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I'm seeing a lot of variance in the ratios. Some flails have longer handles, some have short. Some have chains as long or longer than the handle, some have almost non-existent chains. What are the advantages and disadvantages of various handle and chain lengths, and is there an "optimal" ratio?
[https://acoup.blog/2019/06/07/collections-the-siege-of-gondor-part-v-just-flailing-about-flails/](The optimum is no chain at all).
A flail is a really bad weapon. The chain makes it difficult to control, puts you at great risk of hitting yourself, while not giving you any reach advantage. Real flails were medieval agricultural tools that were sometimes used as improvised weapons, but if you had access to an axe or spear, you would use that. If you have a big spiky ball of iron, it's much more effective to put it at the end of a rigid wooden staff and whack people with it that way; in other words, a mace is strictly better.
That said, real chain-based weapons do have their uses. The lkusarigama is made by attaching a sickle to a wooden handle with a long chain. It is used to entangle and disarm your opponent, at which point you can close in and slash them with the sickle end. Since it involves swinging a sickle on the end of a long chain, it would never be used in pitched battle lest you hit your comrades, and in any case spears are more useful when armies clash. However, kusarigamas were quite handy in one-on-one combat; since they were easy to conceal and could be disguised as agricultural tools, they were primarily used by ninjas and city guards
So to give an answer to your question, if you're going to use a chain-based weapon, the optimum length is long enough to completely wrap around somebody. And in that situation, you want a fairly light, small business end, not a big metal ball.
So maybe something like a rope dart, meteor hammer, or bolas? I've seen some YouTube videos on meteor hammers, and it looks like one way to use them is by throwing the weighted end as a projectile and using the chain (or very often a rope) to retrieve/retract it.
I agree though, flails as shown above seem like an unwieldy garbage weapon. If I had to use one, I'd want a very short chain on it, so probably 2nd from the left on the bottom row.
Unfortunately in some medieval combat sports, the "speed flail," a foam ball tethered to a handle, is an easy non-historic way to bypass a shield -- swing at the top of the shield, and the ball wraps around to hit the opponent's shield or sword arm.
So could a real flail work against a shield that way too?
A real flail is a lot heavier, which is harder to use, which is the main problem that me and my friends had with the foam version being allowed in the sport.
You would have to ask a qualified historian to know if these weapons were ever used in this way. I would be curious to know too.
My guess is that spear/polearm beats shield at a much lower cost and with less risk, but I don't really know I'm not an expert.