[quote]Katanas. HAHAHA! They are not super weapons. They're made of earth found metals. They're not alien nor supernatural, and they do have limitations. Katanas are piercing and slashing weapons. Worn as a sign of social status and far to expensive for most common soldiers to even purchase. This is nothing new to any common soldier, European soldiers fighting for kings had basic weapons, maybe a woodcutting axe, or a hammer. Sometimes a shield or buckler. Any high ranking soldier had access to better arms and gear, this has always been the truth. If I was paid more I'd buy lifesaving gear. Proper swords, some good armor. A shield that's not made from a table.[/quote]

Okay, so, let me clear something up: swords weren't super duper expensive in Europe. You're right about swords being a status symbol, but it's not because they were super expensive.

The first thing to remember when you talk about medieval weapons of war is most of these weapons are derived from a tool used for another purpose. A warhammer is derived from the common hammer; a spear could be used for hunting, as could a bow and arrow; a battleaxe is derived from the more common woodcutting axe. Daggers and knives could be used for more than killing, as could slings, and a shield is really just a means of protecting yourself from injury.

But a sword? A sword has [i]one[/i] purpose, and that purpose is to take life away from other humans.

Swords weren't especially expensive, as I said. A regular footsoldier or a peasant in the medieval era could get his hands on one. The real question is whether or not he could waltz around town wearing one without being eyeballed weirdly. After all, what's some jumped up peasant doing with a weapon whose sole purpose is to kill? Shouldn't that right belong to knights? To wealthy men?

Weapons in general weren't all that uncommon. Actual usable spears, axes, shields, and, yes, swords weren't far from the hands of any army. Armor was the tougher thing to get your hands on, at least in the early medieval era. Vikings wearing chainmail were much rarer than Vikings wearing little to no armor. Footsoldiers throughout a lot of medieval history would be considered fortunate to have a gambeson or some padded cloth with metal rivets underneath. You can be darned sure, though, that a proper footsoldier would probably have a spear and a dagger thrust into his hands, or maybe a shield and something to whack someone with.

[quote]Training helps, but when it comes down to it, 1v1 fights are a mere roll of the dice between two sets of odds. Sometimes people have drastically better odds, but two people who are really good at what they're doing, even when they're using drastically different things, is like comparing apples to oranges. Yes, some are better at their martial art than others, and that's slightly more measurable, but comparing two martial arts that have endured the test of time in order to definitively tell which one is better is kind of, well, not super plausible.[/quote]

This is very true, and I think it's worth mentioning that medieval warfare was centered around the siege because battles could result in a loss. You only fought battles if you were pretty damned sure you could win.

1v1 fights, I think, are much the same. You don't [i]want[/i] to fight someone of near to equal skill because even an untrained fighter could kill you with a bit of luck. You want to have every advantage possible when fighting someone.

That said, some equipment [i]is[/i] outright better than other equipment... [i]in certain situations.[/i] I'd rather have a warhammer or mace than a battle axe if I'm fighting a guy wearing plate armor, for instance. I'd rather have a saber than a shortsword if I'm going into a 1v1 duel between two guys wearing little to no armor. And I think if I was witnessing a knight in plate armor go up against a samurai in medieval Japanese armor, I'd much rather bet my money on the guy in plate armor because it's designed to deflect weapons like the katana.

But if you took that same knight and samurai and put them in a hot environment where they had to take their armor off, I'd wager the samurai would have a much better chance than before of beating the knight.