Is the double bladed sword / lightsaber a good weapon?

[Music] greetings i'm chad and as you can probably tell i'm going to be talking a little bit about the double-bladed sword now the double-bladed sword has appeared in pop culture in various iterations i think one of the most popular and iconic is darth maul's double-bladed lightsaber but a double-bladed sword like this also appears in say dungeons and dragons 3 and 3.5 and i think there's a couple of animes that have double bladed swords as well so what i want to try and explore in this video is are these things even practical now i have seen a couple of videos that actually say this is a piece of junk why would you ever do it there's no points and i've also seen a couple of videos defending it so what are my opinions and ultimately this is speculation okay i do have a background in martial arts and historical sources ship and i'll be applying my own understanding and knowledge of that stuff to this kind of weapon and there is a lot to try and analyze and break down now just let you know how i constructed this monstrosity this is actually two rowlings synthetic nylon practice swords and because they actually have an internal core that's basically a giant screw uh all you need is an oversized nut right there and they screw together really well it's like how i'm made to do it not really so yeah you just remove the pummel from the swords screw them together and you actually have a really functional training double-bladed sword because these are made to take like huge impacts okay and to simulate the approximate weight they're not perfectly they're a little bit on the lighter end but the weight is still a very good analog for a real sword and so when you put them together uh this actually makes a really functional practice of a blade sort of look at that first i want to explore functionality and then after that practicality and when i look at this how practical weapon is this in real life uh that actually inform us somewhat i feel as to why it didn't really exist in history now i do have some vague memories of me trying to play around pretending a stick is a double-bladed weapon and i always held it like this and i think in a lot of tv shows and stuff they fight with it you know holding it like this this is how darth maul usually holds his he had a bit more kind of uh grip or length on his handle but generally fighting with it this way okay and i just uh two hands now when i just hold it like this and try and go through different moves okay there is a measure of uh you know functionality that you could get out of it but what i'm finding is that the cross guards if you actually have cross guards they tend to get in the way of your edge alignment especially if you're holding like because just by virtue of the length of this handle my hands need to go on an inwards angle like that for me to hold it because it's shorter than the width of my shoulder so maybe if this was further out the cross guard wouldn't be as detrimental but because my hands need to be angled inwards when i hold it that means the cross guard can't flip up and down past my forearms with any amount of ease and so because that gets in the way you might think well it's not an effective weapon well no it's not as effective you can still get a measure effect but it's not as effective when you hold it this way you don't have to hold it this way in actual fact when i was you know my own experimentation holding it like a spear actually nullifies that problem completely and gives you more options fighting i find you can present the tip to your opponent much easier you can actually even get more reach if you want like fully leaning out and look because my handle is essentially doubled from a regular long sword i get way more reach in a thrust and it gives you a lot of options all right and so when i was experimenting with this thing i was finding that my goodness this isn't nearly as terrible as some people have said so the obvious comparison between a double bladed sword is with a single single-bladed sword but there's not only that what about comparing it to a spear because this is now a pole arm all right you wouldn't it it's it's wrong to really call it a sword i'm not really fighting it like a sword i'm not holding a sword grip i think one of the best grips as i mentioned is like a spear okay a double-bladed swordy spear but still let's compare it to a regular sword you should put bubble really short yeah like when you sword you might recognize it this was scarlet grims and he was selling it when i heard that he was selling it i was like well i know someone who might like to buy it so my own personal impression when comparing a regular long sword to a double-bladed sword is that the initial engagement can be pretty much the same there's really only a couple of guard positions that you wouldn't be able to do with a regular sword because remember the double blade sword is just a sword with a sword on the other end okay and so however way you want to place your guard you can do that with a double-bladed sword so off the bat they're quite equivalent except if you're doing it like this if you had you know a wrath position or something well you have a blade that you can actually present to your opponent already and spin it around so if i wanted to try and kind of do a wrath guard with a double-bladed sword i would actually want to keep my point on point right uh presenting to the opponent very similar to one of the positions that you hold when fighting with a polax okay because there are actual other weapons historically that are essentially kind of double-bladed the polax is one of them because on the opposite end sometimes they have a spike a metal spike not always but sometimes and so one of the guard positions you'd have the polex on one end hold that ready for a big strike and you present that spike that tip to your opponent so you can still thrust with it this is a very similar guard position and so you can keep your opponent at guard or at bay and then if they try and attack you have a very strong defensive point to just knock something aside and then you're ready to fall up knock aside and then hit and this this blade essentially should be pushing aside your opponent's weapon leaving them open for a counter strike which is very quick this is i think one of the biggest adventures about a double-bladed sword i have heard some arguments saying that a regular sword is just as quick let's let's break that down a regular sword can be very quick i'm not saying it isn't so if you knock a strike aside you can follow up with a reverse cut very quickly just hit and you can keep running into your opponent so just deflect strike thrust hit so these are all pretty darn fast attacks whether it was a block parry or a post at whatever length of time it took for me to spin it around that length of time would have been halved if i was using a double bladed sword and so if i let in with a strike or i just raised a guard and then i wanted to spin to do a reverse cut on the other end the length of time it takes my blade to re-engage is hard with the double blade of sword because it's right there the blade would be here where i go to strike and block and just hit with the other end that's actually very darn quick the regular sword like i said all the way around to hit with the other end this half the time this is a significant advantage that i don't think we should disregard it's very well worth analyzing and trying to consider seriously now in my opinion one of the best moves with a long sword is a single tempo riposte where your guard your defense is an attack in one move and i was watching this longsword tournament where one of the opponents pulled one off and i was just beautiful he just simply had a low guard his opponent came in with a high strike and he just brought in like just straight up he caught the opponent's blade with a perfect block and the tip of his sword went right underneath his opponent's armpit right there just bang right in oh that was a beautiful move very quick so decisive a single tempo repost now when you do that there's really no need for a secondary blade but as soon as you go into a two-tempo move whatever it is two moves this is where the double-bladed sword actually has really significant advantages now don't get me wrong there are many second tempo moves that you can do that don't require you to move your blade too much especially if you want to engage with the zornhau and finish with a thrust well there's really no extra position you to put your sword into for that second move so i'm not saying the double bladed sword would be better in every regard i'm just saying in a lot of situations it has some significant advantages keeping your blade on point and keeping your opponent at a measurable distance away from you because again this is a long blade right and then ready to defend in any way like you've got a full defensive action here where you can defend your upper body and lower body pretty darn effectively okay and with whatever defensive move that you want and you don't have to wait for your opponent to attack you you've got this blade right there you can thrust you can go to any number of attacks but whatever you do you have a second attack all the way ready to go now you might be thinking okay hang on it's a double-bladed sword if you missed with the first blade wouldn't the next one naturally miss anyway or if the opponent blocks it no not really with whatever first strike you do you can just step forward afterwards so your second strike has even a greater chance of landing and then if you are waiting for the opponent to strike first there are multiple effective guard positions that you can employ something where it's more raised up it'll take a bit more energy but presenting that point to your opponent or there's even at good at risk guard positions where just kind of holding it low if they're ready to knock aside and defend you can easily defend your legs by moving them back and then when you deflect you can easily strike back and really fast and remember each one of these attacks can also be switched to a defensive action very quickly instead of a strike you can sweep knock aside reverse and then hit again and these blades are moving consecutively really fast in response to one another i strike i withdraw to re-engage but then the blade is already there there there there like these are fast you know attacks that would be very difficult to defend against i think now in all the experimentation that i've been showing here notice how i've been holding the sword like a spear okay so not the darth maul kind of double quarter stuff maneuvers thing as i mentioned before all the moves that i've been playing around with would be more difficult holding it like this again mainly because of the cross gun perhaps the length of the handle but even with a longer handle again i still think you get more versatility and honestly the strikes you just feel more engagement with your biomechanics there's more power behind them holding it like this just going in for a big old cut like that i mean there's a reason why we hold swords like this we don't hold them like this obviously because you know point of the blade but also the way we want to engage our muscles okay just down in with a strike there's another part to the double-bladed sword that i think is worth considering and that's the matter of spinning okay spinning the actual weapon now of course usually when you spin the sword dumb thing to do you'd never do it in combat but with a double blade sword maybe there's a bit more viability in it simply because there's a lot of blade swinging towards your opponent they are twice as fast as if you were with a regular you know blade so hit hit hit so these are pretty you know fast consecutive and i'm not doing casual i'm not even trying to be fast here but these blades are moving towards your bones very quickly having said that though there is a crossover point that leaves you fairly open is when you go strike strike and you move down to cross over there's no real guard position here the blade isn't there but having said that there's a blade moving around to knock aside anything that might come in and then you follow up with another strike and so knock hit hit so i don't know maybe and we have to remember this is also intimidating if you're facing off opponent with a s with a weapon spinning like that which is like blade blade blade blade i mean trying to time your attack to try and block these strikes that are just going crazy towards your opponent okay uh look you could defend against it would be difficult the other thing is if you do defend against it and say you're in a strike and they block okay this could lock away your weapon pretty good i do admit but there are other ways you can counter it and then hit again so it's a bit too much of a complex thing for me to make a call on right now i'd actually want to experiment with this with sparring against another person unfortunately there's no human club nearby that i could try it out with but a lot of you guys are human practitioners and you know i assume a good number of you might have rolling synthetics like this i just went to my hardware store bought these things the thread is an 8w or w8 thread for the screws you just find an extra long nut like that and some washers so you get the right distance and it also holds the grip in place they don't bother you when you grab it and then you've got a double-bladed sword you can play around with and when i do have the opportunity to file someone i know what i'm going to be trying out just to get a better read onto how effective this really would be but from my own experimentation at the moment i actually think there's some validity to it it's looking pretty positive now if these are effective okay there are a lot more people in the past who are fighting with swords why don't these things exist historically well i think there's a number of reasons okay because we've looked at the functionality now let's look at the practicality and this is a profoundly impractical weapon i mean can you imagine carrying this around this it's hard to it's two exposed blades it would be hard to keep two sheaths on it it'd be hard to draw them quickly and then it'll be also be annoying to just carry this thing around everywhere now one of the easy ways is just to unscrew the things mine's fairly tight but you know you know we'll get there we'll get there okay just unscrew them and then you can put them in two sheaves but drawing them out very difficult i mean you've got two swords ready to dual wield and we know that dual wielding did happen in the past usually as a novelty and not with long swords i mean you can fight alongside one hand it is difficult they're not perfectly balanced for it but still you got them and then if you wanted to fight your opponents and i'm not sure if you'd have that time to screw them together and the other thing is why i don't think they would have been made in the past is difficulty of making them okay uh when i was kind of saying you could unscrew them the types of threads we have in the modern day way stronger way more precise they did have threads in the medieval period we know this from unscrew the pummel in your opponents rightly and that's a big weakness of the sword there's no pummel what are you gonna do fail but wait wait is the entire second [Music] this weapon just became the most epic weapon in existence but yes they did have threads in the medieval period again so problems with it they weren't as precise weren't as strong and i'm not sure they could hold a sword together as well as what i'm we're seeing right here so i do think if you did have a double blade sword in the past it would need to be one piece okay and that's so profoundly impractical no and because you wouldn't carry this around as a weapon for self defense which is the role that sword the sword most predominantly filled throughout history there aren't many cases it was a battlefield but more predominantly there's a weapon for self-defense your sidearm and this is not a sidearm okay if anything this is a battlefield weapon yet there is another realm which it becomes far more practical which is something we didn't see historically but it's something we enjoy much nowadays that's the idea of fantasy no fantasy is somewhat you need convenience you carry around yet you know you're going to be fighting pretty large creatures so you want weapons that can do serious damage and stuff like that so i think the double blade assault is actually a more practical plausible weapon in a fantasy setting then i know i had even given credit i remember looking you know does the dragon's 3.5 what the double later sword is like that's just dumb i i have to eat a bit of humble pie they actually not almost i was thinking but discounting fantasy and only looking at the historical context like if any this would have to be a battlefield weapon but it's not the best battlefield weapon just by the design of it being a sword okay you want a battlefield weapon to do generally one thing really really well so if your opponent's wearing armor you want a weapon that can handle armor better than all other weapons so it's like a mace or a pole arm okay we're looking at the hull bert or pollak's bill hook the spear is one of the most prominent battlefield weapons we see you know historically as well because the spear you get even more reach i mean this is the length of the spear but you know you're not going to hold the blade i suppose you could there were times they held the blade but with the amount of weight that's on the other end and how thin sword blades are no you're not going to hold it like this okay so spears get huge reach so they're a better battlefield weapon than this uh the pole axes hull birds better battlefield weapon than this and so even though there's some certain advantages in a one-on-one scenario or even an adventuring scenario it's not a good battlefield weapon okay it has a ways that you could get in armor you know it's got if you get particularly pointy but when you're using a sword to try and jam it in between those gaps in armor you need a bit more kind of control and articulation than this is really allowing because to move you know this blade from one side to another you have to kind of move it forward around and in you just you can't switch the blade on one end because it is hitting you that's the same limitation with a sphere mind you but with a regular long sword like this you have so much versatility to try and jam this point in your whatever the gap you want to get it and you can connect with your opponent's blade just feel out the pressure get ready to get this point in where you want it and of course you can half sword and when you're half sorting it you got a lot of versatility as well and so when fighting against ponies with like significant armor i think you actually might want a regular long sword instead of this double bladed sword you're fighting against a more unarmed opponent maybe even unarmored creatures like goblins and monsters and things again i think this is still a pretty good pick and i'm not saying it's completely ineffective against armor you can still try and get it in points but again like i was trying to get the blade to this side to kind of jam it down and had to move it all the way around so there are limitations because of the size and i think these reasons that we've just explored here the impracticality of carrying it around the difficulty in construction and also some of the limitations that you would find on a battlefield because again it's not the best battlefield weapon and it's too awkward to carry around a civilian self-defense weapon is too big i think it's kind of obvious we didn't see them historically even though i do admit there are certain significant advantages that this weapon has all right and it's pretty cool so again this is actually a more plausible fantasy weapon more than i was willing to regard it or consider it if you haven't seen it already do check out my review of thanos double bladed sword it's uh rather different to this one and so for darth maul yeah you know i'm willing to grant it it's not ridiculous and like for a fantasy adventure go to town [Music] you

Channel: Shadiversity

Views: 3,517,979

Rating: 4.9042983 out of 5

Keywords: double, blade, bladed, sword, double bladed sword, light, saber, lightsaber, darth maul, lance, duel, longsword, hema, historical european martial arts, medieval, fantasy, medieval fantasy, pop culture, history, historical, greatsword, sabre, star wars, dungeons and dragons, dnd, d&d, middle ages, how to, adventurer, top ten, top 10, skyrim, game of thrones, lord of the rings, pop culture weapons analysed, fantasy weapons, saberstaff

Id: PQApbJ29QJQ

Length: 17min 59sec (1079 seconds)

Published: Sat May 11 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/47tw]

So the added "speed" of a weapon which is dangerous at both ends (only needing to rotate 180 degrees in a two tempo move and not 360) means that the "free" extra attack with a double bladed lightsaber in KOTOR is relatively accurate.

One benefit which is perhaps overlooked is the way having two blades makes it easier to defend (assuming you're actually trained with the weapon). See how a polarm with a spike at its base allows you to harass someone while you're winding up for a huge over the head blow. I suppose that this would be represented by a bonus to Defense, however this could be unbalanced. Perhaps an "accurate" way to represent the two weapon types is to give single blades much better critical hit ranges to make up for the huge benefits of using a double bladed lightsaber.

And of course the main PRACTICAL reason we don't see double bladed swords in history is that they're so long and impractical. They're dangerous and unwieldy unless you're actually holding them and ready to attack someone.

A lightsaber removes that problem since it is very small unless it's turned on.

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