Intergalactic Summit

This is the shortest and bloodiest sword fight I ever saw! Or not saw, but heard about. I always imagined duels like that when you deflect strikes of each other with sword for about an hour, and then it stops when someone gets a scratch finally, and you were just standing there and... cutting each other?

Uh ... not really just standing there, Ms. Hanaya. I provoked her into charging me, then met her charge. Both of us committed fully. We didn't really get out of the first exchange.

So, think about a good holovid sword fight. Typically what you're seeing there is a plotted-out, choreographed series of moves and counter-moves. To the degree that those are "real" moves, they're idealized-- they're what fighters might do if they had all the time they needed to think about what they were doing.

Now pull up a video of a fencing sporting event (doesn't really matter which style, unless you find somebody practicing something really archaic, like sword-and-board). Watch how each of the exchanges goes-- pretty fast, right? Only, this is a sporting event, with rules and scoring. There might even be places and ways to hit the other side that don't award any points at all.

Now imagine that sporting event, with every touch that applies even a little bit of pressure opening a bleeding wound.

A sword's not a piece of sporting equipment; it's an ancient weapon, like a gun. Its reach is pretty limited, so opponents can circle around each other without engaging, and maybe test each others' defenses without committing fully, but it's pretty likely that the first serious exchange will be the last.

Knives are all the more so. As a rule, they're not much for defense. I'm a little specialized in them (there's some history there), but I remember from somewhere a list of rules of knife fighting. Maybe I picked them up at the State War Academy? They're definitely not from my family's monastery. They're generally pretty good advice, though.

1. Never get in a knife fight.

2. Never get in a knife fight with anyone smaller or quicker than you are. (I like this one. I'm smaller and quicker than most people. Only, Ms. Kim is about as small and quick as I am.)

3. If you get in a knife fight, you will get cut.

(There might have been others; if so, I don't remember them.)

This bout was really right on the edge between a sword and knife fight, Ms. Kim with a pair of Caldari short swords and me with a pair of monk longknives. (Like most monk weapons, they're descended from a tool: in this case, a fish filleting knife.) The difference in length wasn't a lot.

That said, yeah, we could probably have fenced around and tested each other a little if we'd been a bit less aggressive, but I don't think either of us was willing to concede momentum to the other. And it wasn't even as deadly as it had the potential to be. We both missed our initial strikes.

It never ceases to amaze how people insist on using archaic and outdated weapons, when they clearly don't even know how to use them properly. Is it a "cool" thing? I keep hearing about "cool" but I'm too old to figure out what it is or what purpose it serves.

The purpose of 'cool' is to look totally 'rad' and 'awesome' and impress the audience.

Also, what kind of military outfit doesn't even teach their operatives how to knife-fight properly? It's part of the whole CQC course package!

Though knife-fighting as taught in the RMS and, as I understand it, any military organisation worth a damn, usually involved grapples. Alot of grapples.

Now that sounds interesting! Can you tell us a little about it, my lord? It sounds like the sort of thing the children of certain Holders would be trained at?

Although it seems like that sort of thing could prune a family tree pretty quickly (pre-cloning, anyway)....

To be fair, if you're down to a knife on a modern battlefield, you're probably screwed anyways. But, yeah, it's still taught in distilled form to most any infantry contingent, albeit as a last resort method of self-defense. Other, more specialized, outfits make far more use of such, and get more complete training in the use of blades as offensive implements, typically for the purpose of removing individual targets quietly.

Conventionally, your point holds true. That said, I hear that a DUSTer's Nova Knife is among his most valuable (and used) implements.

I'll have to consult with Templar Vadam to know more.

I'm surprised that people think this was a short fight, most hand to hand combat is over within 3 to 30 seconds. I guess we're all used to holovids portraying epic duels between Raata swordsmen that go on forever.

Generally, it is last resort. However, for marine companies, CQC training is given more importance due to the sort of environment the marines will find themselves operating in most often: starship interiors. Plenty of hallways, corridors, dead angles and etc. there. It's easy to turn a corner to run right into a hostile, be it boarders or defenders, right in your face.

So we need to learn to defend ourselves in situations like these with anything at hand, from our assault rifles, SMGs, shotguns, knives, E-tools, fists, etc.

It is rare to hear of boarding on capsuleer vessels, I must point out, because we are just very damn efficient at killing other ships, very few baseliner vessels, which tend to carry marines if military or pirate, even bother trying.

Woe to the ship's crew without hand-to-hand training when the Blood Raiders board.