"somewhat more force" ???

I don't think you understand the physics of the bat swing very well. You can swing a bat with exponentially more force than you can swing your own fist.

i think you seriously udnerestimate the amount of force which full baseball swing generates

Well for starters I said somewhat more force than a kick. Obviously A-rod's bat swing is going to be substantially different than mine in terms of how much stronger it is than our respective kicks. But that doesn't change anything else in my argument, and it doesn't change the fact that a knife is a far easier and more efficient weapon to kill someone with.

Remember equal skill, equal opponents. Despite how hard you think you swing a bat, you're not A-rod, etc. 1 bat strike vs as many knife strikes as I can get in after that. You'd seriously take this?

but how much force is at the tip of the bat vs at the mid point of the bat?

Again it doesn't matter. A full baseball swing is predictable and can be absorbed/deflected avoided for starters. #1, you aren't going to get a full baseball swing in; it's not like the knife person is going to stand at your optimal fighting range and take bat blows. It's incredibly easy to close range in any sort of combat and once you do that, the bat is essentially useless while the knife is still fatal.

There have been demonstrations done by the cops showing that from a good ways away, a fast guy with a knife can close on a prepared and ready cop and stab him an insane number of times before the cop can draw and successfully fire.

Of course this isn't precisely analogous, but it does get across how incredibly quick a close can be. Bat guys thinking they will always be able to successfully stop a close with a full power swing are wishfully thinking. A motivated guy with any athletic ability can cover ground FAST.

Just as important, too, is that a lot of this is about perception speed and reaction speed and timing. That is, who has the initiative at any point in time. Neither party can count on their reactions being flawless, or their perceptual speed or timing.

But it seems this is being argued as if the bat guy will always be a beat ahead and land a completely crushing blow successfully, and will never get floored without even getting a halfway clean shot off because the knife guy was just a little slicker or more alert than he was that day. And it's easy for someone to be a little slicker than you one day to the next. Happens all the time in every sport in the world. Assuming our physical and perceptual assets were even that good in the first place.

enough to render someone useless for a few seconds after a clean blow is landed

You are just choosing not to listen to what I'm saying. Your odds are SLIM of landing a clean blow in the time it takes (less than 1 second) the other person to close to a range at which your bat is useless. Your bat takes 2 hands to operate and once you begin your swing (if it's going to be an effective swing) it's easy to see where it's going to end up. All it takes is a thrown-up arm to take the bat strike and then stabby stabby, you're dead.

I'm guessing he actually tried to level you and leveled himself. Looked like he was laughing at a bat strike being very comparable to a kick in degree. But you never said it was; you said it was comparable in kind.

One extra note though: a good thai kick is way harder than probably a lot of people give it credit for. I think most people would be absolutely astonished at the power if they felt it for themselves.

So you're saying that your strategy would just be to close the distance, block the bat swing with an arm, and try to stabby stabby?

Would the force of a bat connecting with your arm not slow you down at ALL?

Plus, why is the bat useless at close range? I can still jam it against your neck, or jab the bat handle into your midsection, etc.

Probably a good chance both people end up dead. Unless you can slice a carotid or femoral artery on your first couple of stabby stabby, I'm not going to bleed to death before I can f you up serious also.

Ya guys think maybe it's possible that the bat could be used in a way other than some Babe Ruthian home run swing?... Like maybe choke up and wield it like a club?

Good luck on the clean blow thing.

Nice thing about the knife is just about any way it lands on you is extremely dangerous. It doesn't need to be even close to a clean blow.

You don't even have to kill a guy right there. Slash a couple of seconds worth in one or two good places, or get a few seconds of stabbing in, run away with your crippled arm and come back in a couple minutes to finish off, if there's anything still left to do at all. Then feel free to pass out too.

QFT, I'm not diminishing a bat strike by comparing it to a kick at all, it's just similar in the way it's thrown and the ways that you can deal with one. Even a very powerful strike like that can be significantly reduced in the damage it does by simply letting your arm catch it at about a 45 degree angle and pushing it along the plane of your arm (weird to describe, but really easy if you see it). Basically glance the blow off of your arm, you'd be surprised how easily this lets you take a beating from this type of strike. It's not easy to do, but it's not hard either and even just throwing your arm up there to get wrecked is better than taking a stab to the stomach/chest/neck/face.

Could be, but I'd bet few people would do this.

Sounds fairly useless to me. Especially in comparison to what a knife can be doing at the same time. I'd welcome someone trying to jab a stick in my gut while I was stabbing them, ripping up through their belly, or slashing their throat.

Keep in mind too that the position of your body after swinging a bat, whether you hit or miss, is going to be very poor.

Not really, no... I mean it's going to hurt, but like, so what? I'm not some huge tough guy, I'm 5'10" about 155-160lbs with like 2 years of Muay Thai experience, and we fought with weapons infrequently. The difference between the bat hitting your arm at a 90 degree angle and a 45 degree angle is the difference between breaking your arm (which would slow you down) and basically just getting a bruise, which is going to hurt a lot but is not going to put you into shock or stop you from advancing or anything.


At close range you're probably better off just fighting with your hands honestly. The whole advantage of a bat is the enormous power you can generate with a big, deliberate swing, otherwise it's not much better than your fists and significantly less maneuverable. And you don't have to necessarily kill someone with a knife either; you can cut up under the armpits, the top of the elbow joint, etc and seriously incapacitate someone from getting any sort of force out of their arms/swinging a bat.

It's not like a bat's a sucky weapon, and it's way preferable in like a real-life situation (which is not going to be a fight to the death obv) but in a pre-determined fight to the death it's just not even close unless you get insanely lucky and manage to incapacitate the knife wielder in the one chance you'll have before he's in range and doing exponentially more damage per strike than you are.

if 2 people who are fighting are both equally proficient in using their respective weapons I do not see how will there will not be a good chance of a guy with the bat slowing down the guy with the knife.

I’m saying it will be a close fight; people like mbillie1 argue that it wont be.

sightless,

I'm not saying the bat guy will just roll over and die... but the range advantage of the bat is at most what, 2-2.5 feet? That's like 1-2 full steps, I mean even if you stun someone how long are you going to keep them from advancing 1-2 steps? And at that point the damage per strike is shifted massively in favor of the knife. For the bat to do damage it has to be fairly slow (wind up / swing), deliberate, it has to land squarely, etc whereas even a child, untrained person, a weakling, etc could do fatal damage with a knife. An equally skilled opponent is going to wreck the bat wielder.

Edit: also a bat's effective range is like, arms reach to 2.5' greater than arms reach, whereas a knife's effective range is arm's reach and closer; once the knife person gets past the "happy zone" or whatever the bat is going to do very little damage per strike where the knife could kill with any accurate stroke or do fatal/seriously incapacitating damage (cutting tendons/ligaments, puncturing vital organs, etc) with minimal accuracy and force.

I'd agree that you would slow the guy down, especially IF you made that perfect strike. But there are things make that less relevant than I think you credit:

1. It would be much harder to get that perfect strike in than might seem. If your enemy is a little closer in when he lands, the force he absorbs will be significantly lessened. To get the maximum power out of the bat, you really need to time it just perfectly. I think you'd miss making the perfect strike quite often.

2. Even if you slow down the knife guy significantly with the strike, you will be slowed down too. Your body will almost certainly be out of alignment and in recovery mode to get its balance. This means that even if you win, you don't necessarily keep initiative. You both lose initiative and are now both trying to recover your balance.

3. Knife guy's weapon at close range is so dangerous and so far superior to your bat that he needs far less initiative less than you do to dominate. And when he gets started, even with a crippled arm, you are deeply screwed. Even just a clumsy rage of weak and sloppy slashes can incapacitate you. Or just one lucky stab.

4. During the close, while your bat swing may have landed, his knife blow might have too. He might, say during the process of blocking, have ridden his blade up along your forearm or wrist and ruined your veins, or sliced your bicep half off your arm, or stuck the blade into your gut. Now, again, there's another reason that it's two people dealing with pain, shock, and the loss of initiative instead of just one.

And all that could happen even if you land your strike!

All in all, the bat is much less forgiving of everything not going perfectly. You can be pretty miserable and unlucky with the knife and still do very well.

Working under the assumption these are both random people with no particular proficiency or lack therof towards fighting. I would go with bat, since I don't think the average person could use a knife very efficiently. If you have someone who is trained with a knife it is obviously more deadly than a bat.

They key is that you don't need to use a knife efficiently, but you DO have to use the bat just right, and even then, it might not be enough.

Yeah but equal size/skill/etc is assumed in the argument. Also, it's very difficult for a weak/inexperience/untrained person to actually kill someone with a bat (it requires a lot of strength and coordination to do any real damage) whereas even an 8 or 9 year old could do fatal damage with a knife.

This will solve it I think.

Me and Blarg seem to be arguing for the superiority of the knife, so we will fight any other two OOTers to the death, us two with our knives and you two with your bats. Obviously this will be two separate fights, no teamwork or anything (as that adds a dynamic as yet undiscussed). We'll obviously have to go to some lawless third world country to make this happen. Wagering is encouraged; maybe we can get that guy from HSNL who wanted to pay someone to cut off and eat his own finger involved. I'm 5'10" 155-160lbs with 2 years of martial arts training. Blarg is eighty feet tall and shoots lightning out of his eyes, so he might be a more difficult opponent, but to compensate we'll give him a smaller knife (a swiss army knife maybe).

Equal size/skill means they can both be 6"6" 300 black belts or 4"0 100 with no experience. In a situation where the equal skill includes skills that would allow one to wield a knife efficiently it changes thing because even against a skilled batsmen a knife is more lethal. I also agree with mia that with two average people they wouldn't be able to continue fighting with a broken forearm or stuff like that.

Whats so hard about pounding on someone who is down for a couple of minutes