Got a Real World Weapons or Armour Question? Mk XII

[Incanur]

They weren't obsolete, read up a bit on the Russian front in WW I. They just has a much more limited (increasingly limited) role.

They only meaningful advantage the sword has over the pistol is that it doesn't require ammunition. Even today swords are theoretically useful in war - people still get killed with knives and improvised close-combat weapons on occasion. They're still obsolete.

Emphasis on the 'if' and the 'some'. Read up on it a bit further, including in the book you are citing. Quite often the swords were so bad the pommel was preferred for use as a knuckleduster than the actual blade itself.

I've read the whole thing and various other nineteenth-century sources. Sometimes regulation swords performed as bludgeons, other times in caring hands they cut as well as one could expect. While opposing blades tended to cut better, the better British sword lines did fine as long as somebody took the time to sharpen them.

This was an intentional design feature of many swords, see Petter Johnsson...

No, there's no benefit from having such a thin layer of hard steel on the outside of the blade. Alan Williams explicitly describes the design as lacking. Moreover, Williams disputes the notion that an iron core provided any benefit, as steel in period was tougher (wholly or in part because of lower slag content, if I recall correctly).

Yes but the plural of anecdote is not statistic, and that doesn't change the reality - swords from the mid 16th century on back to the early Medieval period were usually hand-made by experts, master cutlers and sword smiths. European military swords in the 17th, - 20th century were usually mass produced using very shoddy methods, often not even properly sharpened, and / or kept in metal sheathes which dulled the blades and so forth, and English swords in particular were notoriously bad, worse than continental designs, according to the English themselves.

Data in The Sword and the Crucible don't really support this notion. The metallurgical quality of European swords apparently quite erratic before the fourteenth century, and in the Renaissance era many/most were still of dubious quality. Indicating his low opinion of the quality of early European swords, Williams writes that "[e]even in the 16th century many ordinary soldiers carried blades little better than those of a thousand years before." The numbers in The Sword and the Crucible only go into the seventeenth century for Euorpean swords, but those indicate that blade quality in terms of hardness on the whole improved up to that point. However, I can't find any metallurgical tests of nineteenth-century British swords, so I guess it's possible that they could be even worse than the medieval average. Given the overall improvement in steel production and their performance when properly sharpened, I doubt that. I imagine it depends on the exact pattern in question and all that. Williams describes a seventeenth- or eighteenth-century Indian sword as one of the best swords made anywhere, anytime because of its metallurgical properties, so it's not terribly surprising that Indian swords typically outperformed poorly sharpened British regulation blades.