Why are Katana stalker sheathes specifically on the back on the characters?

[Lkapitan]

I have a katana ninjitsu stalker with multiple costumes. One of which, would look great if the sword was placed on his waist when sheathed rather than the back. (this specific costume has no shirt, and I don't want to take away from the look by adding a chest strap of some kind. A floating katana on the back is also very unflattering.)

 

My question is, why are the stalker AT forced to have the swords sheathed only on the back while all other AT force the sword to be sheathed only on their waists? Why can't we choose for all AT if we want one costume to have a sword on the back and another on the waist? I understand the animations may have already been coded to reach for those specific areas upon creation and they simply just added the costume piece to that specific area to make it realistic. Is there anyway for you to adjust where the character reaches for the weapon? IE: from the back or from the waist regardless of AT? 

[Rudra]

My guess would be the draw animations the ATs use.

 

Aside from that? The daito and shoto were worn on the side. Always. Only in anime and Hollywood versions do they get carried on the back. The ninja-to on the other hand, was small enough to be concealed on the back without risk of slicing the user's throat when drawn. And since a ninja-to would have been considered an obvious mark of you being an assassin, would have been kept hidden.

 

(That said? CoX's ninja-to is fricking huge. And actual ninja-to were garbage weapons. Some were even carried in pieces and had to be assembled. Not relevant to the discussion though. So, sorry for the tangent.)

[Rudra]

Yeah, any peasant caught with a daito would be summarily executed on the spot. As for them breaking? Depended on the iron and treating. The really good daito were resilient. The more common ones were pretty bad. (Not ninja-to bad, but not as great as people romanticize them to be.) (Really good daito took a really long time to make though. And LOTS of failures would be made while trying to make 1 good one.)

[srmalloy]

17 hours ago, Krimson said:

Katanas also broke all the time. The folded steel thing is a myth.

Depending on the skill of the smith, folded-steel edges can be kept sharper than regular forged billets, but the actual purpose of the folding is to address the crap quality of the raw material they had to work with. Satetsu (iron sand) produces a low-quality bloom of steel (tamahagane) that does not have a uniform character; the Smith will break it into pieces and sort them into harder and softer steel by eye. The pieces chosen for the blade are wrapped together and heated to be hammer welded into one mass, then folded repeatedly to drive out impurities and voids in the billet.

 

This process is necessary to turn the low-quality steel into something that can equal -- not outclass -- the steel in other swords. This material is then forged into a trough shape, and an inner layer of more ductile steel is welded as the core to give the blade strength, then the blade is shaped, a tapered layer of clay for the final quenching giving the edge its temper and creates the curvature of the blade. It's possible to make an excellent blade this way, but it takes considerably more skill, which is why the best swordsmiths are revered; the average katana was of much lower quality -- from simply mediocre to having defects that compromised the blade (too hard and brittle, too soft, voids in the steel reducing its strength, etc.).

[Rudra]

I thought they used 3 different metals because their iron was crap? A soft metal for resilience, their low quality iron for strength, and a mid-grade metal to bond them.

[Vanden]

On 9/22/2022 at 2:01 PM, Lkapitan said:

My question is, why are the stalker AT forced to have the swords sheathed only on the back while all other AT force the sword to be sheathed only on their waists?

 

To answer your question, OP, you don't, in fact, have a Katana Stalker, you have a Ninja Blade Stalker. Katana Stalkers don't exist. Ninja Blade is drawn from the back, while Katana is drawn from the hip. Is it weird, and somewhat arbitrary? You bet. But it's the way the game works, and something that was set in place about 17 years ago, so it's what we got. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[srmalloy]

11 minutes ago, Rudra said:

I thought they used 3 different metals because their iron was crap? A soft metal for resilience, their low quality iron for strength, and a mid-grade metal to bond them.

It all came from the same bloom produced from the iron sand; because the iron sand was not smelted at a high enough temperature to fully melt the iron, the bloom created has different grades of steel in different parts of the bloom. The smith had to separate the pieces the tamahagane was broken into according to the quality of the steel, making final determination of where each piece would go according to its behavior when first hammered into thin plates before being forge welded together. Some swordsmiths would separate the tamahagane pieces into more grades -- Masamune Goro allegedly created swords from seven different grades of tamahagane, for example. The actual construction of the base sword billet depends on the smith; the crudest method just used one homogeneous block, while many used the trough-and-core method, while others would use a more composite construction, with a more ductile core, a very hard edge, and side/back panels of a steel less rigid (and brittle) than the edge, as well as other geometries for layering the different grades of metal.

[PeregrineFalcon]

"The Katana is a pure DPS weapon, through and through. While the Longsword is a more balanced weapon meant for a tank."

 

 

[Vanden]