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I have not followed up on this (over here) as I intended – hopefully I’ll wrap up the last loose ends on the starting project in a few days…
…In the meanwhile, I thought the following videos were very interesting as far as simple home brewing goes. If you’re not familiar with Brian and Derica, they have a really nice channel for home brewing on YouTube. It also touches on a subject matter covered over on Discord – gruit:
So, while my brewing process was far more austere (preparing the wort in the same pot used for primary fermentation), they present a slightly more sophisticated approach in which a few more containers are used (also closed fermentation). All the key steps for making what is commonly thought of as beer at some level is also included, including the mashing process. Very cool videos, and I thing if you’re interested in this stuff, would be very much worth your time.
Great points!
I want to state, for the record, that I myself never really had anything in the super-low price range, save for a “katana” I once bought from a visit to the New York Chinatown (have since parted with it as well). Instead, I have wound up with a few good things that I am quite pleased with.
That said, my interest in this thread is looking for what might be out there that’s actually worth half a damn, either for budget use OR as a low-cost hobby project. As someone who much more easily imagines having hobbies than actually engaging in them, it’s a fun mental exercise. After all, if you can manage to turn that sub-$200 sword into the equivalent of a $500 sword, that’s a win! And if you like the sword, even better!
…Of course, the biggest problem that you brought to light was the quality of the steel. Cutlery-type tasks, or just finishing the steel, is an artist’s and patient man’s game. Heat treatment, to me, is more akin to magic. I don’t know what it might possibly take to refine the grain structure you saw on that Deepeeka, but it’s certainly beyond my meager capabilities as of this writing. If you could do that, however, you could certainly evolve that lackluster sword into a really nice one, and I find the concept of doing things like that very interesting indeed.
The point on maintenance is brilliant – the more things you have, the more things you have to take care of. At the same time, I think there are things you can do to make your life easier. One of those things is to get into the habit of waxing your swords and knives. Set up a regular interval in which you inspect them and just wipe them down with oil. Know when it’s appropriate to use certain “oils” and when it’s not to. For instance, avoid using Ballistol when there’s copper alloys in or on your sword. Wall fixtures don’t like WD40. If you don’t want to take any chances, just use food-grade mineral oil even that old bottle of baby oil you find under the bathroom sink. But, putting a layer of wax to polish and protect your sword is going to hold up far better than just a coat of oil. And if you add oil afterwards, it’s just another layer of protection. In fact, I wonder if they used wax for this sort of thing way-back-when. It almost seems it would have been more available than oil for protecting tools!
I have to agree that those are really nice looking! I do also want to say that if you actually kit those messers out properly, they start to go up in costing pretty quickly!
…I’m surprised they don’t carry katzbalgers, being an emporium for Landsknechts and what have you… 😛
…I hope nothing I stated was off, and furthermore, I hope mentioning those conversations did constitute a breach of confidence! I feel I learn something every time we discuss such matters, and I hope we can do it again at some point. 🙂
Here’s another inexpensive sword to consider, and it often is offered through that most reviling of distributors: the BudK Catalog…
https://www.budk.com/Honshu-Broadsword-With-Scabbard-1060-High-Carbon-S-43400
…Horrible advertising which targets… certain Americans!
…Overly hyped features with underwhelming performances!
…Small design quirks leading to a mixed presentation!
And all-the-while, nothing seems really bad…
The first time I saw the sword above, I thought it looked a bit like the hero sword they gave Sean Bean when he played Boromir. Of course, that’s not really the case. The sword features a stylized, asymmetric scent stopper pommel and a ludicrously chunky cast guard. All of the parts are threaded and they come apart with common tools – and they go back together with common tools as well. Of course, you could actually just watch a reasonable review on the sword, complete with its own… issues:
…If you could endure that video, complete with bad volume mixing and late 80s / early 90s musical intermissions, you would have found that the non-goon presenter gave some really decent reports on the weapon. Cutting performance implies some less-than-ideal blade geometry, which is to be expected from such a low price point. The scabbard is not fancy but it does seem to do almost everything you would want a proper scabbard to do; work on your own fittings and you probably wouldn’t be too upset with it. I found the most interesting feature to be the construction – not because I like the screwed-in construction, but because if you bought this sword as a project sword, you’d not need to destroy anything first in order to put it back together according to your own liking!
While I would actually like to see a Matthew Jensen destruction-for-science presentation on this sword (especially on the guard – don’t trust your castings!), I think a person legitimately attracted to this weapon would not be looking to replace that $200 investment right after making it. The Honshu actually does look to be a very reasonable first sword, and I assume it would be more reliable than the Deepeeka featured in the first post. If not a first sword, it would probably make for a good “beater” which would not cause the user to grieve too much if something were to happen to it. However, as you have likely guessed, I feel this weapon would be a very good candidate as a project sword. With a tight-fitting scabbard, seemingly reasonable blade which could be refinished however the user so-chooses, and rapid disassembly for reconstruction… the only real question is if it would be more worth your while to just buy a Hanwei-Tinker bare blade if you’re intent on replacing all of the hilt furniture anyway. Still… not a terrible package, and it surprises me that I say as much!
I’d like to conclude with the following: aside from all of the other things swirling around in the world at the moment which seem to be driving it into a bleak place, the general state of commercial swordmaking seems to be improving at all levels. There is no way, a decade and a half ago, you would have found something as good as that Honshu at the same price. There are still tons of crappy, cheap swords out there, but there also seems to be an influx of just cheap swords as well. I would like to think that the crappy segment of the market is going to start going away…
Never responded to this one when it first popped up, but the featured gentleman has produced an absolutely beautiful shirt of mail for himself. Not sure what the links are made of – I presume they’re just butted links – but I think that would save him from a “casual” attacker.
Being on a Tolkien kick lately, I look at his armor and immediately think of Frodo’s tiny Mithril hauberk…
Interesting that you note FreeCiv – whatever I’m doing, it just doesn’t seem to have the same gravitas as Civ II, which my sister and I grew up playing. I also found that… well, it’s a huge timesink! With me, I find that it just induces this odd sense of wondering what’s going to happen next while also remaining fairly confident that nothing too pressing is going to come up. That said, I do like the game (currently playing on Linux), but I’ve been trying to occupy my time with things more worthwhile.
…On the bright side, it’s most certainly a free game with lots of drop-in tilesets, etc. If there’s one truly fond memory of the game it was back in my Windows Vista days. The AI made HORDES of howitzers which my air force was desperately bombing as they crossed the mountains! I must not be paying good attention to the game settings, as I’ve not seen that kind of insanity since getting it on my distro.
As per scenarios, I do believe there are medieval scenarios in the game, but I’m not sure how those work. The base game makes doing anything of note in the ancient period kind of moot – the time passes so rapidly. Civ II did that as well but the ancient warfare was definitely more pronounced.
I for one am glad that codpieces are no longer a thing, but also bemoan the absence of long coats in day-to-day attire at large…
…The skullcap or headscarf with a frilly hat is also a bit foreign to the modern viewer, though in this weather it looks somewhat practical!
Fun read.
…While reading, the most immediate thing that came to mind from my previous life as a dweeb – the time when I watched cartoons – was a show called [i]Spice and Wolf[/i]. This was a medieval European-styled anime, and I imagine a lot of the inspirations for that production stemmed from legends such as this one.
Neat.
This is quite interesting – it reminds me of my concept of “triggers” on the old forums:
The difference in the trigger and this chant seems to be the internalization of the effect. The chant, verse, etc., uses a mass of verbiage to establish an ideal state of being to those that choose to take it in. It captures the attention long enough, and projects enough of an image through its description, that it can be “deployed” on an audience without any special preparation the audience must do on their own, except what might be normally required of them. To clarify, if you have a chant or verse you “deploy” on warriors, you must expect of those individuals that they be willing and able to fight. But, nothing more.
In contrast, the trigger – as defined by my old forum post – is a state of mind the individual prepares for themselves. It is possible that another individual could deploy the trigger on the one affected by said trigger, but without that internal, self-preparation, the trigger is ineffectual.
…All-in-all, very interesting! And, it demonstrates two different approaches by which one arrives at, basically, the same end result.
Alright,
I was able to steal a few minutes to work on this – is the following chart clear to you?
https://www.dropbox.com/s/36qepmh56wm4zjc/LouderThanWords.png?dl=0
In the future, I will need to sink more time into visuals! I took the relevant parts of my table and the other dude’s (TM) graph and made some more-angular-than-squiggly lines to connect them to each other. Look at that, then read my prior post, and see if it makes sense to you now. If it’s still unclear, I will try something else.
Right, so a bit behind on following up on things. However, I do want to clarify the Shadowrun / dice pool chart presented in the linked articles. I looked over my old tabulations from the outdated forums – check out the p = 1/3 chart (meaning that 5 and 6 on a d6 will work; these are two of the six faces, hence 1/3). You will note that if you compare the die rolls column (n = 8) with the success rows (k), you get the same data as the chap in the linked article got:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/ydmjo7jgxrxkq1d/D6-P13Prbs.PNG?dl=0
Compare this with the other graph:
k = x = 0, 3.90%
k = x = 1, 15.61%
k = x = 2, 27.31%
k = x = 3, 27.31%
k = x = 4, 17.07%
k = x = 5, 6.83%
k = x = 6, 1.71%
k = x = 7, 0.24%
k = x = 8, 0.02%…Note that it’s really important to understand data in context. The graph he generated for Shadowrun’s dice pool requires that all eight dice be rolled to get that data. If you require a certain percentage (p = ?) to meet a target number with a given number of dice (n = ?), you need to have numbers available for those situations, and you need to understand how to use that information once you have it.
One thing to consider with Codex is that the target number can change depending on the scenario, rather than being a fixed percentage. The dice can also change in terms of quantity used. So, you will have similar charts generated to the one for Shadowrun in that particular case, but they will all be very different.
Alright, to be perfectly honest, it looked like a really interesting article, so I posted it here to take a better look at it later! It’s going to take some time to do that.
First and foremost, you need to be aware of the fact that the article is full of “math poop,” which is a technical term. I take a long time combing through my own original material because making sense of the shite is pretty challenging. I’m long past calling myself any semblance of intelligent, but it still hurts to be called retarded – unless the person calling names is me. :p
…So, when you see “variance,” it is not in the common English word context. It’s in the math context, which can be just as bad as evil-robot-lawyer-speak if you don’t know what’s going on. I actually still don’t know what’s going on, but I intend to get it sorted out by no later than this weekend.
One thing you can start with is the first set of graphs the blogger puts out. The middle one is indeed the normal distribution output of 3d6, which is a cumulative dice. Because this is the most readily read graph (it makes sense when you look at it), we can dissect what all the axes are on the graph, and therefore see what they are on the other graphs as well:
1. The bottom, horizontal axis is the die output, or in this case, sum. 3d6 ranges in values from 3 to 18 for a total of 16 outputs. Likewise, the D100 (kind of but not exactly a cumulative dice) graph to the left ranges from 1 to 100, and the non-cumulative d6 chart to the right is a bit different: it counts the number of d6’s used for a given roll.
2. The vertical axis notes the probability of getting a given roll. 3d6 definitely spikes in the middle, because on average your rolls will sum to those numbers, regardless of how the sum is achieved (I suppose you could design a game in which the manner of getting the sum would be important, but why (or maybe, why not)?). Ideally, you have a 1% chance of rolling any one number with a D100, but I don’t buy it when you’re using crappy dice like D10s. However, note that the D100 graph is a constant flat line, which is what any other single dice would be as well in ideal circumstances. The non-cumulative d6 chart for Shadowrun on the right is again different, as it’s noting the probability of scoring with a 5 or 6 with any one die. The curve for that chart drops off not because you’re less likely to succeed with more dice, but because you’re less likely to succeed with all of the dice at once. The Shadowrun graph is going to be what is most similar to Codex in this case.
3. All of the graphs have an added pair of numbers on them, which I believe are the variance and standard deviation. These are important numbers apparently, but I still don’t know what significant they hold for real human beings. I will get back to you on that matter in time…
Great work, Jean!
By the way, I think your link does not go where you think it goes:
https://www.woodenswords.com/Codex_Guide_to_the_Medieval_Baltic_Vol1_p/book-cod02.htm
