Bat'leths
- Thread starter JRoss
- Start date
Indeed it isn't - the long "blade" surface of the main curve doesn't appear to be sharpened at all!
It may be a purely defensive component of the weapon, with all the offense coming from the pointy ends. When our heroes and villains perform blocking moves with the long curve, it is either to stop the opponent from swinging his own sword like a warhammer, points first, or to push him off balance. And when that curve actually hits the opponent in the chest, there is no cut whatsoever.
Watch the Worf-Duras duel in "Reunion", for example. Worf never once tries to cut Duras with his blade; all of his moves are blocking ones, to stop Duras from scoring with his katana-like blade. Finally, Worf wears out Duras and, instead of doing a horizontal swipe that might well decapitate the opponent who has now lowered his katana, hits his throat with the "blade", twice, to knock him down and brings the pointy end of his own weapon down to the victim's chest. The throat apparently remains undamaged...
Might be the old-time Klingons fought opponents who wore body armor, and blades couldn't penetrate it - only points could. So the bat'leth was a warhammer with a defensive secondary mode, while half a bat'leth could be mounted at the end of a long pole for use as a halberd of sorts, as seen in "Birthright" and in various wall displays.
Timo Saloniemi
I get what some people are saying about the thoughtful design by Dan Curry, but almost everything I'm seeing, including accounts of the creation from around the web, leads me to feel that it was more of a "make something that looks neat, then work out a way to make it functional".
Most of the arguments for a bat'leth are "it could work if...". That doesn't really make a good design. Fighting defensively to tire out an opponent is not good general strategy. It might work in certain instances, but the odds are not in your favor if all you do is parry until exhaustion.
Someone armed with two mek'leths is going to win against a defensive bat'leth wielder in very short order. If he blocks to catch the first blade, the mek'leth is going to hook into the bat'leth, and you can then push or pull it out of the way and come in with the second blade.
Most of the arguments for a bat'leth are "it could work if...". That doesn't really make a good design. Fighting defensively to tire out an opponent is not good general strategy. It might work in certain instances, but the odds are not in your favor if all you do is parry until exhaustion.
Someone armed with two mek'leths is going to win against a defensive bat'leth wielder in very short order. If he blocks to catch the first blade, the mek'leth is going to hook into the bat'leth, and you can then push or pull it out of the way and come in with the second blade.
Well, it works fine against the likes of Duras; that guy kept hacking against the supposedly unyielding metal of Worf's weapon like there was no tomorrow, making this a self-fulfilling prophesy...
I mean, Duras' sword clearly had little mass. So 1) it shouldn't have been able to pierce the opponent's blade or "blade" and 2) it should have been agile enough to get past that blade or "blade" with almost trivial ease; double fault for Duras! Yet Duras seemingly engaged in this duel solely out of a desire to do the honorable thing - so a bat'leth might be the perfect way to deal with idiots who live and therefore die by the honor code! Especially if the code requires said idiots to choose an inferior weapon and to employ an inferior tactic when they are at liberty to choose otherwise on both counts.
There are historical precedents for trussing up for a fight of endurance, and winning through passivity. The partial armor of a generic homme d'armes is functional protection for an active fighter, but the full armor of a real knight is there to allow the knight to ignore the activity of the opponent(s), to stand his ground with minimal physical effort, and to concentrate on delivering the superior blows of his long-reaching sword against any fool who tries to be active against the knight. It's actually a massive handicap in knight-to-knight fighting, but that type of engagement is a rare occurrence outside ceremonies.
Passivity also protects the dug-in infantryman, the submarine, and the burly bar brawler being accosted by a skinny karateka, placing the active attacker at a disadvantage soon enough. It's a tactic that easily backfires, but not if you can tell in advance what sort of tactics and weapons the enemy will be using. And the big point about Klingon bat'leth fighting is that it's all ceremonial, impractical... And highly predictable.
Timo Saloniemi
As I allowed for in my post, there may be times when passivity is beneficial. See Bruce Lee's philosophy of water. Fighting to exhaustion is a very risky proposition. You're gambling that your opponent will tire before you do, and that they're not skilled enough to break your defenses. Every strike is a risk, and the fact is that just holding the blade, feinting and maneuvering to ensure your defense actually works is tiring.
I can't see this tactic ever working in a mass battle. Send the front lines at each other, wait a couple hours (legendary Klingon endurance) for the first line of men to fall, repeat 40 times.
I can't see this tactic ever working in a mass battle. Send the front lines at each other, wait a couple hours (legendary Klingon endurance) for the first line of men to fall, repeat 40 times.
IrishNero
Commodore
Having worked with weapons of varying sorts for many years, and having taught martial arts for about as long as half of you have probably been alive, I can tell you that it is the practitioner that makes a weapon effective. If you practiced long and hard enough, and used the right techniques, you could probably become deadly with an unsharpened pencil.
I've never worked with an actual Bat'leth, but I can easily see some strengths to its design, and don't believe it would be any more difficult to develop a workable offense and defense with that weapon than many of the modern 'real' handheld weapons that are already available. A 3-sectional staff would be a great example. It's clumsy and doesn't give you a great deal of confidence as a weapon at first glance and with no experience, but it's extremely effective with the right practitioner.
I've never worked with an actual Bat'leth, but I can easily see some strengths to its design, and don't believe it would be any more difficult to develop a workable offense and defense with that weapon than many of the modern 'real' handheld weapons that are already available. A 3-sectional staff would be a great example. It's clumsy and doesn't give you a great deal of confidence as a weapon at first glance and with no experience, but it's extremely effective with the right practitioner.
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ISTR somebody wrote an article on this in the Star Trek Magazine a few years back...
I've thought for ages that the bat'leth is a poor weapon:
If you grip it by both handles, there's no way to keep the blade fixed in one direction. What you have essentially is a giant hinge. And it's not much better in sword mode, as all that metal would make it heavier than a sword, and unbalanced (and you can't hold it two-handed like an axe).
Does anyone remember the Andorian knives from the ENT episode "United"? They were kind of like one-handed bat'leths, used in pairs, one in each hand.
http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Ushaan-tor
If you grip it by both handles, there's no way to keep the blade fixed in one direction. What you have essentially is a giant hinge. And it's not much better in sword mode, as all that metal would make it heavier than a sword, and unbalanced (and you can't hold it two-handed like an axe).
Does anyone remember the Andorian knives from the ENT episode "United"? They were kind of like one-handed bat'leths, used in pairs, one in each hand.
http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Ushaan-tor
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