How the FUCK do you fight with one of these? They look cool but idk what is going on here.
Any hemafags or nerds know how? I want to attack my party with a bunch of khopesh wielding mummy jackalmen but I want to get the descriptions at least semi-right.
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>How the FUCK do you fight with one of these?
You swing it, ya dingus.
I assumed it's like a kind of swordaxe
Yes but HOW
Seriously OP, it's a sword. You use it like a sword. If you want to be more technical: curved blade means slashing, so...
>You swing it, ya dingus.
Found this for you
youtube.com
You swing it. It's an axe. The kind of axe the Pharaoh's best troops use, as opposed to the epsilon axe.
>bad for thrusting
>can't murderstroke thanks to its weird fucking blade
Why are ancient cultures so shit?
Swing it like an axe.
It's not a sword, it's an axe.
Become the axe.
My being a HEMAfag doesn't help much here since there is no record outside hieroglyph style wall carving to prove how they were used.
Mike Loades writes at some length about them in his book swords and swordsmens. Conjecturing that the obvious advantages of such a uniquely curved blade, Strength in the swing and depth of laceration from push and draw cuts is complimented by the fact it may have been useful to some extent for hooking at shields or limbs.
All we know is it was used as a predominantly cutting and chopping sword for a very long time.
>DUDE CHECK OUT MY DANK AF SWORD DESIGN LMAO
>Oh heck yeah, my dude, that's hella sick
Truly the worst of times
Another one.
youtube.com
Notice the use of the back of the blade as a hook to bind and deflect the opponent's sword. Neat trick.
With the sharp part towards the enemy.
Why can you not thrust with it?
>The mordhau meme
Gross. This is fast becoming the most overblown martial arts technique of the decade.
To be fair that's just a beat that would work with any sort of sword but yea it's much more effective with a Khopesh.
Because of the shape. The curve near the tip will bend or break if it meets any kind of resistance.
No. That's absurd. Even with bronze.
Stick them with the pointy end?
It's basically an axe
You chop with it.
It's a single-edged blade weighted towards the end; basically a militarized machete.
The primary way to use it is to chop downwards with the curved edge. You can stick your opponent with the point or catch their limbs/weapons with the hooked bits, but mostly you will be chopping.
>BEAT THE BLADE
HOOK THE LEG
>BEAT THE BLADE
HOOK THE LEG
>BEAT THE BLADE
HOOK THE LEG
>BEAT THE BLADE
HOOK THE LEG
>BEAT THE BLADE
HOOK THE LEG
They are supposed to be turned around to hook the enemy shiled and drag it off balance before striking again.
Follow that show on discovery channel about ancient weapons sometimes.
It's metal, not plastic. Even most plastics wouldn't break, it has to be cheap toy plastic to break just from that.
Pretty accurate.
You slash, cut, hack, and chop. Not so much stab.
You also use the hooked bit to pull down shields, like an ax.
Also also, the curve lets you make the blade longer without access to good metallurgy.
But at the end of the day, Khopesh are shotty unbalanced swords.
This weapon evolved from a fucking axe. It was used before people realised how to make swords, which isn't all that easy with basic copper hammering or primitive bronze making. The moment materials improved and so did craftsmanship, the khopesh was long outdated anyway.
Seriously, have you ever wondered how the FUCK someone build a penny-farthing? You know, the retarded bicycle with huge front wheel and tiny back one instead, you know, normal bike?
That's the same kind of shit.
Take one conscripted peasant.
Give him a weapon he's familiar with. A farming scythe.
Try to improve the weaponized scythe you've given him.
Get Khopesh.
>2000 BC
>Scythe
Please tell me you are baiting, and not for real stupid
Also
>Khopesh
>Scythe
It's a fucking axe, you nimrod.
Also
>Peasant in Bronze Age
>Metal tools
You know? You really must be baiting hard, because I simply deny a possibility someone could be so fucking dense.
Here's your (You)
You use both sides for different types of attacks - use the smooth convex side against flesh to slice, use the hooked weighted end to fuck up shields and puncture armor.
>Chopping weapon is bad at thrusting
>What that could possibly mean
Maybe that you are using it wrong?
Think of it as an axe with a sharpened handle most of the way down rather than a normal sword. It has a lot more weight/a different distribution of weight that gives it an axe-like center of gravity rather than sword-like, but it's basically a cool-looking war-axe (ie lighter than a woodcutting axe - it only needed to cut through meaty things and maybe leather or light platemail).
As with most survivals from 5000 years ago, it's likely that examples we have today from that period were primarily ceremonial, like the giant ass-fuck swords of Europe in the medieval period - there were two-handed greatswords that got used, but most of the super-comical examples were basically decorative.
>penny-farthing
I'm pretty sure they invented that as a labor-saving device, since it came after the Boneshaker, which was more or less bicycle-shaped; but there were numerous innovations prior to that which used the two-size wheel combo, because the larger wheels (on bike and trike) were the powered (person powered) wheels, and therefore the larger their circumference, the further you would travel on a single rotation of the pedals.
However the larger-wheeled varieties were largely favored by young men - with a thrillseeking attitude, since you're risking your fucking neck just getting on one of those deathbringers. Thrillseeking, lazy young men who didn't see why they should work harder to travel the same distance.
In fact the only reason they did it that way - gearing being fairly well understood by the early 1800s - seems to have been a problem of weight, expense and metallurgy needing time to catch up.
That's it. I'm sick of all this "Masterwork Leaf Sword" bullshit that's going on in the d20 system right now. Khopeshes deserve much better than that. Much, much better than that.
I should know what I'm talking about. I myself commissioned a genuine Khopesh in Egypt for $20,000 (that's about 240,000 greek pesos) and have been practicing with it for almost 2 years now. I can even cut slabs of copper with my Khopesh.
Egyptian smiths spend years working on a single Khopesh and fold it up to almost once to produce the finest blades known to mankind.
Khopesh are thrice as choppy as greek swords and thrice as long for that matter too. Anything a leaf sword can cut through, a khopesh can cut through better. I'm pretty sure a khopesh could easily bisect a hoplite wearing full greaves with a simple vertical chop.
Ever wonder why medieval Europe never bothered conquering Egypt? That's right, they were too scared to fight the disciplined charioteer and their khopesh of destruction. Even in World War I, australian soldiers targeted the men with the khopesh first because their killing power was feared and respected.
>seems to have been a problem of weight, expense and metallurgy needing time to catch up.
Apply this to the way how khopesh was made, designed and used and you have the anwer why it happend
Yes, I'm aware you are most likely not the original user asking the question about shit design
>Playing d20
>Amazed it's shit
It's your own, god-damn fault that you are playing bad game with awful mechanics.
I hope this is bait.
It's an axe, you use it like an axe.
This is why no one likes newfags.
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>How to derail a thread in one single step
my sides are in upper Egypt and the Nubian highlands
Best one I've seen in a long, long time.
I rode a modernized version of a penny farthing just around a car-park. Can confirm that it's fucking terrifying.
>has a lot more weight/a different distribution of weight that gives it an axe-like center of gravity rather than sword-like
I can't say I've seen any amount of data really worth a lot here, but for what it may be worth, in Skallagrim's review of Neil Burridge's budget khopesh the centre of mass appears to be just hilt-wards of the middle of the sword.
While that's proportionally at least very tip heavy for a sword, it'd also be decidedly ass heavy for an axe, and matches a Chinese dao (pic) I got to handle once. As such, while the khopesh seems to have evolved form an axe, the handling may have changed significantly during the evolutionary process. Evolved from does after all imply that it is no longer that.
Then again, the biggest issue here could easily be thinking that there's any one way that khopesh behave. They certainly don't all look the same.
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Y'all know what this thread needs?
Mechs with electro-khopeshes.
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>How do you fight with a chopping weapon
By chopping people down.
We're talking about fucking ancient egypt. If you had a sharp piece of metal back then, you were already better equipped than 90% or so than your potential enemies
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What's the difference between chop and slash?
when slashing you move the blade against something
when chopping you smash the blade into something
What's the difference between parallel and orthogonal?
You know what the worst part it?
People keep fucking calling it half swording. Which is its own thing. Really rumbles my jamborees.
hey KM, unrelated question: how much do you know about cossack shaska swords?
>tfw my PC uses a khopesh
Best sword stronk.
You use it like an axe with a hook. The outer edge is sharp, letting it chop.
There are all sorts of khopeshes, not just Egyptian ones, and they're all pretty much just axes that look like a variety of swords.
Fucking lurk, dipshit
Very little I'm afraid.
You dont know much about metal properties do you?
Its actually sharpened on both sides
>The curve near the tip will bend or break if it meets any kind of resistance.
Are you, like, not familiar with metallurgy or actual weapons at all? Because it takes a LOT to break metal, and it's designed this way to give the tip a little added heft as well as a hook to make it significantly more versatile, if not quite as outright lethal.
lurk more newfriend
Fucking reeeeeeeee
Any source on that? All the (sadly limited) material I have shows them as single edged when such can be determined.
The kopesh is what happens when a sabre and falchion have a baby
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CHOP
CHOP
CHOP
CHOP
CHOP
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>It was used before people realised how to make swords, which isn't all that easy with basic copper hammering or primitive bronze making.
You are aware that a Khopesh is an all-metal blade, and is essentially a angular sword?
How the hell is making a sharply angled sword like a Khopesh easier than a straight sword?
Furthermore, it ultimately is neither a sword nor an axe, but a hybridized version that has more heft than a sword, chopping power, and a hooked end like many axes, but is not as cumbersome as an axe and still enables its wielder to fence and thrust. While it's not AMAZING at the latter, it's still more than reasonably capable of doing it, while having more chopping power, a hook to pull legs, arms, and shields, and having a larger cutting surface.
Real-life tech and weapons do not develop linearly, nor is it a "rock-paper-scissors" contest of weapons. Hybrid weapons definitely had merits of their own in most cases.
Also, to run off on a slight tangent, while a weapon can be more or less optimised for slicing cuts or chopping ones, the realities of combat may make one possible to deliver but not the other. At such a point it'd be ill advised not to do damage in whatever way you can.
Also, while a straight chopping cut can certainly inflict a lot of harm, even with an axe a slight slicing component to the cut will make it bite much deeper. Correspondingly a slicing cut will probably not be quite parallel to the target either, working its way deeper into the target as the tissue is cut apart.
Not him, but I've physically seen one in the Museum of Natural History in Houston (no idea if it's still there) that was sharpened on both sides.
It's important to remember that while there broad characteristics that classified weapons, there were also a lot of personal touches and non-standard features depending on when they were made, where they were made, what they were made with, who made the weapon, and who the weapon was made for. Even "mass-produced" weapons could still have quite a bit of variance between them.
This should be the last with either in itself obvious edge geometry or illustrations showing it.
>and a hooked end like many axes
Even though I've posted some examples where that wasn't the case...
So not unheard of then at least, though seemingly rare.
that's very sad, because it seems like one of my friends have an original 1904 cossack shaska. Although it's not 100% sure and it isn't in perfect condition but the marks seems legit as far as I can tell. Hoped that you might know more about them
>Even though I've posted some examples where that wasn't the case...
It was an extremely common feature, though.
>How the hell is making a sharply angled sword like a Khopesh easier than a straight sword?
Daggers are simpler to make than Khopeshes. Swords are not.
Curving the blade gives you more leniency cooling it, which matters a lot if you aren't making something short.
>fold it up to almost once
I have a cracked rib user
don't do this to me
>tutankamen_smaller_khopesh_41cm.jpg
>tutankamen
Wouldn't you much rather post pics from the tomb of Psusennes the First?
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Bronze isn't heat-and-quench hardened like steel can be. Perhaps you could go for some grain refinement through rapid cooling during casting, but that's not the sensitive, temperamental process that quenching steel is.
We're also looking at quite short blades, and I don't really see how the curvature would help beyond hiding slight cosmetic flaws, but I suppose those bits are besides the point given the material.
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I had a 2e character who used it magnificently. Killed a hydra, helped kill a smaller red dragon, a bunch of asps, a whole lot of fire giants and some trolls. Sadly never got the killing blow on any drow in the game despite them showing up alongside the fire giants...
You're being silly on the internet
Are there any inscriptions on it?
How is it better than a falcata or a yatagan?
one one side there is a makers sign (I think)
A, A with a crown and a 4
On the other side there is '1904'
ehh, it's a 5 I just cannot into typing today
Can you post a photo of the whole shshka?
yep, although none of them is in great quality but all I have now.
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That's pretty righteous.
I always assumed you swung by aiming the interior curve at the baddies like a falcata
I personally doubt this weapon was used to hook limbs terribly often. Not enough of a hook to make that consistent in practice.
The unique shape of the curve probably has more to do with using the weapon in conjunction with a shield than any other consideration.
With that curve you can give your shield a second support on the rim without placing your hand near the shield itself which would endanger you if a javalin or arrow overpenetrated into your hand. This kind of bracing is important so that your shield isnt knocked around too much when catching arrows or sling shot which might expose your body to fire. Also it looks like a one handed weapon which lends some support to my theory.