Contrary to popular belief. Katanas were not efficient weapons and often broke due to poor steel quality composed of iron sand. They were prized for their art not their lethality. Any European sword would’ve snapped a katana’s blade if they collided.
>>61588331your legs would snap if you tried to stand up from your mobility scooter
>>61588364Just because I’m a cripple doesn’t make my opinion less valid. It’s a historical fact that Japanese Steel was worse than your average kitchen knife.
>>61588372So was your average european sword. Good steel and iron is expensive.
>>61588331>he thinks European furnaces pre 17 century could produce quality steel
>>61588331Imupuresshibu
>>61588387Price doesn’t come into account for tradition. When you look at metallurgy and mining techniques in medieval Europe compared to Japan it becomes clear Europe was simply just better.
>>61588331I can already hear the namefag sword autist KM looking up with a sad, tired expression>is it that time again?>why is the bait this obvious?>why am I still posting here>just to suffer?
>>61588396Preheating furnaces was a known technique throughout Europe and Asia. Europe actually had the stone to viably do it without cracking their furnaces. Japan often used clay crucibles they would have to break and recycle.
>>61588438>Preheating furnaces was a known technique throughout Europe and Asia.And yet Europe lagged behind for +1000 years in high temperature klins... China, Korea and Japan were on par or ahead. China was (pseudo)industrializing pig iron for 2000 years by the time that Europeans invented puddling and reverberatory furnaces. In Europe the idea of heating a metal or clay at +1200ºC wasn't even considered because it normally "burns" the metals and destroys stoneware/earthware. That's why China had porcelain at least 1500 years before Europe
>>61588470Sounds like cope bro. China, Korea, and Japan were never producing iron at a rate past Europe. If anything they were smelting silver which is much easier to work with. Just because they had a prototype doesn’t mean it was used.
>>61588470Doesn't matter, Europe got glassware because wine. Won in the end.
>>61588572wtf are you talking about lmaoChinese ironmakers were outproducing Europe since the ancient times, both pig iron and steel. That only changed during the period of 1750-1800 (iirc closer to the 1800s than the 1750s) and single-handedly done by England.The "High Temperature" revolution in Europe was mostly due to glassmakers and in a lesser extent to alchemist -and inter-kingdoms espionage against the Venetians-. Even after developing furnaces for 1300-1400ºC they didn't "connect the dots" to understand that it could be useful to make porcelain and steel.Europe needed another 500 years to have their first metallurgical revolution in 2000 years, that's since the pre roman times. It was the result of "combining" all the scattered knowledge and practices into an "universal corpus" to "un-BS" every single area of knowledge and metalworking. Preheaters and coke weren't even a thing up to the 1700s-1800s... China was cooking coal since the 1000s, 700 years before.
>>61588331Typical reactionary thinking against weaboos. The Katana was a typical 1600s self defense sword. Nice long grip, slight curve, thick and sturdy blade. It gives the impression of being inferior since Japan had a long period of peace starting in 1635 and ending at about 1850. There wasn't a need for weapons development so the Katana went essentially unchanged.
>>61588416 This is a bit like saying "Everybody in the USA is a Cowboy". Europe is a big place and sword quality is all over the place.
>>61588331Except Euros were not universally conscientious craftsmen putting out the height of what was achievable. Jap steelmaking was technologically "behind" but it's more accurate to think of it as an orthagonal move since the result is still absolutely passable and notable for having a good, consistently hard edge.
>>61588331All I need to know is what features to look for in my modern day 100 dorrah katana hunt. What are the good ones?
>>61588331>irrelevant image>lust provoking threadinefficient slide thread, Ranjesh, your Moscow minder will have one of his children removed today because of this
The problem a lot of people get into is scale Most katana you see in the west are scaled to western proportions and the design just doesn't scale up that well.When you consider the average jap was about 3'7" at the the the swords were popular and scale the katana down to it's appropriate 1'8" length it is much more sturdy and usable as a weapon.
>>61588861Hadn't considered this, a 1'8''-2' blade sounds fast as fuck in the hands of a 6'' man. But then the entire manual of arms goes out the window and you're probably better off with 1-handed downward swings and slashes than a 2-handed dual stance. Can you recommend any 1'8'' katanas?
>>61588372>your average kitchen knifeModern steel is amazing in terms of material qualities and cheap as dirt, people don't appreciate it enough.
>>61588963Yeah the average knife set in most people's kitchens would have been high end gifts fit for nobility/royalty back in the pre-modern era.
>>61589050Stainless steel needs chromium in the mix which wasn't available till about 1840. Rust free, easy to clean, keeps an edge okay, bends a bit and doesn't shatter, comfy plastic handle, I think all that would have been seen as a gift from gods / aliens or get you burned as a witch.
>>61588413muting gwo hartibing
>>61588861>average jap was about 3'7" at the the the swords were popular and scale the katana down to it's appropriate 1'8" lengthThe average height of a Japanese man during Tenbun (when first contact with the Portoguese was made) was 5'3". Japanese katana are consistently between 27-31" of blade length from this period to the present.A japanese sword of 18" would be considered a large dagger or a tanto knife and not work in the beltFor Europeans from 1400-1650 the average height was 5'5". European military sabers were quite a bit longer, 33-35" blades, because they were used from horseback. Japanese cavalry swords like the tachi are likewise significantly longer than the katana.The Portguese sailors would have had Carracks swords with blades generally between 29"-32", similar to the katana in weight and length
it's pretty funny to me that so many weeaboos don't even know their nip historykatanas weren't it anons
>>61589219How long was the typical staff it went in?Naginata-size or smaller?
>>61589287bery rong
>>61588331>talks about Katana>posts a Shin-Gunto
>>61589294I mean it looks like it's meant to be assembled, right? Is it one of those chinky chain contraptions? Tigers paw or whatever?
>>61588331-No one in the modern era believes that katanas are the ultimate swords. "Thing: Japan :O" still applies in general, but that myth has been thoroughly debunked. -They were absolutely prized for their lethality, and they were the most lethal swords the Japanese had access to-Just because Japanese steel was lower quality than European steel doesn't mean that they were made from chinesium pot metal. You're overstating your case here, even if they've earned a reputation for being brittle.
>>61588846You don't get anything at 100 dollars. Ronin katana, jkoo, probably hanbon, and shadowdancer all have sub-200 dollars offerings that wont explode, but are as basic as it gets.
>>61588331Gr8 b8 m8
>>61588331Katana were symbols of office, real samurai were archers with spears and katana were side arms.
>>61588331Known, katanas being high performing blades is just weeaboo lore. The Japanese didn't know how to process good steel, but it's what they did with the technology they had that made the blade such a decent feat. They folded it so many times to rid it of impurities as much as they could. They curved it and hardened only the edge to give it a stronger structure, so the slicing edge was hard and the supporting edge could bend more and help it endure stress. The swords as a whole are very balanced and easy to play with as either a one or two handed sword, with the hilt being long enough to take a wide grip on for better maneuverability.With modern steels, they can be alright but it's still a very thin lightweight blade so there's limitations to how much you can break with it. It'll kill an unarmored person no problem but against another sword or shield it's fucked, it's going to bend, chip, and break. With old Japanese steel they just shatter to shit. Japanese steel had nothing on middle eastern and western steel, but they made do pretty well which shows their intelligence. I think these were mostly backup weapons to bows and spears.
>>61588846Damascus steel is the closest thing to traditional tamagahane but it's stronger. Folded a bunch of times and a mix of stiff high carbon and springy low carbon steels, so it should operate by the same engineering philosophy of allowing the blade to bend some but being strong at the same time.You can't really fake Damascus steel and it's not even expensive to make so no one really would. I have one and it's great just to scratch the katana itch. I wouldn't go chopping down trees with it though.
>>61589130it was *kinda* available in the 12th century CE onwards. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S030544032030145XBut only at 1% levels, not high enough to be stainless - only for refined grain structures
>>61589729Damascus steel and welded pattern steel are completely unlike katanas that are a soft but tough back and a hard and 'brittle' core-edge. >springy low carbon steelsYou need homogeneous medium-high carbon steel to make something springy, and thin enough. Low carbon steel is tough not springy, it yields easily but without breaking, the deformation absorbs the shock/bending, good for sparring and avoid a broken blade. European rapiers had a high-carbon skin with a welded sandwich of high and medium carbon steel, in that way it was springy by cracks wouldn't propagate as easily as with a mono-steel core (regardless of folding).
>>61588846100$ is too low. 300$ is like a minimum unless it is a blem/scratch and dent or whatever. Some brands have around 200$ options that are okish but the fitment and furnishings are bad.T. Owns amazon katana and a ronin
>>61589287From 6-13ft staves were used depending on the type of polearm. Naginata were usually 6ft staff+32" blade length and used quite actively, while spears and pikes were much longer and used in massed formation
>>61589696>folding memelol
>>61589398>Japanese steel was lower quality than European steelit wasn't. it was much better quality right from the jump, and used in ways the Europeans had little to no clue about to make tools that far outperformed anything the Portuguese had seen, and that is a major reason the swords quickly began to acquire their mystique.European steel didnt even come close until the late 1700s and even all the way through industrialization when Japan saw notable steel shortages, its own mines and ore sands produced the highest quality steel compared to what they could import
>>61589954You could buy a used decent one that someone bought and now doesn't want. I actually have one that was $400 and change that's just been sitting in a closet. Most likely that's what yours is gonna do. I'll post pics if anyone is interested, I'd go 100
>>61590024Yeah but with used we can say that about most shit. Plus people offload more crap than decent from personal experience. If he can find a kniwn sword brand used for that price more power to him I guess.
>>61589990Tamahagane made very inconsistent iron blooms and it took an expert to break them up and categorize them by their qualities.Some parts were very brittle and more like steel while others were soft like pig iron.
>>61589729>Damascus steel is the closest thing to traditional tamagahane coudl not be further apart in terms of how its made or used>but it's stronger. no>Folded a bunch of timesno>>61589729>same engineering philosophy of allowing the blade to bend some but being strong at the same timeno. Completely different. tamahegane is a high carbon steel bloom broken up and arranged by the smith by carbone content, then regularized through forge welding>6 gorillion timeswootz is crucible high carbon steel ingots that comes out already regularized and it simply forged to shape and heat treated. Both end up with a steel that is about as good as any modern spring steel and can be given the same properties>>61589696>old Japanese steelI'll have to dig it out but there's a study that compares the mettalurgy of a 600 year old sword with a modern sword made in the traditional manner and they are almost identical, and of exceptional quality>>61589696>middle eastern ish. African and Arab steel was crap. Indo-Persian steel and Chinese steel were of similar high quality to Japanese steel, because that's who the Japs learned how to make it from.>and western steelcomplete garbage, actually embarassing, until the Industrial Revolution and scientific metallurgy (quite a lot of which was based in stufying far superior Eastern steels like wootz btw, it was a pilgrimage to India for Royal Academy scientists interested in modernizing steel production)
>>61588861>when you consider the average jap was about 3'7''Who the fuck told you that piece of utter retardiation? Average samurai was like 5'3''.
>>61589345It's a Yari head. They were generally a good deal longer than Naginata staffs.
>>61588675Ching chong ding dong.Post your gun with timestamp.
>>61588438>Japan often used clay crucibles they would have to break and recycle500 year old clay from the time of legends and heroes folded 1000 times
>>61589345yes, no, noit's a yari spear head like the other anon saidall the weeaboos obsess over katanas but don't understand the samurais real weapon was the yumi, and their main implement in war was the yarikatanas were an afterthought lol
>>61588331they're quickdraw urban combat weaponsthey don't break easily but they bend because of the clay temper. the edge is harder though.
>>61588438>Japan often used clay cruciblesYeaj! Not only that but they figured out how to do it on an industrial scale by the end of the Edo period, turning out absolutely incredible amounts of bloomery iron, well comparable to China or Rome at their ancient heights.>>61590622he's right. consider the following: When the British moved into India after the Muhgals had spent a few hundred years raping it, the upper class inhabitants used all-steel hunting bows. Yurop didn't invent the leaf spring until 1804 simply because there was no widely available steel of high enough quality until then. But it was used for toys by the rich in the East
>>61590622real mature
>>61589696>They curved it and hardened only the edge toThe katana is curved because the heat treating an quenching process are used to show off the skill of the smith in choosing the right tyopesof steel in the right order.They're not curved to make the sword better, they're curved becaue it was just too easy for the Japanese blacksmith to make high quality straight swords, so they made it harder because of typical Nip autism
>>61588331>inb4 europe had spring steel so their swords were bendy and more durable while japan didn't because their tech and iron sources were shit so they had to make do with what they hadnext thread please
India invented steel and has best weapons
>>61590622Wah wah blah blah post yours first
>>61588331Absolute bullshit. You can easily buy traditionally made Japanese kitchen knives and see for yourself that they are _still_ exceptionally good, despite undeniable huge developments in modern metallurgy. And you are trying to compare them to the medieval-level shit.
>>61588331>bitter Mongolian hands typed thisYeah yeah keep seething Gantulga, folded over 6000 times. Also your land locked now LMAO.
>>61588331Japanese steel was just normal bloomery iron
>>61591465>Yurop didn't invent the leaf spring until 1804Steel crossbows existed well before that so that's just wrong
>>61591017They were specifically made to bend (instead of breaking) at the point of failure so that they could be repaired (instead of being scrapped)
>>61590109It's probably Gookshill again. This is one of his favorite little lies: That medieval Koreans were these huge strapping mountains and Japanese were fragile pygmies. Truth is that people of both countries were quite a bit smaller than today, but not hugely so.
>>61593243For a bunch of frail pixies the Japanese sure did do a good job at fucking Korea's and later Russia's shit up for the past hundred so years. How is it even a good cope to say you fucking lost to an army of effeminate twinks and mantels and needed America and China to save your ass? Mountain Gooks have some weird self defeating counter arguments for sure.
Lots of Asiatic cope. Asia has invented nothing.
>>61588572China skipped bloomeries and went directly to blast furnace 1300 years before Europe. Ever wondered why Marco Polo wanted to go there?
>>61592791Not OP, but I have a question. I know that Jap kitchen knives today have a lot of cachet among chefs. How much of that is grounded in better performance versus just weeabooism/hype around exotic foreign goods? What does a $300 Jap knife do better than a $40 Victorinox chef's knife in real terms?
>>61597152They run the blades extremely hard (60-62HRC and many use a high carbon steel that can take a very highly polished edge.hotel knives/western knives are run much softer (54-58HRC) and usually made with a mid-grade stainless that can't take quite as fine as edge as the Hitachi White Paper or Blue #2 steel.This is entirely down to style, hotel chefs strop their knives several time a day during service and have them sharpened once a month, while traditional Jap cooks don't strop and lightly hone their knives once every working day.So if you're used to a Victo or a Henckels, suddenly you have a knife that cuts like a laser beam and basically never goes dull under normal home use, so you think its better. In the professional cooking world 90% of cooks use the softer western style and only faggoty fine dining cooks use the japanese stuff (outside Japan).There's also a few missing knife shapes in the Western canon than the Jap knives fill in nicely, like the santoku small veg cleaver and the straight edged gyuto chef's knife
>>61597328If the Jap knives are that much harder, doesn't that mean they're probably brittle?
>>61597400yes, and they can chip like crazy. but like I said home cooks usually don't use their knifes enough to notice that. Also there is absolutely no issue finding both cheap jap knives like Tojiro and expensive Euro knives like Wusthof, price isn't the best comparison although generally the more expensive product is going to be better all-around. the differences are real, but they are just down to preference, not inherently superior one way or the other
>>61588331true but many sword obsessed retards forget that literally all swords were breaking no matter where they were made
>>61596819Hot Asian women.
>>61588710The last group of people to use the folding tecnique in Europe were the Vikings in the 9th century. At that point everyone had switched to crucible steel.
>>61599469Ay lmao.
>>61599469>. At that point everyone had switched to crucible steel.>History of production in England>Benjamin Huntsman was a clockmaker in search of a better steel for clock springs. In Handsworth near Sheffield, he began producing steel in 1740 after years of experimenting in secret
>>61596819>China skipped bloomeriesNo they didn't
>>61588331>Katanas were not efficient weapons and often broke due to poor steel quality composed of iron sand.That's why I prefer tachi over weeb-bait katana.
>>61588331no your wrongtsugoi hayai ninjutsu desu*teleports behind you*nothing personel kid
