CrashbotUS

Snuffy was still around when I was in.

Minimum wage jobs used to be the things people did while pursing other options, like education. The US has managed to collapse the middle class to a point people are needing to work these service industry jobs as full time careers. It has also managed to con the younger generation with newspeak terms like "shared economy" which is simply a smoke and mirrors version of Victorian era piecemeal work.

Hippies and bums leave me alone. I am not a very agreeable person.

Shashka > katana

I'm still not keen on using a file to create the edges and fullers. It defeats the purpose of hammering out the fuller with the correct tool. You shouldn't be removing material like that.

All of Russia resides within the Siberian shelf, duh.

21st century America. No place for our kind anymore.

Wall hangers.

Why did they use a file to create the fuller? Makes no sense.

Probably seen this before but here it is. A bunch of European members of my group (black shield, red cross with white trim) are in the fight scenes and I have a knife made by the smith in video. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/ancient/secrets-viking-sword.html

I have no experience with rapiers but I am assuming much of the I.33 wards I know using arming swords and buckler would apply in much the same way. I can run 'maybe' 100 yards at dead sprint in full kit but I can fight for a very long time. Of course I train about 10 hours a week and work out every day so that helps. My full fighting kit includes pants, a linen under tunic, a linen or wool over tunic, pouch, belt, a padded leather gambeson, a mail shirt, lamellar, spangenhelm, broadsword, seax, hand axe, Danish axe or 8' spear and a 34 round shield. Funny thing is, it's not a whole lot more than what I carried as soldier in the 20th century.

I wouldn't want to face an armored opponent using a rapier, you would have to be exceptionally skilled to get into the squishy vulnerable bits. I'd definitely want something like that for dueling or unarmored street fighting though.

A swords degree of usefulness is dependent on what your opponent is wearing. You'd be surprised how quickly you can disarm or bind a sword with a bearded axe or how quickly I can stick a one handed spear in your pumpkin. The benefits of axes and spears is the level of training a soldier needs to be effective in battle.

North of the ever expanding urban sprawl that is Dallas, Texas.

Yeah, I have some good friends that are smiths. Smelting and forging without the use of any modern equipment is quite difficult. It reinforces the fact that fancy weapons like swords were rare and expensive but axes and spears were what the average iron age European carried into battle.

That is why I moved out to the middle of what was once nowhere. I have a strong dislike of people and out here I didn't need to see many of them. Now, people are moving out here in droves to "get into the country" but bringing everything from the city with them. Rezoning land, building strip malls and chain stores, and throwing up cookie cutter housing developments with names like "The Estates of Fox Oak Creek" although they chased off the foxes, cut down the oaks, and paved over the creek...

I'm going to have to call BS on that one. Every bit of training we do, be it directly from manuscripts or testing new fighting concepts we developed, is done with intent. You don't actually need to kill your opponent to show that a particular movement will kill someone. You run out of training partners if you kill everyone.

If there was ever a reason to drive a tank through a diner, that would have been it.

I know the Gallic tribes used bronze swords and later on had pretty low quality iron swords, so bending would definitely have been a problem.

My mean time of commute corroborates this. Even way out where I live it is getting crowded. The Dallas -Fort Worth-Arlington statistical area is freaking ass to chest with people now.

Here you go. This is a period crafted and hand forged to museum specifications sword. The only difference is that it isn't sharp because although hitting people with it is fun, getting killed would not be.

I fight with one the more sought after Europeans smiths Type H broadsword. It''ll bend to 90' fairly easy but I don't think I could force it into a circle. Maybe a longer arming sword could do that. Everything sword/spear/seax related that I own doesn't go much past the 12th century.

I should make a quick video of just how much you can bend a spring steel sword.

The days of ruggedly handsome soldiers leering suspiciously at each other across Fulda are gone.

Pre-Colonial Africa had some pretty impressive localized empires. Like to Oyo Empire, one of the only Yoruba groups to utilize horse cavalry.