How many of you have seen this show? What are your thoughts on it?

Personally, I think it's good only for entertainment purposes, but I can't take it too seriously. I'm watching the Vlad the Impaler vs Sun Tzu episode and throughout the show, the weapons experts representing each person respectively, talk nonsense to each other about how the weapon they are using, has advantage over the other similarly ranged weapon, from the other group of experts. When the truth is most weapon designs have advantages and disadvantages.

I mean, this show pits two warriors in a fight to the death. But you can't simulate in a computer program whats going to go through the mind of each warrior if or when they are going to fight. Also, there's just too many other factors at play such as; the terrain and weather, how a person has trained to fight physically and psychologically, the weight, size and shape of the weapon being used, the force and accuracy of the wielder, the weapon they are up against, their mood that day, lifestyle and views of the world, where and how bad they are injured and a whole slew of other things.

When you combine all these factors and the variables contained within them, you are going to get a number of different results of who comes out victorious.

But generally speaking, I think fighting is all about intention. Which again falls back on how we think and how much we want to harm a person or not, when a situation escalates to become physically violent.

I find it entertaining (I guess I'm easily impressed with large pointy things hitting dead pigs), but it is something that you shouldn't take at all seriously. The methods they use to test the weapons are flawed (IMHO) - and they haven't given much information about how the computer simulation at the end works. It could be doing a simple dice-roll for each iteration for all we know...

It does have a certain Mythbusters-feel about it all, so it's worth watching.

Plus I'm a fan of medieval weapons :D

I haven't seen the show but from your description and what I've seen from commercials I think the point of the show is to explain how each society had their own effective means of battling opponents and how those weapons were tuned to the society and the locale.

I think the point of analyzing a society's methods of fighting allows you to begin to understand their view of the surrounding world and their philosophies. It might sound goofy but compare the fighting style of a very precise and focused form of Japanese hand-to-hand combat versus the style of a viking or some such barbarian type where it's a much more brutal 'in-your-face' type of fighting.

Of course we can't truly simulate these fights but it's purely for entertainment purposes. The same idea of a million variables not being simulated pertains to just about any historical simulation that hasn't happened in recent well-documented history.

Cheap garbage that I wouldn't waste my time with. Their weapon reproductions are cheap and sometimes down right wrong. Their 'facts' are Victorian myth often as not, and their 'testing' methods aren't even good enough to laugh at.


Worse, many of their 'experts' are sloppy, and ill disciplined, or fight in completely different styles than they claim.

I'd say it's just marginally better than the other dreck the History Channel's been spewing the last couple years. At least there are no monsters, UFOs, pseudo-Christian conspiracy theories, or rednecks involved.
Maybe I'm viewing it through rose-colored glasses, but I seem to remember a time when there were half-way decent historical documentaries, historical movies, and such on. Even if it went a little heavy on WWII and Nazis, it didn't constantly insult your intelligence or peddle falsehood.

Quote: Original post by Talroth
Cheap garbage that I wouldn't waste my time with. Their weapon reproductions are cheap and sometimes down right wrong. Their 'facts' are Victorian myth often as not, and their 'testing' methods aren't even good enough to laugh at.


Worse, many of their 'experts' are sloppy, and ill disciplined, or fight in completely different styles than they claim.

Like I said - you shouldn't take the show seriously. If you just see it as platform to show-off real weapons in-use then it does it's job.

Have you ever seen their "Simulation"
I forget exactly how I saw this, but one time they were like "Our simulation is a complex Excel Spreadsheet developed by <no-name company>"

An Excel Spreadsheet!! Hah!

I saw one episode a few weeks ago that was the Medillin drug cartel vs. Somalian pirates. They brought on a guy who was reportedly a descendant of one of the management types of the cartel, a guy who used to kill people for the cartel, and a random guy of Somalian descent.

I think it was at the point where they did a carbomb demonstration in order to make a scale model of the 440-lb carbomb that killed 22 people, and the show's hosts all gawped, cheered and hooted like it was some sort of fireworks display that I turned it off.

Normally I'm not sensitive to these things but it was an absolute lack of reverence for the innocent people who got slaughtered. I seem to remember a few people were fairly incensed at how they handled the various IRA episodes as well.

Yeah the IRA episode wasn't broadcast in the UK/Ireland... They should probably stick to conflicts that aren't in living memory.

Quote: Original post by Orbital Fan

Quote: Original post by Talroth
Cheap garbage that I wouldn't waste my time with. Their weapon reproductions are cheap and sometimes down right wrong. Their 'facts' are Victorian myth often as not, and their 'testing' methods aren't even good enough to laugh at.


Worse, many of their 'experts' are sloppy, and ill disciplined, or fight in completely different styles than they claim.

If you just see it as platform to show-off real weapons in-use then it does it's job.

Yeah, but the problem is that it often doesn't do this! For a few of the fight clips I've seen they may as well have been giving a group of kids ten pound bags of sugar and red bull, then handed them all a pile of pool noodles and told them to go at each other.