Wraith said:
I've been hit with latex weapons before, wouldn't mind being hit with them again, but I do have a bit of trepidation. The way ultralights have influenced some of the fighting styles I've seen to have much more in the way of wrist flicks and high speed drumrolling, I would be less than comfortable facing when done with a weapon rep with a firmer and possibly pointed tip. This isn't the SCA, and I don't always have a closed-face hem on. All it would take is ducking wrong once to get a poke that would make me really unhappy.
Then again, all it takes to salve that problem is slowing down combat a little and fighting safer instead of faster. How to do that is one hell of a debate.
As you point out, this is as much a combat style issue as an issue with the reps.
Time for more anecdotes. I got started in sword fighting with 2" wood closet rods, oak bokken, broom handles, and whatever else my friends and I cooked up. We were highschool kids, we had no rule system, no marshalls, and no formal restrictions. We had no armor beyond thin leather gloves and jackets. We did not wear helmets, knee pads, or elbow pads. Whether a weapon was acceptable to fight with was entirely between the two fighters. Other people would weigh in if they saw something they thought was unsafe, but mostly it was up to the two guys fighting to decide whether they were comfortable with the weapons.
Over the course of three years, fighting about five hours a week, the only injury that I know of was a broken pinky finger. There were lots of bruises, sure, but no concussions, no broken ribs, no eyes put out, no organs ruptured. We fenced with 1/4" fiberglass rods without any face protection and never managed to hurt each other.
Basically, the only thing that kept us from killing each other is that, although we were fighting full speed we were never try to hit the other guy. The point was just to land a 'fatal' touch, a touch to the torso, upper legs, upper arms, something where we figured a full speed hit would kill or incapacitate.
My point is that with the most dangerous weapons you could use short of steel, with no adult supervision, no safety gear of any kind, we managed to go for years without significant injuries. We were fighting on bad terrain, with ridiculous wooden great swords, daggers, flails, and one pole axe that involved a three pound training weight taped to a six foot shaft and padded with a towel. What we were doing was incredibly dangerous, and I understand that in retrospect. But think about it.
The only thing keep us safe was ourselves. We wanted to play our game, but we didn't want to hurt our friends. And we managed to play the game in conditions that no larp or sport fighting group would even consider without injury because it was more important to control our attacks and pull the force out of them than it was to win.
Ultimately, what's going to keep people safe in any sport is the players and the marshalls. To me, arguing about weather or not latex weapons are safer than boffers is ridiculous. I've fought, extensively, with the worst weapons you could imagine for sport fighting and got through it just fine when just one accident, one dodge in the wrong direction, one bad fall, could have stove in my head, shattered my neck or spine, ruptured an organ, or driven a broken shaft into my eye. And that can always happen, no matter what we do, no matter what we choose to fight with. A perfect rep that anyone could pass might have a flaw in the manufacture of the core and that core could shatter and drive through the padding. two inches of open celled foam won't slow it down or do anything to protect the person on the other end. And then someone is dead, whether it was PVC and pipe foam, a pool noodle, camp pad, fiberglass, whatever.
Ultimately it doesn't matter. The rules are the rules, and if a latex weapon doesn't have the 5/8 in of padding required to pass under the rules it won't pass. But I would strongly discourage anyone from thinking that any of the weapons we use are really safe. That is all up to the players and the marshalls.
Here is a news article that I think illustrates what I'm trying to say about 'safety' in sport fighting.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_V ... ch_Smirnov
A master fencer, using the best equipment available at the time. But he died due to an expected failure of his opponents blade and his own armor.
On a slightly less morbid note, I think there are recipes for ballistic gelatin on line, and I think I could rig up a basic stabbing robot with a reciprocating saw. Anyone curious to see how many stabs it takes for a standard alliance weapons core to poke completely through the tip?
