Babelfish, the weight of the arms, according to Mattressi of 9.5 lbs, cannot proportionally be added to the weight the weapon to calculate weight and speed ratios. Wave your arms back and forth as fast as you can, it is almost instantaneous. The arms are applying the impulse to the sword, they are not part of the ratio.
Let's break it down: the 3 joints involved are the wrist, elbow and shoulder joints. When you say "the arms are applying the impulse", which set of muscles around a joint are you specifically referring to as 'the arms'? Unless you believe the only muscles used to move the sword are those in the wrist joint, you must account for the weight of at least half of the arm (even then, you would still need to a account for the weight of the hands). You can't just decide that you can't be bothered to work out what is happening within the arm/shoulder and say that the arm's weight can be left out.
As for the instantaneous bit, let's start again. Swing your arm. Measure the time it took to complete the swing. Pick up a pen and swing your arm. Measure the time it took to complete. Pick up a 1 litre (screw it, you can convert it to whatever ridiculous measure of volume you might choose to use) container of water and swing it. Measure the time it took to complete. You'll notice that the time's are all remarkably similar. Even though it feels like the bottle of water is slower, you'll notice almost no increase in time taken (unless you can't use a stop watch and are unsure of what 'repetition' is). There was certainly not a linear difference in the time taken to complete a swing based on the weight ratio. For me, the water bottle took exactly the same time (average of 0.31 seconds) to complete an ~180 degree swing from the right side of my body to the left side of my body. The pen weighs about 0.3 lbs while the 1 litre bottle weighs 2.2 pounds. Shouldn't that mean that I swing the bottle 7.33 times slower than the pen (i.e. it should take me 2.27 seconds to swing the bottle)? Or will you finally concede that, perhaps, the weight of the pen is negligible (as well as the weight of the bottle)
because the arm weighs significantly more?
Regardless, while you can balance a game on mathematics, you can't balance it based on real life physics. If we did, shielders would be able to attack while blocking, their shields would rarely break and nothing but blunt weapons would work against plate armor. But please, if you're going to reply only to this paragraph and ignore the rest of my post, just pretend that you didn't read this.
