Case Study: SoCal 2018 Sword and Buckler
I’ve always been a big advocate of evaluating tournaments in as objective a manner as possible, so I’m going to take a crack at it. […]
Articles by Sean Franklin
For the paranoid and the pansies: What is real risk?
Something that a lot of people are really bad at (other than HEMA) is evaluating risk. This isn’t just in relation to martial arts, it’s everything in your life. But I don’t care about the rest of your life, I just want you to make smarter HEMA decisions.
Scalability: Why bugs are small and tournament rulesets are hard
I bet you never imagined a connection between why bugs are small and why large tournaments are run a certain way. But here we are.
What is Force Dispersion? And how it keeps you safe from swords.
How our gear keeps us safe is an important topic, especially if we ever want to make it safer!
Impact, Impulse, and Momentum
Sometimes people talk about how much ‘force’ something hits with. Unfortunately, they use the same term to describe average force, peak force, and impulse.
Is It Important To Weigh Target Values?
Tournament organizers gave different point values for different targets, and you’ll never guess what happened next!
The Myth of Control
Why going at high intensity and having perfect control is not physically possible, no matter how much we want it to be.
Hanging Targets is cheating!
Hanging targets for test cutting doesn’t give any sort of realistic impression of what a sword would actually do. Take my word for it, or read to find out why.
Physics, Push-Pull with the longsword, bad cuts…. and you!
If you have had (good) formal instruction on longsword cutting mechanics, you would have been informed that you don’t want to create a levering action between your two hands. Here’s why.
Non Zero-Sum Concepts in Tournament Rulesets
The more I think about tournament rules, the more it becomes apparent to me that a zero-sum solution to scoring will never get us the results we want. Also: lemon pie.