Throwing Knives (Or, Alternatively, Stabbing People With Them)

[Demesnedenoir]

Yeah this is decidedly true. Hell, we kind of grew up with The Magnificent Seven knife thrower guy and throwing stars killing people in MA flicks. Throwing stars! Yeah. Throwng knives, stars, all that sort of thing are useful to: distract, cause an ouch, maybe convince the enemy not to follow you too quickly?

One of my favorite survival story is the guy who was drunk and put an apple on his head to have it shot off... An arrow through the eye later he wasn't dead. There's a moral to the story about being drunk and letting drunks shoot arrows at your head, but it also proves just how tough humans are... despite the fact that we'll sometimes die from a stupid-lucky blow to the chest or head.

There are also historical references to rapier duels where both combatants eventually died, but in pop culture a rapier or knife is as deadly as a zweihander. There's a reason warriors wanted serious hunks of steel in war.

Throwing axes... at a target not knowing it's coming? That can be a serious hunk of steel in the back, still probably not fast, but serious ouch.

And I'm sure this was mentioned in her before, but the reason puncture wounds were so feared in low med tech war was death from infection. Slow and ugly.

 

[DragonOfTheAerie]

And I'm sure this was mentioned in her before, but the reason puncture wounds were so feared in low med tech war was death from infection. Slow and ugly.

Oh yeah...

Definitely low med tech. Post apocalyptic, so... We also have a deadly plague that infects people through open wounds. So a knife wound will very likely kill you through infection...

 

[Malik]

I had an idea on this, DOTA.

I don't know your MC's backstory, but if her father was a soldier, and he had learned to throw knives as a pastime during campaigns -- just something that, in my experience, soldiers seem to do -- it might be a thing that he teaches her when he gets back.

There are "tells" for former military, even in our society; things that allow you to pick an ex-soldier out of a crowd, that often they don't even realize are unique to them. Throwing a knife could be one of these tells for your society. Just a thing that no one else does.

Now, this next part is a bit farfetched, but it could that if no one ever sees her throwing the knives, the authorities might immediately start suspecting former soldiers -- especially grizzled campaign veterans -- and not some youngster. It could throw them off her tail for a while, either inadvertently or on purpose.

 

[SeverinR]

Technically,
even a poisoned blade would kill slowly.
The poison has to get into the blood stream before it takes affect. Poisoned blade trope is just as believable as the knife throwing trope.

Unless you can throw a knife into the throat of the victim, they will yell, and still might be able to if the knife wound is air tight.

My character is a knife thrower in a traveling show. There is armor on many warriors, so a thrown blade has less areas to hit.
So a thrown blade to a leg will slow them down. An arm hit will slow their sword. Also both could be fatal eventually, if they hit a vein or artery. Or as they have said infection sets in. (BTW if an unclean object strikes bone, bone infection can set in. Without antibiotics the limb will have to be cut off.)
I believe the philosophy in fencing and knife fighting is to tear down the opponent, rather then one strike one kill. Poke holes in them until they pass out from blood loss, or make them unable to fight, cutting tendons or muscles. Each small wound takes it's toll, the knife fighter takes advantage of the previous wounds to make deeper and better strikes as the wounds allow the fighter to "get in" more often.
Fighting a fully armored person, One scene my knife fighter lands a knife to a joint, draws blood but the armor locks the blade, she loses the knife, luckily she has a spare. There is always weak points to even the most armored person.
I even had a small female character attack from prone, a fully plate armored gentleman standing over her, with a thin knife up thrust up between his legs. (femoral artery and bladder were cut.) He had protection from a normal sword strike there, but not for a precise knife. (Also he didn't think the girl had any chance of harming him, nor did his friends, because she got away, because they were so surprised.)
So a knife should not be underestimated. Police know the 21 feet rule. A person with a knife can land a fatal attack from 20 feet before the average officer can get his pistol out and fire. (granted the officer will shoot the knife attacker, but they will be seriously wounded.)

 

[DragonOfTheAerie]

I don't need instant death from a blow in any scene. I just need opponents slowed down enough so that they can't pursue, or incapacitated enough to be finished off.

My MC's main aim is to protect herself in most scenes. She often aims to escape rather than to kill. As for actually killing people, she stabs a guy through the throat in a flashback, and she supposedly kills a guy in the opening scene, but I was going to have her gut stab him anyway...

A major problem I see with knife throwing, though, is how will you retrieve your knives? If you hit a guy in the gut and he's on the way to being dead but is still kicking...you going to go back and pull that knife out of him? That's the last thing you want to do. You'll go through them fast.

 

[TheKillerBs]

Technically,
even a poisoned blade would kill slowly.

It depends on the poison. Something like marbled cone snail or poison dart frog venom would incapacitate you almost instantly and kill you within minutes.

The poison has to get into the blood stream before it takes affect.

While this is true, if a knife laced with poison makes the target bleed, the poison is in their bloodstream. If it's something as deadly and fast-acting as the two venoms I mentioned above, they're done.

 

[SeverinR]

Just a note on the poison dart frogs- only the wild frogs are poisonous, something about domesticated poison dart frogs renders them poisonless. (Not sure if poison free, or just not deadly, so don't let Fido eat the frogs)

Also Marble cone snail is also known as the Cigerette Snail, because you only have time to smoke one cigarette before you die and there is no anti-venom known to date. So deadly yes, instant dead...no, unless you can ensure it goes directly into blood stream then I doubt you have time for a cig.

 

[Michael K. Eidson]

I saw someone throw a knife once when I was young, maybe it was at a circus. I thought it looked cool, and started practicing it. Knowing no better, and not having access to any good resources, I was throwing handle-heavy knives, and grasping them by the blade to throw them. I got to where I could fairly consistently stick them in boards or in the ground. I'm confident I couldn't have seriously injured anyone with my knife throwing, and I was not able to precisely hit small targets.

The moral of the story? Motivation can come from observing a skilled knife thrower at work and wondering if you could do the same thing. But gaining a true skill would best be done through learning from an expert.

 

[DragonOfTheAerie]

Just a note on the poison dart frogs- only the wild frogs are poisonous, something about domesticated poison dart frogs renders them poisonless. (Not sure if poison free, or just not deadly, so don't let Fido eat the frogs)

Also Marble cone snail is also known as the Cigerette Snail, because you only have time to smoke one cigarette before you die and there is no anti-venom known to date. So deadly yes, instant dead...no, unless you can ensure it goes directly into blood stream then I doubt you have time for a cig.

what about a poison that causes immediate excruciating pain? Not good for stealth, but...How quickly can paralysis set in?

 

[Michael K. Eidson]

This thread reminds me of a roleplaying game where I played an assassin character of a special race the GM made up. My character collected poison from his own skin to use on darts and daggers. Thing was, he wasn't immune to his own poison, so he had to be careful not to cut himself while collecting the poison. I don't know if something like that even makes sense, maybe for a fantasy story, but it was a fun assassin character to play in an RPG. Part of the fun of that character was that he was highly uncharismatic, so I got to be totally rude to everyone and blame it on being in-character.

 

[TheKillerBs]

what about a poison that causes immediate excruciating pain? Not good for stealth, but...How quickly can paralysis set in?

I'm not aware of any poison like that. I think rattlesnake venom gets very painful very quickly, but I'm not sure so don't quote me on that. The great thing about speculative fiction though is that you aren't restricted to real life poisons and therefore you can make up a poison to do whatever you flipping want.

 

[SumnerH]

I'm not aware of any poison like that. I think rattlesnake venom gets very painful very quickly, but I'm not sure so don't quote me on that. The great thing about speculative fiction though is that you aren't restricted to real life poisons and therefore you can make up a poison to do whatever you flipping want.

Platypus venom causes excruciating pain very quickly; it's pretty debilitating, though just short of outright paralysis. One description from the 1880s:

the pain was intense and almost paralyzing. But for the administration of small doses of brandy, he would have fainted on the spot; as it was, it was half an hour before he could stand without support, by that time the arm was swollen to the shoulder, and quite useless, and the pain in the hand very severe

An Australian soldier who served in Vietnam and was later stung by a platypus said the pain was far worse than any shrapnel wound he'd had, and didn't respond at all to morphine.

 

[Malik]

The Palestinian Yellow Scorpion ("Deathstalker Scorpion") won't kill you, but it hurts so much you'll wish it had. Its sting contains multiple types of neurotoxin, so it takes a shitload of antivenom. It can kill, but generally doesn't. It's a little yellow bastard the size of your thumb with a black stinger ball.

 

[Malik]

Platypus venom causes excruciating pain very quickly; it's pretty debilitating, though just short of outright paralysis. One description from the 1880s:


An Australian soldier who served in Vietnam and was later stung by a platypus said the pain was far worse than any shrapnel wound he'd had, and didn't respond at all to morphine.

Further proof that God was ****ing with us when He created the platypus.

 

[psychotick]

Hi,

I used to throw knives a long time ago. Normally the blade was at least as heavy as the handle, mostly more so, and the throwing technique involved holding it by the blade. When I was first learning I took some cut on the hand. This isn't going to be good if the blade is covered in some poison.

As for your poisons - if you want paralysis there's three effective ones I can think of - botulinum, tetanus and curare. If you want pain the scorpion toxins and jellyfish neurotoxins are probablya good start.

Cheers, Greg.

 

[DragonOfTheAerie]

Something that occurred to me...

I found myself thinking frequently amid writing this draft that I need to foreshadow the "magical" aspect of the story much earlier. I played with an alternate beginning where the MC discovers some pre-apocalypse magical artifact (without recognizing it for what it is) early in the story, but never liked it. Now I'm wondering if said strange-and-weirdly-magical-seeming-artifact could be the MC's weapons. In addition to being more accurate and deadly than knives should be, they could have the look of being from another era, an odd delicacy in design that clashes with the surrounding world... About the only problem with this is explaining how she got them, which is a dilemma, but that itself might be an opportunity for the foreshadowing and developing I want to include.

Having magicked knives seems to me a trait with a Mary Sue-ish aura...I don't like it. Also, if I had something that valuable, I sure as hell wouldn't throw it. But if I was sure of a kill, now...

I'm trying hard to make this work, but the reader needn't know that. I need to solve the foreshadowing problem regardless of the knife problem anyway.

 

[Michael K. Eidson]

Have you given any thought to the knives being magically enchanted to return to their thrower's hand? This could be only if they miss their intended target, returning like a boomerang. If they hit, the assassin would still have to try to retrieve them, but at the same time, they served their real purpose, which is to maim or kill. If the assassin only uses them when facing a single opponent, then retrieving them isn't so bad. it's when facing multiple opponents that the assassin would need to be clever, but this also keeps the assassin from being a Mary Sue.

With magic, you could have the daggers be able to extricate themselves from corpses and return to the thrower, but this is treading closer to Mary Sue territory. You'd need some kind of restriction on that sort of ability, and make sure the restriction came into play in more than one or two scenes.

It could be also that the assassin has the power to, say, attract the rare type of metal used in constructing the knives, and in this way is able to draw the knives from corpses or wherever they landed. Drawbacks here might be that the assassin has to be within direct line of sight of the thrown knives and within a certain range. Also if anything else in the area happens to be made of the same rare type of metal, the assassin could attract those things as well as the knives.

Some of the above sounds a bit roleplaying-game-ish, but I'm just throwing out ideas, since you're thinking the knives might be magical.

 

[psychotick]

Hi,

Had a thought. The reason throwing knives is such a useless technique apart from the ones already mentioned like having to retrieve them, is that when you throw them you spin them. I've never seen anyone manage to throw a knife without it spinning. The spinning means the knife hits at an angle and maybe even hilt first. If the blade is heavier than the hilt and it hits hilt first but not at too steep an angle, the blade will still manage to spin into flesh. But it won't strike deep. And even if it hits blade first, the momentum of the spin means it wont strike straight.

To make a thrown knife as deadly as possible it needs to fly straight like a dart so all the momentum carries the blade straight into the flesh as deep as possible. Like a spear. I don't think people can do this, and those that cause the most damage with a spinning knife would use a heavy blade which isn't going to be easy to conceal.

But what about a spring loaded knife thrower worn on the insides of the lower arms that fires blades dead straight like a spear? It can be concealed by long loose sleeves, and maybe has a magical aspect to it as well as the spring. And if the throwers magic but not the knives then the issue of throwing away such expensive blades doesn't arise. Also she could be more accurate without needing to train so much, and it's silent more or less if she hits the throat and people can't scream.

Cheers, Greg.

 

[SeverinR]

Pain is different. Because the "poison" would attack the nerve sensors. The sight of injury would burn with nerve pain, then it would move up the extremity as the poison spread affecting more nerves. The pain could render the person unconscious from overwhelming pain. Depending on how the nerve pain worked, it could theoretically overwhelm the nervous system and block all impulses to and from the brain. Total paralysis from pain, possibly even causing heart beat irregularities that can turn fatal.
The poison could also damage the nerves, which would permanently render the extremity unusable, paraplegia, and quadriplegia.
I don't know of any poisons that would fit this, but you can create something like this for your world.

Maybe consider the feeling of your arm going to sleep, the worst tingling burning you've ever felt, and it moves towards the heart and brain. (The extremity going to sleep is circulation problem, but the tingling is nerves.)

 

[SumnerH]

As for your poisons - if you want paralysis there's three effective ones I can think of - botulinum, tetanus and curare. If you want pain the scorpion toxins and jellyfish neurotoxins are probablya good start.

Tetanus onset is typically 7-10 days after infection. Botulinum takes several hours at minimum (Botox injections take a few days to take effect). Neither is going to be very effective in battle.

With curare you're looking at at least a minute for a direct syringe injection of refined turbocurarine into a major artery, more like 10-25 minutes for normal curare poison with a weapon delivery. Fast enough to be effective for hunters who can track the prey (one of the nice things about curare is that it's not absorbed by the digestive tract, so you can safely hunt with it and eat the poisoned victim), but on the borderline of being useful in battle.