To get back off-topic on-topic? Or vice versa? To get back to the off topic topic?

I feel woozy.

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"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
Illuminati's Razor-The most complicatedly evil answer is usually the most correct answer. - Fazor
"Every book is a children's book if the kid can read." - Mitch Hedberg
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

How about when the landing party lands well away from an undefended/uncontested objective and has to walk quite a ways to get there? I'm not refering to times like the Battle of Endor when they have to avoid detection to take the objective, but to times like was spoofed on Galaxy Quest where they didn't just land in the open area near the sheres, grab one and go. . . .

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"Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it." — Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man

441!!!! :)

If you want to be undetected then your insertion point will be miles away. SAS Observation and Raiding parties in the Falklands War were landed more than 5 miles from the objective so that there was no chance of the target hearing the Chopper.

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'The eye can only see what the mind is prepared to accept'

I'm talking about when detection is irrelevant. . . I understand there are times you don't want anyone to know when you're around. . . .

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"Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it." — Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man

441!!!! :)

Yes, but Pink Floyd's Echoes will still be better than both...

Alright, maybe not Bohemian Rhapsody, but still...

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There is no dark side of the moon really, as a matter of fact it's all dark - Pink Floyd, The Dark Side Of The Moon

Socially inept nerds/geeks. Also, they look like stereotypical nerds/geeks. I myself, and probably most of the people on this forum are nerds/geeks, and while I can't speak for anyone else, since I don't know you in person, I'm not socially inept nor do I "look like a geek".

Swords being cut in half by another sword. Not only can this not happen, even if it could it's used too much.

Changes to genetic code that instantly manifest themselves as body structures and biochemical processes.
The only movie I've seen that portrays how long it would take in an accurate manner is the 1986 version of The Fly.

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If we don't play god, who will?-James Watson
I never think of the future, it comes soon enough.-Albert Einstein
The large print giveth and the small print taketh away.-Tom Waits
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a yo-yo.-Enoch Root, The Confusion
When I was a kid, if someone brandished a shrink gun he'd get a little bit of respect!-Myron Reducto, Harvey Birdman

Most of my nerd/geek friends are "differently-ept." But you never see that option.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

No reason why you can't cut a sword in half with another sword, of course it will depend on what sort of swords are being used. Movie swords are often much heftier than they were in real life to stop actors breaking them.

Mythbusters tackled this one once; they tested a variety of swords, with the swing speed and force matching that of an expert swordsman, and found that no authentic pre-20th century hand-forged blades broke, and only one low-quality factory-made sword snapped, and that was at the base, not at the point of contact. IIRC.

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"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
Illuminati's Razor-The most complicatedly evil answer is usually the most correct answer. - Fazor
"Every book is a children's book if the kid can read." - Mitch Hedberg
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

If the question is can a piece of metal cut another piece of metal in half I say the answer is definitely yes. Under the right circmstances you can cut through a sword with a piece of wood.Whether it's possible for a particular sword to cut through another depends on specifics. I have no doubt that in actual history almost no one would have intentionally have cut a sword in half in battle. I do know swords broke fairly frequently (depending on the technology used) but just where they were likely to break I don't know.

Did they test what would happen if the blade was struck on the flat? My understanding, at least of Katanas, was that it was a common tactic to try and hit the flat of the blade with a blunt weapon (staff, tonfa, jitte, sai) in order to break it. One of my books also mentioned that when the swords were made, it was normally 250 to 300 layers of steel folded, not the 512 that is advertised in most catalogs. It was explained to me that this was because while it makes the steel very strong along the cutting edge, it makes it very weak along the flat. None of that is from a source I really trust enough to stand behind it, but the sword breaking tactic is very common throughout many books for both sword, and the other Okniawan weapons.

There is a company called Atlanta Cutlery, that has a branch called Museum Replicas. They advertise that the swords they sell as "combat ready" can have the blade bent far enough to take the blade tip 7 inches out of line and still return it to true. I've actually been really happy with just about everything I've bought from them.

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A Nerd can figure out how long it will take the original Enterprise traveling at warp 6.5 to travel from Regulus to Antares.
A Geek will think he can use that to pick up a girl in a bar.
A Dork knows he can't pick up the girl with it, but will hang around for hours anyway, just in case she asks.
She might. You never know.

Katanas could certainly be broken. Great care would be taken to protect the edge as it was extremely sharp but somewhat brittle and users would train to parry blows with the unsharpened edge. Once a katana blade was damaged so the softer metal of the core was exposed the sword was ruined as the defect could not be sharpened out. (Well I say ruined, but even a sword with a big notch in it can still kill you.) Maybe it would be possible to cut a another sword in half with a katana, but it's the sort of thing their users were trained to avoid.

Yes. They tested about every configuration people came up with, and with pretty high-quality blades, too--probably, in fact, Atlanta Cutlery blades. While blades will break, there's little evidence that they'll get cut in half.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

Ahh okay, I see the distinction now. I had just always assumed when I saw a blade come apart in a movie that it was being broken, not actually cut.

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A Nerd can figure out how long it will take the original Enterprise traveling at warp 6.5 to travel from Regulus to Antares.
A Geek will think he can use that to pick up a girl in a bar.
A Dork knows he can't pick up the girl with it, but will hang around for hours anyway, just in case she asks.
She might. You never know.

any kind of knife that is thrown and sticks in an inch or so instantly kills the victim.

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'The eye can only see what the mind is prepared to accept'

Any kind of knife that's thrown, sticks. Except the one in one of the Scream movies.

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A Nerd can figure out how long it will take the original Enterprise traveling at warp 6.5 to travel from Regulus to Antares.
A Geek will think he can use that to pick up a girl in a bar.
A Dork knows he can't pick up the girl with it, but will hang around for hours anyway, just in case she asks.
She might. You never know.

Any bar of steel a few feet long and an inch or few inches thick is going to be pretty hard to break unless it includes a large flaw such as an included impurity or a weak weld, and then you still have ot hit it in the right spot, and very hard, and it has to not be free to move so the force doesn't just get wasted on knocking it back instead of breaking it. How breakable would you expect any other equivalent-sized bar of steel to be while held in the hands? At the very least, you'd have to have it braced against something solid while you hacked at it.

Descriptions of damage to European swords from the time they were really used describe them getting bent, not broken, and sometimes bent back again and still used. And it was generally done by someone or someone's horse falling on it or some other such oddity, not by a blow from someone else's weapon in open air. (A katana might be more likely to break instead of bending under such circumstances, but the key is the abnormality of the circumstances. It just doesn't happen in fights.)

Hitting it on the side is best for knocking it out of the way if its user is attempting a cut, because that creates the biggest change in the sword's direction of movement. If you intend to damage someone's blade, though, the best place to hit it is the front. The edge is harder than the spine (back), which is good for cutting but makes it more brittle than the somewhat softer but more shock-resistant spine. So the front is the place that's most likely to lose a chip or flake. That means that if you see a blunt force coming and you need to block/deflect it with your sword instead of just dodging, you'd actually want to turn your sword to the side for the impact.

It's not necessarily a movie cliche, but I hate it when you're shown a distant explosion and can hear it instantly. I especially hate it when "documentaries" add explosion sounds to WW II or Vietnam era bombing video from the point of view of the aircraft.

Oh, and thanks a lot, Jim. Now, I'll have In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida stuck in my head all day.

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