The "Myth" of the "Dacian Falx" as a super weapon

[Olaf]

First Shock Troops only work against unexperienced opponents or those with bad moral.
A disciplined group of soldiers will not be shocked by a group of half naked men storming at them.
Second a trained fighter will not patiently wait for you to land your blow on his shield, but kill you the second you give him an opening.
Now to demonstrate the weaknes of the Falx iused in the way suggested here I ask you to tak a stick of ca. 1m length, grip it in both hands at one end and stand back from a wall so the other end of the stick touches the wall at the heigth of your head.
Now move the stick like a Flax swinging and "cutting" horizontal and vertical. You will notice that your swing take up a lot of space on both sides and behind you.
Now move forward a single step, and you should notice that you are now quite close to the wall.
Now try the same swings and you will see that you will hit the wall with your hands or the lower part of the stick before you can bring the tip of the stick anywhere near the wall.
Now grip the stick with one hand at about 50cm from the tip pointing forward and perform some short stabbing motions at the wall from the close position. Also perform these stabbing motions from the position a step back, while stepping forward with the leg where you hold the stick.
From this you should notice a few things:
1. The stab, even when moving forward, reaches his target faster then the swing.
2. The stab only uses up the space of your own body. So in a battleline stabbers can fight much closer to each other meaning that a chopper would be most likely be outnumbered.
3. The stab can be perfomed from an extremely close proximity to your target.
4. If the wall would be an opponent with a Scutum stepping into your swing, you would not be able to complete your swinging motion but your hand or grip of your weapon would actualy hit the rim or face of a Scutum before you can get the blade in a position where it can actually wound your opponent.
I agree with Matt that the only way I see these weapons being usefull would be in a supporting role in conjunction with a shield wall like the Daneaxes were most probably used.
If we assume that the reach would be enough to hook a Scutum or attack an opponent from the second rank, thereby opening the opponent to a killing blow from a better armored or shielded first ranker than it would actualy make sense.