Katanas

Wrestling happened.

im still fucking pissed about /asp/ being ruined

You don't say fellow user, you don't say... Some pretty great Hemageneral threads were had out there and I don't think they could be housed somewhere as of now.

That gif is making fun of katanas

Please look before you post

Still a shitana thread

Should be officially named Alternative Sport now, I don't think there's ever going back from the wrestlefag migration

DID SOMEBODY SAY FOLDED 1000 TIMES?

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>man this wrench really sucks at sinking nails

You and me both user. It was fun while it lasted.

sword made for cutting flesh and bone somehow destroys itself on a sword that can pretty much pierce steel armor.
Or at least to my knowledge.

Very few weapons were actually able to pierce steel armour, swords were particularly hopeless as long as you're targeting the chest. Even if you were thrusting with the sword, you would need to be aiming for a less protected part of the armour, like an armpit.

katana for twink gay boy, real men use laminated damascus steel like viking warrior which is exactly the same thing as glorious 1,000 time folded nipon steel except west make blade shape look better for punching through man armor and not wimp flesh

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Learnin something everyday, thanks.

Hey pal, you do know plate isn't as good as people say right? It existed since antiquity. Romans used plates, greeks used plates. Romans favored chainmail which he's talking about them targeting over plates. I'm just going to point this out since you're probably getting meme'd. Even soft armor was more prolific in antiquity than plates or chain. You don't get surviving examples of it because it breaks down over time. It's still even popular over hard plates now. Just thought I'd let you know so you don't catch the meme autism that a lot of people seem to get obsessed with. Plate being as good as it was is more of a meme about having larger horses and selectively breeding them to carry more weight.

>sword that can pretty much Pierce steel armour

Full retard

Different user here. Of course it was often super heavy, but it was effective against slash and stab attacks. Thats why maces and hammers were popular counters. Also lol at you if you believe plate armor in antiquity was as good as plate in the age of european reconnaissance.

The kind of plates most people think about when talking about armour are mostly the larger, shaped plates that you see on armour worn by medieval knights. Roman plate armour was more like a bunch of metal strips all overlapping each other. It was still good, it's just not the same, and I'm pretty sure it doesn't work as well as one solid plate. Cloth and leather armour, like a gambeson was extremely good, so you're right there.

Piss off, he's learning. Sure it's a clear misconception if you're better versed in how armour works, but when you're just starting to learn about it your best experience would be movies and video games.

nigger

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Here's the real one katana are best sword

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So you're saying over lapping strips of plate are not the same as segmented pauldrons? Because most of the parts of the don't hit this part people talk about, are actually over lapping segmented plates like you're saying.
That's like exactly what the thigh bits when you're talking cavalry was more innovative over antiquity examples has different. Are you just trying to be contrarian on purpose? You know the same thing about armor applies to weapons. The weapons wouldn't have been as refined as the armor neither, funny thing about it all is that the weapons always win in the end and defeat armor. I've never heard of armor not getting defeated later on, yet in antiquity you can actually find examples of a full plate suit actually working and resisting weapons to a point they had to stab them in a spot that didn't have a plate.
Nobody carried that shit as a counter. Knights were just as likely to be trying to run down and trample peasants as a samurai horse archer was.

i mean im under the assumption that after hundreds of years of development there would be at least some kind of sword designed to pierce armor.
I know that claymore hilts can kinda do it, and that maces basically break bones and dent plates.
That and most samurai didnt have armor untill later years, and also why people died practicing kendo because there wasnt any protective gear.

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Bullshit.

they had it and used it based upon circumstances of training. You didn't always wear your gear everytime. you practiced because form and comfort and hassle.

Practicing strokes, parties and counters at half speed? No armor required.

Know you are going full retard? Gear up.

Even before the actual development of what we would see as a katana there was laminate armor and coats of plates using iron and steel, and the sword is NOT the uber super weapon for killing armored opponents.... fucking spears and bows were.

F

>reddit spacing

Well yeah thats kata, you dont need armor for kata forms.
They started dying from blunt trauma from bokken, thats when shinai started getting popular to reduce this.
Fucking musashi killed people with bokken.
Also i have not mentioned once that the katana is a super weapon for armor The armor thing i thought was just more common around the edo period and not before, didnt know about the earlier and later lighter armors they used.
Did kendo for 2 years, i may not be extremely knowledgeable but im not an ass when someone gets shit a bit wrong.
S.

Japs never figured out how to make good steel. Europeans figured it out long time ago and their steel was almost as good as any modern general-purpose carbon steel. So japs had to fold it "million fucking times" to refine the iron and remove impurities from the steel. Contaminates make up a large part of katana steel. This is why katanas would bend and had very little flex. This is why Europeans could make rapiers and other light and flexible swords which could defeat armor and could pass between the seams.

But japs have the marketing and mythology.

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Indians essentially pioneered steel metallurgy and European methods are based off of Indian techniques. Also, it wasn't that the japanese couldn't figure it out, it was that they had low quality natural resources for steel production.

not only that, they only heat treated the edge while leaving the spine completely un heat-treated, fully ductile pearlite state(thats what makes hamon line as in pic related) which can easily deform under heavy impact as shown in So yeah katanas are not springy, and traditionally, only edge quenched

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wrenches suck lol what do they even do

Actually the vikings got their metal from the sand people.
But still accurate.

They work great at connecting hot wires to things.

This is basically all false. When you pull the bloom out of the furnace it's much the same stuff in Europe and in Japan, neither will make a functional sword, or anything else either really. The main historical way of fixing that, in Europe as well, is to fold. Shown here for exmaple is a part of a Swedish door hinge, probably 18th century, with a clear folding texture to it.
Switching over to making pig iron (often people say you switch to a blast furnace, but that's not quite correct, and ma medieval bloomery furnace was also a blast furnace) does get rid of many of the issues you find in a bloom, but instead you introduce so much carbon into it that you can't even forge the stuff any more. So now instead you have to get rid of the carbon, and after that process you may still find yourself needing to do a bit of further folding. If we then have to carbeurize up iron to steel that process may add further need for folding.
As for the final product, no old steel really matches up to what we have today, but both in Europe and Japan they managed to make steel that was good, and fit for its purpose. As for the chemical composition of the Japanese steel, it's extremely low on undesirable stuff as shown by
mediafire.com/file/37hsh4pa2hslsia/ where we see P and S amounts that'd pass muster even for modern carbon steel and which I think compare quite well to Swedish osmund iron.
As for European "anti armour" weapons these are not thin,l flexible things. While they tend to have a narrow profile, this is usually matched to a rather considerable thickness making for a stiff, strong and somewhat heavy "prybar" of a weapon.

If you're thinking of crucible steel that didn't really become a thing in the west Europe until the Bessemer process started taking off in the second half of the 19th century. And there's nothing about the Japanese ores that make for poor metal that I've heard of, despite all the people who claim it.

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>This is why Europeans could make rapiers and other light and flexible swords

Rapiers aint light tho.

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The Arabs made better swords anyway

Weren't Katanas not just for show anyway and only used to kill peasants and foreigners?

And they used other weapons for war?

Katanas are a sidearm. If you loose your spear or whatever other primary weapon you had, then you would draw your katana.

>What happened to the HEMA general?
The HEMA community is growing, but there simply wasn't enough posters to keep the general alive in the tumultuous sea of wrestling threads.

They were very much weapons of war. It first shows up in the 13th century (if not earlier) as a sidearm for the common grunt, where it largely remains throughout the rather violent Nabokucho period. As we then move into the very war-torn Sengoku period changes to how battles tend to be fought (in short: larger battles, focus on infantry) result in the katana gaining acceptance higher up in the ranks, until it displaces the katana as the main "full sized" sword around. Eventually the Tokugawa clan conquers all of Japan and the big battles end. At this point the katana becomes the daily carry sword for the warrior caste, both a self-defence tool and a status marker. This period would be why some think of the katana as not being a weapon of war, since by and large there were no wars for it to serve in. Not that you'd be any less dead getting killed by a mugger, drunk and belligerent samurai, or pissed off peasant... Regardless of how it served (or didn't) in this period though by the time we get there the katana has over three centuries of battlefield service behind it.
Of course, when people say katana they usually also mean the tachi, which showed up perhaps a century or two before the katana, and remained the sword of choice for Japanese warriors until the katana overtook it.

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>when actually interesting threads can't compete with the ones where gun autists screech about their interactions with people who aren't gun autists.

>They folded it to burn and remove iron
>burn and remove iron
>remove iron

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>Rapiers aint light tho.
They shouldn't be flexible either, but then the original sentence could be read something like "they could make rapiers but also light and flexible swords". Well, could, but should really.

it is called mild steel, not iron dumb fuck

what a stupid test, that's not at all relatable to how katanas were actually used

Call me retarded, but somehow that made sense in my thoughts so bear with me.

>mfw newfag /asp/ie
I kind of feel guilty now. I sometimes take a peep at HEMA threads on /asp/ thinking why the fuck are these threads here but soon after I actually find them quite interesting.

If they hardened the entire sword it would break on the first hit. Hence the flexible spine.

Sweet fucking lord I spent so long waiting for people to stop treating katanas like lightsabers only to have the pendulum swing to full retard in the other direction. I'll never not be amazed at how people on this board can go from bitching about how grabbers don't know WTF they're talking about to sword threads where they parrot this one thing they sort of remember reading in another thread.

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Its not iron, even the core is soft steel.

That test is flawed for several reasons. For one you are using a katana based on modern standards rather than one based on older, Segoku patterns which would have a geometry more suitable to heavy blade on blade contact.

The second is both those swords were main with modern steel with modern smith equipment.

This is huge, because the forging process of a katana, and other pattern welded blades, compensated for the drawbacks of using premodern bloomery steel, and the far less controlled conditions of a premodern forge.

With modern steel all that is not only unnecessary but a drawback compared to monosteel.

Long swords, and arming swords by extension, forged under modern conditions are also far more consistent than they would be in the late medieval or Renaissance period.

In other words this tells us about the quality o modern replicas and nothing about historical blades.

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all of that shit is different then putting a sword in a vise where it can't flex at all

no matter how herculean your grip strength is, the sword isn't going to take as much impact because your arms are going to move and bleed some energy off while you try to block.

Steel is an iron alloy you moron and folded blades use two steels with different carbon content.
Folding is a technique to purify the steel because feudal japanese could not produce high quality steel like europeans, assyrians and iranians.
The biggest joke is they make both steels in the same go because their forges are so shit they can actually melt it down and have to guess which parts have more carbon.

>Folding is a technique to purify the steel because feudal japanese could not produce high quality steel like europeans, assyrians and iranians.
>who also folded their steel
Weebs were dumb for thinking that the folding process made Japan special, Westaboos are dumb for thinking that the folding process makes Japan inferior. All things in balance.

Nice strawman you cuck. Japanese steel smelting was inferior there is no way around the fact that they folded their blades because their steel was of such poor quality. I take it youre talking about damanscus which isnt folded out of two steels but an alloy producing a fain pattern. The folded blades in the ME and Europe were cosmetic only and aimed at cashing in on the mythos of the legendary damascus steel.

>their steel was of such poor quality
But it wasn't...

Yes it was. The entire design is to acomodate this fact. Everything from the two differend folded steels to the thick spine over differential hardeneing of the edge.

I don't think you know what strawman means and I don't have a gf to cheat on me you dumb normie, did you forget where you are?

>I take it youre talking about damanscus
Then you know even less than I assumed you did, especially if you think forge welding was solely for cosmetic reasons. People may have fucked around with PATTERNS for cosmetic reasons but there's plenty of reason to mix steels or do things like putting a steel edge on an iron spine.

both European and Japanese swords were inferior to Arabs

>Call me retarded
You're retarded
>but somehow that made sense in my thoughts
That's because you're retarded
>so bear with me
Why, are you going to miraculously get brighter?

Japanese steel was pretty much the same as bloomery steel all across the world. It was not until blast furnaces became wide spread that it was inferior.

Given how you don't say how or why Japanese smelting is supposedly so bad I can't really give any specific answer, but a lot of the usual nonsense has been covered in That folded steel in Europe and the middle eats would only be in imitation of pulad steel (aka damascus) seems unlikely. For one thing bloomery steel demands significant further refinement to make it good enough for a sword (or for most other tasks too, like the hinge in my post above), and the only historial alternative to folding was some crucible process, which we didn't really get started on until the late 19th century. And as bloomery metal was the norm until the end of the middle ages or so... We should also keep in mind that most of the artistic pattern creation (pattern welding and folding not being quite the same) in Europe was done before pulad steels and their patterns became known to any real degree here. When the crusaders ran into swords made of such steel, and for centuries thereafter, fashion in Europe called for swords to be polished bright and uniform, hiding any signs of folding or pattern welding rather than showing them off. What Asian crucible steels made their way to Europe in the Viking age was either simply not pulad (far form all crucible steel is) or the local smiths simply didn't know how to bring out the pattern if it ever was.

>It was not until blast furnaces became wide spread that it was inferior.
That too is questionable. If you look through mediafire.com/file/2lw9w2stunb6zyt/ you'll see that one of the manufacturing centres used both fined pig iron and bloomery iron in parallel for a while, with the latter going into the high quality armour and the former being used to mass produce cheaper stuff. You get less inclusions to worry about form the furnace, but instead you must deal with the excess carbon (and possibly some inclusions created by SiO2-uptake during the decarburization process).

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>with the latter going into the high quality armour and the former being used to mass produce cheaper stuff.
Hm, let's clarify a bit more. I doubt bloomery steel is inherently superior as well, the point I'm trying to make there is rather that it wasn't (until very recently) really superior either, since they could make their high end armour with it.

>That too is questionable

I understand that I was generalizing to a point. My understanding is that it didn't even become the standard untill pretty late, and that bloomery steel continued to be used in less industrialized areas until the 20th century or so.

I also think early blast furnaces were not as good as some of the later ones? Maybe you could clear some of this up.

Japanese steel was not up to par with medieval european quality let alone the Renaissance steel they were introduced to by the arrival of the Portuguese, Dutch and English on their shores.

Katanas gained fame due to their sharpness, in current warfare meta were the preferred European sword was mean for trusting (like the ubiquitous rapier). It made an impression in foreigners and most likely the flashiness of japanese martial arts played a part in it like it still dues today.

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Furnaces making pig iron turn up already in the late medieval period or so (these are commonly called blast furnaces, though that word can also mean any furnace you feed air with bellows or so). In many cases the early furnaces for this appears to have been also capable of making blooms if you played around with the process parameters. As the pig iron furnaces were bigger, and could do continuous production they eventually became the standard for large scale production in Europe.
The big shift in the late 20th century wasn't to making pig iron, but in how said pig iron was then turned into iron or steel that could be forged as the Bessmer process showed up (patented 1856, developed into the currently dominating LD-converter in the fifties). This appears to be where western metallurgy makes the large scale shift over to what could be considered crucible steels (not that everything's processed purely in solid state before it).
As for the quality of the pig iron straight from the furnace there's certainly things to play around with there, our current stuff should be a lot better than what they made back in the 14th century, but the impression I've gotten is that much of the advances there are too recent to be of relevance to the question of swords.

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Based Smith Autist user
Keep on keeping on man, I love learning about this shit

>more iron than steel
This statement really bugs me out

Iron, Ferrum, Fe, becomes something different when it touches carbon. Iron can take up to 0.02% carbon at high temperatures (and a tenth at room temperature) and become Ferrite, alpha-Iron. Beyond that it is defined as steel
>The carbon content of steel is between 0.002% and 2.14% by weight for plain iron–carbon alloys.

So if you have like 0.01% C steel then yes, its mostly ferrite, but... its steel! Its the definition! If you get over 0,002% carbon, its not iron anymore, but steel.

This basically

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I don't know what your sources but that seems somewhat inaccurate. Where are the sources supporting this superior steel quality?

The differences in Japanese and European swords were mostly determined by the forging process, not the steel used.

As for flashy martial arts, I don't see why Europeans or Chinese would consider the kenjutsu of the day flashier than their own sword arts.

jesus christ user you're a faggot

Largely adding to this, some thing to keep in mind...
European swords can be all steel, of all kinds from the unhardenable mild steel to high carbon steel. They can also be just plain iron. And they can be a mixture of high and low carbon material (while the definitions are what they are, from the blade maker's point of view mild steel and iron is basically grades of the same thing, while the hardenable steels are a different critter). An iron core can have steel edges welded onto it (or the other way around if the smith forgets which bit was which), or wrapped entierly in a steel jacket. Or we do the same, but the core isn't just low carbon material, but a mixture of low and medium carbon material artfully welded together and manipulated to make a neat pattern. A mild steel blade can be case hardened to produce a millimetre-thin skin of hardened medium-carbon steel. There's isn't this one way that European swords were made, it all depends on when, where, and in many cases which specific blade we're looking at.

Secondly a lot has been made of what this means for the performance of the blade. Does it combine the strength of the hard material with the toughness of the softer material? Or does indeed the weaker iron bend? In reality it probably means very little. When you try to bend a beam, the material at the surface of the inside and outside of the bend are what takes up most of the load. The load on the material then gradually decreases as we go into the material form the surface, until along the very centre plane it'll be zero (by necessity as it goes from compression to strain, ie it shifts direction). This means that the material in the core of our beam does very little, and thus its performance doesn't matter much for the overall strength of the piece (the logic behind the I-beam is that we can thus simply remove most of it outright). Mixed metal swords use the cheaper low carbon material where it doesn't really matter for anything but cost.

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katakana are made for unarmored targets
swords are made for armored targets

fight unarmored katana wins
fight in crusader armor sword wins

Cant believe there are so many /asp/fugies here.
Good times back when the board started, but i fucking knew that allowing wrestling would be our doom.

Hey KM, your post are always great I really enjoy reading them.

I've got a question for you, I've been trying to to find an online copy of The Connoisseur's Book of Japanese Swords, I've checked the usual sites like Library Genesis but I haven't managed to find a full copy anywhere, so what I wanted to ask is if you knew of any places that had a full copy of it.

I'd buy it but money is kinda tight right now.

Sorry, haven't seen it.

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Oh well, thanks anyway, I guess I'll just buy it later on.

Trips wasted on an awful post.
Damn shame.

Are you trying to say that the katana is not a sword

its called a mace

Samurai had armor since their inception. Kendo bogu is modeled after Japanese armor but has very little to do with it. It was created in peace time to enable safe(r) sparing

The problem isn't the sword, the problem is the puny mortal wielding it. Making a sword that can withstand the stress of being shoved right through a breastplate isn't terribly hard, making a human who can shove it right through a breastplate is. And that's why just about everyone's solution to "sword vs armour" was to find a gap in the armour.

>i mean im under the assumption that after hundreds of years of development there would be at least some kind of sword designed to pierce armor.

Armour (particularly medieval european stuff) was insanely good at its job. As it developed, it just got better and better.

by the 16th C, it was tested by shooting the breast - the dent was often etched as proof it would resist a bullet - literally, the bullet-proof. A human does not have the strength to match that sort of force.

Armour was designed to deflect - blows slide off, and the likes. the development was to change the way of fighting, to use thrusting swords (the estoc, for example) not to go through - everyone knew fine well it was almost impossible to punch through - but to go around, by pushing plates apart, and getting into gaps. And in that regard, there were developments from the moment articulated plate started to appear, to counter it.

>That and most samurai didnt have armor untill later years
What are you talking about, the japanese had armor before samurai were even a thing

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>>katanas
>inferior weeb wand

I do HEMA, want to get into harnischfechten

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tl;dr im dumb and learning

>mace
I see that more of denting then piercing, though i've seen some with spikes that probably do the trick

>bogu
i know it was modeled from it, i didnt know they had it before the edo period. as i explained to someone else.

>armor
Read above and , clearly a misunderstanding of how long they had it. Found out its based off of chinese armor way before.

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Kendo bogu and shinai certainly allowed competitive kenjutsu as many people anachronistically imagine, that much is true.

It wasn't that the training itself was deadly, at least not so much more than today, its that fighting a duel, even with bokken was potentially deadly, and its not like they necessarily took great care not to kill the other guy. Often, these were duels, not friendly matches. Even matches with Shinai between different styles could be rather ugly affairs by our standards today.

i too have been lurking these threads a long time ago in a galaxy far far away, awaiting to go to fuddhalla like glorious viking warrior.
these threads wrapped around a long time ago , it's been quite a while but basically crusaders regarded damascus steel like what you use to see people say about katanas if you follow any of the nerd stuff like acedemia about the subject.

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>That test is flawed for several reasons.
hitting bigger mass with smaller mass not valid?

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>Secondly a lot has been made of what this means for the performance of the blade. Does it combine the strength of the hard material with the toughness of the softer material? Or does indeed the weaker iron bend? In reality it probably means very little. When you try to bend a beam, the material at the surface of the inside and outside of the bend are what takes up most of the load. The load on the material then gradually decreases as we go into the material form the surface, until along the very centre plane it'll be zero (by necessity as it goes from compression to strain, ie it shifts direction). This means that the material in the core of our beam does very little, and thus its performance doesn't matter much for the overall strength of the piece (the logic behind the I-beam is that we can thus simply remove most of it outright). Mixed metal swords use the cheaper low carbon material where it doesn't really matter for anything but cost.
this sounds like bullshit jetfuel can't melt glorious european steel sword

Bogu like armor was created in the Edo period, around the 1700. Shinai however were created 150 years before or so, they also add partial protection for the hands (Itto-ryu onigote for instance) and head but not full training armor.