How good was the water dance?

[FaceGardener]

A person trying to use sabre-fencing techniques on a medieval battlefield would be very dead, very quickly. It's a stylized form, derived from 17th century-onwards fencing.

So. Many. Errors.

1. "Weak points" as you seem to understand them, don't actually exist. In an articulated plate, there are no "gaps" in which you can fit an epee's point.

2. Your use of "longsword" is...well, erroneous. The long-sword (langes schwert) was the style of fighting with two hands on the sword, and did give at least as much reach as later epee fencing does.

3. Deep lunges = death. Every single fechtbuch I've seen stresses this point. Why, you say ? Well, it's fairly simple. While you are making that deep lunge to attempt wounding me in the leg or whatever, I will simply execute a blow to your head, which will be not only faster (since the distance from my guard to your head is going to be shorter, seeing as you just presented your head to me as a target, but also much, much more deadly.

1 & 2) I can't comment, as I know relatively little of these things

3) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6r7VWIQCHvM

check out what happens at 2:10

[Lord Reaver]

Yes, excellent example. The guy with the longsword has a wound in his arm, the other guy has his skull cleft in two.

Who would you say won?

[FaceGardener]

Yes, excellent example. The guy with the longsword has a wound in his arm, the other guy has his skull cleft in two.

Who would you say won?

Look more closely--at the slow motion take. The longsword chop to the head never connects. The wielder of the rapier parries the strike, and you'll note that he can do so because moving his rapier to parry from a lunge takes a simple flick of the wrist, whereas the longsword wielder must move his longsword around the rapier before he is able to strike the head. In this instance, the head strike is much slower than the arm strike.

I'm not proposing that the rapier is always superior--in this video, sometimes the rapier wins, sometimes the longsword wins--I'm just trying to provide some data.

[Lord Reaver]

Look more closely--at the slow motion take. The longsword chop to the head never connects. The wielder of the rapier parries the strike, and you'll note that he can do so because moving his rapier to parry from a lunge takes a simple flick of the wrist, whereas the longsword wielder must move his longsword around the rapier before he is able to strike the head. In this instance, the head strike is much slower than the arm strike.

I'm not proposing that the rapier is always superior--in this video, sometimes the rapier wins, sometimes the longsword wins--I'm just trying to provide some data.

That "parry" would never work if the guy with the longsword had put proper amount of force in his blow.

Naturally, when one is sparring like this, even with masks (I don't know if those guys use specially reinforced ones or not), people don't tend to go full force on shots to the head. Which is quite understandable, we don't actually want to kill each other, after all.

The flick of the wrist, as you mention, has nothing near the power behind it required to turn a two-handed downward blow to the face. Not a chance.

For reference, I don't know what the guy with the long-sword is doing here. There's no attempts to bind, or move in or anything. Of course you'll be in some tight spots if you allow your opponent to use his strengths, but utilize very few of your own.

[FaceGardener]

Something you learn in all the "soft" martial arts, from rapier fencing to aikido, is that leverage matters much more than strength. If you're using the lowest third of the epee, you can parry a two-handed sword blow as easily as a 100-pound woman can throw a 200-pound man, because you are redirecting the force rather than meeting it head-on.