| From: | Marc Renouf renouf@********.com |
|---|---|
| Subject: | exchange rates, and APDS...pronounced APP-ee-das ? : ) |
| Date: | Tue, 23 Feb 1999 08:38:13 -0500 (EST) |
> Don't know about the gun part, but he's right about 500 being quite a bit
> for a katana nowadays.
Um, no, $500 is a drop in the bucket, and all you're likely to get
is either a non-sharpenable alloy replica or a single piece of 440
stainless crap that has almost none of the metallurgical strength of a
traditional katana. Hell, I paid over that for my practice blade. My
instructor's sword (made the "old fashioned way" by a father&son team of
Japanese smiths) cost him like $7,000 and took over three months to
finish (though a significant portion of this time was finishing other
backlogged work before they got to his).
The problem is that a lot of people *think* they can make a
katana. They take a chunk of steel and hammer out a blade that's slightly
curved and sharp on one side and say, "look, I've made a katana." They're
wrong. That kind of sword bears almost no resemblance (metallurgically
speaking) to a katana made correctly, and making them correctly is pretty
much an exhaustive, time-consuming affair fraught with the possibility of
screwing it up and making it useless. And that's not even counting the
difficulty in correctly making and mounting the furniture for sword
(another thing that people just sort of assume "if it looks right, it
must be right" - and again they're wrong).
> But, as you said, in the SR future, they're now being built for combat,
> and hence would be using a lot sturdier metal, that may not be as
> pretty, would have sharper edges, and probably be taken a lot
> more seriously than they are nowadays.
Actually, there's nothing as impressivley beautiful as a
well-crafted, combat-ready sword. The real thing puts the "pretty"
decorative imitations to shame. There is no real way to duplicate the
nioi line (area where the steel crystals change size and shape), or the
hamon (temper line) without actually making the sword right.
> Hell, you can find swords nowadays that aren't even hand-made, I doubt
> this happens much in SR, except if technology happens to have found a
> way to make things better than they would be by hand.
One of the things that makes the handmade swords better is that
the carbon content tends to be different. The "old ways" of making swords
are slow, laborious processes that require actually making more than one
strip of steel, each of which has a different carbon content and lamellar
strength. Modern, machine-made swords tend to have a uniform carbon
content, as they are made from a single piece of metal. They can be
strong or they can be sharp, but it's really hard to do both well. In
some ways, modern steel is almost "too good" simply because the uniformity
actually makes the blade weaker overall.
But that's not to say that with 60 years of technological
advancement and a resurgence of "samurai culture" in Japan that someone
wouldn't figure out a way to do it right by machine.
Marc
