7 ADVANTAGES of CURVED Swords that YOU NEED to know!

let's have a look at seven advantages of curved swords [Applause] hey folks matt easton here scholar gladiator now what we're going to look at in this video are seven clear advantages of curved blades on swords now that's not to say of course that straight swords straight blades don't have some of their own advantages which curved swords don't have but specifically for this video i've identified what i consider to be seven clear advantages for curved blades on swords it's very clear if we look throughout history that the question of a straight blade versus a curved blade has been one which many cultures in many periods have tried to address and there's never been a final solution on which is better because they're better for different things of course but the fact is we have to accept that we find straight and curved blades in parts of asia like japan and china and in india as well of course and we find straight and curved blades in europe also they have different strengths and weaknesses so what are what i consider to be the seven strong advantages of a curved blade well before i break those down i first of all want to have a word about our sponsors who are raid shallow legends raid is the hugely popular turn-based fantasy combat game it's absolutely free to play it's free to advance and get better in and you can download it onto your pc or your mobile phone right now now speaking about curved swords there's a number of my champions have got curved swords let's have a quick look at them there's my shaman and you can see there that she's got a couple of sort of uh sabers or falcions pretty cool looking thing here's one called the sand lash survivor and she's got a massive great two-handed um saber i would say something like a meow dao like a chinese sword and here's another one called the avenger and she's got some really awesome kind of they're a bit like katana maybe da pretty sweet swords anyway and i love her out there not all of the champions have curved swords but a lot of them have really really nice armor since i started playing there've been a huge number of updates in the game so what's new in lego you don't have to take my word for it you can check other people's reactions in the app store reddit and elsewhere they've recently made their biggest ever update the doom tower it's a giant tower with 120 floors a bunch of secret challenge rooms and 12 seriously badass bosses to take on and i've been having a blast on it so far and you don't have to take my word for it check out the comments on reddit the app stores youtube videos and so on pretty much everyone's loving it and that's not all with a bunch of new champions coming soon a load of awesome events coming up through february along with some special valentine's day events there's never been a better time to dive in and get started so go to the description under this video click on the special links there and if you're a new player you'll get 50 000 silver 50 gems one energy refill one clan boss key and five mystery shards plus one day xp booster and one free champion the executioner all this treasure will be waiting for you up here in the inbox these rewards are only for new players and only for the next 30 days you can find me in-game under the name captain context of course and if you're quick enough you can join my class so simple as that it's free to download free to play go and have a great time and i'll see you there so thanks very much for sticking with me now let's get back to the topic of this video which are my seven defined advantages of a curved blade on a sword first up i want you to consider the issue of edge alignment now clearly when we're cutting with any sword edge alignment is super super important if we're using a straight blade if we just grab this big long sword here for example then if your edge alignment is um you know is leading with the edge and is correct then that's great however one thing we have to notice is that when you have a curved blade you have an asymmetry to the sword okay regardless of the hilt type but just the blade alone being curved gives you an asymmetry which means that you can actually feel the edge alignment a little bit better in the hand this becomes even more distinct with particularly curved blades it's actually quite difficult to swing a very curved blade like this killing bladed sword here or indeed one of the more curved sabers and yes indeed with even with um relatively modestly curved blades like japanese swords be they uh tachi or katana or whatever wakazashi you do feel the curvedness you do feel the asymmetry in your hand and this aids edge alignment one of the issues with straighter blades if i grab in fact a smaller slightly more manageable for the room size bastard sword here indeed if you've got two hands or one hand on the weapon there are some clues to edge alignment particularly if you've got a cross guard for example anything which is an extension out from the central axis the rotational axis of the sword itself a weapon but the straight blade doesn't really give you any assistance because it's completely symmetrical so my first major and probably one of the most important advantages in my mind to a curved blade is that much like an axe or anything else which has a projection in one particular direction it aids in edge alignment now another major advantage that i consider to a curved blade is in follow through what do i mean by that well quite simply when you strike a target and here is a burmese da 19th century when you strike a target there is a moment at which you impact with the target and you start to cut into it but also through it now one of the advantages of a cut over a thrust is a thrust enters the target and stays there until you physically extract the blade and that blade does need to be extracted unlike with a blunt sword be it a kendo shinai or a fencing foil or whatever that just stops on the target and doesn't enter the target with a sharp blade it does enter the target and needs to be pulled out again before you can either attack again or indeed defend yourself with that weapon that's quite important with defense and i've talked about that in previous videos but if you're going to attack again or defend again there is a degree of follow through with a cut that you naturally get so when the blade enters and passes through the target it frees itself naturally with the very action of cutting and the more effective the cut is of course the quicker it frees itself if it goes straight through the target then it will be free again to either cut again or defend or whatever you need to do with it so a curved blade actually assists in that by its curved nature it's more likely to unless it completely bisects the target and then it doesn't really make any difference whether it's curved or straight a curved blade because of its curved nature draws through the target more conveniently than the straight blade and one of the reasons for this is that the curved blade slants away from the target as it passes through it this is assuming it's a backwoods curve rather than the forwards curve i'll deal with forwards curves perhaps in a future video a straight blade has a lot of hacking potential and strike you know will cut with a little force and will pass directly through targets if you completely bisect a tatami mat with a straight or a curved blade there's no real difference but as it's passing through the target the curved blade will potentially draw through and free itself more easily more quickly and is more likely to come out if you think about it in these terms i'll just grab this very curved kill it's bladed prang naba again this is very curved here if it enters the target at this point at the center of percussion once it enters the target the rest of the blade is sort of aligned with the motion of the cut and so it will naturally free itself a bit like pulling a thrust out of a target okay whereas a straight blade would be sticking off in here and would still be trying to fight its way through that target through the whatever that target's made of meat or tatami mat or anything else so while that straight blade would still be trying to pass through the material the curved blade is kind of in and out in a more natural line essentially because the curve follows the arc of the cut more closely so the next advantage that i would give to curved blades is accessing them drawing them from the scabbard now this is very important of course because swords are in most cultures in most periods and most situations a backup weapon a sidearm something you wear at your side like a knife or a pistol and very often in self-defense or even combat situations on the battlefield when you come to access that weapon you need to get it quickly okay you need to be able to get it out quickly and deploy it quickly but it's not necessarily in your hand pointed at the enemy at the moment that you need it there in your hand so you need to get it out of the scabbard and you know there have been whole martial arts or aspects of martial arts which have been focused on this in japanese martial arts ei or yaido and in fact we find these sword drawing techniques as well in european treatises we find if you're a delivery philippe vadi a bunch of other treatises also um so getting the sword out quickly super important and it can be done with any type of sword and of course you can train it the more you train it the better you'll get at it like everything else now with a straight sword like this chinese gin we there are numerous ways that we can access the sword and get it out quickly generally speaking that's one of the reasons sword swords in most cultures tend to be worn quite low down hung quite low because that gives you more space to draw the sword out and indeed a fairly long blade like this about 37 inches i think can straight blade can be drawn out quickly but you have to remember that most movements of the body are rotational and being rotational they are arcs and not straight lines now we can force the body to move in straight lines and of course there are some things which the body naturally does in straight lines but in terms of drawing a sword in order to draw the sword out when it's a straight blade we need to move the sword artificially in a straight line in order to access the weapon inevitably with a curved blade it is um can be a little bit more convenient to get the sword out more quickly and access it when the motion is in a curved line and indeed certainly if you were going to cut at the end of that cuts being whilst they can be delivered straight with a push or a draw cut they um and obviously a thrust is a straight line most cuts have a rotational element to them and if there is already a curved line to the drawing that naturally links into a curved line with the cut and this is what the eido is largely based on but the fact is that a curved blade naturally will come out a bit scabbard more easily and what's interesting is um very curved blades i'll go back again to this prang labor but i could be using the 1796 type saber blades behind me here they come out very very naturally out of their scabbards in in a curved line which leaves you in a position to either cut from there or indeed to cut directly from the scabbard and of course you could thrust from there as well but the fact is that they come out of the scabbard in a curved line because they've got a curved blade and this can be conducive with certain movements which we often find ourselves wanting to do in either a self-defense or a battlefield and skirmish melee situation so the next advantage that i consider actually this is to me it's an important one i think it's um very important we need to do more uh testing to demonstrate this um with actual sort of scientific data but i think that it's uh fairly sound and that i don't think many people would um argue with this but we'll see and you're always welcome of course to comment underneath my videos and we can have some dialogue about this but to my way of thinking and my experimentation the things that i've found through years of sword use a curved blade focuses the energy into a smaller smaller area of the blade now why you might say why is this a good thing well quite simply because you're concentrating the energy that you put into the weapon so mass and velocity you're putting that into the weapon you're striking the target and it's when it's impacting the target there is a transference of energy and the smaller area of blade that that energy transfers into the a greater penetration you'll get basically on the target and we love deep penetration when it comes to blades now the perfect kind of example of this is the use of the point of course and we all know that points will get deeper penetration than cuts into a large gelatinous mass um and when we're talking about like penetrating armor for example you basically most types of effective armor you can't penetrate the cuts but you can penetrate them sometimes with thrusts okay so when you concentrate energy into a smaller surface area like a point then it becomes more penetrative now this is also true of edges if we focus the moment of impact into the smallest area of blade possible you're more likely to pass through more of whatever material you're striking okay now a curved blade how does that do that well i've got magazine here to demonstrate this so if we roll up this magazine like that then you will notice so this could be anything could be a tatami mat could be an arm could be whatever hold on let's get this magazine rolled up properly then when the edge impacts it it impacts it only with a tiny little bit of surface there and as that thing compresses it's still a relatively small part of the blade because the blade is curving away from it on both sides of the point of impact now if i grab a straight blade over here it's not a huge difference but it's a small difference and when you're talking about millimeters over that short surface area that can mean quite a lot with the straight blade when it impacts it and we squish down you'll notice it makes contact with a far greater portion of the blade so quite simply if you're striking onto a target you know be an arm or shoulder or a head or a tatami mat or a water bottle or whatever the straight blade will make contact with a longer surface area of edge and that means that the energy will be spread over a broader surface so my belief is that a curved blade helps focus the energy into a smaller area and increase penetration which is always good now most cultures have versions of specialized thrusting swords in europe we've famously got the rapier we've got the small swords various small forms of small sword and spladroon which is sort of compromised design and indeed even if we go into um famous cutting swords like the basket hilted backs or they they can still thrust and certainly if we look at the manuals and treatises for the use of these from the 17th 18th centuries then they are used for thrusting equally with cutting so straight blades clearly are well adapted to thrusting and all over the world in all different cultures they have developed types of straight bladed swords that are very effective thrusters while still being able to cut well so people often write off a curved blade as something which is yeah that's great for cutting but not good for thrusting and whilst it's generally true that straight blades offer more advantages in the thrusting game an advantage of a curved blade is it can do curved thrusts and that's something a straight blade can't really do it kind of can do so with the straight blade indeed we often find uh movements um in swordsmanship where indeed you increase the angle of the the hand is coming in at so that you can thrust around or bind into an opponent's sword okay just to explain a little bit what i mean there if an opponent's sword is this side here and i'm pushing into their blade with the back end of my blade i can still have my point online and deliver a thrust okay and obviously that's true on both sides it can be true low or high equally i can have an absence of bind so i can come around a person's sword and thrust here to come around their guard or parry or whatever or just simply to make it more difficult for them to guard or parry and so i can change the angles that the points coming in at but that's also true of a curved blade and one of the interesting things about a curved blade is that you can achieve angles of thrust that don't happen with a straight line because this is a curved line and indeed if you're coming around someone's weapon um so for example if i cut from my right hand side and they guard okay so they guard against that cut i can now flip the sword and thrust around their guard so there are angles that you can achieve with the thrust with the curved blade that you simply can't achieve with a straight blade not saying that that means that this is advantageous universally in thrusting systems generally straight blades are overall better as thrusting swords particularly because the energy that you're putting into the sword is in a direct line up the blade with this with a curved blade the energy gets diverted because the point is in not in line with the rest of the blade so generally speaking straight blades are better at thrusting but it is nevertheless worth mentioning that an advantage of curved blades is that they can do certain types of thrust slightly more effectively perhaps certainly in terms of coming around an opponent's blade or hitting at angles that are somewhat difficult to predict and defend against compared to a straight blade so there we go another advantage of kerb blades they can do some quite funky and interesting types of thrusts and also just lastly to join to that point is the fact that these interesting angled thrusts can be particularly useful on horseback now imagine we we normally think of i am a i'm a human size a person fighting a human-sized opponent and so we're thinking about two people at the same height but if one person's on horseback and the other person isn't then that completely changes because one person is now significantly higher than the other and if you're on horseback thrusting at people on foot then indeed having my hand at this height but my point at this height and delivering thrusts to uh people on foot infantry while i'm on horseback that's cavalry that can be advantageous so indeed as well as coming in at some quite funky angles that funky angle can be used particularly when you're on horseback so what i have here are two blades one is actually british and the other one is um from southeast asia but the fact is they're both inspired by turkish killich or pala blades and these have a particular feature to these blades that give us another advantage for curved blades and that is this rather expressive and large and noticeable false edge okay now i should mention this is only an advantage to curved swords that have a false edge indeed not all curved swords do an obvious example is the japanese sword unless it's a there are a few um uh naginata type blades which do in fact have a false edge on them but generally speaking japanese swords are completely single-edged they have no false edge so this advantage doesn't apply to those it doesn't apply to the burmese da it doesn't apply to most indian talwar although it does apply to some in fact i've got one here so here's an indian tawa which does in fact have a large yelman as it's called or false edge on the back now what's interesting is that when you have the large false edge or yellman having such the curved blade enables you to come in with cuts with false edge cuts particularly at a person's sword hand and wrist now these were called in british and french circles as the mulchette and malchet just means sleeve in fact but sir richard francis burton for example actually has a section in his fencing treaties using the saber the military saver rather than the modern olympic sabre um and he specifically describes how to use the false edge for cuts against the opponent's hand and arm but additionally if we look at alfred hutton's the swordsman from 1897 when he's talking about the british officer fighting against an afridi um swordsman using a tilwa or pawa with a shield and he uses the full search as well and that's with the british officers sabre which doesn't it does have a false edge but it's not a particularly big or expressive one like the turkish killich and he uses the false edge for the coup for example which is cutting the back of the opponent's hamstrings with the false edge he does it across the back of the neck and this kind of stuff so you can use it in a situation where maybe ideally you would have given the thrust but you come into grapple you're too close you're in a clinch and in a clinch you can use the false edge behind the person's body so you come so close to your wrestling and punching distance and you can apply the false edge in that distance behind the person now this has other uses you can use it against a person with a shield so say for example you cut in at someone and they've blocked they've blocked with a shield you put the shield in here you can now wrap your sword around over the top of the shield and cut with the false edge you can apply it to the opponent's legs to come around the back of their hamstrings so there are biological advantages sometimes the tender and important bits of a person's body their arteries their tendons things like this can be difficult to get to with a direct attack but you can get to them with this almost hooked scything attack and the other thing we have to note as well is that sometimes you can get in with the false edge cuts from angles that you wouldn't be able to get in with a direct cut either with a curved blade concave i'm sorry convex edge or a straight edge that you can get in with a concave or hooked edge so there are some advantages to these sickle or side like cuts which of course you get with a curved blade if that edge is sharpened so there's another advantage of curved blades so the final advantage for kerblades and i was in two minds about whether to include this because i think with that we need some physics or mechanical engineering or engineering people to weigh in on this but i believe that a curved blade has increased structural integrity compared to a straight blade which potentially makes it stronger okay so if we just pick up a completely different blade for a second that being the rapier now everybody knows that a rapier can flex in this plane okay and that's a good thing because it means it absorbs shock it means that if it comes up against the target it can't penetrate with the point then it will bend instead of break or bend or stay bent and so being flexible is an advantage some of the time but something that a lot of people don't realize is that while blades in the plane of the flat can flex they also flex not necessarily visibly although if you take high speed photography or video you will notice this if you slow it down when you're cutting things and they will also flex in the plane of the edges as well okay so if you hit a target and remember of course this happened in war where the edge might not pass through something something hard like a helmet even sometimes a person's head there are records of blades bending and breaking or people's heads skulls evolution have given us a good bony knob and so that's there to protect your brain and um the fact is that these will encounter hard objects other weapons like spears and um muskets and other swords shields helmets all this kind of stuff and they will um give they will absorb some of that energy in flexing in every plane of the blade now the fact is that a straight sword if you imagine building a straight uh a bridge which is just a straight plank versus having a one that is a uh it's got a curve to it we all know that arches um can sustain a lot more weight than just a flat beam okay now of course a flat beam can also be really strong and you can make it strong with its cross section like an h beam or eye girder whatever you want to call it so with its cross-section you can make a straight length much stronger but the fact is that when you make something curved if the energy if the sort of damaging energy if the potentially harmful energy is happening here this is an arch and i believe is better at sustaining whether it's guarding against blows or whether it's hitting something that's very resistive like someone wearing armor or a shield or just passing through a thick target indeed i believe that this is less prone to harmful damage to the material of the blade and remember historically all these blades weren't made of the best steel that we have now and they weren't made of they didn't necessarily have the best heat treatment that we can ensure with all of our modern technology so the material was sometimes prone to failure and swords did break throughout history in every culture so if you can make the shape of the blade stronger and less likely to break then i think that's a good thing and i would add to that as well that if we go back to the first point i made about advantages of curb blades about edge alignment one of the things that sometimes happens with these straight blades is if they don't pass through the target then they wrap around it and if you watch shows like forged in fire you'll see when people have made particularly flexible straight blades if the edge has not penetrated the target the thing that pretty much always happens is the blade turns to its flat and then the whole flat wraps around the target so quite simply i think that having a curved blade which is less likely to um to do this and is has got more structural intel integrity like an arch carrying a load on the top i think that's an advantage to curved blades now one final caveat i want to add to the whole curved blade uh debate or question or point is also about tang or grip hilt angle okay now this changes a lot of things and it changes how the curved blade behaves so a lot of people are familiar with japanese swords but one particular and quite unusual uh or rather characteristic feature of japanese swords is that their curve follows through the blade and the tang now this is particularly expressed in earlier japanese swords if we go back to the um sort of 10th to 14th century then the tachi tends to have a continual curve and in fact most of the sorry or curve as it's called is actually in the base of the blade and into the tang if we go into later the uchigadana and the katana and then you're more familiar with a straight line from the grip to the beginning of the blade and then a gentle curve but nevertheless what's interesting is that they curve the grip or the the hilt curves away from the cutting angle now we do find this in some other swords it's not just particular to japanese swords for example we find it in the dar in the burmese da but contrary to that if we look at other types of saber from the world if we go to not that far away in world terms the indian talwar the indian talwar tends to have a hilt which is in the direction of the cutting edge okay so this hilt curves forward the japanese and the um the in that case burmese hilt curve away from the cutting edge so what does this mean well they're both curved blades and i believe that the seven advantages that i've spoken about still apply to all of these curved blades it doesn't change that but i do think it's worth mentioning because the effect of the cutting is slightly different for each of these where the hilt curves away or with the curve of the blade this naturally is going to have a more slicing effect it does also change other things to do with how you draw the weapon and all sorts of other things as well but primarily if we just talk about the basic the most obvious thing it means that you naturally get a more slicing effect to the curve because the curve is coming away the whole time from the thing that you are cutting at when we have a blade that has a hilt which actually curves in the direction of the edge it has more of a cleaving or chopping effect if you imagine an axe with an axe you have a shaft and then you have the blade sticking out to the side and the blade is in front of the um axis of rotational motion the stick you're swinging basically so the stick you're swinging the blade or the edge the moment of the point of impact is in front of that and that actually happens with these curved blades because if you look at the line of the hilt the line of the hilt leads to a line actually behind here and the cutting edge is out here so they're similar to an axe they actually strike in front of the hand and then they slope away and it's the same here with the parang nabu where the angle of the grip you see there goes out to here behind the cutting blade so the cutting blade is in front like an axe and then it slopes away again if we go to the european sword it's a little bit less expressed with this one but you can see that we've got a general tendency this one down here is particularly quite sloped forward with this sloped forward grip again it means that the line of motion is behind the point of impact so it's a bit axelike see we've got a very powerful chop and then a slope away so not all curved swords uh perform in exactly the same way there are some differences but all of these seven advantages that i've talked about for curved blades in this video do apply to both of those types of curved sword so to sum up just to reiterate that this video is not to say curved swords are the bestest swords ever okay they're not magical they're not um they're not they don't supersede straight swords straight swords have their own advantages okay and there are lots of advantages to straight swords obviously uh particularly in thrusting and penetrative power in thrusting but there are some advantages to straight swords both in parrying and defending yourself but also to some degree in cutting as well and it should be said that some of the advantages of a curved sword can be simulated through your system of swordsmanship with a straight sword okay and that gets into the issue of wrist angle and how we apply the cut but that is a massive topic for another video i've touched on it in previous videos so have a look at some of my past videos um if you're not familiar with them all because this is a topic that i've gone into across a lot of different videos broken down a little bit so straight swords and curved swords certainly both have their place in the world and both have different advantages and disadvantages and relatively you know different merits essentially different strengths anyway i hope this has been interesting and thought provoking as always i'm always interested to read your thoughts and feedback below and hopefully i'll see you again on the channel for another video either talking about curved swords or straight swords or something that's not even about swords so see you soon folks and cheers for watching thanks for watching we've got extra videos on patreon please give our facebook a like and subscribe if you haven't already cheers folks

Channel: scholagladiatoria

Views: 131,737

Keywords: sword fighting, curved swords, katana, samurai sword, sabre fencing, are curved swords better, how to cut with a sword, how to use a sword, who uses swords, what is the best kind of sword

Id: 03N27COiLJU

Length: 31min 41sec (1901 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 17 2021