Fun historical trivia- Persian sword manuals include variations on draw-and-cut techniques to be used with the scimitar, including one that's meant to be done as you're lounging among pillows with a hookah in your off-hand and your sword resting between your legs.
If you're an assassin, you can simply walk up to your target on the street and suddenly draw and disembowel them before they can even yell. If you're a bodyguard, the second you sense hostility you can strike the first blow before your opponent and then be ready to fight at speed.
My cousin teaches German Longsword, which is great for him- he likes military and economics stuff, while I mostly do culture and folklore. We're working together to try and develop a formalized system for Cherokee martial arts.
Our standardized system of warfare is spear-and-shield or warclub-and-dagger, with the use of slings and shortbows for ranged combat. Armor's not much of a thing since most wars were fought over blood debts, but we did make wicker armor.
I'm not somewhere where I can get my own warclub, and anyways I still need to replace the point, but this is a decent recreation of another not-uncommon pairing, warclub and pick.
You use the pick to pull down the shield and the warclub to kill people with a single blow to the head- the spike acts as a guide that lances the brain and forces a small crack in the skull that the ball shatters completely, no living that without modern medicine.
These are modern fine-metal reproductions, but the pick was usually made out of dense stone driven into a wooden haft, and you'd make the spike on the warclub with either sharpened stone or iron.
Because I am a law-abiding citizen, I do not even bring a pocket knife into the fairgrounds during the State Fair. But I do head straight to the flint knapper in Pioneer Village first thing through the gate for my souvenir.
The play is basically "Backsweep with club to deflect spear, overhead with pick to hook shield, mid-lateral shot with warclub to kill". You use similar motions when playing the ball game!
It may tickle you and/or your cousin to know that at one point I was investigating exactly this use of picks against shields as a model for giant robot combat.
The use of picks to peel back armor plating? That makes sense, although depending on the hardness of materials you could probably also use a diamond-tipped pick to shatter plating directly.
Well, scale matters here; I'm thinking about 3-4 meter suit-vehicles, so the primary offensive utility of the pick is tearing out the cockpit hatch, and the defensive use is to hook shields and limbs.
Short, nasty fights, mostly decided in a few blows, little to no parrying.
For actually going *through* armor, you have various shaped-charge contact weapons and arc torches, some of which might be mated to a pick head or not as-needed.
...come to think of it, you could adapt that to the broad shape of a warclub if you wanted, with the heavy ball replaced by a hollow-charge warhead - you might have both disposable and field-reloadable versions.
Anyway, tangent, don't mean to derail the thread, just thought you'd find it cool.
That sounds…efficient. I definitely wouldn’t want to fight someone wielding those. Not sure you’d be able to survive the club to the skull even with modern medicine, with that spike…
Depends on the part of the brain that gets hit, but yeah, I wouldn't want to take my chances at all. Probably wouldn't be a life worth living.
Warclub and dagger/pick (dagger is for light engagements) is what you do if you're a real serious warrior.
Usually, you did that by aiming for the arm or leg and being good enough with spike-placement that you didn't lance a major artery.
There's a reason all the tribes we fought started figuring out how to make wood-and-cloth helmets, lol
(That's the weakness of the war club- if you can disperse the force of the spike using cloth, pelts, or sturdy enough wood, it either gets stuck or snaps and now it's *just* a club- still dangerous, but not the fucking Angel of Death it is with the spike.)
