The Katana isn't the super weapon I thought it was? Next you will being telling me too much bacon is bad for you.


Pathfinder First Edition General Discussion

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Great article about swords from a sword smith.
http://www.cracked.com/article_20634_6-things-movies-get-wrong-about-swords -an-inside-look.html


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xorial wrote:

Great article about swords from a sword smith.

link

linked for the phone users


Heck, that's pretty much the case in pathfinder anyway. I mean, it's a scimitar with an extra d2. I'm fond of it, but it aint the god weapon we want it to be.


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Yeah. You're better off with a delicious, delicious Fauchard.


Or a Falcata.


Ugh! Now I feel dirty. I'm gonna go wash my hands now. :/


lol i hart cracked articles another thing to note there is a lot of armor types that completely stop the katana but a baster sword will kill you regardless


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Good read, thanks for the post.


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You better not be talking shit on bacon in here.


FlySkyHigh wrote:
You better not be talking s%$$ on bacon in here.

that has serious repercussions


+5 Toaster wrote:
FlySkyHigh wrote:
You better not be talking s%$$ on bacon in here.
that has serious repercussions

Exactly. Another +5 for your toaster good sir.


2 people marked this as a favorite.
FlySkyHigh wrote:
+5 Toaster wrote:
FlySkyHigh wrote:
You better not be talking s%$$ on bacon in here.
that has serious repercussions
Exactly. Another +5 for your toaster good sir.

*pokemon evolution jingle starts playing*


4 people marked this as a favorite.
+5 Toaster wrote:
FlySkyHigh wrote:
+5 Toaster wrote:
FlySkyHigh wrote:
You better not be talking s%$$ on bacon in here.
that has serious repercussions
Exactly. Another +5 for your toaster good sir.
*pokemon evolution jingle starts playing*

MUUUUUUUCH BETTER!!!

Dark Archive

3 people marked this as a favorite.

obligatory post


Name Violation wrote:
obligatory post

amen to #12 on the list


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Kyras Ausks wrote:
lol i hart cracked articles another thing to note there is a lot of armor types that completely stop the katana but a baster sword will kill you regardless

Who needs a bastard sword when you have a poleaxe?


Mister Fluffykins wrote:
Kyras Ausks wrote:
lol i hart cracked articles another thing to note there is a lot of armor types that completely stop the katana but a baster sword will kill you regardless
Who needs a bastard sword when you have a poleaxe?

or a shield


2 people marked this as a favorite.
Kyras Ausks wrote:
Mister Fluffykins wrote:
Kyras Ausks wrote:
lol i hart cracked articles another thing to note there is a lot of armor types that completely stop the katana but a baster sword will kill you regardless
Who needs a bastard sword when you have a poleaxe?
or a shield

OR ME


Mythic +10 Artifact Toaster wrote:
Kyras Ausks wrote:
Mister Fluffykins wrote:
Kyras Ausks wrote:
lol i hart cracked articles another thing to note there is a lot of armor types that completely stop the katana but a baster sword will kill you regardless
Who needs a bastard sword when you have a poleaxe?
or a shield
OR ME

+10 toaster much better than crap katana. it makes toast and slays demons

Silver Crusade

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Concerning the rest of that article...

Man, thinking blacksmiths quenched new soft blades in people was a thing?!


I think the only time I've ever heard of quenching a new blade in flesh was in A Song of Fire and Ice.

Maybe he was confusing that with the practice of testing new blades on prisoners? Which isn't exactly the same thing.

Grand Lodge

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Yeah, sadly people out there really believe that was how it was done.

I've done some blacksmithing, so I pretty much knew all of these, but my favorite explanation was not actually in this article.

On the folding thing, a lot of the point of the folding was to take a hard (brittle, but will hold an edge) steel, and a soft (flexible, but dulls quickly) steel and combine them so that you get the best of both. To do that, you want to have a lot of thin layers. But you can't actually have a layer thinner than one atom thick. (Okay, you really can't have one much less than a couple atoms thick, and if you can get layers that have a consistent thickness of one atom, you probably have better technology than folding iron.)

The problem is, every time you fold, you double the number of layers. After about 26 folds (I might be slightly off by five or so on that number, it has been a while) some if not all of your layers are less than one atom thick, and the more times you fold it, the *fewer* layers you have left.

Grand Lodge

They also missed the point about the katana being the Hereditary Weapon of the True Samurai and all that. (Samurai were actually horse archers. The katana was their backup weapon, and using it pretty much meant someone somewhere had messed up big time.)


Yep. Just like in Europe: Gotta love spears/polearms and ranged weapons.

Asia had their bows (or repeater crossbows with poisoned darts). Europe had their crossbows. Asia had their spears. Europe had its bardiches, halbreds, billhooks, fauchards and poleaxes.


Ah, "facts"... what is supposed to be the bane of ignorance, but often simply ignites a flame war with belief :)

It's all just sharp pieces of metal to me(and to guys getting chopped by it)... at least PF didn't repeat the mwk. bastard sword for katanas.

I prefer high fantasy, so basically any weapon can look the way the player wants, names are just for stats.

Also; colors! cloth and metal... 'cause "the age of brown, black, rust and steel" is not epic.

(Ever notice how katanas always look like katanas, but longswords can pretty much look like any fantasy warrior's rainbow dream.)


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But, but, but... Fauchards! My love for reach polearms is ticking clock.

Grand Lodge

Pathfinder PF Special Edition, Starfinder Roleplaying Game Subscriber
havoc xiii wrote:

I think the only time I've ever heard of quenching a new blade in flesh was in A Song of Fire and Ice.

Maybe he was confusing that with the practice of testing new blades on prisoners? Which isn't exactly the same thing.

The twelve Swords in Fred Saberhagen's series of novels were quenched in the blood of the human smiths who assisted the god Vulcan in their forging. Vulcan also took the arm of the one smith who survived, but I'm not sure it was for any good reason.


FLite wrote:

Yeah, sadly people out there really believe that was how it was done.

I've done some blacksmithing, so I pretty much knew all of these, but my favorite explanation was not actually in this article.

On the folding thing, a lot of the point of the folding was to take a hard (brittle, but will hold an edge) steel, and a soft (flexible, but dulls quickly) steel and combine them so that you get the best of both. To do that, you want to have a lot of thin layers. But you can't actually have a layer thinner than one atom thick. (Okay, you really can't have one much less than a couple atoms thick, and if you can get layers that have a consistent thickness of one atom, you probably have better technology than folding iron.)

The problem is, every time you fold, you double the number of layers. After about 26 folds (I might be slightly off by five or so on that number, it has been a while) some if not all of your layers are less than one atom thick, and the more times you fold it, the *fewer* layers you have left.

26 is actually way too high. Once you get to 13 folds you're layers would be smaller than the atoms of the things blades are typically made of. And the point of folding the blade was to spread the 'weakness' of your material (many steel blades are made from railway steel... steel thats been sitting in the dirt for over 50 years getting rained on and driven over and generally frapped to hell....) out over the entire length of the blade so that the blade had no particular area of it where the weakness was focused, which would cause the blade to break at that point. 26 folds might get you down to the atomic width of iron, but a good cutting blade isn't made from pure forged folded iron....

Grand Lodge

Yeah, I think the 26 folds may have been the "at this point everything is less than an atom thick" point, but again, I would have to go back and look. It has been at least 10 years since I worked with this stuff.


Is there such a thing as too much Bacon?


Degoon Squad wrote:
Is there such a thing as too much Bacon?

Yes. If you don't believe me ask the next of kin of someone who's been buried under a hill of the stuff.


they died happy


Only because they had their bacon flavored mint.


LazarX wrote:
havoc xiii wrote:

I think the only time I've ever heard of quenching a new blade in flesh was in A Song of Fire and Ice.

Maybe he was confusing that with the practice of testing new blades on prisoners? Which isn't exactly the same thing.

The twelve Swords in Fred Saberhagen's series of novels were quenched in the blood of the human smiths who assisted the god Vulcan in their forging. Vulcan also took the arm of the one smith who survived, but I'm not sure it was for any good reason.

I've encountered it in a few other places, such as Freak's Squeele (and that one still kind of looked like it exploded during the process). I think that it was a trope in Western beliefs about Eastern cultures, but it fell to the wayside with time much like legends of headless tribes with eyes on their chests.

One indication that this is just superstition about other cultures is because I cannot pin it down on any one society in what I've seen. Sometimes its Japanese katanas, sometimes it is Middle Eastern/Indian damascus swords. It was used as a tantalizing story about whichever country became the fad to talk about at the time.

Contributor

What is this ...

Why I never ....

*reads linked thread*

*backs out of thread slowly*


Katanas have to be special, because Leonardo favors one. If you can't trust a ninja turtle, who can you trust?


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Leonardo's swords were easily stopped by a Donatello's wooden stick.

Wooo... wooden stick is the superior choice - and within my budget!


DonDuckie wrote:

Leonardo's swords were easily stopped by a Donatello's wooden stick.

Wooo... wooden stick is the superior choice - and within my budget!

You can actually use it against people too. Those swords were obviously +1 construct bane weapons, since that is all you ever see them actually hitting. the rest of the time he just kicks.

Shadow Lodge

lemeres wrote:
You can actually use it against people too. Those swords were obviously +1 construct bane weapons, since that is all you ever see them actually hitting. the rest of the time he just kicks.

Spoken like someone who never read the original comics. Leo killed the resurrected Shredder by decapitating him.


DonDuckie wrote:

Leonardo's swords were easily stopped by a Donatello's wooden stick.

Wooo... wooden stick is the superior choice - and within my budget!

Don was a beast in the original NES game. Leo was a close second.


As someone who has been part of an anime convention for the past 11 years(video game room), I can't tell you guys how many times I've heard some fan-kid go on and on about how amazing katanas are, or how amazing they are at using katanas, since they bought a wooden one at last year's con and have been "training."

The link at the top had me laughing pretty good. :)


FLite wrote:
Yeah, I think the 26 folds may have been the "at this point everything is less than an atom thick" point, but again, I would have to go back and look. It has been at least 10 years since I worked with this stuff.

2^26 is 67,108,864 layers

2^13 is 8192 layers

Assuming a sword is roughly 0.5cm thick, 2^26 is 0.00000007cm (7*10^-8) per layer while 2^13 would be 0.00006cm (6*10^-5) per layer. "The diameter of an atom is roughly 1*10^-8cm." So 23 folds is very roughly within an order of magnitude of 1 atom thick and 24 would be far less than 1 thick. Pretty reasonable statement.

A simple (standard? basic? This is beyond my level of chemistry) iron crystal is a cube 2.86*10^-8cm on a side. (I think I converted Picometers into cm correctly) which would still very roughly fit on 23 folds but not more. To keep significantly larger crystal structures intact, 13 folds would be much more reasonable.

As for quenching blades in people, I wonder if there isn't a grain of truth in it: Blood is essentially a brine (with a bunch of impurities), and brines were used in quenching blades. I could see someone quenching in blood, or at least advertising as doing so.


Akerlof wrote:
As for quenching blades in people, I wonder if there isn't a grain of truth in it: Blood is essentially a brine (with a bunch of impurities), and brines were used in quenching blades. I could see someone quenching in blood, or at least advertising as doing so.

Well of course you advertise as doing so. Because it sound like a fairly metal way to ....forge metal.

But the logistics seems like it would be hard to pull off more of the time. Even if you made the concession of using some large animal's blood, you would have to deal with having the blood close at hand for who knows how long near the heat of a forge. It just seems like it could easily turn into a congealed and diseased mess fairly quickly. Sure, you could try to time when you get the blood to when the sword needs quenching, but that seems like it would take particular costs (having the animal butchered right then).

I could possibly believe that a sword meant for a wealthy lord might have such a technique used, but for the vast majority of swords? No.


All you need to know about katanas

Well I guess there's more

Grand Lodge

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Good old fashioned axe for me.

Hatchet, for close combat.

Marv, from Sin City made me fall in love with those.

For swords, I like the Gladius.


Mister Fluffykins wrote:
But, but, but... Fauchards! My love for reach polearms is ticking clock.

Right with you on that one.


@OP. Great thread with lot of good reading.

edit:
@: Name Violation. Really good reading and some of the stuff is hilarious. “Crossbows are Underpowered in d20 “ and “Cats are Overpowered in d20” are two of my favorites. Well (allmost) all of them are really funny and the actual serious response to the original post is good.

Although the "Woomera" thing was both bad and offensive.

Xenh wrote:

All you need to know about katanas

Well I guess there's more

Any idea what Treblaine (one of the responders) mean when he says: “Google search /wiki/Rayleigh_scattering”


Except that isn't what happens. The sword gets folded in two layers. Those layers melt together, at least partly. The sword again gets folded into two layers. Again, they melt together. And so on. You can't simply multiply until you get down to atom size and say "at this point each layer is less than an atom thick". Metal is a very particular structure. If it were a bunch of atom-thick sheets, every time you hit something, the blow would scatter large such sheets everywhere.


Well of course, exploding in your face is part of why katanas are the awesomez...


Yeah, sorry. I forgot.

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