#weapons asks

I haven't played any of the LoZ games, I'm afraid, so I can't offer any kind of in-depth analysis. From a quick image search...

Most of them look like recurves with some kind of ornamentation pasted on. (The shapes look more like modern compound bows, but you can get that shape with wood/traditional materials if you really really want and are more concerned with aesthetics than effectiveness.)

The bow of light clearly works Because Magic, as it doesn't look like anything that physics would have anything to do with.

Metal bows are fine, if you have the tech to make steel (or some kind of magic metal, I guess). See this link for a steel bow from 19th c. India, but they date from at least as early as 15th-16th c CE.

Metal isn't actually ideal though, even if some modern compound bows are made of it. (Most of those are made of fiberglass composite or carbon fiber, maaaaybe aluminum.)

Wood is lighter, and that's important. The more weight to the bow, the more it has to overcome to give the arrow any kind of velocity.

Anything that can hold tension without snapping, flex, and return to shape can be used to make a bow, but that doesn't mean it's going to be the most effective.

Most crossbow prods are made out of metal after a certain stage of technological development, but crossbows undergo different kinds of tension and release than a regular bow.

Well, the earliest crossbows are from quite far back! There’s an ancient Greek one that dates to at least 399 BCE (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kP8bqIgd5ro) and a Chinese one that came into common military use between 600-400 BCE (https://www.ancient.eu/article/1098/crossbows-in-ancient-chinese-warfare/) and they’re absolutely portable.

If your fantasy elves have any kind of technology developed at all, they could absolutely come up with one. (Possibly as an assistive device, hm, thoughts for later.)

The artillery version (arbalests) mostly came later.

Whether they should be running around a forest with one...? Less convinced.

The thing about crossbows is that they tend to be a lot slower than a recurve until the technology has gotten pretty far advanced.

You have to stop what you’re doing, drop the front to get your foot in the stirrup and hoist the string back with both hands/a tool or wind it back with a crank mechanism. After. Every. Shot.

That’s slow! That’s a bad thing if something is chasing you or your dinner is trying to escape!

(Hunting crossbows are totally a thing, but mostly for rich dudes with gamekeepers and dogs to chase the deer/whatever into range or, modernly, meant for stealth hunting from blinds, where you just hang out all morning waiting for something to come into range.)

Crossbows are largely useful for shooting things that are going to be in a predictable place long enough for you to get a second shot off if you miss the first one.

Hokay so:The answer is no for several reasons!

In short, these things were protective gear.  Anybody who needed them still wore them, probably longer/later than you imagine. 

I mean, mail went out for the most part when ballistics started being the primary weapon-of-choice, as it’s best against cuts and slashes (and is still used in some industries, e.g. butchers using mail gloves) and is time-consuming to make if it’s not even going to be super useful.

Crossbows, longbows, and then guns are very effective against mail.

But plate armor survived in regular use into the 1600s.  There’s an official term for the armorers firing a bullet at it to show the buyer that it would withstand shot - proofing - from which we get the term “bulletproof”.

Fancy generals and anyone who was busy making a target of themselves on the back of a tall horse wore it longer, both because they were richer and because it would actually stop bullets from a distance even into the 18th c., because they for sure weren’t on the front lines facing fire at close range.

But plate armor’s always been expensive, esp. custom-fitted stuff, and by the time that the metal industry got so that it was cheap enough to make it in bulk, they’d got good enough at guns to make it not worth the weight to issue to foot-soldiers generally.

Foot-soldiers did still buy cheap metal back- and breastplates up through the Civil War if they were willing to carry the weight, but it’s a lot to carry on a long march and there’s a history of piles of it abandoned on the side of the road.  Plus it was cheap and thus generally shitty.

WW1 was the death of the cavalry, and thus the death of plate armor by way of sheets of metal.

Then Stephanie Kwolek and her clever fellow scientists invented ballistic cloth…

My tumblr name: http://hsavinien.tumblr.com My AO3 name: http://archiveofourown.org/users/hsavinien Where you can find my work: The above places I am offering: * Weapon rant (see:http://hsavinien.tumblr.com/weapon_rants) - bullet pointed historical infodump about a medieval weapon (and its use in the Tolkien movies, if desired), minimum bid $10

Onto the topic at hand, I woke up this morning and spent a bit over an hour thinking about custom sword design.

Initially I started with something like an arming sword / side sword in mind so I:

Defined an axis system, failure mechanisms (bending at hilt, bending around point of contact, shear at point of contact, twist from improper edge alignment), geometric variables from thickness and width to longitudinal (hilt to tip) taper, edge grind depth (assuming flat chisel grind for simplicity), hollow grind radius e.t.c. and finally different load cases for impacts from edge to edge (point force load) to a strike against something large like a chest plate or shield (Distributed load). While maintaining the inflection point for vibration in the handle, but also i loath vibrations.

It was at this point that my hyperfixation ran out so tl:dr, do you have some sources for design guidelines for swords (preferably straight European designs) ?

And yeah I did want to try go at it myself first so didn’t even check out Shad/Skall but now I’m bored with myself and need a boop on the snoot.

Also thanks for reading all the way through my confused rant now😏