[Nightshade]

Originally Posted by RMS

You're all over the place here on how effective a spear is...

Not from where I sit.

Obviously, militias use what is cheap and available. (Spears are no easier to use than a sword. However, they are inherently a defensive weapon, so are a natural for nonprofessionals.) Similarly, the bayonet is pretty much just the

This disagrees with the statements I've heard on the matter from everyone who's ever trained with both swords and spears (usually in a martial arts context) so you'll excuse me if I take it dubiously.

However, the part about spears being chosen because of a lack of other weapons is incorrect. Spears, of one sort or another, have dominated

I didn't say that was the only reason, but its often a big reason. An effective spear doesn't even really require metal, something you can't say about a sword or really an axe.

battlefields from the Bronze Age to the advent of the repeating firearm, and for good reason. Even you note that pikes (a spear) are developed (partially at least) to defend against the lance (a spear): so the two dominant weapons of the battlefield are both spears until the point when firearms become powerful enough to marginalize all melee weapons.

Lances are the only really effective horseback weapon until you get horse pistols, and pikes were formation weapons; I'd never deny the benefit of spears as a formation weapon, but that says little about their benefit as an individual weapon.

Once formations break up, one side is running away and it doesn't matter what weapon they have. The other side is chasing them down on cavalry

Formation fighting has hardly been the only form of warfare, especially the tight formations necessary for effective shield walls and spear use. In fact, its effectively disfunctional in certain environments.

The spear has a lot of advantages beyond those. I find it interesting, that all the other weapons you mention have fairly limited eras they existed on the battlefield, and yet the spear was there at the beginning and end. Even the sword doesn't fair nearly as well historically.

You don't think this happens to have anything to do with the fact that the sword requires effective metallurgy and a spear doesn't? Maces and axes have limited life because in the end, they are an evolutionary trend toward the sword; they kept some benefit in certain periods because they all interact slightly differently with different types of armor. But of course the sword isn't going to have as long a history as the spear; a spear requires a relatively straight stick and something to sharpen the end with, in the end. The closest you can get to a sword at the same technology level is a club.

True. The concept of a sword being used for both is something that postdates swords actually being used to any large extent on the battlefield. Actual swords are designed to do one or the other and are not balanced properly to do both. I don't allow the option in my RQ games. Big swords are slashing weapons, strictly, and short swords are thrusting weapons...though they can be used either way.

Some late period swords are relatively effecient at both (the saber wasn't bad at either though it was a better slashing weapon), but the realities of armor tended to limit it before that, because a slashing weapon had to have some heft behind it to do anything to an armored location, and a heavy sword is a lousy thrusting weapon.

(This is primarily an issue with longswords; shortswords seem to get much more complicated in this area, though they still tend to lean one way or another).