@fred-erick-frankenstein / fred-erick-frankenstein.tumblr.com
The Lewis MK1 Machine Gun, designed by Isaac Newton Lewis in 1911, was mass produced by the Birmingham Small Arms Co. during the onset of the First World War. Over 15,000 Lewis Guns were produced by 1918.
FIREARMS IN PEAKY BLINDERS
I saw and reblogged this one a while back, but it’s always worth repeating, and this time I’m adding a bit of background info comparing common fantasy sword features to the Real Thing (with pictures, of course.)
Leaf-bladed swords are a very popular fantasy style and were real, though unlike modern hand-and-a-half longsword versions, the real things were mostly if not always shortswords.
Here are Celtic bronze swords…
…Ancient Greek Xiphoi…
… and a Roman “Mainz-pattern” gladius…
Saw or downright jagged edges, either full-length or as small sections (often where they serve no discernible purpose) are a frequent part of fantasy blades, especially at the more, er, imaginatively unrestrained end of the market.
Real swords also had saw edges, such as these two 19th century shortswords, but not to make them cool or interesting. They’re weapons if necessary…
…but since they were carried by Pioneer Corps who needed them for cutting branches and other construction-type tasks, their principal use was as brush cutters and saws.
This dussack (cutlass) in the Wallace Collection is also a fighting weapon, like the one beside it…
…but may also have had the secondary function of being a saw.
A couple of internet captions say it’s for “cutting ropes” which makes sense - heavy ropes and hawsers on board a ship were so soaked with tar that they were often more like lengths of wood, and a Hollywood-style slice from the Hero’s rapier (!!) wouldn’t be anything like enough to sever them. However swords like this are extremely rare, which suggests they didn’t work as well as intended for any purpose.
I photographed these in Basel, Switzerland, about 20 years ago. Look at the one on the bottom (I prefer the basket-hilt schiavona in the middle).
A lot of “flamberge” (wavy-edge) swords actually started out with conventional blades which then had the edges ground to shape - the dussack, that Basel broadsword and this Zweihander were all made that way.
The giveaway is the centreline: if it’s straight, the entire blade probably started out straight.
Increased use of water power for bellows, hammers and of course grinders made shaping blades easier than when it had to be done by hand. This flamberge Zweihander, however, was forged that way.
Again, the clue is the centre-line.
Incidentally those Parierhaken (parrying hooks - a secondary crossguard) are among the only real-life examples of another common fantasy feature - hooks and spikes sticking out from the blade.
Here are some rapiers and a couple of daggers showing the same difference between forged to shape and ground to shape. The top and bottom rapiers in the first picture started as straights, and only the middle rapier came from the forge with a flamberge blade.
There’s no doubt about this one either.
The reason - though that was a part of it - wasn’t just to look cool and show off what the owner could afford (any and all extra or unusual work added to the price) but may actually have had a function: a parry would have been juddery and unsettling for someone not used to it, and any advantage is worth having.
However, like the saw-edged dussack, flamberge blades are unusual - which suggests the advantage wasn’t that much of an advantage after all.
Here’s a Circassian kindjal, forged wiggly…
…and an Italian parrying dagger forged straight then ground wiggly…
There were also parrying daggers with another fantasy-blade feature, deep notches and serrations which in fantasy versions often resemble fangs or thorns.
These more practical historical versions are usually called “sword-breakers” but I prefer “sword-catcher”, since a steel blade isn’t that easy to break. Taking the opponent’s blade out of play for just long enough to nail him works fine.
NB - the curvature on the top one in this next image is AFAIK because of the book-page it was copied from, not the blade itself.
The missing tooth on that second dagger, and the crack halfway down this next one’s blade, shows what happens when design features cause weak spots.
So there you go: a quick overview of fantasy sword features in real life.
Here’s a real-life weapon that looks like it belongs in a fantasy story or film - and this doesn’t even have an odd-shaped blade…
Just a very flexible one…
If you want more odd blades, Moghul India is a good place to start…
i could not ask for a better addition to my meme post than blade education thank you so much
I love this more than I love my left foot. (Seriously, fuck you left foot, why aren’t you a freaking wiggly sword? Huh?).
@deadcatwithaflamethrower i feel like you would like this
Bless you for the lovely post reminding others that those “fantasy” blade designs actually did come from somewhere, because we’ve been Doing Weird Shit To Iron for a very long time now.
This 1000 year old Katana looks as good as it did the day it was made. [3746x3024]
Oh man… This is no longer my lane but I can’t leave this at “1000 year old sword”.
This is Mikazuki. The Crescent Moon blade.
This sword was crafted by Sanj(y)o Munechika and is older than 1000 years. (The Smith’s oldest signed work is from 987).
There are only 5 of the smith’s pieces remaining and this one exhibits one of the first times in history that the Japanese sword takes on it’s utilitarian curved shape.
This sword was owned by a laundry list of important historical figures including Oda Nobunaga’s general Toyotomi Hideyoshi who unified Japan.
You are essentially looking at a Japanese Excalibur.
I am humbled to even be able to see a picture of this sword.
If I could ever see this blade in person I might just die there on the spot.
This blade is one of the finest examples of the blacksmith’s art ever created. Ever. Anywhere. Period.
This is a bit of an OP oopsie!
I got an odd little “something’s out of whack” mental tickle between @rannulfr’s description and the original image, and a bit of searching proved I was right.
The description is of the Munechika Mikazuki - but the pic isn’t.
This is.
What felt out of whack was calling it a katana. A sword as old as Mikazuki would be a tachi (katanas hadn’t been “invented” yet) and as such it would be displayed, as worn, with edge DOWN, like so:
Fully hilted and scabbarded tachi always have slings and cords to hang them from a belt; this one’s got an elaborate “court dress” hilt…
…while this one has a “standard” hilt; the scabbard slings are unmistakable.
A katana, as in the OP image and the picture below, is worn through a waist-sash with edge UP, and is always displayed that way. Its scabbard never has sling-mounts, just a pierced knob for the cords wrapped around its scabbard.
Those cords are to secure it to the wearer’s sash, as in the left hand image below. Often they weren’t tied, to make it easier to remove the sword and carry it, or surrender it in situations where keeping a sword to hand wasn’t permitted. (IIRC, the wakizashi shortsword was never surrendered.)
This page uses the correct photos, but wrongly calls Mikazuki a katana; maybe the (Western?) writer didn’t know there was a difference and defaulted to a reader-familiar word.
This page is the Museum’s own, properly calls it a tachi, and (interesting, this) says that the sword was owned by Hideyoshi’s first wife, not the man himself. She was born an aristocrat, he was born a peasant.
For reference, the rule is simple and AFAIK without exceptions: a sword with sling fittings on its scabbard, or a bare blade displayed edge down, is a TACHI; a sword with no sling fittings, or a bare blade displayed edge up, is a KATANA; any internet image which shows one and says the other is wrong.
There’s another slight oddity about Mikazuki. Bare blades are displayed so that any inscription on the tang faces the viewer (away from the wearer) which means they’re almost always shown point-left, but Mikazuki is displayed point-left yet its inscription still faces the viewer and is (just) visible.
I’m guessing it was made before the custom or rule for inscription placement was adopted, or it was made for a left-handed user… :->
———–
Incidentally, Mikazuki looks far better than “the day it was made” (read this article) because on that day the whole blade would have looked as rough as its tang still does.
Here’s another tachi tang:
And here’s the whole thing.
That’s why sword-polishers are so important.
Until Mikazuki became a don’t-use-just-own heirloom, it would have gone back to a polisher several times for maintenance and refurbishment. The polisher’s work might even have involved repair. Armour, helmet, another sword or even a bone can chip a blade’s edge and that needs great skill to put right.
Skill like this…
You can just see how the darker metal of the hardened edge is fractionally smaller in the lower photo, where damage has been ground, sorry, polished away prior to restoring the point profile. Mr Hofhine’s final polish to reveal the edge patterning is also considerably better than the original.
It’s remarkable work.
Sword-polishers are very important indeed.
Oh! Ive actually done a bit of research on this! I found some scythe like weapon alternatives that work well as weapons while still maintaining the aesthetic!
@masochist-incarnate WHAT ARE THEY
First, let’s start with war picks, also known as horsemans picks, or nadziaks. they look like this to start:
these weapons were fucking INCREDIBLE at piercing through steel plate armor, and was highly used by calvary in the 17th century with origins in the middle east and europe, not only were these functional weapons, but they were good, your armor wouldn’t protect you from a swing of this, and its not like not wearing armor would do you any good.
kamas are essentially the daggers of scythes, even being used for farming asian crops, they don’t have any real downside, and are even heavily used in martial arts
these were made for a similar use as the war pick, but it’s structured to be a sharper edge with a reinforced point, which allowed it to pierce through armor, like the war pick, but kept the sides sharper, allowing it to cut more effectively, and the handles on them are short and long depending on preference.
These ones come closest to the scythe in visual terms in my opinion, and are also my favourite, these ones are still armor evicerating, but have a counterweight hammer on the other side, which helps stabilise the swing, and adds more momentum, along with being a hammer on the other side.
i know what you’re thinking, and yeah! i agree! its not a scythe like weapon, its a bad looking spear! these were made when farmers found out that their farming scythes were pretty sucky weapons and did like shit, so they repositioned the blade on the pole to be more usable! I hate this and i didn’t want to include this, but i have to because one of you fucks will do a 3 second google search and ask “what about war scythes” because you think you know more than me! i hate this weapon!
Also, if giant sickles are more you’re speed, there’s the Ethiopian shotel
Or, the more popular Egyptian khopesh
As someone who writes fics with action sequences and the use of guns, I thought maybe it would be helpful to pass some things on. Even though I’ve done lots of research and talked with family members (I live in WI which is a big hunting state and we have lots of guns), I still catch myself making mistakes with specific terms and their usage. Reading more James Bond fics lately, I catch others making mistakes also. So here is a little guide to help writers.
So yeah! Here are just a few basic tips if you want to write a fic where a character uses guns.
I see you’ve got terminology down, now let’s go for a little technicality.
Other helpful tips:
A few things I have to add to this:
The caliber of a round is usually measured in either millimeters or in hundredths of an inch. One “unit” of caliber, I guess, is one one-hundredth of an inch. For example, a 45-caliber round has a .45 inch diameter (which is why it’s called a .45). DO NOT CONFUSE THIS WITH MILLIMETERS. .45 mm is NOT 45-caliber.
Common cartridges measured in millimeters with their respective calibers:
Rifles:
Handguns:
(*the measurement you’re more likely to see for each cartridge.)
In the case of rifles, cartridges meant for civilian use are usually designated as .223, .300, .308, etc. Designations such as 5.56mm, 7.62mm, etc. are usually indicative of military-grade ammunition. This is not always true, but usually that’s how it is.
Military-grade bullets are held to higher standards and typically cause more stress on the internal mechanism, and the guns they’re meant for are built to handle that. They can also handle civilian ammunition. It doesn’t work the other way around, however. Do not attempt to use military-grade ammunition in a civilian-model firearm that hasn’t been modified to handle it.
A few different kinds of cartridges:
- Full metal jacket, which gives increased penetration capabilities but doesn’t do much in the ways of expansion. Risky to use in situations with a lot of innocents around, as often they can over-penetrate and go on to hurt someone behind the target.
- Hollow-points, which expand like crazy when they hit something, causing massive internal damage to their target. Outlawed in warfare under the Hague Convention of 1899, but can be used by civilians.
- Soft-points, which serve as a happy medium between the penetration capabilities of full metal jacket rounds and the expansion of hollow-point rounds.
- Shot, usually rat-shot or snake-shot, which can be fit in bullets and used to kill small vermin at close range without doing a whole lot of damage to the surrounding area.
- Sub-sonic, which have a lower muzzle velocity and effective range, but will decrease the chance of overpenetration. This is also the ideal ammo choice for weapons fitted with suppressors, as subsonic rounds avoid the “crack” of a sonic boom that other bullets can make upon leaving the barrel.
The tone deafness is mind numbing
Okay, so is the point of these things to give cops an excuse to shoot unarmed black people for looking at their cell phones in public? Or is it to make mass shootings easier by slipping these guns past security in schools? This is cartoon villain levels of awful. Fuck the NRA.
Guys maybe youre also forgetting the possibility that this gives police a reason to murder ANYONE who could try to RECORD THEM IN THEIR CRIMINAL ACTS. In this day and age its vital to record the police, but with this being a thing they can reasonably say they were “afraid for their lives” that someone was gonna pull THIS on them and then shoot bystanders without question
This is heinous
Getting close to fifteen thousand notes and almost every single comment is outraged and disgusted, at least people can see the terrifying implications of this
I saw and reblogged this one a while back, but it’s always worth repeating, and this time I’m adding a bit of background info comparing common fantasy sword features to the Real Thing (with pictures, of course.)
Leaf-bladed swords are a very popular fantasy style and were real, though unlike modern hand-and-a-half longsword versions, the real things were mostly if not always shortswords.
Here are Celtic bronze swords…
…Ancient Greek Xiphoi…
… and a Roman “Mainz-pattern” gladius…
Saw or downright jagged edges, either full-length or as small sections (often where they serve no discernible purpose) are a frequent part of fantasy blades, especially at the more, er, imaginatively unrestrained end of the market.
Real swords also had saw edges, such as these two 19th century shortswords, but not to make them cool or interesting. They’re weapons if necessary…
…but since they were carried by Pioneer Corps who needed them for cutting branches and other construction-type tasks, their principal use was as brush cutters and saws.
This dussack (cutlass) in the Wallace Collection is also a fighting weapon, like the one beside it…
…but may also have had the secondary function of being a saw.
A couple of internet captions say it’s for “cutting ropes” which makes sense - heavy ropes and hawsers on board a ship were so soaked with tar that they were often more like lengths of wood, and a Hollywood-style slice from the Hero’s rapier (!!) wouldn’t be anything like enough to sever them. However swords like this are extremely rare, which suggests they didn’t work as well as intended for any purpose.
I photographed these in Basel, Switzerland, about 20 years ago. Look at the one on the bottom (I prefer the basket-hilt schiavona in the middle).
A lot of “flamberge” (wavy-edge) swords actually started out with conventional blades which then had the edges ground to shape - the dussack, that Basel broadsword and this Zweihander were all made that way.
The giveaway is the centreline: if it’s straight, the entire blade probably started out straight.
Increased use of water power for bellows, hammers and of course grinders made shaping blades easier than when it had to be done by hand. This flamberge Zweihander, however, was forged that way.
Again, the clue is the centre-line.
Incidentally those Parierhaken (parrying hooks - a secondary crossguard) are among the only real-life examples of another common fantasy feature - hooks and spikes sticking out from the blade.
Here are some rapiers and a couple of daggers showing the same difference between forged to shape and ground to shape. The top and bottom rapiers in the first picture started as straights, and only the middle rapier came from the forge with a flamberge blade.
There’s no doubt about this one either.
The reason - though that was a part of it - wasn’t just to look cool and show off what the owner could afford (any and all extra or unusual work added to the price) but may actually have had a function: a parry would have been juddery and unsettling for someone not used to it, and any advantage is worth having.
However, like the saw-edged dussack, flamberge blades are unusual - which suggests the advantage wasn’t that much of an advantage after all.
Here’s a Circassian kindjal, forged wiggly…
…and an Italian parrying dagger forged straight then ground wiggly…
There were also parrying daggers with another fantasy-blade feature, deep notches and serrations which in fantasy versions often resemble fangs or thorns.
These more practical historical versions are usually called “sword-breakers” but I prefer “sword-catcher”, since a steel blade isn’t that easy to break. Taking the opponent’s blade out of play for just long enough to nail him works fine.
NB - the curvature on the top one in this next image is AFAIK because of the book-page it was copied from, not the blade itself.
The missing tooth on that second dagger, and the crack halfway down this next one’s blade, shows what happens when design features cause weak spots.
So there you go: a quick overview of fantasy sword features in real life.
Here’s a real-life weapon that looks like it belongs in a fantasy story or film - and this doesn’t even have an odd-shaped blade…
Just a very flexible one…
If you want more odd blades, Moghul India is a good place to start…
i could not ask for a better addition to my meme post than blade education thank you so much
“Sword breaker” don’t you mean forbidden comb
