Should a melee spear really do less damage than a thrown spear?

[williams_482]

6 hours ago, Rainbow Fresh said:

The limiting factor is supposed to be that you lose the spear in the process (I think you can pick it back up? But that's assuming you are not being chased down by a bear or other, running for your life). If the target isn't dead after the first throw, you might have a problem. Whereas with melee attacks you can keep poking until the job is done.

The solution that most experienced players adopt is to cary 3-6 spears, throwing all but the last and looking to circle around some obstacle (like a cluster of trees or a small pond) to pick up the thrown spears and repeat. Running around an obstacle is a good strategy anyway against bears because the player handles changes of direction far better than animals will, so the chance to recover thrown weapons is a bonus. 

Carrying all those spears means you can't carry as much other stuff, but that's an acceptable cost if it wins you an otherwise fatal fight. 

[Steel General]

Spears are the real-life cheat-code of melee conflict, the first choice from hunters to soldiers, still being issued in WW1, and the bayonet really brings it all the way to WW2. Even in medieval warfare where swords were standard issue, they mostly started with spears and didn't switch to the sword until they no longer had room to wield a spear. The sword wasn't even a viable weapon against spears until it could be paired with shields, and even then the shield was the primary weapon, because with it you could press your opponents into a helpless ball and stab a sword between the shields - the only real defense against a shield press is to have shields just as sturdy and press back, and then spears become useful for everyone behind the front. (While shields were being used with spears before swords existed, they weren't sturdy enough for a press.)

Trying to fit spears to the performance of other melee weapons is a sacrifice of realism for the sake of gameplay from the beginning. The only drawback is crowding, and even then you can just grip the shaft closer to the head unless you're also backed up to a wall.

And there is no realism in having bronze through steel do different damages - the only difference should be durability.

19 hours ago, Teh Pizza Lady said:

For rough comparison:
A ~4 kg spear thrust at ~10 m/s is ~200 J of energy. If the spear is thrusted much slower (because 10m/s is a generous speed!) then the number goes even lower.

KE = 1/2 * 4 * 10^2 = 200 J

A thrown spear in realistic human ranges (~25–35 m/s) is:
KE = 1/2 * 4 * 30^2 ≈ 1800 J

The easiest fix to this math is to add the wielder's mass to that of the spear in the thrust: KE = 1/2 * 80 * 10^2 = 4000 J

The throw is faster than the thrust because at range it costs nothing to recover balance, but putting that much force into a melee thrust would incur a moment of vulnerability. If a recovery (say, 1/2 second of drunk-style movement and passive shield-use) were added to the throw then people wouldn't do it at point-blank range so often.

[Teh Pizza Lady]

1 hour ago, Steel General said:

The easiest fix to this math is to add the wielder's mass to that of the spear in the thrust: KE = 1/2 * 80 * 10^2 = 4000 J

every source I could find said that wasn't feasible unless the wielder was charging with the spear. The thrust would only carry the mass of the arms used to thrust it.

Also the speed would be slower around 3-4 m/s which is the average speed of a human male running with both hands occupied.

KE = 1/2 * 80 * 3.5^2 = 490 J

Even if it were a full fencing thrust, not all of the weight of the wielder would transfer. I would guesstimate somewhere between 30-40kg and a higher speed of maybe 6m/s instead. Plugging that in we get:

KE = 1/2 * 35 * 6^2 = 630 J

Both numbers are still lower than the thrown spear, which even if it slowed to 20m/s would still have 800 J of KE behind it at the moment of impact.

KE = 1/2 * 4 * 20^2 = 800 J

That's a lot of energy

Edited Tuesday at 06:30 PM by Teh Pizza Lady
clicked submit too early

[LadyWYT]

1 hour ago, Steel General said:

The sword wasn't even a viable weapon against spears until it could be paired with shields

Really depends on the sword. For the most part swords are sidearms and status symbols, but if you want to get really technical you have cases like the zweihander, which were meant for creating openings in pike formations in addition to just being a handy way to control space against multiple opponents. The main advantage of a spear is the reach, but once the opponent gets past the pointy end the weapon loses a lot of effectiveness.

 

[Teh Pizza Lady]

11 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

Really depends on the sword. For the most part swords are sidearms and status symbols, but if you want to get really technical you have cases like the zweihander, which were meant for creating openings in pike formations in addition to just being a handy way to control space against multiple opponents. The main advantage of a spear is the reach, but once the opponent gets past the pointy end the weapon loses a lot of effectiveness.

 

hard to poke when the poking bit is pointing in the wrong direction, eh?

[Steel General]

19 minutes ago, Teh Pizza Lady said:

every source I could find said that wasn't feasible unless the wielder was charging with the spear. The thrust would only carry the mass of the arms used to thrust it.

Also the speed would be slower around 3-4 m/s which is the average speed of a human male running with both hands occupied.

That run would still end in a hard thrust - the speed of the charge is added to it, not substituted for it. The chief benefit of the charge is in the momentum delivered to the body, not the kinetic energy delivered through the weapon (though a clean run-through is rarely disappointing, it's not the expectation).

21 minutes ago, Teh Pizza Lady said:

Even if it were a full fencing thrust, not all of the weight of the wielder would transfer. I would guesstimate somewhere between 30-40kg and a higher speed of maybe 6m/s instead.

I'm not even sure what force diagram would lead to this result, except to imagine that the wielder's arm is collapsing or grip is slipping during the impact, and that's user error

It's easy to test for yourself: grab a stick, face a sturdy wall, and thrust - if you can overbalance yourself backwards with that impact, then a good portion of your body's mass was in it (as a lever with the ground as the fulcrum), not just the arm (which would entirely contain the recoil if that was the only mass involved in the strike), and if you set yourself to not overbalance then much more mass is in it. If you step into the thrust with your body extending and the impact transfers all the way through your feet to the ground then your whole mass was in the impact - which is to say, had the wall dodged you would have been thrown off-balance, because all your mass is moving with that thrust.

25 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

The main advantage of a spear is the reach, but once the opponent gets past the pointy end the weapon loses a lot of effectiveness.

Depends on maneuvering room - if the spear-wielder is part of a formation then they need to drop that and draw a short sword. Otherwise, the haft makes a fine staff for bashing, and shortening the grip, while an imperfect balance, will sure surprise someone who thinks they've gotten past the problem. When the spear is too long for those tactics it's mostly not used outside of a formation, so they make it long enough that getting past the first point still leaves two more to go to get to the front line.

[Kreeate]

Here's a simple real world exercise to observe the different damage aspects of a spear.

 

1. Have a wooden target at say 25 feet away.

2. Take spear No.1 and throw it at the target.

3. Take spear No. 2 and walk up to the target. Stop 2 feet away.  Thrust as hard as you can with spear No. 2.

4. Take spear No. 3 and walk right up to the target and place the tip of the spear on the target. Now push as hard as you can.

 

Want to guess which spear penetrated the most?

Edited Tuesday at 08:21 PM by Kreeate
typo

[LeviticusFox]

You can impart more energy in a single moment into a thrown spear because the human body is very good at throwing things, but when you stab something you can follow through and continue applying force because you're still holding it, that matters a lot for fleshy soft targets. Any argument you could make that one should do more damage than the other comes down to sematics like how the spear is designed, how stong the person using it is, if they're good at throwing, if the target you're throwing at is below or above you and the spear gets extra energy from gravity, etc.
The weirdos spewing formulas and talking to chatGPT have totally lost the plot lol

Edited Tuesday at 08:31 PM by LeviticusFox

[DeanF]

7 hours ago, Teh Pizza Lady said:

every source I could find said that wasn't feasible unless the wielder was charging with the spear. The thrust would only carry the mass of the arms used to thrust it.

Also the speed would be slower around 3-4 m/s which is the average speed of a human male running with both hands occupied.

KE = 1/2 * 80 * 3.5^2 = 490 J

Even if it were a full fencing thrust, not all of the weight of the wielder would transfer. I would guesstimate somewhere between 30-40kg and a higher speed of maybe 6m/s instead. Plugging that in we get:

KE = 1/2 * 35 * 6^2 = 630 J

Both numbers are still lower than the thrown spear, which even if it slowed to 20m/s would still have 800 J of KE behind it at the moment of impact.

KE = 1/2 * 4 * 20^2 = 800 J

That's a lot of energy

I've been digging around in experimental archaeology papers where folks attack ballistic gelatin with spears, and I think we were probably both wrong.  Or less accurately, we were both partially right.

But to be clear, you are still inappropriately using KE = mv^2 to model a thrust spear.  I have explained why, even if you refuse to hear it.  That only works for the thrown spear, because it is a projectile, a closed system.  But a thrust spear is an open system, with the wielder shoving more energy into the target over time, so you have to look at the total work, W = ∫F dxW.  A thrust spear will deliver more energy to a target than a thrown spear.  But the thing is, even though you did the math wrong your conclusion isn't wrong.  Or at least no more wrong than mine was.

As I said quite a while ago, terminal ballistics gets complicated... and messy.  The method of energy delivery matters.  For instance, a pointy projectile will penetrate deeper than a blunt projectile of similar energy.  Ah, but that blunt projectile might slow more and actually stop inside the target, thus transferring all of it's energy to the target, whereas the pointy projectile passes completely through the target and dumps less energy into it in the process because it wastes some to fly on uselessly after it leaves the target.  A thrown baseball and an arrow have remarkably similar kinetic energy, but one is going to penetrate a lot better than the other.  Lots of factors matter.

Messy.

So, what is "damage"?  Total energy?  No, probably not, which is unfortunate for the thrust spear.  Total tissue disruption?  Might be on to something, but you could disrupt a lot of non-vital tissue without degrading the target much.  Depth of penetration?  Again, partially- the deeper you penetrate the more likely you are to hit a vital structure.  The FBI though that depth of penetration was the answer after the Miami Shootout, leading to their adoption of 10mm handguns, but they have now reversed themselves on that and gone back to 9mm.  (Firearms terminal ballistics is one of my areas.)  Another thought experiment- would you rather be impaled all the way through by a smallsword with it's 1.5cm-wide blade, or cleaved halfway through by a battleaxe?  And which has "better penetration"?

So, back to experimental archaeology.

Bottom line- it turns out that thrown spears do penetrate very well, even though they have less energy.  Because energy application over very short timescales helps for penetration, and that's what a thrown spear does- less total energy, but it is applied nearly instantaneously.  And that equates to penetration because of the high impulse, J = F dt.  (I think that I mentioned something like that earlier?)

The thrust spear will deliver more total energy, but more slowly, so it has less impulse and doesn't punch deeply very quickly.  You can get a thrust spear to penetrate deeply, but it takes a while of applying the force, and also depends upon the medium- some are easier than others.  But it is still more total energy, so for instance the thrust spear will push the target back much further than a thrown spear will.  W = F*d, and the thrust spear does a lot more work.  And if the target is pushed against something that doesn't move so that none of the energy is wasted moving the target and can instead get put into penetration, then the thrust spear will generally out-penetrate the thrown one.  Well, depending upon the medium.

So, my one comment that perhaps the thrust spear just needs more knockback may have been wisdom from the mouths of babes.  You can push with a thrust spear in a way that you cannot with a swung sword, for instance.

Which spear penetrates better also depends upon what you are trying to penetrate.  Naked flesh (i.e. ballistic gelatin) is different than leather, which is different than plate.  Sometimes a thrown spear works better and sometimes a thrust one does.  Generally, the thrown spear outperforms the thrust one against harder targets, like armor, and less against naked flesh, where the thrust spear can penetrate very well pretty quickly.  As I said, the medium matters.

And here's a point that neither of us brought up: precision.  The thrown spears often missed the target entirely, whereas thrust spears never seemed to.  Recall that I mentioned that penetration does sort of matter because you have to reach a vital structure?  Well, shot placement matters too when trying to hit a vital structure, and it turns out that the thrust spear is much more precise.  The thrust spears hit the center of the gelatin blocks much more reliably than the thrown ones, and thus might more reliably target vital structures like heart or lungs.

So... it's complex.

This is all unfortunately spread out over many different papers, and yes there is a lot of my interpretation in that summation above.  There is no paper that I can find that directly compares them.

Edited yesterday at 01:42 AM by DeanF

[DeanF]

I've been digging around more in the experimental archaeology literature, and I found some interesting things.  I was motivated to get to the answer, and I learned a lot.  I apologize, though, because these papers are are behind paywalls for most people- I get access through my organization's library account.

First, there was a flawed study that would seem to show what Pizza Lady alleges.  See: Ballistic Study Tackles Kinetic Energy Values of Paleolithic Weaponry, Archaeometry, Coppe et al. (2019)

This study does directly compare thrown spears versus spear thrusts using a ballistic pendulum, and they got data that seems to roughly agree with Pizza Lady.  But it turns out that their methodology was flawed.  When the spear thrust was tested, they did so with the spear impacting the pendulum at the extreme end of the thrust.  So someone was just barely tapping the pendulum with the spear held out as far as it could reach.  It had no follow through as a human would actually use in real life.  Which meant that their results corresponded well with KE=mv^2.  Their values for the thrust spear were something like 2-5 J, which is simply ridiculous because there is tons of data on human punches from the athletic literature and a human male can punch 200-500 J, with truly elite professionals reaching 1200 J.  It is ridiculous to believe that a spear thrust would generate so much less.  So they were widely criticized for this.  The exact words used in some critiques were that they "failed to replicate the full thrust event".

So this is the sort of things you get when non-physicists try to play with ballistic pendulums or use equations that they don't fully understand.

But studies like this (there were other earlier ones) motivated other investigators to do it correctly, and those papers are out there, too.  So these are not theoretical values derived from formulas- they are actual measured results using pressure plates, ballistic pendulums, and ballistic gelatin.  And they used the correct technique, with follow-through on the spear thrusts.  See:  Early Spears as Thrusting Weapons: Isolating Force and Impact Velocities in Human Performance Trials, Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, Milks, Champion et al. (2016).  These investigators used military personnel who had had bayonet training, so that they would thrust correctly.

And it turns out that thrown spears and spear thrusts have about the same energy. 

From all of these various papers:

• A typical realistically thrown spear mustered 70-180 J.  With poor aim and maximal effort they got more like 100-200 J.  And there were outliers up to 400 J.
• A spear thrust generally generated 100-400 J.  But the spear thrust more reliably attained the higher end of the scale, rather than 400 J being such an outlier.

But the really good studies tend not to focus on Joules; they show Force-Time curves instead, and that tells us some things.  Please see the first figure, attached.  Disclaimer- all of these graphs were AI-generated and are idealized to demonstrate the concept, though the numbers do correspond roughly with the various studies.

So even though the total energy is about the same, the thrown spear applies a very high force for a very brief time, whereas a spear thrust applies a lower but more constant force over a much longer period of time.  And this has implications that I alluded to in prior posts.

Frist, I have to make a correction about one of those earlier posts of mine.  I used the word impulse, but I used it incorrectly.  I should have said peak force instead.

On the graph, peak force is obvious, since it is the highest point on the curves- very high for the thrown spear and lower for the spear thrust.  In layman's terms peak force translates into armor penetration.  But impulse is represented as the area under the Force-Time curve, and is the amount of momentum change inflicted upon the target.  Or in layman's terms impulse is how much "knockback" the strike produces.

Obviously, the spear thrust has much higher impulse than the thrown spear, whereas the thrown spear has a much higher peak force.

As I said, the area under the Force-Time curve is impulse (N*s).  But Force x Distance is work (N*m = J), and the area under a Force-Distance curve is energy delivered to the target (also J).  Please see the second figure, attached.  The important point is that with good technique and a long follow-through, the spear thrust can exceed the energy delivered by the thrown spear.  This is why the spear thrust would more reliably produce energies at the higher end of the scale.  That being said, it is easy to understand why an ideal long thrust might not happen reliably in a real fight- the enemy gets a vote.  The thrust spear will also often penetrate more deeply than the thrown spear, but only assuming an unarmored target or one with armor that the thrust can penetrate fairly easily.  Please see the third figure, attached.

Because that is the strength of the thrown spear- armor penetration.  That's what the high peak force means.  It will punch through armor.

But regarding an unarmored target, well, skin fails at about 10-30 MPa (thickness varies by body location).  That's a low bar, and the spear thrust will penetrate skin easily.  Ergo, excellent penetration against unarmored targets.

Please see the fourth figure, attached.  Assuming that a person thrusting a spear can maintain the thrust for at least 150 milliseconds or so, penetration will usually be deeper than for the thrown spear.  But that's only against the bare skin of an unarmored target, or at least one with light armor that the spear penetrates easily.  The thrown spear will better penetrate through heavier armor because of the high peak force, whereas the spear thrust might not penetrate at all if the armor is heavy enough.  Note though that "knockback" probably still applies even without armor penetration.

But this should all demonstrate why penetration is governed by pressure and work, not just kinetic energy.

Edited 2 hours ago by DeanF

[Teh Pizza Lady]

On 4/28/2026 at 3:25 PM, LeviticusFox said:

You can impart more energy in a single moment into a thrown spear because the human body is very good at throwing things, but when you stab something you can follow through and continue applying force because you're still holding it, that matters a lot for fleshy soft targets. Any argument you could make that one should do more damage than the other comes down to sematics like how the spear is designed, how stong the person using it is, if they're good at throwing, if the target you're throwing at is below or above you and the spear gets extra energy from gravity, etc.

Any argument you could make for thrusting a spear into the side of a bear should come with the requirement that it be made while actually thrusting a spear into the side of a bear in real life. Then and only then you will understand why throwing > thrusting.

I have to side with the devs on this one, no matter what the graphs say. The human body isn't a hydraulic press. It's a bag of fleshy snacks held together with bony toothpicks all wrapped up in a convenient wrapper called clothing and armor. A mere hindrance to the determined predator, really.

On 4/28/2026 at 3:25 PM, LeviticusFox said:

The weirdos spewing formulas and talking to chatGPT have totally lost the plot lol

to be perfectly fair, he started it.

 

EDIT:

@DeanF

After a thorough review of your posts, I can confirm that you are right.

But only when the spear is thrust by a rigid robot with zero flex or give at an unarmored, stationary, cooperative target that doesn't move, fight back, or have opinions about being stabbed...like a bear

Your physics are sound when the conditions are ideal in a lab.

However in a real encounter, the conditions will never be ideal. The target has a vote, your body is not a rigid force-delivery machine (your grip slips or shifts, your elbows flex, your shoulder rotates to absorb recoil; the body is full of involuntary shock absorption systems that cannot be overridden even with perfect technique), and a thrown spear just simply... does not care about ANY of that. Because it can't. Because you already threw it as hard as you could.

It's a video game and the number for throwing a spear simply is higher because you are literally throwing away your weapon after a lengthy wind-up and aiming period. It just feels better. When the thrown damage was nerfed, the player base rioted.

Also I threw a homemade spear at a barn once. It stuck in the wooden pole. I got in trouble. Why did I throw the spear? Because it didn't hurt my hands like stabbing the pole did and it was an imaginary enemy that I just couldn't damage otherwise because thrusting the spear just didn't deal the same kinetic force as throwing it did.

Idk what else to tell you, dude.

Edited 40 minutes ago by Teh Pizza Lady