What is the most impractical combat knife design you have seen that is more of a show piece than anything?
You can check the answer of the people under the question at Quora “knife design“
About Eden
Written by: Eden
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What is the most impractical combat knife design you have seen that is more of a show piece than anything?
You can check the answer of the people under the question at Quora “knife design“
About Eden
This goofy piece of shit.
No. It is most assuredly not the deadliest knife ever made, as that is a notion that just doesn’t hold water in the real world. A knife is utterly useless unless you know how to fight with it, and different knives require different styles of fighting.
Also, any potentially deadly knife wound would require surgery. Any potentially deadly knife wound, left untreated, would cause you to bleed out in minutes.
So, looking at this knife, how useful is it? Well, due to the spiral shape of the blade, I concluded that it is purely a thrusting weapon. For a weapon to cut well, the edge must be in a plane, and that plane aligned with the path of motion through the target. This twisted edge here entirely prevents that from being possible.
So, as a thrusting knife, how useful is it? I’d say it would have to be used in the manner of a rondel dagger, held high in an “ice pick” grip. My dagger training comes from the German school, so that’s how I’d try to use it. The wound, honestly, I don’t think would be much worse than a typical rondel dagger. A deep penetrating wound.
However, there is one area where this dagger would have some unique qualities, and I believe that is in grappling. Grappling is a large part of medieval dagger fighting, since you fight close enough to touch your opponent with your hands. Since this dagger effectively has an edge around its entire circumference, there is a higher risk of defensive slashing wounds.
However, the minimal ability to give incidental slashing wounds would not cause me to purchase or carry this dagger. I would still prefer a more conventional design.
I pick this one because unlike a fantasy knife,
the jagdkommando is marketed as a serious combat knife for soldiers. Which is ridiculous.
Original question- What is the most impractical combat knife design you have seen that is more of a show piece than anything?
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Zombie knives…
OOOOO scary I know. So scary that governments have banned them for some reason. In reality, these blades are usually made with shitty steel and are not designed for combat. They are designed to look edgy basically like tacticool but worse.
I wouldn’t even call this a show-piece but clearly, some people think it looks cool. A kitchen knife like this
Is a superior weapon by far made with better steel. Kitchen knives are also among the most common knives used on the street. Not those stupid zombie knives. Are we going to ban them now? How about cars which can run over people and sticks and stones? Why don’t we ban murder while we are at it? That would logically stop murder right? …Right?
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Most. I’d take this knife over a kbar any day of the week
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My vote goes WAY back.
These became a fad after Rambo: First Blood. Hollow handle survival knives.
Why are they junk? Well, what makes a knife strong is the tang. It’s part of the handle. Basically, good knives are one piece of metal. It forms the blade and the tang. The best tang is a full tang. As you cut back on this, you loose strength.
The hollow handle knife is worse than even the half tang knife because it has NO tang. This is the weakest spot on your knife, either as a tool or a weapon. In trade, you get a place to store fish hooks, string, or something else. Right off, you can carve a fish hook out of wood or improvise one out of metal.
But, RAMBO. A fictional character started this fad, like so many others do, and no one stopped to think about how bad it was.
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How about this idiotic piece of crap – a knife hidden in a fake gun. This idiotic device was used by the chucklehead that attacked Dave Chappelle.
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Are we talking about fantasy knife stuff, or actual “advertised as a usable knife and people actually buy it for that”? ’Cause that will change the answer.
If you mean the first, well fantasy knives are pretty universally terrible. they have odd shapes, handles that are more dangerous to the wielder than anyone else and more doodads to snag on random bits of clothing than Velcro. It is actually harder to find a fantasy knife that have decent utility than one that is a safety hazard just looking at it.
This knife can stab everyone involved in a fight at the same time
In all fairness most of these knives are designed more as sculptures, and half of them do not even have usable handles. They may bear the label “combat knife”, but do so in the same way as a rock bears the label “person sitting”. No matter how good the sculptor, it is still clearly not a real person siting there.
Now if you mean an actual serious produced-and-used combat knife, my vote will have to go to those hollow round handled abominations.
*shudders*
I do not really care all that much about blade geometry. Anything with a sharp edge and a decent point is going to do the job well enough. What I care about is ergonomics, and these knives have absolutely horrid ergonomics.
One of the first things you should be able to do when you grasp a knife is tell, just by feel , what direction the blade is oriented. You cannot do that with these knives unless you find the guard with your index finger or thumb. The handles are often significantly fatter than is optimal, making them super easy to twist out of your hand, and while they often have very good knurling, the extra fat grip still makes it easy to pull out of your hand. Most of them also have a flush fit cap “pommel” that does nothing to alleviate this issue either.
A knife is a knife, trying to combine it with a storage compartment detracts from the utility of both. Just stop please.
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The Chinese have flooded the markets with substandard worthless copies of original weapons.
Daggers, Knives you name it.
Chinese copies of the Colt M4 are being sold at my village for a fraction of the original’s price and ofcourse it must have a fraction of the original’s efficiency.
The same is the case with fake Glock 19’s and other gear.
In knives and daggers, its so funny that it becomes sad after viewing a few dozen. Wierd and out if the world impractical designz and shapes, copies of some original idea somewhere merged with the shape of a kitchen knife at a Sushi bar and a saw blade to give it the shape of an oversize Swiss army knife for the purpose of, what? Well certainly not combat nor survival. Perhaps for cutting cheese that too cream cheese.
And ofcourse every item must have the jungle camo color to trap the enthusiast.
One suggestion. Keep gear thats original and simple to use. You may need it once but that once may make all the difference between life and death.
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Hi
I don’t know if this counts, but those Star Wars Build-Your-Own Lightsabers.
I ain’t talking about these,
Those are fine, but I’m talking about THESE.
Like… if you were to use this in a real battle, you’d probably stab yourself really quickly.
… What are these? OK, I get that a trident is cool and not so impractical and that a double lightsaber is just classic, but the 2nd one from the top! ARRRGHHH!! It’s SO OBVIOUS that it’s only for looks! Also, what’s up with the bottom one?
How would you even hold this and not stab yourself?
ALL IMAGES ARE FROM GOOGLE
K BYE
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Every knife, ever. Well, almost.
I know, that reads like clickbait, but let me explain.
I question the very notion of a combat knife. A knife is a tool for cutting. Actual combat weapons like daggers are for thrusting. While you can thrust with some knives (try with a sheepfoot blade), knives are tools optimized for cutting. Daggers on the other hand evolved over hundreds of years and were refined for penetrating protection.
Most military fighting techniques I am aware of put a large emphasis on thrusting, for a good reason — it is simple. You can teach every idiot how to properly thrust with a knife in a matter of hours. Slashing, on the other hand, lends itself to prolonged fights, which in turn require extended stance training, tactics, spatial awareness and whatnot.
There are numerous instances in which people actually got out of a knife fight totally or mostly unharmed because the attacker did not know his shit and thought knife fights are done as Hollywood depicts them: He tried to slash instead of stabbing the victim. And the “protection” which prevented serious injury were denim jackets, for example. The problem is that not only a knife needs to be quite sharp to cut through fabric, you need to apply a considerable amount of force. And you will hardly find a victim standing still or leaning into the slash. A victim usually will try to evade the sharp, pointy piece of metal somebody is using to injure or kill him.
You might argue that daggers have an edge and can be used for slashing. I cannot deny that, but it is hardly a necessary feature to fulfill their primary purpose. It is more like that if you have a piece of hard, properly heat treated metal, you can as good give it an edge while you are at it while giving the dagger a really pointy point.
Now for the (sole) exception:
This is a Kukri of the Brigade of Gurkhas and technically classified as a knife. However, it is more of a non-blunt impact weapon and slashing with it is rather rare. Have a look at the Kukri drills of the Royal Ghurka’s, of which you can see some in:
The advantage of the Kukri is that due to the form of its blade and its relatively high mass, combined with the techniques the Gurkhas use, you can actually concentrate a lot of force onto a comparatively small area. The fact that the Kukri is sharp only adds to this injuring potential, but is hardly the main point.
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This one. The U.S. Navy Elgin Percussion Cutlass pistol of 1837. This pistol was made by C.B. Allen of Springfield Illinois. The Bowie knife underneath it is 11 inches long.
Allen and other manufacturers like Morril, Mossman, and Blair created these cutlass pistols to cash in on the popularity of the Bowie knife.
George Elgin patented the Bowie knife on July 5, 1837, then began producing this type of pistol. It was the first percussion handgun officially used by an military service. Only 150 were produced and some were used by the Wilkes-South Sea Expedition.
Next up…
The 17 century German Axe Pistol. This combined a single shot flintlock pistol with an axe for battlefield use.
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There is a whole genera of fantasy knives they should be ignored because they’re not really meant for fighting. The designs that are meant for tactical use and possibly fighting but are probably more likely to injure you than and opponent is the “Rambo Knife”. I don’t know how popular they are now but in the 80s when I grew up they were huge. They usually had a loose resemblance to a kbar knife but the blade was oversized and had back serrations of dubious merit. They also tended to have a barrel shaped handle that was hollowed out to contain matches, fishing line, a compass etc. As a result these knives are very weak and would probably snap off at the point where the impossibly short tang stopped. Avoid!
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This is a cool looking knife and very threatening in appearance, but I wouldn’t want to trust my life to it in combat. Hacking and slashing are the primary and most effective moves with a knife. Severing muscle, tendons and blood vessels will quickly disable an opponent. A stabbing move exposes one to damaging defenses, and a single puncture wound is seldom disabling. Plus, this design is virtually useless for anything other than poking holes, little more than a broken epee. Why would anyone want to carry such a single purpose tool.
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I know of two knives that I would include as practical combat knives. I only say this because they were recommended to me from people who were there, they saw the elephant. They made it home.
Ka-Bar combat knives were issued to infantry troops in WWII in the ETO. My buddy used his. He used it to baton through sheet metal roofing. He used it to cut meat. He used it to dig through frozen mud for a foxhole. He used it kill Krauts. He said it was the most important implement he had short of his M1 Garand.
The Fairbairn Sykes FIghting Knife was issued to Israeli Commandos for taking care of business silently. I knew one of these folks. She was complaining that she’d had to leave hers back in Israel when emigrating. My friends and I took her to a gun show and found her one. It was like reuniting a child with her lost puppy.
You can take these two knives and compare them against others based on purpose. To the extent they differ from another knife tells you about the candidates practicality.
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