Realistically, and I'm looking at you HEMA fags...

Realistically, and I'm looking at you HEMA fags, why couldn't my character just crash and slam my sword down on a knight's helmet during a duel in order to kill him? even if the blade won't fucking dent the armor?

I mean, if you put on a helmet onto your head, then hit yourself with a blunt sword:

1) Your head will still hurt.
2) Your neck will be fucking thrashed because the neck supports the head, and absorbs impact.

If you that over and over again eventually you'll a) coma; b) die. We can all accept this is fact.

Why am I getting called stupid for doing exactly that in a game?

> warhammers be expensive m8

Other urls found in this thread:

youtube.com/watch?v=rO2nM_2iBXA
youtube.com/watch?v=osTQrJ_axfc
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mordhau_(weaponry)
youtu.be/PFikXfAxVwU
twitter.com/NSFWRedditGif

Not a HEMA fag, just a guy.
The other guy is actively trying to not let you do that by dodging and blocking. It's tiring and leaves you open. If you sword`n board to not leave yourself open, you can't crash through a block anyways.

This actually why pommels exist, to slam into knights armor like a warhammer.

Because helmet designs are made to deflect pointy and sharp weapons, and thus remove most of the force by way of redirection.
Add to that the fact that a trained fighter in armor won't just stand there and let you get "that perfect shot", which'll be infinitely harder to pull off with a sword.
Plus, a sword is a long, thin surface to spread force over, meaning it has a harder time connecting meaningfully as opposed to the more concentrated striking face of a warhammer or similar weapon - try striking a bowling ball with a ruler, and you'll see what I mean.
Besides, the armor you see, i.e., the plate, usually has at least one layer of padding under it, and probably more, as do the rest of the head-and-neck region, quilted doublets and gambesons and similar things I've heard my HEMA nerd friends speak of, which would cushion the blow, and combine that with the guy in the armor maneuvering to use his armor as a shield, a sword is a pathetically bad weapon against someone in armor, at least if you're using the blade and not either halfswording the point into a gap, or Mordhauing.
But you're not gonna accept this answer, are you.

Because swords aren't that heavy, and you're using the lighter part of the weapon to strike with. Zweihanders, for example, weighed 7 pounds at most. Sure, you could kill someone with a gym weight of that much with blunt force, but all the weight is spread out over 4-5 feet, so it's easy to say a longsword (which weighs four pounds at heaviest) won't be doing much better. Swords are designed to flex a little bit, so it's likely that it will bend away from the chance to put a dent in armor.

Plus, if you have a GM that likes fun, you can fluff your attacks however you want, so your meathead barbarian can use a sword to club in heads if you wants, realism be damned.

This is a great idea, but it needs to be done with a mace or pick-type weapon, which implies tradeoffs elsewhere.

An arming sword weighs about as much as an unloaded 1911 pistol and the weight is mostly concentrated in the hilt. They're cutting weapons, not crowbars.
You can grab the sword by the blade and hit him with the hilt or guide the point through a gap in the armor, but bashing with the blade simply does not provide the necessary force to hurt and kill someone properly wearing a helmet (with suspension and padding) in a timely manner.

Half-swording?

...

>realistically

i believe the reason you can't do this is that the other guy is armed and will kill you if you get close enough to try. the whole point of a weapon three to five feet long is that you can attack the guy without having to get your fist immediately above his skull. getting that close to someone who's reasonably well armed is NOT REALISTIC. he'll fucking kill you.

...

Realistically, and I'm looking at you Amerifags, why couldn't my character just crash and slam cannonballs down on an Abram's front armour during a duel in order to kill it? even if the shots won't fucking dent the armor?

I mean, if you put on a tank onto your head, then hit yourself with a blunt cannonball:

1) Your head will still hurt.
2) Your neck will be fucking thrashed because the neck supports the head, and absorbs weight.

If you that over and over again eventually you'll a) pancake; b) die. We can all accept this is fact.

Why am I getting called stupid for doing exactly that in a game?

> HEAT be expensive m8

Can't you just shoot the knight with a gun?

...

...

You would, if you could. Mordhau technique, pic related. The guy using the sharp end but holding the blade halfway down is 'halfswording' which is another anti-armour technique.
Nails it.
Good alternative strat. Even the guys at the Wallace collection believe that proof-marks were caused by half charges of powder. Though you would still need a decent hit to penetrate plate with a musket until pretty late on.

It's for balancing the weapon.

...

youtube.com/watch?v=rO2nM_2iBXA

youtube.com/watch?v=osTQrJ_axfc

lol what is this shit

Its from Berserk, I think? Not a very realistic or good, in my opinion manga/ anime.

I will fucking death strike you to death

Helmets commonly had leather, hide, quilted cloth, or other padding inside of them. This, along with a chinstrap or fasteners held the helmet firmly in place to reduce concussive force against the knights head.

In addition, the shape and style of most but not all helmets are made to deflect force. You'd probably need a heavier weapon with a flatter striking surface than a sword to be more effective.

Weapons made to combat armor were larger, more blunt and able to deliver more force. In a pinch, you may be able to 'half sword' and strike with the flat, or guard/ pommel of the weapon to deal damage but you'd get more leverage using your armored elbow or knee.

Honestly, you'd be better off attempting to stab someone while half swording, or buying a war pick, punching dagger, or other heavy piercing weapon made to fight against armor. Or similarly, implementing techniques in order to slip your weapon into the gaps in your opponents armor.

TL;DR Yes, your strategy works, but its shitty and doesn't work well. Get a better weapon faggot.

>not good

There's ordinary wrong, and then there's pioneers like you who are discovering entire new continents of how to be wrong.

It's very badly paced.

How?

Try to read it chapter by chapter and not by the hiatus. The release schedule’s the problem, not the pacing itself.

Spoilers. I don't like high fantasy.
Demons, supernatural curses, city destroying beings with powers that can obliterate an army. and a guy who wields a sword that realistically couldn't be used in combat. It breaks my suspension of disbelief and ruins it for me.

It's both. For a lot of weapons, speaking of the pommel as a counterweight can be misleading, as it acts more as an ergonomic feature to stay in your hand, whereas most of the balancing is done by varying the shape and thickness of the blade, keeping the overall weight low. The pommel does still act as a counterweight, but less so than one might think. On a lot of shorter/cut-centered swords, pommels are often hollow, so they look way heavier than they actually are. Then again, for nimble swords, like rapiers, the pommel does act as a counterweight, just because it's impractical to get the right balance by changing the blade (without making everything stupidly heavy). One might argue that the pommel was not "made" for pummeling people with, but just ended up being used for that, not that it matters.

TL;DR: It depends on the sword, but generally both.

Man, I need to replay Armies of Exigo.

> Even the guys at the Wallace collection believe that proof-marks were caused by half charges of powder
That's not always the case. If a bright guy was going shopping for armour, he'd bring his own gun and test the thing himself. Armourer Colombo of Brescia (1574) complains.
>Of course my armour failed - when my patron used an inch charge of powder!

If you can't handle curses or supernatural creatures, what kind of fantasy do you like? Even most low-fantasy affairs have something resembling that.

Interesting!

this is how weebs justify their ridiculous armour to themselves "oh you don't need it, it doesn't work".

>guy who wields a sword that realistically couldn't be used in combat. It breaks my suspension of disbelief


Oh god, it's you, the biggest faggot on Veeky Forums.

Because helmets were shock resistant? Have you ever played football?
>he hasn't played football

Don't bring up this retarded shit again. There is no situation where you would ever need to do this, it is literally ancient trolling for retards.

>Multiple writers across different countries, decades and centuries all decided that the murder-stroke was the most hilarious ebin troll of all time.
Not buying it.

>muh half swording
If you think this is a "technique" that should be practiced, you're an idiot. It's a desperation move that requires no talent to pull off. Why would you ever present the hilt of your sword to your opponent. Unless you literally picked it up off the ground like that and smashed the guy out of desperation, you wouldnt do anything to him that you can't accomplish while holding the sword correctly, or by grabbing the Fucking morning star hanging off your belt and just using that.

Not that unlikely. Weapons regularly broke or were lost during battles. People carried multiple weapons because of that.

HEMA, ACL/HMB, and SCA fag here.
Next year, I will have been doing this for half my life. My dad, for three decades. Hardwood and rattan batons. Blunt steel swords, polearms etc. I will grant you that our maces and axes are slightly under weight, but still pretty brutal.

Armour works. Thats why we wear it. If you smack me in the helm with a sword, you literally won't do shit to me except scuff the surface. I know this, because this is my weeked almost every week.

>1) Your head will still hurt.
Nope. Mine is padded using historic materials at that. You can hit me all day. People do it anyways.

>2) Your neck will be fucking thrashed because the neck supports the head, and absorbs impact.
The head and body is not stationary, nor is a proper helmet going to allow full energy transference. Helms developed glancing surfaces for a reason.

>If you that over and over again eventually you'll a) coma; b) die. We can all accept this is fact.

Except no. If you're using mass area impact distribution, such as football and hockey impact, then you're using the wrong physics. You're also missing the most important safety feature of a metal helmet, being its mass and thick padding. Compare my helmet to an ultra light, minimum padding football helmet, and you'll understand.

>Why am I getting called stupid for doing exactly that in a game
Because you think you're smarter than you are.

>Its you, the hero of kvatch.
You sound like an npc. The biggest faggot on all of Veeky Forums is that one guy who makes trashy elf threads.

Let me rephrase. Curses are fine, mental illness as a theme is fine (PTSD in this case), hell even small magical miracles are cool. But remember the giant skeleton knight with the weapon made of faces, or the huge worms that could overtake a town, those things and a guy who can kill them feels like I'm just watching the author jerk himself off to a power fantasy.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mordhau_(weaponry)

Not that user, but while it may not have been made expressly for the purpose of bludgeoning, later sword designs, especially in the Germanic regions, were built with techniques such as seen in the link in mind.

literally
>pshhh nothin personal, m'lord
the anime

great answer.

Unless you use...a bigger and pointier sword.

>Why am I getting called stupid for doing exactly that in a game?
Go watch some IMCF footage where people hit the shit out of each other across the head repeatedly, then tell us it's a good idea.

youtu.be/PFikXfAxVwU

good luck concussing someone with that.

Bohurtfag here. Seconding this statement. My helmet weighs close to 10 times the weight of a hockey helmet, and is significantly better padded.

So it's not ancient trolling for retards after all?
The murder-stroke is found in many books by many different writers. How so, if it was ineffective and endangered the user's life?
And even the way it is described is not indicative of a desperate situation: the directions and instructions given can be rather elaborate. Here's De Arte Athletica by Paulus Hector Mair:
>In this device you do as follows: stand with your left foot forward and hold your sword outstretched towards your opponent with the left hand on the point. Let go of the hilt with the right hand and move it to the left and strike a death blow to the opponent's head with the cross and pommel.
There are even instructions on how to counter the strike if your opponent tries it and on how to perform the move from another direction.

you sure pwned his fatuous ass

Who said anything about concussions?
This sword is optimized to fight against plate armor. All thrust, no cuts.

>Buhurt is love. Buhurt is life

Guts is nowhere near the same tier as the Skeleton Knight, and Guts only defeated the Sea God thanks to the combined efforts of his entire party alongside the power of cursed life-threatening armor.

And, somewhere in this power fantasy, you managed to forget that Guts routinely gets the shit beaten out of him, and the only reason he isn't dead is because he has a magical healing pixie dust and a number of allies that he depends upon.

Yes, Guts is awesome, and yes, Guts is a power fantasy capable of far more than any ordinary human, but to act like it's just an author jerking off to a Mary Sue is forgetting that this is a guy who loses often, and one of the major arcs of the story is him overcoming the vast insecurities and psychological trauma that he's endured through an over-the-top miserable existence.

This isn't some Nobel Literature prize winning material, but your attempt to handwave it away has rendered you truly the biggest faggot on Veeky Forums, all because you don't like big swords and you need to try and justify that to yourself somehow.

Sarcasm? He's completely right.

I'm a fan, but I actually agree with you. I think it's actually a common problem in High Fantasy: the conflict is so incredibly far removed from the normal people of the setting it's hard to buy.
I do like the armour designs, though.

What helmet is that meant to be? It reminds me of some cross between a milanese armet and pic related.

Which is exactly NOT what the OP had suggested.

no, not sarcasm. :) sorry for confusing you there. i agree that he's quite right, and i was expressing my approbation.

You're wrong on both assumptions. A properly padded helmet (which any professional is going to be wearing) is going to take care of the vast majority of the impact. You might, at best, stun them.

Their neck will be fine. Do you have any idea how strong neck muscles are? I didn't think so.

If you want to do significant stunning or deadly blows on a helmeted foe, get a pick, a hammer, or do a murderstroke with a longsword.

> I think it's actually a common problem in High Fantasy: the conflict is so incredibly far removed from the normal people of the setting it's hard to buy.

This isn't a problem with High Fantasy, this a problem with your brain. Not everyone's brain mind you, specifically you and your tard brain.

Even take a look at Lord of the Rings. It's not just a single narrative, but a complex series of multiple storylines being told at once, with different people with different levels of power and ability all working towards a single goal.

You don't care less for Frodo's plight and struggles just because Gandalf is busy getting his ass beat by Saruman. At least, you shouldn't.

I like big swords, don't get me wrong. But they aren't effective for combat being that big.

Also, yes, Gets has magical plot armor. In a good story, he'd be dead. Very, very dead. But that's ok because although Guts is a well thought out character, plot armor is shit. And just to piss you off more; Game of thrones is a better fantasy story.

Armor in Berserk is amazing. The artist is fucking phenomenal, and honestly I wish more people knew how to draw armor like that.

as far as it being removed from real people, yes. That really sums up my problem, thank you.

>Violently hugging each other in armour

It's actually an amalgamation of several pieces, and slightly optimised for modern sport requirements.

I was talking about something else entirely.
Basically, my point was that the huge magical powers of High Fantasy ("High" as in "With lots of explicit Magic", where I wouldn't classify LotR) often create a plot where the main characters are imbued with hugely inhuman amounts of power.
These heroes obviously need enemies that have similar power levels, causing the plot to become extremely high-stakes and overblown.
And in such a plot it is very hard to connect to the normal people of the setting.

You have brain damage. Have you seen the doctor about your brain damage? I'm concerned for your mental well being. Because of your brain damage.

Maybe you should find someone to relate to and stop obsessing over fantasies, like someone else, who has similar brain damage and can't relate to reality. They can help you live with your brain damage. You could start a brain damage support group for people who have brain damage, from being hit with realistic weapons.

>I was talking about something else entirely.
You're talking about having a deficit of imagination to connect with people that have different circumstances than you. That's borderline sociopathic, and at the very least describes you as unempathetic.

Thanks for confirming that you're the worst faggot on Veeky Forums. Put on a trip already so people know to avoid your autistic ass.

Faggot, I posted the reason you were fucking wrong. Just like I posted why you're wrong about your shitty high fantasy. This is my trip, and you is (are) wrong. I'm not the only person telling you that you're wrong. But you're not socially inclined enough to understand that.

>Faggot, I posted the reason you were fucking wrong.

Nuh uh.
And with that alone, I have a more convincing argument that your ensuing faggotry.

Of course it's harder to connect to people who can swing about gigantic swords and shoot fireballs than to those who can't - but that's not at the crux of the matter.
The existence of magical superheroes and the focus on only them necessarily dehumanizes the "normal" characters and makes their struggles seem insignificant. It's very hard to care about the lives of unremarkable individuals after you've just seen physical gods get bifurcated. This manifests even in Berserk, despite its quality: can you say with a clear conscience that the adventures of Rickert, Isidro and Luca are as remarkable or interesting as those of Guts, Griffith and Ganishka?

/Thread

>can you say with a clear conscience that the adventures of Rickert, Isidro and Luca are as remarkable or interesting as those of Guts, Griffith and Ganishka?
Yes, but you are the one doing a disservice by trying to compare characters with a different focus, different goals and a place in the story, as though it is somehow a competition.

>I like big swords, don't get me wrong. But they aren't effective for combat being that big.

When fighting the monsters he does, it is. That's the whole point.

>Also, yes, Gets has magical plot armor. In a good story, he'd be dead. Very, very dead.

In a good story, which it is, what keeps him alive is laid out and explained and follows the logic of the story. And, please, you making a fool of yourself is hardly pissing anyone off.

>Armor in Berserk is amazing.

Most of the Armor in Berserk was copied from the movie Excalibur because Miura didn't have any actually decent reference materials. It's well drawn, but the only reason to praise it is the amount of detail that he puts into everything.

It's amazing how you're even an idiot when you're trying to praise the work.

>That really sums up my problem, thank you.

You having severe autism? Shouldn't your handler keep you away from the internet?

For your helmet shit.
Because I know you're retarded enough to be the op.

Also, as far as fantasy goes. Its not good because its over the top. If you sat down and realized that, maybe you'd be able to relate to characters who were more realistic instead of being drawn to characterizing yourself with characters who are walking cliches.

The place in the story they have is a poor one. The scope has vastly grown from the Golden Age days. When your main character is battling demons and the fate of empires are at stake, it's not time to shift the focus back onto an innkeeper or a kid samurai.
This would be a bad writing in any story, but it's especially egregious when the stakes have grown as high as they do in High Fantasy.

>can you say with a clear conscience
>Ganishka
>Isidro

Isidro is a far more interesting character than Ganishka. Easily.

One is a crazy demon king that turns into a tree. Impressive, but he's more of a feature of the setting than an actual character, and Isidro has proven himself over and over again to be one of the most engaging and entertaining characters post Eclipse.

Big swords don't slay big monsters. Otherwise we'd use 7.62 as a standard round. Bigger does not equal better.

Plot armor is the reason he is alive. It is literal plot armor. That is the explanation. Its a shit explanation too.

I'm not praising the how well drawn it is. I'm praising how realistic it is. There are two kinds of people in this world. People who can extrapolate from the data given.

>Autismo being used.
Godwin's law.

> Most of the Armor in Berserk was copied from the movie Excalibur
Any sauce on this? One can clearly see that he's taken inspiration from actual armour and techniques.

A character is more than their job title.

Luca is a genuinely likable character that might not have any special fighting talents or magical arts, but still performed heroic and clever acts even when the major action of the story involved the physical incarnation a pseudo-deity. She helped the reader to explore and understand the "normal people" and to actually care for them, and to show that even though world-altering events are happening, ordinary concerns don't disappear and in fact are dramatically affected by the more cosmic struggle.

We're literally talking about a character to help autists like you, and you're going out of your way to say "No, I have SEVERE autism."

A character is more than their job title, true - they are also the actors within a plot and persons with their own desires, virtues and vices.
But characters like Luca have little to no agency within the plot because they lack the capacity - and their personalities are, by necessity, not as fleshed-out and compelling as those of the main characters of the story.

>Big swords don't slay big monsters.

Yes. Yes, they do.

>Otherwise we'd use 7.62 as a standard round. Bigger does not equal better.

Do you know what the term "elephant gun" describes?

>Plot armor is the reason he is alive. It is literal plot armor. That is the explanation. Its a shit explanation too.

No, that's not true at all. And, the literal "plot armor", the berserk armor, is offensive in nature and nearly killed him, and would have if it were not for Flora and Shierke interevening. Basically, the reason Guts survived so long is thanks to him being strong enough to attract strong allies, and to be hurting so bad that he attracted sympathetic allies as well.
Stop going out of your way to show how dumb you are already.

>I'm not praising the how well drawn it is. I'm praising how realistic it is.

Seriously, I just explained the armor style is based on a Hollywood movie and is nowhere near realistic. It's well drawn in the comic because everything is well drawn, but it source material is highly stylized and distinctly unrealistic. It was made of cheap aluminum and looked that way.

If you don't want to be called an autist, don't reveal yourself to be one.

The armour in the comic is usually fairly realistic and doesn't even look like anything in Excalibur. What's your source on this?

You're presenting a hypothetical while citing a character that undermines your entire argument.

Luca's intelligence and sensitivity are what allowed her to alter important parts of the story. Her capacity is not to be measured by how strong or magically talented she is, but by how far her strength of will and wisdom can carry her.

She was one of the lynchpins that kept the refugee camp from exploding in upon itself, and helped protect Casca while gathering information that ultimately helped Guts take down Mozgus. She also the one who helped sparked the compassion in the Egg Apostle that made him become the incubator of the demon child, which may be one of the most pivotal, if understated, moments in the series, which we're still only now discovering the ultimate effects of.

You don't measure a character's capacity by the size of their sword.

Also, she's not a main character, not because she's physically/magically weak, but because there's enough main characters already.

>But characters like Luca have little to no agency within the plot because they lack the capacity - their personalities are, by necessity, not as fleshed-out and compelling as those of the main characters of the story.

This is why you are really an idiot. The most fleshed-out and compelling of the main characters, outside of Guts, are some of the least "capable" members of his party. For a fair part of the story, Farnese was a powerless figurehead that had no good aspects aside from her appearance and her family. Then, she managed to take a step up after the conviction arc and turn into a glorified babysitter. And, despite being barely able to fend off a goblin by herself, she was still one of the most compelling, fleshed out characters, even while Guts was teaming up with the Skull Knight to battle a physical incarnation of Slan.

The early armor in the series all comes from a time when there was no internet and Miura was a poor assistant with no time to do proper research since he was too busy drawing. Later on he accumulated more references (an enormous amount now), but for the early volumes his major reference source for armor and other aspects of fantasy medieval life was just an Excalibur Design Book.

I'm trying to track down the exact interview, but there's a lot to sift through, and most of my search results are just people referencing that interview rather than the interview itself.

I did find one passage in an Italian interview with him that does help translate some of his feelings about it being a fantasy world.

"Naturally it is not the true Middle Ages, but a bogus image, recreated, of Europe of the age, that collects a great success today in a oriental country like Japan. Probably, the samurai or the ninja drawn from a westerner will appear strange to our Japanese eyes ,but perhaps the same medioeval world of Berserk appears strange to the westerners, is it not so? Rather, I am been surprised of the acceptance received from Berserk, not by the public of modern Japanese which it was addressed, but by the readers of the place in which the history is carried out, that is Europe and in particular Italy..."

That's not half swording you dumbass. That's murderstroke/Mordahu grip. Half swording is holding the blade with your other hand half way up the sword to get more control over the tip.

>Implying your strike would transfer all of its momentum to the neck, instead of simply sliding/bouncing off
>Implying that even if you did catch it at a good angle, the force would be transferred into the neck directly, and not into the various supports for the helmet and the padding lining the head/neck
>Implying you could effectively strike down from above with the pommel without completely opening yourself up

That is assuming you use the pommel. The crossguard would be a much better idea, but that is an actual well-documented historical technique, so I assume you're not asking why people didn't do that. And if you mean strike with the blade...

>Implying the blade wouldn't vibrate like crazy due to the impact, with the armour being fine, being specifically designed to reflect this shit
>Implying you wouldn't end up denting/bending the blade otherwise
>Implying you're not just blunting it
>Implying it wouldn't open you completely up
>Same deal with the actual force of the impact

user, try even doing it with a motorcycle helmet. You'll soon find hitting yourself over the head is doing precisely diddly squat, because headgear designed specifically for protecting the head tends to do a pretty good job of it. Wearing a helmet is not like putting a pot on your head, a motorcycle helmet would be significantly less protective and absorbent than good late renaissance armour.

Yes, that's kind of most of the point of the story.
Guts leads an exciting and dramatic life, but he's fucking miserable. He has severe mental illness, he has survivor's guilt, ptsd, he's prone to extreme outbursts of rage and hates opening himself up to people. He's an anime action hero, sure, but every "power" comes at a cost. He got a cool gun arm, but at the cost of his flesh one, which he's often shown longing for, he's depicted as naked and vulnerable without his metal arm. He's got a huge sword, but that's at the cost of a fucked up childhood where he had to swing swords since he was 4, starting with the longsword. He's got magical armour, but it's slowly killing him, he's ageing prematurely, he's losing his colour vision and the feeling in his extremities, he's dying slowly, and is often seem wishing for the type of life normal people lead.

Rickert is the goal. Rickert is emotionally balanced, and can see the greater picture. He'll fucking slap griffith and hate him for what he's done, but he won't dedicate his life to revenge. And that's what guts has spend the last 20 years trying to be. Normal, balanced. Being an anime action hero is fucking suffering.
And that's what makes you care about the regular people, because berserk regularly throws them into the story. We had Jill in lost children, the prostitutes in conviction, the fucking old man and his daughter in chapter 2, everyone in golden age, and so on. Guts' current party is made of nothing but ordinary people, and they're the emotional core of the series, the series makes you care for them because of how they contrast with the main characters. The lives of all of these people can be just as engaging as Guts' without the magic and demons and angels and all that, and he needs to let that go if he's to become well.

Of course, this all is being wrapped up now that Guts got off the boat, got over killing griffith, and has healed casca's mind

What is the most aesthetic medieval helmet?

From Migration period to pre renaissance.

You're all missing out two commonly overlooked features. A pommel changes the vibrational mode of a sword and affects the position of percussion point.

The vibrational mode substantially affects stresses in the sword on impact both by changing the mass and the length of the wave. I'm too lazy to look up the figures or the pictures but the position of maximum magnitude of shockwaves (as measured by von Mises stresses) changes as different sizes of pommel are applied. Where possible it's desirable to avoid these stresses being near the transition between blade and tang since that's already a stress concentrator. The size of the stresss are comparable to the ultimate strength of steel (which is in the low to mid hundreds of MPa and up to low GPa) which is indicative that they can cause the metal to fail.

Centre of percussion will markedly change the stresses felt on the hand at impact. Lack of a pommel can move the CoP beyond the end of the sword which is undesirable. Different swords will be affected by this differently but it can easily be 10 to 20 cm on arming swords and this really affects the way the sword feels and how well it transfers energy to the target.

Other things that people sometimes forget to mention about swords that have pommels. They help keep the grip on the tang, they stop the hand sliding off and can protect the hand if doing a pommel strike.

Swords aren't very heavy. When you spread the impact all over the helmet, it's kind of like hitting someone with a small pillow over and over. Sure it could get tiresome, but it will no way in hell murder someone. One-handed swords simply lack the brute force of a club or mace, because they're designed to CUT.

Thats fucking dope, bruh.

>Their neck will be fine. Do you have any idea how strong neck muscles are? I didn't think so.

Not OP:

Yes, I do.

Neck muscles do not help in a compression of the spine. They work by getting shorter which is exactly what happens in a compression such as when the head is hit downwards.

They aren't strong enough or fast enough to resist lateral forces from an impact by a sword, mace, bat etc. If neck muscles were that strong no one would ever get whiplash in car accidents.

>Neck muscles do not help in a compression of the spine. They work by getting shorter which is exactly what happens in a compression such as when the head is hit downwards.

You have no idea how medieval combat works, do you? Blows coming directly down on the head, like hammering in a tent peg, are incredibly rare, being dangerous and exposing to the user, and not very effective against an active target.

This is one of those universal constants that you find throughout martial art systems globally.

Yes, smashing a man's head with a baseball bat would be terrible. Its really unlikely that it will happen in an active fight. Blows are more effective from a diagonal quadrant.

Oi, well put, Grope.

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>Why would you ever present the hilt of your sword to your opponent.
Because you want to attack your opponent with that end?

>But they aren't effective for combat being that big.
>literally called too big to be a sword, too rough and a giant hunk of iron
>protagonist explicitly uses it because he’s hunting enemies who take cannons to reliably stop

Not that user but bigger weapons do better against these enemies with sheer mass alone. We don’t use 7.62 for many logistical reasons & the fact that a rifle doesn’t fire artillery.

>Mordhauing
Why not carry a warhammer instead then if you know you are facing armored opponents?

Because I’m too rich for that. Pole arms for me.

I mean, if you had the option, yes, but you the lowly footsoldier wouldn't necessarily know what foe you were facing, nor would you like lugging around a pile of weapons "for every occasion". That technique was primarily invented to deal with platemail armour in the period before maces were widely adopted. Late-era plate rendered the sword completely obsolete. That didn't mean you never had to fight a plate mail opponent with your sword; thus this method was developed to turn your sword into a functioning, albeit not perfect, mace.

Warhammer and mace are short weapons, mainly used on horseback by armored warriors against other armored warriors riding horses. Mordhau is technique used on foot.