@Josiah Myles begone bot

William Hull well if we want to be correct first blood rules have been the leading in duelling since the 1200s. Mostly because you don't want to kill your opponent a lot of times for various reasons (legally it's still murder) So you might even go and ask why have swords that doesn't support this? That's relatively easy to answer as swords have been sidearms for self defence apart from duelling.

True--I meant more when swords lost their prominence on the battlefield to guns and bayonets, at which point dueling and sport were the most common uses. (Though officers were wearing ceremonial and ancestral swords as recently as World War 2, the sword as a primary weapon of warfare disappeared once the musket came along. It's like that old Warhammer 40k meme with the general sticking out of the futuristic tank saying, "Drive me closer--I want to hit them with my sword!") I actually had a question I was going to ask as an addendum about sword-wielding cavalry, but after a bit of research I learned that, after the advent of rifling (in the mid-19th century) which brought casualties by melee combat down from 1/3 of all combat deaths to under 1/100, cavalry didn't actually use swords to kill people; they were used more as a psychological tool to inspire allies/scare enemies (and bayonets were no longer used as a primary weapon, but instead basically became utility knives that could be snapped onto the end of your gun in a pinch). So, again, once melee combat disappeared from the battlefield, you're left with duels with first-blood rules, which benefit more from control and precision than they do from power, ergo "perfect balance is in the guard/hilt".

William Hull yeah but that's already at least the 1860s. Also rifling as an invention exited since 1470s only it wasn't economically viable. Repeating rifles also existed since the early 1500s but they were very expensive and only a few well decorated hunting firearms remain.

or for thrust oriented swords like rapiers or small swords, they don't need cutting power, but the control to precisely stab the opponent in the right spot.

William Hull exactly Perfectly fits the amateur concept created by Fancy Upstart fencist (Not serious about fencists but it does fit with the origin of that myth)

CarnalKid every time I see his jawline I work out for 72 hours straight

Or did he mean "bind" in the sense of when the blades collide? And not the thing when it comes to pushing another blade aside as in the blade are in prolonged contact? Because that would make sense then since a balance point closer to the tip would give the blade comparatively more mass and thus more kinetic energy when colliding with the other blade.

Now I can usually read, but...

Leverage, my dear friend, has a lot to do with the point of balance, because point of balance tends to affect leverage. Ya' see now if your POB is close to your pivot point, or is so then you will have really good leverage, however, if it is furthest away you will have worse leverage, or at least that is my theory based on light testing thus far.

However yet, more testing is to be done in future times.

think of a lever. the longer the lever the easier it is to move it. Levers will keep their balance at the base as it's the easiest to push. It'd be dumb to make a super heavy lever, as the whole point of it is to move it with ease. Look into it op.

That's not quite right, a cut must get past clothing and cut into the flesh, mass helps with this. I'm not totally sure how to put this but here I go anyways - mass without speed (finesse) is unusable but speed without mass is futile (no power in the hit) As such pure cutting blades have more mass at the tip and stabby swords have the point of balance back towards the hilt. If this were not true then why did they make swords like this for hundreds of years, it's not just about power you gotta look at the whole process.

Sigh where do I even begin....... Every single practical test done with ancient weapons disproves this. Literally. Every. Single. One. The problem with your argument is multi-fold: 1a. Your assumption claims that you can endlessly accelerate a hilt-balanced sword to make up for the lack of weight and therefore make up power. This is not true. There is a limit to how fast a human can physically swing his or her arm. It turns out that at the weight of most historical weapons even the most "unbalanced" weapons can achieve this maximum speed relatively easily. The only difference is the amount of energy needed to recover from misses, both hilt-balanced weapons and tip-balanced weapons achieve the same speeds in roughly the same time. 1b. Moreover we are talking about balance, not weight. A hilt-balanced sword will weigh just as much as a tip-balanced sword, and thus take just as much energy to accelerate to max speed. If anything the tip-balanced sword will actually take less energy to accelerate since the mass is out further and thus it "wants" to hit the target. 2. Constantly swinging a blade as hard and as fast as you can is really, really dumb. Even with a hilt-balanced blade you would be constantly throwing yourself off-balance when you miss. Therefore a "less balanced" weapon is still better since you don't need to accelerate it as much to hit just as hard 3. You are completely, and I mean completely, ignoring the principles of leverage. Medieval battle-axes, maces, and war hammers don't actually weigh more than Medieval swords. They all weight around 2-2.5 pounds on average (talking about one-handed weapons). So why do axes, maces, and war hammers hit harder? Leverage. If you put a weight at the end of a stick and hit something with it, you will hit harder than if you grabbed the weight directly and swung the stick. The same principles apply to swords. A sword with the point of balance closer to the tip with ALWAYS hit harder than one with the weight in the hilt. That's why practice swords are ridiculously hilt-heavy, because with all the weight in the hilt you'd have to hit really, really, really hard to do any real damage. To the point that in order to actually hurt someone with a practice sword you'd have to do one of those ridiculous full-body swings that throw you completely off-balance if you miss and cause you to fall flat on your ass. Obviously not idea in combat 4. And finally, and most importantly, the balance of the weapon affects two things, and ONLY two things: power and recovery. The two are inversely related: if the balance is geared towards power the weapon will hit hard but be hard to recover from misses and less nimble. If the balance is geared towards recovery the blade will recover from misses more easily and be overall more maneuverable, but won't hit as hard. This is really a summary of the points I made earlier. Speed has next to nothing to do with practical combat because again, most real weapons are light enough that it is super easy to achieve max speed and acceleration. Don't make comments like this if you've never actually held a weapon before in your life

Now I'll answer all your points and address them. 1a. The further away the center of mass of an object is from the person who is holding it the more force you have to do in order to move it around. Especially to bring it up. Affecting recovery. Also inertia will slow down the acceleration. You can still achieve max speed, but it'll take longer to achieve it. As you know, bursts of speed are very important. Tip heavy means stronger punch also because the tip travels faster than the hilt but it'll mean max speed is achieved later than a hilt heavy sword. You are right, however, that you cannot have infinite speed and as such from a certain point onwards you can add extra weight without losing speed. 1b. When talking about balance we're talking about centre of mass. As such your statement on how much energy you need to accelerate is not true because it depends on weight distribution and thus balance. The more weight there is further from your hand the less manouverable the object will be and the more force you'll need to gain acceleration. Just try it out with a hammer with a long handle. Pick it up on the heavy side and it'll be easy to move it around. Pick it up on the light side and it'll need more force to get it moving. Especially in recovery. Also you're assuming that inertia doesn't exist. And you're disregarding what you just stated in 1a about max speed. You'll achieve about the same speed, but get to that speed a bit later. 2. We agree on this until you talk about less balance being best. It depends on what is your sword's job. If you have a cutting sword you might want to have its balance further from the handle to add cutting power. If you want a more precise stabby sword you'll want a balance closer to the handle. 3.Again we agree and it throws me back to point number two. It depends on the purpose of the sword. Medieval battle-axes, maces, and war hammers were made to defeat armor. And as such they had to pack a big punch, thus being very tip heavy to hit with a stronger mementum. You seem to not understand that the total weight of the weapon is not really accounting for it's power. It's its weight distribution that accounts for it. Now, there are some swords tip heavy, like the falcata or the kopis if I'm not mistaken. They were short choppers. Because they were short, the center of mass wouldn't be very far from the point of leverage or handle and thus they'd remain quite manouverable. And ofc, their main purpose was to cut. A weapon like the gladius a mostly piercing sword is handle heavy. Point of balance close to the handle. Why? Precision. You could cut with it but it was not its main purpose. It was percise thrusts. When we talk about swords, especially medieval swords, we're not talking about swords made for chopping or slashing. We're talking about percision weapons. They were not made do defeat armor and are in fact the worse weapon to choose in a battlefield. Thus they weren't tip heavy. The point of balance of most medieval swords is closer to the handle because their purpose was not to defeat armor. They were meant to be somewhat easy to control (close to hilt balance) be able to do percision thrusts (close to hilt balance), to slash\cut ( close to tip balance) and to defend with as well (close to hilt balance). Making an overall closer to hilt balance around the first quarter of the blade. 4. You seem to be disregarding armor. You can hit armor hard or not so hard with a sword and it'll do little damage either way. Hence why tip heavy swords were not common in medieval europe. Plus you also seem to be disregarding the fact that humans are weak enough that a hard or not so hard hit with a proper fighting sword will to heavy damage. So you need nimble swords so you're able to move them around with minimum effort for attack and defence and they need to have a very sharp blade in order to cut effectively against unarmored\lightly armored opponents. With this in mind a good balance for a medieval longsword is a balance closer to the hilt at about a quarter\fifth blade lenght from the hilt. All this to say, yes there are good points of balance. It just depends on the purpose of the weapon you have at hand. You don't need to wield a blade to understand the physics behind it. And I know the weight of a sword because I've held a couple in my hand. I think you haven't really thought about the importance of weight distribution as you keep mentioning total weight of the weapon. It actually makes a huge difference where the weight is on an object. You do make some fair points and I think we're not in that much disagreement. I hope this clarifies where I stand on the issues.

It would be really cool if there was a sword with a weight in the middle of the blade that could slide up or down and snap into place either near the hilt or near the tip. Then you could fence better or conserve energy with one balance, and then change it at the right time to gain more cutting power.

I got a sparring playlist, you can look there! ^^

Was more interested in seeing just general sword movement. Modern sparring is just too attack focused and nobody ever seems to learn basic defense. Even so, in several attacks, the guy I assume to be you does rotate the sword around the center in order to achieve speed. You seem to feel that is the way to increase the speed, so I presume you understand this, at least from the feel of it. Everything is a trade-off with swords; as such, you can trade cutting power for point control and point speed increases by moving the center of balance closer to the hilt. Some blades are made for cutting, so you wouldn't do that with them. But the more pokey blades benefit from the balance being closer to the hilt. I add lead tape to the handles of all my swords before wrapping in tennis grip leather in order to improve point control and tip speed. You might suggest that I could just get my forearms stronger and do the same thing, but that isn't how it works. When my forearms get stronger, point control and speed increase even further because of how I balance weight my swords. I wouldn't press the issue, but you did write "debunked" in the title of the video. And that suggest certainty, and really you only offered the small part of one side of the issue and didn't even touch on the benefits.