#slower ramp up for swordfighting bc i had to have excellent technique to even hit hard enough

[yaninus-de-venoix]

so as someone who does both hand to hand martial arts and armored combat (medieval swordfighting), and is significantly smaller than nearly everyone I fight - size absolutely does matter, but not in the way people think. like, being small doesn't make me less likely to win (at least, not in the long run), but it definitely does change the way I fight. a foot or so doesn't make a big difference for hand to hand, though the added mass + strength + leverage that usually comes with size does. (doesn't mean you can't win, you just have to do things a little differently). but with melee weapons, it's a longer lever, so the differences get magnified.

I'm barely 5'3", around 115 lbs, light build, mainly using a smallish heater shield and a broadsword that's a bit on the short side. thinking about the most extreme size differences I've encountered and how those play out... there's a guy who comes to the weekly practice in my area who's like 6'3", former body builder, built like a brick, and mainly fights with a spear. now THAT does make a difference, because our ranges are so different. he can hit me way before I can, and by the time I can reach him, I'm closer in than he really wants me to be, since I have more mobility in close range. so when we spar, I end up basically chasing him around the field just trying to get close enough to hit him. not that it's an unwinnable fight!- I'm usually about 1:1 with that guy, actually - but it looks very different from fighting someone with smaller reach.

extrapolating that out to an even bigger size difference... if you have a 3' tall person fighting an 8' tall person, I'd expect the viable options to be 1. range weapons, or 2. force the fight up close. if you have to fight melee in an open field, you better be agile enough to close the distance, fast. otherwise, back them against a wall, or in a corner. get close enough that they can't maneuver, and now the odds are tipped way in your favor. that's the ticket, get through the Danger Zone (the range where they can hit you and you can't hit them) as fast and defensively as possible, so you can get to the Stabbing Zone (where you can comfortably hit them and they have to twist around to hit you).

being close in might not inconvenience the tall person so much in hand-to-hand combat, where you don't need room to swing - I know folks who can throw a helluva punch in less than 2 inches - but you at least need to be able to reach them if you want a decent chance of winning.

I've seen your posts about size not being significant in fights and an under 5 foot tall person can reasonably fight someone over 6 feet in melee. But I'm writing sci fi and I have alien races where some adults are 3 feet tall and others are 8 feet tall? Is size now important? It's realistic sci-fi. What I mean is, like I've never questioned Yoda fighting humans but because of the non realistic Force so I bought it. But I do kinda question pure martial arts.

So, when you're comparing two humans, a foot of height difference doesn't significantly affect their reach. Humans are all equivalently unstable (roughly speaking) (we're all bipeds), so the difference of a few inches of limb length. Outside of very specific edge cases, this doesn't have a lot of combat implications. Basically, anything you do with your hands will bring you inside your opponent's strike range.

However, we're not talking about two humans, which means a lot of the assumptions, based on the fighters having similar physiology, are no longer relevant. Limb length can't be reliably tied to height (overall), nor can the characteristics of those limbs. A fight between an octopus and horse is going to look very different from a fight between a Wookie and an Ewok.

There's a serious problem in popular science fiction, with the appearance of alien life. Because (most) science fiction series and films relies on actors wearing prosthetics to represent the aliens, we get a lot of scifi where the vast majority of aliens are just humans but with funny rubber foreheads. This isn't as pronounced in literary science fiction, but the trend is still there.

There's an understandable kind of narcissism in looking at yourself and saying, “well, I look normal,” but, to put it very bluntly, humans are goddamn weird as a species on a number of fronts. Including our physiology. If you're looking at, “realistic sci-fi,” the odds of encountering another bipedal, roughly human looking, race are almost non-existent.

Star Trek explicitly responded to this idea, though it took them over 25 years to address, with an advanced alien race that seeded genetic data across the galaxy millions of years ago, resulting in manyraces that looked suspiciously like humans in makeup. This entire justification doesn't stand up well to scrutiny, but at least an attempt was made.

The standardized bipedal template isn't inherently a problem from the perspective of presenting aliens as other people. However, actually encountering a species in outer space with two two arms, two legs, a head with eyes, ears, a nose, and a mouth in a familiar configuration, is a genere convention, and makes no sense from an exobiology (or xenobiology) perspective.

It's worth remembering that humans are genetically coded to be xenophobic to near humans. Specifically, I'm talking about the, “uncanny valley,” and it usually comes up in relation to attempts to create human simulacra, particularly with humanoid animatronics. It is very likely this instinct would kick in hard with near human aliens, and may kick in with divergent human species. (Which is to say, humans who have spent enough generations on other worlds to result in physiological adaptations. It's also quite possible that the uncanny valley is, in fact, the result of now extinct near human divergent species, such as Neanderthal.) Or, put another way, being in the same room as a Vulcan would be absolutely terrifying on a genetic level.

So, do the height differences matter in this situation? I'm not sure they do. If the example is two, roughly similar bi-pedal fighters, then yes, if only because of reach. However, when we're talking about two alien races, we really don't have a baseline, and that throws off all our assumptions.

-Starke

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