Can the SHOVEL be a good weapon?

[Music] greetings i'm shad and let's talk a little bit about a shovel as a weapon how effective would it be in what situations uh would it excel at and uh doesn't really hold up when we compare it to other weapons that could be used for the same purpose um before we really dive into it it doesn't need to be said though the shovel uh of many different types has played an important role on the battlefield throughout history now not necessarily as a weapon but definitely as a tool and as a backup weapon if it was needed early as the roman period they were using shovels to dig their ditches for their forts also putting in a kind of like battlefield obstacles for the opponent also to give yourself cover setting up you know pickets and things like that shovel has always been there for a good while they especially excelled in world war one where trench warfare was so prominent and this in particular was where the shovel uh had started to be used in combat a little bit more because in the close confines of those trenches they needed a some type of weapon that was smaller and more usable in such close you know areas where you didn't have a lot of room around and so this is where the entrenching tool or kind of came about there were some earlier versions and in world war one they were more often fixed it was by world war ii that a uh a fixed type of e-tool or trenching tool um came about that could be used as either like a shovel or they could turn it like this and it would be used as a pick uh quite a versatile tool you could make your own dugouts for cover also trenches and things like that and they became pretty much standard issue for a lot of types of soldiers and were extremely useful and beneficial and so in regards to their actual existence on the battlefield yeah the shovel has been around and oddly enough we see more examples of the shovel as a combat weapon in modern warfare as opposed to historical warfare for the reasons that i'm going to explain because it is actually an interesting situation why we see shovels more used more in a modern kind of setting than medieval then after that we're gonna swing some of these around to see how effective they would be and i've actually bought some so we could test so this eat all here we have a kind of this there's the bigger shovel we'll test that as well but we also have this is like one of those multi-tool camping um tactical shovels uh i it's not i i wouldn't necessarily call it an e-tool it's a bit bigger smaller than a full-size shovel but i want to see how effective this would be as a weapon and a regular shovel as well comparing to some other weapons and i was able to purchase these items thanks to the sponsor of this video which is audible now i can't recommend audible enough audio books are just phenomenal they're one of the great entertainment mediums of modern day if you're not trying them out i really do feel you're missing out because there are just such incredible stories that you get 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video now we're just talking about how it's interesting that the shovel has become a more prominent weapon in modern warfare than in the past why on earth is that the case i think the answer is pretty evident when you dive into it and you know the historical context in the modern context melee weapons aren't hugely prominent okay we have ballistic warfare guns automatic rifles all those things just to have rendered a lot of melee weapons obsolete but in the medieval battlefield of course melee weapons were all around there was ranged weapons okay we have warbows and crossbows but there were ways to protect it against them much easier than modern warfare in modern warfare to get proper protection against gunfire you basically need dugouts trenches and things and and cover in medieval warfare you don't necessarily need that you could have armor that could protect yourself against it and you could close the distance to use some devastatingly effective melee weapons and out of the arsenal that they had available well we're going to compare them but just on the surface you can see that there are some medieval weapons that would just vastly outperform shovels now when i say you know what i'm talking about modern warfare there's a lot of trench star warfare in a napoleonic era as well especially in the musket kind of errors but the further you go back you see less earthworks in defense aside from you know fortresses castles and things still were around but as a result there was less need for a shovel to be worn on you where you always needed a type of cover and because of the warfare they're engaging in they needed less cover as a result as well so they could dedicate themselves to using weapons that were optimized for melee combats and again they weren't in trenches so they had more room to move again you might be closed off in a formation where you have you know allies next to you but in terms of in front well you have all the range you need to do some serious damage so we can really see why the shovel actually came into more prominence in the modern day when cover is essential and if you don't have cover you make it by digging how do you dig shovel but then you have a tool with you that isn't a terrible weapon it isn't the best that's what we kind of will find especially when you compare it to things like back to corner like seriously which one's going to be better but say in a confined trench maybe the vector corbin wouldn't be the uh best pick yet at the same time would it be better than other weapons that you could use in those close confines like a dagger well it's a little debatable honestly there is one major difference that i think gives a knife an edge even over a shovel and this is one of my clarifying criteria on how to determine if a weapon is better than another i've done a dedicated video on objective standards in weapons and one of those objective standards is the amount of energy you need to exert to produce lethal force one of the massive advantages of knives and anything with a severe point you do not need to exert a lot of force to do lethal damage with something like this with a shovel especially a trenching tool as you can see to do lethal damage you do need to exert a lot of force now it wasn't difficult to produce that energy but the fact that there can be situations where you might be grappling and you don't have the movement or leverage to produce that energy any weapon that you can produce lethal force with little energy if you're grappling and you're right here if you could kill someone with the weapon already touching the opponent that gives you a massive advantage that makes the weapon vastly better than one in which you can't do that if it's already touching where you need to swing so in all honesty no i don't think a trenching tool or e-tool is better than a dagger but it's a lot better than nothing and in actual fact you could consider it a lot better than other weapons in the same situation might be why those other weapons might be really crap because it's a force multiplier you've got a point of leverage you've got a blade an edge that could really cut in you do have many different angles and you've got versatility if you instead of cutting wanted to resort to something that basically was a medieval weapon a pick and yes the war pick even one handed existed right now one of the differences this is a pick that is made for digging it's mostly blunt but you could sharpen it up okay and you have a really deadly weapon does it have the same limitations i think there are still limitations and so i don't think it makes it better than a knife or a knife that's so big you could almost call it a small sword or maybe a short sword that's an appropriate they already exist a short sword we've been talking a little bit about this recently uh yes i think this would have been a more effective weapon even in trenches in like you know modern warfare but the problem is it's not a multi-purpose tool and you have only have so much weight you can carry with you and so this is why i think the e-tool has become more prominent again in monday warfare because of its utility as a tool and so instead of carrying a like a weapon that's really like it honestly is better than this but yeah it's a crap shovel it's a really bad show you could try and use that is a terrible shovel where this is a great shovel and it's a good weapon might not be the best but it's good enough and so for convenience your loadout how much weight you can carry the practical solution becomes pretty clear and the entrenching tool is obviously more prominent on the battlefield as a result now we talked a little bit already about how deadly would it be let's increase the size because of course it can't be getting out in a modern context but you might be able to get away with something like this something is because this is too cumbersome okay unless there was a supply car of some kind that brought these you would just use it and you wouldn't use a weapon but if you were needing to march and you only could take what you carried with you maybe they could get away with something like this but a more standard size e tool is vastly more common and i'm not saying every entrenching tool was this size the ones with bigger heads about as big as this even but with shorter handles about this bigger they would fold and carry with them and stuff getting one with an even larger handle like this that's what i was mainly referring to in terms of size and then a full-size one you wouldn't really see it often on a modern battlefield but it needs to be acknowledged that would definitely increase its damage and its capacity as a battlefield weapon not necessarily in trenches but i want to compare it to the medieval battlefield how viable would a shovel be on the medieval battlefield as a weapon it wouldn't be better than a spear a spear like the range you don't need too much force to do lethal damage it's so easy like the spear is such a king of weapons it's brilliant yet there are other medieval weapons in which a full-size shovel that has a sharpened edge might actually be a bit more comparable for the utility of a shovel this one was never meant to be a weapon and because sorry they've designed it purely of of course to shovel which gives us an actually rather sophisticated shape do you see the curve of the shovel how it bends this way right this curve in the shovel is to prevent the steel from bending down when you want to leverage and pull up and so you can even test it with a piece of paper curve the piece of paper like that then try and bend it along the opposite plane and it would need to curve out of that shape all right having these ridges helps hold it in place and that makes shoveling if this was a flat bit of metal and it wasn't as strong i think it's actually a pretty strong piece of steel but there's a high chance that it would bend instead of being able to leverage the dirt up so easily so shovels are great they actually have a more sophisticated design but it makes them more awkward weapons as a result because of edge alignment it's not perfectly in lined with the shaft not just vertically but also horizontally it like bends away which makes striking with the shovel problematic at the least what's interesting is shovels that are made to have some more combat utility like the e-tool they're much flatter but not perfectly flat for the reason we talked about it gets so much more structural stability in having raised edges like this but they don't raise them nearly as much even on this multi-purpose camping one so you can use the edges like this even has a bit of a mini saw on it because they're designed for being able to cut through exactly and you could kind of do that with a larger scale combat shovel so if we could pretend that this one had a more combat oriented spade so what the head is called a spade i know a spade is a small trouble with a handle but i've had a more combat oriented head on it okay could we then compare it to some other weapons a little bit compared to say the glaive it's a there's a stick with a really good cutting end on it better thrusting like but you could point give a stronger point on a shovel these ones have minimal points mainly to help for digging but it does increase their utility thrusting but you can make it accentuate it even more than this right and as a result a type of pole arm shovel it wouldn't be a terrible weapon there's a lot worse ones okay that people propose as great weapons it would be the bottom end it's funny recently i did a video on um making a tier list of medieval battlefield weapons all right well you look at classic but i'll say some just ones that we threw in there for fun it's a great video check it out the question is where would a combat oriented shovel not this exact one but with some of the changes i mentioned go on that list oh it's not as effective as dedicated pole arms meant for pure combat but we're making this ready for combat it would have reach it would have leverage and it'll be really deadly i would put it in the a class i would consider a combat shovel an a-class weapon not s tier but a tier because there are so like it performs about as well as other weapons that we put in at and so it's like in terms of shovel as a weapon in a medieval in a more medieval setting you could throw it in say fair to see it's not terrible i find really funny so if you combined medieval to other settings even sci-fi yes the combat shovel could be justified like what we actually kind of see in warhammer because the the shovel is over white is a chain shovel i am talking about full-size kind of pole arm shovel i think the more you go down in size the less utility it has as a weapon like look at this one it's nowhere near as balanced as a good one-handed weapon this is not even though it should be this by its size it should be a you know one-handed weapon it's a good size for one-handed but it's just too awkward and unbalanced and too heavy yeah like i don't think it'd be better than a mace in terms of armor penetration there's it's just still a thin bit of steel thin enough and so it doesn't have as much weight as a mace for armor penetration it could i think you'll be better at armor penetration or impact through armor so blunt force than a sword okay but still too heavy like this is this is by its weight it's a two-headed weapon but because it's shorter now not as effective i got this one from one of those fun camping sites um multi-purpose you can there's a knife in here somewhere hang on and it's just fun like where's the knife you wheeled look at that you screw on the other side like so you have one end to trouble ah no it is a wasted opportunity so if you wanted as we kind of see in uh 40k warhammer 40k you could justify the shovel as a weapon in fantasy if you kind of one you can follow some of the same parameters that we see in the real world trenches you if you need a tool about a necessity that you carry with you it's better a tool that can double as a effective enough weapon than a tool that can't and it's and so that gives the rail otherwise the shop yes the shovel is uh fits that category quite well and out of i think a better combat weapon than a hammer there's more got more utility in warfare than a hammer because of digging is more important than hitting they're nails used for transit but you can also hit males with a shovel depends what type of hammer though i can hit nails with this like i reckon [Laughter] yeah i know right but you could do it i i think i think um a hammer is a better combat warfare weapon because they literally more often exist as warhammers than a shovel but that goes to show you that um their tools absolutely did exist as permanent battlefield weapons in a battlefield configuration like the warhammer or pole hammer back to corbin uh the bill hook is another farming tool that was adapted as a permanent battlefield weapon the shovel not so much because as great it is it has too many short fallings in comparison to other weapons that can do the same purpose outside of ones that can be used to dig when you need to dig as we said it's got an interesting place that it can fit i mean the war peak existed right and this is if you sharpen it up it's essentially a one-handed war pick so in that sense yes primary about a full weapon as a permanent thing and i could like the change is that is the thing that like you can see why people prefer it because you've got the pick action and you've got the dig action right there and you've got the stab action and and so if someone developed the technology or a because one of the things that really enabled see this thread here they had threads in the medieval period they weren't precise they weren't great but say if you wanted to hand wave advanced threads that are strong and precise like this that could switch the head and and because then you could have a permanent pick and a permanent shovel and then warping i could see the entrenching tool being justified as a permanent in a permanent place in a medieval fantasy setting imagine a knight warping tool the shield now the shovel knight there's there's precedence for it and the logic that you can use to justify it more than well enough so there we go has been my thoughts on the shovel as a weapon let me know your thought hey oh look at this i didn't even know i did that like so if you just wanted to pick a nose shovel i dig it i dig it a lot permanent war pig give it a bit of a longer handle bit of a bigger pick still usable as a regular pick but a war picket yes they just need if many people had this technology they could do it or make it easier stuff like that because i think someone could make a variant of this with medieval technology but it might be too expensive then but if someone you know yes it could be justified so uh let me know your thoughts in the comments below look forward to reading them and i of course hope to see you on the next video here on chat adversity so until that time farewell [Music] you

Channel: Shadiversity

Views: 187,233

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Id: gxFUZzGdp6I

Length: 23min 12sec (1392 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 04 2022