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.
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.
Oh no, I do! I'll confess my only real familiarity with mecha stuff is Lancer, and that has... a very different philosophy about mecha than what you're lining out here for the most part.
The basic model I was working from was VOTOMs (www.wikiwand.com/en/Armored_T...); semi-disposable cheap vehicles that just happen to be dude-shaped.
This was off the back end of a project I was working up about slower-than-light interstellar mercenaries about.... 12+ years ago?
Ah, yeah, there's some stuff in Lancer that has that vibe, but most of it's framed as old, last-gen tech primarily used by the cheaper end of mercenaries. The manufacturer that's closest to that stuff aesthetically (IPS-N) has really bad signal warfare but tanky mechs.
(Size 1/2 mechs, which are all basically power armor, will never not be funny to me, but the ones that are direct-combat units are *especially* funny.)
Yeah, this is in the ballpark. There's a degree of implied chivalry (once the cockpit hatch is gone you're effectively dead whenever the other guy wants, so capitulations are acceptable), but fights to the death would be over _fast_.
Mech combat in Lancer's a lot more about positioning, setting traps, and a surprising amount of signal warfare (the equivalent of a "mage" in the system is the signal warfare specialist), with the occasional "here's this physics-breaking tech a posthuman AI made for us" being thrown in.
There is an enemy archetype that can strip you out of the mech, though, and it's fucking *terrifying* even if it has a lot of limitations (have to be right on top of you, one shot to do it, you can make a save to not get screwed).
Oh, no worries. I'm not going in to deeper detail because I like being effectively anonymous on this account.
I find there's not a lot in-genre I dig, so this was more 'I want to showcase cool lesser-known martial arts shit with robots' and backsolving as much of that in as I could.
