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Description
Drawn in a 3 to 4-hour burst in the afternoon of December 18th, 2015, this submission is a follow-up to the previous one, which can be seen here: fav.me/d9kc025 - as well as a "catalog" summarizing both new directions for a current design project and a few things I'd been doing over the past year. However, the projects shown here all still have one thing in common: they're attempts to create a dagger as a secondary weapon for one of my favorite fictional characters of them all: Weiss Schnee, heir to the Schnee Dust Company and one of the four heroines of Rooster Teeth's action fantasy series, "RWBY."

The nucleus of all of these ideas came from the fact that Weiss Schnee's primary weapon, Myrtenaster, is a type of Rapier. The original Rapier was the standard civilian gentleman's dueling sword of the Renaissance, and it was frequently used alongside different types of dagger - and what I've done here was try to use the basic concepts behind the appearance and functionality of the Myrtenaster Multi-Action Dust Rapier to design secondary weapons for Weiss to use in the pattern of the Main-Gauche (parrying dagger) and the Rondel Dagger. All of these designs are actually intended to be capable of being developed into constructible props, possibly at some future time.

Without further ado, let's go over these designs one by one, starting with the two on the top - which just happen to be the newest ones, the Rondel Daggers. The Rondel Dagger, a bizarre weapon by today's standards, was introduced during the late Middle Ages, where it made its debut as the sidearm of plate-armored medieval knights and, subsequently, Renaissance gentlemen. Worn on the hips just in front of the legs for a quick draw and designed for a lethal stab, these long-bladed daggers' unique rondels - their flat, circular disc guards - served to lock the user's hand and wrist in position but consequently put limitations on the fighting style that could be used with the weapon: a Rondel Dagger can only be effectively held in the "reverse" or "icepick" grip with the blade below the fist, a design optimized for thrusting attacks.

Also, in the world of "RWBY," every individual weapon is supposed to have a name. Although I did not name the bottom two dagger designs (for reasons I'll touch upon later), the Rondel Dagger designs - being variants of a single project - share a name that I coined for them about a day or two after I first started working on that version of the weapon: Silberdistel. "Silberdistel" is the German name for a flower more commonly known as the dwarf carline thistle or silver thistle, a central European thistle whose flower petals are white. Although the name doesn't sound like something you'd say in the same sentence with "Myrtenaster," it follows the same naming theme. "Myrtenaster" or "Myrten Aster" also refers to a family of central European flowers, known to the German people, whose flowers can be found in a white color - a reference to how Weiss Schnee's color theme is white and how her character design draws inspiration from classic German fairy tales. Furthermore, thistles are known for their painfully sharp spines - and that quality seemed to befit the Rondel Dagger design, which is essentially little more than a long, pointy spike on a stick.

Design #1 is based on the first version of Silberdistel, the Rondel Dagger that I designed for Weiss Schnee, as featured in my previous submission. It features all the elements worked out in those previous sketches, including a cylindrical chamber that is reloaded by twisting it clockwise to expose a hole in the magazine, an internal hammer mechanism, two large rondels with the rear rondel wider than the front rondel, a small, button-like "trigger stud" firing mechanism, three Dust exhaust ports on the forward face of the Dust chamber and a very stiff, purely thrusting blade featuring a razor-sharp point and a three-sided, hollow-ground triangular cross-section, a class of blade best-known for being used on 18th century smallswords, 18th-19th century bayonets and the modern fencing epee. Incapable of cutting, the blade is completely thrust-centric - and is said to create nasty three-sided wounds that are incredibly difficult to stitch up.

Design #2 is a "new" variant of Design #1, a revised version of Silberdistel, the Rondel Dagger, featuring somewhat reworked proportions and, most importantly, an entirely new blade design. On this version of the "Rondel Dust Dagger," the aforementioned hollow-ground triangular blade (a blade type that has been seen on some real-life Rondel Daggers) has been replaced with a four-sided, rhomboid, "diamond"-shaped blade. However, despite the totally different blade geometry, I should note that this 4-sided rhomboid blade is still so thick and so stiff that it can't realistically take a cutting edge so, like the three-sided blade, its focus is on the weapon's razor-sharp point and it is still an entirely thrusting dagger. Furthermore, the total replacement of the blade has also prompted a redesign of the Dust exhaust system. There are now four, rather than three, Dust exhaust ports. They're smaller, and they've been moved to the blade, with one exhaust hole "carved" into a recess in each of the four sides of the blade.

After Design #2, we move on from the Rondel Daggers to the Main-Gauche (Parrying) Daggers, Designs #3 and #4. Ironically - and this is because I've been deliberately keeping relatively quiet about them - Designs #3 and #4 *predate* Designs #1 and #2 by almost a year. I first came up with Design #3 in October of 2014, and had perfected Design #4 by February of 2015. As these drawings are not done to scale, I should probably note first that the Main-Gauche Daggers are meant to be *smaller* than the Rondel Daggers even though it doesn't look that way on the design sheets; they're no longer than 22 inches, which is a more-or-less realistic size for historical Main-Gauche Daggers.

The word "Main-Gauche" is actually French for "left hand," which is why the parrying dagger is sometimes also referred to as the "left-hand" dagger. In Rapier fencing, the Rapier sword is primarily an offensive weapon. Classical Rapiers could be up to four feet long, making them very efficient for attacking on the lunge but slow and less effective when it came to pulling back from an attack to defend. For that reason, many duelists also carried a special dagger designed to block or even trap an opponent's blade in the off-hand, and in many cases, these "parrying daggers" were made together with the larger Rapier swords as a matched set with the dagger designed to look like the sword in miniature. (This is why Designs #3 and #4 are intentionally created to look more and function more like Weiss Schnee's original Myrtenaster Multi-Action Dust Rapier.)

Because the vast majority of fencers have always been right-handed, they would carry their daggers in their left hands, and that's why they became known as "Main-Gauche" or "left-hand" daggers. (Ironically, Weiss Schnee herself is left-handed, and she would carry her Main-Gauche in her *right* hand - and this is why both Design #3 and Design #4 have "right-handed" control schemes.) At the moment, I've been in collaboration with two friends who own a cosplay propmaking business. We are trying to see if we can do anything with Design #3 and/or Design #4, and that's why I've marked the two designs as "proprietary" in the design sketches. This is also why I haven't named the Main-Gauche designs, because I have reserved that honor for my collaborators as part of our arrangements. They have been simply called "Dust Daggers" ever since they were first drawn.

Design #3 was the very first "Dust Dagger" I ever designed for Weiss Schnee, with work beginning shortly after Anime Weekend Atlanta 2014 ended, when I first began to get the idea of creating a dagger based on Myrtenaster to give Weiss a new secondary weapon. As such, I used Myrtenaster directly as a starting point and this is the one design out of all four that you see here that looks the most like the original Myrtenaster sword. It even splits apart to reload with the top of the sword splitting upward on a hinge to reveal a slot for Dust like Myrtenaster does in the sword's concept art. However, despite these superficial similarities, this is still a smaller secondary weapon. Designed to only use crystallized Dust as ammunition, this version of the Main-Gauche can fit one Dust crystal into its magazine at a time. Its Dust exhaust port, like Myrtenaster's, is exposed above one side of the blade and it's got an exposed hammer and trigger, as well as a special slide switch to release the top of the magazine. It also shares the design of its elaborate "guard fins" with Myrtenaster, but on the dagger, the fins have been reduced in size and number; the dagger only has two, while the sword had four. The final "special" characteristic of this dagger - a feature shared with Design #4 - was an enlarged, more elaborate, weighted pommel. From a practical standpoint, the pommel helps balance the knife to make it faster and more responsive in combat, and from a visual standpoint, the spectacular spiked, flared rear end of the dagger is deliberately designed to evoke the White Queen chess piece, a sort of homage to Weiss' aristocratic background and her tendency to be nicknamed the "Ice Queen."

Design #4 followed a few months after the completion of Design #3. A variant of the Main-Gauche and still designed for use by Weiss Schnee, this variant doesn't look quite as close to the design and mechanical layout of the original Myrtenaster Multi-Action Dust Rapier, but it was designed to be more easily converted into a constructible physical prop. It's noticeably flatter than Design #3, though it maintains the same overall design themes all the way to the designs on the guard fins and the "White Queen"-themed weighted pommel, with a flat breech block built into an oblong box-shaped breech forming the center of the weapon. Its Dust exhaust ports have been rearranged into a new layout featuring a double set of short fullers sunken into the middle of the blade on each side, with a tubular Dust exhaust port nestled into each funnel. This version of the knife features a trigger and hammer similar to the ones found on Design #3 and on Myrtenaster, but its third control is different - a thumb-operated lever that activates the reloading mechanism, and the unique thing about this dagger is that I actually proposed two workable reloading systems for it. The first proposal would have the breech fitted with a trapdoor; thumbing the lever would drop the trapdoor, allowing a vial of powdered Dust to be poured into the magazine before resealing the breech. The second proposal, on the other hand, would cause a mechanically-operated cylindrical breech to rise from the breech block; this breech would reveal a circular hole that could then be loaded with a single crystal of Dust. Like Design #3, Design #4 was turned over to my propmaker friends - and is currently under further development.

All four "Dust Dagger" designs created for Weiss Schnee have the same general limitations. Their effective range as Dust weapons is extremely short, and they can only hold a single charge of Dust at a time, restricting them to use as secondary weapons, although the Rondel Daggers are not strictly meant to be paired together with Myrtenaster and can be used without it, whereas the Main-Gauche (Parrying) Daggers are specifically designed to be used together with the Myrtenaster Rapier as a paired set - they're not really meant to be used on their own.

Description
Drawn in a 3 to 4-hour burst in the afternoon of December 18th, 2015, this submission is a follow-up to the previous one, which can be seen here: fav.me/d9kc025 - as well as a "catalog" summarizing both new directions for a current design project and a few things I'd been doing over the past year. However, the projects shown here all still have one thing in common: they're attempts to create a dagger as a secondary weapon for one of my favorite fictional characters of them all: Weiss Schnee, heir to the Schnee Dust Company and one of the four heroines of Rooster Teeth's action fantasy series, "RWBY."

The nucleus of all of these ideas came from the fact that Weiss Schnee's primary weapon, Myrtenaster, is a type of Rapier. The original Rapier was the standard civilian gentleman's dueling sword of the Renaissance, and it was frequently used alongside different types of dagger - and what I've done here was try to use the basic concepts behind the appearance and functionality of the Myrtenaster Multi-Action Dust Rapier to design secondary weapons for Weiss to use in the pattern of the Main-Gauche (parrying dagger) and the Rondel Dagger. All of these designs are actually intended to be capable of being developed into constructible props, possibly at some future time.

Without further ado, let's go over these designs one by one, starting with the two on the top - which just happen to be the newest ones, the Rondel Daggers. The Rondel Dagger, a bizarre weapon by today's standards, was introduced during the late Middle Ages, where it made its debut as the sidearm of plate-armored medieval knights and, subsequently, Renaissance gentlemen. Worn on the hips just in front of the legs for a quick draw and designed for a lethal stab, these long-bladed daggers' unique rondels - their flat, circular disc guards - served to lock the user's hand and wrist in position but consequently put limitations on the fighting style that could be used with the weapon: a Rondel Dagger can only be effectively held in the "reverse" or "icepick" grip with the blade below the fist, a design optimized for thrusting attacks.

Also, in the world of "RWBY," every individual weapon is supposed to have a name. Although I did not name the bottom two dagger designs (for reasons I'll touch upon later), the Rondel Dagger designs - being variants of a single project - share a name that I coined for them about a day or two after I first started working on that version of the weapon: Silberdistel. "Silberdistel" is the German name for a flower more commonly known as the dwarf carline thistle or silver thistle, a central European thistle whose flower petals are white. Although the name doesn't sound like something you'd say in the same sentence with "Myrtenaster," it follows the same naming theme. "Myrtenaster" or "Myrten Aster" also refers to a family of central European flowers, known to the German people, whose flowers can be found in a white color - a reference to how Weiss Schnee's color theme is white and how her character design draws inspiration from classic German fairy tales. Furthermore, thistles are known for their painfully sharp spines - and that quality seemed to befit the Rondel Dagger design, which is essentially little more than a long, pointy spike on a stick.

Design #1 is based on the first version of Silberdistel, the Rondel Dagger that I designed for Weiss Schnee, as featured in my previous submission. It features all the elements worked out in those previous sketches, including a cylindrical chamber that is reloaded by twisting it clockwise to expose a hole in the magazine, an internal hammer mechanism, two large rondels with the rear rondel wider than the front rondel, a small, button-like "trigger stud" firing mechanism, three Dust exhaust ports on the forward face of the Dust chamber and a very stiff, purely thrusting blade featuring a razor-sharp point and a three-sided, hollow-ground triangular cross-section, a class of blade best-known for being used on 18th century smallswords, 18th-19th century bayonets and the modern fencing epee. Incapable of cutting, the blade is completely thrust-centric - and is said to create nasty three-sided wounds that are incredibly difficult to stitch up.

Design #2 is a "new" variant of Design #1, a revised version of Silberdistel, the Rondel Dagger, featuring somewhat reworked proportions and, most importantly, an entirely new blade design. On this version of the "Rondel Dust Dagger," the aforementioned hollow-ground triangular blade (a blade type that has been seen on some real-life Rondel Daggers) has been replaced with a four-sided, rhomboid, "diamond"-shaped blade. However, despite the totally different blade geometry, I should note that this 4-sided rhomboid blade is still so thick and so stiff that it can't realistically take a cutting edge so, like the three-sided blade, its focus is on the weapon's razor-sharp point and it is still an entirely thrusting dagger. Furthermore, the total replacement of the blade has also prompted a redesign of the Dust exhaust system. There are now four, rather than three, Dust exhaust ports. They're smaller, and they've been moved to the blade, with one exhaust hole "carved" into a recess in each of the four sides of the blade.

After Design #2, we move on from the Rondel Daggers to the Main-Gauche (Parrying) Daggers, Designs #3 and #4. Ironically - and this is because I've been deliberately keeping relatively quiet about them - Designs #3 and #4 *predate* Designs #1 and #2 by almost a year. I first came up with Design #3 in October of 2014, and had perfected Design #4 by February of 2015. As these drawings are not done to scale, I should probably note first that the Main-Gauche Daggers are meant to be *smaller* than the Rondel Daggers even though it doesn't look that way on the design sheets; they're no longer than 22 inches, which is a more-or-less realistic size for historical Main-Gauche Daggers.

The word "Main-Gauche" is actually French for "left hand," which is why the parrying dagger is sometimes also referred to as the "left-hand" dagger. In Rapier fencing, the Rapier sword is primarily an offensive weapon. Classical Rapiers could be up to four feet long, making them very efficient for attacking on the lunge but slow and less effective when it came to pulling back from an attack to defend. For that reason, many duelists also carried a special dagger designed to block or even trap an opponent's blade in the off-hand, and in many cases, these "parrying daggers" were made together with the larger Rapier swords as a matched set with the dagger designed to look like the sword in miniature. (This is why Designs #3 and #4 are intentionally created to look more and function more like Weiss Schnee's original Myrtenaster Multi-Action Dust Rapier.)

Because the vast majority of fencers have always been right-handed, they would carry their daggers in their left hands, and that's why they became known as "Main-Gauche" or "left-hand" daggers. (Ironically, Weiss Schnee herself is left-handed, and she would carry her Main-Gauche in her *right* hand - and this is why both Design #3 and Design #4 have "right-handed" control schemes.) At the moment, I've been in collaboration with two friends who own a cosplay propmaking business. We are trying to see if we can do anything with Design #3 and/or Design #4, and that's why I've marked the two designs as "proprietary" in the design sketches. This is also why I haven't named the Main-Gauche designs, because I have reserved that honor for my collaborators as part of our arrangements. They have been simply called "Dust Daggers" ever since they were first drawn.

Design #3 was the very first "Dust Dagger" I ever designed for Weiss Schnee, with work beginning shortly after Anime Weekend Atlanta 2014 ended, when I first began to get the idea of creating a dagger based on Myrtenaster to give Weiss a new secondary weapon. As such, I used Myrtenaster directly as a starting point and this is the one design out of all four that you see here that looks the most like the original Myrtenaster sword. It even splits apart to reload with the top of the sword splitting upward on a hinge to reveal a slot for Dust like Myrtenaster does in the sword's concept art. However, despite these superficial similarities, this is still a smaller secondary weapon. Designed to only use crystallized Dust as ammunition, this version of the Main-Gauche can fit one Dust crystal into its magazine at a time. Its Dust exhaust port, like Myrtenaster's, is exposed above one side of the blade and it's got an exposed hammer and trigger, as well as a special slide switch to release the top of the magazine. It also shares the design of its elaborate "guard fins" with Myrtenaster, but on the dagger, the fins have been reduced in size and number; the dagger only has two, while the sword had four. The final "special" characteristic of this dagger - a feature shared with Design #4 - was an enlarged, more elaborate, weighted pommel. From a practical standpoint, the pommel helps balance the knife to make it faster and more responsive in combat, and from a visual standpoint, the spectacular spiked, flared rear end of the dagger is deliberately designed to evoke the White Queen chess piece, a sort of homage to Weiss' aristocratic background and her tendency to be nicknamed the "Ice Queen."

Design #4 followed a few months after the completion of Design #3. A variant of the Main-Gauche and still designed for use by Weiss Schnee, this variant doesn't look quite as close to the design and mechanical layout of the original Myrtenaster Multi-Action Dust Rapier, but it was designed to be more easily converted into a constructible physical prop. It's noticeably flatter than Design #3, though it maintains the same overall design themes all the way to the designs on the guard fins and the "White Queen"-themed weighted pommel, with a flat breech block built into an oblong box-shaped breech forming the center of the weapon. Its Dust exhaust ports have been rearranged into a new layout featuring a double set of short fullers sunken into the middle of the blade on each side, with a tubular Dust exhaust port nestled into each funnel. This version of the knife features a trigger and hammer similar to the ones found on Design #3 and on Myrtenaster, but its third control is different - a thumb-operated lever that activates the reloading mechanism, and the unique thing about this dagger is that I actually proposed two workable reloading systems for it. The first proposal would have the breech fitted with a trapdoor; thumbing the lever would drop the trapdoor, allowing a vial of powdered Dust to be poured into the magazine before resealing the breech. The second proposal, on the other hand, would cause a mechanically-operated cylindrical breech to rise from the breech block; this breech would reveal a circular hole that could then be loaded with a single crystal of Dust. Like Design #3, Design #4 was turned over to my propmaker friends - and is currently under further development.

All four "Dust Dagger" designs created for Weiss Schnee have the same general limitations. Their effective range as Dust weapons is extremely short, and they can only hold a single charge of Dust at a time, restricting them to use as secondary weapons, although the Rondel Daggers are not strictly meant to be paired together with Myrtenaster and can be used without it, whereas the Main-Gauche (Parrying) Daggers are specifically designed to be used together with the Myrtenaster Rapier as a paired set - they're not really meant to be used on their own.