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Carillon posted:Mispelled épée If I wanted to just stand around aimlessly I'd play baseball.
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Mar 9, 2023 16:08
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I'm absolutely not able to defend them personally, but I do know the instructor had some level of education on the subject, like it's what he went to college for and I believe he had some published papers and presentations. He linked me a talk he gave about rates of violence in early modern German towns, let me see if I can find it. He's the instructor in the New Orleans HEMA club and his info is online, I don't think I need to be secretive about who he is. Really don't want to overstate my involvement in the club, I went like three times and couldn't make the scheduling work. Edit: Here's a lecture he gave, talking about how much of historical sword fighting wasn't what we conventionally think of as war: https://youtu.be/bwsUVaa9lKo Jack B Nimble fucked around with this message at 16:18 on Mar 9, 2023 |
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Mar 9, 2023 16:11
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I distinctly remember reading about slashing v. thrusting in one of Haythornwaite's books on Napoleonic warfare as a kid. Also, link. Relevant: quote:Thrust, thrust, as much as you can; you will throw to the ground all you touch; you will demoralize the enemy who has escaped your cuts, and you will add to these advantages that of never exposing yourself and being always on guard. In the first wars in Spain our dragoons achieved by their thrusts a reputation which demoralized the Spanish and English troops.” (de Brack, [1831], 1876, p. 51)
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Mar 9, 2023 16:17
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Jack B Nimble posted:I'm absolutely not able to defend them personally, but I do know the instructor had some level of education on the subject, like it's what he went to college for and I believe he had some published papers and presentations. He linked me a talk he gave about rates of violence in early modern German towns, let me see if I can find it. He's the instructor in the New Orleans HEMA club and his info is online, I don't think I need to be secretive about who he is. Actually it was the Tod video where Matt Easton talks about the texts he works from is what sparked the question in my mind. Lots of people write nonsense self-defense and martial arts manuals and I'm just curious about the historicity of these old longsword texts.
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Mar 9, 2023 16:17
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why were german farms so small, though? germany had free imperial cities. italy had free cities. italian rich guys bought, sold, and improved farmland to be worked by sharecroppers or renters. it's totally modern behavior. why didn't german rich guys do that back in the early modern times?
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Mar 9, 2023 16:20
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Cessna posted:If I wanted to just stand around aimlessly I'd play baseball.  loving savage lol
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Mar 9, 2023 16:20
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zoux posted:Actually it was the Tod video where Matt Easton talks about the texts he works from is what sparked the question in my mind. Lots of people write nonsense self-defense and martial arts manuals and I'm just curious about the historicity of these old longsword texts. well just from a book history perspective, remember the much greater barriers to literary production in that period and the absence of a public literary marketplace. Someone makes a book like that now to sell lots of copies and make some money and build some influence to maybe sell tickets to seminars. That pathway is not possible until about 1650 (in England) at the earliest, and probably not realistically until the 1720s or so. Most of these books that Easton and guys like him consult are manuscripts, possibly one-offs. Someone produces a book like that for different reasons which are going to be local and personalized - sometimes it's archival for their own posterity or an institution, and in other cases it's a personal memoir, or in others it has been commissioned by a patron who has some kind of relationship with the authors. So this isn't to say that they're going to be nonsense-free, but the older process has more chances for filtering out the real charlatans. If I'm a fifteenth century Austrian aristocrat who decides that he wants to sponsor a sword master to train my household and produce a manual, I'm going to be able to evaluate the author's abilities whether through reputation or personal interaction, and I'm going to be much more motivated to hire someone who isn't poo poo. e. as far as the specific historicity, that's a somewhat different question - battlefield vs brawl vs duel are very different situations. I get the sense that most people think of these as battlefield manuals, but they're likely more often about formal duelling, whether personal or judicial. Some of them could be about hypothetical and unlikely situations.
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Mar 9, 2023 16:26
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zoux posted:Lots of people write nonsense self-defense and martial arts manuals https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5uO0wsEUBN0
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Mar 9, 2023 16:33
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Cessna posted:If I wanted to just stand around aimlessly I'd play baseball. 
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Mar 9, 2023 17:03
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And that is how parade drill is made.
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Mar 9, 2023 17:05
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zoux posted:Actually it was the Tod video where Matt Easton talks about the texts he works from is what sparked the question in my mind. Lots of people write nonsense self-defense and martial arts manuals and I'm just curious about the historicity of these old longsword texts. So, I'm going to talk about one specific early text here as a example, Fiore de'i Liberi's flower of battle. It was written quite early - 1410s most likely - and 4 copies of it survive to the present. Two of those from the library of the Dukes of Ferrera, which explicitly have a dedication to the Duke at the time and therefore were probably a gift of some sort. Two other copies have turned up in other libaries and archives, and while the illustrations are slightly different (given they were done by hand by subcontracted artists for each copy this isn't that surprising) but the text is very similar, with the biggest changes being in the ordering of the sections. One copy explicitly states it is "arranged by his [Fiore's] own hands". This tells us that rich people were willing to pay Fiore to make copies of his manual, so they've probably met him and judged his competence themselves. Furthermore, Fiore actually starts the book by justifying his own skills and competence. As well as general platitudes about his skill and passion for the art of combat, his lists 7 knightly duels and tournaments that his students have been involved in, with names, titles, and basic details of the event. 2 of these we have independent documentation about that matches his description - while neither mentions that Fiore was the fencing-master or trainer for the knight Fiore says he taught, they agree that the duel happened in the way Fiore describes it. These are fairly high-profile events - involving the Dukes of Milan, the Marshal of France, etc. So we know he sold or gifted his manuscript to high-ranking Italian nobles, while also listing other high-ranking nobles and famous captains as his students. These people shared the same circles and exchanged letters - if he was bullshiting he would have been called out. And that is was also a large expense and require lots of skilled labour to make these books, yet several different copies were made a different times with different artists. That is a pretty good basis to say that the contents of the flower of battle were considered credible by lords and knights in early 15th Century Italy, who did regularly fight both wars and duels with each other. There's also a interesting paragraph where he justifies even writing a book on martial arts to begin with. He says that he'd been studying the martial arts for 40 years, and was not yet a perfect master of the martial arts. Yet that if he had studied law and medicine for 40 years, he'd have several doctorates. So he will write a book of martial arts so that he will be remembered, and that his students can hold more of the martial arts in their memory, for to be a master he had to know everything in this book yet no man could remember more than a quarter of the book without a reference.
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Mar 9, 2023 17:42
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I think the point (lol) to remember about cutting vs thrusting is that this was actually a debate that went on for hundreds (thousands?) of years with both cutting and thrusting weapons being used throughout the world. Historical people weren't idiots, so this means there were tradeoffs and advantages and disadvantages of both, even if some of them might not be super obvious to us today. For instance, the point I made about extracting your blade from your victim is probably not something HEMA can really model... Fangz fucked around with this message at 17:57 on Mar 9, 2023 |
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Mar 9, 2023 17:48
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Nothingtoseehere posted:So, I'm going to talk about one specific early text here as a example, Fiore de'i Liberi's flower of battle. It was written quite early - 1410s most likely - and 4 copies of it survive to the present. Two of those from the library of the Dukes of Ferrera, which explicitly have a dedication to the Duke at the time and therefore were probably a gift of some sort. Two other copies have turned up in other libaries and archives, and while the illustrations are slightly different (given they were done by hand by subcontracted artists for each copy this isn't that surprising) but the text is very similar, with the biggest changes being in the ordering of the sections. One copy explicitly states it is "arranged by his [Fiore's] own hands". This tells us that rich people were willing to pay Fiore to make copies of his manual, so they've probably met him and judged his competence themselves. Thanks, that's a great answer to a question I've had for a while now.
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Mar 9, 2023 17:53
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evil_bunnY posted:You go stand around aimlessly over there and lemme have a go, see what happens 
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Mar 9, 2023 18:02
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zoux posted:Thanks, that's a great answer to a question I've had for a while now. There's also a set of anonymous illustrations that are very similar to those of Fiore's. Are they copies of Fiore, or was there some earlier work that the anonymous authors and Fiore were all working off of? We know from other sources that Fiore was a professional soldier, so he probably knew about fighting. However, all we can really say for sure is that a) Niccolo III of Este kept his copy around, b) three other manuscripts exist and c) Philippo Vadi probably found a copy and used it as a source for his own work in the 1490s. Does that mean it "works" on some martial level? Eh. You'd have to learn the system and try. And now I want to get a copy of Street Sword just to see what kind of nonsense that actually is.
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Mar 9, 2023 19:27
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Loezi posted:Warfare truly is the search for increasingly efficient ways to stab a dude. What is artillery, after all, if not a delivery method for things that then distribute very small stabby-things over large area.  Source is SMBC Comics, of course
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Mar 9, 2023 19:41
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Siivola posted:It's kind of hard to say. Like Easton asks about 13 minutes in, why didn't anyone invent the rondel dagger until the 14th century, when mail has been around for so much longer? Why do people wear swords, even though they're bad? Rondel daggers came about in a time when the bits of mail protection started becoming really small. You can stab somebody through a mail shirt with a straight sword or larger dagger, but if you're trying to stab somebody under the arm pit you need a more specialized dagger. Greg12 posted:why were german farms so small, though? "germany had free imperial cities. italy had free cities." You're just sort of associating words here. A Free Imperial City was a particular legal status, it didn't let them become the dominant political force in Germany. In any case, the average farm size in Italy was even smaller than it was in Germany c. 1933
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Mar 9, 2023 19:52
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A_Bluenoser posted:One way I have head of thinking about the sword in a military context is that is has normally been a sidearm rather like a pistol today: seldom intended to be a primary fighting weapon but very nice to have in an emergency or in close quarters. There's another very important reason why a modern infantry officer has a pistol and not a rifle. The officer's job is not to shoot at things; it's to work out what their people should be shooting at. If you're concentrating on firing, you're not doing your job.
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Mar 9, 2023 19:56
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Also didn’t the Junkers do that? I imagine the value proposition of farming your little patch and doing some wage work was viable for a ton of Germans for whatever reason.
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Mar 9, 2023 19:57
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Nothingtoseehere posted:So we know he sold or gifted his manuscript to high-ranking Italian nobles, while also listing other high-ranking nobles and famous captains as his students. These people shared the same circles and exchanged letters - if he was bullshiting he would have been called out. I went from martial arts to (olympic style) fencing. One thing I really like about fencing is the fact that it knows it is a sport and doesn't even try to pretend otherwise. Because of this there's a lot less bullshit. In martial arts there's always the "what if," because by necessity whenever you're doing martial arts you're holding back. You can't really practice a life-or-death fight without someone possibly getting killed (which is bad for business). As such, there's often an undercurrent of "well, if this was a REAL fight I would have done X" (re-stomp the groin, whatever.) It's like alt-history discussions, there's a never ending reservoir of "but then I would have done this, or that, or unleashed my ki/force powers, or blah blah blah." In fencing it's very easy to tell who is better at the sport; either the light goes off and they get a point or they don't. I'm pretty sure the same thing applied to those duels. Either you win or you don't, choose which school you go to accordingly.
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Mar 9, 2023 20:03
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Rondel daggers were developed as a response to the emergence of plate armor, and specifically plate armor with gauntlets.
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Mar 9, 2023 20:15
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Trin Tragula posted:There's another very important reason why a modern infantry officer has a pistol and not a rifle. The officer's job is not to shoot at things; it's to work out what their people should be shooting at. If you're concentrating on firing, you're not doing your job. I have basically never seen a lower-than-Major combat arms officer with a pistol at anywhere exciting or in serious training in the US Army. In Finnish Army, I saw some FN Hi-powers and glocks with some combat arms officers, but pretty drat rare. Either Army still had it so, that you’d have your rifle with your pistol. I’ve seen them SOMETIMES at the pistol range. Tankers I guess have pistols for officers, but infantry officers, cav scouts, artillery, and engineers are the ones I’ve been crawling with in the ditches. No pistols visible. Source: former US Army paratrooper medic who also served in Finland. Edit: I guess the staff officers milling about the brigade or battalion command post had pistols. But mostly rifles there, too. There were some rifle-less officers and NCOs. Vahakyla fucked around with this message at 21:11 on Mar 9, 2023 |
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Mar 9, 2023 21:04
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Jack B Nimble posted:Regarding stabbing vs cutting in armor, the very little HEMA I did was based on early moden german texts and the instructor pointed out in the first class that we were learning the longsword techniques intended for unarmored enemies and he specifically mentioned that they wouldn't slash against armored opponents and instead used a lot more piercing joint attacks and, I think, a lot of leveraged joint locks to throw your opponent down. English civil war musketeers (so definitely not aristocrats) get issued mass produced swords. They're crap and probably mostly got used for cutting firewood or something but by this point its definitely not poshos only. On the other hand I suppose France around this time has 'the nobility of the sword' (traditional nobility) vs 'the nobility of the gown' (parvenus appointed by the king) so the traditional associations are still there. feedmegin fucked around with this message at 21:32 on Mar 9, 2023 |
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Mar 9, 2023 21:20
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Trin Tragula posted:There's another very important reason why a modern infantry officer has a pistol and not a rifle. The officer's job is not to shoot at things; it's to work out what their people should be shooting at. If you're concentrating on firing, you're not doing your job. This is incorrect. You're right about the "it's not their job to shoot" part, but not about them carrying pistols. Line officers in combat haven't carried pistols since at least WWII if they want to live. Carrying a pistol and not a rifle - or any other obvious indicator that they are officers - has a way of attracting sniper fire. It's like saluting in combat, you just don't do that unless you want to eat a bullet. Vahakyla posted:Tankers I guess have pistols for officers, but infantry officers, cav scouts, artillery, and engineers are the ones I’ve been crawling with in the ditches. No pistols visible. In the US ALL tankers carry pistols. This isn't an obvious indicator that they're an officer; they're also all (officers and enlisted) wearing nomex (coveralls) so it doesn't make them stand out per se. Cessna fucked around with this message at 21:38 on Mar 9, 2023 |
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Mar 9, 2023 21:36
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What does an infantry platoon leader carry?
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Mar 9, 2023 21:40
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zoux posted:What does an infantry platoon leader carry? A rifle, traditionally with an ACOG and a laser pointer. When my unit had a shortage of ACOGs for a while, the Platoon Leaders made sure to give riflemen all ACOGs and voluntarily used the red dot sights, but usually the PLs have ACOGs. This same would apply to artillery officers, cavalry scout officers, and engineer officers.
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Mar 9, 2023 21:43
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zoux posted:What does an infantry platoon leader carry? The same kind of rifle as the majority his/her troops. They may have a pistol assigned to them, but it's going to stay in the armory if they're doing anything serious.
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Mar 9, 2023 21:47
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I guess at what echelon do the officers stop carrying rifles. Also is the M4 considered a rifle or a carbine or am I splitting hairs.
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Mar 9, 2023 21:48
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zoux posted:I guess at what echelon do the officers stop carrying rifles. Also is the M4 considered a rifle or a carbine or am I splitting hairs. Also generally in TYOOL 2023 it's just "a rifle". There's very few M16s floating around anyway, and at least from personal experience "carbine" and "rifle" are not really used to separate anything, since everything was a "a rifle". The staff officers at S1, S2, S3 et cetera in the headquarters might not have rifles. They'll be usually captains and one or two lieutenants. The Major, the Battalion XO, might also not have a rifle. The staff officers have a small circle of staff NCOs and maybe a few privates. They'd have a rifle usually. However, the headquarters itself, with the headquarters company, was also expected to defend itself. So even staff sections had SAWs and a few AT-4s laying around. From what I saw, the Battalion Commander and the Command Sergeant Major did carry rifles as they were often in the front. For the Brigade commander, it was an example question to carry the rifle and be in camo paint. Vahakyla fucked around with this message at 21:55 on Mar 9, 2023 |
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Mar 9, 2023 21:52
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feedmegin posted:English civil war musketeers (so definitely not aristocrats) get issued mass produced swords. They're crap and probably mostly got used for cutting firewood or something but by this point its definitely not poshos only. I sincerely doubt the cutting firewood part. Clearing brush, removing branches and stuff like that maybe, but splitting wood with a sword would be very difficult.
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Mar 9, 2023 21:54
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zoux posted:I guess at what echelon do the officers stop carrying rifles. I don't have a single hard rule here, and I'm sure it varies by situation, job (i.e., all tankers carry pistols), etc. Generally speaking if you're out in combat actively shooting/getting shot at you don't want to do anything to stand out as a particularly attractive target. In some cases that obviously can't be helped - for example, the guy carrying the machinegun is clearly a machinegunner, not a rifleman, so he's going to stand out a bit compared to the riflemen. The guy carrying the radio is also an attractive target, so as technology improves they try to make radios smaller/less obvious. If you're away from combat, like in a headquarters - well, in my experience you had to have your weapon and gas mask within arm's reach 100% of the time. (I still have odd dreams where I wake up in a panic that unable to find my gas mask all these decades later, it's that important and burned into your brain.) If you're even further away from that, like in a VERY secure area but still in-country, there's probably something like an armory where you can lock up your weapon, but still have it where you can retrieve it relatively quickly. When you're not deployed - i.e., back on Camp Pendleton or Okinawa or wherever - your weapons are locked in an armory all the time unless you are actively cleaning them or using them on a firing range/training exercise, or are on post/guarding something. Rank-wise - I'm not 100% sure at what level officers in different MOS (jobs) get what sort of weapon because it varies by job. I.e.- - ALL tankers ONLY get pistols. - In Amtracks (APCS) all enlisted up to E-6 get a rifle. All Staff NCOs and officers get a pistol. When deployed (wartime) the SNCOs and Officers get reassigned rifles. - Infantry? I don't know for sure, I wasn't a grunt, but the vast majority of the time in peacetime I saw their officers in the field carrying rifles with maybe a pistol in a holster. I'm sure there were all knids of rules, exceptions, etc, but I don't know them. - Other infantry, guys like machinegunners or SMAW gunners or the like had pistols, but when deployed they got rifles from somewhere, see above. - Corpsmen (medics) carried pistols in the field. I think they may have had the option to draw rifles for self-protection depending on the situation, but I don't know exactly how this worked.
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Mar 9, 2023 22:06
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Cessna posted:
In the paratrooper army unit, medics had the option to choose to carry a pistol. If the training was some doodoo, they often chose pistols at the armory because it was easier to carry and have in the clinic or even in the platoon out there. But anytime it was anything remotely resembling game time, it was all rifles.
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Mar 9, 2023 22:10
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Vahakyla posted:However, the headquarters itself, with the headquarters company, was also expected to defend itself. So even staff sections had SAWs and a few AT-4s laying around. Yeah, there are also all sorts of odd TO&E things like that at work. ("You have been assigned X.") For example, in the 90s every platoon of AAVs was assigned a couple of M-60 Es. Why? There's no practical use for them. You've already got lots of much heavier weapons, and if it comes down to the range where you can use it for some sort of self-defense you're screwed anyway and would be better off with a rifle or pistol (or, better yet, a box of hand grenades). But the infantry had moved to the M240 B/G, and so we wound up with the (old/useless) M-60Es. I was assigned one as I was one of the bigger guys in the platoon; every time I had to take it to the field it ended up being wrapped in trash bags and padlocked to a bench, it might as well have been dead weight.
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Mar 9, 2023 22:17
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Is the "all tankers wear pistols" an actual practical concern or is it a Patton thing
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Mar 9, 2023 22:18
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Also the tanker officers (being part of the privileged class of “has a hatch”) are among the loader “people who fondle the two rifles” inside the tank. (At least in the Army side of tanking) You could argue that if there is a tanker that never sees the rifle it’s the gunner or the driver whereas a TC shooting out-of-hatch in close support is “this can happen” territory. (And did, 3ID had a TC die in Iraq on 2003 invasion who, after losing the main gun AND coax AND .50 AND loaders 240 was hit by an RPG…. While laying flat on top of the (still attacking) tank turret engaging targets with his m4 while loudly calling his K/D stars over the intercom.) Ofc before a tank commander starts fondling a rifle he or she has already tried to hijack the turret from the gunner, or to use his .50, or to call in indirect, so… Valtonen fucked around with this message at 22:26 on Mar 9, 2023 |
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Mar 9, 2023 22:23
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zoux posted:Is the "all tankers wear pistols" an actual practical concern or is it a Patton thing Pistols are useful for vehicle crews as they are still a weapon even if they aren’t a rifle. FDF tanker coveralls actually have a dedicated pocket for the pistol so you don’t have a holster hitting things while rummaging in the tank.
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Mar 9, 2023 22:25
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Cessna posted:I went from martial arts to (olympic style) fencing.  Fiore is plenty a fan of "dishonourable" combat with kicks the groin if nessacery. He covers grappling, dagger, mounted, etc aswell as the sword both unarmoured and armoured. This is a somewhat a problem for modern HEMA because as you say, you can't do alot of this stuff at full intensity without hurting someone. Longsword is actually the easiest to do - with the right protective gear blunt steel swords are fairly safe. But the grappling, dagger, close plays? Those are alot harder to train and do safely. And the people who have practiced it havn't found it that useful. Is that because it's the kind of flashy move you put in your book but don't really practice, or is it because even the best modern HEMA fencers are alot worse than people training at this their whole lives and it does work if you're good enough? Jury is still out on that.
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Mar 9, 2023 22:27
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zoux posted:Is the "all tankers wear pistols" an actual practical concern or is it a Patton thing Would you prefer a spear in a tank or a dagger?
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Mar 9, 2023 22:27
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zoux posted:Is the "all tankers wear pistols" an actual practical concern or is it a Patton thing Tanks are cramped, but if poo poo happens and your crew needs to GTFO of a burning vehicle in a hurry it's better to have a pistol than not.
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Mar 9, 2023 22:28
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zoux posted:Is the "all tankers wear pistols" an actual practical concern or is it a Patton thing Sorry, I don't understand?  In Finland tank crews have one folding stock RK-62 and everyone has a personal pistol. The assault rifle used to be a Kalashnikov back when Finland used T-55 and T-72 equipment, they arrived from Soviet Union with the AK as part of the equipment so it stuck even after switching to Leopards. But even before that Finnish tanks had Suomi SMG's onboard.
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Mar 9, 2023 22:29
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