First of all, the fact that Katana’s are folded has absolutely nothing to do with their specialization as cutting (slicing if you will) weapons. Folding metal was done to hemogenize the impurities in the steel, a necessary step in Japan due to their poor quality iron. Similar methods (pattern welding for example) were employed in Europe during the migration era but were not used later as improvements in manufacturing of steels made the techniques a waste of time. Regardless, the function of the weapon will have a lot more to do with the design and geometry of the blade and hilt than with it’s material makeup.
As opposed to what? Standing there and getting hit? When someone swigs a sword at you there are only so many basic things you can do (when you get down to technique the possibilities are many, but there are only a few basic methods) to deal with the problem. You can parry and redirect the force of the blow away from it’s intended target. You can evade the blow with good footwork. You can prevent the blow by out-timing your opponent.
I’d wager good money that both European and Asian martial arts would have very near the same emphasis on each of these tactical options.
What does “more solid than the norm” mean? If anything harder would mean more brittle and IT would be more likely to break than a sword made of softer steel.
Except that when asked to clarifiy the poster stuck to his bit of poetic license portraying as accurate fact.
If anyone’s still interested, the Mythbusters special tonight is supposed to tackle, inter alia, the question of whether a sword can cut another sword.
For future reference, I cannot promise that I will always respond to a question asked about a post I made 6 months earlier.
Upon glancing over my post, it looks as if you discern it correctly. My post was just a quick (too quick in retrospect) somewhat wild assed guess. Much research, calculations, and material testing and prototype testing would need to be performed in order to begin optimizing the sword.
I am well educated in materials science but not in sword dynamics.
I suspect that most or all epoxy resins may be too brittle, but I’m not certain since I don’t know the sword specs such as bending modulus and whatnot. Also, carbon fibers do not especially hold up well to heavy dynamic forces. Perhaps, Kevlar® fibers would work better.
Diamonds are well-suited for heavy abrasive applications, but not heavy dynamics. Assuming the user isn’t trying to saw through armor, a diamond-tipped blade probably doesn’t provide any noticeable advantage over - say - a tungsten carbide tipped blade. Though, both are likely too brittle for the application.
I can only speculate, but the most superior material for a sword may be a carbon nanotube reinforced (high strength and high modulus) metal matrix. A good fiber/nanotube reinforced plastic provides a better specific strength/mod, but probably isn’t best for the sword application due to the dynamics involved.
My spouse had a titanium rod over a foot long substituting for the bones of his calf for 40 years of his life (I still have the rod - it survived the cremation process). He set off metal detectors like Wolverine does. I’m not sure how modern metal detectors work, but apparently they can detect significant amount of titanium.
