How comes western weaponsmiths never invented katana?

>Did Japanese know something that Europeans didnt?
Japanese.

I wonder why katanas had that kind of guard and why they never hard cross-hilted guards....

They did. They were called sabers
>/thread.

>Did Japanese know something that Europeans didnt?
Actually, Europeans knew something that the Japanese didn't; How incredibly difficult it is to kill a man fully clad in plate armor using only a thin, light sword

>forgot pic

Probably because their swords were more curved like sabers. Most sabers and curved bladed don't have cross guards.
A better question is why no pommel?

>Probably because their swords were more curved like sabers. Most sabers and curved bladed don't have cross guards.

Good point, but is there any reason why a curved blade shouldn't have a cross hilt?

The Japanese had steel armor from early on. tachi (katana denotes the sword of the late medieval and early modern period) where perfectly suited to probing the gaps in Japanese armor armor
r

Hate to point the obvious, but sabers were one-handed weapons, which is quite a significant difference.... There were some curved two-handed swords used in Europe but they were much rarer.

Also the few curved two-handed swords that were used in Europe did have cross-guards, rather than saber like hilts.

The Japanese actaully did put cross guards on polearms like spears and naginata. As far as I know they never put them on swords though

>How incredibly difficult it is to kill a man fully clad in plate armor using only a thin, light sword

Katana is not thin, nor is is light for it is size. Not that big, heavy swords are any better against armour; Against armor you'd want your sword to be first and foremost rigid and pointy/narrow.

Europeans had something called SHIELDS

Katanas can be one handed user

Just as sabers can be two handed

I guess they didn't see the point in making a light curved blade(best for cutting) two handed.
Different needs for different circumstances. What is the point of OP's thread still?

the samurai's main weapon was the bow(while mounted, which is two handed,
so it makes sense that they'd use a two handed sword too, with one side for slashing(front) and the other for parrying(back). It would be a bit impractical for them to constantly carry around a shield or a pavise knowing this.

>It's bigger than I expected.

For thoust

Because a medieval katana literally breaks when blocked by any european sword...

Kek

A shitty one at that.

Katanas are literally spelled out as sabers in Chink Characters.

刀?

刀 (dao) means "weapon or tool with a single edged blade."

Kitchen knife is 刀
Saber is 刀
Katana is 刀
A polearm with a single edged blade is 刀

Yeah, and gladius means just "sword" in Latin, therefore gladiuses were in no way different from other swords.

Also see

>Since the Euros had access to decent quality steel, they never had to develop such intricate forging processes.

Folding had been out of use in Europe for centuries already when it found use in Japan.

Everyone says Japan had shitty iron
How did they extract and process it versus the European/Indian method?

My understanding is it was almost the same untill the invention of the blast furnace.

They had shitty iron ore, their steel was fine, tamahagane was fine, at least for the time period

It is folded a million times.

It's scarcity that's the problem...

They're on a tiny isolated island versus the entirety of Eurasia all engaged in cross-continental trade.

>Crafted from the finest pig iron

America plays chess Japan plays checkers. Squintys were busy taking our pawns with their edgy weapons until be took the entire board in one move.

Japan was never isolated. They traded with Eurasia all the time.

Cite.
Cite.

If you think katanas are significantly better than Eurasian contemporaries, you're a weeb. Indian and Middle Eastern smiths made better swords with better steel with better craftsmanship.

Go look up "longsword vs katana"
There are several videos, doesn't matter which one you choose. Bottom line is that a big hunk of sharpened steel does much better than a curved one folded a thousand times.

This. The good steel wasn't all that shitty, there was just very little of it and it took lots of labor.

I'm not that guy but being banned by the Church was a joke riffing off the crossbow ban of 1139

The Gladius Hispaniensis was different from other gladius'

This.

Japanese iron is perfectly fine - what was comparatively lacking was their smelting process. However, what comes out of a Japanese tatara oven isn't all that different from a European bloomery, and bloomery iron was used throughout the European middle ages well into the early modern period. Only few places fulfilled the logistic requirements of operating blast furnaces and oxidisation ovens which came up during the 13 - 15th century.

>Go look up "longsword vs katana"

Almost all those videos are terrible Most of them are just Hema guys ranting about katana fanboys

>Cite

Friday "Samurai, warfare and the State in Early medieval Japan".
Early samurai armor was made of overlapping steel and leather plates, later armor was made of steel like in this picture

One example of the use of the japanese sword against their own armor.
youtube.com/watch?v=8aeWU8CYl5M

Tunnistatud

Katana's actually did have a few significant technological advantages over European swords of a comparable time period, they are just unknown to both weeb and anti-weeb shitposters in these kinds of threads.

Where European swordmaking really suffered by comparison to Japanese is in terms of metallurgy. European swords often had pretty poor heat treatments and their hardness and microstructure were both typically too soft and grossly inconsistent.

By contrast, Japanese swordmakers developed a very effective forging and differential quenching process that allows for a much more consistent transformation to the desired steel microstructure (e.g. pearlite, martensite, bainite) in the intended regions of the blade, and a MUCH harder and more consistently hard cutting edge, often in the neighborhood of 60 Rockwell C in medieval katanas.

See:

myarmoury.com/feature_bladehardness.html

and

tameshigiri.ca/2014/01/21/razor-edged-3-comparing-metallurgy/

on the subject.

Its a pity the katana turned into a meme that people feel they have to react against

>Confusing go with checkers
holy fucking shit

Kek

What's even more terrible is that all the bs were most certainly made by people who know nothing about actual traditional japanese martial arts, japanese metallurgy, or actual historical japanese swords.
Most people in the koryu ''business'' that I have read, be them western or japanese are usually humble and ground-based people, they aren't the ones talking about "ultimate techniques that cant be blocked" or the katana being able to "cut through anything", quite the contrary really.

try and use a katana against steel armor and you'll see

You are saying that as if it never happened on a regular basis during the feudal period.
seeSwords were used in Europe against plate armor as well, just in both cases, it didn't involve bashing directly at the armor.
You make it sounds like experienced fighters could do nothing else but bash people on the armored part when they were faced with heavily clad opponents, that's just ridiculous.

>Where European swordmaking really suffered by comparison to Japanese is in terms of metallurgy.
In terms of metallurgy Europe and Japan were pretty much on par throughout the middle ages while during the late middle ages, European metallurgy surpassed what the Japanese had due to blast furnaces and oxidisation ovens allowing them to smelt high carbon steel in much greater quantities.

>By contrast, Japanese swordmakers developed a very effective forging and differential quenching process that allows for a much more consistent transformation to the desired steel microstructure (e.g. pearlite, martensite, bainite) in the intended regions of the blade [...]
Differential quenching has been known to Europe at least since the late antique.
The pic shows an Alemannic Sax from the 5th century. It was made from pattern welded bloomery iron and constructed in what the Japanese would call a kobuse construction. A carbon rich U-steel wraps around a more ductile core steel. The edge was then differentially hardened. On the right it can be seen in the state it was found, the left shows the blade after it was polished. It shows the same kind of visibly hardened edge you can find on katana.

>[...] and a MUCH harder and more consistently hard cutting edge, often in the neighborhood of 60 Rockwell C in medieval katanas.
To which extent a hard edge is beneficial to a sword is questionable since excessive hardness may not be a property you want - a sword is not a razor, it needs to withstand the stresses of impact in combat. The process of tempering specifically reduces tensions in the material and European smiths experimented a lot in terms of differential quenching and tempering techniques, using damp sand or oil, for the specific purpose of achieving a differential distribution of hardness throughout their blades and reducing the overall stress. Swords of the Islamic world were not hardened to a comparable extent either.

Here, another example of differential quenching from the late Roman period. A spatha with a differentially hardened tip, as the difference in corrosion indicates.

Not him, I have heard of this but was under the impression that it was not used universally or consistently

>Totally ignores experimental data showing the as tested hardness and microstructure of a variety of European swords shows that the heat treats appear to have been done by blind spider monkeys.
>Posts a bunch of unsourced specatulive nonsense without zero testing data to back it up.

Yes, yes, please tell me how a sword randomly varying from 20-55 HRC at varying points was evidence of well developed heat treatment protocols (that was the 15th-16th C European blade).

Also, more important than the 60 HTC cutting edge is that the Japanese swordsmiths were able to consistently achieve the intended result (hardness and microstructure) on the intended portion of the blade, while all the European blades tested had their hardness and microstructure vary ar random.

Not the guy you are replying too but differential heating and slack quenching can make hardness vary over the length of the blade. Hopefully resulting in a harder edge with a softer core.

>katana vs long sword
Why do they always compare to art-blades following late sword smithing practices where the sword was a primarily status symbol and dueling weapon. I know reproductions are this way because as wall hangers, art-blades are more aesthetic.

Just quenching the tip is very different from Japanese differential quenching. It's just as likely that when they had the blade in the smith's tong's, they only submerged the tip as a matter of convenience. You normally don't drop the entire blade into the quenching medium.

We called them sscimitars, falchions, and later sabres. Curved sword are not something unique of Japan, arabs have curved swords too. Personally I prefer European straight sword, because they are more multipurpouse (you could use the grip as a mace), also you could stab without problems and penetrate armor. Katanas in the other hand is perfect for slashing enemies without metal armor.

The European swords tested were not differentially heat treated deliberately, they were merely heat treated poorly, typically being under-hardened, and very unevenly hardened.

Again, if you read the sources I posted, a large number of European blades from a variety of periods were tested, and the vast majority showed fairly poor heat trearments.

On the other hand, the Japanese swords tested show much more consistent hardness numbers for each section of the blade, and actually achieved a fine grained martensite dominant microstructure in the cutting edge.

But it was just the tip
Just for a minute
Just to see how it feels [spoiler]stabbed into the heart of a savage[/spoiler].

I didn't read anything in this thread I just scrolled to the bottom.

Veeky Forums has been kinda shitty lately so I can't be bothered to plough through all this endless shitposting. I know myarmory and it was actually Johnson who talked about the differential hardening in another thread.

Because they has better iron. Katana is designed to overcome the technical limitations of japan's very poor quality ores. Europoors had better ores and could design a more useful sword

Also the Kriegsmesser is similar in form but not forging.

...

It was used fairly consistently. It's not like this was some super secret technology to make undefeatable blades. It's more that the base material has some limitations and this kind of technology allows you to circumvent some of them.

The data you've shown on the Japanese blade is taken from a paper from 2009 based on the Muramasa 2nd, which you declare 'average' here; a highly revered Japanese blade from one of their most competent sword smiths. And you're comparing it to data taken from a few random European swords. Had you taken your research a bit further, you could have found on that very website a better example of European heat treatment:

>The carbon content of the tempered exterior ranged between .6 – .7, making this a fairly high carbon steel. The core contained only .1 – .3% carbon, reinforcing the softness of the core steel. This would have resulted in a flexible blade with excellent cutting edges.

>Hardness tests were made on the blade section removed for destructive testing. Exterior / edge hardness rated between 450 and 504 Vickers (46-48 Rockwell C). The interior core tested at 142-151, again showing a much milder steel.

>The researchers interpreted the above information to mean the blade was likely forged from one piece of relatively soft iron, roughly carbonized to improve its quality, with the exterior subjected to further carbonation and tempering.

>It was likely heated to around 900-950 degrees Celsius, then quenched in wet sand or oil, which allowed the exterior to harden significantly while leaving a softer core. This form of forging has been known in Europe since the early middle ages, and was very popular in late Medieval Europe. In the hands of an expert smith, this was a fairly simple method of production which resulted in excellent quality swords.

tameshigiri.ca/2014/07/09/background-and-metallurgical-analysis-of-a-ducal-renaissance-blade-from-raciborz/

It is an early form of differential quenching. People discovered that different parts of the blades should have a differing degree of hardness and they discovered how to achieve it. A more refined method can be seen in .

Refer to .

weebs BTFO

In addition to and it should be mentioned again that excessive hardness may not necessarily be a desirable property. The fact that Muramasa chose to make the edge that hard does not necessarily mean that it was generally a good idea. Swords in Europe and in the Islamic world weren't hardened to a comparable degree either.

>It is an early form of differential quenching.
No it isn't. That's like saying because they didn't stick the tang of blades into the quenching medium that all blades are deferentially hardened.

It is differentially quenched in the sense of just quenching a specific part of the blade for the purpose of giving it a differing amount of hardness relative to the rest of the blade. A more elaborate (5th century) example can be seen in .

Which does not necessarily mean that it was excessive or undesirable.

No, I'm merely challenging the claim of: harder = better.

Because that's what she said.

delete this

Would they also have discovered toilets given enough time?

I actually think the Japanese blades are prettier if that's what your going for

I was talking about the quality of the blade. I read that pattern welded viking swords were of the highest quality swords in existence before blast furnaces took over.
However this is not my expertise, so maybe someone can tell me if i've been memed or not.

>tfw you will never own a bona fide Damascus steel sword, the only swords in history that deserve their legendary reputation

I'd always be a bit cautious when it comes to claims like 'highest quality in existence'. I don't see what would set them apart from Japanese swords since they were essentially made from a comparable base material and the forging techniques applied comparable strategies of overcoming the material's shortcomings. Based on material alone, the crucible steels of Afghanistan and India were likely the 'best' material to work with throughout the middle ages, however, they've recently found comparable material in the Netherlands from the late-antique, so it's questionable whether it was truly exclusive to them. Not to mention that there's no guarantee that weapons made from it would automatically surpass pattern welded weapons made from bloomery iron, or Japanese weapons for that matter since a lot of other factors are at play here.

...

Why would you expect the one European sword listed on that page, which did appear to at least have a decent heat treat, to outweigh the twenty European swords tested in the source I cited?

I would have been happy to look at and refer to additional data points regarding hardness testing and microstructure analysis of katanas, so please do share if you happen to have any.

For that matter, why do you refuse to understand that my point about the cutting edge of the tested katana was not that it was 60 HRC per se, but rather that the heat treat protocol was able to achieve the desired high hardness, martensite dominant, fine grained micro structure so effectively.

My inclination is to believe that the Japanese swordsmithing approach to quenching with painted on clay to control cooling rate enabled a much more granular control of the quenching process than oil or wet sand.

To be honest, when I first started to see the data on hardness and microstructure testing of medieval European swords, I was blown away by how inconsistent and soft they were.

>fine grained micro structure
I'm not this guy, but if you know a thing about metallurgy, it means tough and sharp. Big grain structure means not tough, even if the metal is not hard. Hardness is not the only determinant of brittleness.

If I pulled that off, would you die?

>Why would you expect the one European sword listed on that page, which did appear to at least have a decent heat treat, to outweigh the twenty European swords tested in the source I cited?
Why would a singular weapon made by the highly revered Masamune be representative of the average Japanese sword? Your whole idea of what these weapons are like is based on that singular analysis of that particular weapon from 2009, while your data on the European weapons is murky at best since none of the examples was taken a look at in comparable detail. We know barely anything about the tested weapons from that article. Where were they found? Whom did they belong to? What state were they in when they were found. It should be considered that plenty of findings - very much unlike many katana - weren't kept in temples and cared for to a great detail, but they were found in tombs, enclosed in riverbeds, etc. - very often with severely corroded edges. If I can easily point you to a random weapon belonging to a European prince that was given an elaborate heat treatment it should be enough to make you reassess your idea about these weapons.

>I would have been happy to look at and refer to additional data points regarding hardness testing and microstructure analysis of katanas, so please do share if you happen to have any.
I have seen two papers on the subject, one is an analysis from WW2 on a Japanese officer's katana conducted by the US military, another is the paper from 2009 cited in your article. In particular I'd be interested in Sengoku Jidai weapons, i.e. swords from a time period when they were actually used.

continued
>For that matter, why do you refuse to understand that my point about the cutting edge of the tested katana was not that it was 60 HRC per se, but rather that the heat treat protocol was able to achieve the desired high hardness, martensite dominant, fine grained micro structure so effectively.
The major question is whether it was a desirable property at all, since neither Europe nor the Islamic world desired a comparable hardness in their weapons apparently, and they saw their fair share of battles. And it's not like they were unaware of how to harden their weapons and in terms of carbon content there are plenty of weapons that surpass the Masamune, especially the crucible steel used in the Middle East.

>My inclination is to believe that the Japanese swordsmithing approach to quenching with painted on clay to control cooling rate enabled a much more granular control of the quenching process than oil or wet sand.
I disagree there since in that particular example I posted you can see a fairly 'granular' control of the quenching process, with the end result being a flexible weapon. The fact that they didn't overdo it with the hardness might as well be their deliberate intention.

Damascus has big carbides. Carbides are hard and fragile. It means you have to make the supporting iron matrix soft and flexible. Damascus steel gets it's sharpness from the big coarse grain carbides.

That's an unproven hypothesis stated in a paper by the TU Dresden based on their analysis of 18th century Sabres.

They looked at the weapons under the premise that they were supposedly special and then thought about why they were considered special and came up with that idea that it might have something to do with some sort of 'medieval nano technology'. There is no evidence whether that is actually the case though. Fact is that you can find such structure within the slowly cooled crucible steel cakes but whether they actually do anything in regards to the cutting properties of the weapon is lacking evidence at this point.

Instead of blindly buying into the hype and trying to find an explanation for it they should have been questioning the hype and putting the material to the test.

By 'unproven' hypothesis I obviously meant that there's no supporting evidence. Obviously a hypothesis is not 'proven' but supported by evidence or contradicted by it.

You're insane. Steel has carbides. What separates steel from iron is the carbon content. Carbon forms carbides. Carbides are the obvious answer to patterns in steel when no pattern welding takes place. You don't see it so much anymore because modern metallurgy has focused on uniform carbide distribution and you don't get big long interconnected chains of carbides. Carbides aren't fucking nanotubes. Modern tool steels that we can now control the composition of with precision are alloyed with the intention of forming carbides. You literally don't know a thing about metallurgy except what papers on swords say. Carbides are not voodoo science. The method used that resulted in banded patterns of carbides is a mystery. You are literally engaging in nuh-uh-ism when you know nothing about the topic.

like everything else europe created

How about you provide some evidence for the macrostructures found in Damascus steel contributing to a blade's cutting properties then instead of talking out of your ass?

Not to mention that the process of making Damascus steel is not a mystery. While the exact recipe (and there were likely many) is unknown the general idea of how to create something structurally similar enough is well known.