All thrust attacks should be couchable

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It's not me you'd need to worry about, it's Isaac Newton. Though I'm sure NASA would probably also be entertained by you explaining how we've had the basic laws of motion wrong all this time :razz:
Okay, let's take this step by step. Let's say that you have a spear, and that I am standing 20 feet away from you. You raise the spear toward me (thrust) and you walk (advance). You aim the point the spear at my chest and i don't move or defend myself. You continue to walk (advance) toward me until the point of the spear touches my chest. You keep walking.

What is my current situation?
 
My point of contention is that the damage being dealt by such a (relatively) passive assault should be negligible compared to the damage brought about by an active, forceful attack. I understand that a sharpened spear point being pressed against someone's bare chest is likely going to draw blood -- but say that you're doing this against someone with thick gambeson or chainmail. There is simply not enough force behind such an assault to do any significant damage, whereas a forceful thrust with a spear is more likely to actually get through the armor and cause harm.
Also understand that in combat, no one is going to simply stand there and let themselves get poked by a spear that they can clearly see being pressed toward them. They'll get out of the way or block.
 
Holding out a piercing weapon and walking into an enemy should deal damage.
That not only sounds silly but would probably be OP if i have my 250 ft lance held out and just touch an opponent, i'd win every battle just being " a flag holder"
 
That not only sounds silly but would probably be OP if i have my 250 ft lance held out and just touch an opponent, i'd win every battle just being " a flag holder"
Sure, but what's your plan if they get by the pointy part of the 250 ft, now useless pike?
 
such a (relatively) passive assault
Are your leg muscles bigger than your arm muscles? Mine are. Put you weapon up (thrust) and walk (advance). This kills the bad guy. You can complain about armor, which is fine, but we have commoners tunics (And berserker leggings for a whopping 2 body armor!)
 
Okay, let's take this step by step. Let's say that you have a spear, and that I am standing 20 feet away from you. You raise the spear toward me (thrust) and you walk (advance). You aim the point the spear at my chest and i don't move or defend myself. You continue to walk (advance) toward me until the point of the spear touches my chest. You keep walking.

What is my current situation?
That depends. Breaking the skin with a knife (and functionally a spear is simply a knife on a stick) requires between 10 and 20 newtons to be applied, or roughly 1 - 2 kgf against the tip of the spear. If you're simply standing there, the only force you're exerting is against gravity (perpendicular to the spear). So all things being equal, the end result is you being pushed backwards at around the same speed I'm moving. In order to actually break the skin I require that 1 Kgf is generated somehow, either by you pushing against the spear or else accelerating the spear to generate the force against you thanks to inertia (theoretically I could also increase the mass of the spear, but that's somewhat unlikely).
Though even then this would just be piercing bare skin - if my intent was to wound I've been a bit silly aiming for the chest since it pretty quickly requires piercing through bone, which would require much more force than I could generate simply by walking. I'd be much better off lowering the spear to your stomach where I'd only need to worry about soft tissue. It's also implying bare skin, as soon as you start getting dressed the force required starts increasing (and thus the harder you need to push back or the faster/bigger I need to make the spear).
 
you are forgetting something, when you hit something, sorry for my not exceptional english, when you hit something hard say with a stick. When you hit, either you move the object as the energy is transferred. If not, the energy you get through the handle - increases.

th point isnt about penetrating anything ...

when you have a long stick in one hand, and do a forward movement with it, hit something, most of the energy transferred is from your hands holding the stick firm, so you get to absorb the recoil through your muscles. If youre weak, or the object is too resistant, then, there isnt much point to it.

If youre pretty strong that youre able to effectively wield a spear in one hand, it adds to the spears effect. When bracing, with both hands, or even against the ground vs say cavalry, the cavalry gets its own momentum used against it.

Couching, bracing helps add effective mass behind an attack. For example, a 90 kilo guy running at you with a 1,5-2m long stick, say 4 cm diameter, and you standing there, receiving the stick when said guy has it braced, not lounging, just ramming. Instead of the whole body impacting, the braced stick will transfer the energy from the 90 kilo guy running with minimal loss compared to it being held by 1 hand, or being thrust forward. I would not want to be on the receiving end of the stick.

Putting a long spewar/pike against ground, against things like horses to prevent the horse from falling on you and to not have to absorb the horse charging, but the ground doing it.

So again, a 90 kilo guy bracing a longer stick, running, or you being 90 kg running against a braced stick at a correct angle, what would happen ? Somebody woul be knocked out on the ground or on the way to hospital.
 
Couching, bracing helps add effective mass behind an attack. For example, a 90 kilo guy running at you with a 1,5-2m long stick, say 4 cm diameter, and you standing there, receiving the stick when said guy has it braced, not lounging, just ramming. Instead of the whole body impacting, the braced stick will transfer the energy from the 90 kilo guy running with minimal loss compared to it being held by 1 hand, or being thrust forward. I would not want to be on the receiving end of the stick.
Yes, the force exerted is a function of mass and acceleration. That's the problem though - the reason you thrust with the spear, or indeed swing a fist, is to increase acceleration. At a walking pace - which I'd define as slow enough to come to a dead stop without needing to slow down - the force generated is likely to be considerably less than the 1kgf minimum required (momentum would be close to zero). If I were to start running rather than walking it's much more likely I'll penetrate with the spear.
That's also not quite how couching works. Mass is an irrelevance - you hit with the spear tip, not a body slam. For humans it's pointless simply because you'll always (or at least should) be able to propel a few pounds of stick faster than you can propel a few kilo's of human plus stick, thus a swing will always hit with more force than simply walking or indeed running into someone. It works from horseback precisely because the horse can accelerate the spear much faster than a human can (and conversely, grounding the spear against a horse charge works for much the same reason, while instances of people casually strolling to their death on a grounded spear are mysteriously scarce).
 
Should work vice versa with horses too. Why if a horse runs at me at speed it does 500 damage but I can't deal 500 damage back if I hold my spear up.
Am I hearing this right? So all the medieval horsemen of the past who swung a sword or lance in the past should have had the same damage right back at them? Then there would have been no reason to be on a horse in past wars.

Usually those on horseback hit first and thus your dead or on the ground before your lance or sword touches them
 
Am I hearing this right? So all the medieval horsemen of the past who swung a sword or lance in the past should have had the same damage right back at them? Then there would have been no reason to be on a horse in past wars.

Usually those on horseback hit first and thus your dead or on the ground before your lance or sword touches them

Yes being on a horse does not mean you're immune to
Am I hearing this right? So all the medieval horsemen of the past who swung a sword or lance in the past should have had the same damage right back at them? Then there would have been no reason to be on a horse in past wars.

Usually those on horseback hit first and thus your dead or on the ground before your lance or sword touches them

If a horse is running at speed into a spear it would be impaled yes.
 
It's not me you'd need to worry about, it's Isaac Newton. Though I'm sure NASA would probably also be entertained by you explaining how we've had the basic laws of motion wrong all this time :razz:

Walking a couched spear into your opponent will definitely hurt him. It's just less powerful than say thrusting at him AND walking into him at the same time. If you've done any hema or sports fencing training at all you'll know most thrusts involve thrusting and stepping in right before your arm reaches full extension. (aka George Silver's 'True Time') Just thrusting with your arms gives you limited reach, speed and power such that you have to walk into your opponent's true time thrust range first which means you're moving in false time and will cop a thrust before you deliver your own thrust.
 
Mass is an irrelevance - you hit with the spear tip, not a body slam. For humans it's pointless simply because you'll always (or at least should) be able to propel a few pounds of stick faster than you can propel a few kilo's of human plus stick, thus a swing will always hit with more force than simply walking or indeed running into someone.

You seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of physics.
 
The same way you would couch a foil. Raise it up, lock your arm, walk it in. You just might need a little more shoulder muscle to keep it there.
You kind of already can do that in game. Just initiate a thrust, and then walk it in within the duration of the thrust animation. The duration of the thrust is a bit short i get it but even in real life you seldom hold a weapon in longpoint position for long durations anyways because the longpoint stance is not strong enough to resist lateral force applied to your weapon, meaning that it gives your opponent the opportunity to knock your weapon aside and attack you before you can recover. This is why fencers who want to thrust usually stand in the Pflug position which places the weapon in retracted position.

I do agree it might be a good idea to try the persistent weapon hitbox concept, so as to allow players to stand in the longpoint position for extended periods of time, if there's a way to properly model the parrying and counter cutting mechanics against weapons passively held in longpoint position in the game. This way we might finally have rapiers and longswords correctly represented in a video game.

Perhaps it might be a good idea to control the extension of the arm using the scrollwheel, but unlike games such as Mordhau where scrolling forward does a thrust for an instant the arm should stop moving when you stop scrolling and stay at a certain position depending on how much you've scrolled forward, such that you can walk an extended sword into your opponent for a thrust. And should you wish to retract your extended arm you have to scroll back to do so. Such a system would require weapon momentum to be modelled correctly and i suspect we don't have that kind of computational power for a game that's designed to depict large scale battles. Maybe some indie developer can make a game that focuses on sword duels and work from there.



 
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A pike/shieldwall push mechanic would be great. You could have something like the first line of troops holding the enemy shields in place by just fixing them with the points of their spears and pushing while the second line does the striking. But unfortunately this should be to advanced for this game.
 
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