How could a person survive a blow with the flail on the head? No helm

Magic, bitches.
To be precise, magical shielding.

Is that real?

Glancing blow. Scrapes their skin badly but doesn't catch. They lose brain cells but don't die.

Blow with no power to it. The enemy wielding the flail slams it into the wall, and the guy tries to attack. Enemy pulls it out and catches the guy on the head on the backswing but it's not going at full force.

Flail is being swung underwater.

Person is using magic.

Person is undead.

Flail is made of papier-mache.

Person is wolverine.

>chain hits
>skull caves

I don't know much about physics and shit, but something doesn't seem right.

People have survived worse injuries, but those are probably birth defects.

Depends on how fast the flail's head is moving. Either way, flails are fake.
How could a person survive a trip to the iron maiden? No armor.

Afro?

>How could a person survive a trip to the iron maiden? No armor.

be really dehydrated so you don't leak when you're peirced.
be too skinny to get poked by the spikes
be covered in dimples exactly positioned to accept all the spikes into them without causing damage.

What if you are fat?

You're rich in dem times

glancing blow only rattles brain

sauce

Then your CON bonus to HP means you'll survive for a few more rounds.

have you ever been hit with a chain? to the head? Certain chains are heavy as fuck, thats why Veeky Forumsizens wear them around the waist and do dips

You can survive, almost fully functional, with half a brain.
The vast majority of "you" is on the side of the brain opposite you dominant hand (i.e. the side of the brain that controls your dominant hand).
On an interesting side-note, it's well documented that people with damaged corpus callosum (the connection between the two halves of the brain) have had the non-dominant half of their body act methodically, but independently of their dominant half.
On another interesting side-note, the side of your brain that controls your dominant hand is also the side of your brain that controls your mouth (left half of the brain for right-handed people, right half for lefties).

this. you're the guy hiring people to dodge spikes and hobgoblins.

black mirror

episode in question is how a woman utterly fails to appreciate a robo-husbandu replacement of her dead husband

a skull malformed in just the right way to catch the flail without damage on cushiony folds of scar tissue

What's the ideal length of the chain and handle? And why are some flails called morningstars?

Te occidam!

The morningstar, as I understood it was a mace or flail with the spiky ball for a head.

...

>What's the ideal length of the chain and handle?

Flails are fucking stupid and were barely used in history.

I'm sorry, I can't hear you over using dirty peasants to destroy everyone so hard people refused to fight me anymore.

I also can't hear you over the drums they made out of my skin.

>fuck Popes
>Fuck the Germans too

Well fuck you too then.

>When you wonder how would history have changed if Joan hadn't been captured and instead got destroyed by the Hussites

1. They have enough HP so it just bounces off (if you're using meat points) or it doesn't actually fully hit them in the head (thematic HP).
2. The flail just barely clipped the forehead, bounding off the thick bone and causing a concussion at minimum.
3. The person is wolverine or someone with metal bones.
4. The person is someone with supernatural durability.
5. The person swinging the flail fucked up and hit them with the handle part.
6. The flail wasn't going that fast.
7. The flail is made out of very light materials or very fragile materials.
8. The person is knocked unconscious and would die shortly after from internal bleeding, but the cleric cast cure critical wounds so he recovers.

Glorious French tears, Bohemia would still be exhausted after the wars and still may have fallen under the sway of Austria

You should be able to grip it in a place where it hand strike your hands (after rebounding funny, or whatever else might happen).
c

You'll notice the slight lag. The head of the flail swings around and impacts the back of the skull, which is also why that's the area that most noticeably deforms.

>And why are some flails called morningstars?
Just a confusion in terminology.

Morningstars are wooden clubs with metal spikes in the head.

Getting hit with a solid shot with a flail or morning star without a helmet (And usually with one too) is going to take you out of the fight, even if it doesn't kill you. Basic physics dictate at the very least, you'll you'll be concussed, and will most likely suffer a depressed cranial fracture with internal hemorrhaging. And that is just a hardwood head. If we add metal banding, spikes etc, you're in even worse shape.

That said, they are not accurate weapons, and not ever a first choice. Even peasants would take spears and polarms when they could.

Ball and chain flail never existed and is stupid before you're going to rip your own arm off the first time you miss, or hit yourself in the chest with it and die.

Actual flail was the above posted long stick with a cylindrical doodad on the end, and is a repurposed farming implement. Nunchuks are the same thing.

>Ball and chain flail never existed

Unfortunately, you're wrong. We have plenty of documentation and extant examples.

Bellifortis of Konrad Kyeser, MS.1360

Depends on the grain being flailed - you use long chains with heavier grains like wheet, while using smaller flails with rice.

Also, according to wikipedia the only legal way to harvest wild rice in missouri is in a canoe using a traditional wooden rice flail.

>Ball and chain flail never existed and is stupid
Meme-tier history, on par with 20-pound blunt-club euro swords, and razor sharp katanas.

>And why are some flails called morningstars?
A ball with pointy bits looks like the common graphical interpretation of the sun, or the "morning star".

Why does "ye olde art" look so bad? Were they more so like rush drops to get across the point that made them look that way? Or were the people drawing them just not adept at art?

Please tell me you aren't really this dumb. Please, user. I couldn't take it if even Veeky Forums had fallen so low.

Tell me, you fuck! Tell me you're just memeing.

>THERE IS NO HISTORICAL RECORD OF FLAILS BEING USED IN COMBAT

>why were automobiles in the 1800s so slow and shitty? were they just rush jobs to get something on the roads that made them that way? or were the people making them just inept mechanics?

Yes, and no. Maybe I'm just overthinking it. Pardon me for my ignorance.

Are you that insecure that katana existence as one of the strongest slashing weapon trigger you?

I seriously want to challenge this man to an academic debate, followed by judicial combat.

>the only legal way to harvest wild rice in missouri is in a canoe using a traditional wooden rice flail.
T h e U n i o n W a s B e h i n d T h i s

are those guys getting ambushed while removing or donning armor? suck.

I have the sudden urge to play Jade empire

depends on where it hits and how hard. if it doesn't cave in the skull right at the crown or the temple or another plate joint the blow itself would technically glance off though at varying degrees and they wouldn't take the full force of the swing. The jaw would also be survivable but obviously unavoidably painful and bone crushing.

the chain impacting it's what did it, the chain hit, laid over, and when the ball came down it pulled the chain taught and into the skull, like a rubberband sting but with several pounds of solid metal doing the stinging and the full momentum of the moving ball end doing the snapping

You've got his name and it's easy to find out the general area he lives in.
It wouldn't be hard to look up his address and phone number.

Logged in to upvote this.

They hadn't invented perspective yet.
Also the goal was to illustrate important story points, not to make accurate 1:1 representations of real life.

You're thinking of Egyptian art. European art didn't place great value on details, but it wasn't trying to be symbolic and abstract.

The chain hit which compressed the ballistics gel at the base, then the ball swung around

I don't think there's an exact science, but good rule of thumb is 'not long enough to hit your hand or easily whack yourself in the face with.' So always shorter than your handle, half the length probably being the safest maximum you could get.

Technically that's not fully true - Egyptian art wasn't even focused on telling a story as much as it was preserving a record, usually of a person and their deeds. And their art was stiff and strict because they were concerned about keeping to a rigorous form - they show with art of animals that they can easily create art of things from life that actually look realistic.

It depends somewhat on the medium or reason behind it, but usually medieval European art was religious in nature, and was like the other user said, mainly just to illustrate important story points - or even to actually be abstract. I remember there was a sect of monks that put great emphasis on carving and painting their churches with all sorts of exotic and out-there designs, with fantastical beasts and scrollwork. And there was some other group of monks that absolutely hated that shit and went out of their way to make things plain as possible, saying the other guys were distracting themselves from God.

Perspective had existed in Roman times, especially in wall frescos or carvings, but the knowledge behind it had been lost/wasn't considered as important due to changing artistic traditions (influence from Celts, 'simplification' of Roman art in the later years of the empire due to costs, etc). It wasn't until about the 13th century that you really start seeing it again in Italy in paints in churches.

damn carl insulting my glorious plumes

"art" as we know it didn't existed back then, at that time art was only meant to illustrate something, so all they cared for when drawing was that it was just enought to be understandable with the right explanation, those illustrations are not meant to be seen alone, they always come with some text or where used by someone to explain some idea/tell some story

his neck mussels were too weak

Time for a real life story.

A schoolmate of mine was one of the weirdest people I've ever met. Not in a nerdy way, but actually one of a kind in a fucked up way. He was seemingly unable to experience any emotions at all except for different shades of happiness and bliss. Got a bad mark? Put on a huge smile. Accidentally hit his head on an iron bar? Break into jolly laughter. He was also extremely destructive, like a four year old kid. Anything he got his hands on, he needed to fiddle with, which usually resulted in damage of some sort. And finally, he was an utter psychopath. He never felt the slightest bit of remorse for all the destruction he caused and all the pain he casually inflicted on people. When others demanded some sort of an apology, he laughed and patted them on the back.

Unsurprisingly, he was extremely into historical reenactment. Not the faggy kind where you put a lot of work into creating historically accurate renaissance costumes and prance around in them. No, he liked the kind of reenactment where you dress in crudely cobbled together historically inaccurate armour and beat the shit out of each other with blunt swords.

So, on his first day in a reenactment club, he walked in and immediately saw a spiky ball flail just like in OP's picture. Needless to say, he instantly grabbed it and tried swinging it around. The guy who gave him a guided tour around the facility was understandably a bit shocked. He asked my schoolmate to put the combat flail back and offered him a training flail which used a tennis ball stuffed with sand as a replacement for the spiky ball. But my schoolmate casually dismissed him and continued to swing the flail around with growing confidence. The guide could not even take the weapon back by force, because he was afraid to approach a flail swinging maniac. But this didn't save him, as my classmate accidentally bashed him in the head anyway, giving him a bad concussion.

He went on to become a dentist, by the way.

Pretty sure the French would just bulldozer right over Bohemia. Don't fuck with the medieval French. They wreck everyone.

Because the pictures you're referring to were drawn not by professional artists, but by monks.

what happened to them?

Except angry Swiss cow herders. Those are the French kryptonite.

nigga just get some extra HP. A flail does just 1d8 damage, go to the gym, grow up some levels

I remember that there was some research in our HEMA group about flail techniques, but it was pretty hard because all the manuals were like
>pic 1.: two guys standing in some pose
>pic 2.: one guy is on the ground with a bleeding head wound

So step 1.5 is ???

Those paintings are about as historically accurate as action movies.

Not saying you are wrong, just thought I'd point it out.

Action movies still tend to feature prop guns that are modeled after the real ones.

Mah nigga.

Right, but going by that standard, you'd think the Pancor Jackhammer was a common weapon.

>incoming angry Lindy Beige rant

Monks who drew those old drawings are just like the modern anime industry. Meaning it's full of people who have no idea how anatomy works or the outside world in general.

I think those are political cartoons.

>Implying these aren't all memes that were slowly circulating the great parchment-net, manually penned by the tiny segment of society that had the ability, the time, and the sick desire to do it.
>Basically Veeky Forums

Pretty much all of these images have very strong and obvious allegorical subtext.

If only, I've had a hardon for that since fallout 2.

Because the pictures in question are FUCKING TINY. Manuscript miniatures are in fact, fucking miniscule and made with primitive pens and inks that make detail a pain in the ass. That said, there is plenty of good high medieval art.

He's actually right. To my knowledge there is no surviving flail discovered in a battlefield dig-site.

I'll never understand why they choose such ridiculous facial expressions in these things.

Humor. Monks and the later professional artist were a raunchy and bored bunch with little free time from the consuming nature of their job. For example if a monk cocked up a letter while writing, he would then draw a figure using a crane to drop the right letter over the wrong one, while another man dragged the wrong letter away.

It's not humour, it's more or less a faithful rendition from the Romance of Alexander. It was pretty weird.

>Don't fuck with the medieval French. They wreck everyone.
>a wild Edward The Black Prince appears

>Flail is so robust that no one using them ever died in medieval warfare

Amazing.

erase time

And the Hussites perfected a style of warfare that was effective at murdering stupid angry assholes trying to bulldoze over them.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Golden_Spurs
>everyone

>inb4 the French won the war
It's still no excuse for losing against flemish farmers

/thread. Use your goddamn imagination OP.

He can survive the blow if the flail sucks

>They lost one battle, what a huge shame
Reminder that Crecy was only lost after 15 charges, and that the french cavalry was actually doing frontal charges on swiss pikes at Marignano. Meanwhile the english could barely handle a bunch of border scottish bandits.

>2017
>Still thinks the right/left brain hypothesis is supported by science

don't even fucking say it