That's okay Jon. I'm used to heated discussions on swords, but we should ratchet it down a bit <img src="/forum/images/icons/laugh.gif" alt="" />
Part of this heat probably gets back to how we're attached to our own concepts of how to beat on things, and this very same familiarity and preference probably contributes to our difficulties in clearly conveying our actions into words, as shown repeatedly throughout this thread. We can show much easier than we can describe, and when we have people coming from different biomechanical backgrounds words for a position or blow can often do more to cause confusion than bring clarity. This is one of the reasons we prefer to stick with the terms used by the master we're studying, or invent a new equivalent, than borrow an existing term, as another term will for some convey something possibly different from the master's intent. Plus it lets us rethink the posture of guard ______ instead of having to explain why it mysteriously went from being a prime to a seconda, especially when it's actually neither.
Anyway,
There's an unbroken line between therapods and turkeys; that doesn't mean Thanksgiving dinner is going to disembowel you with a kick and feast on your intestines. I didn't say things didn't change; they changed a lot.
Exactly, and much of it comes down to the physics of winning and losing, and how changes in the rules and actions can produce evolutionary pressure.
When we wore varieties of armor we had a greater ability to absorb blows, essentially establishing a floor on the impulse required to do harm. In the case of plate this impulse is quite high, making pole-axes a better choice against it than a sword. But in all cases we have to use more space and better mechanical efficiency to supply the energy necessary to deliver a harder blow, also taking care that the blow attacks a target that's vulnerable to it, or else purchases a response from the opponent that sets up for a better follow-on blow. The rate our muscles can produce energy is necessarily limited, so we're just stuck with aspects of this tradeoff of time for energy.
In very crude linear terms the energy in the blow is the force multiplied by the distance of application, and the blow's momentum boils down to the square root of twice the product of the force times the useful delivery distance times the effective mass (mv=sqrt[2*F*s*m]). So at this same crude level of analysis the blow's momentum increases equally according to either the square root of your force, its distance of application, or the effective mass of the weapon. Thus to hit strongly and effectively you need to be strong, swing through some fair distance, and have a weapon of some sufficient weight. Ignore any one of those and your blows are weakened.
Yet though strength always adds to both power and quickness the other two of those basic factors, effective weapon mass and swing distance, both increase the time it takes for the blow's delivery (t=sqrt[2*s*m/F]). Increased weapon mass also slows down your defensive response time overall, as does having your guard positions normally located far from your opponent, as with tail guards and such.
So the optimization of your technique and your weapon for both ballistic effectiveness and always hitting first has two of the three basic elements in conflict. Absent this conflict swordsmanship would've shot all the way to an end of the spectrum, becoming a lumberjack competition on the one end or fingertip mounted laser pointers on the other. If you raise the armor's kinetic energy limit (or rather the impulse limit) either the weapon weight must go up or the blow delivery positions must cock further back, or both. If you lower the kinetic energy limit by lightening or removing the armor then the optimum weapon weight drops and the normal positions for the start of a blow can shift forwards. In the practice hall, where hitting first and being quicker than your opponent wins the day without regard to a blow's momentum, this effect puts a downward pressure on weapon weight and and tries to shift guard positions forward, and any trends in this direction would have to get corrected based on feedback from periodic experience on the battlefield.
Add the complexities due to our body's biomechanics and varying vulnerabilites of our different parts and you don't necessarily get a smooth transition, you get shifts in weapon design until you hit a jerky jump between elements of one basic set of styles, weapons, and techniques and another. When we stripped off the armor our weapons and techniques got the inevitable jolt, and there's no way this wouldn't happen. Since the older positions offered suddenly unneccessary power while being hindered by the slightly extra time required for the delivery of this power, we had a new optimizations to make. So we rethought the optimal art and produced a new set of methods that looked quite strikingly different from the old. Early rapier manuals just don't look like Talhoffer.
It was fitting and proper that we did this, and from one perspective why would a perfect art require armor in the first place? Shouldn't a proper method of swordsmanship keep you from getting hit at all, and wasn't all the armor therefore just a crutch to patch over the fact that prior arts were imperfect? So we not only have an evolutionary pressure due to simple physics, we have it butressed by an obvious argument in favor of change, and thus we got the early masters of what we recognize as somewhat modern fencing. In their view the old arts would seem archaic and imperfect, while the older view would hold that only a fool goes into a sword fight ballistically naked. The greater reality was that only a fool goes up against guns with a sword.
But then we have our practice, and in practice we don't use real blows with authentic weapons so we can't really tell the effect of one blow versus another. Applying greater impulse and momentum takes more time, using either space or weight, and the person doing it will generally be beaten in competition by someone who's equally strong but using a lighter weapon and closer, quicker hits. In our practice sessions and competitions this response time continues to favor quickness over power because it's easier to tell a first hit than it is to carefully gage the power of that hit. At first those with real-life fighting experience might argue against the effectiveness of weaker blows and lighter weapons, but one-on-one they'll be losing the competition matches. Their battlefield reputations might for a time give weight to their arguments, but since we'd quit using swords on the battlefield such naysayers would certainly soon disappear. So later people will likely read their arguments but not really heed them, like respecting your elders' wisdom without actually believing their complaints about the evils of rock and roll.
Others may take up their cause and try arguing about the effectiveness of blows, but absent a military reputation built on using swords in combat they'll be largely dismissed. Such people, after losing a bout because of their use of bigger sweeping motions, wouldn't be in a good position to argue the point. Their opponent, the one who consistently hit first, was obviously faster and better, while the one who kept getting hit would obviously be a sore loser and a whiner to boot. When the winner is decided by first hit and first hit alone citing the energy or momentum component is a pleading argument left to the losers, and to become winners they have to adopt a style that’s proven to hit first. And so in a competitive arena the art would keep shifting, the energy and momentum dropping until checked by standardizing the allowed weapon design.
If the average blow's energy crossed far below the threshold of combat effectiveness and lethality those skilled at the art would prefer to overlook it. Anyone arguing the point is probably using bigger swings with heavier weapons, almost by definition being one to lose in competition. Being losers they're easy to dismiss as lacking art and skill, and the effectiveness of the current state of the system, where ever it may be on a continuum, will be supported by pointing to the effect of blows in fights long ago, closer to the beginning of any downward trend in power. One sign that this point has been crossed is when statements and terminology about blows, momentum, and impact become quite vague. These will be replaced by voluminous discussions of various and obscure aspects of time, since optimization of time gets left standing as the single equation of profound importance, the other equation swept under the rug as it were. You'll inevitably get a blow's power attributed to some undefinable aspect of "technique" or "skill", as opposed to the obvious route of using more powerful swings and possibly switching to heavier blades. The distinctions between light blows and hard ones, and all blows in between, will become rather vague as well, without any hard numbers on any of it, not that hard numbers are all that easy to measure in actual combat.
Strangest of all, this is something that should by nature happen to all sword or stick arts once they adopt a scoring system based on the first hit. The same kind of thing can happen in a sport of pure accuracy without consideration to impact energy, such as archery, where pressure for accuracy over energy dropped draw weight down to 30 to 45 lbs. Fortunately archery by its very nature, and because we still go hunting, has always had to pay attention to power and draw weight.
So anyway, hand-to-hand weapons have a dichotomy between quickness and power, and while war requires armorers and masters of defence to divine the optimal compromise, competition naturally ignores the power because it's too hard to correctly measure, is invisible, and just results endless arguments and disputes. So sword arts must shift in the absence of combat, especially since civilized society can't maintain an art that requires hacking people's arms off for its reality checks.
I'd say that the simple physics would predict a shift in style when we dropped the armor, followed by an inevitable pressure favoring quickness over power and momentum.
