Realism; Strength is not important for swordsmanship(?)

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by Gerrard of Titan Server

Next, as mentioned by another upthread, based on what I've read, I'm dubious as to the claim that stronger people can swing a weapon faster, and I'm especially dubious that this relationship should be linear.

It's definitely not linear, but it's definitely faster. There's a reason baseball batters weightlift and use steroids.

Originally Posted by Gerrard of Titan Server

Further, from a biomechanical point of view, real human strength comes from muscles, and adding muscles adds weight which needs to be moved, and this (highly amateur) armchair reasoning suggests that you won't see linear returns in weapon swing speed by increasing strength, and it may even go so far as to be a wash, e.g. increasing strength also increases mass, and the net result is no improvement in weapon swing speed. AFAICT, IMHO.

It's only going to be a wash if the amount of non-muscle weight added is equal to the amount of muscle weight added. This may well be the case for whole-body activities, but a sword is still a quite considerable weight compared to an arm. A human arm is typically estimated at around 5% of overall body weight, so a 200 lb man might have a 10 lb arm, but because it's a lever with a rotation point of your shoulder, a sword with a length equal to your arm length only needs 1/7 of the mass of the arm to hold an equal amount of energy.