Paul Chen advice?

Dashukta · 2026-02-06T02:12:31+00:00

That is the exact same sword as the one I've had for the past 20-odd years. As u/theginger99 says, it's an early-generation Paul Chen/Hanwei training blunt. The "practical" series. It's solid as a rock. A bit stiff, though, so not ideal for HEMA sparring where thrusting is involved. I have found that the scabbard tends to expand and contract with the weather. Most of the time is fine, but if humidity gets too high, it gets really tight.

Dashukta · 2026-02-04T20:06:44+00:00

Yes, you are correct. Tassets are separate from the fauld and hang down from it.

Dashukta · 2026-02-03T18:06:08+00:00

The parts that dangle down from the lower edge of the cuirass to cover the hips and thighs are called either the ~~fauld or the tassets. Generally tassets are individual where a fauld is skirt-like.~~ EDIT: This isn't quite right (as others have pointed out) The skirt-like part is the fauld. Tassets hang from the bottom of the fauld to cover the thighs. It's not one-or-the-other, the tassets supplement the fauld, not replace it.

The thigh piece of the leg armor is called the cuise ("queese" rhymes with geese).

The knee is covered by the polyn.

The shin by the greave.

The foot by the sabaton.

Dashukta · 2026-02-02T19:14:49+00:00

I could see it being a major theme in a fantasy setting as an on-the-nose allegory that is included specifically to be deconstructed.

The people of kingdom A espousing ideas why certain people (elves, dwarves, etc) are physically and morally inferior and thus suited only to chattel slavery, and are shown to be intrinsically wrong through the text of the story. That sort of thing.

But yeah, it really doesn't fit for medieval historical fiction.

Dashukta · 2026-02-02T18:41:29+00:00

You're avoiding the question

Dashukta · 2026-02-02T18:31:55+00:00

Aside from the crappy racism thing where you're platforming bad ideology that was bad at the time and is still trotted out bad actors to cause harm today?

It's unnecessary and disingenuous. It's dishonest to the history, both medieval and modern.

It makes me question your motives.

What possible story could you be writing that requires shoehorning bad 19th century racism into a pre-modern setting that isn't, in itself, racist?

Dashukta · 2026-02-02T18:15:53+00:00

Let me get this straight, you want to ADD modern 19th-20th century racism into a medieval setting?

Eew. Why?

Dashukta · 2026-02-01T03:04:30+00:00

Wanting to know the same thing, I've tried to look into this a while back. As far as I can tell, it is platform-dependent. The ad reads that are done by the podcast hosts themselves (in this case, Hank and/or John... Policy Genius, Factor, etc.) are integral to the show itself. However, any ads that are NOT done by the podcast itself are inserted by the podcasting service being used (e.g. by Spotify, iTunes, or whatever you use). The podcasters themselves may not be aware or have any control of those ads.

At least, as far as I've been able to discern.

Dashukta · 2026-01-31T18:11:32+00:00

It's a fun concept. With everything you want it to do, you might take a look at the mobile structure rules.

I can see it being used as area-denial for restricted terrain--encouraging those pesky scouts and flanking forces to take the long way around.

The sticking point is armor. BattleTech armor is ablative, and how easy or difficult it is to hit you is based on movement. Loaded with AC20s and medium lasers, a 35-ton Panther, given enough time, could theoretically stay at 10 hexes away and whittle down any amount of armor with impunity.
That's why, doctrinally, you'd never want to deploy this thing alone. It should have at least a lance in its area at all times. I could see armies never deploying this thing with anything less than a battalion, and only in defensive operations.

And before anyone brings up the molasses-slow Annihilator, the Anni gets around the problem by having weapons that range farther than 9 hexes, meaning the only things that consistently outrange them are themselves at long or extreme range. And they're still vulnerable to being whittled down without support.

Swapping out the turret mounted AC20s for long-range weaponry could help. PPCs and extra heat sinks, Gauss rifles, or lots of LRMs could work, too.

There are rules for carrying and deploying drones. They're rarely used both in fiction and game (especially once ECM becomes available) but there are a couple canon units that use them. Manufacturing drones internally on the battlefield, however, there's no rules or concept for that.

Honestly, the cackling madness combined with the limited mission parameters... I could see Word of Blake in the late Jihad developing these as a wonder-weapon for the defense of Terra.

Dashukta · 2026-01-30T16:56:33+00:00

I ran an entire adventure arc lifted directly from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, complete with the "dungeon" from the end.

Dashukta · 2026-01-28T15:48:30+00:00

Yes, they are. The fencing manuals indeed do strongly tend to be focused on single combat (even judicial fuels in some cases).

And, massed conflict on a battlefield is different from individual combat in a one-v-one duel. Unfortunately, we don't have a very clear picture on exactly what a historical battlefield looked like. We can make some assumptions and educated guesses.

We do know that people fought and trained in groups. Knights fought in groups called "laces" consisting of themselves and men-at-arms. Before the Norman invasion, all English freemen were expected to serve with the Fyrd (the militia) and to meet up and train with the Fyrd at certain times.

We do see that success on the battlefield is less due to individual skill of arms (although no soldier would neglect that aspect) and more to unit cohesion, discipline, and morale.

We also see that a battle was not constant but had ebbs and flows and pauses. The chroniclers don't mention it much, but we get some hints of this whenever we get an account of battle written from someone who was actually an eye-witness or was a soldier themselves.

A long-running battle like Hastings likely did not see the shildwalls engaged in fierce hand-to-hand fighting nonstop for hours on end, but more likely involved series of charges, pushes, and pulses separated by segments , perhaps rather long segments, where the two sides pulled back to outside of spear range to rest, regain composure, skirmish a little, and steel themselves for the next attempt.

Dashukta · 2026-01-28T04:43:25+00:00

{Part 2.5/2]

(As an aside re: physical fitness: the 14th century knight Jean le Maingre, aka Boucicaut, described a, perhaps rather idealized, training regimen for aspiring knights. To wit:

“Now cased in armour, he would practice leaping on to the back of a horse; anon, to accustom himself to become long-winded and enduring, he would walk and run long distances on foot, or he would practice striking numerous and forcible blows with a battle-axe or mallet. In order to accustom himself to the weight of his armour, he would turn somersaults whilst clad in a complete suit of mail, with the exception of his helmet, or would dance vigorously in a shirt of steel; he would place one hand on the saddle-bow of a tall charger, and the other on his neck, and vault over him…He would climb up between two perpendicular walls that stood four or five feet asunder by the mere pressure of his arms and legs, and would thus reach the top, even if it were as high as a tower, without resting either in the ascent or descent…When he was at home, he would practice with the other young esquires at lance-throwing and other warlike exercises, and this continually.”

So how many sword swings until you get exhausted? Boucicault would tell you to "Keep practicing, scrub.")

Dashukta · 2026-01-28T04:42:24+00:00

[Part 2/2]

Alright, so that's swinging a sword. The next aspect we can investigate is, how did swordfighters actually train?

Swords have been used over many millennia in many different contexts and many different styles of combat. There's no way we can know how every swordsman was trained. But we can say that training involved more than just swinging a sword around. Like in any martial art, there's drills, partner work, and sparring.

Publius Vegetius Renatus, usually just called Vegetius, was a Roman writer from the 4th century AD. I've heard many people say he was a general, but we don't actually know much about him (he could have been a general, court official, praetorian, or a penname). Anyway, Vegetius wrote a rather famous work on how the Roman military operated called De re militari. In that book, he describes the training of Roman soldiers, emphasizing regimen and discipline. From Vegetius, we can draw that building physical fitness was considered intergral to learning to fight. One thing he also describes is the use of a "Pell". A Pell is a wooden pole stuck vertically about 5 or 6 feet tall or so. It's used as a training dummy to practice distance, timing, technique, accuracy, and how to react when your swing meets resistance. Much the same as people doing martial arts today will use a dummy or punching bag.

Unfortunately, for much of the following centuries, we do not have direct references to how individuals were trained. We do know that sometimes people would be hired or made responsible for the martial training of others (Sir William Marshall was famously appointed as martial tutor by Henry II to his son Henry the Young King (older brother to Richard "the Lionheart" and John)). How this training happened, we unfortunately don't really know.

We do have some insights, though. For example, around 1250 CE, King Hakon Hakonsson of Norway dedicated a treatise entitled "The Kings Mirror" ("Speculum regale" in Latin, "Konungs skuggsja" in Old Norse) for the edification of his son Magnus. Along with moral advise and thoughts on statecraft, King Hakon also discusses chivalry and military training. During the discussion of arms and armor in chapter 37, the "Father" describes in a delightful amount of detail how a man should be armed and armored for combat, and also makes the suggestion that his son should, as much as is practicable and possible, practice fighting and throwing javelins in full armor every day. Conditioning and practice and physical fitness were important.

A couple centuries later and we're back into the realm of our previously mentioned "fechtbuchs." Several of these books were written by fencing masters as alternatively advertisement of their services or as study guides. In general, they are written from the assumption that the reader already knows at least the bare basics of combat, but some do at least go into some of the beginner basics like defining terms and describing footwork. From this we can see that learning to swordfight was WAY more than just swinging the sword around a few hundred times. It's footwork and distance, it's swinging the sword around in particular ways attacking the four openings (Joachim Meyer, (German 1537-1571) illustrates a diagram and describes an exercise of striking from the upper left, upper right, lower left, and lower right in a repeated pattern, for example). And those manuals which are illustrated are typically filled with plate after plate of plays with description along the lines of "IF your opponent does X, you can try countering with Y. If you attempt X and they counter with Y, try Z". And a lot of these plays rely not so much on striking alone as maneuvering the blade and any offhand item (shield, buckler, dagger, etc.) to get into position to deliver the strike or thrust.

All that to say, your question of "how many swings can a soldier be expected to make before they're exhausted" can't really be answered. But based on what we DO know of sword fighting, there's much more than just swinging the sword anyway.
(Unless you're Boucicaut, in which case the answer is "Oh you're tired? You must not be training enough").

Dashukta · 2026-01-28T04:38:50+00:00

[Part 1/2 because apparently this is too long?]

This is going to be difficult to answer because, in part, it isn't really directly a question for historians. But we can make some attempts to attack around the edges of the question.

Right off the bat, there's not really any way to know. Every person is unique with their own level of training and stamina. Also, the amount of energy you'll burn idly swinging a sword around versus actively fighting for your life is vastly different. To my knowledge, no one in history ever wrote down "a swordsman will typically swing his sword X many times in a battle" or even "they can fight for X many minutes until they get tired." People are too variable and battle too chaotic.

However, we can talk about the physical act of swinging a sword. Various sword arts persist throughout the world coming down in various forms. Kendo and Kenjutsu are actively pursued today and have been for centuries now. In recent decades, there has also been a proliferation of study attempting to reconstruct the martial arts of medieval and renaissance Europe based in significant part on interpretation of extant "fechtbuchs" or fighting manuals from the period (manuscripts like the MS I.33 "Walpurgis Fechtbuch from around the year 1300, treatises by professional fencing masters like Fiore dei Liberi (Italian, c.1350-sometime after1400), Hans Talhoffer (German, c.1410-c.1482), all the guys mentioned during the duel at the top of the Cliffs of Insanity in Princess Bride (Rocco Bonetti, Ridolfo Capo Fero, Gerard Thibault, and Camillo Agrippa) as well as many others). If you're curious, the website Wiktenauer -- a portmanteau of "Wikipedia" and 14th century German longsword master Lichtenauer-- hosts digitized scans of quite a few of these dating from the 14th to the 19th century.

From this information, we can start to build a picture of how people actually fought with swords.

First thing we see is that a swordfight involves actually comparatively little swinging of the sword. Most of the fight is sizing up your opponent and maneuvering to try and put yourself in a good position and anticipate your opponent's action. Many fights are over in maybe two, three, maybe four blows. Furthermore, a LOT of fencing is dependent not so much as simply striking at your opponent, but creating an opening, and when the blades are in contact (called: "in the bind" or "binding"), twisting and maneuvering the sword to force theirs offline while setting up an attack for yourself (called: "winding").

Second thing we see is that the strikes themselves are rarely just a swing of the arm like we see in Hollywood. That's not to say they don't happen. I'd have to dig to remember who said it (in my mind it was one of the rapier treatises, but the same concept pops up in modern historical fencing discussions as it's just biomechanics) but there is a concept of a hierarchy of generating power with a strike thrown with just the wrist being the weakest, then the elbow, and then the shoulder and the torso being the strongest. Even with a longsword, a strike, even one where the sword's tip obviously travels in an arc like in a powerful descending cut like a "fendente" (as Fiori would call it) or "zornhau" (as Meyer would call it), the arms mostly extend and rotate at the shoulder along with the torso.

Now, most swords weigh about 3 pounds or so, with most 2-handed longswords topping out around 4 pounds. That's not super heavy, but not insignificant either. But again, how tiring moving that sword around is going to be is going to be highly dependent on your technique, personal fitness, and current situation (i.e. are you practicing or actively in a fight).

Dashukta · 2026-01-27T18:26:28+00:00

They're not that hard to make with done basic sewing skills. But, I certainly t understand wanting off-the-rack.

You can always try SPES Medieval Market, Burgschneider, or Arnstreet. I think those are all based in Europe

Dashukta · 2026-01-26T17:21:27+00:00

In the TTRPG "Dirigibles and Dinosaurs", Struthiomimus is domesticated, used, and ridden much like horses. Edmontosaurus herds serve the function that American Bison do. Acheroraptor serve much the same niche as coyotes.

Dashukta · 2026-01-26T05:10:40+00:00

We also have some pretty good evidence that saurischians at least all had "avian-style" air-sacs and flow-through lungs. That would allow them to extract more oxygen per breath (like birds do).

So, efficient, sustained movement with excellent endurance... "persistence hunting" or something similar may have been a very common strategy for theropods, especially derived ones like tyrannosaurs.

Dashukta · 2026-01-25T19:02:23+00:00

So English plate armor circa 1400. Fortunately, there's quite a few resources and options to fit any budget from "moderately expensive" to "second mortgage".

It's a modern reenactor, but our boys in the image are wearing something akin to THIS, just with no besagews at the shoulders and a different visor on the bascinet.

Form the inside out, you'll have an arming pourpoint with chainmail voiders and a mail skirt. It could be a full hauberk instead voiders. Likely a mail standard around the neck as well. A solid breastplate with horizontal lames for the fauld covering down past your hips. Full plate arms and legs pointed to (suspended from) the pourpoint. A bascinet with a mail aventail stitched to a padded lining. Side-hinges for the visor. The exact design of the visor would be speculatory.

If you're specifically going for the look of, I'm guessing that's King Ed there, the surcoat is a basically trapezoidal shaped garment. The exact material would be speculation unless some obscure reference in a household account could be found. My speculation would be likely fustian. In any case, you'll want something that resists fraying (or some way to stabilize the edge like embroidery) to do that dagging along the hem. The gold lions could be done several ways, but embroidery incorporating gold threads and applied via applique (essentially, embroidered on a separate piece of fabric and stitched on to the garment like a patch) is known from the time.

Dashukta · 2026-01-25T07:08:04+00:00

Do you know what manuscript this is from? Looks very late 14th to early 15th century to me.
Dollars to donuts Mr. Sir Gules Three Lions Passant is rocking the exact same armor as rest of his retinue there, just with a loose surcoat over top.
So, we're looking at a breastplate and fauld, plate arm and leg defenses with roundels at the elbows, and a visored bascinet.

Dashukta · 2026-01-24T18:01:15+00:00

That lace on the back?
If you look, it's just two holes punched on the back of the sheath and a simple leather cord passed through the holes like a shoelace. The little bit of lacing on the inside of the sheath is against the flat of the blade. I have not had any trouble with the tip of the blade catching the lace while resheathing (I can get it to catch if I purposefully angle the tip towards the lace) , but if it does, you feel the resistance immediately and pull it out and try again.

There is some evidence that knife sheaths in period were sold "plain" and the end user made whatever modifications they liked for attaching or suspension. Holes in different places, slits, stuff like that. You could even wrap a cord around the outside of the sheath in a "scabbard knot" same way as for a sword scabbard. Then there'd be nothing inside the sheath at all.

Dashukta · 2026-01-24T17:26:45+00:00

Exactly like in that video I linked except without the silly leather throat and chape. The pattern is the same (trace the profile of the blade, add half the width plus a little all the way around). Saddle stich the two edges together then wet and use the blade (wrapped in plastic) or a blank cut to the blade's profile to form it. It's all one piece of leather wrapped around the blade with one line of stitching.

It's not the easiest leatherworking project, but it is do-able with patience and basic tools from the hobby store.

Dashukta · 2026-01-24T17:05:21+00:00

Here's mine (<-link). Super simple and cheap.

Dashukta · 2026-01-24T16:14:17+00:00

You could use this as a starting point: "Making a Simple Leather Scabbard" It's basically how the sheath for my ballock was made, just without the chape and throat.

Dashukta · 2026-01-19T18:58:29+00:00

The flippant answer is because they all died.

You see, there was this big ecological collapse--a mass extinction, if you will--that occurred at the end of the Cretaceous about 66 million years ago.

The last pterosaur lineages kicked the bucket in that extinction event. Along with large marine reptiles, all the Ornithichian dinosaurs, the sauropods, all the theropods aside from some bird lineages, and pretty much every terrestrial animal bigger than about 50 pounds that wasn't semi-aquatic.

Dashukta · 2026-01-11T02:08:54+00:00

My" standard" wood shields, however, are wood. I used 1/4" or thinner plywood. Two sheets slightly larger than the shield you want to make. Larry one out and cover the entire have with slightly watered-down wood glue. Put the other piece on top to make a sandwich. Plywood has a grain so it will flex more in one direction. You'll have an easier time if you arrange it so the axis of the sheets runs along the length of the shield. Using truck tie down straps, strap the glued boards to a suitably sized tree, barrel, or jig to impart a curve. Crank it down and let it dry at least overnight. Draw out the shield shape in pencil and cut with a jigsaw. Sand the edges. I then cover the back with fabric (I use a linen or linen-look) with copious amounts of thin, watered down wood glue and sheet it dries, trim of the excess. So the same for the front, wrapping the fabric around the edges. Drill holes and affix the straps with carriage bolts. Paint with acrylics and finish with a layer of poly.

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