Recent content by Gray-Hand

Those counterpoints are very persuasive. Many of them reinforce the idea that a spear is a more effective weapon than a sword. Starting with your TLDR: 1. There is no superior weapon. I don't think anyone would agree that some weapons are generally more effective other types of weapons...

Yeah, I thinking on the nation rather than empire scale when I wrote what you responded to. I agree with you about knights being professional warriors, but I think that’s probably true of pretty much any type of ‘cultural warrior’ I can think of off the top of my head. If it were a Venn...

I don’t think that the situation in the Byzantine Empire really breaks the pattern. The Byzantine Empire was the cultural inheritor of the Roman Empire which had converted to a professional military culture 700 years earlier following the Marian reforms. They still had a strong central...

It seems like cultural warriors are a thing in a decentralised society where the warriors need to be spread out throughout local areas to provide protection and maintain order. A certain amount of the resources of each local area are used to maintain the local warrior caste. Professional...

The advantage of having ‘cultural’ warriors like knights or samurai is that they sort of come ready made for whoever is leading an army. If the warrior role is a cultural one, it probably means that a certain proportion of a certain demographic will probably have been trained both physically...

The gladius was an iron/steel weapon.

Very, very little armour was made of steel. It was usually made of iron because steel is difficult to produce on a large scale until blast furnaces are a thing. Spears weren’t super effective against plate armour, but nor were swords. By the late Middle Ages knights (and even basic infantry...

Swords were usually the backup weapon. Samurai used Katanas. Cultures that fought in shield formations like the Greeks or Saxons tended to use some kind of short sword that could be used effectively in very close quarters. The main advantage of a sword over a spear is that it is more...

When samurai walked around town in their kimonos they carried their Katanas. When they went into a battle they carried spears (or spear type weapons). So did the Spartans. So did the Vikings and the Saxons. That is history. The Samurai had Katanas as their backup weapon. The Spartans had...

Some misconceptions here. Swords aren’t really any better against armour than spears. Spears are probably more effective against most types of armour compared to most types of swords. The piercing ability of a spear is far greater than a sword due to the force that can be put through a spear...

Spears are generally a more effective weapon than swords. Across many cultures over thousands of years, swords were generally a back up weapon for a spear. Armies made up of spearmen (or pikes) have always been far more common than armies composed of swordsmen. The reach and speed of a...

Tolkien had no experience fighting with swords, shields or axes. Neither does George Martin, Bernard Cornwall, Conn Iggylden or David Gemmel. Tom Clancy, Matthew Reilly and Lee Child have never been in a gun fight. The wachowski sisters never learned martial arts. As a ‘martial artist’, I...

I have heard ‘Ducal regalia’ used. Others you could use : Ensemble. Raiment. Array.

“Perfect for redirecting a sword blade to the wearer’s head”

There are probably quite a few stories where characters get drunk and do something dumb that they otherwise wouldn’t do while sober. Wolf of Wall Street has several such scenes. As does Breaking Bad. Martin Scorsese’s films usually have instances where characters act to their detriment while...