Check out these armoured guys sword fighting in a ring in Russia

Yup

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For some reason, my pants are tighterā€¦ And I have the sudden urge to start spending money on blacksmithing lessons.

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It seems like the rules donā€™t allow you to poke or stab with your weapon so you might be out of luck but with some good blacksmithing skills and a lot of hip swinging they might be able to accommodate you yet!

That reminds me, I guess @Medievalist will dig this. Who else is mad for this stuff? My memory fails me.

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They ought to put those hard rubber balls on the ends of the swords and say ā€œno holds barredā€.

Theyā€™re cutting in half what they can do with the swords without the pokey-stabby part. Which is a damn shame.

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I was gonna summon Medievalist myself. Too slow, I guess.

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I see what you did there.

But really, Iā€™m fairly sure the fights would last about 5 seconds if stabbing was allowedā€¦ and the fighters would last no more than a couple of fightsā€¦ unless one just kept winning all the time.

Maybe they can cross this with the multiple-participant MMA fights? Throw in some armoured horses and a trebuchet and youā€™ve got a BBQ!

I did say put one of those safety ball things on the end of the sword. Nobodyā€™s going to get run through, theyā€™re gonna get bopped about twice as much. Although blows to the face would be a lot easier.

I just imagined the point stabbing right through anything placed on the end for ā€˜safetyā€™, maybe just blunt the endā€¦ surely there are sword designs that already incorporate such a feature?

Didnā€™t I see some jousting competitions somewhere recently? They should go from horse back to this in some kind of seamless transition. But what kind of an arena would handle that? Indoor would be hard to accomplish, unless they did something like those crazy medieval experience nights, big hay strewn arena surrounded by quaffing tourists gorging on wild boar.


here we go

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Geeze that jousting is brutal. I love it.

But yeah, the swords they already use are completely blunt. The idea I had was just putting a solid rubber ball about the size of a tennis ball on the tip, but thatā€™d probably be weighting the end too much. Maybe itā€™d be better to just have a rounded blunt tip with an actual tennis ball on top of it, super-glued on or something like that.

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If we can find some nutcases in armour we could be the next big thing!

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I once smelted a folding chair and tried to make a sword with it. It took weeks before I gave up, stopped pounding on the piece of metal I poured and decided to just call what Iā€™d made a shiv.

Iā€™d expect functional light plate armor is rather more complex and time consuming to make than a simple sword.

Hey listen, Iā€™m just the ideas guy that will split 50% of the profits with you. We hire armour to begin with and then once the moolah starts rolling in we can employ some blacksmiths to forge our own.

Seriously, Whereā€™s Medivalist, he really needs to get in on this on the ground floor!

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Wow. Donā€™t google ā€œflesh woundā€ without ā€œpythonā€.

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Thereā€™s a fencing foil kicking around here somewhere with a ball-end.

Of course, you could always resort to a bokken. Nobodyā€™s gonna get run through, but they can be lethal.

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Bokken arenā€™t suitable for sparring. Thatā€™s what Shinai are for

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Hi guys!

You canā€™t use a rubber tip in this style (basically BoN) because they get chopped off within seconds.

The blade edges are required to have a rounded profile that matches the diameter of a Euro coin; they canā€™t be flat or wedge-shaped, so they cannot cut the level of armor that is required, but tips routinely get slammed into or dragged over shield and armor edges, and stuff like that, so plasticky tip guards just canā€™t survive.

Solid metal balls are too heavy if they are big enough to prevent entry into armor gaps and eyeslits, hollow balls get flattened in a day or two of combat. So, no thrusting.

Schlager fighting styles (at least those done in the round) are kind of the opposite of this; no hacking or brawling, to preserve the rubber tips, but you can do these very fine precise moves like throat- and wrist-slitting (if you are expert enough to pull something like that off without getting stabbed, anyway).

You can spar with bokken, but you need kendo armor or better. You can spar with shinai with basically no protection at all, and as long as the other guy doesnā€™t stab you directly in the face the worst youā€™ll get is a nasty bruise or crushed testicle. If you wear any reasonable kind of cup and face shield you can use shinai with no rules at all, which is why shinai are totally dead awesome.

I love the way the guy in red has to ask how the hell heā€™s supposed to get into the wrestling ring!

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Thanks for inviting me, fellas. I personally thought the guy with the brigandine was fundamentally a more skilled/experienced fighter, but the guy in the red viking kit was faster and perhaps younger. I didnā€™t try to count the hits and add up the scores, but faster & younger often takes the day.

One thing to notice here, if you follow this sort of thing: the knee armor of the guy who lost appears to have a weakness - thereā€™s no riveted join between the bottom lame of the knee and the greave - and the guy who won was focusing pretty hard on that area. The Russians have a reputation for that kind of behavior, and Americans and other westerners often regard it as dishonorable. (The other Eastern Europeans just shrug and say ā€œtheyā€™re Russians, of course they cheat!ā€ and fight them anyway.)

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What it needs now is dragons. I wanna see crazy Russians vs. Truckasaurus.

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