I suppose that a Mathematician ought to be able to come up with a formulae to work this question out. You'd need to know things such as: Length and Speed of the arrow; and the speed that the staff was spinning. Assuming the staff just missed the head (point) of the arrow, as it sped towards the target, you'd need to know if the other end of the staff would come around in time to intercept the shaft (or flight perhaps) in order to effectively deflect the head from its target.
Sorry, I didn't read the review before I posted. I still haven't, although I did take a quick preview. Speaking about WEKAF Eskrima masks it says: "The metal bars across the face region are spaced closely enough that there is no potential for a stick/sword getting stuck in the face masking, or hitting an eye." Which is simply not true! A sword could easily enter the mask point first. In addition to that, several years ago, one of my own students had a rattan Eskrima stick penetrate his mask, in a competition, and the end of the stick removed one of his contact lenses. We took the mask off his head and had to stand on it in order to be able to remove the stick from between the bars. We then held the mask in one hand, and the same stick in the other, and attempted to drive the (same) stick through the bars. We couldn't do it. But when two bodies are moving towards one another, then that's obviously a different matter!
Lets see... The arrow's travelling at about 200 fps (lower limit for a proper bow), and is about 2 feet long. As such it'll cross the path of the staff for only 0.01s. If the staff is 1m long, and we make it infinitely thin (i.e. the arrow won't hit the staff, but can be hit by it) then you need it to cover 360 degrees every hundredth of a second in order to be guaranteed to deflect the arrow. The circle the staff is describing will be 3.141m around (2 * pi * r, or pi * diameter of a meter). In order to cover this distance every hundreth of a second the staff would need to be spinning with an angular velocity of 36000 degrees per second, or 100 revolutions per second. This works out at 6000 revolutions per minute. A plane propellor rotates at approximately 1900 rev/minute. So, if you can spin a staff three times faster than a plane propeller, you can guarantee you'll be able to deflect an arrow from the lower speed bows. * Maths may be slightly off, I'm out of practice.
I stopped reading and trying to follow that as soon as I read that the length of the 'staff' was just 39 inches long!
The same would apply to a staff of any size to be honest. If you went for an eight foot quarterstaff, for instance. Fortunately I've now found a calculator that'll work out how fast the tips of the staff have to be moving, in terms of tangential velocity, saving myself some work. In order to a quarterstaff to be spinning fast enough to guarantee deflecting a 2 foot arrow, moving at 200 feet per second, the ends would be moving at over 1500 meters per second (or over 5000 feet per second for the stick in the muds). Or, roughly five times the speed of sound... The ends would be experiencing a force throwing them away from the center equivalent to 90 000 times the force of gravity at the surface of the earth. I think it's likely to splinter under that sort of force - possibly spontaneously combust. For comparison, the force of gravity at the surface of the sun is only 28 times the pull of gravity on earth.
To be honest, I'm not even gonna both trying to work it out. I certainly wouldn't wanna try my luck! I don't really consider a length of 39 inches to qualify it to being called a staff however. In addition to that, it wouldn't have to travel 360 degrees if you are spinning it by holding it in the middle.
I knew I was going to get something wrong. That throws the figures completely off you realise. Curse you. Although they seem a little more realistic now (my mistake was putting in the radius as eight foot, when it should have been four, and doubling the number of rotations needed). So instead we get a straight line speed equivalent of 383 m/s, only about 40 m/s faster than the speed of sound. The effective acceleration on the two ends of the staff would be twelve thousand times the speed of gravity. Still probably enough to have it ripped in half and embedding itself in the ground/achieve orbital velocity...
What Pugil noted in post #46 was the 1st thing I noticed... so did you change the 360° of arc to only 180°, as well as using half the length of the stick for the radius in your formula? EDIT: Also, I wasn't gonna mention that 2 ft. for the length of the arrow is kinda short (mainly because crossbow arrows are usually shorter than that, and would therefore equal things out), but the standard draw length is 28" and so the arrow must be a wee bit longer than that (thus making 2.5 ft. a more accurate call).
Yep. That's already accounted for (sort of) since an arrow's generally about a yard long, but a war arrow is going to be travelling at about 250-300 feet/s - so the rough time calculation still applies.
As long as the guy with the bow was around 200 yards away, I'm not gonna bother spinning my staff in an attempt to deflect the arrow away from me. I reckon that on seeing him loose his bow I'll have time to move to the side - even at my advanced age!
with regards to REAL staff sparring bytomic do some nicely overprice 'action flex' products for contact weapon training, ive held one of the staffs.. (crap) anyway.. staff sparring! been several occasions ive got together with a friend in the garden and went for it staff vs staff or staff vs bokken. few lumps afterwards but abit of control goes a long way between friends haha. must say anyway at whatever speed catching an arrow out the air is pretty ninja!:ninja2: in reply to all the fancy maths in an earlier post (10/10 for effort by the way) ive tested this in a much simpler manner. one day whilst doing some snow training in the park we began discussing the theory in question.. "can arrows be stopped by spinning your staff?". all very interested to answer this question i voulenteerd to participate in what id like to call 'a controlled experiment'. i stood there spinning my staff as fast as i could in front of me about 5or6 meters away from one of the guys in my class(can you see where this is going yet? ) Basically he threw 5 snowballs at me, i took 5 to the face.. theory denied! -J
yes but think about the actual are of the arrow that the staff could hit to have an adequete effect on the trajectory /__________________________________________ \ ^ surely anywhere after halfway would not make a difference? the arrow head would just continue forward the next few inches (and thats all it needs). ok lets say the closer to the middle the more effect it will have, then youve got how ard you actually hit it with the staff. but let face it 1fps or 300fps.. you still wouldnt want an arrow in the face! pardon the diagram -J
The nearer the point the better - same as when trying to deflect the point of an Eskrima stick being thrust at you!
