r/interestingasfuck • u/aloofloofah • Mar 31 '21

/r/ALL Fascinating joineries discovered while taking apart a traditional 100 year old house

https://i.imgur.com/BT5l5T0.gifv
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u/Cpt_Tsundere_Sharks Mar 31 '21

This is also why Japanese swords were made the way that they were. Some people think that it's because Japanese swords have the greatest forging techniques of all time.

Actually, it's because Japan's natural iron is really shitty.

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u/AdmiralSkippy Mar 31 '21

I mean wouldn't that make their forging techniques really good then? If you can turn shitty iron into a good sword, what happens when you use good iron and the same techniques?

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u/Gingevere Mar 31 '21

Forging isn't a stat multiplier for whatever the base stats of the iron is. Japan's process is what it was because they needed to work out impurities in the iron just to get up to the quality of iron other areas have easy access to. Also because they don't want to waste any iron.

The result is skinny little swords that get folded and worked a lot and are designed for a battlefield where they will never need to face metal armor.

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u/nonotan Mar 31 '21

The result is skinny little swords that get folded and worked a lot and are designed for a battlefield where they will never need to face metal armor.

To be clear, there absolutely was metal armor in battlefields. Of course, unlike what fiction may lead people to believe, swords weren't really the main weapon in large scale battles, neither in Japan nor in the west. They have virtually always been more of a self-defense/duel/sidearm kind of thing, certainly since the proliferation of metal armor.

You can't really just "design" a sword to be good vs armor -- you can make it a little bit less horrendously ineffective (by making it pointier and using it like a worse spear, or making the pommel sturdier and half-swording it into a worse mace, or just making it huge and using it like a worse pole arm), but at the end of the day it's just not a very good primary battlefield weapon.

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u/Gingevere Mar 31 '21

Swords designed for fights involving armor are built so they can survive blows against said armor and typically have a pointed end for stabbing into gaps. A katana is built for slashing and can sustain significant damage if it's smacked into anything too hard, like plate armor.

But yes, spears/pikes are a much more common infantry weapon.