Talk:Nikana Prime/@comment-122.52.163.67-20160223002354/@comment-85.23.198.132-20160223193009

"-I think in older days katana is placed at home like...using it for decoration but it actually shows the status of the family ."

If by "older days" you mean "after they stopped seeing much actual use", sure. Meaning the aforementioned Edo period when there was preciously little warring happening in Japan. More practically, most of the "family heirloom" swords are and were expensive specimen from the upper end of the price/quality bracket; as in the kinds of things the owners took very good care of and used very little if at all even back when sword fights were still a thing.

The armouries of European museums have no shortage of comparable extremely high-grade, little-used swords and other weapons made for the upper crust. The main difference is really just that *we* weren't time-capsuled for three hundred years by a hyperconservative medieval police state whose ruling class REALLY liked circle-jerking around their fancy sword collections, and thus said outmoded armaments were all but forgotten in dusty storages instead of getting fetishized into cultural icons.

"-How can it penetrate an iron armor better than Broadsword?"

It cannot and doesn't. The katana is basically a hand-and-half sabre, and like all convex sabres was primarily designed for slicing "draw cuts" against flesh with the tip portion of the blade. This sucks even *more* ass against even remotely decent armour than the hewing cuts of straight and concave blades, which is why most continental Eurasian users (primarily cavalrymen, as the whole weapon type originally evolved for mounted use) routinely also carried straight-bladed swords and/or "mass" weapons such as axes, maces and warhammers for use against harder targets.

Japanese armour designs tend to have awfully large gaps particularly around the joints that would doubtless have downright horrified most European warriors used to the essentially complete coverage possible with mail, however, so the penetration issue was fairly easy to work around. And of course much sword-swinging happened in "civilian" contexts away from the battlefield where armour wasn't much of an issue anyway.

"Katanas were increibly sharp but they were made out of very little metal and so they chipped and dulled easily."

"very little metal" all of my what. A summary glance at the typical weight range (~1 to 1.5 kg) will tell you they had just as much iron in them as most swords of similar lenght. As for chipping and dulling, well, that goes for all edged weaponry. Warriors commonly carried whetstones to the battlefield to give their blades quick resharpenings during lulls the fighting and nicks are pretty much a given for any surviving specimen that actually saw serious combat use. Hell, IIRC in one Viking saga the protagonist laments that the sword he borrowed from a friend for a judicial duel (hólmganga) got a nasty nick in its blade from the opponent's iron shield-rim and the owner won't be happy about that...