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 11 hours ago 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 9 hours ago 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 9 hours ago 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 3 hours ago by DeanF