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  1. - Top - End - #151
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    GreataxeFighterGuy

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    Default Re: Got a Real World Weapons or Armour Question? Mk X

    Quote Originally Posted by Lapak View Post
    This implies that the best solution might be missile-mounted lasers. I fire a small, single-shot weapons platform at the enemy ship. Being massively smaller and more maneuverable allows it to get into a range where the enemy ship still can't effectively target it, but it can target the enemy ship. Best of both worlds!
    Didn't Footfall by Niven and Pournelle feature X-ray laser missiles?

  2. - Top - End - #152
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    Default Re: Got a Real World Weapons or Armour Question? Mk X

    Quote Originally Posted by mcv View Post
    Didn't Footfall by Niven and Pournelle feature X-ray laser missiles?
    I believe the Honor Harrington series also has those, although I might be misrembering.
    Fhaolan by me! Raga avatar by Mephibosheth!

  3. - Top - End - #153
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    Default Re: Got a Real World Weapons or Armour Question? Mk X

    With respect to the space weapons discussion, I have an alternate suggestion: kinetic weapons. Rail guns.

    The problem with missiles is that 1) They require a lot of fuel to accelerate , and all the electronics etc. detract from the payload. 2) A laser point defense, while not exceptional at targeting a distant spacecraft, should do a dandy job of detonating the missile's fuel or messing up the warhead.

    A hunk of iron, by contrast, is cheap. The launcher is back on the attacking spacecraft. You can afford to throw a lot more iron than missiles. Also, laser point defense is less useful because even if melted or whatever you're still dealing with a rock of iron on the same vector. It'll still make a kinetic impact with roughly the same amount of force.

    Another possibility might be a hybrid -- take a chunk of mass, give it maneuvering jets and guidance for course correction, but still launch it using a mass driver. This allows us to not have to expend a tremendous percentage of the weapon's mass just accelerating it away from the attacking ship, and also makes it less vulnerable to countermeasures.

    Of course, the fact that we're dealing with projectiles means that it's hard to hit a target at tactical ranges in space. The solution, then, would be to saturate the target area with a LOT of projectiles. It's not a fool proof solution, but if the target area can be narrowed down enough it should be possible to fire a swarm of projectiles with a reasonable chance of hitting the target. And when we're talking about a projectile moving at a significant fraction of C, you only need one hit to take a target out.

    Call it a "meteor swarm" :).

    I just don't see missiles -- at least , the kind we now use for air-to-air engagements -- as being that useful in space. It probably won't possess much in the way of fuel or warhead , which means that you're going to need to get it very close to the target to have any effect, and the fact that the target spacecraft likely has more fuel and engines means that it has plenty of time to get out of the way. Assuming it has no point defense. A missile which would be useful might be as large and expensive as a normal spacecraft!

    If we develop an interplanetary society, I would not expect that we would continue to reach orbit using chemical rockets. We will be launching into orbit with magnetic accelerators or with skyhooks. I expect our weapons will leverage that same technology, and wars will be fought with mass drivers.

    Respectfully,

    Brian P.

  4. - Top - End - #154
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    Default Re: Got a Real World Weapons or Armour Question? Mk X

    Yep, Lopes... a legendary figure in HEMA circles. Great guy once you get to know him. Are you in his group? AMEK?


    Quote Originally Posted by mcv View Post
    I admit I'm not too experienced with the sheitelhau yet, but wouldn't that make you vulnerable to an abschnitt? Not that anyone every actually does those, so maybe I should give it a try.
    It is the recommended application of the sheitelhau as a master-cut, it does work though if the defender is very fast with an abschnitt and moves off-line, he can beat it. This typically only happens if the individual making the sheitelhau telegraphs, the reach seems to give you a big advantage.

    I'm having trouble picturing this, but I'll give it a try.
    Ask Lopes how to do this. It's a standard defense against a mittelhau; you just displace with the pflug, and step in with a thrust to the face (if you catch the bind). It's a good way to bind, same as with the high (Ochs) absetzen. You an also displace with a hanger but it doesn't give you any advantage, the absetzen gives you control of the center and allows you to make a single-time counter if your execution is good.

    I believe you. My experience with sword and buckler is limited to one (weekend long) I.33 workshop.
    I've never really studied either in any depth, I have about the same level of exposure to each (a weekend). But that is my understanding.

    G

  5. - Top - End - #155
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    GreataxeFighterGuy

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    Default Re: Got a Real World Weapons or Armour Question? Mk X

    Quote Originally Posted by pendell View Post
    With respect to the space weapons discussion, I have an alternate suggestion: kinetic weapons. Rail guns.
    I've been thinking about that too. Can't you create a big cloud of very fast particles that hits every location where the enemy could possibly move to in that time?

    I'm not going to do the math to figure out whether that would actually work, though.

  6. - Top - End - #156
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    Default Re: Got a Real World Weapons or Armour Question? Mk X

    The problem with rail guns though is that you have to carry all the mass to eject. Lasers require no weight.

    G

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    Default Re: Got a Real World Weapons or Armour Question? Mk X

    Quote Originally Posted by Fhaolan View Post
    I believe the Honor Harrington series also has those, although I might be misrembering.
    Bomb-fueled X-ray lasers, yes. Those weren't carrying their own targeting systems, though; it was more of a 'get it close and them trigger the bomb to spew lasers in every direction' setup IIRC.

  8. - Top - End - #158
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    Default Re: Got a Real World Weapons or Armour Question? Mk X

    Quote Originally Posted by Galloglaich View Post
    Yep, Lopes... a legendary figure in HEMA circles. Great guy once you get to know him. Are you in his group? AMEK?
    I am. Is he really that legendary? I just know him as my instructor, and I do know he's involved in lots of international stuff, but I have no idea what his actual stature is outside the Netherlands.

    It is the recommended application of the sheitelhau as a master-cut, it does work though if the defender is very fast with an abschnitt and moves off-line, he can beat it. This typically only happens if the individual making the sheitelhau telegraphs, the reach seems to give you a big advantage.
    Against an unterhau? I thought the sheitelhau was the meisterhau against the alber (presumably after an oberhau, but I get the impression there's some confusion about that).

    But the sheitelhau is easily the meisterhau I know the least about. (I might have missed some lessons.)

    Ask Lopes how to do this. It's a standard defense against a mittelhau; you just displace with the pflug,
    Do you mean as a kind of close guard (or whatever it's called)?

    and step in with a thrust to the face (if you catch the bind). It's a good way to bind, same as with the high (Ochs) absetzen. You an also displace with a hanger but it doesn't give you any advantage, the absetzen gives you control of the center and allows you to make a single-time counter if your execution is good.
    I'll ask Lopes about it. Or maybe another instructor. (I actually think Matthys Kool is the better teacher; at least at my level. But don't tell Lopes that.)
    Last edited by mcv; 2012-04-17 at 10:29 AM.

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    Default Re: Got a Real World Weapons or Armour Question? Mk X

    Quote Originally Posted by mcv View Post
    I've been thinking about that too. Can't you create a big cloud of very fast particles that hits every location where the enemy could possibly move to in that time?
    Perhaps with superior numbers and positioning. I can't imagine that happening with equal numbers. I'm not sure how far off this analogy is, but I imagine it's like painting a car red with penlights. Even if you can do it, the amount of pen lights needed might end up weighing more than the car itself...

  10. - Top - End - #160
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    Default Re: Got a Real World Weapons or Armour Question? Mk X

    Re: Space Weapons and targeting - more info on NASA & JPL's Optical Communications work. Challenges:
    Quote Originally Posted by NASA.gov
    With the aid of Sun-sensors and star-trackers, an interplanetary spacecraft can find the Earth and maintain its attitude relative to the Earth with an accuracy of a few milliradians (.02 degrees). At RF communication frequencies (S-band and X-band) this level of pointing is perfectly adequate. With optical systems, this spacecraft attitude control must be augmented with a fine-pointing mirror which removes the spacecraft vibration. To maintain this fine-pointing direction, it helps to have a reference point, or a beacon. The beacon could be a laser emanated from Earth, the Sun-illuminated Earth itself or background stars.

    Currently, few lasers are powerful enough to be useful as a beacon, and introduce logistical difficulties since one has to reliably maintain this beacon. Current cost and implementation considerations direct us toward natural sources of light as beacons. Our recent work indicates that combination of star tracking and inertial sensors (accelerometer, gyro, or rate sensors) will be most suitable for acquisition, tracking and pointing (ATP) purposes. To sense the direction of the homing beacon, the remote laser-communication terminal contains a focal plane array (such as a high-rate CCD camera) to track the apparent motion of the beacon and commands the fine pointing mirror to correct for that motion. In this way, the modulated laser beam (carrying data) can be pointed with high accuracy towards the Earth. To account for the relative motion of the Earth and the spacecraft, the fine-pointing system must also calculate and implement a ‘point-ahead’ angle.
    Existing capabilities / testing:
    Quote Originally Posted by NASA.gov
    To bring the promise of free-space optical communications to fruition, a long-term strategy of developing the appropriate technology, and demonstrating its capability must be followed. A laser-communication terminal consists of lasers, optics (telescope, lenses, filters…), electronics (drivers, mini-processor…), and the ATP subsystem (focal planes array, fine-pointing mirror…). Each of these components has been independently demonstrated on various space missions. Indeed, some have flown many times. The only remaining critical technology to demonstrate for deep-space optical communications is a demonstration of long-range acquisition, tracking and pointing. Ranges as high as 35,000 km (GEO orbit) were demonstrated successfully with a Japanese optical communications terminal (on the ETS 6 spacecraft) during the Ground-to-Orbit Laser Communication Demonstration (GOLD). GOLD was the first bidirectional laser communications link between the ground and a spacecraft in geostationary orbit.

    The Galileo Optical Experiment (GOPEX) demonstrated the ability to point lasers precisely to objects in deep space, and to sense long-distance optical pulses. Laser beams were transmitted from JPL's Table Mountain Facility and the US Air Force's Starfire Optical Range in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Over an 8-day period, the optical beams were successfully detected by the Galileo spacecraft at ranges of up to 6 million kilometers. A downlink demonstration of optical comm ATP has not yet been attempted from deep space.
    For reference, one light second is a bit under 300,000 km.

    I really don't think targeting at light second ranges will be an issue. We've already exceeded it from earth. The challenge now is miniaturizing the equipment needed enough to put on a space platform.
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    Default Re: Got a Real World Weapons or Armour Question? Mk X

    With all this talk about simulated fighting, a question came back to mind:

    How does a warrior train for a killing blow? How does one condition themselves to go through practiced movements with random resistance from tissue. Is it easy to cut off a limb? To behead? To bifurcate? Is it any harder or easier to thrust or stab a torso and recover to a ready state?

    I'm mostly interested in the physical aspects of preparing to kill, but how did warriors of the past cope with killing other humans psychologically? Good ol' stupid hatred can't have been all there was to a mentally stable career murderer.
    Quote Originally Posted by No brains View Post
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  12. - Top - End - #162
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    Default Re: Got a Real World Weapons or Armour Question? Mk X

    Quote Originally Posted by No brains View Post
    With all this talk about simulated fighting, a question came back to mind:

    How does a warrior train for a killing blow? How does one condition themselves to go through practiced movements with random resistance from tissue. Is it easy to cut off a limb? To behead? To bifurcate? Is it any harder or easier to thrust or stab a torso and recover to a ready state?

    I'm mostly interested in the physical aspects of preparing to kill, but how did warriors of the past cope with killing other humans psychologically? Good ol' stupid hatred can't have been all there was to a mentally stable career murderer.
    People were hitting dummies, strawmen, each other with blunt weapons, and this really worked, it's not much philosophy here.

    Even practice on living flesh wasn't very uncommon, in most places and times fighting class(es) also tended to hunt on pretty large scale.

    Mental aspect will hugely depend on dozens of things, so it's hard to answer like that.

    But people in 'developed' countries are generally living in extremely 'soft' conditions.

    To pretty much any person in medieval Europe, slaughtering pigs, violence, death, illness, and other nasty things would be much more common sight, and familiarity with need of defending oneself and fighting would be more common too.

    Today in different parts of the world you still see people killing each other for things that are 'trivial' from our point of view, so it's not hard to imagine someone killing when adrenaline and all put him in 'fighting' mode.
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    Quote Originally Posted by Raum View Post
    I really don't think targeting at light second ranges will be an issue. We've already exceeded it from earth. The challenge now is miniaturizing the equipment needed enough to put on a space platform.
    Yes, we've managed to hit a probe that was deliberately standing still with a communication laser.
    The challenge is to hit a target that's moving unpredictably with a laser that has a much narrower focus (Necessary if you want a destructive result)
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    Default Re: Got a Real World Weapons or Armour Question? Mk X

    Quote Originally Posted by Thiel View Post
    Yes, we've managed to hit a probe that was deliberately standing still with a communication laser.
    Standing "still"? Not deliberately evading yes, but hardly standing still. But my point was simple, the precision needed to acquire, track, and point at a target approximately 20 light seconds away is current technology.

    The challenge is to hit a target that's moving unpredictably with a laser that has a much narrower focus (Necessary if you want a destructive result)
    I agree with all except "unpredictability" - but I do understand your point. I simply think we have enough of a basic start to make adding the rest reasonable between now and whenever we have enough infrastructure and technology in space to fight a war.
    Last edited by Raum; 2012-04-17 at 07:22 PM.
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    Default Re: Got a Real World Weapons or Armour Question? Mk X

    So out of curiosity, has anyone thought about categorizing all of this?
    and on topic: my friend was saying that a kukri(sp?) was more effect than a K-bar in combat; empty bluster or is he right?
    Last edited by faith; 2012-04-17 at 10:12 PM.

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    Default Re: Got a Real World Weapons or Armour Question? Mk X

    Quote Originally Posted by faith View Post
    and on topic: my friend was saying that a kukri(sp?) was more effect than a K-bar in combat; empty bluster or is he right?
    Empty bluster: One cannot say that X weapon is "more effective" than Y weapon just like that, unless one is weapon is a sock that needs darning, and the other is a nuke.
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    Default Re: Got a Real World Weapons or Armour Question? Mk X

    Quote Originally Posted by Galloglaich View Post
    Keep in mind also, while the German (esp. I.33) sword and buckler does use the buckler primarily to protect the sword hand, in the Bolognese school it's different, they aren't used together so much.
    The English use of the buckler is also quite unlike i33, it is used as a weapon as much as a shield. It is simply called "fighting double" if you have a dagger, buckler, or even a second sword in the off hand. I've found it difficult to mesh most of what I've seen from i33 with the English system.

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    Default Bomb-pumped laser firing missiles

    Quote Originally Posted by The Grue View Post
    Switching gears to science fiction for a moment...

    Plausible armaments for spacecraft. Missiles? Projectile weapons, even gauss or railguns, would probably be ineffective except at extreme(relative) close range, or against targets that can't manouver. Lasers would work over long distance, if not for how easy it'd be to coat a ship with some kind of reflective material. Not like stealth is a design consideration anyway.
    So far, nobody has mentioned the dual system from the Honor Harrington series. David Weber may have picked up the idea elsewhere, I don't know for sure, but it was original to my lengthy scifi reading experience.

    Use a missile that approaches the target to within a certain range, then fire a nuke-pumped x-ray laser to hit it. The target's defensive lasers don't have appreciably greater effective range. On a rare occasion you might be able to use the mini-nuke itself against the target, but it would probably have to be a soft target to get that close.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Raum View Post
    Standing "still"? Not deliberately evading yes, but hardly standing still. But my point was simple, the precision needed to acquire, track, and point at a target approximately 20 light seconds away is current technology.

    I agree with all except "unpredictability" - but I do understand your point. I simply think we have enough of a basic start to make adding the rest reasonable between now and whenever we have enough infrastructure and technology in space to fight a war.
    But it is unpredictable. At one light-second you're seeing me where I was a second ago and the lase will take another second to reach me. Me being me I'm not going to sit around and just let you shoot me so I'll be thrusting all over the place. Even a two second delay will be enough for you to miss by miles.
    At twenty light-seconds there'll be a 40 second delay which is enough to make you miss by thousands of miles.
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    Quote Originally Posted by Thiel View Post
    Me being me I'm not going to sit around and just let you shoot me so I'll be thrusting all over the place. Even a two second delay will be enough for you to miss by miles.
    I don't buy this. Space combat is effectively guaranteed to take place at high speeds, but it's change in velocity we care about. As of now, spacecraft aren't able to accelerate all that quickly, and I don't see any reason to think that will change to the point where the velocity is now several miles per second different.
    I would really like to see a game made by Obryn, Kurald Galain, and Knaight from these forums.

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    Default Re: Got a Real World Weapons or Armour Question? Mk X

    Missiles seem the only thing that would be practical, as they can adjust their path as they get closer to the target and the target is changing position and direction.
    But then, shoting down missiles as they get close with lasers or railguns would be relatively easy.

    I'd say really long range engagements in space are still rather unlikely, even with super advanced targeting systems. Not as close as in most movies, but you'd still have to get close enough for your weapons to travel the distance in a reasonable amount of time.
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    Default Re: Got a Real World Weapons or Armour Question? Mk X

    Quote Originally Posted by Thiel View Post
    But it is unpredictable. At one light-second you're seeing me where I was a second ago and the lase will take another second to reach me. Me being me I'm not going to sit around and just let you shoot me so I'll be thrusting all over the place. Even a two second delay will be enough for you to miss by miles.
    At twenty light-seconds there'll be a 40 second delay which is enough to make you miss by thousands of miles.
    It becomes a race between how much reaction mass you've got and how long your enemy can power his laser. With current technology, high speed acceleration costs enormous amounts of reaction mass. This will probably change in the future, but if it doesn't, evasive action will end up being too expensive.

    Keep in mind that you don't know when your enemy will shoot. You have to evade all the time.

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    Default Re: Got a Real World Weapons or Armour Question? Mk X

    Quote Originally Posted by Thiel View Post
    But it is unpredictable. At one light-second you're seeing me where I was a second ago and the lase will take another second to reach me. Me being me I'm not going to sit around and just let you shoot me so I'll be thrusting all over the place. Even a two second delay will be enough for you to miss by miles.
    At twenty light-seconds there'll be a 40 second delay which is enough to make you miss by thousands of miles.
    You can completely forget about lasers at distances measured in light seconds anyway. Diffraction will make the beam at least a few miles wide at the destination (for reasonable-sized lasers). In theory, you could counter this with phased arrays (or very, very large lasers), but we are far from having the technological means to pull this off in the visible spectrum (or even near IR). With a MASER, it might be possible though.
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    Default Re: Got a Real World Weapons or Armour Question? Mk X

    Quote Originally Posted by mcv View Post
    With current technology, high speed acceleration costs enormous amounts of reaction mass. This will probably change in the future, but if it doesn't, evasive action will end up being too expensive.
    I think this leads to an important point. What space combat will look like will depend greatly on what technology we will have in the future. Currently Space Combat consists of using missiles to shoot down satellites and (possibly) ballistic missiles. Future space combat will depend greatly on:
    • What kind of propulsion is available? Chemical rockets? Ion drives? Fission rockets? Fusion rockets?
    • Can space ships be armored?
    • How much energy is avaliable to the ship?
    • Do high powered lasers exist? How well can they be focused?
    • What is the goal of a Space Navy? Is it defending Earth from invaders or protecting space lanes to Mars?
    • What is the rate of fire of high powered lasers? Are they like modern chemical laser which require fuel or do they only require power?
    • How effective is missile defense?


    Personally, I feel that combat at light second distances will be very difficult. remember a light second is about the distance to the Moon and it took the Apollo astronaughts days to get that far. I doubt any missiles or projectiles will be able to go much faster. In addition, the defending ship can be shooting at the missiles as they approach. On the other hand, as others have pointed out, it will be very hard to aim and focus lasers at those distances.
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    Default Re: Got a Real World Weapons or Armour Question? Mk X

    Quote Originally Posted by Thiel View Post
    But it is unpredictable. At one light-second you're seeing me where I was a second ago and the lase will take another second to reach me. Me being me I'm not going to sit around and just let you shoot me so I'll be thrusting all over the place. Even a two second delay will be enough for you to miss by miles.
    At twenty light-seconds there'll be a 40 second delay which is enough to make you miss by thousands of miles.
    As Knaight says it's sudden deltas that matter, not raw speed. Newton's first law is going to prevent the type of jinking you can get out of an aircraft which uses atmosphere and Newton's third law is going to help you predict direction when you can detect the ejecta from the drive.

    I agree, there are targeting challenges still. But they're solvable challenges.

    Quote Originally Posted by Autolykos View Post
    You can completely forget about lasers at distances measured in light seconds anyway. Diffraction will make the beam at least a few miles wide at the destination (for reasonable-sized lasers). In theory, you could counter this with phased arrays (or very, very large lasers), but we are far from having the technological means to pull this off in the visible spectrum (or even near IR). With a MASER, it might be possible though.
    Yep, called this out before being distracted by the targeting argument.
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    Default Re: Got a Real World Weapons or Armour Question? Mk X

    Quote Originally Posted by mcv View Post
    I am. Is he really that legendary? I just know him as my instructor, and I do know he's involved in lots of international stuff, but I have no idea what his actual stature is outside the Netherlands.
    Lopes is very well known in HEMA circles worldwide. For one thing, he travels a lot and he's a hard person to forget when you have met him.

    For the others here, here is one of his matches in Sweden in 2010. Lopes is in black. Unfortunately they are sparring with those horrible rubbery rawlings simulators so it undermines the fencing a little bit, but as you can see he is pretty aggressive and fast. Not that it helps when you lose your sword!

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5IrR...feature=relmfu

    He made short work of me in the quarter finals in Houston in 2010 but I hope next time we fence I'll give him more of a challenge.

    Lopes is well regarded as a fencer, I'd guess he's in the top 5% or 10% of longsword fencers worldwide. He's also well respected for his understanding of body mechanics, you should learn as much of that as you can from him.

    But of course he is also at least as well known for his appearance, remarks, and antics. And for things like wearing kilts in downtown areas of major American cities and so on... Lopes is an amusing guy I like him a lot.

    Against an unterhau? I thought the sheitelhau was the meisterhau against the alber (presumably after an oberhau, but I get the impression there's some confusion about that).
    It is the meisterhau against the alber but it works well against low guards, including when people make attacks at your leg, whether a a sweeping cut or an unterhau at the lower opening. The body mechanics allow you to over-reach. The counter for the person doing this is to try to aim an unterhau at your hand but like I said, if you don't telegraph the Sheitel usually works.

    Do you mean as a kind of close guard (or whatever it's called)?
    Next time you are training, have someone aim a mittelhau at your waist or left elbow, and try displacing with a pflug. To bind, pull back a little when they make contact with your blade while stepping forward and trying to place your strong on their weak. Once you get used to that, try catching a bind and then making a thrust into their face with a passing step to your right. That is the low absetzen.

    I'll ask Lopes about it. Or maybe another instructor. (I actually think Matthys Kool is the better teacher; at least at my level. But don't tell Lopes that.)
    Is that Ties Kool? Try it out and let me know what they say, I'll be interested to hear.

    G
    Last edited by Galloglaich; 2012-04-18 at 01:14 PM.

  27. - Top - End - #177
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    Default Re: Got a Real World Weapons or Armour Question? Mk X

    Quote Originally Posted by No brains View Post
    With all this talk about simulated fighting, a question came back to mind:

    How does a warrior train for a killing blow? How does one condition themselves to go through practiced movements with random resistance from tissue.
    Actually I think this is a pretty good question.

    We know that the Japanese were obsessed with test-cutting, they cut special straw mats (most famous type being the tatami mats) and they also cut animal and even human cadavers. We also have some Arab and Turkish fencing manuals which recommend test-cutting on cane poles and other targets.

    We don't have a lot of data about how Europeans practiced cutting techniques yet. I'm not certain why that is.

    As Spyrit said, this would be a period in which it was much more common for people to have experience with things like butchering animals and so on, as well as of war. But they trained intensively in fencing, so I think it's likely that they did practice cutting as well... if for no other reason than because...

    Is it easy to cut off a limb? To behead? To bifurcate? Is it any harder or easier to thrust or stab a torso and recover to a ready state?
    From modern experience of people involved in the HEMA scene, the answer is that it is fairly easy to sever a limb or behead say, a pig carcass, if you know what you are doing. Big if. It seems to take some practice for most people. Rather like target shooting does. Most of us practice on tatami mats like the Japanese, or we use things like pool noodles and plastic water bottles.

    Cutting through a few layers of textiles covering meat and bone is a little harder and requires a higher level of skill. But still not too hard if you are skilled and have a good weapon.

    However if you aren't skilled, you can cut a plastic gatorade bottle full of water with a very nice, sharp sword and it will just bounce across the yard with a dent in it. So IMO, some training does seem to be necessary.

    I'm mostly interested in the physical aspects of preparing to kill, but how did warriors of the past cope with killing other humans psychologically? Good ol' stupid hatred can't have been all there was to a mentally stable career murderer.
    The Medieval period, at any rate, was a bit more violent than today, or at least, it may be more accurate to say that while violent crime rates were similar as today, they were more evenly distributed and of a different character: transgressive criminal behavior wasn't as common, but violence based around issues like pride were much more common among middle and upper class people than today. So experience of violence wasn't as rare.

    And as spyrit said, hunting was a popular passtime even for middle class urban dwellers.

    We also know that their training was more violent. Whereas today we train with blunt swords like they did, we use fencing masks. At least some of the time they seem to have determined the winner of a (training) fight by "the red bloom", i.e. the guy who got his scalp split open and bloody lost the fight. We are too chicken for that today, and I imagine it did harden people psychologically somewhat.

    Beyond that, I think it's a good question worth looking into further.

    G

  28. - Top - End - #178
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    Default Re: Got a Real World Weapons or Armour Question? Mk X

    Quote Originally Posted by Galloglaich View Post
    From modern experience of people involved in the HEMA scene, the answer is that it is fairly easy to sever a limb or behead say, a pig carcass, if you know what you are doing. Big if. It seems to take some practice for most people. Rather like target shooting does. Most of us practice on tatami mats like the Japanese, or we use things like pool noodles and plastic water bottles.
    But those aren't armored, trying to dodge, and also trying to kill you in turn. In an actual combat situation, there is probably almost no chance at all to carefully aim a precise chop like that.
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    Quote Originally Posted by a_humble_lich View Post
    • What kind of propulsion is available? Chemical rockets? Ion drives? Fission rockets? Fusion rockets?
    • Can space ships be armored?
    • How much energy is avaliable to the ship?
    • Do high powered lasers exist? How well can they be focused?
    • What is the goal of a Space Navy? Is it defending Earth from invaders or protecting space lanes to Mars?
    • What is the rate of fire of high powered lasers? Are they like modern chemical laser which require fuel or do they only require power?
    • How effective is missile defense?


    Personally, I feel that combat at light second distances will be very difficult. remember a light second is about the distance to the Moon and it took the Apollo astronaughts days to get that far. I doubt any missiles or projectiles will be able to go much faster. In addition, the defending ship can be shooting at the missiles as they approach. On the other hand, as others have pointed out, it will be very hard to aim and focus lasers at those distances.
    Well, transit to the moon was a ballistic trajectory, not powered flight. Fission and fusion rockets would theoretically top out at around 20k ISP due to limitations on heat transfer to reaction mass. That allows modest sustained acceleration (½ G to 1 G) for combat inside the 1 LS range. It allows continuously powered (flip halfway and decelerate) transit at something less than ¼ G for comfortably short travel times between planets, but the reaction mass reserves are so large that combat maneuvers would require fuel tank jettison. You recover the tank if you win, and if the tank wasn't destroyed.

    Note that for fusion you still have to hand-wave some comparatively small scale thermal deuterium fusion or some other implementation that currently looks impossible.

    Most games rely on some form of "reactionless" drive, by which they mean no reaction mass is required. They posit various ways of using gravitational manipulation or space-time distortion to effect acceleration more efficiently than is possible for reaction-mass driven propulsion. If we hand-wave a few centuries of future science and say that is possible... well, we're no longer in the realm of real world tech, just scifi staple.

    For weaponry, games usually hand-wave target and focus issues away. Broad phased arrays are the only way to keep a laser beam focused at great distances, but that doesn't look as cool as the long barrel of a naval cannon. Who wants ship armament that looks like a bank of solar panels?

  30. - Top - End - #180
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    Default Re: Got a Real World Weapons or Armour Question? Mk X

    Quote Originally Posted by Galloglaich View Post
    AThe Medieval period, at any rate, was a bit more violent than today, or at least, it may be more accurate to say that while violent crime rates were similar as today, they were more evenly distributed and of a different character: transgressive criminal behavior wasn't as common, but violence based around issues like pride were much more common among middle and upper class people than today. So experience of violence wasn't as rare.
    I'll have to dig up the source on this, but it comes down to this: there's been a gradual reduction of violence for a very long time. The medieval period was far more violent than today, the iron age more violent than the medieval period, the stone age more violent than the iron age. This also carries over to the ages in between those ages.
    I would really like to see a game made by Obryn, Kurald Galain, and Knaight from these forums.

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