If the katana was such a bad weapon, why did the samurai, the

>>31917393
They lived on a closed off island. It's the best they had.

>>31917468
They had spears too, which were routinely used to kill idiots using katanas.

>>31917393
They also primarily used bows

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From what I've studies,

-Limited access to shifty iron led to the design
-Limited access to everything
-They used bow on horseback mostly

>>31917393
Because the Katana suited the style of combat in Japan present since it's creation and because of Japanese being strange fucks.

What I mean by this is that Japanese soldiers wore very little if any metallic armour (thanks to the poor ore and processing methods they needed to use on it to make it anywhere near "good" quality).

This meant that having a weapon capable of piercing armour was a far, far lower priority than in Europe or such where metal armour was more common.

Thus when the Japanese, during an attempted invasion of china, they discovered the Chinese sabre; a weapon ideal for cutting through flesh and non-armoured targets. They adopted it with great speed.

This weapon became the katana we know of today as, for the next few hundred years, the Japanese did very little to the actual sword. Sure, they invented new methods of smelting the metals, to get better quality or different combinations of steel but as to the actual design? Very little if any changes.


Now as to why this is? That is the interesting part, one could blame the Japanese culture, their rulers or the general lack of interest in modifying what "works".

Consider the fact that, the Japanese, ignoring a few failed invasions from (like the mongols) or to china / Korea have never had a outside threat until the western world arrived. By which time the sword no longer held such importance.

This means that they were never being pressured by the need to be better than their enemies to any great degree (unlike in, say, Europe where kings spent great wealth improving their armies); all their wars were fought for short periods of time and "internally".

This discourages leaders from investing in better weapons in case their followers turn on them and also because wars arrived out of thin air. Making it harder to predict what weapons need improving, what tactics need changing and such.


(P 1-?)

>>31917496

Wow. Autocorrect really fucked that one up.

Studied*

Shitty*

Why can't anyone seem to make a bait thread without begging the question nowadays?

>>31917499
Then there is the samurai themselves; they didn't use the katana as their primary weapon, that was the bow. Thus Japanese bows are actually quite decent, for a isolated power with a long list of problems... like the samurai themselves.


>>31917511
Dunno, all I know is that I enjoyed writing out my response. It's nice to think about some of this shit sometimes as it grants insight into history.

>>31917393
WHo the fuck molds a sword? That's the worst way to make a weapon.

Bait, but I'll bite. The quality of their iron was ass. Full of impurities that made the metal weaker. The Japanese smiths overcame this by folding the steel. Weebs believe that this is a solely Japanese technique, when Westerners had been doing it long beforehand. The folding process was done to remove impurities, but it also removed carbon. In steel, you want that carbon. The Japanese countered this by mixing in another, higher carbon steel. This made up the spine of the blade, strong steel in back and the more flexible steel up front. The blades wouldn't do shit against plate armor, you might smack the wearer around, but nothing serious. The blade was also very heavy and unwieldy, necessitating the need to use both hands. Most of the time, as another anon said, they used bows. The katana was more of a last resort. Weebs and Japanese nationalists love to praise their glorious Nippon steel, but it was a blade that had a weak design, poor quality steel, and most certainly could not cut through men (let alone Western steel) like butter.

>>31917563
Depends on the material, generally copper, bronze and such were moulded and then sharpened.

>>31917563

Casting was actually quite common.

In fact it's kind of why swords beat out axes as the common foot weapon. You can cast a lot of swords really fast as basically a straight bar with a tapered tang which serves as the casting sprue.

By the late middle ages bloomery and early blast furnaces could be built on a scale to make hundreds of pounds of steel. Set up a sprue and mold arrangement and just cast dozens of swords in one go. Let them cool, snap them off and sharpen the edges. Rinse and repeat.

That's how armies were equipped in Europe.

>>31917393
Reminder that the whole mythology of the katana was made up by a bunch of warrior-caste bureaucrats who carried them as badge of rank, and that when they actually fought the bow, and below that the spear, were their iconic weapons, with swords as last-ditch backups.

>>31917499
They wore metallic armor. It was mainly laquered iron scale mail, but it was metal.

>>31917588
They removed impurities and smoothed carbon levels during the smelting phase, using layers of iron sand and charcoal in a huge, single use clay crucible. 10 tons of iron, 12 of charcoal, and an output of 2.5 tons of useable refined metal they then had to chop up and divide into the harder and softer base metals. The folding part of forging was mainly to homogenize the carbon levels.

>>31917393

They used long spears and bows.

The katana was just a shitty back-up.

>>31917661
No, it wasn't. Cast iron is brittle because it has no hardening processes done. Maybe in the bronze age, but in iron you have to forge out the steel. Now, in the modern era you can get pre-forged bar stock to grind to shape, but that isn't the same thing.

>>31917661

>Casting was actually quite common.

For architecture.

>In fact it's kind of why swords beat out axes as the common foot weapon.

No it's because Steel got cheaper.

> You can cast a lot of swords really fast as basically a straight bar with a tapered tang which serves as the casting sprue.

Cast Iron is brittle, it would break on first strike.

>By the late middle ages bloomery and early blast furnaces could be built on a scale to make hundreds of pounds of steel.

>blast furnace
>steel

>Set up a sprue and mold arrangement and just cast dozens of swords in one go. Let them cool, snap them off and sharpen the edges. Rinse and repeat.

Please tell me this is b8. Armies in later middle ages were equipped with Spanish steel not cast iron.

>samurai
>best warriors of all time
pick one faggot

>>31917593
>>31917661
I'm not even a metalworker and I know this shit is wrong, purely because
>>31917966
>Cast iron is brittle because it has no hardening processes done. Maybe in the bronze age, but in iron you have to forge out the steel
>>31917977
>Cast Iron is brittle, it would break on first strike.
>Please tell me this is b8. Armies in later middle ages were equipped with Spanish steel not cast iron.

Jesus fuckign christ if you don't know metallurgy then don't fucking talk about metallurgy.

>>31918758

>Jesus fuckign christ if you don't know metallurgy then don't fucking talk about metallurgy.
>says the guy that thinks you can cast swords

Nigger just stop while you're ahead.

>>31918791
>>says the guy that thinks you can cast swords
YOu're bitching at the wrong guy, cuz that isn't me. I'm the guy who called it bullshit in the first place.

>>31917496
>>31917499
>>31917588
Nice memes. Their ore was low yield, not low quality. The Japanese did not have poor iron. Far from it. They had steel that was the same quality as everybody else. Also, iron was not rare.

>>31918917
And? Low yield ore is inherently low quality ore, since quality as a word refers to the ability of a object or substance to perform a purpose, like yielding a certain metal. You've added nothing to this conversation or even corrected a mistake. You've just complained that we are misusing a word (when by my logic we aren't)!

>>31917393
Because they are better than sticks.

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>>31917661
REEEEEEEE!
everything you think you know is wrong. just stop believing your knowledge

legitimately pissed me off three 10/10

also, bronze weapons were always work hardened.

t. mechanical engineer with interest of history

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>>31917947
Their smelting phase wasn't hot enough. This is what you get from a lot of iron sand, a lot of charcoal, and not quite the temperature to melt steel.

They broke up this mess, and separated the higher carbon from the lower carbon. Hammering and folding them together many times means that they are losing carbon in the process.

>>31919091
Right, which was also why they'd sandwich a bar of soft steel inside a u-shaped bar of hard steel.

>>31917977
Do not listen to the stupid man. He knows not what he says

>>31919091
>>31919245
which is the same process that everyone else in the world used before bloomeries

>>31919510
Right, but crappy, low-yield ore + extremely low combat priority of use means they really just built a combo cavalry/infantry sword and called it a day, and it wasn't until the shogunate peace that you start to see fetishization of the sword.

>>31917477
Musashi is rolling in his grave over this one.

Unskilled front line infantry peasant recruits used spears. The sword was reserved for elite warriors with cash to spare.

>katana, a weapon that turns bamboo into a spear
>a weapon that makes weapons
>spear is meant for cowards to keep distance otherwise they'd die

You guys stay stupid and cultured, y'hear?

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>>31919573
*uncultured

I dishonor my famiREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!

>>31917393

>best warriors of all time

>>31919573
Except many of the "elite warriors" primarily trained with bows while mounted on horseback and used the sword as a status symbol and a personal defense weapon. Musashi himself trained and taught the use of throwing weapons in addition to swordsmanship.

>>31919573
Musashi was a weird outlier who dueled in the Shogunate era. So he was up against guys who were literally inventing sword schools and technique sets to make money off of students wanting to learn because they had started fetishizing and rewriting history to make the sword out to be an amazing weapon.

He was unusually tall and strong, and loved to use headfuck games to get his opponents off-balance. Actual combat line samurai were primarily cavalry archers, which is why the Yumi is such a weird offset design: to get a larger bow's performance out of a horseback-compatible bow.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xHp_tVPCios

>>31919562
>crappy, low-yield ore
Japanese ore is of normal quality, it is actually quite low in sulfur and phosphor, which is a good thing. And for steel made from the bloomery process, Japanese one is about as good as it gets.

>>31917393
If the samurai were the best warriors of all time, how come they're dead?

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>>31919689
For comparison, here are early medieval seax blades, polished in the Japanese tradition, experts couldn't tell the steel from traditional Japanese one.

>>31919689
Meanwhile, in Europe they had the Spanish mines and foundries in Toledo cranking out fantastic alloy bar stock at bargain-basement prices, Persia had the Wootz mines and crucible process down to a perfected science, and China had blast furnace smelting 700 years before Europe. While Japan got stuck with the extremely inefficient tatara process that took 72 hours of constant bellows work to turn 10 tons of raw or into 2.5 tons of >>31919091

>>31919573
>>31919656
Also Musashi talks about the advantages and disadvantages of halberds, spears, bows, guns, and swords in the Book of Earth.

>>31919771
It must also be noted that the samurai caste was wrecked during Nobunaga's campaigns that mostly united the island with peasant riflemen hiding behind wheeled wooden walls.

>>31919765
Well, that happened over time, the blast furnace did not take hold in Europe until the 11th century in Scandinavia and it did take up to the 13th century until it really took over Europe, Persia had the crucible process from India where it started 3rd century BC, but they only could make small cakes, real crucible steel was unavailable in Europe until the 17th century. And the Chinese might have had blast furnaces, but they only produced cast iron, they never learned how to turn it into steel, that only came in the 18th century.
So yeah, Japan never managed to get past the bloomery process, but they mastered said process to perfection.

>>31917890
The sword has always been seen as a sidearm in virtually every warrior culture. Bows, spears, slings, and javelins have done the overwhelming majority of the killing.

>>31919828
>Japan never managed to get past the bloomery process, but they mastered said process to perfection.
Which, I'll take a moment to point out, is a very Japanese mindset. Nips tend to avoid rapid change in favor of taking the processes they have and doing everything they can to make it better.

katanas were used mostly for executions, chopping heads, hands and foots. like in saudi arabia nowadays.

Samurais were nothing more than bullies hired by a local daimyo to keep unarmed half naked peasants in line.

>>31919828
>And the Chinese might have had blast furnaces, but they only produced cast iron, they never learned how to turn it into steel, that only came in the 18th century.
Holy shit, you're claiming China didn't have steel before the 18th century? They made steel the same way everybody else with bloomeries did. Also later in the Han era they made crucible steel, and used the co-fusion steel making process.

>>31917393
It was purely used as a ceremonial weapon, Samurais actually carried m4a1's and scar-L's

>>31921013
No, I claimed they couldn't turn their cast iron obtained from their blast furnaces into steel.

ITT:
Buthurt weeaboos

>>31918758
Nigger, cat iron is brittle as fuck. It WOULD break on the first strike. I've SEEN cast iron fragment from impact stress. You need to refine cast iron, removing carbon and the silicone that makes it brittle, to make it strong which is what is desirable in a sword, not the hardness you get from cast iron.

And much of the strength swords COMES FROM FORGING because of how forging alters the crystalline structure of metal.

>>31919573
Naginatas were more badass then gay ass katanas

>>31924143
>slashing spear
hahaha

>>31917393
It was the only sword style made on such nation of islands.

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>>31924551
>implying China and Europe didn't have similar weapons in the halberd and guandao

Because they didn't need anything better.

Also, people really underestimate the adoption of early firearms by the Japanese people.

By the time Matthew Perry's black ships made it to Japan, Japan had around 200 gunsmiths.

They were just terribly outdated Tanageshimas.

>>31917661
not a single word of what you've written is even slightly close to reality.

it would be laughable, if it wasnt such a fucking trainwreck of ideas pulled out of "conan the barbarian" and "lord of the rings"

>>31924776
Well, there's also the fact that the Tokugawas saw them as a fundamental threat to rule in the wrong hands. But that was also part of everything else Tokugawa Ieyasu did, including heavily restricting travel within the country, turning the Ninja clans into his secret police, restricting wear of swords (only samurai men could wear the daisho, samurai women could carry a sword but not in the belt, etc.) and generally turning the island into an authoritarian hellhole where he was unopposed. Even then, the Yakuza came about pretty much because small towns were isolated, and had no government support. So the hired blades and vice peddlers organized to do it instead.

>>31917393
You can blamed Tokugawa shogunate for that. Heck, during Sengoku Jidai period, most samurai used variety yari and naginata even fame Sanada Yukimura and Date Masamune (blamed video game for putting them in ridiculous image of multi-wield). Although Satsuma domain (Shimazu clan) loved the usage of odachi (huge katana) but they are among the first to adopt firearms as well.

>>31917393
>Samurai
>Best Warriors of all time.

Kek. The Samurai would get their Shit pushed in by practically any other military force spanning from the Spartans of ancient Greece to the Musketeer's of France.

>>31922279
You'll be wrong anyway. They mixed the cast iron with wrought iron and fired them in crucibles to obtain steel.

>>31917393
Because Japan only had access to shitty steel.

Weebs being butthurt their swords were meh at best: The thread

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>>31917393
They had basically no quality iron so they were forced to come up with complicated smiting techniques just to make a usable sword.

The design was also garbage, there's a reason it looks so unique.

It's because it was so useless in any form of free combat that nobody ever got close to designing a similar sword elsewhere.

>>31925562
China did not had the crucible steel technique afaik. So, you're wrong. If not, please source.

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>>31917393
I hate that anime being used as "LOL KATANAS SO GOOD LOLOLOL WEEBSHIT LOLOLOL" crapslinging. In that anme the damn things are literally magically forged weapons. I would not be the least bit surprised about a weapon forged using god damn magic actually being really fuckin good with some seriously special traits.

Anyways I figure the actual swords were probably pretty solid against the lamellar armor you're going to encounter fighting your centuries old adversaries, the formidable Bakka-kyun clan, for the hundredth time in the last month. It's not like they were fighting dudes walking around in full plate on anything even slightly resembling a regular basis.

As far as the casting argument couldn't you just purify large quantities of metal by melting it, getting rid of as much slag/dross as possible, pouring it into your blank molds, cooling your blanks, sharpening and refining them, then heat treating and quenching like you would any other weapon? I imagine the most pain in the ass part would be melting it to a liquid state and getting rid of all the slag to get your clean metal. Probably not going to produce the best weapons in the universe but probably takes less time than hand forging every last blade. Please don't get uppity if I'm wrong about everything ever on this, I'm not exactly a metalworker.

>>31926136
Steel swords have never been cast. All you get is some brittle cast iron blade and thats it.
Liquid steel was not produced until the 19th century and the invention of the converter, and even then nobody ever directly casted blades, because frankly, it wouldn't work.

>>31917393
Because the Samurai used leather armor, they never left the island and thus never need anything better.

>>31926156
Would a basically processed set of cast iron weapons be good enough for the less than "noble" hordes that often make up a large part of medieval and earlier armies though?

Not trying to defend the anime, just thinking about how to quickly arm a fuckload of peasants with things that cut without bending permanently the moment you get metal on metal or going straight to spears and only spears.

>>31925348
They actually had a notice go out to all Samurai to stop challenging European sailors to duels because the kept getting killed by fencers.

>>31926181
Yes, you can use good quality cast iron for certain weapon types, heads for iron clubs, and massive heads for Chinese halberds and maybe even points for heavy crossbow bolts. And the Chinese did just that, they made cast iron weapons en masse, which is a pretty smart idea.
However, you cannot make a long thin blade from it, cast iron just does not work that way. Now they tried even that, they did cast blades and then tried to decarburize the cast iron to steel, this didn't work out well however, the blades where bad quality.
Later on the Chinese did import crucible steel from Indo Persia and even blades from Japan .

>>31926136
>As far as the casting argument couldn't you just purify large quantities of metal by melting it, getting rid of as much slag/dross as possible, pouring it into your blank molds, cooling your blanks, sharpening and refining them, then heat treating and quenching like you would any other weapon?
Nigger, do you fucking realize how expensive this could possibly be?

First, because you're casting, you're trapping impurities deep within the metal. Second, melting cast iron doesn't purify it all that much. It needs to be worked, because Cast Steel wasn't possible to make until the 19th century.

Third, heat treating cast iron takes hours, at temperatures higher than 700 degrees, to get anything worthwhile, that won't shatter immediately.

You can't just remove slag. Slag is just impurities that have precipitated out of molten iron. Thus why forging was used to purify metal, because as you forge, you remove carbon from the metal, and with the carbon, you remove things like Silicone and Sulfur that make the steel alloy weak.

If you were going to use Iron for blades, you used Wrought iron, hands down.

And your idiocy doesn't defend your weeb tier trash anime. It's fucking nippon circle jerking over the Samurai bushido bullshit that only exists because of WW2 Nippon propaganda.

>>31919586
Underrated comment.

>>31926540
You didn't actually read that last line did you? Calm your tits jackass.

>>31917393
They didn't use it all the time, katana was only a side weapon to cut down peasants or commit suicide.

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reminder, if you do not fully understand pic related, you might better refrain from posting on shit you have no clue about and instead post some cute anime.

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>>31917393
Ya you can swing around your silly katana while I fill you full of lead.