glyn

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Semper in excretum. Solum profunda variat.

entropy

You're starting to feel like glyn, that is.

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If memory serves...

deadkenny

Well, since no one else appears ready and willing to clear up these important matters, I'll lay it out for you.

1. Elephant vs. T-Rex

Come on, is there really any doubt here? T-Rex isn't gonna let a little thing like being extinct for millions of years slow him down. I'm afraid Mr. Elephant isn't much more than a McNugget to good ol' Mr. T. The Elephant is going down hard. Now maybe if it had been a gigantic species of woolly mammoth it might at least have been 'interesting' for a few minutes.

2. Loch Ness 'monster' vs. Moby Dick

Now, this might at first glance at least appear to be a bit more even, seeing as how both contestants are 'imaginary'. However, the simple fact of the matter is that these 2 are simply not in the same 'weight class'. Although old Moby isn't actually a carnivore, he's gonna 'squash' Nessy like a bug if he gets riled up. I apologize to all the Scots out there who were 'cheering' for the home town boy, but Nessy's going down for the count in this one.

3. Batman vs. Spiderman

Now I can foresee some serious debate over this one. However, when you boil it down it's really not all that complicated. At the core, Batman is simply some guy with some gadgets. On the other hand, Spidey's got some serious 'superhero' powers going on. I'm giving this one to Spidey, although Batman might make it 'interesting' if he can come up with the right gadgets at the right time.

OK, so there you have it, T-Rex, Moby and Spidey are on to the next round. So, it looks like we're gonna have T-Rex up against Moby Dick and Spiderman will be facing either the Knight or the Samurai, if we can ever manage to pick a winner between them, to advance to the next round.

braindead

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Skullstorm17

If that would be so I would not want to be the Knight no matter how thick my armor is.

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~Skullstorm17 A.K.A. kappe pwnz

lazybastard

If I were the knight I'd stick my trusty squire in my suit of plate armor while I ride away from the scene as fast as possible.

snc128

Samurai......

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action speaks louder than words

Maggot

What I've seen in this thread is that there is a whole lot of bad Victorian history being presented, regarding on the nature of armour. The average suit of plate armour worn on the battlefield weighed about 50 pounds. There were heavier suits of armour made, but they were generally only for jousting or some high noble's parade armour or if they felt like a complete pansy and didn't want to fight.

When I say 50 pounds, it's not 50 pounds in a box, held in your outstretched hands. It's 50 pounds very lightly distributed across the body. Please do not get your historic research from some RP gaming manual. If armour restricted a knight's fighting ability they wouldn't have worn it. Period. Guys have worn these suits and done gymnastics in them. By the 1400's quenched steel armour plates were a remarkable thing.

When you fired an arrow at them, they were generally angled, like today's tank plates, so not only are there more deflections, but the armour at an angle is thicker. A lot of people showing off the longbow always have a 90 degree angle of plate to shoot at, which is completely inaccurate. Where it's commonly said that the archer defeated the French knights at Agincourt, it wasn't with the arrows. Mostly they just pissed them off. The French at Agincourt advanced down a funnel terrain without adjusting their ranks and the archers jumped them from the flanks and clobbered them with maces and stuck them with daggers, at a high cost.

The idea of the medieval warhorse as a big plow monster, heavily encumbered and barely able to move, with a crane needed to get the rider on, is more bad history, passed down to us by the Victorians. They weren't as big as the horses that were bred for slow plow work. They would have compared better to the big horses in todays showjumping rings and what armour they wore was very lightly distributed on their bodies. They would sweat more, but that's about it. These horses were built for speed and power in the charge, as well as the pursuit and maneuver. They weren't plow horses. The Knight fought in battle with a lance or cut down to a spear. The sword was symbolic, but mostly you used it when you broke your poky stick.

The Samurai really never hit their full bloom until the 16th century, a full century after the knights hit theirs. Musashi wasn't dicing things up till the beginning of the 17th Century, by which time their warfighting style was so behind the Europeans that it wasn't even funny. Cool martial arts and anime films aside they were two completely different warriors from two completely different realities. European knights trained for years in a fighting style and weren't just a punch of drunken thugs. Japan wouldn't have had the spare metal to create the European knight. The Samurai in battle was more of a mounted archer, but their bows wouldn't have done that much to a decent set of plate armour. The Naginata (Japanese glaive) was also very much used and would have been pretty useless against the armour of a knight. The Samurai used small metal plates, if they were lucky, covered in bigger patches of boiled leather for armour. Boiled leather armour, besides being rations on bad logistics days, is very good at blocking a slashing attack but has a cut through buttery feel when facing a thrust attack. So for Japanese warriors, boiled leather rocked, because they never had to fight Europeans in them.

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Maggot

The Japanese martial arts survived because they limited the technological advancement of their civilization for centuries and because they linked their martial arts to religion. The Europeans martial arts mostly died out after the Renaissance, except for a few like sevate and fencing. The only fighting style tied to religion in the slightest was the knight, but the Europeans were not exactly sheltered from advances in warfighting technology, because they were the advances in warfighting technology.

Triple C

Well done Maggot. I couldn't have sum up the technology of it better myself.

The problem is, the Japanese, as horse archers, when handled with competence, could throw volley fires of arrows at the knights as the later could not keep up in speed. Victory would depend on fighting the enemy at the time and place of your choosing and having superior men, not gear.

If it's up to me, the Spanish tercio would have kicked both of their aristocratic asses.

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gunnut

My question is can the katana cut/pierce through plate armor? Katana is best used for slicing lightly armored opponent. Japanese had cloth and leather armor. Katana was great at slicing through those. European knights had chain and plate mail. I doubt katana can slice through metal armor.

Meanwhile, European knights had weapons that will work against samurai armor. Footman's mace, warhammer, battle axe, long sword, and especially 2-h sword, will either go through samurai armor or severely bang up the guy in said armor.

Katana is razor sharp, but has very little strength on the side. It might have a sharp point at the tip, but that's not how the weapon is used. The fighting style is a lot of slicing.

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IDonT

People have "romantic" notions (and bias) of what a knight and a samurai is like. The reality is totally differrent.

During its heyday, the Samurai were used, especially by Nabunaga, as matchlock riflemen, infantry spearmen, horse archers and heavy shock cavalry. The popular notion of the samurai, the warrior sage poet that constantly contemplated on how to kill himself, occurred after its prime.

The plated armored knight, the romanticized version, on the other hand is purely heavy shock cavalry. The reality is also different.

Maggot

Oda Nobunaga was also mid 16th Century, by which time the Europeans were a bit more advanced in their use of firearms on the battlefield, since they were the ones giving them to the Japanese in the first place. Muskets were on battlefields of Europe long before Nobunaga was even born. The Landsknechts and Spanish musket-pike squares occurred well before the Japanese 'discovered' how to fight this way.

Saying that every soldier on the battlefield had their roles done by Samurai, would be like saying that all the crossbowmen, foot soldiers, and cannon users were also Knights. Nobunaga instituted more of a modern style army, more in the manner of the Europeans at the time, without the same emphasis on social ranking as the Samurai class at all.

The actual Samurai committing seppuku was a bit more than romance. The ceremonial aspects changed over time, but it was a constant. Ritual suicide over points of honour were often taken to what Western viewers would see as ridiculous extremes in Japan. It got to the point where Samurai would write home to their family about it being regrettable that they were broke and would have to kill themselves over a lack of cash, to extort their parents. It was a very ingrained part of their warrior culture that should not be so easily discounted.

troung

I have wondered that as well. People (Russia/Poland) who had the misfortune of having heavy armored shock cavalry on one border and steppe light cavalry on the other ended up using two types of swords the broadsword for armored and giving the guys on the steppe frontier sabers.

As a boy I saw a man do a cartwheel in armor.

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IDonT

That would be interesting isn't it? The European Tercio of the late 1500's vs Hideyoshi's Samurai army of the same time period. The Japanese, at the height of there civil war, were producing more arquibuise than anybody else.

The Japanese equivalent of the European Knight is the Daimyo - a feudal lord. The Daimyo was required to have a standing army based on the size of his holdings. These soldiers were called Ashigaru.

Ashigaru were traditionally consript and usually armed with spears, naginata, and match lock guns. Following the rise of the Tokogawa Shugonate, these soldiers became the lower class samurai. The realm of the higher rank samurai was the heavy calvary and archery.

Hedeyoshi's invasion of Korea fielded a large 100,000 men combined arms army of arquibuisers, archers, infantry, and cavalry.