Thai Swordplay.

The other night I watched a movie called “Paradox”. This was described as a “neon noir”, and given that it was set in Thailand, made me think of the goddam awful “Only God Forgives”. Paradox was actually an entertaining action film, and is worth a watch.

In one notable scene we see a fight with Thai swords (daab/dhaab/krabi). At least I think they are all Thai swords. Given the scene is set in a meat processing plant it is quite possible one or more of them is actually a butcher’s tool. 

Much that I respect the katana, it is rather overused in action and superhero movies and it is nice to see something else for a change. I tend to favour shorter blades anyway. Long swords have a lot of momentum, which can be hard to manage if you are not a full-time swordsmen. Shorter blades such as a wakazashi, on the other hand, tend to be swift and highly agile. Come the apocalypse and I will probably reach for one of the shorter swords or machetes in my collection. 

I found these interesting videos:

In the first video we see some inversions and hand-switching, the latter of which is not a tactic you usually see with swords. This gives some rationale to such long grips on single-hand weapons. Flips, swaps and inversions are covered in Attack, Avoid, Survive. In the second video we see these techniques used in some sparing. As well as switching we see good use made of the empty hand, as well as elbows and even kicks, which is to be expected from Thai fighters. Such techniques can also be used with knives, nightsticks or riot batons.

Siam Blades have some very nice looking Thai-inspired designs, which are sadly way beyond my budget. Cold Steel has a Thai-inspired machete that looks to be more affordable (but I am still skint. Buy more books!). There is a rather fun review of the Thai machete here:

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My Left Pocket: Epilogue

An amusing little endnote to my previous post. Last night I walked into my local takeaway. My ipod is hanging around my neck.

“That is exactly what I need!” enthuses one of the staff. “I am always losing my phone.”

“It’s a shoelace.” I explain.

“Where did you get it?”

“Er, my pocket.”

I have to explain that one day my headphones had broke. The only replacements I had had too short a lead for me to use them and place the ipod in a pocket. So I had fished a shoelace out of my pocket, tied it into a short of net around the device and hung it around my neck with another shoelace. The only later improvement was replacing the second lace with a badge lanyard I had in a drawer.

I end up reaching into my left pocket and demonstrating that I really was the sort of person who walks around with old shoelaces in his pocket.

I explained the technique was very simple, and was actually just a modified bottle hitch or parcel tying method. (even though it looks like my ipod is into Japanese bondage). I informed the lady there were doubtless lots of websites that could show her the knots, and also lots of interesting decorative knots too (for her phone that is, although that statement is also doubtless true of Japanese bondage too). She suggested she could use ribbons, and that is a nice idea. 

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My Left Pocket.

A common piece of advice is to re-lace your boots with paracord. The more thoughtful of you may have wondered about the wisdom of being in a survival situation with unlaced boots! What is usually omitted is that in an emergency you are supposed to take the cores out of the cord, then re-lace your boots with the empty outer or some of the core cords. This assumes you did not buy the budget cord that doesn’t have particularly good cores!

Re-lacing your boots with paracord isn’t a bad idea. It cannot hurt. One day you may find yourself cold, tired and wet, your numb hands trying to unlace your boots, gut the paracord and then re-lace your boots. That sounds like something you may want to avoid if possible!

In my post on an EDC shopping list I suggested you add about two metres/ a fathom/ an armspan of paracord to your everyday carry (EDC). Or a pair of long, strong bootlaces, whichever you can acquire more easily. The utility of this was expanded on in one of the links from my 4-4-4-4 article. In the event you missed it: 

I had a quick look in the left front pocket of my trousers. The contents were:

• One bandanna, various uses.
• Disposable lighter, for emergencies.
• A hank of paracord, roughly two metres.
• A actual length of shoelace. I tend to pick up potentially useful bits of cordage! Useful for stuff that does not require the paracord.
• A tubular spectacle safety cord. My habit of acquiring cordage paid off here. What I thought was a bit of shoelace turned out to be something very useful to me. If the situation requires, I can retrieve this from my pocket and add it to my glasses.
• A couple of metres of cotton string. Saves the paracord for important jobs. Potentially could be used as tinder. 

 

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Arrows: Time of Flight and Momentum.

Many thanks to Ric Morgan for his donation to support the blog.

Recently I got to thinking about archery. In particular, I was curious about the time of flight of arrows and quarrels. This seemed quite a practical thing to know. I was a little surprised at how little information on this could be found on the internet.

Most modern archers are target shooters, so not particularly interested in how long the arrow takes to reach a static target. They also shoot at ranges that provide very little insight into, say, bows being used on medieval battlefields. If you play role-play games arrows probably hit in the same turn, which may be the same second, of firing. You would think there was considerable discussion of flight times among bowhunters, but not according to my search engine.

One target site did inform me:

“Recurve bow arrows can travel up to 225 feet per second (fps) or 150mph while compound bow arrows can travel up to 300fps (200mph). Longbow arrows travel slower due to the weight of the arrows. Even at 300fps, it takes around a second to reach a 90 metre target. You hear your release first followed by the thud of the arrow hitting the target a second later (you can’t see it unless you use a telescopic sight).”

More trawling found me this article, with the following table:

I also remembered an old book I had, which gives the following table:

90m in the first second sounds like a good rule of thumb, although I would like to know how this changes beyond this range. 

Why does it matter? If in an emergency situation a bow may be one of your options for defence or food gathering. Much of this will also apply to other hand-thrown missiles such as spears or rocks. Contrary to what you see in action movies, bows are not “silent killers”. Some of the energy stored up in a drawn bow is released as sound. Your arrow will travel at 100-200 fps, while sound travels at about 1,100 fps. The animal you are shooting at will hear you before the arrow arrives. Many animals survive by being paranoid, so there is a good chance it will begin moving before your arrow arrives. Thus, you need to lead your target. For this, you need to know time of flight. Calculating lead and other parameters is covered in my book on survival weapons.

While there was very little discussion of time of flight, it seemed initial velocity and kinetic energy seemed to be of great interest to bowhunters.

The V0 of a bow is the equivalent of the muzzle velocity of a gun. Most bows don’t have muzzles. Arrows lose energy at a pretty steep rate. One of the above sites uses a working figure of 3% per 10 yards. This means that the terminal velocity of an arrow is going to be very different from the V0. Failing a really strong tailwind, V0 is the one velocity your arrow will not be at!

As discussed elsewhere, kinetic energy is something of a red herring when predicting bullet performance. It is popular in the gun press. It is far more impressive to say a round has 2,352 ft/lbs of energy than that it has 1.7 ftlb/sec of momentum!

Terminal performance of arrows is somewhat easier to estimate than for bullets. Arrows mainly rely on cutting to produce blood loss. Given similar size and configuration of arrow heads it seems reasonable that the more effective arrow will be that that penetrates more. Just for fun I ran some figures using the following formulae:

Energy (ftlbs) = [(Velocity (fps))2 x Weight (grains)] ÷ 450,240

Momentum (ftlbs/sec) = Weight (grains) x Velocity (fps) ÷ 225218

From the above chart I selected a 450gr arrow at 130 fps and compared it to a 350gr arrow at 147.4 fps. These would both have a kinetic energy of about 16.89ftlbs. Since weight is different, so will momentum be. The heavier arrow is at 0.2597ftlb/sec while the lighter is 0.225 ftlb/sec. That is about 15% difference. One would expect the arrow with more momentum to penetrate more due to its higher inertia, but would the difference be significant in real world applications? Something to think on.

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