrace/peltast.htm)), but my own knowledge on throwing melee spears (re-enactment spears with pine or ash hafts).

There certainly are spears in the Iliad specifically called out as being of unusual size. Ajax defends the Argive ships with a sort of pike, described as being so long the shaft is jointed together. Achilles' Pelian ash spear - a weapon that has its own epithet - is apparently of such a stature that none of the other Achaean warriors can handle it. Patroklus, when arming for his last and only fight, takes two spears but not the Pelian ash.

However for normal people, simple physics dictates that using a 21ft spear to fight someone at 5ft is rather sub-optimal. :smallbiggrin:

Most of the casts in the Iliad seem to be over very short distances, short enough that after a missed throw a combatant can quickly close the distance with his sword.

Probably about 20ft, working from the other topic.

So gist of the argument is this. My friend asserts that modern fencing, like the kind you would watch at the Olympics, is objectively the best way to use a sword that mankind has come up with, and that a good fencer today, if he was armed with an actual sword instead of blunt sports equipment, would kill any other swordsman in history.

Further to other replies, possibly if the other swordsman was fighting under fencing rules.

In full contact under HEMA/HMB rules... the protective gear a typical fencer wears is inadequate: HMB competition between Russians and Ukranians (http://middleagestoday.com/en/video/album/955).

Even under the same rules, a longsword versus a rapier appears to be about even. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6r7VWIQCHvM)

As proof, he says there is a youtube video out there where a "relatively good" fencer has matches against historical reenactors using other styles and handily defeats them all.

Does you or your friend have a link for this video? Even so, re-enactors* tend not to be competition fighters, so someone trained in sport fencing under sport fencing rules is going to beat them. If it were someone who was a HEMA/HBA fighter, then it would be a fairer match.

*I'm using the specific term of someone primarily interested in authenticity of the kit, language and techniques of the period.

Mr Beer

2013-06-23, 02:31 PM

Fencing weapons are the ultimate sword...for fencing. I wouldn't want to fight an extended battle against numerous guys in armour and carrying heavy weapons, while armed with a rapier. The guys who did that kind of stuff felt the same way, which is why they used swords, axes, spears etc. instead of extended stilletos.

Armour is heavy, expensive and exhausting to fight in. Still warriors tended to get the best armour they could afford and wear it in battle. Because it worked. Most armour would stop a fencing weapon very easily, leaving the "primitive warrior" free to attack (or "riposte" if you will) and good luck parrying a broadsword or axe with a rapier.

warty goblin

2013-06-23, 02:36 PM

Fencing weapons are the ultimate sword...for fencing. I wouldn't want to fight an extended battle against numerous guys in armour and carrying heavy weapons, while armed with a rapier. The guys who did that kind of stuff felt the same way, which is why they used swords, axes, spears etc.

Armour is heavy, expensive and exhausting to fight in. Still warriors tended to get the best armour they could afford and wear it in battle. Because it worked. Most armour would stop a fencing weapon very easily, leaving the "primitive warrior" free to attack (or "riposte" if you will) and good luck parrying a broadsword or axe with a rapier.

Actual rapiers can be fairly substantial weapons. The later smallswords and epees are where things start to get really, well, small.

Galloglaich

2013-06-23, 02:39 PM

You can tell your friend that modern epeeists, sabrists, and foil fencers routinely enter HEMA tournaments and try their luck, I've never heard of one winning any without also getting training in the historical techniques. That said, having both modern 'fencing' training AND HEMA (historical training based on 400-500 year old fencing manuals) is a good combination, there are at least two dozen sport fencers I know who are also good competitive HEMA fencers, including at least one guy who is an "A" rated epeeist (all the competition sport fencers are rated A-F) who is one of the top longsword guys in the US, but he's also been training German longsword for 7 years.

The problem with the modern fencing as others have already mentioned, is that they are trained to go back and forth in a strait line, are not allowed to grapple, and most damning from our (HEMA fencing) point of view, they don't really defend themselves since you can win a sport fencing match by stabbing the other guy 0.0003 seconds before he stabs you, which is ridiculous.

The rapier should not be confused with the epee or the foil fencing, nor the Olympic "saber" (basically a car aerial) with real saber fencing.

Sport 'fencing' weapons look like this:

http://visual.merriam-webster.com/images/sports-games/combat-sports/fencing/fencing-weapons_1.jpg

Basically car aerials, extremely light, 400 - 500 grams or around 1 lb in most cases.

A real smallsword, which is what the epee and the foil are based on, is a much more deadly, heavier weapon, closer to 2 lbs

http://www.darkwoodarmory.com/images/smallsword%201.JPG

A rapier is quite heavy (3-4 lbs) and almost 4 feet long. The ones we fence with are quite substantial beasts, which require a lot of arm and wrist strength to use:

http://www.darkwoodarmory.com/images/papCommonringI.jpg

Real sabers (usually around 2-3 lbs) look like this:

http://www.cowansauctions.com/itemImages/tee5804.jpg

And actual 16th-19th century style ('military') saber fencing is a very rough sport, though a lot of fun, which looks like this

http://www.hroarr.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/HROARR-site-cover-swordfish-2012-01.jpg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3_YCJ406JU

G

Brother Oni

2013-06-23, 02:52 PM

Armour is heavy, expensive and exhausting to fight in.

It's not as heavy as you think (earlier on this thread, there were some links to the agility of people in full plate), which in turn, doesn't make it as exhausting as you make it out to be.

Expense, I'll definitely give you. :smallbiggrin:

And actual 16th-19th century style ('military') saber fencing is a very rough sport...

I believe their advocates have a saying - 'Give blood, fence sabre.' :smallbiggrin:

Spiryt

2013-06-23, 02:56 PM

If we have to guys in shirts and pants standing against each other and going at it swinging weapon -

Then 19th century style smallsword/epee could be really dangerous weapon to go against - extremely quick, mobile, and has surprisingly low 'dead field' so it can stab from short ranges and weird angles, while lunges are still rangy.

And blade that penetrates few good inches and can bend a lot to make things worse could be very deadly, or at least health ruining.

The 'problems' begin when we complicate situation, and wonder about actual ability to stop/disable opponent where he stands, defend against different threats when things go nasty and there's not enough room/time/cold blood for footwork and so on.

Brother Oni

2013-06-23, 03:12 PM

If we have to guys in shirts and pants standing against each other and going at it swinging weapon -

Then 19th century style smallsword/epee could be really dangerous weapon to go against - extremely quick, mobile, and has surprisingly low 'dead field' so it can stab from short ranges and weird angles, while lunges are still rangy.

I definitely agree that under those circumstances, a fencer has an advantage, but that's significantly different from saying a fencer would kill any other swordsman in history.

rrgg

2013-06-23, 03:17 PM

A javelin is weighted towards the tip to help it being thrown. Melee spears are more balanced, so it makes them a bit 'light' to be thrown as effectively and personal experience with 6ft re-enactment spears seems to corroborate this.

Not necessarily, weighting the tip does surprising little to keep a javelin flying straight (both ends are supposed to fall at the same rate regardless of mass and all that).

Whether a spear was good for throwing sort of depends on what your goal is. Skirmishers' javelins would often be really lightweight things, finger-width shafts that were only around 4 feet long. Javelins of those type probably had a lot of range, but if you want just a ton of damage then you probably want something weighs closer to a thrusting spear. You might not have a ton of range, but you'd still have more reach than a sarissa if need be.

TuggyNE

2013-06-23, 05:36 PM

Not necessarily, weighting the tip does surprising little to keep a javelin flying straight (both ends are supposed to fall at the same rate regardless of mass and all that).

Irrelevant; weighting the tip shifts the center of mass forward past the center of pressure, which allows airflow to stabilize it. Same basic principle as rocket fins, arrow fletching, and the like. Sure, it's less impressive without actual stabilizing fins (since there's a smaller moment of stabilization) but you can still manage it with enough of a weight change.

Mr Beer

2013-06-23, 06:16 PM

It's not as heavy as you think (earlier on this thread, there were some links to the agility of people in full plate), which in turn, doesn't make it as exhausting as you make it out to be.

Expense, I'll definitely give you. :smallbiggrin:

It is as heavy as I think; I don't think it weighs 250lbs or anything like that. I also know you can do all kinds of stuff in platemail, including some quite startling acrobatics. But it gets tiring to fight in, certainly much more tiring than no armour *.

Really my point is not that donning armour is excruatingly unpleasant but rather that no-one would do so unless it had a great deal of utility.

* I suspect that well trained knights were extremely fit. People tend to think of raw strength as a knight's defining characteristic and while they would certainly be stong, I imagine that having the stamina to exercise vigorously in full armour for any length of time would be more important.

Kaeso

2013-06-23, 07:05 PM

TheYell

2013-06-23, 08:55 PM

This question isn't really about weapons or armor, but it's still related to ancient militaries so please forgive me if I'm not allowed to ask this here. I just want to know when actual military training became standardized. This question has been haunting me for a while because standing armies weren't really "professional" until the age of Napoleon. For example, ancient Hoplites outside of Sparta were just rich citizens who could afford the equipment needed, as "normal" civillians I imagine they had little more than the most basic training of "pointy end goes into the enemy". So when did the hardcore training regiments we know today come into being? The ones where soldiers are drilled to their maximum extent to keep sure they stay in tiptop shape and have the morale a "real" soldier needs?

I think you're forgetting Rome and Sparta, and centuries before that, since the Egyptians and Assyrians used mass chariot units, there had to be some discipline in an army that moved at different speeds in coherent groups.

The era of Napoleon is when mass universal conscription comes in, from the politics of the time that basically said all of France could be looted to pay for the national army, which was a total reversal of medieval tax policy. Also, transportation after Napoleon came to be improved, and by the last quarter of the 19th century, the army wasn't expected to forage to survive. Medieval and early modern armies were usually temporary musters of men. Temporary because of the huge cost, and because they had to steal to eat as they walked around, and because the simple act of putting 100,000 people together could kill several thousand of them with disease. But at some point after the age of steam and rail, it became possible to bring several hundred thousand recruits hundreds of miles to stand with career soldiers - at which point it became realistic and prudent to bring the recruits to the standard of veterans as quickly as possible.

Before that happy period of kriegspiel, even in Roman times, you tended to have a crack core of hard veterans who were the best trained, permanent, professional soldier. He had the best gear, the best leaders, the best weapons, higher priority in the minds of the commanders, and if possible was the best soldier out of the rest of the army. These elite forces were surrounded by many times more second-rate or worse recruits, called out as needed and send to reinforce the elite forces. He'd be trained to respect the elite forces as the backbone of the army, and given duties that basically prepared him to fight the enemy until the elite settled the issue. Apart from them, there were also such local yokels as could be persuaded, or forced, to fight with the army. They were not expected or prepared to stand their ground, and their role was usually to scout the enemy force, bring food, guard the food, or harass escaping enemies after the elite broke them on the field.

So, as we read from Bernal Diaz del Castillo's "History of the Conquest of Mexico" that at some point :

Cortes now reviewed the whole of his troops, which amounted to 1300 men, 96 horses, 80 crossbow-men, and a like number of musketeers. This body of troops Cortes considered sufficiently strong to venture fearlessly into Mexico [the capital] with, particularly as the caziques of Tlascalla had furnished us with 2000 of their warriors.

And of that body less than 500 Spanish were hardened veterans of the first part of the campaign in Mexico. Cortes had a hardened vanguard. He had hundreds more Spaniards with less experience but the same gear and accustomed to the same army organization and discipline. He had temporary use of 2000 natives with their native weapons and no real experience of Spanish order, but used to fighting the common enemy and more knowledgeable of the immediate area. The art of knowing what to expect of each such contingent was necessary in a general for at least two millenia.

Mike_G

2013-06-23, 08:57 PM

you can win a sport fencing match by stabbing the other guy 0.0003 seconds before he stabs you, which is ridiculous.
G

That's not actually true, except with epee. Foil and sabre points are not awarded to the guy who hits first, but the guy who has established prioty, or right of way.

If I attack you, and you just counter- attack into my attack and we both get hit, I get a point and you don't regardless of who landed first.

If I attack you, you parry and riposte, and I continue my attack and we both get hit, you get the point.

The reason for this is that fencing rewards parrying, not just double hits, which comes from the original intent as a training weapon for dueling.

So, in a nutshell, until you defeat my attack, it has the priority in a double touch. The unrealistic thing is that my "parry" doesn't have to be very strong. I just have to make contact with your blade to get right of way for my riposte. So a weak parry that would have left D'Artagnan dead counts for points.

It's tag with blunt swords. But it does teach very fine point control and speed, so it's something any rapier fencer should do to help polish their tip control.

I was a rated sabre fencer and fenced all three weapons back in college. It's not a martial art, but it's not as pointless as a lot of other fighters think. A good sport fencer can pick up SCA rapier style quickly and beat the snot out of the generally slower and sloppier SCA rapier guys, because all he needs to do is learn to incorporate lateral movement and stronger parries. He already can put his point on target and is used to a much faster sport, so that extra speed and control helps

Galloglaich

2013-06-23, 09:12 PM

This question isn't really about weapons or armor, but it's still related to ancient militaries so please forgive me if I'm not allowed to ask this here. I just want to know when actual military training became standardized. This question has been haunting me for a while because standing armies weren't really "professional" until the age of Napoleon. For example, ancient Hoplites outside of Sparta were just rich citizens who could afford the equipment needed, as "normal" civillians I imagine they had little more than the most basic training of "pointy end goes into the enemy". So when did the hardcore training regiments we know today come into being? The ones where soldiers are drilled to their maximum extent to keep sure they stay in tiptop shape and have the morale a "real" soldier needs?

It's a perfectly legitimate question (though I think you mean 'regimen' not 'regiments') but oddly, it's one which has been answered recently several times. I'm going to try to tackle this in as simple a way as possible, but I'd like to ask you - please review the other comments on this subject earlier in the thread.

The difference between the Napoleonic era army (and later, up to modern times) and the armies of what the Napoloenic folks called the "Ancien Regime" (basically everything that came before going back to Rome, is in a word, conscription.

The systematic training regimen was invented to take non-warriors, people unaccustomed to bearing arms let alone to acting in concert as a group of fighters, to learn how to obey orders, march, maintain their weapons without ruining them, and fight under command.

In the eras before hand, people who fought, basically all free people, were training most of their lives more or less continuously.

As an example, you might ask, at what point do people in North America or Europe or Asia learn to use computers and the internet? When do they go to training for it? The answer is, for most people, that we don't. It's just part of our life. If you are talking about free people in Europe before roughly 1790 AD, a good percentage of them (proportionally more the further back in time you go) did have some familiarity with fighting, the use of weapons, and war, more or less the same way. It was just part of life.

Even the Romans, who did do some systematic training of new recruits (especially when new Legions were formed) for most of their history, relied on recruits who had some military experience; initially Roman citizens, burghers and small landowners of a certain level of wealth, later on increasingly "barbarians" from Germanic, North African, Central Asian and Middle Eastern tribes who were saturated with the martial and military arts just as much as medieval Europeans were after the Western Roman Empire fell. In Byzantium, the most reliable troops were Varangians, who were basically Vikings, and later Saxons and Gaels from the British Isles, who were also 'hard men' with a fighting culture.

For really systematic training you have to look to Central Asian and Middle Eastern cultures which took slave boys and trained them from early youth to be fighters, like the Mamelukes in Egypt and the Janissaries in Ottoman Turkey. These were effective troops but not necessarily more effective, it's worth pointing out, than their opponents from Poland, Hungary, the Teutonic Knights, the Serene Republic of Venice, the Knights Hospitaller, the Tercio's and Conquistadors of Cortez and so on and so forth, who relied on free warriors who learned to fight through the more open, informal (rough and tumble) training methods which I and others described already upthread.

G

Galloglaich

2013-06-23, 09:39 PM

That's not actually true, except with epee. Foil and sabre points are not awarded to the guy who hits first, but the guy who has established prioty, or right of way.

If I attack you, and you just counter- attack into my attack and we both get hit, I get a point and you don't regardless of who landed first.

(snip)

You'll have to forgive me, I'm pretty opinionated on this matter - to me, Right of Way is just another way in Sport fencing where you can win a match without any regard for your actual safety- you get the point on a double-hit

In HEMA tournaments, in most cases, if you get a double-hit it counts as a loss for both fighters regardless of who struck first or had 'right of way'. I have been at tournaments where nobody won in a given weapon category because both guys 'doubled out'. There is in some places an 'afterblow' rule which says if you get hit right after you hit the other guy you get no kill (because you failed to protect yourself). I'm kind of on the fence about it because it does have some similarity to 'right of way' rules.

But either way the emphasis in HEMA rules-sets, at least to date, is on NOT getting cut or stabbed, which I think personally is what is needed to really consider yourself a fencer. If you can't prevent yourself from getting cut, or stabbed, regardless of what your opponent is doing or whether he or she is playing by the rules, then what do you really know about fencing which is the art of self defense?

Personally I think Olympic competition and (especially) electronic scoring pretty much ruined sport "fencing". Classical fencing is another matter entirely, and there is no doubt that some of the skills you learn in sport 'fencing' help a great deal for something a little more hard core, whether it's HEMA or Kendo or Jianshu or Eskrima or whatever. It may just be a matter of taste, but regardless, I'm just stating what I've seen with my own eyes, the premise that a 'modern' "fencer" can defeat anyone with more antique weapons is ludicrous, and is not born out by evidence. Otherwise the increasingly substantial prizes at HEMA tournaments would be carried home by all those A rated epeeists as an afterthought. They can use our same equipment, just have to bleach it white ;)

The smallsword is a good weapon against say, a walking stick or a cudgel, but I'd hate to be in a fight with a smallsword against a guy with a rapier and dagger, or against a longsword, let alone something like a spear. If you look at judicial evidence, remittance letters and so on, (of which some very interesting stuff has been published recently) smallswords don't do all that great; two guys dueling with them often stab each other and both die, the blades frequently break, and in unevenly matched fights (one type of weapon against another) they often lose out to other weapons like staves or daggers, for whatever reason.

I was a rated sabre fencer and fenced all three weapons back in college. It's not a martial art, but it's not as pointless as a lot of other fighters think. A good sport fencer can pick up SCA rapier style quickly and beat the snot out of the generally slower and sloppier SCA rapier guys, because all he needs to do is learn to incorporate lateral movement and stronger parries. He already can put his point on target and is used to a much faster sport, so that extra speed and control helps

SCA, I'll take your word for, but I haven't yet heard of a sabreur, ranked or otherwise, walking into a significant HEMA saber tournament and winning or even placing, without doing some historically based training first. They are just not used to an 'open' fight, moving around other than back and forth in a strait line, or the striking power of a realistically weighted saber, unlimited target areas, grappling, and so on.

G

Mike_G

2013-06-23, 10:00 PM

You'll have to forgive me, I'm pretty opinionated on this matter - to me, Right of Way is just another way in Sport fencing where you can win a match without any regard for your actual safety- you get the point on a double-hit

In HEMA tournaments, in most cases, if you get a double-hit it counts as a loss for both fighters regardless of who struck first or had 'right of way'. I have been at tournaments where nobody won in a given weapon category because both guys 'doubled out'. There is in some places an 'afterblow' rule which says if you get hit right after you hit the other guy you get no kill (because you failed to protect yourself). I'm kind of on the fence about it because it does have some similarity to 'right of way' rules.

But either way the emphasis in HEMA rules-sets, at least to date, is on NOT getting cut or stabbed, which I think personally is what is needed to really consider yourself a fencer. If you can't prevent yourself from getting cut, or stabbed, regardless of what your opponent is doing or whether he or she is playing by the rules, then what do you really know about fencing which is the art of self defense?

I freely admit that fencing isn't fighting. It's several steps removed. But the precision it teaches is a nice addition to any fighter's skill set.

I just wanted to correct the statement that all you have to do is hit first. Because that's simply not true. I did say that a parry in Olympic foil doesn't actually have to be a useful real world parry to count, but it does need to happen.

Personally I think Olympic competition and (especially) electronic scoring pretty much ruined sport "fencing". Classical fencing is another matter entirely, and there is no doubt that some of the skills you learn in sport 'fencing' help a great deal for something a little more hard core, whether it's HEMA or Kendo or Jianshu or Eskrima or whatever. It may just be a matter of taste, but regardless, I'm just stating what I've seen with my own eyes, the premise that a 'modern' "fencer" can defeat anyone with more antique weapons is ludicrous, and is not born out by evidence. Otherwise the increasingly substantial prizes at HEMA tournaments would be carried home by all those A rated epeeists as an afterthought. They can use our same equipment, just have to bleach it white ;)

That premise is ridiculous. But an A rated epeeist, or better, and A rated sabreur, would have a strong base on which to build the skills of a good HEMA fighter.

The smallsword is a good weapon against say, a walking stick or a cudgel, but I'd hate to be in a fight with a smallsword against a guy with a rapier and dagger, or against a longsword, let alone something like a spear. If you look at judicial evidence, remittance letters and so on, (of which some very interesting stuff has been published recently) smallswords don't do all that great; two guys dueling with them often stab each other and both die, the blades frequently break, and in unevenly matched fights (one type of weapon against another) they often lose out to other weapons like staves or daggers, for whatever reason.

SCA, I'll take your word for, but I haven't yet heard of a sabreur, ranked or otherwise, walking into a significant HEMA saber tournament and winning or even placing, without doing some historically based training first. They are just not used to an 'open' fight, moving around other than back and forth in a strait line, or the striking power of a realistically weighted saber, unlimited target areas, grappling, and so on.

G

It may have been my time in the Marines that made those less of of an obstacle, but it doesn't take much to adapt to moving sideways. It didn't for me anyway. Learning to hit a quarter taped to my fencing coach's jacket was hard. Learning to sidestep when it seemed appropriate, not so much

But SCA rapier is just as unrealistically sanitized as Olympic fencing. You can't grapple or grab his blade or kick anybody. They just like to claim that "sport" fencing isn't real, like their style. So I enjoy wiping the floor with them by their own rules. In my mid forties.

There isn't a real HEMA group anywhere local, so I can't comment on it. I am assuming a more realistic style would be better suited to real combat. I still fence once in a while because it's fun, even if it is tag with blunts, and I play with the rapier guys because it's like NERF fighting for grown ups.

I only waded in to correct the statement on timing. Because hitting first means squat in foil or sabre meets. I'm not trying to argue that a gold medal foilist would beat a guy with a rapier and dagger.

Galloglaich

2013-06-23, 10:30 PM

Yeah you are right, I apologize, I kind of bristle over that issue because there are a lot of debates in the HEMA community about sport fencing rules, some of the sport fencing federations are trying to get involved in HEMA currently, so it's a bit touchy.

But you are absolutely correct, I've seen that with my own eyes: sport fencing does have some of the real 'art' in it and it does teach valuable skills that a lot of HEMA-ists are lacking, even if the reverse is also true.

SCA for me always have too many rules but some of the SCA rapier guys do come out of that to fence pretty well. A few of their heavy weapons guys too, with a little training (though they too are trying to kind of carve out their own HEMA niche, or somewhere between HEMA, SCA and something like battle of the nations, and still calling it HEMA which is alarming to me)

Sometimes all of this seems like a bit of a siege of what has been built up so far with HEMA in the last 10 or 15 years, I guess it's only a matter of time before we get more and more restrictive rules too in the name of 'safety' or whatever. It feels like kind of a 'golden age' right now, particularly in Europe, but I know it won't last. It's certainly been an interesting run.

G

Mike_G

2013-06-23, 11:01 PM

I fully understand.

There is a lot of defensiveness and boosting of individual styles out there. It's like the Katana Cult.

I know I get irritated when fencing gets too much bad press, since I know it's a real skill, and a real art that takes a lot of concentration and dedication, and when Grimgnash, Bane of Ding- Dongs and Duke of some faux medieval land outside of Cleveland sneers at it, I blow my stack, so I can imagine that reading about how Foil is the One True Art, the apogee of thousands of years of sword technique, can make a man surly.

I think most martial traditions have something useful in them, and we can learn from pretty much all of them.

Mr Beer

2013-06-23, 11:04 PM

Learning to hit a quarter taped to my fencing coach's jacket was hard. Learning to sidestep when it seemed appropriate, not so much

How technically difficult would it be to run your weapon through someone's eye or throat? What if they were say attacking you with a longsword and modestly competent but inferior to yourself in both skills and reflexes?

Avilan the Grey

2013-06-24, 01:33 AM

I definitely agree that under those circumstances, a fencer has an advantage, but that's significantly different from saying a fencer would kill any other swordsman in history.

A sidenote:
Not that he is a real authoroty, but Jackie Chan has, when asked, said that the most deadly marial art in history was 19th century european fencing, at least against an non-armored opponent.

He actually demonstrates this in Shanghai Knights, where his character, Kung Fu master as he is, gets his behind handed to him over and over, with extreme ease, by the Big Bad who is an English aristrcrat and uses this tecnique.

Not necessarily, weighting the tip does surprising little to keep a javelin flying straight (both ends are supposed to fall at the same rate regardless of mass and all that).

Another sidenote: When it was allowed to experiment with the equipment in the Olympics, there were several "new" types of javelins invented. Almost all of those were lighter and had a more evenly distributed weight. Combined with things like different elasticity in the shaft etc these eventually flew so far that combined with the 'roid use in the 80ies and 90ies they had to be banned, since they were in danger of hitting other athletes and even the audience at the end of the field.

The difference between the Napoleonic era army (and later, up to modern times) and the armies of what the Napoloenic folks called the "Ancien Regime" (basically everything that came before going back to Rome, is in a word, conscription.

Just nitpicking, but some of us had conscription a hundred years earlier...

Fortinbras

2013-06-24, 03:01 AM

At the risk of delving into matters I have only a little practical experience with, here is the best analogy I can think of for the foil vs HEMA issue.

A .22 long is great for target shooting. It's very light, it's quiet, and it has basically no recoil. It is an excellent caliber for hitting things with, if that is your only concern. Someone who knows little of combat but is aware that shooting your opponent is a desirable outcome for a firefight might consider a .22 to be a good rifle for combat: it is good for shooting things with and being shot at with one by someone who was a really talented marksman would be a terrifying experience that could very well end in serious injury or even death. However, you would be insane to choose a .22 over an M-16. The M-16 has vastly superior "stopping-power", a better magazine capacity than a target rifle (the one I learned to shoot on was single shot), is better suited to the rigors of campaign, etc. The M-16 is a much better choice for a solider or Marine who has all manner of concerns beyond simply hitting his opponent.

Likewise, a Norman arming sword is not going to be as quick as a foil. A foil is probably better at hitting things than an arming sword and if you didn't know much about sword fighting but you were aware that stabbing your opponent was generally a positive, you could be led to believe that a sharpened foil would outclass the slower arming sword. Certainly having a talented foilist try to stab you with a sharpened foil would be a terrifying experience that could easily end in serious injury or death (occasionally this happens even with blunted foils). However, a foil has less "stopping power" than an arming sword, it is more likely to get stuck, it is more likely to break, etc. The arming sword is a much better choice for a solider who has all manner of concerns beyond simply hitting his opponent.

Spiryt

2013-06-24, 04:23 AM

Thiel

2013-06-24, 04:31 AM

a better magazine capacity than a target rifle (the one I learned to shoot on was single shot)
I realise this is a nit I'm picking at here, but there's more than a few companies who makes ridiculously high capacity magazines for .22LR.
Like Tactical Vantage's 70 round drum (http://www.tacticalvantage.com/en/marlin-795-magazines/865-mar-a4-marlin-795-22lr-70rd-smoke-polymer-drum-magazine.html) or American Tactical Imports' 110 round drum. (http://www.kygunco.com/american-tactical-imports-gsg-522-110rd-drum-magazine-49186) Heck, I've even seen pictures of a 200 round casket magazine, though the link escapes me at the moment.
Exactly why you'd need so many rounds remains a mystery to me and judging by the manufacturer's rather fuzzy sales pitches they don't seem to know either.

Brother Oni

2013-06-24, 06:00 AM

It is as heavy as I think; I don't think it weighs 250lbs or anything like that. I also know you can do all kinds of stuff in platemail, including some quite startling acrobatics. But it gets tiring to fight in, certainly much more tiring than no armour *.

No problem, just checking. Some people tend to have over-inflated ideas of how much armour weighs.

Heat exhaustion is certainly a major issue in hotter climes with armour though. That much padding is very insulating and with the large surface area of plate armour absorbing all the sun's heat, you'd probably get a very good idea of what a turkey has to look forward to at Christmas.

A sidenote:
Not that he is a real authoroty, but Jackie Chan has, when asked, said that the most deadly marial art in history was 19th century european fencing, at least against an non-armored opponent.

He actually demonstrates this in Shanghai Knights, where his character, Kung Fu master as he is, gets his behind handed to him over and over, with extreme ease, by the Big Bad who is an English aristrcrat and uses this tecnique.

A couple of caveats to that - Jackie Chan although very technically competent, isn't a competition fighter, particularly with weapons. I'd also be somewhat wary of using a film as a source, particularly when the villain is a nod towards Basil Rathbone, who was a very good fencer and often appeared to be holding back in duelling scenes to let the hero win as per the script.

I'd agree that in the unarmoured opponent category, fencing with its emphasis on speed and precision would probably be optimal. However I'd think that opening up the weapon variety would make things more complicated, (spear especially (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_IIHlFOEiI)).

As an aside, while digging up some information, I found a story dating from 1625 about an English sailor called Richard Peeke (http://quarterstaff.wordpress.com/2010/04/21/richard-peeke-a-boo/) who armed with a quarterstaff, apparently fought three Spaniards armed with rapier and dagger, killing one and disarming the other two, who are forced to run away.

Even George Silver claims that a man with a quarterstaff is worth two armed with rapiers, so that's something Vitruviansquid can use against his friends - a big stick is better than a rapier. :smalltongue:

Galloglaich

2013-06-24, 07:45 AM

But (and I know this is a tough concept for gamers) rapier has almost nothing to do with modern sport fencing.

Even real smallsword (which is what the foil and epee are based on) is only marginally related to modern sport fencing; Classical fencing which uses the smallsword, is essentially HEMA, it's unrestricted, dirty fighting where you can grab the blade, grapple, move all around, use inanimate objects like cloaks, candlesticks, chairs and etc.

The idea that a real weapon is so much slower than a smallsword or even a foil is also kind of absurd. To get a flick onto someone, literally a slap with a wire, a foil is fast yes, but to actually stab someone to where it would have any real effect, it's not any faster than a rapier or a lot of longswords or sideswords. If you look at actual fencing matches, they are real fast with blows that can actually kill.

The main advantage of most 'real' weapons over a foil or a smallsword is that they are longer and so can more easily hit first; and sturdy enough to strike another blade without snapping. Dealing with armor is a completely separate issue; longswords, rapiers, sideswords, arming swords, "Viking Swords" and so on were all used in a civilian context as well as military, and many were designed strictly for the civilian duel (and thus made lighter and faster for that purpose)

The majority of the surviving texts on German longsword fencing for example are all blossfechten, which is unarmored fencing, only a relatively small proportion of the surviving manuals deal with fencing in armor.

G

warty goblin

2013-06-24, 08:16 AM

For example, ancient Hoplites outside of Sparta were just rich citizens who could afford the equipment needed, as "normal" civillians I imagine they had little more than the most basic training of "pointy end goes into the enemy". So when did the hardcore training regiments we know today come into being? The ones where soldiers are drilled to their maximum extent to keep sure they stay in tiptop shape and have the morale a "real" soldier needs?

It's interesting to note that contemporary sources don't actually rate Spartites as the be-all end-all of fighting men that popular culture do today. Theban/Boeotian hoplites were generally considered every bit as effective of soldiers. This they demonstrated at Leuctra, when a Theban force, spearheaded by the Sacred Band*, broke a Spartan phalanx.

*150 pairs of warrior-lovers trained to fight as an elite unit. Insert your 300 joke here.

Avilan the Grey

2013-06-24, 09:00 AM

A couple of caveats to that - Jackie Chan although very technically competent, isn't a competition fighter, particularly with weapons. I'd also be somewhat wary of using a film as a source, particularly when the villain is a nod towards Basil Rathbone, who was a very good fencer and often appeared to be holding back in duelling scenes to let the hero win as per the script.

That was exactly what I pointed out; he is no real authoroty on the subject, but it was an interesting tidbit. It was his genuine estimate though.

It's interesting to note that contemporary sources don't actually rate Spartites as the be-all end-all of fighting men that popular culture do today. Theban/Boeotian hoplites were generally considered every bit as effective of soldiers. This they demonstrated at Leuctra, when a Theban force, spearheaded by the Sacred Band*, broke a Spartan phalanx.

*150 pairs of warrior-lovers trained to fight as an elite unit. Insert your 300 joke here.

I think what gave Spartans their reputation was not their SKILL, but their rumored refusal to ever surrender. From the sources I have seen the status of the Spartans in their enemies eyes was lowered very quickly once they started surrendering. When the Athenians could show a number of Spartan prisoners that surrendered willingly, their reputation basically went *pop* like a baloon.

Mike_G

2013-06-24, 12:15 PM

Incanur

2013-06-24, 12:23 PM

Dienekes

2013-06-24, 12:44 PM

It's interesting to note that contemporary sources don't actually rate Spartites as the be-all end-all of fighting men that popular culture do today. Theban/Boeotian hoplites were generally considered every bit as effective of soldiers. This they demonstrated at Leuctra, when a Theban force, spearheaded by the Sacred Band*, broke a Spartan phalanx.

*150 pairs of warrior-lovers trained to fight as an elite unit. Insert your 300 joke here.

Sort of. For awhile contemporary sources did consider them the best soldiers of Greece. Some even go so far as to call them the best in the world (in reference to a specific group of Spartan mercenaries who fought through Persia back to Greece anyway). But their time in the sun was limited to say the least. By the time of Leuctra the Sparitiate population had already dwindled beyond recognition, they had lost a large portion of their slave population that allowed their society to function, the agoge had been changed to make up for it, and the peltast was starting to be recognized for its tactical uses in other Greek poleis, and so forth. What really got rid of the Spartans was the cultures inability to change socially or tactically.

Leuctra was a defeat of the Spartans partially because the Sacred Band were amazing warriors in their own right. But also because of the weighted, curved phalanx that the Spartans had no idea how to deal with. Their stagnation was their undoing.

warty goblin

2013-06-24, 12:56 PM

Sort of. For awhile contemporary sources did consider them the best soldiers of Greece. Some even go so far as to call them the best in the world (in reference to a specific group of Spartan mercenaries who fought through Persia back to Greece anyway). But their time in the sun was limited to say the least. By the time of Leuctra the Sparitiate population had already dwindled beyond recognition, they had lost a large portion of their slave population that allowed their society to function, the agoge had been changed to make up for it, and the peltast was starting to be recognized for its tactical uses in other Greek poleis, and so forth. What really got rid of the Spartans was the cultures inability to change socially or tactically.

Leuctra was a defeat of the Spartans partially because the Sacred Band were amazing warriors in their own right. But also because of the weighted, curved phalanx that the Spartans had no idea how to deal with. Their stagnation was their undoing.

All valid points. I seem to recall Thucydides claiming parity between Boeotian and Spartan soldiers even at the beginning of the Peloponnesian Wars. It's been for ever and a half since I read Thucydides though, so I could easily be misremembering.

Dienekes

2013-06-24, 01:04 PM

All valid points. I seem to recall Thucydides claiming parity between Boeotian and Spartan soldiers even at the beginning of the Peloponnesian Wars. It's been for ever and a half since I read Thucydides though, so I could easily be misremembering.

He probably did, which unfortunately brings up another problem with piecing together how the Spartans were perceived. Spartans didn't write anything down (apparently their motto was important things should be memorized anyway) so that about all the information we get from them is by their enemies. Thucydides was a disgraced Athenian general who blamed the barbaric Spartans for ruining Athens. And he may be right about all of that, he does have some points definitely (though I personally point to the fact that Athens was the one who started the hostilities). But in any case he was a biased source who liked to paint the Spartans poorly (again though, he probably had a lot to go on in that regard. Spartans were hardly saints).

Bug-a-Boo

2013-06-24, 01:37 PM

Hey guys, I read the discussion about rapiers and I thought I'd add something to it:

One reason the rapier isn't the end-all-be-all of swords is that thin piercing points aren't the best weapons to quickly end a fight with. The thrust is a powerful move that is quick to perform, hard to block and doesn't require much force to penetrate. A deep thrust is hard to treat and will probably kill a man in time the way a cut to the hand wouldn't. All good reason's that it got popular enough that a weapon was developed around maximizing it.

However, as dangerous as a thrust can be to deeper organs, it can easily miss vital areas or fail to cause enough shock to stop an opponent. This isn't a big problem in a street fight or a mugging - no one there wants to throw away his life in the end - but in a battle, you want your target to stop fighting Right Now and not after he's buried his axe in your face. A weapon that kills is great, but a weapon that incapacitates quickly is much more valuable against a determined foe.

The rapier just isn't very good for that. Modern sport rules are only about the touch of the blade. But in real combat, wounds count. A rapier fighter may be dextrous and precise enough to avoid an armoured foe's armour and stab into the joints... but if that stab doesn't have any appreciable effect, the rapier man will be in big trouble. And from what I hear from stage actors and the like who have been pierced through (or who have pierced someone through) by accident, such stab wounds can have surprisingly little effect on a person.

I also have an interesting article saved for people who're interested:
http://www.classicalfencing.com/articles/bloody.php
http://www.classicalfencing.com/articles/kill2.php

warty goblin

2013-06-24, 02:06 PM

He probably did, which unfortunately brings up another problem with piecing together how the Spartans were perceived. Spartans didn't write anything down (apparently their motto was important things should be memorized anyway) so that about all the information we get from them is by their enemies. Thucydides was a disgraced Athenian general who blamed the barbaric Spartans for ruining Athens. And he may be right about all of that, he does have some points definitely (though I personally point to the fact that Athens was the one who started the hostilities). But in any case he was a biased source who liked to paint the Spartans poorly (again though, he probably had a lot to go on in that regard. Spartans were hardly saints).

Your knowledge of the historiography of the period is clearly vastly in excess of mine, so I happily defer to your judgement. I hope you agree with my original assessment - possible source idiosyncrasies aside - that the modern 300 fueled dude-bro evaluation of the Spartans is somewhat out of line with both their historical rep and performance however, which was really the only point I wanted to get across.

TheYell

2013-06-24, 02:45 PM

Short and sweet-- how lethal is, say, a hundred grams of explosive at close quarters?

Long and (hopefully not) sour: For a freeform Stargate RP, I'm considering creating a very small, flying drone that can fly near enemies under active camoflauge and detonate near their heads. It uses naquadah (substance that basically multiplies explosive effect, a 1 megaton nukes becomes a 1.2 gigaton nuke, etc) wrapped in advanced chemical explosives for its payload.

Well, 1 gm of TNT has 4484 Joules of energy and blows out at 6,900 meters per second. If that helps.

With naquadah 1gm of explosive would go off like 1.2kg so I don't think there's any question of somebody being 0.5 meter beyond the blast radius.

A stick of dynamite is 186 grams. So if you have .155 grams of dynamite wrapped in naquadah that's going off like a stick of dynamite. If your drone were a seed pod that blew 20 such matchhead charges over an area 10m in radius, that's like having 20 sticks of dynamite go off around you - the blast effect of simultaneous overlapping explosions is cumulative. That's why the military built the Rockeye bomb cluster.

if you don't want area effect but a sniper weapon, put the charge in the tail and have it be a kinetic weapon - launching itself into the target at 6900 m/second.

Galloglaich

2013-06-24, 04:27 PM

The smallsword has Donald McBane (http://www.aboutscotland.com/theroyalscots/histmcbane.html) in its favor, which really counts for a quite a bit. McBane claimed that smallsword wielder with coat wrapped around their arm and wet napkin (http://www.swordforum.com/forums/showthread.php?89944-McBane-s-wet-napkin) under their hat has odds over the opponent with broadsword and target. He also asserted that thrusts kill while you can take forty cuts (http://www.swordforum.com/forums/showthread.php?55232-Taking-40-cuts-amp-the-Genetically-Superior-Scotsman) and still fight.

Well, that depends on the sword which cuts you. I certainly wouldn't want to second-guess McBane, who is justifiably famous and without a doubt both a pragmatic man of action and an expert fencer - but by his day, the quality of swords had declined sharply (pun intended), these were not very often hand made works of craftsmanship of the Medieval era, but more often (particularly in the English army) mass-produced, crude blades made for the cannon fodder. A well made, sharp sword, or for that matter, a kurkri knife, can deliver cuts you won't easily recover from, whereas a smallsword (particularly the stronger type of smallsword known as a Colishmarde or Konigsmark) can be pretty effective without being particularly well made or even sharp.

McBane beat various men with broadswords himself, so he can't be easily dismissed. On the other hand, many in the period - including McBane at times - fought without the intent to kill for social and cultural reasons. (Killing people tends to really piss off their relations and/or the government.)

This was definitely the case in earlier eras as well: people don't realize that even in informal duels such as McBane so often indulged in, it was common to still fight according to some rather vague rules of 'fair play' and / or, with moderate force to prevent actually killing one's opponent unless they had already escalated the fight past all moderation, for exactly the reasons you note.

Additionally, heavy garments would have protected against lighter cuts, especially to the body.

However, on the whole I think McBane was an extremely skilled swordsman but I suspect other masters (George Silver, Zach Wylde, etc) correctly attribute odds to the cutting sword over the smallsword.

In Silver's day he was really talking about rapiers and sideswords, smallswords came later.

G

Galloglaich

2013-06-24, 04:31 PM

The rapier just isn't very good for that. Modern sport rules are only about the touch of the blade. But in real combat, wounds count. A rapier fighter may be dextrous and precise enough to avoid an armoured foe's armour and stab into the joints...

Keep in mind, a rapier and a foil and a smallsword are all different weapons.

Most rapiers are long, heavy, and can be quite formidable. There were battlefield versions and civilian dueling versions. Some almost exclusively for thrusting some which were really cut / thrust weapons.

A smallsword is more like a fencing foil but, it's stiff rather than flexible.

G

Mike_G

2013-06-24, 05:29 PM

How technically difficult would it be to run your weapon through someone's eye or throat? What if they were say attacking you with a longsword and modestly competent but inferior to yourself in both skills and reflexes?

Eyes are small, and people naturally flinch when things come at their eyes, so an eye would be a very very difficult target. A throat would be relatively easy.

Now a very god sport fencer fighting a guy with, say, an arming sword, could probably land a thrust fairly easily. The lunge has a lot of range and is deceptively fast. Aim at his face, then when he moves to parry, disengage around the parry and put the point in his chest or his throat.

But, fencing attacks are fast because they can be. The rules protect you. In a bout, the action is over when I hit my enemy. Unless he has right of way, i don't need to worry if he hits me back. I get a point, and prove my style is better.

In real,life, I could probably put my point in you, but I wouldn't bet my life that you wouldn't live long enough to split my melon with that arming sword you just raised in an attempt to parry.

Fencing is a sport. Once I land an attack with right of way, the action is over. But a real smallsword isn't a disintegrator. A narrow blade in your chest or even you throat won't necessarily stop your counter attack. Plenty of smallsword duels ended in both parties being badly, maybe even fatally hurt.

Now, there are techniques to control the opponent's blade while you attack, so you don't get hit with the counter. Beats, binds, and so on. But these are designed to work against another smallsword. I wouldn't necessarily expect them to work on a different weapon. And a combination of weapons, like sword and shield, or sword and buckler or sword and dagger would allow you to attack and defend at the same time, which is hard with a single sword. Anything with reach present more challenges to the fencer. It's not impossible to defeat a spear or halberd or longsword, but it's not what the fencing techniques were designed for, and they don't work out of the box that way.

So, no, I would not bring a smallsword to a fight against most other weapons. And I'm pretty darn good with a foil.

But I'd advise any sword fighter to study fencing for the control and speed it gives you. Any new technique is one more arrow in your quiver, so don't sneer at other styles. Learn from them.

Incanur

2013-06-24, 06:33 PM

This was definitely the case in earlier eras as well: people don't realize that even in informal duels such as McBane so often indulged in, it was common to still fight according to some rather vague rules of 'fair play' and / or, with moderate force to prevent actually killing one's opponent unless they had already escalated the fight past all moderation, for exactly the reasons you note.

Yes, though duels in Silver's day often ended in death or maiming for one or both parties. While Silver strongly counseled against dueling over trifles or being the aggressor, I don't recall anything in his manuals about fair play or restraint for reasons of honor or morality once in a fight. Silver advises powerful cuts to the head and thrust to the body as a matter of course. A bit earlier in the German context, however, Joachim Meyer wrote that when fighting with the longsword Germans didn't thrust against one another; thrusts were reserved for the common enemy in the field.

In Silver's day he was really talking about rapiers and sideswords, smallswords came later.

Sure, but we can confidently speculate that Silver would have given the odds to his short sword over the smallsword. He considered cutting ability and length key; under Silver's hierarchy of weapons, the smallsword is too short (usually 28-31 inches of blade vs. Silver's ideal of approximately 37) and can't cut. I suspect he'd rank the smallsword even lower than the rapiers he so despised. Amusing enough, Joseph Swetnam, who thought the long rapier too strong for the backsword/broadsword/Silver's short sword, likely would have scorned the smallsword as well as because it's just too short. He might have used one for a dagger in pinch. (Swetnam recommended a four-foot rapier and two-foot dagger.)

Mr Beer

2013-06-24, 07:11 PM

No problem, just checking. Some people tend to have over-inflated ideas of how much armour weighs.

Yes indeed. Until quite recently a lot of fiction on the subject gives the impression that plate armour was like wearing a uranium straight jacket.

fusilier

2013-06-24, 09:54 PM

I think what gave Spartans their reputation was not their SKILL, but their rumored refusal to ever surrender. From the sources I have seen the status of the Spartans in their enemies eyes was lowered very quickly once they started surrendering. When the Athenians could show a number of Spartan prisoners that surrendered willingly, their reputation basically went *pop* like a baloon.

My understanding was that Spartans were known for the martial skill, but in reality they retreated quite often. Surrender may have been rare and very embarrassing, but if they felt the odds were against them (or even just had some unlucky omens) they would give up the entire campaign. This issue became more pronounced as time went on, as the number of full Spartans declined (mostly due to loopholes in the laws) and they didn't want to risk loosing irreplaceable men. The Battle of Thermopoly, where a large number all fought to the death, was an exception not the rule. The old "come back with your shield or on it" phrase not withstanding -- which was actually somewhat ironic, as they apparently had straps to sling the shield over their back, so they could run away without dropping it. ;-) [Just to add some more understanding for those who don't know: Spartans also used their shields as stretchers for the dead -- so the phrase admonished someone to return with honor, or dead.]

I think there was a famous event during the Peloponnesian War, where a group of Spartans were trapped on a besieged island and they eventually surrendered -- which was considered a huge deal. I think they were put in cages and shown off in Athens?

After their victory of the Peloponnesian War, there was one Spartan king that like to beat up on Thebes a lot. As a result the Thebans gradually became better at fighting, and *eventually* hit upon a phalanx strategy that could defeat the Spartans: put veterans soldiers on one flank to hold the line (the left I think), and simply pile up the number of ranks on the other flank to aid in a break through. They used this technique successfully *twice* -- the Spartans being unable to learn from their mistakes, and the losses they were taking to the Spartan citizen population had a detrimental effect on the city as a whole.

Galloglaich

2013-06-24, 09:58 PM

Yes, though duels in Silver's day often ended in death or maiming for one or both parties. While Silver strongly counseled against dueling over trifles or being the aggressor, I don't recall anything in his manuals about fair play or restraint for reasons of honor or morality once in a fight. Silver advises powerful cuts to the head and thrust to the body as a matter of course. A bit earlier in the German context, however, Joachim Meyer wrote that when fighting with the longsword Germans didn't thrust against one another; thrusts were reserved for the common enemy in the field.

Meyer isn't the only one by a long shot, and even Silver was complaining about how the new Italian style duels were too lethal. But in the German context it was different because you wouldn't automatically get in bad trouble for dueling, even if you killed the other guy, so long as you played 'by the rules', which meant among other things not stabbing and even striking with the flat, at least initially so long as the fight had not yet escalated.

There are a bunch of court records on this from the German towns, which get into a lot of detail (testimony about the fights from multiple witnesses, as well as the judgement and ultimate ruling). Someone even did some interesting analysis of remittance letters in a journal that came out back in May looking at the results of injuries in duels in Flanders and France. As you noted, instant death was apparently rare. Only severe injuries to the head or neck were ever instantly lethal (in the sample of I think about 700 remittance letters), even though most injuries to the chest or side (I think over 60%) were eventually lethal. One of the other interesting statistics to emerge was that daggers were pretty effective compared to other weapons, though the Halberd looks like the most lethal (though this was from a much smaller, statistically irrelevant sample of about 80 remittance letters where each person involved in the fight had a different weapon).

Sure, but we can confidently speculate that Silver would have given the odds to his short sword over the smallsword. He considered cutting ability and length key; under Silver's hierarchy of weapons, the smallsword is too short (usually 28-31 inches of blade vs. Silver's ideal of approximately 37) and can't cut. I suspect he'd rank the smallsword even lower than the rapiers he so despised. Amusing enough, Joseph Swetnam, who thought the long rapier too strong for the backsword/broadsword/Silver's short sword, likely would have scorned the smallsword as well as because it's just too short. He might have used one for a dagger in pinch. (Swetnam recommended a four-foot rapier and two-foot dagger.)

Silver preferred the cutting weapon, no doubt, but the smallsword has it's other advantages, though much shorter than a rapier, it is very fast and as I think someone mentioned upthread, can attack effectively at almost any range. Smallswords too were also used in battle, keep in mind, usually issued to officers (along with other things like those wretched spadroons...)

But then by the 18th 19th Century... swords just weren't the same any more in the West for the most part.

G

Admiral Squish

2013-06-24, 11:17 PM

So, I have a number of questions about leather armor. Or, rather, unusual leather armors.

Does increasing the thickness of the leather significantly increase the protection it offers, or is thicker leather only marginally better? And can extremely thick hides be treated properly to make armor? For example, an elephant's hide is an inch thick in places, and a walrus' can be four inches thick, if you use the right parts. Can scaled hides be treated for armor, or do the scales fall out?

Storm Bringer

2013-06-25, 12:02 AM

The old "come back with your shield or on it" phrase not withstanding -- which was actually somewhat ironic, as they apparently had straps to sling the shield over their back, so they could run away without dropping it. ;-) [Just to add some more understanding for those who don't know: Spartans also used their shields as stretchers for the dead -- so the phrase admonished someone to return with honor, or dead.]

my understanding was that while a man can run carrying the shield, fleeing troops would normally ditch their shields so that they could outrun their pursuers, in the same way gunpowder era troops have been known to drop their firearms and run.

Yora

2013-06-25, 02:57 AM

Yes indeed. Until quite recently a lot of fiction on the subject gives the impression that plate armour was like wearing a uranium straight jacket.

There is also a difference in how the weight is carried on the body. From what I've heard, wearing armor is a lot less uncomfortable than carrying it in a large bag on your back. If some of the weight is on your arms and on your legs, it puts a small strain on every part of your body, instead of one big one on a relatively small part.

Brother Oni

2013-06-25, 03:39 AM

Does increasing the thickness of the leather significantly increase the protection it offers, or is thicker leather only marginally better? And can extremely thick hides be treated properly to make armor? For example, an elephant's hide is an inch thick in places, and a walrus' can be four inches thick, if you use the right parts. Can scaled hides be treated for armor, or do the scales fall out?

Assuming the hide is uniformly thick and retains the same density throughout, then yes, thicker is better. That said, there's going to be a limit to thickness where the weight and restriction to mobility is going to out-weigh the protection it offers.

There's some examples of Native American Tlingit armour made out of walrus skin, reinforced with metal coins:
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-6Tz5CZssBrg/Tz4WHQUHORI/AAAAAAAAEfo/JBFCZhEdYXc/s1600/Armor.jpg

I know that alligator scale purses and other accessories made out of reptile scale (not skin) are semi-popular, which indicates that properly treated scales don't fall out.

Bear in mind that due to the nature of leather armour, it can't be repaired easily once the integrity has been compromised.

There is also a difference in how the weight is carried on the body. From what I've heard, wearing armor is a lot less uncomfortable than carrying it in a large bag on your back. If some of the weight is on your arms and on your legs, it puts a small strain on every part of your body, instead of one big one on a relatively small part.

I can confirm this in the case of mail. One trick I was taught, is to wear a belt (over the mail) and get the mail to hang slightly over the belt.
Doing this significantly reduces the strain on your shoulders plus holds the mail to your body, otherwise it's going to hang straight down like a metal robe, resulting in mobility/agility issues (at least with my mail shirt and body shape it does).

Avilan the Grey

2013-06-25, 04:37 AM

I can confirm this in the case of mail. One trick I was taught, is to wear a belt (over the mail) and get the mail to hang slightly over the belt.
Doing this significantly reduces the strain on your shoulders plus holds the mail to your body, otherwise it's going to hang straight down like a metal robe, resulting in mobility/agility issues (at least with my mail shirt and body shape it does).

Exactly; full chainmail is far heavier to wear than a full plate armor, because you get all the weight on your shoulders (and hips, as you describe) while a plate has every body part carry the weight of that part of the armor.

warty goblin

2013-06-25, 08:09 AM

Exactly; full chainmail is far heavier to wear than a full plate armor, because you get all the weight on your shoulders (and hips, as you describe) while a plate has every body part carry the weight of that part of the armor.

The part of this equation that I never see mentioned is that having weight at the ends of your limbs makes for more work than having it over your core. I have a pair of heavy leather gloves backed with mail. They weigh maybe a pound each, and I have pretty much never worn them for an extended period of time, because they add so much drag to my arms*. My 24lbs hauberk is just fine; I can fight in it, hike in it, whatever.

*Also because I'm afraid I'd accidentally clonk somebody with them sparring, and break their face. They're sort of like wearing hammers.

Galloglaich

2013-06-25, 10:40 AM

This same kind of thing may be the reason why infantry so rarely wore leg armor, especially on their lower legs.

G

Admiral Squish

2013-06-25, 02:14 PM

Galloglaich

2013-06-25, 02:50 PM

The point is regarding leather, is if you make it that thick it's actually a lot heavier and much bulkier than more effective steel or even iron armor is. If you end up with leather half an inch (12-13mm) thick or more vs. 1.5 mm thick steel armor, I believe the steel armor is lighter AND considerably more effective. Maybe somebody can do the math for us on the weight. As far as I can tell, leather armor was just about never used in Medieval Europe, except as stiffeners under mail armor and possibly in certain cases as tournament armor. Textile was the poor mans armor, not leather, despite what 3 decades of RPG's tell us.

Elephant and Rhino hide armor was however used in India, and buffalo hide was used as lamellar armor in Central Asia and in China and Japan at various times, though it was considered secondary quality armor I believe for the most part.

I think lamellar is the only way to make leather armor somewhat functional

G

Galloglaich

2013-06-25, 02:59 PM

So according to this

http://www.chapelsteel.com/weight-steel-plate.html

12" x 12" of 1.5mm steel plate (0.059 inches) = 2.04 lbs

I couldn't find anything to compute the weight of 12" x 12" x 1/2" leather but think it would be more than that

I don't think individual leather sheets even get that thick though of course, (since cow hide isn't that thick) so to get a 1/2" thick hide, let alone 4", you'd have to combine multiple leather sheets and bolt or rivet them together or something.

G

Brother Oni

2013-06-25, 03:18 PM

Would the chemicals/heat required to treat leather for armor even work on leather that's four inches thick? Would it be able to penetrate all through? Does it even have to, or is the surface all it needs?

I've got no experience in treating leather for armour, so this is all speculation.

Looking up some sources, there's no surviving record of how leather was treated for armour, so there's only modern reconstructions and guesses of how cuir boulli (boiled leather) was made: link (http://www.jeanturner.co.uk/static-content/tutorials/CuirBouilliTechnique.pdf).

You need a fairly thick piece of leather to offer decent protection though: link (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDvTXprbAO4).
Those are 92-110lb longbows at 15 yrds with bodkin points penetrating 6mm leather with ease. Even later on when they double the leather (so 12mm or 1/2"), some arrows still penetrate.

In comparison, anything greater than 1.5mm steel plate was virtually arrow proof.

12" x 12" of 1.5mm steel plate (0.059 inches) = 2.04 lbs

I couldn't find anything to compute the weight of 12" x 12" x 1/2" leather but think it would be more than that.

Unless I'm reading this chart wrong (http://www.tandyleatherfactory.com/en-usd/home/infoandservices/leatherguide/leatherguide.aspx), 1/2" thick leather would weigh 32oz per square foot or 2lbs exactly.

That's untreated leather though - it could gain weight significantly once you've treated it, especially since most guesses of cuir boulli manufacture involves boiling in water.

warty goblin

2013-06-25, 03:32 PM

Not purely leather, but leather caps stitched with rows of boar tusks were apparently quite popular in Mycenaean Greece.

Leather was also used as shields in bronze age Europe. The Conbrin shield from Ireland is the only extant example, but period artwork from the Aegean is rife with leather shields, and most of those used in the Iliad are described as multiple layers of leather fronted with sheet bronze. IIRC sheet bronze shields with what could have been leather backings have been discovered.

So far as I'm aware, there is no evidence for leather body armor during this period; all evidence points to solid, lamellar or scales armor of bronze and (much later) iron. Note that the scale armor may have been stitched to a leather backing, though I rather suspect cloth would have been a better choice in terms of comfort and durability. The Greeks, possibly starting in Mycenaean times, also seem to have used multiple layers of linen glued together for body armor.

I suspect one challenge with leather armor is that leather doesn't like being moist. Put on any sort of armor and step out into the summer sun, and you'll sweat like a waterfall. It's a poor sort of defense that degrades significantly just from wearing it.

Dienekes

2013-06-25, 04:50 PM

Your knowledge of the historiography of the period is clearly vastly in excess of mine, so I happily defer to your judgement. I hope you agree with my original assessment - possible source idiosyncrasies aside - that the modern 300 fueled dude-bro evaluation of the Spartans is somewhat out of line with both their historical rep and performance however, which was really the only point I wanted to get across.

Oh agreed, and sorry if I came on a bit strong there. Sparta is basically my pet historical culture that I studied religiously years ago. And when questions about her come up I tend to get overexcited. I do the same thing when Machiavelli gets mentioned.

My understanding was that Spartans were known for the martial skill, but in reality they retreated quite often. Surrender may have been rare and very embarrassing, but if they felt the odds were against them (or even just had some unlucky omens) they would give up the entire campaign. This issue became more pronounced as time went on, as the number of full Spartans declined (mostly due to loopholes in the laws) and they didn't want to risk loosing irreplaceable men. The Battle of Thermopoly, where a large number all fought to the death, was an exception not the rule. The old "come back with your shield or on it" phrase not withstanding -- which was actually somewhat ironic, as they apparently had straps to sling the shield over their back, so they could run away without dropping it. ;-) [Just to add some more understanding for those who don't know: Spartans also used their shields as stretchers for the dead -- so the phrase admonished someone to return with honor, or dead.]

I think there was a famous event during the Peloponnesian War, where a group of Spartans were trapped on a besieged island and they eventually surrendered -- which was considered a huge deal. I think they were put in cages and shown off in Athens?

After their victory of the Peloponnesian War, there was one Spartan king that like to beat up on Thebes a lot. As a result the Thebans gradually became better at fighting, and *eventually* hit upon a phalanx strategy that could defeat the Spartans: put veterans soldiers on one flank to hold the line (the left I think), and simply pile up the number of ranks on the other flank to aid in a break through. They used this technique successfully *twice* -- the Spartans being unable to learn from their mistakes, and the losses they were taking to the Spartan citizen population had a detrimental effect on the city as a whole.

my understanding was that while a man can run carrying the shield, fleeing troops would normally ditch their shields so that they could outrun their pursuers, in the same way gunpowder era troops have been known to drop their firearms and run.

Both correct. Spartans were supposed (though it tended to happen more often as time went on), to never surrender and never be routed. However living to fight another day was a fine thing to do and encouraged. Only an idiot would fight to the death in a valley when they could win if they just made it over to that hill a mile away.

It's amusing to me when Thermopylae gets brought up so often yet no one looks at how the Spartans acted in the next major battle, Plataea, is far more in accordance with what they were trained to do. The Sparitiate moved out first showing their strength, overextended and were beaten back by the Persian forces, so they moved along the hilltops were the cavalry couldn't really chase after them well to regroup with the rest of the army and helped lead the way for the victory. Mind you that is the quicknotes version of the battle. But to me it shows both the strength and weakness of the Spartan military force, the idiotic arrogance in their own strength that caused them to push ahead of their army, yet the discipline that allowed them to make their way back, and the tactical savvy to figure out how best to actually do that.

The Peloponnesian surrender story is true (Battle of Sphacteria), and it was a huge deal at the time. I think it was the first time ever non-disgraced Sparitiates surrendered after they remodeled their society after the laws of Lycurgus. And while it did do a lot to lower the opinion of Spartan invincibility, it is worth mentioning that technically Spartas highest point of hegemonic dominance occurred after that debacle. Though it only lasted 33 years. Amusingly, one of the major points of conflict between Thebes and Sparta that lead to them coming to arms was that Thebes wanted to wipe Athens off the map after the Peloponnesian War and Sparta wanted to keep them alive in honor of their role during the Persian Wars. And of course also because the Spartans were getting their hands in everyone's business and were much worse at it than the Athenians were.

Admiral Squish

2013-06-25, 05:57 PM

warty goblin

2013-06-25, 06:41 PM

Okay, to clarify why I'm so interested in leather. I'm working on an alt-history america setting where the takeover isn't quite so sweeping. So, while european metal armor is available, it's very expensive, and the natives generally don't have the infrastructure (mines, forges) to repair it or make more. So, in a lot of cases, they instead use traditional armor, made of materials they CAN access. Leather, of various sorts, wood, bone, textiles.

So, yes, I know metal's a much superior material for armor than leather, but leather is better than nothing.

As for how you'd get 4" thick leather, as I mentioned earlier, walrus hide can be 4 inches thick in places. No bolting or fastening required, it just comes like that. I was considering the plausibility of armor made from the thickest parts of walrus hide. There might be magic involved to fuse the slabs together, so a lucky strike on the bindings doesn't make the whole suit fall apart.

Speaking for myself, I wouldn't want to fight in four inch thick anything. Even if the weight wasn't crazy high, my mobility would be shot pretty much anywhere I strapped the stuff to myself.

And given the paucity of evidence for the use or popularity of leather harness, it's actually arguable that nothing is better. The slight increase in survivability may just not be enough to offset the loss of mobility and endurance - to say nothing of expense - of the stuff. Skin may grow on animals, but the skins one wants aren't exactly easy to come by.

Many soldiers in antiquity for instance seem to have fought quite well without much in the way of armor. Hannibal's crack North African troops seem to have depended almost entirely on large shields, and the Celts were unholy terrors for a long time despite frequently going into battle without armor - and in some cases pants. Even the legionnaires of the early Roman republic quite frequently had nothing but a bronze or iron plate to protect the upper chest.

Personally I'd come up with a method for the natives to get decent textile armor, maybe reinforced with some higher density bone over critical areas. I'd imagine you could make a fairly good helmet using walrus tusks for instance. But bottom line is that you're going to have to add something to one side, or take it from the other. Or give North America all the really fun diseases, so a large proportion of European settlers develop pustules, keel over and die upon arrival.

Brother Oni

2013-06-25, 06:54 PM

Okay, to clarify why I'm so interested in leather. I'm working on an alt-history america setting where the takeover isn't quite so sweeping. So, while european metal armor is available, it's very expensive, and the natives generally don't have the infrastructure (mines, forges) to repair it or make more. So, in a lot of cases, they instead use traditional armor, made of materials they CAN access. Leather, of various sorts, wood, bone, textiles.

So the Europeans invade the Americas, the native civilisations aren't crippled by smallpox first, plus metal armour is rare all round?

So, yes, I know metal's a much superior material for armor than leather, but leather is better than nothing.

Cloth armour would be superior in my opinion (until it gets wet) and has the added advantage of being historically accurate.

As for how you'd get 4" thick leather, as I mentioned earlier, walrus hide can be 4 inches thick in places. No bolting or fastening required, it just comes like that. I was considering the plausibility of armor made from the thickest parts of walrus hide. There might be magic involved to fuse the slabs together, so a lucky strike on the bindings doesn't make the whole suit fall apart.

You don't need to use exotic walrus hide to get 4" thick leather armour, just simply get eight layers of 1/2" cow hide and glue them together.

Of course, this very heavy and cumbersome - using this estimation of body surface area distribution (http://origin-ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S0305417909004100-gr6.jpg) and the average value of 1.9 m2 for total body surface area (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_surface_area), we get a rough value of 3.1 square feet for the front of the torso.

This means a 4" thick leather breastplate alone is 49lbs, which is simply ridiculous.

I'm also somewhat surprised that you think striking the bindings is a potential problem in combat - armour is usually designed so that the bindings are extremely difficult to damage. In the freak chance that they are, your armour integrity is typically so badly damaged it's no longer protecting anything anyway, or you're too busy bleeding to death.

Or give North America all the really fun diseases, so a large proportion of European settlers develop pustules, keel over and die upon arrival.

I've always wondered why Cortez and his mates never apparently caught something while they were running about in South America, especially with all the exotic disease the tropics tend to have.

My suggestion: mega fauna are still alive in the North Americas and the natives are experts in staying the hell away from them.
Sure, they may have magic boomsticks, but when a pack of 1 tonne Andrewsarchus (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrewsarchus) turn up, or even worse, an Arctotherium (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctotherium) (imagine a polar bear twice as big and twice as mean), my money's on the thing that can fit your entire head in its mouth.

fusilier

2013-06-25, 07:04 PM

Okay, to clarify why I'm so interested in leather. I'm working on an alt-history america setting where the takeover isn't quite so sweeping. So, while european metal armor is available, it's very expensive, and the natives generally don't have the infrastructure (mines, forges) to repair it or make more. So, in a lot of cases, they instead use traditional armor, made of materials they CAN access. Leather, of various sorts, wood, bone, textiles.

So, yes, I know metal's a much superior material for armor than leather, but leather is better than nothing.

As for how you'd get 4" thick leather, as I mentioned earlier, walrus hide can be 4 inches thick in places. No bolting or fastening required, it just comes like that. I was considering the plausibility of armor made from the thickest parts of walrus hide. There might be magic involved to fuse the slabs together, so a lucky strike on the bindings doesn't make the whole suit fall apart.

You may want to study Spanish Colonial America. The Spanish fairly quickly adopted Meso-american armor (usually padded cotton, but there were also padded leather versions). They also continued to use chainmail at a time when it fell out of favor in Europe. Into the 19th century, the Spanish Presidio troops wore heavy "cueras" -- long coats made out of up to seven layers of thick hide, which could weigh quite a bit. There's evidence of barding being used in the late 17th century at the latest as well.

The treatment of leather for armor depends upon what you are intending to do with it. Most of the leather I just described needed to be flexible, so it was usually brain tanned (which was a standard treatment). Hardened leather -- leather that's designed to be stiff -- is made in various ways, which are greatly debated on the internet. When I needed some stiff leather, I took vegetable tanned leather and soaked it in water then let it dry. It works fine and stays stiff. This doesn't work with oil tanned leather!

Most leather's are maintained with the use of waxes and/or oils.

I don't really think there would be much you could do -- or would need to do for 4 inch thick leather -- to improve it's suitability as an armor. :-)

Brother Oni

2013-06-25, 07:14 PM

I don't really think there would be much you could do -- or would need to do for 4 inch thick leather -- to improve it's suitability as an armor. :-)

Maybe make it lighter so that you don't need to have the build of a power weight lifter to wear a full suit of it? :smalltongue:

JustSomeGuy

2013-06-25, 08:06 PM

I think he would attain that build if he wore his new armour often enough! He could even start weak and incrementally increse his strength by adding layers, armour periodisation programming if you will.

Mike_G

2013-06-25, 09:07 PM

gr6.jpg"].

I've always wondered why Cortez and his mates never apparently caught something while they were running about in South America, especially with all the exotic disease the tropics tend to have.

The Europeans were more resistant in general from having grown up in closer, more densely inhabited areas, with more travel and occasionally poor sanitation. They built up antibodies to more germs because they were habitually exposed to more. Especially soldiers, who would have travelled and drunk new exciting bacteria in different water across a continent, and lived in close camps and tightly packed ships trading germs freely

Many Native Americans died from disease caught by casual contact with Europeans. The South and Central American natives had bigger cities than the North American tribes, but I doubt the average Aztec had been exposed to as many germs and general filth as a European mercenary with a few years service and a sea voyage.

Mr Beer

2013-06-25, 09:54 PM

AgentPaper

2013-06-25, 10:15 PM

I would not have anyone wearing 4" inch thick leather armour unless significant magics are involved; even then I don't see why they wouldn't wear something of normal thickness and magic that instead. It's something you might see on seige weapons or war elephants or something.

Now if I had to run something with 4" thick walrus leather armour, I would make it all enclosing and magically bio-mechanically enhanced. Yes, it would be a gruesomely fleshy sort of power armour. The elite native troops don it and acquire Walrus Power and run around knocking over lesser warriors like ninepins.

This is almost exactly what I thought as soon as he mentioned magic. This would be preeminently awesome, especially of different tribes had different suits. The northern natives could have the walrus super-thick armor that lets you shrug off blows, while others might have Buffalo armor that gives strength and endurance, or Jaguar armor that enhances your speed and agility, etc, etc.

Other than that, though, leather ends up just being a sort of "if you have to" armor that's out-classed in one way or another by everything else other than being really easy to figure out how to make.

Mr Beer

2013-06-25, 11:01 PM

This is almost exactly what I thought as soon as he mentioned magic. This would be preeminently awesome, especially of different tribes had different suits. The northern natives could have the walrus super-thick armor that lets you shrug off blows, while others might have Buffalo armor that gives strength and endurance, or Jaguar armor that enhances your speed and agility, etc, etc.

It could make an interesting encounter when the party puts on their magical Plate +2 to intimidate the metal-less primitives - and then the tribe suits up into their animal-themed power armour and kicks the crap out of them.

Brother Oni

2013-06-26, 01:59 AM

The South and Central American natives had bigger cities than the North American tribes, but I doubt the average Aztec had been exposed to as many germs and general filth as a European mercenary with a few years service and a sea voyage.

I'm fully aware of why the native civilisations were crippled by the diseases the Europeans brought over - I was just wondering why the same didn't happen to the Europeans by the native bugs.

Looking on a travel vaccination list, dengue fever and malaria are two diseases native to Central America that the Europeans of the time would have had very little exposure to. They're both mosquito borne, so it's highly likely that they would have been bitten and infected at some point.

I concede that those two are nowhere near as potent as the super bugs the Europeans brewed up with their close living and poor sanitary conditions, but I'm having trouble finding any records of problems the Europeans had.

It could make an interesting encounter when the party puts on their magical Plate +2 to intimidate the metal-less primitives - and then the tribe suits up into their animal-themed power armour and kicks the crap out of them.

So like a Meso-American version of Power Rangers, only with more human sacrifice? :smalltongue:

lsfreak

2013-06-26, 02:06 AM

The Europeans were more resistant in general from having grown up in closer, more densely inhabited areas, with more travel and occasionally poor sanitation. They built up antibodies to more germs because they were habitually exposed to more. Especially soldiers, who would have travelled and drunk new exciting bacteria in different water across a continent, and lived in close camps and tightly packed ships trading germs freely

In addition to this, my understanding is that, while the evidence isn't completely clear, it points to syphilis being a New World disease, so Europeans didn't escape completely unscathed.

Brother Oni

2013-06-26, 02:26 AM

In addition to this, my understanding is that, while the evidence isn't completely clear, it points to syphilis being a New World disease, so Europeans didn't escape completely unscathed.

'Not completely unscathed' is somewhat of an understatement, given that syphilis was a major contributing factor for the formation of the Anglican Church.

Board rules instruct me to point you at Wikipedia for details unfortunately.

Mr Beer

2013-06-26, 03:43 AM

ISo like a Meso-American version of Power Rangers, only with more human sacrifice? :smalltongue:

Ha, yeah pretty much.

fusilier

2013-06-26, 04:14 AM

I concede that those two are nowhere near as potent as the super bugs the Europeans brewed up with their close living and poor sanitary conditions, but I'm having trouble finding any records of problems the Europeans had.

It's been a while since I've studied this, but I seem to remember expeditions in South America, into the Amazon, etc., had greater mortality rates due to disease. I think that may have happened with the Guatemalan campaigns, and De Soto himself died of a "semi-tropical fever" in what is now the Deep South of the U.S.

Cortez in 1519-21 may have mostly avoided it by moving out of the coastal tropical regions where such diseases were more common; Central Mexico being a much dryer place.

Galloglaich

2013-06-26, 08:44 AM

In addition to this, my understanding is that, while the evidence isn't completely clear, it points to syphilis being a New World disease, so Europeans didn't escape completely unscathed.

Yep. And it was much more virulent in the 16th Century than it is today, it was literally eating people alive.

Don't forget Typhus as well.

Also, if you look at the Black Death, it came from Asia into Europe (introduced by the Mongols, arguably on purpose) so it's not like the Europeans didn't experience the same kind of mass-extermination event due to international contact.

G

eulmanis12

2013-06-26, 10:29 AM

one of the primary reasons for the European's not being wiped out by an American disease in the same way as the natives and smallpox comes from the lack of contact between various native cultures compared with contact between Eurasian cultures.

it works like this, on the Eurasian+african landmass, there is enough contact between the various parts that a major disease that begins in one area will eventually hit all of the major population centers, the textbook example being the black death, which orriginated in the far east, and eventually spread along trade routes to hit all parts of Europe. This phenomenon meant that the European populace would over time be exposed to a large number of diseases, which it would develop natural resistances to.

in contrast, in the Americas, there was very little contact between existing cultures, so a hypothetical disease that developed in the Incan empire, would not be able to spread to the Aztecs and vice versa, leading to a smaller pool of diseases, and less resistance buildup. In addition to this, outside of the Aztec and Incan empires, most of the natives were nomadic or semi-nomadic, a lifestyle which tends to cause the development of fewer diseases in general.

Additionaly, many (some say most) human diseases orrigionaly come from livestock, Europeans kept many types of livestock, and were thus exposed to many diseases, meanwhile, the natives tended to have little to no live stock. (the Incans had llamas and that was about it)

In reguards to the diseases that did exist in the Americas, many of them did affect the Europeans, but they simply did not spread by means that would allow them to decimate a population.

In addition, differences in medical practice also had an effect. not in that the doctors of either group could cure the diseases, but in how the practices limited spread of disease. European practice with diseases primarily involved quarrentine with both the patient and the "attending physician" (read, poor sap who drew the short straw) being kept separated from the rest of the group, which greatly limited the spread of disease, while native physicians/medicinemen/witchdoctors tended to continue to mingle with the rest of the population after tending to a diseased individual helping to spread the disease further. Additionaly, the Europeans did eventually make some real advances in medical practice around the time of the later stages of colonization, namely the discovery/invention of smallpox inoculation, which in addition to making them largely immune to their own diseases, made every inoculated person a carrier that could spread the disease to any natives they came into contact with.

Brother Oni

2013-06-26, 12:37 PM

one of the primary reasons for the European's not being wiped out by an American disease in the same way as the natives and smallpox comes from the lack of contact between various native cultures compared with contact between Eurasian cultures.

While that's all true on a population scale, my question was on the much smaller scale of "Why weren't Cortez and his ~500 men decimated shortly after they landed in the Yucatan in 1519?".

Fusilier's explanation that Cortez went inland where it's significantly drier, thus less people and potential disease vectors, makes perfect sense to me, not to mention the later expeditions, which did stay in the hot wet areas, were badly affected by disease.

AgentPaper

2013-06-26, 12:46 PM

While that's all true on a population scale, my question was on the much smaller scale of "Why weren't Cortez and his ~500 men decimated shortly after they landed in the Yucatan in 1519?".

Fusilier's explanation that Cortez went inland where it's significantly drier, thus less people and potential disease vectors, makes perfect sense to me, not to mention the later expeditions, which did stay in the hot wet areas, were badly affected by disease.

Because the natives didn't have nearly as many or as virulent diseases as the Europeans did. The natives only had what they could brew up between themselves and whatever random nomads passed through recently, while the Europeans had all the diseases of the Eurasian continent brewed in close quarters with animals and each other over thousands of years, which had just spent a few years in the pot-broiler incubators that the Spanish call ships.

Also, diseases have a tendency to prey on the very young, the old, and the weak, none of which is a good descriptor of the veteran, elite soldiers that Cortez brought over. They would need to have very strong immune systems to have lived through as much war as they did, which could have helped them shrug off any new diseases more easily than the natives, who had all the young, old, and weak of a civilian population.

Brother Oni

2013-06-26, 01:36 PM

Also, diseases have a tendency to prey on the very young, the old, and the weak, none of which is a good descriptor of the veteran, elite soldiers that Cortez brought over. They would need to have very strong immune systems to have lived through as much war as they did, which could have helped them shrug off any new diseases more easily than the natives, who had all the young, old, and weak of a civilian population.

Without specific antibodies to a disease, you're reliant on the non-specific components of your immune system, which can be easily overwhelmed by things getting into places where they shouldn't (e.g. opportunistic injections by E.coli or S.aureus) let alone exposure to a novel organism.

The soldiers that came with Cortez are fit and healthy, which counts for far more than previous disease exposure when encountering a new organism (aforementioned syphilis, typhus and Black Death spreading rapidly throughout Europe, despite its optimal environment for breeding diseases).

The main reason for increased mortality in the very young, the old and weak, is due to secondary complications brought on by the disease, rather than the disease itself. A strong, healthy individual could potentially shrug off the fever caused by the body's reaction to kill the disease, while the same fever would kill a young child due to hyperpyrexia.
Likewise, a strong person could survive secondary infections of syphilis lesions that would kill a lesser person.

That all said, I do concede IgE from the adaptive part of the immune system may limit the effect of the malaria parasite though.

Galloglaich

2013-06-26, 01:40 PM

A very high percentage of European sugar-cane workers and other colonists (many forcible, 'transported' prisoners, indentured servants and so on) in places like Jamaica, Cuba, Brazil and etc., simply died of Malaria, Yellow Fever and other Tropical diseases, to the extent that there is little trace of them now in some of those areas in spite of tens or hundreds of thousands of them being sent there.

G

Incanur

2013-06-26, 07:10 PM

As you noted, instant death was apparently rare.

I noted this? While I think that's often true because of human physiology and weapon dynamics, English coroner's rolls (http://www.thearma.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=35209&sid=647d05293b7ded431afaa12bade00b90) from around Silver's time contains various examples of instant incapacitation. They should be taken with a grain of salt, given that the folks assessing the situation weren't witnesses and perhaps erroneously attributed instant death to serious wounds. But the number of deep cuts to the head suggests that swordplay similar to Silver's may have been common in the British Isles. Joseph Swetnam also wrote that Englishman favored cuts at the head, especially when angry.

But then by the 18th 19th Century... swords just weren't the same any more in the West for the most part.

That varied; a number of Brits in particular fought with cutting swords very much like Silver's in the second half of the nineteenth century. They even rediscovered Silver right before the start of the twentieth century. See Blades of the British Empire and D. A. Kinsley's other works for extensive primary-source collections. It's more than a little bizarre that British soldiers - especially officers - persisted in fighting with the sword, but they did so despite great risk to and sometimes loss of their lives. Arguably the most extreme example of this comes at the Battle of Omdurman. Amidst the overwhelming power of artillery and Maxim machine guns, the 21st Lancers charged into Sudanese infantry. Both sides fought primarily - though not exclusively, as some Lancers had automatic pistols - with lances, spears, and swords. Though successful, 28 out of 340 Lancers died in the charge, which accounted for more than half of British dead for the entire battle! Certain British soldiers valued the glory of close combat over their lives.

As far as leather armor in the Americas goes, it was actually quite important, especially in what's now the U.S. Southwest and Great Plains, into the nineteenth century. One of the reasons the gun could grant significant military advantage in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is because it penetrated leather and fabric armor that resisted arrows.

JustSomeGuy

2013-06-27, 02:33 AM

I feel now would be a good time to point out the cap badge of the Queens Royal Lancers regt.

http://i.ebayimg.com/t/Red-Backed-QRL-Beret-Badge-Queens-Royal-Lancers-Beret-Badge-Army-Hat-Badges-/00/s/Mjk3WDM2Nw==/$(KGrHqV,!h0E5dYNs2qyBObbZN(HYQ~~60_35.JPG

Their motto is 'death or glory'.

Matthew

2013-06-27, 02:38 AM

Matthew, do you know if King John (or Henry) went to much expense to arm his peasants. More generally, does anyone know if kings or lords spending much on arming or upgrading the kit of their peasant militias ever happened much?

No (it was Henry I), the point was just that the levy was so unreliable that they had to be encouraged and shown how to use their weapons (summoning a general levy suggests that money was short). Mind you, scutage is well attested as a means by which English kings supported smaller and more professional armies. Indeed, it was far from unknown for the king to take the money men had brought for expenses and send them home, using the money to support the troops that were selected to remain.

Galloglaich

2013-06-27, 08:30 AM

I'll post some stats later from a recent report on letters of remittance (similar to Coroners Rolls) from France and Burgundy which you may find enlightening on the 'instant death' issue as well as some others.

That varied; a number of Brits in particular fought with cutting swords very much like Silver's in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Maybe superficially in terms of shape or overall purpose, but I'm not talking about that, I'm talking about quality. From the 18th Century onward, the quality of swords made for the military, particularly in England, declined precipitously. The English swords were usually copies of Continental designs at this time, and were typically crudely made of rather poor steel, poorly maintained and often not even sharpened.

For example, from the wiki on the English 1796 pattern officers sword (spadroon):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1796_Pattern_British_Infantry_Officer%27s_Sword#Cr iticism

The 1796 Pattern Sword was not renowned as a great fighting sword. The blade was weak and the hilt gave very little protection to the hand.[1] General Cavalie Mercer of the Royal Artillery, who wore the same sword stated that:

"Nothing could be more useless or ridiculous than the old infantry regulation [sword]; it was good for neither cut nor thrust and was a perfect encumberance. In the Foot Artillery, when away from headquarters, we generally wore dirks instead of it".

It's more than a little bizarre that British soldiers - especially officers - persisted in fighting with the sword, but they did so despite great risk to and sometimes loss of their lives. Arguably the most extreme example of this comes at the Battle of Omdurman. Amidst the overwhelming power of artillery and Maxim machine guns, the 21st Lancers charged into Sudanese infantry. Both sides fought primarily - though not exclusively, as some Lancers had automatic pistols - with lances, spears, and swords. Though successful, 28 out of 340 Lancers died in the charge, which accounted for more than half of British dead for the entire battle! Certain British soldiers valued the glory of close combat over their lives.

I don't think this is anything particularly unusual about the British. This is just the persistence of the effective role of horse-cavalry in warfare, which persisted all the way through World War I and even into the early years of WW II, in which every nation still had a cavalry arm initially (including the Germans).

http://getasword.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/German-ww2-cavalry.jpg
German cavalry, WW II

http://olive-drab.com/images/army-horses-mules_ww2_07_700.jpg
Rusian cavalry, WW II

Swords were used extensively as cavalry sidearms in the American Civil War, despite the use of revolvers and gattling guns, during the Franco-Prussian War, in WW I (where on the Eastern Front, cavalry was arguably the dominant force in play on both sides, in spite of Maxim machine guns and artillery and etc.) and in the smaller wars throughout the 1920's and 1930's leading up to WW II, including the Spanish Civil War, the Japanese invasion of Manchuria and the Winter War in Finland.

Cavalry had an important role as recon, screening, and light highly mobile infantry (dragoons) which remained necessary (especially in some areas) until automotive vehicles (including tanks, halftracks, motorcycles and so on) became sufficiently effective at off-road movement as to replace them, and aircraft began to effectively take over reconnaissance (which started in the American civil war with the military use of balloons, expanded greatly in WW I, but was really not complete until in the 1940's.)

The use of swords by officers also persisted in most armies well into WW I and in some cases WW II, the Japanese were issuing katanas as sidearms in WW II even to NCO's.

G

Incanur

2013-06-27, 09:53 AM

Read Blades of the British Empire. :smallwink: While swords had some utility for personal defense, particularly in the era of unreliable, low-capacity pistols, no rational martial calculus explains the behavior of British swordsmen. The aforementioned book contains numerous accounts of officers and others showing off, explicitly fighting with cold steel because they wanted to. Sometimes when the swordplay turned sour for them, they resorted to a pistol - other times they suffered wounds or death. Certain British soldiers got in trouble for this behavior because it undermined the overall military effort by needlessly risking lives.

Lancers with lances and swords were pretty obsolete by 1898 - even though these weapons endured for years after - and that famous charge was waste of life and resources in practical terms. Winston Churchill survived the charge without injury in part because he carried an automatic pistol rather than a sword. Swords saw action in WWII - mainly in desperate circumstances and for execution - but they weren't important in that conflict.

As far sword quality goes, accounts differs. If properly sharpened, some regulation British swords did good service. I can't find it now, but I recall reading an account of I believe Sikh troops in India who favored British blades and cut masterfully with them. Also note that a number of swords made in the medieval and Renaissance periods had poor to mediocre metallurgical properties. One blade from the Mary Rose, while possessing a hard edge, was soft iron with a very thin outer layer of steel that would not survive many sharpenings. One Viking-era sword was miserably soft and would not have held a decent edge. See The Sword and the Crucible by Alan Williams for details.

Galloglaich

2013-06-27, 10:56 AM

Read Blades of the British Empire. :smallwink:

I own a copy. My buddy Matt Easton wrote the introduction ;) It's a great book of anecdotes.

Lancers with lances and swords were pretty obsolete by 1898.

They weren't obsolete, read up a bit on the Russian front in WW I. They just has a much more limited (increasingly limited) role.

As far sword quality goes, accounts differs. If properly sharpened, some regulation British swords did good service.

Emphasis on the 'if' and the 'some'. Read up on it a bit further, including in the book you are citing. Quite often the swords were so bad the pommel was preferred for use as a knuckleduster than the actual blade itself.

(snip)One blade from the Mary Rose, while possessing a hard edge, was soft iron with a very thin outer layer of steel that would not survive many sharpenings.

This was an intentional design feature of many swords, see Petter Johnsson...

One Viking-era sword was miserably soft and would not have held a decent edge. See The Sword and the Crucible by Alan Williams for details.

Yes but the plural of anecdote is not statistic, and that doesn't change the reality - swords from the mid 16th century on back to the early Medieval period were usually hand-made by experts, master cutlers and sword smiths. European military swords in the 17th, - 20th century were usually mass produced using very shoddy methods, often not even properly sharpened, and / or kept in metal sheathes which dulled the blades and so forth, and English swords in particular were notoriously bad, worse than continental designs, according to the English themselves.

G

Incanur

2013-06-27, 12:02 PM

They weren't obsolete, read up a bit on the Russian front in WW I. They just has a much more limited (increasingly limited) role.

They only meaningful advantage the sword has over the pistol is that it doesn't require ammunition. Even today swords are theoretically useful in war - people still get killed with knives and improvised close-combat weapons on occasion. They're still obsolete.

Emphasis on the 'if' and the 'some'. Read up on it a bit further, including in the book you are citing. Quite often the swords were so bad the pommel was preferred for use as a knuckleduster than the actual blade itself.

I've read the whole thing and various other nineteenth-century sources. Sometimes regulation swords performed as bludgeons, other times in caring hands they cut as well as one could expect. While opposing blades tended to cut better, the better British sword lines did fine as long as somebody took the time to sharpen them.

This was an intentional design feature of many swords, see Petter Johnsson...

No, there's no benefit from having such a thin layer of hard steel on the outside of the blade. Alan Williams explicitly describes the design as lacking. Moreover, Williams disputes the notion that an iron core provided any benefit, as steel in period was tougher (wholly or in part because of lower slag content, if I recall correctly).

Yes but the plural of anecdote is not statistic, and that doesn't change the reality - swords from the mid 16th century on back to the early Medieval period were usually hand-made by experts, master cutlers and sword smiths. European military swords in the 17th, - 20th century were usually mass produced using very shoddy methods, often not even properly sharpened, and / or kept in metal sheathes which dulled the blades and so forth, and English swords in particular were notoriously bad, worse than continental designs, according to the English themselves.

Data in The Sword and the Crucible don't really support this notion. The metallurgical quality of European swords apparently quite erratic before the fourteenth century, and in the Renaissance era many/most were still of dubious quality. Indicating his low opinion of the quality of early European swords, Williams writes that "[e]even in the 16th century many ordinary soldiers carried blades little better than those of a thousand years before." The numbers in The Sword and the Crucible only go into the seventeenth century for Euorpean swords, but those indicate that blade quality in terms of hardness on the whole improved up to that point. However, I can't find any metallurgical tests of nineteenth-century British swords, so I guess it's possible that they could be even worse than the medieval average. Given the overall improvement in steel production and their performance when properly sharpened, I doubt that. I imagine it depends on the exact pattern in question and all that. Williams describes a seventeenth- or eighteenth-century Indian sword as one of the best swords made anywhere, anytime because of its metallurgical properties, so it's not terribly surprising that Indian swords typically outperformed poorly sharpened British regulation blades.

fusilier

2013-06-27, 01:10 PM

Data in The Sword and the Crucible don't really support this notion. The metallurgical quality of European swords apparently quite erratic before the fourteenth century, and in the Renaissance era many/most were still of dubious quality. . . .

This fits with what I've read. During the industrial age swords were usually made from better quality steel -- primarily because it was easier to mass produce better quality steel. I think in the renaissance they *could* make high quality blades, but the common soldier wasn't going to have one, and the majority of swords were probably of low quality.

Galloglaich

2013-06-27, 02:06 PM

I recommend to both of you read Peter Johnsson (http://www.myarmoury.com/talk/viewtopic.php?t=26327) on the subject of the ferrous composition (and design) of medieval swords.

As to the difference between 19th century and say, 16th century swords, just talk to some collectors. Have you handled any?

In a nutshell, the problem with 17th-19th century swords wasn't just lack of sharpening, and there is much more to a swords design than the quality of the steel. It's a matter of weight, balance, harmonics, temper, ability to hold an edge, flexibility and so on. They made many things very well out of steel in the 19th Century, bridges, towers, railroads, boilers, cannons, rifles, but swords? Not so much.

Indian swords up to the 18th are the exception because some of them are of wootz steel (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wootz_steel), using a crucible steel making technique that was lost by the 19th (though supposedly rediscovered now).

Alan Williams is a recognized expert on armor, on swords, he's a bit more... controversial to say the least.

What is a 'common soldier' in the late Medieval / Early Renaissance context, exactly? That is a far more easily defined entity in the 18th Century than the 15th I think... ;)

G

warty goblin

2013-06-27, 03:14 PM

fusilier

2013-06-27, 07:21 PM

Galloglaich -- can you give us a hint as to what Peter Johnsson has to say on the subject of the variations in quality of steel and sword design during the Middle Ages, and comparatively to later periods? [I've only had a chance to glance at the titles of the videos, but I'm hoping to find time to watch the last one, that one looks really cool]

As for sword design -- I have handled some old swords, although it's been a while since I've handled anything as old as 16th century. Recently I got to handle a M1840 Dragoon sword, and I was impressed with the weight and balance (especially for a sword nick-named the "old wrist-breaker", or is that the M1833?) -- but I had been carrying around a modern replica saber that weekend. ;-) I'm similarly impressed by the weight and the amount of spring in my original Vetterli bayonet.

I would imagine, that anybody who repaired a cracked sword with solder would be considered a "common soldier", but I suppose I could be wrong on that. ;-) (Of couse defining common soldier is going to depend upon when and where, and what we mean when we say "common").

Galloglaich

2013-06-27, 09:23 PM

Well, I'm neither a swordsmith nor an engineer, and I can't claim to fully grasp Peter Johnsson's theories, nor am I really qualified to summarize his work, but I'll try a simple analogy.

Most people today grok that Japanese swords are partly made with a low-carbon or iron spine forge welded to the much harder steel blade, as an intentional feature of the design. Many experts who have done destructive testing (like Alan Williams) noted to their surprise that a lot of very fine quality medieval swords have something like wrought iron in the core even when they have very high carbon steel edges with an excellent heat-treatment. Peter seems to be saying that there is a similar design philosophy at work. At any rate, he states categorically that putting iron in is an intentional part of the blades design.

He also made an analogy of his own which I thought was very thought provoking. Noting the cliche that many have repeated, that medieval swords were like 'sharpened crowbars', he suggested that their actual structure is more like an airplane wing.

http://24.media.tumblr.com/853cb41eaff57b94e6ec4f3c4a08f1e6/tumblr_mi06ormQ471r3kwpro1_500.png

He goes on to point out the harmonics of medieval swords, how they all have a sweet spot where there is very low vibration right at the point you would normally cut with on the blade. If you have done any test-cutting you know how critical this is if you want the sword to actually cut well, let alone fence with it. He suggests that this effect is achieved by using the same kind of geometry in the design that was used to build cathedrals, drawn out with circles and squares and based on a sort of numerology that educated people in this period were obsessed with. All this was imbued with Christian symbolism but linked with older syncretic traditions.

He gets into a little summary of all that in this article, here:

http://www.peterjohnsson.com/higher-understanding-and-deeper-reckoning/

He also notes that swords were made not by some sweaty, half naked blacksmith pounding away in the village square, but by groups of highly trained specialists: The cutler or messerschmidt made the design, and subcontracted out to the ironmonger who made the steel, the smith who made the sword blank, the hilt maker who put it all together, the sword polisher who sharpened it, and so on, again a lot like they do with traditional swords in Japan. (Johnsson does not make the specific analogy to Japan, that part is me)

For more on this theories you can read this book, it has a pretty long essay about all this stuff by mr. Johnsson in there.

http://www.amazon.com/THE-NOBLE-ART-SWORD-Renaissance/dp/0900785438

I have handled a few antique swords, quite a few 'sword like objects' and some very high end replicas. I own a few 19th Century sabers myself and I love them, the ones I have are probably low- to middle-end in terms of what was available 150 years ago and they are vastly better than any replica I could afford; but they simply don't compare in terms of overall feel, subtlety, grace... scariness, to the (very few) medieval blades I've had the privilege to handle.

G

warty goblin

2013-06-27, 09:45 PM

Perhaps this is common knowledge, but I was particularly struck by his discussion of how little the center of mass mattered to the handling of the blade. Instead he focused on the points the blade tends to rotate about when force is applied to the hilt. This was the first time I had ever heard anything like this rigorously considered when talking about blade dynamics.

Incanur

2013-06-27, 09:57 PM

Williams is perhaps too dismissive of the Mary Rose sword, as its edge is quite hard (about 500 VPH) and presumably could cut well until the layer of steel wore away. On the other hand, that one Viking sword -the worst of all the blades analyzed by Williams - had an edge hardness of 101 VPH, which is barely more than pure iron. It could only have been a miserable cutter, though perhaps a decent bludgeon.

The problem with supposing medieval and Renaissance-era smiths intentionally used soft iron cores to make blades more resilient is that, according to Williams, in Europe during this period iron contained more slag than steel and thus was more brittle.

As far as nineteenth-century swords go, I've never handled originals from any era, but I'm skeptical that they were significantly worse than medieval swords as a rule based both on metallurgy and period accounts. According to numerous sources, sharpened and skillfully wielded British blades cut as well as you could possibly expect: skulls cloven, arms removed at the shoulder, legs hacked off, and so on. For example, the account of Nizam's irregular cavalry (http://books.google.com/books?id=beIRAAAAYAAJ&pg=RA3-PA59&dq=%22were+these+men+giants%22&hl=en&sa=X&ei=PvLMUbG2MOSJiALQ5YH4BQ&ved=0CD8Q6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=%22were%20these%20men%20giants%22&f=false) using refitted dragoon blades to great effect indicates at least some mass-produced British steel was hard enough to hold a keen edge. Accounts of British swords breaking or bending certainly exist, but on the whole - depending on the exact model in question - the metal seems decent. Countless cavalry authors stressed sharpness, and there's little question that British swords were sometimes if not often too blunt because of steels scabbards and lack of sharpening.

With regards to the obselesence of the sword and lance in 1898, I recommend George Taylor Denison's argument (http://books.google.com/books?id=YvAxAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA30&dq=sikh+swords+cavalry+%2B+cut&hl=en&sa=X&ei=lO7MUcPUJ4aJjALjxoG4Bg&ved=0CGIQ6AEwCA#v=onepage&q&f=false) from 1868. Denison ends up recommending retaining the lance and saber primarily for the pursuit and the intimidation factor - not useless arms, but not really for fighting as they were before.

fusilier

2013-06-27, 11:59 PM

Thanks Galloglaich -- I did manage to start one of the lectures and noticed how he mentioned certain things like "root 2" -- I've actually studied the history of mathematics a little bit (briefly formally), and so I'm perhaps not so surprised by how medieval swords were designed. He seems to be applying Euclidian geometry to the layout of swords, and honestly I'm surprised that no one else attempted that; seeing as mathematics was dominated by geometry at the time, specifically the kind of "constructible" geometry that Euclid describes. I suppose the general thought had been that people simply modified existing designs and therefore swords "evolved" naturally overtime, so why bother looking for some evidence of building to general principles? (however, it could be that swords did evolve to a point where the good ones, just happened to follow certain geometric rules). I do need to watch the full lecture though, it looks like cool stuff.

I think Incanur still has a point -- the material question aside, the use of swords had changed, and it's understandable that it's form would have changed too. On the other hand, with increased standardization, if the board of ordnance adopted a . . . let's say: "suboptimal" . . . design, then you would have a bunch made to that pattern, and troops grumbling until something better was adopted (or using something unofficial). Unlike in the middle ages, where if a swordsmith produced a poor weapon it probably went back into the pot; at the very least there probably weren't a few thousand of them made.

fusilier

2013-06-28, 04:26 AM

I recommend to both of you read Peter Johnsson (http://www.myarmoury.com/talk/viewtopic.php?t=26327) on the subject of the ferrous composition (and design) of medieval swords.

I just finished watching the last video, linked from the . . . link . . . anyway --

If you're interested in how medieval swords were designed, you should watch this. It's very good. I do have some complaints: I think he might be reading too much into some of the more mystical aspects of numbers and geometry (not that they didn't exist -- they had well before the middle ages -- just that you can read them into anything), likewise his talking about irrational numbers and rational numbers in geometry misses the mark a bit (the power, and popularity, of geometry is that it side-stepped those "issues"). Also, he refers to music as mathematics applied to time, which is fine, in the medieval period the study of music was basically a branch of mathematics, but another way of thinking about music is "ratio theory", which was very important during the period.

I think what it boils down to is quite simple: the geometrical processes he describes, are Euclid's geometry --> those were the drafting tools available to Europeans at the time (i.e. the straight edge and compass). Johnsson shows, quite convincingly, how those tools could be used to design a sword.

Very enjoyable to watch.

Galloglaich

2013-06-28, 10:29 AM

On Peter Johnsson's theories, it's true that whether the correlation to the 'sacred geometry' accidental convergence of utilitarian design vs. the intentional application of the patterns of Euclid is impossible to verify yet, but he has had the opportunity to evaluate a lot more swords than anyone else I know of, both as a professor and in the capacity of his job as a designer for Albion, and he has noted that this pattern with the squares and the circles and the harmonic 'sweet spot*' on the blade exists in almost every sword he's examined from around the 12th century through the 16th, but not in Viking swords or swords from the 17th century or later (at least as far as I'm aware).

Which makes sense because this whole design philosophy, and the numerology / astrology / theology that goes with them is a specific type of syncretic mixture of Greek, Arabic, Persian, Hebrew, Roman and probably several other cultural motifs, was a pretty characteristic cultural theme in the Medieval period, which declined in influence in later years for various reasons.

http://www.aboutfrance.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/Strasbourg-Cathedral.jpg

On the sacred geometry, it's also valuable to look at the efficacy of the designs of the medieval Cathedrals. Look at something like the Strasbourg Cathedral, made in the 15th century, it's essentially a skyscraper, over 460 feet tall, taller than the Great Pyramid of Giza. Made with no rebar, with no steel girders, just cut stone and glass... and air. And it's lasted more than 500 years of weather, wars and wear. I don't think many buildings on that scale today will last so long Though described by some as 'architects', the builders and designers were actually just craftsmen, master masons. They were using the same kind of geometry Peter Johnsson describes.

By contrast, the "Flatiron Building" in New York, built in 1884, one of the tallest skyscrapers of the 19th Century, (actually 20th, it was finished in 1902) at 285 feet tall:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/47/Flatiron_Building_Construction%2C_New_York_Times_-_Library_of_Congress%2C_1901-1902_crop.JPG

Also a beautiful building, with an impressive design, but not made with the same level of craftsmanship, I would argue.

As for all the wonderful tales in Swords of the British Empire (which I do highly recommend as it's full of excellent material for gamers or anyone interested in history, war, or fighting) of people hacking heads in twain and so forth, this no doubt did actually happen, but it's also true that in just as many anecdotes you hear about how the blades performed poorly. A few years back, 800 thousand people were hacked to pieces in Rwanda using machete's and gardening hoe's with blades stamped out of sheet metal and barely sharpened, it's still possible to do extremely grievous bodily harm with such crude weapons. I'm just saying that, anecdotally, it seems that the type of catastrophic wounds like severed arms and so on, were more common in a medieval context, which is I think both because the swords were a lot better made and because the people using them were much more skilled in their use than conscripts in the English army in 1890. In later periods it seems to me that it was much more often the case that cuts were superficial, couldn't cut through clothing and so forth.

Like I said I do have some stats on this from remission letters which I'll post soon, though I can't honestly say these really prove anything they do support what I'm suggesting, and they are interesting.

Regarding the reasons for the difference, as Fusilier noted, bad designs could be reproduced in the tens of thousands in the 18th or 19th century, (and across decades of time as well) since sword designs were decided by committee's in the military hierarchy and the common soldier had little choice of what to use, but in addition to that, the production methods for swords were also very different, and IMO, inferior.

But ultimately all this is just opinion, it's too complex of a dataset to really be able to speak of definitively, at least yet. We are all looking at basically the same sources, we can draw our conclusions as best we can, beyond that, nobody has a monopoly on the truth. One thing I've learned doing research these last 12 years, is that "all interpretations are provisional" (and that is an understatement.) All I can really give is my opinion, and the best information I can find at this moment, (which will probably change in a few weeks!)

G

*I think this may be one of the hidden elements which contributed to the superlative cutting performance many have noticed with some of his Albion designs which were very closely derived from antiques - like the famous 'Brescia Spadona'.

Incanur

2013-06-28, 01:03 PM

I'm skeptical of generalizations about medieval vs. nineteenth-century sword performance there's so much variation in each. From what I remember of fourteenth-century English coroner's rolls (http://archive.org/stream/calendarofcorone00shariala#page/n9/mode/2up), the few sword attacks recorded in the this civilian context resulted in no severed limbs or anything like that. Instead, these sword blows inflicted dangerous but modest wounds and didn't tend to immediately incapacitate with a single stroke. In one case a man struck on the head by a sword initially fell but got right back up, fled, and in the end killed his pursuing attacker with a blow to the head from a knife. (See page 90.) The folks in the fights aren't necessarily warriors, but it's one example of how medieval European swords didn't always produce spectacular wounds. Knife and dagger thrusts - far more common here - seem more deadly and more likely to incapacitate from this limited data set, but we know from other sources that good swords in skilled, strong hands deal out devastating injuries.

Honestly I can't think to too many specific examples of severed limbs or heads from medieval and Renaissance times, though the sixteenth-century coroner's rolls I link to earlier contain various deeply penetrating and immediately incapacitating cuts to the head.

Galloglaich

2013-06-30, 03:14 AM

Well we do have some evidence to go on. I don't think anything can be proven by any means, and you are right saying that generalizations are dangerous, but I have reasons for my opinion. And of course, claiming that swords in the 18th century were better than or equivalent to Medieval swords is also a generalization and an opinion.

We really can't know definitively, but we can make an educated guess.

We have literary evidence. From the Norse sagas and edda's to Medieval novels like Tiran lo Blanc, which refer to severed limbs and decapitations and so forth, (I would even venture to say that most fights in the Norse sagas depict serious wounds to someone's limb, they even named their swords things like 'foot-biter' and so on) though they also refer to other things which seem implausible so we have to take such tales with a grain of salt.

We have forensics. Famous battles like Wisby, Towton, Kutna Hora which have been partly excavated and subject to some forensic analysis. We do see a fair number of severed limbs, I know there were quite a few at both Wisby and Kutna Hora in particular. I've posted images like this one (from Wisby) to this thread before:

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/peter.fairweather/docs/Visby2(2).jpg

Then we have the fencing manuals. We see a lot of images like this one from Talhoffer

http://historical-academy.co.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/Cod.icon_.394a_115v-300x211.jpg

And as you have already shown, we do have a lot of documentation from things like court records and so on. Earlier this year, I was lucky enough to get a small paper on urban militias into a peer reviewed journal linked to the HEMA community (http://actaperiodica.org/issues.html), published out of Hungary, and released at the fencing tournament in Dijon, France back in May. When I finally got my copy last week I was able to read the other articles in the journal, one of which deals with this very subject.

The author (Pierre-Henry Bas) examined hundreds of medieval remission letters from France and Burgundy. These remission letters are sort of like pardons from the King of France or the Duke of Burgundy, which were necessary to avoid punishment in the event of getting into a fight in which someone was killed or seriously injured.

This was not the same system in England (from whence we have the coroners rolls) or Germany. England was much more strict, it was common for people to be hung for dueling or fighting with weapons if anyone was killed or seriously injured, (or even if nobody was); in Germany (in most of Slavic and German speaking Central Europe) it was the opposite - you could get away with it so long as the eyewitnesses agreed that you acted with valid provocation and fought according to their idea of 'fair play', which included things like not stabbing and attacking with the flat of the blade unless the other guy escalated the fight (or unless the provocation was sufficiently severe).

Anyway, these two images are from that article, pardon the poor quality due to my phone having a rather crap camera and I don't have the cable for it here at home so I had to go through a pretty convoluted process to get the images uploaded.

This first image shows some statistics related to our discussion. The author looked at about 700 remission letters and sorted some of the details. Where were people wounded (each letter involved a case that could involve between 1 and several peoples suffering injuries), and whether the wound was fatal.

http://www.codexmartialis.com/download/file.php?id=87

You can see that the worst place to be hit was the lower torso and the side, followed by the neck and the upper body. The limbs were obviously the 'safest' place to be wounded, but wounds to the thighs and buttocks were fatal 58% of the time, lower legs 44%, and even in the hands and arms, the wounds were fatal 27% of the time. These latter were mostly cuts. This is spite of the fact that they had pretty good treatments for cuts, (much less so for thrusts).

The author of this article also states that 'instant death' was rare and usually correlated with injuries to the neck and the head. The majority of fatal cases died after a few days. It's also interesting that the places most often hit were the upper and middle body and the head.

This next table isn't directly related to our argument, but I thought people here might find it interesting. It shows, in the relatively small number (75)cases the author could find where both individuals were armed and with different weapons, which weapon was used by the 'winner' and which by the 'loser' (the person who ended up wounded and / or killed).

http://www.codexmartialis.com/download/file.php?id=88

Some of the stats were unfortunately cropped out by my photo, but he shows that the most effective weapon in this sample (again, a small number of cases) was the halberd (70%), followed by the spear (55%), which in turn is followed closely by the dagger (53%) and the sword (48%). The mace and the dussack (a term he used for all saber like weapons) did relatively poorly at 39% and 31% respectively.

The halberd, the spear and (especially) the dagger are all weapons which don't get a lot of love in most RPG systems; I for one have always felt that the dagger, an actual dagger especially as in a 10 or 12 inch double-edged knife (let alone the much larger weapons which also fall into this category), is a really dangerous, lethal weapon! I never got why RPG's portray them as sort of nuisance weapons. A dagger is at a disadvantage to hit initially at the onset of a fight in any open area, but once you get close, the tables turn and the dagger has the advantage, bigtime. In terms of dangerous results, my personal opinion is that assuming a blade strong enough not to break, and with a length of over 8", a dagger (bayonet etc.) is just about as lethal as a sword in terms of the consequences of the wound.

One of the other interesting comments he made in the article is that people used the Halberd at close range by choking up and sort of punching with the business end, which is something I never heard of before.

G

Autolykos

2013-06-30, 09:27 AM

I think what it boils down to is quite simple: the geometrical processes he describes, are Euclid's geometry --> those were the drafting tools available to Europeans at the time (i.e. the straight edge and compass). Johnsson shows, quite convincingly, how those tools could be used to design a sword.Yup, that's pretty much what I was going to say about it, too. His explanation is definitely great, he did lots of good research, and he deserves credit for being the first to point it out - but the findings are actually far less revolutionary than they're made out to be.
Saying that medieval craftsmen used constructions with compass and straightedge and mystical numerical properties in their design is like saying modern engineers use rulers, rational numbers and the sacred properties of the artifacts that define the metric system stored somewhere in Paris. It's technically true, but completely misses the point.
People use the simplest and most reliable tools for design they have available at the time. And if they do something that requires expensive materials and a lot of work, they'll do a design first and not rush head first into construction.
If I were to make a sword and had to get balance, harmonics etc right, I'd either take one that works, or carve a wooden mockup, and adjust that until I'm happy with its handling. Then I'd measure that thing, and use these measurements as a basis for forging a new one. Otherwise, I might waste lots of materials and work on a faulty design.
If I don't have a ruler to measure it, I'd have to find an (approximate) construction with compass and straightedge to get it right. Any actual sword built from this design will of course have the exact proportions, even if my "perfect" mockup didn't. And as Peter pointed out, using a construction instead of measurements means that I can easily scale my design up or down without using a pocket calculator or risking to get the numbers wrong.
TL;DR: There needn't be a mystical reason for this design approach. It's simply the smart thing to do with the tools they had at the time.

Galloglaich

2013-06-30, 11:05 AM

Yes but the fact is, they did put all these mystical meanings onto the numbers, as part of their interest in astrology and numerology and so forth. It was part of the education most people got back then. It doesn't mean it wasn't also prosaic, but they tended to group things together by what they saw as their innate characteristics of certain numbers.

So they tended to see 3 as associated with the trinity and 1 with the sun and 5 with the rose (and therefore noble or lucky) and 8 with Saturn and therefore bad luck and so forth.

This was strongly linked to both weapon design and fencing, as we know the fencing master Talhoffer included one of the earliest European astrological discursions in his 1459 fencing manual (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planets_in_astrology#History), nor was he by any means the last.

Sol was associated with fencers while mars was associated with robbers, killers and warfare. War was looked upon as evil but martial skill as a good. You can see the concepts displayed clearly in these plates from the Schloss Wolfegg Hausbuch

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/06/Hausbuch_Wolfegg_14r_Sol.jpg/373px-Hausbuch_Wolfegg_14r_Sol.jpg
Sol (note the fencers in the top of the plate)

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/ff/Hausbuch_Wolfegg_13r_Mars.jpg/358px-Hausbuch_Wolfegg_13r_Mars.jpg
Mars (note the death and mayhem of a village raid)

How literally they believed all that stuff is an entirely different question. I suspect from what I have read, in most cases - not very. Their sources for these ideas were from ancient Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Persian (and so forth) sources, whose theology they didn't necessary adhere to. But they saw the patterns did exist and were useful. I think part of understanding the medieval mind is that they tended to carry around a lot of 'provisional' ideas in their heads.

But while they may not have believed literally that the astrological nature of the salt of saint peter, brimstone, and charcoal combined in such a way as to make fire, they did know that following the pattern gave them gunpowder. And gunpowder go bang.

Similarly, they knew certain mystical patterns, which they could assign to Sol or Venus or Luna or whomever, allowed them to put together very nice swords. As HP Lovecraft said, you don't have to believe in Santa Claus to get Christmas presents on Dec 25.

G

Brother Oni

2013-06-30, 11:59 AM

One of the other interesting comments he made in the article is that people used the Halberd at close range by choking up and sort of punching with the business end, which is something I never heard of before.

I know you can do it with a spear, holding it with the head on the thumb side of the grip, turning it into essentially a big dagger. I would presume it would be the same way with a halberd.

As an aside, looking up some western halberd techniques videos, I'm quite surprised in that in some places, they're almost aikido-esque in joint and body manipulation: ARMA halberd techniques (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmNTKy8LJiY).

Galloglaich

2013-06-30, 02:46 PM

Yeah it's very similar to Aikido or Jujitsu, especially the Giocco Stretto / 'ringen' (grappling, with and without weapons) stuff

G

fusilier

2013-06-30, 08:55 PM

While they did assign various mystical qualities to particular numbers, it's not clear that they used it to influence sword design. The problem is just about every number has an association-- so whether or not that association was something the designer had in mind when the sword was designed, or something observed and assigned *after* the sword was designed is essentially unknowable.

Returning to the video: during the question and answer period, someone asks a question about scaling a sword to the customers size. During his response Johnsson first shows how the sword can be scaled geometrically, then he points out that if the customer doesn't like the ratio of hilt to blade, the designer can easily change the number of "circles" use to make it. That process would totally wreck any *predetermined* numerology going on with the sword design. Johnsson himself seems to imply that any mystical qualities associated with numbers and ratios would take a back seat to practical results.

fusilier

2013-06-30, 09:07 PM

One other thing I should mention, but it's kind of complicated, and I'm having trouble articulating it --

Briefly, Medieval, and even Renaissance thinkers, often talked about designing things from first principles, using numerology in their designs, etc., then seemed to generally ignore that in their actual constructions. This wasn't seen as a contradiction to them. Kepler, who determined that the planets travelled in elliptical orbits around the sun, also had a crazy theory about the planets involving nested shells and platonic solids. He never gave up on that theory.

fusilier

2013-06-30, 11:30 PM

Galloglaich

2013-06-30, 11:33 PM

That is what I was trying to get at upthread. I believe this kind of "provisional" thinking is the main thing that differentiates medieval, early-modern, and even pre-Christian / pagan European people from today. We live in a Cartesian world where people are taught to expect that everything has a precise value or quantity, every theory is either wrong or right, every question has a definitive answer. I think people back then were much more comfortable with contradictions, with the idea that theories were limited but still useful.

I mean, they had to be. They studied alchemy from Muslim sources, astronomy from pagan Greek (usually via Muslim) sources, rhetoric (from whence that Cartesian thinking eventually sprang) via Greek and Roman sources, and a lot of their numerology from Hebrew sources, Philosophy from a mixture of ancient pagan Greeks, Roman Christians and medieval scholars, and so on. For example, to learn medicine they studied Galen (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galen#Contributions_to_philosophy) (a Romanized 3rd Century Greek who believed in the Latin gods), Hippocrates (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippocrates) (a 5th Century BC pagan Greek), and Avicenna (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avicenna) (an 11th Century Muslim Persian). A nominally Christian man studying medicine in 14th Century Bologna or Krakow couldn't believe all these authors literally, these auctores, the authorities, who he or she was studying, and yet they (especially the so-called Scholastics) were trained to consider them all the experts from whom all the answers were derived. It's a built-in contradiction.

Those who studied Euclid were studying him in his original words. Epicurus, wildly popular in the middle ages originally included manners for holding orgies (a lot of this kind of stuff was edited out of the editions most commonly available today by the Jesuits in later centuries). They were passing around these ancient books like prizes. All the books were full of religious heresies, magic, superstition, the politics and ideology of another people in another age, and all their crazy ideas. But mixed in all that were threads of genius, and the genius of the medieval people was that they were able to figure all that out and double-down on it. If you have ever seen the artwork of the Renaissance Masters up close and personal, or if you ever had a chance to walk the streets of Venice, or Prague, or Strasbourg, or (and I know this is a bit more of a stretch but) if you've ever handled an authentic medieval sword, I think you know exactly what I mean.

G

Galloglaich

2013-06-30, 11:39 PM

G -- I agree what you're saying, but just to correct something, they didn't study Euclid in his original words; the translations (usually in Latin) were often flawed (I know with Euclid some poorly translated postulates caused some problems). ;-)

Also, they sometimes believed that all ancients were in agreement with each other and would come up with weird hybrid theories to attempt to explain away contradictions.

Yeah what I mean is, flawed translations or not, they read directly what he wrote, or tried to if they could, rather than summaries, interpretations or the 'cliff notes' version people often get today.

I think a lot of the convoluted theories which tried to synthesize what the ancients said into proper Christian orthodoxy of their time, was a sort of game played in the Universities, particularly the theological schools like Paris and Cologne, and despite the brilliant efforts by some of those theologians to fit that square peg into that round hole (Thomas Aquinas perhaps first among others), who contributed to certain academic trends (i.e. the Scholastics), they were obviously papering over a rather big hole. In the end it was the Franciscans (Roger Bacon, William of Ockham) and the Humanists who sort of won that debate in the long term, most of whom were much more enamored of the original sources than any more modern theological interpretations (in fact some of them openly advocated a return to the pagan religion of the ancient Greeks)

G

Autolykos

2013-07-01, 07:04 AM

We live in a Cartesian world where people are taught to expect that everything has a precise value or quantity, every theory is either wrong or right, every question has a definitive answer. I think people back then were much more comfortable with contradictions, with the idea that theories were limited but still useful.I can't really agree with this. Scientists and engineers still know that their models are, strictly speaking, "wrong". They are just getting more and more accurate with each new discovery, and in most cases they don't even use the most accurate model when an inaccurate one is good enough. If you want to build a bridge, you'll go with Newton mechanics, even though special relativity is the "more accurate" way to handle it. If you want to launch satellites, Newton isn't good enough, so you go all the way.
What scientists don't accept are straight contradictions, and rightfully so. If you use inaccurate models, you should know how inaccurate they are - and assigning a margin of error removes the contradiction between different models (if done right), but still lets the models make useful and verifiable predictions.
The question whether a definitive answer even exists is best left to philosophers. The Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics is a prime example of deciding not to answer this question - Feynman famously summarized it as "shut up and calculate!".

Yora

2013-07-01, 11:11 AM

Brother Oni

2013-07-01, 12:08 PM

How far a distance can a rider with a single horse cover in 8 hours, if he is not particularly exhausting the horse and keeps it at a pace they can maintain for several days. Assuming feeding and water is easily available along the way.

Is that 8 hours in a single go, or 8 hours spread over the day?

With frequent rests and good terrain, a horse can travel for 8 hours spread over the whole day, averaging between 3-8 mph (walking to trotting). 25-30 miles a day is usually regarded as a good day's distance.

With frequent horse changes and a hard pace, you can cover up to 100 miles a day - the Mongols were renown for this level of mobility and the modern day Tevis Cup (http://www.teviscup.org/) keeps up the tradition of endurance riding.

If you meant 8 hour stretches with no resting then the horse is likely to tire quickly after the first couple days and you'd cover significantly less distance.

Yora

2013-07-01, 12:26 PM

The 40 miles per day in D&D looked a bit fishy to me. But those were calculated based on the assumption that a horse has a walking speed more than twice of a human, which isn't actually the case.

But what's the deal with the endurance of horses? You can catch horses on foot by simply following them until they are too exhausted to continue fleeing, as humans can keep walking for much longer durations.
So does riding a horse actually make you faster on long distances, or is it just less tiresome for the rider than walking himself?

Brother Oni

2013-07-01, 01:27 PM

So does riding a horse actually make you faster on long distances, or is it just less tiresome for the rider than walking himself?

Less tiresome, but if you set the pace hard, you can travel a greater distance for the same amount of time.

The Mongols used several horses, changing out regularly to keep them all relatively fresh, so they could keep the same high pace throughout.

I know many cultures and/or organisations use relay stations with fresh horses so that riders or messengers can change their mounts then hurry on to the next waystation.

The Pony Express (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pony_express) had waystations set up every 10 miles as that was about as far as a horse could gallop (~30mph) before it tired.

The Romans had a similar system (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cursus_publicus) and there's apparently a map of their road system (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabula_Peutingeriana) along with their messenger changeover points, or stationes.

I'm not familiar with horse anatomy and their biology, so will need to do some research.

Edit: D'oh, I'm an idiot. The primary reason is apparently thermoregulation - horses have less surface area to volume ratio than humans and additionally generate greater heat when exerting themselves: link (http://www.atlanticriders.ca/Thermoregulation.htm).

TheStranger

2013-07-01, 01:36 PM

The big advantages to horses are that it's a lot easier on the rider, and that you can carry more stuff. I mean, if you give me the choice between walking 20 miles carrying 50 pounds of gear and riding that distance, I'll take the horse. If that's harder on the horse than it would be on me, I can live with that. And since I rarely walk 20 miles at a time, the horse is probably better at it than I am anyway.

Galloglaich

2013-07-01, 02:30 PM

Depends on the weather conditions, road and / or terrain conditions, and the gait. A horse which can do the ambling gait (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambling) (rare today) could sustain a pretty fast pace for a really long time.

G

Yora

2013-07-01, 02:40 PM

If I understood and remember it correctly, dogs are the only animals that can release heat through panting while they are running. Which makes them excelent hunting animals for humans, who are the only creatures that can release heat by sweating. Both humans and dogs and continue to move at a pretty decent speed until they are too tired or dehydrated, but any other big land animal is also limited by overheating.

Maybe that only becomes a serious issue on hot days and doesn't matter so much in more moderate or cool conditions.

Beleriphon

2013-07-01, 03:23 PM

Brother Oni

2013-07-01, 03:33 PM

If I understood and remember it correctly, dogs are the only animals that can release heat through panting while they are running. Which makes them excelent hunting animals for humans, who are the only creatures that can release heat by sweating.

Actually we can release heat by panting as well (take a look at runners on a cold day), plus by direct contact in the lungs.

Maybe that only becomes a serious issue on hot days and doesn't matter so much in more moderate or cool conditions.

I'd agree that the ability to dissipate heat becomes less important the cooler the climate, but given the general success of early Man, I'd say it was still of some importance.

Most primates can sweat, and so can dogs incidentally, it just happens to be inefficient due to limited sweat glands.

The significantly greater insulation by fur compared to humans would also be a factor in my opinion.

Ninjaxenomorph

2013-07-01, 04:21 PM

Hello! First time posting here. Not specifically for gaming, but trying to write fantasy is close enough, right?

Anyway, in my book I try to avoid the general unrealistic fantasy combat concepts as much as I can. For example, the main character is relatively unskilled in combat, so he uses lighter weapons such as a buckler and 1.5 foot sword (what D20ers might call a shortsword).

Even with a 'mage' in the party, the character who most represents high fantasy in the group of main characters is Naea, a Blood Templar. The Blood Templars are a militant order of monks. In addition to skill in combat, they require expertise in a nonmartial area, Naea's being landscaping. This means the order has the best weapons and armor on the planet. In addition to that, the armor is magically blessed to be lighter, stronger, make the wearer stronger, heal quickly, sustains the wearer, and go into a divine fury thing when injured enough. Also, because it is enchanted so, the armor tends to make the wearer almost a foot taller. And Naea is 7 feet tall unarmored.

So what I'm saying is, she's really, really, inhumanly strong, and she has access to the best smiths around, with virtually unlimited resources.

Her weapon I have had some trouble with her weapon. In my mind, she has always used a two-handed sword. I know that two handed swords had to be thin so they could bend when swung, otherwise the sword would break. However, given the abilities of smithing she has access to, I would think that her blade would be a little more fantastic.

I imagine that it would be a bit thicker and taper less, given her strength, and because I also want to have her use it as a sort of blunt weapon occasionally. Unlike most real big swords, it would also lack a ricasso and parrying hooks, but she would do a lot of half-sword thrusting and mordhau (is that right?). I have several questions: How long would this sword be for someone almost 8 feet tall, how much would the above qualities make someone groan, and how would such a weapon be carried? I'm thinking a mix of blade wrapping and leather straps to carry it across her back.

fusilier

2013-07-01, 05:58 PM

I imagine that it would be a bit thicker and taper less, given her strength, and because I also want to have her use it as a sort of blunt weapon occasionally. Unlike most real big swords, it would also lack a ricasso and parrying hooks, but she would do a lot of half-sword thrusting and mordhau (is that right?). I have several questions: How long would this sword be for someone almost 8 feet tall, how much would the above qualities make someone groan, and how would such a weapon be carried? I'm thinking a mix of blade wrapping and leather straps to carry it across her back.

A large blade could be slung on the back -- if you don't intend to draw it quickly, as you would have to unsling it, and then draw it.

German Landsknechts are often shown carrying their zweihander swords resting on their shoulders, kind of like carrying a musket. However, I have seen a drawing of a Landsknecht with a two handed sword on a belt, almost level across the back (at hip height). Oops, turned out it was a Swiss soldier --

http://warfare.uphero.com/Renaissance/09_Swiss.htm

(Scroll down to the woodcut drawing of six soldiers, and it is the 4th soldier from the left).

Galloglaich

2013-07-01, 06:03 PM

Did you say landscaping? Maybe she should use a shrubbery :)

(sorry)

G

warty goblin

2013-07-01, 08:44 PM

Did you say landscaping? Maybe she should use a shrubbery :)

(sorry)

G

When it comes to cutting evil down to size, I prefer enchanted hedge trimmers myself.

Putting the horticultural humor out to pasture for the moment and getting to the actual topic, as I recall the general conclusion we reached last time this came up was to just go with a big iron bar. At some point increasing the cutting potential of the weapon doesn't really do you much good; if it can cut the stuff it already would have. If it can't, you're better off using something built from the ground up to just break stuff.

Either that or forget the raw power, and use the extra strength, speed, lightness etc to make a very fast, precise weapon of unusual size that the magically enhanced fighter can wield like a lesser combatant handles a regular sized longsword. Fight smarter, not harder.

Mr Beer

2013-07-01, 10:35 PM

I mean, if you give me the choice between walking 20 miles carrying 50 pounds of gear and riding that distance, I'll take the horse. If that's harder on the horse than it would be on me, I can live with that.

This is completely logical and I suspect a good part of why horses were used. People may have been significantly fitter than modern day humans, that doesn't mean they viewed a 20 mile hike with particular relish.

Brother Oni

2013-07-02, 02:28 AM

When it comes to cutting evil down to size, I prefer enchanted hedge trimmers myself.

Power Word Ni also helps.

Putting the horticultural humor out to pasture for the moment and getting to the actual topic, as I recall the general conclusion we reached last time this came up was to just go with a big iron bar. At some point increasing the cutting potential of the weapon doesn't really do you much good; if it can cut the stuff it already would have. If it can't, you're better off using something built from the ground up to just break stuff.

The other problem I think we hit upon, was that if the strength was significantly superhuman, melee weaponry was pointless compared to throwing rocks really hard.
The armour would also have to enchance the durability of the wearer, else she's going to break bones whenever she connects with something at full strength.

Either that or forget the raw power, and use the extra strength, speed, lightness etc to make a very fast, precise weapon of unusual size that the magically enhanced fighter can wield like a lesser combatant handles a regular sized longsword. Fight smarter, not harder.

I agree that an extremely long weapon would be very useful here - from the last time I crunched some numbers, for two swordsmen performing the same swing in the same time, doubling the weapon length doubles the tip speed. Facing someone being able to handle a zweihander like a shortsword would be very intimidating.
As an aside, such a long weapon probably wouldn't be very sharp as it both wouldn't need to be, plus it limits the ability to use half-sword techniques (awkwardness of weapon length would still be an issue, regardless of the effective weight).

endoperez

2013-07-02, 04:31 AM

Just as an aside, the Blood Templar will need a shorter weapon too. The sword is going to be too big to be used indoors. Will he be lugging around two swords, or a sword and a spear/polearm of some sort? Or perhaps the short weapon would be a mace, for use against armored targets?

Edit:
Also, here's a really cool video of a guy practicing swordsmanship on his own, using ever bigger swords. The last one is already quite huge, though.
http://vimeo.com/14262468

Brother Oni

2013-07-02, 05:08 AM

Just as an aside, the Blood Templar will need a shorter weapon too. The sword is going to be too big to be used indoors.

Not if half-swording techniques are used. Bear in mind that she's 7 foot tall unarmoured, 8 with the armour, so you're essentially looking at a W40K Astartes in terms of size (although not quite as bulky).

http://images.wikia.com/warhammer40k/images/a/ae/SpaceMarineAnatomyPhilipGibbering.jpg
In any environment where she can move freely, the length of her sword is unlikely to be an issue and if it's too cramped for her then the length is going to be more useful as she starts using it like a spear instead.

I've just noticed that we've failed to answer the question asked - suppose we use a zweihander (1.8m) as a base for a 2m human, scaling it up to a ~2.5m human would make it 2.25m long, so nearly half a metre longer in length.

This would make it about the length of a medium spear or ~3/4 the length of a short pike, so I wouldn't be surprised if some spear or other polearm techniques showed up in her fighting style (in addition to the half swording). Mordhau techniques (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mordhau) are reportedly only tend to be used against armoured opponents or as a surprise tactic, but I don't have much knowledge of them.

Autolykos

2013-07-02, 06:38 AM

If you're half-swording a lot anyway, why not go even more in the polearm direction, and mount a regular long sword (or 2h sword) blade on top of a stick, either like a swordstaff (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swordstaff) or a nagamaki (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nagamaki). That is, if you want to go the elegant route.
If you want to do what's efficient with absurd strength levels, just take an oversized two-handed mace (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gada_(weapon)), and/or use iron cannon balls as throwing weapons.

Brother Oni

2013-07-02, 07:30 AM

If you're half-swording a lot anyway, why not go even more in the polearm direction, and mount a regular long sword (or 2h sword) blade on top of a stick, either like a swordstaff (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swordstaff) or a nagamaki (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nagamaki). That is, if you want to go the elegant route.

That's probably what I would do (plus I like using spears, staves and other long weapons :smallbiggrin:).

Ninjaxenomorph appears to have his heart set on a two-handed sword for his character though, so we're offering suggestions based on that.

Ninjaxenomorph

2013-07-02, 07:50 AM

Yep. 2-handed sword. Already have a pole arm user.

What I imagine the Blood Templars go for is basically overkill, since what they might be facing REQUIRES overkill sometimes. They might be quelling a civil war, or they might be fighting a bestial dragon offshoot.

One of the man foes I have are a hive-minded species, who have natural armor that is harder than diamond, yet can be sharper than obsidian. However, she uses the sword to knock them down when she cannot get a killing blow.

Also, she carries just the one weapon, and maybe a knife for utility. If she really needs a ranged weapon, as you said throwing rocks works quite well. If something gets too close for the sword, she just punches it.

I have thought about other members of Naea's order, and combining a shortspear/mace and shield is a popular set of equipment.

One of the other aspects of the world is the resident nonhuman race, the Umber Shades. I based them off Greek and Precolonial American civilizations. They prefer (and have to, in some cases) to use more primitive weaponry. That said, they do have metalworking. The most advanced subset of the race, who lives around an active, open volcano, are the few that wear heavier metal armor and use mostly-metal weapons. They do prefer to use forward-bladed weapons like kukris and falcatas, but I can see them also using more advanced macuahuitl.

Brother Oni

2013-07-02, 08:10 AM

One of the man foes I have are a hive-minded species, who have natural armor that is harder than diamond, yet can be sharper than obsidian. However, she uses the sword to knock them down when she cannot get a killing blow.

I'd hate to see the predator that natural armour was evolved to defend against.

Cutting weapons would also be one of the worst weapons to use, unless the blade was enchanted sufficiently to be able to actually cut the aforementioned armour. Blunt weapons would be ideal as their main damage is caused by kinetic energy into the softer underlying tissues.

Edit: As for overkill, crew served weapons like ballistae or mangonels (or your world's equivalent) or siege weaponry as the basic response to anything, would be a good start. Bonus marks if a Blood Paladin is capable of single-handedly carrying and operating a ballistae by themselves or use a 2,000lb draw siege crossbow as a personal sidearm.

Ninjaxenomorph

2013-07-02, 09:00 AM

I'd hate to see the predator that natural armour was evolved to defend against.

Aheheheheh.

The species in question, Atherites, are supposed to be a new thing, so nothing has really been designed to attack them. They are really wierd, existing partially in another dimension, and coming from space. What isn't carapace (anything on the body that would move) is shadowy morass that can be severed. Their whole bodies dissolve a few minutes after death and is reabsorbed into their collective.

I was thinking about having longbow Templars, which would basically mean a small-scale ballista.

One thing: this world doesn't have horses, or indeed any ungulates, and mounted combat is almost unheard of. Most travel is by foot or by boat, and there are beasts of burden, but they are mostly large capybara-like rodents. Would this make for an increase of infantry formations?

warty goblin

2013-07-02, 10:40 AM

I'd hate to see the predator that natural armour was evolved to defend against.

Cutting weapons would also be one of the worst weapons to use, unless the blade was enchanted sufficiently to be able to actually cut the aforementioned armour. Blunt weapons would be ideal as their main damage is caused by kinetic energy into the softer underlying tissues.

Diamond hardness isn't that big a problem for a weapon defeat. Hard things tend to be brittle, so wang 'em a good one upside the exoskeleton and they'll split.

Edit: As for overkill, crew served weapons like ballistae or mangonels (or your world's equivalent) or siege weaponry as the basic response to anything, would be a good start. Bonus marks if a Blood Paladin is capable of single-handedly carrying and operating a ballistae by themselves or use a 2,000lb draw siege crossbow as a personal sidearm.
Siege engines are heavy. Really, really heavy. Also large and awkward. Even at nine feet tall, your common or garden catapult is going to be two or three times the Blood Paladin's size easily, and made out of something dense like oak. Even if a single individual could haul the barmy thing - which I doubt - they'd also need to be able to assemble it. Unless your enemies like to give you a couple hours before launching their attack so you can hammer all the pegs into the holes, I don't think it's a particularly wise investment for a personnel-scale weapon.

What you want is a sling. Human powered and sized slings are damaging enough. With the extra oomph provided by a longer cord and heavier projectile, they'd be bloody murder. Plus they make an excellent fashion accessory.

Aheheheheh.

The species in question, Atherites, are supposed to be a new thing, so nothing has really been designed to attack them. They are really wierd, existing partially in another dimension, and coming from space. What isn't carapace (anything on the body that would move) is shadowy morass that can be severed. Their whole bodies dissolve a few minutes after death and is reabsorbed into their collective.

I think we have basically crossed that hard-to-define line where realism is a particularly important concern. The Rubicon of nitpicking if you will.

I was thinking about having longbow Templars, which would basically mean a small-scale ballista.
That said, because I love to nitpick, don't make 'em out of wood. I suspect that, tough as wood is, at the scale of a longbow for an eight foot tall super-human, the bow would simply tear apart with frightening regularity. Note that most ballista were powered not by flexible wooden arms, but essentially rigid ones compressing coils of horsehair or sinew. For a bow, I'd go with steel, since the sinew coil is probably not particularly easy to integrate into a handheld weapon.

One thing: this world doesn't have horses, or indeed any ungulates, and mounted combat is almost unheard of. Most travel is by foot or by boat, and there are beasts of burden, but they are mostly large capybara-like rodents. Would this make for an increase of infantry formations?
How else are people going to fight? Combat piggyback riding?