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Message: <blockquote data-quote="DungeonMaster" data-source="post: 2350226" data-attributes="member: 27431">I won't argue that axes are historic weapons and have had their use in war tested - it's 100% true. What I have likewise been told is that we uncover many many more swords and spears than axes or other specialised weaponry in archeological digs. Time for my rant (not directed at you specifically storyteller!): I'm a physicist, not an archeologist but I have freinds in archeology who share the same interests in ancient warfare. An axe is useful because of the immense amount of rotational kinetic energy it gets because its moment of inertia is very high. Basically the further away mass is distributed from the point of rotation the higher the moment of inertia, "I". Thus despite being the same mass and same length an axe can have an order of magnitude greater moment of inertia than a similar sword. When you're chopping wood, that's what you notice - the axe comes to a dead stop and all the energy is transfered to the wood. And to top it off you're swinging the axe overhead, and maximizing the rotational speed of your arms - human arms can only move so fast. If omega is the rotational speed then the total energy 0.5*I*omega^2 for an axe or a sword used in this way is dominated by "I" the moment of inertia. The axe causes a deep gash in the wood and the sword a not-as-deep gash.In combat, you'll almost never be able to use the axe in this way - very few blows will deposit full energy into your (moving) target. The higher moment of inertia means you need to provide very stiff acceleration starting the swing and ending the swing to maintain a fighting posture (i.e. not get killed on the upswing or backswing). The lower moment of inertia sword will reach a higher top speed for the same swing and the square-law of the speed going into the rotational kinetic energy means you're not actually "hitting any harder" with the axe, you're dealing a significantly weaker blow. Basically it becomes a trade-off between moment of inertia and speed. If you can swing an axe once in the same time it takes the swordsman to swing his sword twice you need a moment of inertia four times as large to deal the same telling blow. The omega^2 ends up killing you as weapons get heavier.Impact physics is a very interesting field and not that well understood. The basics of conservation/non-conservation of momentum and energy are known but the devil is in the details, particularly material physics and high velocity impacts. A recent shuttle disaster, where foam broke through a reinforced shuttle wing like a bullet - where the glancing blow did more damage no less - shows exactly how little we know. So my suggestion it to appeal to history.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" /> rant over! </blockquote>

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