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curved it is (lemmy.world)
submitted 13 hours ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[-] [email protected] 3 points 2 hours ago

Real swords have curves 😤

[-] [email protected] 10 points 5 hours ago

"What does Katana mean?"

"It means Japanese sword"

  • Samurai Cop
[-] [email protected] 3 points 5 hours ago

Fucking legendary

[-] [email protected] 1 points 3 hours ago

any kriegsmesser homies out there?

[-] [email protected] 13 points 6 hours ago

Hey, have you seen those Japanese? They have curved swords. Curved... Swords...!

[-] [email protected] 1 points 1 hour ago

Psst... hail Sithis.

[-] [email protected] 6 points 4 hours ago

Persians absolutely malding right now.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 3 hours ago

They look cool, but give me a Toledo sabre any day

[-] [email protected] 5 points 7 hours ago

To be fair it is sharp enough to cut through atoms and space time destroying the fabric of reality allowing you to turn back time to the Big Bang and reshape the universe in your image.

[-] [email protected] 39 points 12 hours ago

Have you seen those warriors from Hammerfell? They've got curved swords.

[-] [email protected] 5 points 9 hours ago
[-] [email protected] 15 points 11 hours ago

Curved! Swords!

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[-] [email protected] 8 points 9 hours ago

Well it's no 1896 pattern light cavalry saber...

[-] [email protected] 1 points 30 minutes ago

As far as swords go, the gladius is still the goat.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 7 hours ago

InFeRiOr ErOpEaN WeApOnS!1

[-] [email protected] 0 points 3 hours ago

Why not both.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 6 hours ago

Althoigh this sword\katana discourse is all known at that point, I can't help myself but adding rapier at the western side to spice things up.

Would rapier\katana comparison work better?

[-] [email protected] 2 points 6 hours ago

Rapiers are a tad more modern, but there is a parallel in how they were a bit of a status symbol and often used for less "normal warfare" scenarios.

[-] [email protected] 13 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago)

Sword but very curved and yet not very famous (Ethiopian shotel)

[-] [email protected] 4 points 4 hours ago

Pretty famous among FromSoft fans.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 49 minutes ago

Dex build rejoice

[-] [email protected] 0 points 4 hours ago

Well i'm not one of them.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago)

This looks more like a scythe that doubles as a weapon to me

[-] [email protected] 5 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago)

It was probably inspired by Egyptian khopesh since it was used in Ethiopia even before the kingdom of Axum. Thing is, the blade is sharp on both sides. So you could either use its inner side as big sickle to reach around enemy shield and try for the weak spots like neck, face or armpits, or if the enemy didn't had a shield you could turn it to outer side and in this case it was similar to Persian shamshir in being excellent weapon against unarmored opponents.

Two more interesting thing about it was 1: the designs varies greatly, most were shorter and wider, the curvature also varied; and 2: it apparently worked quite well considering it has been in use for possibly over 2500 years and some Ethiopian emperors even organised special elite units wielding it.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 2 hours ago

Isn't a khopesh sharp on the other side of the curve from a shotel, though? It seems like sharpening the inside was the big innovation that makes shotels distinctive

[-] [email protected] 2 points 7 hours ago

Just how long is that? I struggle to calculate it from what I see.

[-] [email protected] 4 points 6 hours ago

Blade is around 1 meter long.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago)
[-] [email protected] 4 points 5 hours ago

It do looks longer than it is because of proportions. It's very thin and the handle is pretty short compared to European blades because the blade is also very light so it don't need much counterweight.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago)

Probably the round thing (a shield?) fooled us both. For me it looked like a two-hander.

[-] [email protected] 25 points 12 hours ago

While you were out there whacking your straight stick, I spent years studying the blade...

Katana snaps in half after first swing

[-] [email protected] 12 points 12 hours ago

The whole "Japanese steel was really weak" thing is as much of a myth as the whole "katanas are super powerful superior weapons" thing.

They're all just swords, and don't make that much of a difference either way.

[-] [email protected] 5 points 5 hours ago

Yeah, Japanese steel wasn’t great, but they were working with what they had available at the time. Katanas were basically made out of iron dust, which had been melted into slag by filtering through charcoal. The resulting chunks of steel were basically straight up slag, not nice even ingots. So the steel they got was actually extremely high carbon in places, but that also meant it was brittle as hell, because those carbon pockets were prone to shattering.

So the folding was invented, to even out the steel’s carbon content (just like how a Damascus steel blade has visible stripes, Japanese steel had invisible stripes of high and low carbon steel) and to lower the carbon content overall; Every time you heat for another fold, you’re evaporating some carbon. So the folding process took the steel from extremely high carbon pockets to a more evenly distributed carbon content.

Now that modern steel processing exists, the only real reason to stick to the folding method is tradition. There’s no need to fold modern steel ingots because they’re already homogenous and can be produced at whatever carbon level you want.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 43 minutes ago

Now that modern steel processing exists, the only real reason to stick to the folding method is tradition.

And looks. Those folding create a wavy pattern on the blade which is desirable feature for collector.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 1 hour ago

There is still benefit to hot forging the steel to refine and align the microstructure, but it doesn’t have to be many folds.

[-] [email protected] 3 points 5 hours ago

Impurities are melted into slag. Not the iron. That's what slag is.

[-] [email protected] 8 points 8 hours ago

According to whom?

The reason why Japanese iron is inferior is because of the source of the iron itself, they utilized iron sand instead of rock ore. Rock ore can be made up to 90% ferrous material while the iron sand contains as little as 2%.

This means when you smelt your source material into blooms of iron and slag, the blooms made from sand iron were much smaller. Instead of utilizing a single bloom to make a sword, the Japanese had to work several blooms together. Which is much more labour intensive, and can lead to a lot of imperfections in the final product.

This is why katanas were made out of so little material, and had to be handled with care. They were much more fragile pieces than similar swords made in Korea and China at the time.

Plus, the Japanese developed their iron working much later than their mainland contemporaries, as they never independently invented furnace technology. The technology for furnaces was imported, most likely from the Korean peninsula.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 6 hours ago

There's also smelting. Japan didn't have the technology to completely melt iron, which complicates things.

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[-] [email protected] 17 points 11 hours ago

Katana's are weak on the flat side. They aren't really meant to be used for parrying. In fact, most sword fights in Japan would be over after the first or second swing. It was commonplace to hold the grip of a katana but not draw it in such a way so that your enemy has trouble judging how long your katana is and what is a safe distance to be from you. Once your opponent is in range, draw it quickly and kill them in one blow, ideally.

The act of killing your opponent in a single blow is called "nukitsuke" from "nukiuchi" meaning "to cut down an opponent" and "tsuke" meaning "to stop an opponent's attack before it begins".

The Sekiro and popular media image of extended katana fights didn't really happen, but if they did, there would almost certainly be some broken katanas.

[-] [email protected] 3 points 5 hours ago

I promise you, in the real world, fights were just as much of a shield shoving match while trying to slash your opponents ankle as they were in Europe.
The idea of a one-on-one sword fight decided by individual skill is much more of a romantic idea.

[-] [email protected] 0 points 4 hours ago

just as much of a shield shoving match while trying to slash your opponents ankle as they were in Europe

lolwut? Try that leg-targetting shit with a HEMA fighter and see how fast you'll bleed out.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 6 hours ago

According to the dictionary, 抜き打ちnukiuchi and ぬ抜け付けnukitsuke sound like synonyms. I'm a little confused.

I guess with uchi (to strike down) vs tsuke (to put, attach, etc) one sounds more like the result and the action but it's weird that the definitions from Jisho.org aren't too explicit.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 32 minutes ago

I think because "nukiuchi" would be pronounced like "NOO-KEE-OO-CHEE" and "nukitsuke" would be pronounced like "NOO-KEE-SOO-KEE" so kind of similar. I dunno though!

[-] [email protected] 4 points 10 hours ago

I imagine it like a hockey match where when a stick breaks they just go get another one and continue on like nothing happened

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[-] [email protected] 8 points 11 hours ago

I've been watching a japanese sword master on YT demonstrating moves. It's very interesting how they decide when they pull it out which side of the curve they lead with, a choice they make in a split second, and the different attacks each method would have. Even European swords weren't just sharp hammers, they had practical moves and defenses lost in the movies.

[-] [email protected] 6 points 7 hours ago

most members of the warrior class were little more than brutish thugs. A handful would have taken the strategy of individual combat seriously and they would have done quite well.

The majority of the people they were fighting were lightly armored at best and they could get away with just swinging the sharp end at the unfortunate peasant conscripted to try to stop them.

There are plenty of examples of knights and samurai alike, falling for just the most obvious trap you could imagine. Templars charging in to open gates, samurai rushing to duel a guy who insulted them, in both cases blood drunk and stupid, children of privilege and in armor by accident of birth.

The Last Duel is a decent example of what happens when guys like that and up fighting each other.

We tend to have a romantic view of the past, but we have a great Instagram filter between us and then. Reality is ugly and violent. Few people are artists, even fewer are talented artists. This is true whether they're painting or drawing blood.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 8 hours ago
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this post was submitted on 27 Sep 2024
419 points (96.9% liked)

Memes

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