Larger swords vs larger monsters

Question

How much larger and heavier should swords be in order to combat massive monsters?

Fiction and RPGs are somewhat notorious for over-estimating or exaggerating the weight of swords. For instance, a game system might list a two-handed sword as being 10 or 20 pounds and wieldable only with the most brute of strength, whereas in reality they're more like 5 pounds and can be used with great finesse. However, this isn't necessarily a historical inaccuracy as it is a plausible factor of many fantasy worlds - fictional swordsmen aren't always dueling other humans, but rather often fighting huge, towering creatures such as trolls, manticores, and dragons. Against these foes, I would expect that swords designed for fighting other men would be ineffective and would need some extra heft behind them.

By how much, if any, would a sword need to be heavier in order to be effective at harming monstrously large foes? Would a scaled-up humanoid monster, such as a giant or troll, be vulnerable to a realistic sword, or would it need a little more oomph? How effectively could one swordfight a large, dangerous creature in reality, such as a rhinoceros or an elephant?

Answer 1

Your swords should not exist, since you should be using a spear

A fair assumption is that a larger and heavier monster will have a tougher hide and more bulk protecting its vulnerable regions. If that is the case, a sword is a poor weapon for fighting it. If you want to do damage to a large beast, you will need to concentrate on two aspects: penetrating the hide, and going deep enough to do some damage. For these purposes a sword is inferior to a spear.

One of my favorite books is a 14th century hunting manual by Gaston Phoebus, Count of Foix. He has many tips of the trade for the dedicated hunter. Relevant to this discussion is his talk of boar-swords, long thin swords with a strong cross guard, meant to deliver a killing blow to a boar from horseback. From their description they are pretty spear-like.

It is also relevant to note that there is no mention of using swords of any sort on a bear. The bear is too strong to get that close to. You can't swing a sword since that will not kill the bear, and his counter-strike will likely leave you dead. You need to stick your spear into the bear and back off, out of range.

If a bear is too big and tough to kill with a sword, then it a good bet you would need a spear to go after anything larger. Or, you know, a crossbow.

Answer 2

A bigger sword doesn't necessarily cause more damage, in fact it probably causes less because it takes more force to swing it.

From a pure physics perspective, a weapon's wounding potential is roughly proportional to its kinetic energy:

$$ E_{kinetic} = \frac{1}{2} \cdot m \cdot v^2 $$

Adding more mass (m) only increases the energy a little bit. Adding more velocity increases the energy a whole lot. More energy = more hurt.

But to get more velocity, we have to accelerate it by applying force;

$$F = ma$$

That means we need more force to accelerate a heavier weapon to the same velocity. But if we apply the same force to a smaller object, we get more acceleration and thus higher velocity. And as we saw above, we get more bang for our buck by adding velocity than by adding mass.

But when we're talking about living creatures, it's not a physics problem so much as it is a biology problem. Where you hit the monster is a lot more important than how hard you hit it. To kill the monster you've got to hit the vital organs - brain, heart, or major blood vessel. You only need enough power get through any armor/hide/bone and penetrate deeply and accurately enough to damage a vital organ. Really massive weapons are going to be harder to control and therefore less accurate.

From a tactical perspective you want to be able to inflict damage to the monster without the monster being able to inflict damage on you. That means a longer weapon (pike, halberd, lance, naginata, etc) or a ranged weapon (bow, catapult, ballista, etc).

The boring but practical approach to kill a big monster is a formation of guys armed with pikes supported by archers and/or siege weapons. If you want to realistically depict single combat between a hero and a monster, make it a battle of skill vs strength, with the hero using superior agility to let the monster wear itself out enough so that he can deliver a single, precise killing stroke to its weak point.

Answer 3

First, as per kingledion's answer, you'd rather use a spear.

However, if by any motive beyond reason it has to be a sword, you would still not use a big plank of chopping steel like in the animes. You'd stick to thrusting-centric swords.

The only real sword I know it's used to kill (or finish off, rather) a big animal it's the matador's sword, which is essentially a rapier, designed to be thrusted from the "shoulder" to the heart of the bull (which takes almost full length of the blade). Done correctly, it's supposed to instakill.

Answer 4

It wouldn't necessarily need to be heavier, more likely than not the swords should be lighter. Nobody said swords had to be heavy to deal damage, and in fact, you would likely have a much better experience with your swords if you simply made them light. Size, on the other hand, is probably a good thing to keep in mind. If your sword is light, then that means you can swing it quickly. If you know anything about chopping through things, how sharp something is makes more impact on the result of hacking at a monster.
Say your sword is nearly ten pounds, not that much anyways, and it's only as sharp as normal, but it's the same size as most other swords of lighter weight- The lighter weight sword is going to be more effective because you can get more force behind the sword.

Answer 5

Like most of the people in this thread already said spears are the way to go for most things with thick skin or armor. There is one scenario in which i can see large swords being a good idea. In the popular manga "Berserk" the protagonist "Guts" uses a incredibly large sword called the dragon slayer. The exact size is not confirmed but it's something like 6ft long 3in thick and 1 ft wide at the base. There are 3 reasons why this is not just a horrible idea.

1. A lot of the creatures and demons in berserk tend to have no armor or if they do they are very strong. The a spear can't chop thru large amounts of flesh at one it can only hit a small area hard. A stander shortsword or longsword doesn't do much either.

2. Now a spear against armored foes sounds like a good idea but there armor is unnatural and incredibly strong. not only that but the creatures tend to have better regeneration then humans. because of this a spear probably wouldn't be able to pierce the armor without breaking and even if it did hit it wouldn't just win the fight. The massive sword is used because it can do high amounts of force crushing the enemy within there armor.

3. Now it is also thought that the sword is 400 pounds so most people wouldn't be able to use it well. However the protagonist is not only very strong and a expert swordsman. He has magical demon armor that gives him much higher strength letting him swing it like it was a regular sword. If he had a regular sword it would be pointless to have all that power behind a small object.

Thanks for reading this :)

Answer 6

I agree that a spear or spear like weapon is the best for this unless the critter stands around and lets you whack at the same spot like you are cutting down a tree.

Here are a couple of considerations:

In most areas of the human body a weapon needs to penetrate about 4.5 inches to hit something vital. So, how much bigger is the critter and how much deeper in to you have to go to hit something important?

You also have to consider total mass of wielder and weapon. can the wielder actually penetrate the skin of the critter or will he be pushing off against a stone wall? Bracing might be needed here.

Answer 7

1. Swords are for parrying, not brute force. Swords are balanced so that their centre of mass is close to the hilt, which allows you to turn them quickly and easily in order to deflect incoming blows. That is very useful when fighting another human with a weapon, but not much when fighting animals. And the easily part means there is not that much energy in the swing, so it is not enough to significantly hurt anything of a size of an elephant.

2. To get more energy, you need either:

   1. Thrusting weapon. You can thrust a sword, but a spear is longer for weight and sword is not giving you any advantage at this point.

   2. Head-heavy weapon like an axe that you spin around, accumulating significant momentum, or raise high, accumulating potential energy. Disadvantage is that while preparing for the blow, you are not covered. With spear, the point is at least in front of you all the time, blocking access to you.

   3. More manpower. That leads to a long pike carried by more than one fighter. But the coordination would be pretty difficult.

   4. A simple machine. Since the power of your muscles is still the limiting factor, you need to pre-strain the thing. The result is a heavy cross-bow drawn using a winch. This can finally be scaled to have whatever penetrating power you need, at the cost of slow reload time.

3. For how hard it is to kill a large beast, consider whaling. Before the harpoon gun, this involved throwing several harpoons at the whale with buoys attached to them. There was no way to hold onto the ropes—the whale would easily pull the men under. Instead, they waited—for hours—before the drag of pulling the buoys together with the wounds tired the whale so it was barely able to move and only then they finished it off with more spears.

   Now this works on whales because they don't see the attack that is lead from above surface and can't retaliate effectively. But with a dragon that would be retaliating it would be much harder. You could attach on the ropes something that would get tangled to trees or stones and prevent the dragon from following when you retreat, but it could have enough power to pull the harpoon out and it would probably still have enough strength to fight back, so it would be very dangerous.

4. Or you can increase lethality by other means, like poison. Some potent poisons can be found in nature like on the poison dart frogs, or made with little resources, like curare. Something would surely be found that would work on the monster in question.

5. Either way, fighting monsters at range is much safer. If you have fire-breathing dragons, fighting them at close range would unlikely be survivable and if you have flying ones, you need ranged weapon to reach them at all anyway.

So my guess is that if an effective poison is available, poisoned arrows would be the main weapon of choice and if not, heavy crossbows, the later possibly firing harpoons with some kind of anchor at the end of the rope to slow the beast down.

And in either case, the fighters would probably be riding to allow them quick retreat if they missed—or if they've hit, but need to wait some time for the beast to die.

Answer 8

I think the question shouldn’t be how big, but how SHARP and effective. Use the lore of your game to design weapons specifically meant to kill that creature. For example in DARK SOULS they made it common knowledge that LIGHTNING kills DRAGONS. (In that games lore). So you’d use lightning against them.

Answer 9

Very interesting question. It would depend on what it is you are fighting.

A lot of the reposes are advocating for a spear. I'm going to play the role of the tenth man and say that this is generally going to be wrong.

It comes down to the right tool for the right job. There is a vast variety of the types of melee weapons that were made over the centuries. Each was trying to solve a differing problem.

If you are fighting armored creatures (dragons?), spears, arrows and stabbing swords are the way to go. They project all their force into a small area which will make it easier to pierce plate mail or tough hides. Spears and arrows keep the large angry dragon at a distance, which is probably wise.

Swords and cutting weapons are probably more dangerous than spears though, as they can open up a large surface area of tissue, and cause severe bleeding. Go ask any ER surgeon which is a more dangerous wound, a gun shot wound or a knife wound.

If your opponent is lightly armored or unarmored but just big, you might pick a sword. A good two handed sword can slash or stab so you have some good options. If i were fighting an unarmored giant hand-to-hand, this is what I would pick.

Keep in mind that mass and density aren't proportionate. A giant isn't going to have skin that is two inches thick, its skin would probably be about the same as a normal human's skin. Giant beetles won't have armor like a Sherman tank, unless your fantasy world follows rules that deviate from real physics.

Other people have already mentioned the size/weight issues. There is a reason why real two handed swords topped out at between 5 and 10 pounds. If bigger really went through armor better, why didn't weapon smiths ever make 30 pound, 8 foot long two handers?

If you want to hit something with armor REALLY hard, why not just get something that exists in the real world already? The mighty lance. It was long, heavy and designed to deliver a lot of damage to an armored opponent. I bet it would make a mess out of a dragon if you could get close enough.

The real problem in fighting monstrous opponents isn't injuring them, it is not getting injured by them. Someone already pointed out that nobody goes bear hunting with a sword, because bears can dish out damage better than you can. They don't have any real defense other than just being big, but the claws keep all the sword packing bear hunters away.

When something has a lot more mass and reach than you do, your real problem is defense and mobility and not offense.

Answer 10

Well, here's the thing.

There are MANY kinds of swords. Some are light and small like the Roman swords, some are huge things like the "long sword" (medieval Europe), or the great sword (some did come in around 10lbs or more). But in most cases militaries used swords to "hack" at other people. You didn't really stab as much as you would slash. The exception being the Roman swords.

With the Roman sword, you would knock down your opponent with your shield, then while he was on the ground go about stabbing him with the sword.

The other swords, in normal military sense, would be used to hack. You would essentially beat your opponent with it like it was a baseball bat, and hope the sharp part cut through their armor, skin, or whole body parts.

On the fencing side of things, stuff gets more interesting. Your goal in fencing was to land your hits without getting hit. A longer sword was one way to do this, but longer swords take longer to swing. Shorter swords are faster but have much less reach.

Different styles of fencing have come and gone, and what they have to this day is essentially a less lethal way to have "personal" sword fights evolved into a sport.

So now let's look at the right type of sword to use for different creatures. Keep in mind that kingledion is right and that you would almost certainly want a spear, but let's play anyway.

So really short swords are good at stabbing already immobilized foes (Roman swords). There also good at knocking away spears and the like to get inside for a hit. They are mostly useless for knocking aside a heavy weapon like a club or hammer though.

Medium swords like a long sword would be good at hacking at enemies. Not so much for stabbing. There too slow to knock aside poles, but could be used to deflect other swords. They may also have a better shot at deflecting heavy weapons like an axe. A club is still going to be an issue though.

The great sword, is another "hacking" sword. It's longer so you can stay further away from your target. But it's also very slow. It can actual cut armor, so it should do ok on troll hides, but once you start swinging it you better connect.

On something the size of a Hippo or Elephant, where your hacking isn't going to work, then you're back to stabbing. All swords can stab, to one extent or another (there are exceptions) but you're going to want the creature basically immobile.

Maybe if a few people with spears pin a creature, so you could walk in and stab it in the head or something.

A heavy sword would almost be a bad thing. You would want a long, but light sword. The best example I can think of is a boar sword.

Answer 11

If you want to go nasty, instead of swords, give them razor-barbed whips! Each slash will inflict painful and bleeding damage, and once a creature is taken by two enemies, it will harm seriously itself just to set itself free