Name the mass and the lenght of the hammer and its center of mass, Also good would an estimation of the movement speed of the center of mass, else i can only say at which speeds the 200 are reached. The rest is simple.
But a Fastball of a major league player has around 120Nm or J, so i would not put a bet on your statement.
Do you Joust?
I think that some people here overestimate the effectiveness of weapons like simple warhammers or maces. They were good when fighting from horseback but pretty bad when fighting on the ground, The problem with these weapons is that you actually need a lot of space and time to use them powerful enough to be of any harm against an enemy in full plate. These weapons are not very flexible, they only have basically one effective attack and an enemy in close combat could estimate an enemy fighting with them quite easily. Another problem is that they are not that well suited against enemies without heavy armor. Again you have much more flexibility and options with a sword or polearm.
Hi Z.C.,
no, I do not joust, I am a coward.
Joule: I do that not to end up beeing right, I really did’t know that and I was curious… so I did a little Google research. here is what Mr. Google said:
A modern bow with 60 pound has ~60-80 Joule
A pneumatic hammer has around 70 joule, a smallone 8 Joule.
A German police pistol Walther P99 has around 450-490 Joule.
A big hammer for a smith 4kg has around 70-100 Joule energy for the hot metal, but only if the anvil has a hig mass of minimum 150kg and more.
You will say, that the energy is collected in a very small spot at the tip of the hammer, but please keep in mind, that a human body is not fix and somewhat elastic, so you got a more elastic punch and can not use the full energy.
And, I said it before, a good armour ist exactly build to withstand such an atack. It has a polished surface with no flat parts. All is round and the chance to slip off is high. The critical parts are ticker, like the breast part, and has a good steel quality. The best armours of that time are hardened and also elastic like “spring-steel”.
I have a reconstructed breastplate, even from old steel, made years ago from a guy (Walther Suckert) who worked also for museums. For demonstrations I do the following thing: I put the breastplat flat on the floor and then I stand on it and do a little jumping with my full weight. I would not do that, If I would expect any problems.
But that are only the historical informations… I agree, for the game we need only something like simple damagepoints and special anti-armour-weapons. Nobody wants to fight invincible enemies. (But I agree, wrestling down a man in full arms with chance and then kill him with a simple knife in his throat would be a a show, but a nightmare to do the game-balancing 
)
You are correct, they are by their nature cavalry weapons.
Hi loksley,
i have asked, because i think about Jousting in high terms. But i cannot even ride a horse, also have never worn an actual knight/jousting armor, and i had some questions about its use in action.
Or a smart man. My life’s experience shows, that this things (names) are very often interchangeable. Sometimes it would have been better for me, if i were more a smart man or a coward.
Once told me a japanese professor: To watch out for yourself (to be a coward) is a form of love for your parents.
The Energy or Work in Joules or Nm can be nice calculated. Dependent on the strength and movement of the one who executes the attack, it could reach even towards the 250Nm. Higher Energies are quite possible but i did not calculate that.
But a force attacks on an area, and with a lower attack area a higher penetration is possible. A attack angle above the 0° degree (orthogonal to the attacked surface / or below the 90° degrees to the surface) would lower then the 250 Nm depending on the degree towards the surface. And the surface would gain under the attack degree, more depth for armor to penetrate. Both intertwined things result in reducing the penetration rate.
So as i wanted to show the penetrations depends on the kinectic Energy (also the time interval of the effect or the speed of the effect), on the weapons attack kind or the area of the attacking Energy, the kind of armor, the energy distributing area of the armor and the attack angle.
Disclaimer: Certainly i have forgotten many things.
The given calculations in the books are often not good enough from a scientific viewpoint. Often they are only laboratory values, and often it is not shown how they arrived to this data.
I share your believe that the armor is made to withstand very strong forces and attacks, and even a very good attack with a Horseman’s Pick will not always do his job. And the number of 450J for the 3 mm Gothic armor is real killer.
That depends on your weight and the height of your jumps.
Weight (mass m) * Velocity (distance s / time t = v) = momentum / (p = m * v)
Energy (kinetic) = p^2 / 2m
I can’t post the whole book because i’d be violating copy right law of the authour and the uni library but here is the introduction to the armour penetration testing of the book mentioned above.
In this chapter, the energy available from different weapons to attack armour will be discussed.
The kinetic energy of any moving object is given by the expression
Energy = lA X mass X velocity X velocity
The units of energy are joules (J). So a 100g (0.1 kg) missile travelling at a velocity of 40 m/sec will have a kinetic energy of
lA x 0.1 x 40 X 40 = 80 J.
Throughout the Ancient World as well as the Medieval period, swords, spears and axes would have been employed in hand-to-hand combat, and such blows might deliver anything between 60 and 130 J’. By comparison, modern police body armour is supposed to resist an attempted stabbing, which may deliver about 50 J or more2. Of course, the area of impact is of equal importance to the energy available; the smaller the point, the greater the threat of penetration
It seems to add up
@LordCrash thank you, as always, for posting such insightful information. My experience with heavy armor only goes so far as tabletop RPGs and chain at LARPs. As such I was of the opinion that a knight in plate and chain was inflexible. Now I see in the video you posted a guy tapping his feet in the air like he’s dancing in the rain. I might have to refer some of my fellow gamers here to check that out (and hopefully to interest them in KCD while they’re here).
But dangerous of hammers is not that it can create hole to plate, but breaking body periphery. it is simple to break an arm, leg or skull with hammer. And it is nonsense to know energy of attack. You must know size of affected area. Crosbow has advantage of high concentration of energy to thin spike, so it can have energy 200 joule and “Gotischer Harnisch 3 mm: 450 Joule”, but it still goes through.
As chance would have it, I met the actual best armourer in germany and he shows me one breastplate which he has used as a testing object for his famous “250 pounds crossbow against well reconstructed armour-test” (I don’t know what “Beschusstest” is in English), I mentioned above. There was only a small flat hole at the surface of the breastplate from one of the best shots.
Ahhh, I finally found some of the video clips…
Maybe seeing is believing.
Hi I played game War of the Roses (medieval multiplayer game), try to look at that game they is also some good things what can you use.
this is a very interesting topic =)
I have a question (I think a very stupid one, please forgive me XD)
were english longbow effective against armored knight? I mean during a battle =)… or is just a false belief that english longbowmen effectively opposed cavalry? thx =)
If in plate and sword on sword, use your sword like a lever, you want to get the other guy on his arse or back so you can easily dispatch him.
Well, it’s not that easy to answer. Modern recreations of English longbows seem to prove that their arrows probably weren’t able to penetrate the breat plate of a full suit of plate armour. Some historians think that the effect of the longbow wasn’t its high killing rate but the terror and fear it spreaded among the cavalry. And of course horses were quite vulnerable to longbow arrows. It’s also not easy to kill a horse with an arrow but again you can spread fear and chaos by wounding them. In medieval combat much can be reached with discipline. English longbowmen were known as one of the few infantry units of the time who held the line against cavalry attacks. French and German cavalry tactics usually were built on the first rush with the lance since the crusades and before. Medieval (and ancient) fighting was much about the “who flees first?” question and not about who killls everyone else first.
If you just wear mail armour you’re very vulnerable to arrows. It’s likely that not everyone wore full plate armour at the beginning of the 100 years war. That was only true for the nobility and the knights who could afford a full suit of custom made plate armour. Their servants and men-at-arms were quite possibly less well protected.
Even if all 8000 or some knights at Agincourt wore plate armor there could still be a lot of variation in quality, things like metal purity (I.E slag), carbon content, hardening procedures and naturally occurring alloys. So while one breastplate might make it bounce of the other might not stop an arrow. And there are weak spots in most early forms of plate armour, not something you would specifically aim for in battle but something the large volleys or arrows might hit by chance.
Often the penetrating damage is incorporated in the ignore armor percentage. Most heavy weapons still do damage no matter what the enemy is wearing for armor. Blunt damage is just not the best way to describe the ‘blunt’ weapons category, as you correctly say. 
Getting hit full on by a mace or hammer in the dome will shake your head up pretty badly if not half deafen you as well. With enough force you can even cave in the armor/helmets thus effectively negating it but with a bit less damage when you would hit there without armor.
In Agincourt led some factors to the victory of the Englishmen.
The longbows are only so deadly efective with a very long trained archer. Only them could fire 10 arrows a minute without soon fatigue. It was not the accurate shot, but the balistic shooting of thousands of arrows. The longbow was a very English weapon fore some reasons. In the rest of western-europe, the bow was not very often used in war, but crossbows. So it was widely unknown how to fight against them. Years ago, the french learned how to defeat them.
Another point was, that the terrain was very bad for a cavalry attack. The ground was muddy, too and the archers stands behind some palisades and barricardes. So they had much more time than usual to fire one by one volley at them.
One more point: The french knights were very eager to fight and so they probably didnt’t show the needed discipline and carefulness for proper planning and strategy.
And the most experienced commander who was the head of the commander could not even order the crossbowmen to load their crossbow because he was 7 ranks down in the nobility pecking order.
I believe they said that in a documentary but I will try to source it for you.
I would recommend everyone to watch this series. It is very informative on this subject.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqoh0okQ6Ho (Weapons that made Britain)
Ahh DUSHIN.
If the melee weapon attack kinetic energy was just as easy to count out, like that of the arrow, bolt or bullet.
If you have such values you got to ask yourself how they did arrived to this.
First question is did they measured this values, by a apparatus from some humans or did they counted them out in a different way.
If it was measured, then you got to ask, how and on whom. Was this measured on athlets with similar movement or normal street people and etc, how long was their arms, how long was their weapons and the weight and ect. ect.
If it was counted out, then you got to ask yourself ‘how’, and that is more interesting.
Did they counted out the energy, from the center mass point like it is often done, or the hitting tip? Both can result to very different values.
Did they counted in the movement, weight of a person and or their arms or just the weapon?
Did they simplified it (like i did) or have they used the correct torque?
This thing aren’t that easy like E=1/2mv^2.
To the longbow: The same series that Scandinavia has recomended but the episode about the Longbow despite it is also about Crécy, which is 70 years before Agincourt:
