Incorrect, knights in plate were a factor on the battlefield well into the 16th century. Heavy steel crossbows could pierce plate, yes, but they took forever to reload. Crossbowmen would be lucky to get more than two volleys off before knights charged home. Longbows were incapable of penetrating full plate. Even the arquebus had its bullets bounce off at long range. Swords were still used to fight other knights, but they weren't about piercing the armor, they simply stabbed at the weak points: eyeholes in the visor, the armpits, the groin, and the backs of the knees. It wasn't that armor couldn't withstand the bowman( that's patently false), it's that they couldn't stand up to firearms, and that took much longer than most people think it did.
Oh yeah. It's all about the weight and the force. And where you hit them. But the best sort of weapon o whack an armored guy with would be something like a giant can opener. Like a Halberd. Or a Pike.
Sorry for the double post Really? I always thought an arrow with a decent bodkin could penetrate steel if it had enough force behind it.
Where would you get that idea? If the point of a weapon is to break bones there's really no reason to sharpen it. And if there's no reason to sharpen it, it's not a sword. Two handed swords weren't designed to break bones at all. They're designed to slice through people. People without armor. That is, most people. And why would the two handed sword break his arm through the armor? What kind of physics are you talking about there?
Maybe against a flat piece of steel, but plate armor was curved, so they'd bounce off. That's why English longbowmen at Agincourt shot the French horses instead of the knights themselves. Now things like coats of plates and chain mail could be penetrated easily enough. Still, the longbow had a fairly small impact on Medieval warfare, since only the English and Welsh used it, and the only people they extensively fought with it, aside from themselves, were the French and the Scots.
This makes sense. Much sense actually. Do you have a source for this so I can learn more? Perhaps a fighter with a greatsword found himself facing a heavily armored knight, in battle where the fighter was previously fighting folks with little armor, like chain mail or leather? And why wouldn't it break the arm through the armor? If the sword had enough weight (and force) behind it, wouldn't the energy transfer through the metal into the flesh and bone? That was how warhammers worked, through blunt force trauma. Given, hammers are much heavier than swords, even greatswords.
1.) Great swords aren't that heavy. You'd have to look hard for one that weighed more than 9 pounds. What's more that weight is distributed along a flat surface. It would be just about impossible to break someones arm with that. 2.) That's not how armor works. That's not even how physics works. We can see that from the way motorcycle helmets protect peoples skulls when they crash into things. If what you were saying was true than the kinetic force of running into a tree would turn a bikers head into fine mush while never damaging the helmet.
The hard outer shell of a motorcycle helmet does nothing except protect the inner foam core which is what absorbs impact energy. Without that foam core their head would in fact be fine mush. Unless their armor had foam padding the motorcycle helmet is not a good analogy. If you get shot by a bullet wearing a bullet proof vest the vest will not let the bullet penetrate but it still has the potential to bruise or even break bone. It's conservation of energy.
Aha! I was wracking my brain trying to think of real life armor examples and finally found one. Steel toed boots. If what you say were true than it would be possible to drop a weight on a steel toe and, without breaking the armor, mutilate the fragile toe bones. As you can see, that's not what actually happens.
Tiny little toe bones with lots of moving parts, on a solid platform (supported by the shoe which in turn is supported by the ground) is nothing at all like an arm in a piece of armor. The arm bone is long and thin and unsupported. The energy of a swiftly swung sword can be concentrated into a small area (the blade edge) in the middle of that bone, through the armor. Not sure that analogy works either.
On your first point, touché. I don't know why I always think that greatswords are so heavy. And your second point, I do disagree. I side with Aaron DC on this one. It's the padding behind the metal that gives armor its ability to absorb force. Metal on its own just doesn't have the properties to take all that energy and disperse it. Thats why hammers and heavier weapons were so effective against armor. And yes, the motorcyclist's head may not be hamburger, but what of the other effects? Concussion, internal bleeding if he hit hard enough. At the very least he'd be stunned and disoriented. And if we take it back to men in armor, being stunned and disoriented on a battlefield is very dangerous.
? So you agree that force does not actually work in the way originally described? Because if you don't I suggest you never work around heavy equipment. But if you do agree then all your doing is moving the goalposts. We were talking specifically about the ability to break a bone through armor using a sword. I would say this is so improbable it borders on impossible. I agree being stunned on a battlefield is very dangerous, but that's not what anyone was talking about.
I agreed to nothing. I conceded to you being correct in that it's unlikely for a sword to break bone through armor. My second paragraph was countering your armor claim, and the metaphor with the motorcycle helmet.
Jack Asher raising an objection? Surely not. Two handed swords were used three ways. One: in a figure of eight motion to break pikes. Two: with one hand below the pommel to stab weak points; and. Three: to exert a large amount of force over a very small area to cause maximum damage to armoured opponents. The physics is stupefyingly simple- it you concentrate a lot of force into a small area (i.e. the sharpened blade of a sword) it does a lot of damage.
Further more, saying the weight of a sword is distributed along a flat surface and therefore couldn't be used to break someone's arm is like saying the weight of a bullet is distributed along a cylindrical surface and couldn't be used to break bone through a bullet proof vest. What matters is where the kinetic energy is focused -- in the sharpened blade at the contact point between armor and blade -- and how that energy is transferred to the other object: through low or high energy disippating material.
My steel-toed safety shoes provide, in effect, a tiny fallout shelter for my feet. As long as the force isn't enough to deform the toecap, this then prevents the trauma to reach my toes. If the force IS great enough to deform the toecap (like letting a number 9 bus drive over my shoes) then I'd hate to think how tiny my toes would end up! The example of an arm being broken, by a sword, through armour, is more analogous to the situation when I dislocated my shoulder when canoeing. Do a slap support with enough violence, and hitting the water is like hitting solid concrete. And that's enough to disclocate your shoulder, armour or not. In a similar situation, an arm bone would have no "mechanical fuse" such as a tendon, and would break quite easily.
That does not sound like my kind of vacationing fun :-( Were you able to pop it back in? How would you get back to shore otherwise *##(&$#*&(#$ the thought is enough to make me cringe in sympathy.
I have spent a lot of time building buildings. A toe cap is an arch (very strong) designed to transmit force down to the ground. Despite this I have seen a guy with a broken foot as a result of having a scaffolding pole dropped on his steel toe cap as a result of the concentrated energy. Unfortunately I have also seen another guy lose half his foot due to a track rolling over his foot, despite toe caps. That was unpleasant. But toe caps are designed to transmit energy to the ground. Most plate armour is not, it is designed to provide some physical resistance, but if you hit it hard, particularly with concentrated energy (i.e. kinetic energy focused in a small area) it does sweet FA.
Energy transmission; I like it. I can picture it in my head. Those work place accidents sound terrible
The analog for me was when a car turned in front of me on a rainy day a few years ago. I was doing 40km/hr and hit the LHS panel, unclipping in the process and rolling across the bonnet onto the other side of the car. Put a nice ding in that panel and buckled the bicycle wheel.
It was on a river in November - on my birthday. One second I'm sitting balanced on an upboil of water, feeling like a smart-arse, next second I'm tipped halfway in. BANG! Big slap support, ow! I'm still going in. BANG! Same result. Find an eddy to sit out until the pain eases off. Fortunately, there was another group playing in the same rapids, they ferried me across to the beach, helped me get mine and my son's boats on the car, drove me to A&E. The doctors had to knock me out to get it back in, because the second slap had moved it even further out of true. Apparently, my wife learned a little about my extensive competence with profanity.
I just manage the process, there have been worse while I was in the office. I had the guy who had both legs broken when a van trapped him against a truck and the poor girl who died when she fell under a reversing truck All shitty. Before anyone is a smart arse- the contractor controls a job while it is on site, I would be putting my client in a legally precarious position if I interfered. Sad as it is that is the way the world works.
No, the armor in question is a cylinder, so it's job is just to channel the force to the other side of the cylinder. I'm sorry to hear about those work accidents, but I'm lost as to how they apply. If we're carrying the analogy forward, this would be the same as an axe landing blade first on a toe cap, and then somehow breaking the bone without splitting the "armor". That's simply not how physics works. If it was how physics works, than despite the arch construct of the toe cap any weight dropped on it strong enough to break a bone would somehow travel through the cap and break the toe anyway. Again that's physically not what happens. Why? In what way would those be analogous? In the case mentioned I'm not yanking on your arm, I'm hitting it with a sword. The forces involved aren't even on the same scale, and the way in which the force is applied is entirely different.
