Aphroditty said:
You can't cut someone in half with a sword, not in practical terms. Seriously, go buy a claymore and try to hack a person up. You can do some awful damage, but you're not going to be severing limbs at a very high rate. Compare to weapons like the Kalashnikov or AR 15, whose bullets rip and rend flesh, smash bone, and even fragment to compound the damage.
You are mistaken in every assumption about a blade. Without armor to protect it, flesh and bone is easly turned aside by even a crude blade. A simple cleaver can cut most of the way through a limb in a single chop - imagine what a heavier blade combined with a better edge and a faster swing can do. Or, if the trusting weapon is your thing, consider the small sword. A lunge (the most basic way to deliver such a weapon) delivers a blade with nearly 2000lbs of force behind it for the average man, when only a tiny fraction of this is required to drive the weapon through the body bones and all.
Aphroditty said:
Nothing said here is true. A bullet clearly has more kinetic energy, unless it's at the end of its trajectory. For example, imagine swinging a sword with all your might, and that in that swing you somehow manage to hit a bullet dead on -- like a bat hitting a baseball, except in this case the baseball is likely moving faster than the speed of sound, and all its force is concentrated into one point. If your gun is unable to inflict serious harm on an unarmored opponent, hitting them with a sword is going to be the rough equivalent of mugging a UFC fighter with a whiffle bat.
It all depends on the weapon in question really. A sword, in general, has FAR more energy behind it than a bullet. Even for all their speed, bullets are very light weight objects. An exceptinally heavy round such as the .50 BMG weighs in at a mere 2 ounces, and thanks to the simple fact that it travels at around 3,000 FPS it possesses more kinetic energy than a simple sword stroke. The difference between the weapons is simply a function of how said energy is delivered to the target - bullets are, in general, much more efficient about it, and thus why they can punch through armor that would turn any blade.
Aphroditty said:
Basically, the reason swords are still prevalent in video game worlds where there are also guns is because they are effective in those video game worlds. The reason we keep making up worlds where guns are, overall, less effective than swords is largely psychological. Swords are, in a huge nutshell, a symbol of awesomeness, manliness, power and nobility. Guns are violent, dirty, and cheap -- which is of course why they supplanted swords in the first place.
I can, however, agree entirely with this. The fiction of the video game world allows swords to be awesome. In reality, where a simple pistol round is more than sufficient to kill a man, the sword is a liability at best, even in the hands of a master. One is not going to deflect a bullet with regularity or shrug off rounds like so much rain in real life. What's more, in real life one will find that a soldier/guard with minimum training will hit a man in the open with surprising ease, especially when said man has the common courtesy to not bring a gun of his own.
Aphroditty said:
Not really, no.
You do know that JFK was assassinated with a (roughly) .25 caliber bullet, right?
An interesting thing is that this round was a rifle cartridge, which, when paired with the weapon, achieves much higher velocity than say a .22 LR fired from a pistol. Still, one's skull MAY deflect such a round but chances are quite excellent that the round will instead punch through and "disrupt" one's grey matter quite nicely even if it doesn't make it all the way through.
Aphroditty said:
Yeah, he wasn't shot in the forehead, but seriously, go shoot yourself in the forehead at six feet and tell me if you're still functional, regardless of whether or not you die from brain hemorrhaging. Yes, most people won't shoot for the head -- they'll shoot for your goddamn chest. I don't care who you are, take a pop from a .45 ACP in the sternum and you are not going to keep on trucking with your piddly sword.
This is generally true. Considering it takes level II body armor to STOP a .45 ACP round, and even then one still suffers significant trauma (deep tissue bruising, internal hemmoraging, broken bones and so forth), to take such a round without the benefit of any protection is a death sentence. In general, the would channel from such a round has a radius of several inches, meaning quite simply that the damage is inflicted across a far wider body volume that most people thing. A round in the sternum is going to do damage to the heart of some kind, and that is often right up there with the quickest ways to die. Lung trauma ensures that long term breathing is going to be difficult at best and the possiblity of spinal damage (and paralysis) is quite high. In general, a round through dead center of mass means the unlucky target is going to die quickly. No amount of will or badassery will keep you on your feet for long without a heartbeat or ability to draw a breath.
Aphroditty said:
You will have the wind ripped out of you, and a kid can do that for chrissakes. A knife is some deadly stuff up close, yeah -- but you really do have to know what you're doing, or else you're just cutting so much meat. A bullet wound isn't instant death, but it is (generally) far more debilitating than an inexpert knife cut.
Yes, a sword is a deadly weapon - make no mistake. But to wield a sword properly takes YEARS of training and even then a man with a few hours instruction with a firearm has already bested you on the battlefield. Unless the swordsman can guarntee (through magic perhaps) that they will only encounter a gunman well inside sword range then they're already dead before combat begins. To put this in proper perspective, the military considers close combat to be anything under 150m precisely because even a poorly trained rifleman can consistantly hit targets at this range. What's more, even if one fells one opponent using a sword, people often have armed friends - one of them will almost certainly do the job the first one failed at.
