...maybe? (Though of course it is magical crystal with various supernatural bonus features, so ordinary rules don't apply.)
The Aztecs kinda had obsidian swords (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macuahuitl) and obsidian is just natural volcanic glass, although those weapons seem to've been more like a broom handle studded with outward-facing razor blades, rather than one big chunk o' glass. In one of her stories, Tanith Lee describes dagger-sized glass knives as undetectable Renaissance murder weapons-- stab your enemy, break off the handle, pound the blade all the way in so it disappears into his body, and heigh-ho, supposedly no obvious wounds-- but she may've just been making that up.
Alternately, "crystal" might be interpretable as any natural crystalline stone-- quartz? diamond?-- but yeah, diamond at least is relatively brittle and subject to shock-fracturing, hence its facetability. I have no idea of the stress capacity of gigantous natural spear-like crystals (http://www.canyonsworldwide.com/crystals/mainframe3.html) (though the ones shown are made of selenite, which is a fairly soft stone; still, wouldn't want to have one of those things jabbed at me).
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ninetydegrees
no subject
on 2007-05-24 04:08 am (UTC)The Aztecs kinda had obsidian swords (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macuahuitl) and obsidian is just natural volcanic glass, although those weapons seem to've been more like a broom handle studded with outward-facing razor blades, rather than one big chunk o' glass. In one of her stories, Tanith Lee describes dagger-sized glass knives as undetectable Renaissance murder weapons-- stab your enemy, break off the handle, pound the blade all the way in so it disappears into his body, and heigh-ho, supposedly no obvious wounds-- but she may've just been making that up.
Alternately, "crystal" might be interpretable as any natural crystalline stone-- quartz? diamond?-- but yeah, diamond at least is relatively brittle and subject to shock-fracturing, hence its facetability. I have no idea of the stress capacity of gigantous natural spear-like crystals (http://www.canyonsworldwide.com/crystals/mainframe3.html) (though the ones shown are made of selenite, which is a fairly soft stone; still, wouldn't want to have one of those things jabbed at me).