Articles by Sean Franklin

About Sean Franklin

Sean has a Bachelor's Degree in Mechatronic Systems Engineering, and is currently employed as a Controls Engineer. He is passionate about developing more analytical ways to view sword fighting, wishing to develop evidence based standards for protective gear and rule sets informed by tournament statistics. His martial arts history includes competitive success, medaling in international competitions for Longsword, Messer, Grappling, Rapier, and Cutting. In addition to competition Sean has been invited to instruct at a number of events across North America and Europe. For non-STEMey coaching topics Sean posts on https://www.swordstuff.blog/

Data Mining – CombatCon Longsword

July 31, 2018 Sean Franklin 0

How has the CombatCon Longsword tournament changed year over year? We crunch the numbers and see.

Data Mining – SoCal Swordfight Longsword

July 31, 2018 Sean Franklin 0

How has the SoCal Longsword tournament changed year over year? We crunch the numbers and see.

Force Vector: More than a science-ey sounding name

July 25, 2018 Sean Franklin 0

I’m guessing most probably don’t care too much about what the difference between a vector and a scalar is. Trust me, it can be a helpful tool for learning to beat people up.

Case Study: SoCal 2018 Sword and Buckler

July 18, 2018 Sean Franklin 0

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. […]

For the paranoid and the pansies: What is real risk?

July 11, 2018 Sean Franklin 0

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

July 4, 2018 Sean Franklin 0

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.

June 27, 2018 Sean Franklin 0

How our gear keeps us safe is an important topic, especially if we ever want to make it safer!

Impact, Impulse, and Momentum

June 20, 2018 Sean Franklin 0

Sometimes people talk about how much ‘force’ something hits with. Unfortunately, they use the same term to describe average force, peak force, and impulse.