Similarities between Knife Fighting and Sword Fighting?

How similar is fighting with a knife to fighting with a long blade? Do they share any common features, or is the difference in length too extreme to have carry over?

I'm working on a science-fiction setting and I'm trying to justify having swords and such (since presumably firing a gun inside of a spaceship would be... A bad idea) and I figure most shipboard combat would be with blades.

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Considering they have different training regimes featuring the aforementioned weapons separately then one could wager that they're not all that similar.

Knife fighting is much more about close combat and grappling. It's very likely you will be touching the enemy and with the shorter blade your defense is more in controlling his weapon then warding it off with the threat of yours.

Sword fighting, with the greater reach and leverage, allows you to stay outside and protect yourself by threatening with the blade. If the enemy does something stupid you can often strike them with the blade before they can close. In a knife fight, punishing a mistake often means either accepting a mutual strike or retreating out of reach.

The most dangerous thing in either is a suicidal lunge, where a direct, hard to stop attack moves at you with a person's full weight behind you. This leaves them totally open but it's not a whole lot of comfort that they are going to die too if they stab you in the lungs in the process.

Considering swordbreakers and parrying daggers were a thing, similar enough.

there's a huge difference between knife and sword fighting. knife fighting usually ties into hand to hand martial arts. sword fighting has it's own set of martial arts. swords take advantage of distance and are able to block other melee weapons. swords are used to block other swords. knives are short and compact. you have to be as close as possible to a target to kill them, but they are useful indoors where you can pop out of corners. knives are short and allow you to grapple onto a target. you use your other hand to block and grapple. something you can't easily do with a sword, with the exception of the gladius.

European knife fighting is primarily grappling, there's wrestling involved in European sword play as well but it's not nearly as significant when you're not always within Arms reach of your opponent.

youtu.be/fup6-UyfU6Y

both are nogunz

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>those gay little dances
>not kicking or anything

I would trust people who have been in knife fights and used them to kill other people like craig duglas and tu lam about using a blade in real life over those guys.

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There is no "knife fighting". Get a clue, schlomo.

How about fiore since that's who their training came from you fucking dunce

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For the record I just looked up Craig Douglas and I don't even disagree with anything he's saying so far. I fail to see how what he criticized is present in the sparring video I showed.

youtu.be/uANSZdOLd3o

Just think OP. You probably could have googled "irl sword fight" and seen the difference. Knife fighting is mostly grappling since the knife only adds a few inchs while a sword adds a few feet and it's got a lot of shit into it like parrying, reach, footwork, feigns and all this other shit.

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Both craig and lam respect and understand the roots of their art and are well versed in all the traditional knife fighting "styles", having spent decades formally studying them then adapting the theory to their needs because they used in the real world. The difference is they used it in actual combat and looked for the most efficient way to kill someone with a blade and avoid getting killed. This is different from hema guys who "study" but have never actually been in several knife fights or taken lives with blades and sparr with protective gear. Hema is pretty cool. But who do you train with and listen to for gun fighting advance - someone who reads manuals and spars with airsoft but has never been shot at, or instructors with decades of real life experience who have dedicated their lives to separate the superfluous from the essentials and what really works, because they needed it to stay alive and kill? That was the point of my post. If you don't understand the difference then I can't help you friend.

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>How similar is fighting with a knife to fighting with a long blade? Do they share any common features, or is the difference in length too extreme to have carry over?
It is similar, skills do translate, but essentially knife fighting is useless because it is so deadly.
When I do HEMA sparring with swords against newbies (I'm instructor) I would win 19 out of 20 fights with out a scratch, because I got technique and I'm fairly good. I do the same with knives and it's a double kill like 70% of the time. Even with a lot of training chances are high you'll end with a blade in your chest and die if the other guy doesn't give a fuck.

Also when you read old knife or dagger manuals, they mostly show only a few basic attacks, but dozens of defenses and counters. That's about the same with training dagger, two lessons to teach them how to stab proper and then they are dangerous, the rest is al about defenses and trying to stay alive. A lot of this is includes arm locks and throws and translates more to wrestling than to actual fencing. Tempo and distance management however translate 1:1 to sword fencing.

are you on the HEMA discord?

Knife fighting is more chaotic and about strength/grappling.

Remember kids, loser dies in the gutter, winner dies in the ambulance.

>they mostly show only a few basic attacks, but dozens of defenses and counters
That's because it is easy to offend, but difficult to defend. Which is why it is called the art of defense, and not of offense.

George Silver said that.

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Both make me thankful I live in a civilized country where criminals have the common decency to shoot me rather than stab me.

Depends wildly on the knife/sword in question. Fighting with a prison shank is in a different universe than fighting with a broadsword. Also fighting with a broadsword is honestly worlds different than fighting with a gladius despite both being "swords". OTOH some larger knives, like Bowie's in particular, were literally designed for and used with modified sword fighting techniques(cut + thrust in this case). At the end of the day the only real answer to your question is "it depends."

To be fair, even many experienced knife fighters have only been in a handful of real altercations. They should be listened too, but they are not necessarily infallible.

>How similar is fighting with a knife to fighting with a long blade?
I dunno, but what I do know is that I dont want to be involved with either one.

both harder to do armless

both suck if opponent has gun.....

eeeeeh, as a fencing instructor, I'd say not much.
There's no such thing as a parry. Everything is in-fighting, the off-hand is important.

The difference in length fundamentally changes a lot. Still, the general concept of foot-work, feints, and distance all still apply just about as equally as it would for boxing, knife-fighting, or fencing.

> (since presumably firing a gun inside of a spaceship would be... A bad idea)
You've got some troubles if you pierce the hull. Buuuuuut if you're literally killing people, WEAR A GOD-DAMNED PRESSURE SUIT and you're immune. Not even an EVA suit, just a skin-tight p-suit with a bubble around your head. If you're specifically expecting a fucker to shank you, a stab-resistant suit with a metal mesh would largely make you immune.

"shipboard combat". In space there's about a billion ways to die. If someone wants you dead, it'll happen before there's boarding actions. You're looking at police and sending violent crew to the brig more than.... space marines taking ships by force. So you're looking at billy clubs, tazers, and filling compartments with tear-gas.

>no such thing as a parry
there still is though, kinda.
hold your knife in a spot and he can't stab you there without cutting his hand

They’re similar. Manage your distance, learn how to close gaps and how to maintain them, get under or through someone’s guard.

>both suck if opponent has gun
Within about 20 feet, the guy with the knife is just as dangerous as someone with a gun. People can cover 20 feet in like two seconds. I'd rather be shot to death than stabbed

This is a vid of a famous assassination. Guy with a tanto knife slams into the politician like a goddamn train. It's not gory, but the impact is fucking brutal.
youtu.be/9l2AZXPJ3Ac?t=1m6s

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knife combat is a meme

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Longer than his forearm, probably really a wakizashi tbqh. If we're talking about guns VS pocket knives on an even(if close) footing then that's one thing, OTOH a guy surprising you with a 12"+ blade in close quarters is a whole larger order of bad news, in comparison.

More of a.... block or slapping their hand away.

Lemme put it this way, NOTHING about a fencing parry translates over to dealing with a knife coming at you.

>hold your knife in a spot and he can't stab you there without cutting his hand
WTF are you smoking, that's not a parry. More like.... being on-guard. or a "stance".

>Longer than his forearm, probably really a wakizashi tbqh
No, it's a tanto knife because the blade is less than 12 inches. The blade looks longer because the assassin was a a short 17 year old Japanese student. A quick search reveals the weapon is called a Yoroi Doshi, which is a tanto designd specifically for piercing samurai armor.

This guy get's it.
This shit only happens when it's staged as either training or cage fight.
Other than that, it's either a robbery or assault with a knife.
I can't think of reasonable situation when you see attacker coming at you with a knife and you have no way of escaping (thus forced to confront) AND at the same time can get a knife of your own.

But let's assume it happened for whatever reason.
One thing is for sure: no one is walking away uscathed after this fight.
You gotta remember that after receiveing a mortal wound you can still fight for a good while. Hell, there's a record of one guy running 300ft with a stab wound to the heart before he collapsed.
So there's a VERY high chance of both of the fighters ending up dead or at the very best, severely injured.
You'll be lucky to walk away with just a few slices across your forearm.


Coming back to the topic of similarities:
>Almost none.
>different stances
>Blades never touch.
>moves have more to do with boxing than swordplay
>lots of grappling

this.

The rule of thumb is: the shorter the blade the more difficult it becomes to reliably defend against it.
A sword fencing beginner will lose every fight against a better fencer.
A fight with rondel daggers as shown here has a much more uncertain outcome.
A knife fight with short blades is pretty much a coin toss.

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This.
Most people who are confronted by a knife wielding nigger did not see the weapon.
In fact: Most of the people who got stabbed only start realize that the attacker HAD a knife when they notice their wounds.

Accord ingredients to Wikipedia it was a yoroi doshi.

If you can make the argument that in your universe ships and cargo are so valuable that boarding is tenable you're basically looking at pirate melee weapons. So something like a cutlass. You're balancing the fact that a knife vs a sword is terrible but carrying around a sword all the time is inconvenient. And fighting in tight spaces mean a great sword wouldn't be as useful as a cutlass. It's all tradeoffs and it's dictated in part by what everyone else is using.

If you're interested in reading about knife fighting Hank Reinhardt's Book of Knives (and his book on swords) won't be bad places to start reading.

HEMAfag here.
I train with daggers a lot. Short version: you're gonna get stabbed or cut. Also, if you want to be really good at fighting with knives, learn grabs/throws/joint-locks/etc. Fairbairn-Sykes is no joke. The only overlap with fighting with swords (in my experience, of course) is some of the really close-range stuff but at that distance the key is you're just using your weapon as a tool for leverage. There's not really any overlap when you're striking "in measure".

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that was such amazing violence of action on the part of the responding parties.
I do not believe you would see such a quick intervention today among any security force.
The assailant was fortunate to cause injuries resulting in death in the limited time available.

y'all remember bush dodging shoes?
youtube.com/watch?v=TxNprnas7i8
our smol ninja would have had time to take his head off.
however, I'm guessing it would have been impossible for him to introduce a fucking wakizashi into the meetingroom since they started implementing searching people first

>stab the other guy
>dont get stabbed
>distance = good
That's about it.