[Christopher VaughnStrever]

I have yet to become a student of learning to fight properly with a sword. So my knowledge on the subject is rather quite limited. I have also been looking up old threads on ways to effectivly to kill/wound a knight in a full suit of armour. That is not the discussion I would like this thread to be about.

This is the general conclussion i have found on the other threads... The effective way for a fully armoured knight to utilize a sword to kill another fully armoured knight would be to thrust the sword through the plates and/or thrust the sword into a voider of maile and break the rings open and stab the person.

The question I pose now is... Of course not every thrust will hit its intended target. So how much damage would the tip of a sword incur from missing the target? To hone in on the question, would we be talking about a single battle? or two, three battles? With half-swording being common for added accuracy, wouldn't the point of the sword have to be kept up to penetrate the padding (Gambeson, Arming Jacket/vest) under the armor. Since armor was designed to cause blows to glance off of the armor, would the tip of a sword really be worn down at all? How much abuse can the tip of a sword take until repairs are need?

And then this brings us to the next point (No pun intended) This would make great since to have a war hammer and/or mace just in case your sword were damaged or some of the sort.

[Felix R.]

Actually I didn´t try my Albion Fiore (The best "antiarmour" sword in my collection) against composite armour until now. I once scrached the concrete flod and the tip lost about 5mm in length )on my new sword ( but I managed to rework it quite easily.

For the actual "kill", please consider that not only the sword but the whole armoured opponent is the weapon. There are so many ways to cause the other guy harm despite the sword. So maybe after throwing him to the ground using halfswording techniquese "Fioresque", you can finish him of with you basilardo or an armoured elbow in the face.

[Vincent Le Chevalier]

[Samuel Bena]

[Maurizio D'Angelo]

One with the crown on the head, was certainly crazy.
I read somewhere that after a certain period (1500) were hardened armor ...

[Jim Mearkle]

I suspect more often than not, a thrust to plate armor would glance off without doing a lot of damage to either one. It would take a near-perpendicular hit or a thrust to one of the few concave areas to avoid skipping off.

[Justin King]

It would depend a lot on the shape and hardness of the blade, which upon the evidence would vary a great deal. With a very acute point or a softer blade this would obviously be more of an issue.
My guess is that historical users would have taken a pragmatic approach, if the tip was damaged too easily they would have had it reduced to a more functional geometry during resharpening. In any event a typical wear/sharpening pattern would be that as the tip became more worn and was re-sharpened the geometry would gradually become more obtuse, creating a more robust tip.

[J.D. Crawford]

Although period art shows men in full plate armor fighting with swords, I believe those images are romanticized. I can accurately thrust at something the size of a quarter when it is standing still, but once it starts moving its a different ball game. IMHO, in battle conditions, it would really take a lucky thrust to hit the right spot and do damage. It would be more effective for fully armored knights and men-at-arms to use hammers / maces / axes as their main arms against each other and then use swords as a back-up, e.g., when the lines broke and it came time to mop up the lightly armored archers and back-up infantry in the remaining chaos, or to defend themselves against civilians armored with pole arms and the like.

To make a modern day analogy, tanks use their main guns against other tanks, but they use machine guns against infantry. History has shown that tanks without machine guns (like the German Ferdinand / Elefant in WW2) were vulnerable to infantry.

That's not claim that people didn't try doing this - otherwise there would not have been type XVII swords. However I think this was a failed experiment in the face of plate armor development, i.e., pretty soon Knights were back to cut-and-thrust weapons, likely for the reasons cited above.

That's just an opinion based on zero practical experience, I'm happy to be proven wrong.

[Justin King]

[Maurizio D'Angelo]