Late 15th century armor is fucking amazing. Can you imagine how

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Also general gothic armor appreciation thread

And this is why the french got BTFO at Agincourt

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The sallet is also a neat looking helm. After centuries of trial and error they eventually figured out that this was the best form to protect your head with, and hundreds of years later we still use combat helmets based on the sallet.

Youre stupid anon. Without gunpowder armor wouldnt have had evolved to todays standards which are miles ahead medieval or anything that is made to stop blows created by muscle power

>gothic armor was bulky
>scifi armor is nimble and fits like a wetsuit
nice baseless projection there.

>>34849623
>if gunpowder was never discovered?
Yes, fuck firearms, they were a mistake!

>>34849649
The french eventually got better armor that could even withstand longbow arrows. The english lost that war in the end.

Does anyone know how medieval smiths produced such nice, smooth sheet metal to make the armour from? Surely it is impossible to make something like that by hammering flat a lump of iron?

>>34849623
Why are his shoes like that? That would impede agility, as well as serve as something to step on for an enemy.

>>34849676
The reason they got BTFO was because the weight of their men-at-arms got them bogged down in the mud. They got cut down where they stood.

>>34849689
Fashion and that type of armor was for horseback use anyways.

>>34849689
Probably not battle armour. Also, men at arms usually fought each other.

>>34849689
The points were detachable, and most knights would fight from horseback

>>34849683
It's steel, not iron. You make steel by combining iron with carbon, the stuff that burnt firewood is made from.

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>>34849689
It won't, one of the biggest misconceptions about medieval armor was that it impeded agility a lot.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hlIUrd7d1Q

>>34849737
The complaint was about the pointy shoes. Those guys don't have said shoes.

>>34849737
He's making a point about the stupid shoes, retard. Learn to read, you illiterate nigger.

>>34849689

Those are sabatons, they're pointed so they slip into the stirrup easier. Later the points were elongated to denote rank. It's an early form of the big hat theory of leadership.

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>>34849683
They got the steel plates from hammer works like this
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAv3hkOQZjg
Final forming was done by hand

>>34849727
it is a much more complicated than that.

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>Can you imagine how much more armor would've evolved if gunpowder was never discovered?
gunpowder was a thing in europe for some 200 years before gothic style appeared and it didnt stoped the development of plate armour.
also gothic is overrated as fuck
and Armets>>>>>Sallets

>>34849727
that totally misses the point of my question.

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>>34849649
How exactly would a German harness form ca 1485 have affected the outcome of a French-English affair in 1415?

>>34849655
And after about half a century of assorted sallet forms they moved on to other helmet designs.

>>34849699
Slogging through deep mud is slow and heavy work even without armour, and doing it without good armour against heavy longbow fire would probably mean horrendous losses. So the armour probably helped the French here (if only by keeping them alive for long enough to get caught in the trap), their problem instead being a somewhat reckless assault on a well prepared defensive position. And even with that the English knights had to fight like hell to stop the French from smashing through and killing just about every Englishman around.

>>34849689
Start with pointy shoes to work well with stirrups, exaggerate the shape to appease fashion, and then either make the excessive pointedness removable or keep a separate pair of more restrained sabatons around for whenever you're going into combat on foot.

>>34849792
Disagree. Sallets were much more mobile than armets while giving you the same amount of protection. Also looks cooler aesthetically IMO.

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>>34849683
Start by hammering out a rough sheet, raise/dish to shape by and large, then planish, grind and polish to make it smooth.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8QgBIb_xFI

>>34849649
They still won the war

does anyone actually own a copy of tobias capwells latest book on english late medieval armour?

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>>34849813
>Sallets were much more mobile
cant argue with that, mobility is the selling point of the sallet, but the armet offers the best mobility, vision and airflow for the level of protection and coverage that it has
>giving you the same amount of protection
are you crazy?

>>34849772
>it is a much more complicated than that.

Yes yes, chromium, nickel, magnesium too. But iron and carbon is what stainless steel is, mostly. And stainless steel is teh shiny stuff!

>>34849794
It does not. You assumed the armor was iron. It was steel. Steel is shiny. Iron is not.

>>34849675
They were.
Bring Back the Warrior Class!

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>>34849903
"Armour of the English Knight 1400-1450"?

I have that one, it's superb. An extremely in-depth look at how pretty much every detail changed over time, along with some context, explanations, and a touch of personal experiences.

>>34849940
Is it mostly text or has a good amount of pictures as well?

>>34849623
>At this point armor wasn't the big bulky stuff of fantasy anymore
Was it ever the big bulky stuff of fantasy?

>>34849940
i think thats the one he was promoting with matt easton, yeah. how much did you pay for it, and where did you get it from?

>>34849957
not really, the closest it came to fantasy nonsense was with the anti-rifle breastplates desu

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>>34849969
The decorative armor they made for nobles and kings was pretty nutty

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>>34849921
They didn't have any stainless steel in the 15th century, they had your basic carbon steels, and that was it.

As for what's what, iron with a suitable amount of carbon gives you steel. Steel with more than 10% Cr gives you stainless steel by common definition, though it'll usually take a lot more to make it somewhat stainless in reality. Though some stainless steels strain the definitions a bit by not including any carbon at all.

>>34849931
Plain iron will happily turn bright and shiny too if somewhat polished. Notice the saw-cut surface on the left here, on a piece of medieval-type iron.

>>34849991
assuming the breastplate is rivveted and constructed in such a way that it doesnt inhibit mobility, i see nothing wrong with that armour.

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>>34849991
>>34850004
i love this style of armour

>>34849623
>Can you imagine how much more the ar15 would've evolved if laser weapons hadn't been discovered?
See sometimes you've just reached the end of a particular tech and it's not going to change anymore until you stop using it and move on to the next thing.

>>34849997
God I love material chemistry. I wish I had a job at a smelting plant or something.

>>34850026
i dont desu, i like my armour waisted at the natural waist and paired with mail underlayers, though i do like a bit of fluting to my plate

>>34849991
It would look cooler if the lord wasn't so into roasts, though if he was still active enough to commission armor at that stage in life he probably could squash my head like a grape.

>>34850029
muh materials science

muh propellants

>>34850029
We do have improvements we could add to ballistic weapons. I don't think I need to tell you that cost and sufficient effectiveness are the reasons for why we don't change. Smaller armies are ironically starting to get better infantry rifles than larger ones, because they can more easily switch them out.

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>>34850004
It was Henry VIII's armor. He loved ridiculously ornate armor that could only be used by him because he was so fat and had syphilis that made his dick swollen

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>>34849949
Plenty of period artwork, drawings, and the odd photography of armour pieces to illustrate things.

>>34849959
I actually can't remember what I paid for it. Had pre-ordered straight from the publisher, paid, and forgotten all about it when I got a note to drop by the package collection centre to pick up somewhat. Well there I was handed an entire air mail sack (pic related), which didn't exactly leave me any less confused. I guess mine was the only one going to Sweden.

Pretty sad the luxury gold-edged edition never happened. It's a work that deserves that treatment IMO.

>>34849957
There's some bits here and there that may be a bit more voluminous than they need to be, but by and large no. Armour may not be terribly heavy, but it's still heavy enough that you won't be very interested in carrying a lot of extra weight for no good reason.

>>34849991
Plenty of decorations, true, but not a lot of extra bulk, especially not for field armour.

>>34849737
Someone should make a webm of him doing jumping jacks at 1:23. I would, but I'm a useless autist.

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>>34850069
>had syphilis that made his dick swollen
that and "muh kingly dick" i imagine, tudors werent shy about being sexually agressive

>no codpiece
dropped

>>34850078
ive seen it go for some crazy prices
i know its a good book and all, but £50+ is pretty damn pricy, were well into serious textbook prices there

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>>34850055
>muh materials science

Advances in steel making form the 15th century up to the late 19th century are mostly just ways to make more of it cheaper. Good steel remains much the same throughout this period.

>>34850069
While the codpiece may have been welcomed by those who had a large chunk of tender, diseased flesh to handle, it was also simply the fashion of the time. That it's not quite so common on armour is because full armour was usually made primarily for mounted use, and having a metal codpiece between you and the saddle would probably result in anything from severe discomfort to outright injury.

>>34850078
You know where to find the traditional shoes? Want to try them out becasue they look slightly less autistic than toe shoes but flexible and comfy.

>>34850110
50 euros for a hardcover is pretty par for the course.

>>34850119
im used to jewing it out and getting my books from cheap online sources or charity shops, and ive seen some places charging £100 for a copy

>>34850127
Yeah, almost all my books are from the library dumpster and back orders of old editions of textbooks. There's a reason libraries used to be a rich man's thing.

Books are like cars, expensive new and rapidly depreciate unless it's something rather rare or out of print

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>>34850110
As I'm currently working on adding some pedagogic courses to my old engineering degree, I bloody well wish my textbooks were up to the academic standards of Capwell's work. A published paper we got to read at one point was based of pure data mining.

>>34850127
Books like these tend to run up quite a bit in price as soon as they're out of print. My copy of the Knight and the Blast Furnace was over 100EUR from what I can recall, with The Art of Combat being around there too.

>>34850171
>tfw no publisher releases things digitally
Even if it was like 30 bucks I'd buy it this is fucking nonsense how books go out of print and them are out of print forever unless someone manually scans everything, this is the internet age, damn it.

>>34850171
thats an impressibe collection of books senpai, right now my collection consists entirely of largely unread comp sci books and a selection of works related to politics stuff like locke, hobbes, and stuff on the history of western politics.

ill probably grab a copy at some point, but right now i have like 0 money to spend on such books, hell, i dont even own any actual swords or armour yet.

>>34850211
You can find a lot of books on medieval armor here

http://libgen.io/search.php?req=armour&open=0&res=25&view=simple&phrase=1&column=def
https://io.ua/search_pic.php
https://avxhm.se/

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>>34850219
>hell, i dont even own any actual swords or armour yet.

Hit the books first, that'll help you get the right arms and armour.

>>34850264
which books should i be hitting? all i know is that albion are well reputed for actually doing their homework on sword construction, and everything in this area pretty much goes on reputation.

>>34850171
Where's your suit of armor KM? You know a lot about armor, but why don't you own one yet?

>>34850305
>why doesn't he own a multi tousand peice of custom kit
I dunno, you are on a gun forum, where's your Holland and Holland?

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>>34849623
Black men invented body armor

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>>34850310
this is pretty accurate.

I spoke to Roman Tereschenko about having a harness of 16th C armour made. The pricetag for it would've been in the region of $20,000 A basic, simple harness of 15th C milanese, by a good armourer like Per Lillelund Jensen, Eric Dube, Gorges Joliot, Dave Hewitt, William West, you're looking at at least $5000, and $10000 is far more likely to be the pricetag. that's for basic gear. something flash, you can double those prices easily.

Something like this, by Mac, was sold 2nd hand for more than $30,000

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>>34850290
>all i know is that albion are well reputed for actually doing their homework on sword construction

That's what happens when you hire Peter Johnsson to do it for you.

Books, well, depends on what you're looking to learn about. "Arms and Armor of the Medieval Knight" (Edge&Paddock). Oakeshott's "The Archaeology of Weapons" and "European Weapons and Armour" are probably a bit dated in bits, but can also be good starting places. Hall's "Weapons and Warfare in Renaissance Europe" goes into how guns became a thing, including a good look at the state of warfare just before that. Combining "The Craft of the Japanese Sword" (Kapp, Kapp & Yoshihara) with "The Sword and the Crucible" (Williams) will keep you safe from a lot of omgkatanaweebfolded nonsense.

>>34850305
As the local bank remains un-robbed... Would be a bit of a bother finding room for it as well.

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>>34850349
You don't have to spend THAT much for real armor, SCA fighters spend a hell of a lot less than that

>>34849794
A hammer and anvil, you fucking moron. Steel is pliable.

>>34850346
WE

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>>34850069
The sad thing is that it was all caused by a fall from a horse. In his youth prior to the fall he was an active and accomplished fighter. The leg ulcer came from when he fell and some bone splintered into the flesh, unable to be removed.

David Starkey historical documentaries are all over YouTube and a great watch.

Also most aesthetic helmet coming through.

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>>34850376
If you've ever seen real armour, 95% (if not 99%) SCA harnesses area bad joke.

from the mis-articulation, to consistently oversized poleyns, to the use of conical rolling instead of hammer-curled pieces, the vast, vast majority of SCA kit is incredibly crude, compared to even the simplest real stuff.

I've been fortunate in my career to be able to have my hands on genuine pieces of 15th century armour - I've been able to study the world-famous "Avant" harness, out of its cabinet, look at the inside of the parts. What you see in the SCA is not even a pale shadow of the real stuff.

>>34849659
He is saying 15th century armor was like sci-fi armor.

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>>34850418
A somewhat related bit of trivia, Gustaf II Adolf became something of a poster bit for not wearing a metal harness in the 30 years war, an early forerunner of the large scale reduction in armour that followed later in the century. But not because of some grand vision, he simply got a bullet lodged in the shoulder that stopped him from wearing a cuirass any more.

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>>34850422
>functional bio-mechanical art will never reach these heights again
You'd think with the increases in tech there would be some company making gucci custom ballistic armor.

>>34850161
>>34850127
>Books are like cars, expensive new and rapidly depreciate unless it's something rather rare or out of print

Oh man I know that one. My sister did history at university. Focusing on England from the 11th to 16th century. She wrote her final papers on the crusades using a book that she managed to find that was printed around 1750. It cost her around £230 if I remember correctly.

I did history at college doing between William 1st to Henry 2nd and also Henry 7th-Elizabeth 1st. Also did classical civ which is Greek and roman literature/politics/history.

Ended up doing STEM at uni though because I like money.

My sister is building a collection of rarer and old books

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>>34850460
it will. but its a long time coming.

look at body armour in military today, and its fairly similar to coap of plates from the early 14th C. In effect, we're 100 years behind the real flourishing of the developed full harness.

I expect materials technology in the next 40-50 years will catch up, and at that point, I dont think its unreasonable to assume that some elements of the biomechanics of medieval armour's articulation will begin to reappear in modern body armour.

problem is there's been a shift in thinking in the last centuries, from deflection - that a incoming attack be pushed aside, to absorption, that the impact gets sucked up and resisted. that's a very different, and much cruder philosophy, and it might take a lot of shifting of values to make armour that works by the older principle, that its better for the impact to be pushed away.

>>34850422
For every nice preserved set of armor you have looked at there probably were ten very real suits of armor used in battle lying in the mud somewhere with joints that dont articulate to your standards.

Why are historians always angered when tell them you can indeed easily get battle ready medieval weapons off amazon. Telling them they aren't "real" even if you could use the amazon sword to smash up a pile of cinder blocks and then still cut a pig in half.

>>34849921
what I meant is you don't just add carbon to iron and tadaa steel! Making steel with preindustrial methods is complicated and labor intensive. Thats why proper steel for plate armor is a relatively late development.

>>34850524
Problem is absorption needs to happen as almost all service cartridges are designed to drill straight through, deflation won't work unless it's some super hard surface.

>>34850551
Yep yep yep. The further you get into it, the more amazed you are at what our ancestors accomplished with shit materials and shit technology.

Pattern-welded swords, for one. They aren't sharper or more flexible than homogenous iron swords of the same era, but it turns out they're a helluva lot more fatigue resistant. So if you're using your sword for actual sword stuff -- like beating angry Vikings over the head -- you're willing to pay way more for something that won't snap off in your hand. It wasn't until Ulfbehrt that somebody figured out how to make a homogenous iron sword with a nice hard sharp steel edge to it that would last as long as a pattern-welded blade, and centuries more before the technology proliferated.

Armor follows a similar course.

>>34849737
> TFW No Level 1 Armored Combatives

>>34850538
>Why are historians always angered when tell them you can indeed easily get battle ready medieval weapons off amazon.

Because you have absolutely no clue what you are talking about.

Most importantly, real swords were not able to be "bashed against cinder blocks" before cutting a pig in half. they werent designed for that. Your ideas of what real weapons were like is utterly misplaced

I am a historian. in my career, I've handed... honestly, no idea, a few hundred real swords, from the viking age to the 18th C. Mostly high medieval and renaissance, 1300-1550ish.

I have not seen a single sword "on amazon" that even comes close to the subtleties of detail of even the most basic munitions swords. Crosses are too bulky. Pommels are solid, or not small enough, or misshaped. blades are too thin at the cross, too thick in the tip, or the other way around. edge geometries are rarely accurate. go to the thousand-dollar stuff from albion, you get it right, but not on amazon's mallninja shit.

and that angers historians, because you, without any experience of the real stuff, are insisting you know what its like.

its a bit like a historian who's never served in the military, trying to say that they know exactly how a solider in the Gulf Wars felt about their equipment, by then going into a store, buying a whole load of ultra-expensive tacticool kit, wearing it for a weekend in the local hills in a temperate climate, and claiming that was representative of the stuff used, without knowing the reality that so much of it was problematic, didnt work, needed fixes, etc. If I, the historian did that, then the guys who I know who had to deal with that in the actual war would be rightly angry by my assumptions.
Same with other historians being angered by your assumptions on the period and stuff people like me have studied the real archaeological examples of.

>>34850620
>Ulfbehrt
Imported Persian wootz steel via the Volga trade route.

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>>34850538
We do have surviving pieces of the bargain bin, made by the thousands armour. They don't have poorly articulating joints, instead they will tend to have much simpler joints that don't cover quite so well instead of sacrificing mobility. T Hough the most common approach appears to have been simply using soft or no armour for the limbs of the common footslogger.

As for your historians here they appear to behave more like kids on the internet than actual historians, with perhaps a faint aroma of hay about them. Regardless though as you're speaking of historians here you should consider the question form the historians perspective. To understand how swords worked and were used back then, it isn't enough for a sword to simply be sharp and resilient. Instead you need something which is just like swords were back in the day. Handling is the really big thing missing from the view you present (and one that'd be critical for its combat performance), but there's plenty of subtleties to be found in every aspect of it. Hell, if the modern sword can take more abuse than the historical one then that's a bad thing for anyone looking to understand the sword in its historical context.

So your backyard chopper can be a lot of fun and a nice thing to have (let's just hope none of the subtle details skipped in the name of cost wasn't there to keep the tang-blade junction from developing cracks over time), but if you're looking to understand what swords were historically, well, it lies. That's nothing you need to be angry about, but it's something you should keep in mind.

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>>34850398
WUZ

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>>34850708
HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE. AS RITE. DAT WUZ US TOO.

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>>34850538
>For every nice preserved set of armor you have looked at there probably were ten very real suits of armor used in battle lying in the mud somewhere with joints that dont articulate to your standards.

the problem with that idea is, the vast majority of the stuff we have doesnt conform to your ideas.

We have a lot of very finely preserved high-end stuff. things like OP's pic, which is for emperors and kings.

but we also have a LOT of low-end stuff that is archaeological to a degree. Chalcis hoard finds, castillion hoard swords, the armouries of lower-end nobles, and things like munitions grade armour.

and yes, some, the really low-end munitions almain rivet type armours are crudely articulated.

but the instant you get to the full harnesses - Mantua b1-4 Churburg 18-21, etc, you find that the workmanship on those relatively standard, basic harnesses is light-years more detailed than the stuff you see in SCA events.

the simple fact is. Real stuff was far better quality than the vast majority of repros today.

and until you actually go and look at them, study them in detail, you have no idea what you're talking about, I'm afraid. Sorry to be blunt, but you do not know what the details of the subject are.

>>34850722
Friedrich Jamal jr.

>>34850708
Is that a Polish Hussar?

>>34850676
>instead they will tend to have much simpler joints that don't cover quite so well instead of sacrificing mobility
That's what I thought, but I didn't know. So I kept my mouth shut. Thanks for the clarification.

>>34850669
Sauce on that, if you please. The Ulfbehrt blades were made in the Rhine valley. And kraut steel was and is perfectly satisfactory.

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>>34850620
>but it turns out they're a helluva lot more fatigue resistant.

You mean compared to a stacked/hairpin lamination blade? because otherwise that'd be news to me. Any links to material for me to devour?

>It wasn't until Ulfbehrt that somebody figured out how to make a homogenous iron sword with a nice hard sharp steel edge to it

The crucible steel Ulfberth blades were steel throughout, not steel edges on an iron body. That was part of their longevity, some swords of the time had very small amounts of steel at the edges (particularly those which were forged form just iron and then had the edges carburised), quickly worn through by honing. An all steel blade wouldn't suffer that fate any time soon. Though with swords with welded on steel edges there'd usually be enough steel to avoid that as well.

>>34850669
Did they pin down where exactly it came from? I can't recall, and we do see crucible steel from the Persian region, all the way down to Sri Lanka, and then up a bit into central Asian Russia as well IIRC.

>>34850754
Boot polish hussar yes

>>34850744
well, the people who had time and resources to make full plate armour didn't let bumblefuck mcgee do it. Armorsmithing was a craft, and to even polish it you needed to be a certified journeyman.

If i turn the question around, why would there be crappy armor? Who would pay for it or want to wear it? Many armies were basically mercenaries (by todays standard) and bought their own stuff, you know.

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>>34850765
The use of imported crucible steel for one of the Ulfberth-labelling makers (supposedly one of the counterfeiters actually) is covered in Alan William's "The Sword and the Crucible". Quite easily spotted under the microscope due to its relatively low amount of inclusions. Though I feel Alan may be a bit too enthusiastic about it, as I don't think we have any measurements really showing it as very superior, to the contrary even, what little I've found suggests that the patterned "wootz variants ta least tended to be somewhat brittle. This might be less of an issue when comparing with unhardened or poorly hardened blades though (the crucible steel being left unhardened).

Also, a picture of some really basic and cheap armour, showing how the arm defences have sacrificed protection rather than flexibility.

>>34850765
>Sauce on that,
http://www.academia.edu/6426127/Crucible_steel_in_medieval_swords
Ulfbehrts are more complicated than you think, it was a brand and not a maker, and it was an often copied brand.
also 9th century Rhine valley steel was as good or bad as any other in Europe, bloomery made refined steel, this was long before the blast furnace on walloon forges, the Franks just happens to be good craftsmen.

>>34850777
http://www.academia.edu/3426345/Does_pattern-welding_make_Anglo-Saxon_swords_stronger

There have also been a lot of practical experiments by English reenactors. Hell, they've even tested bronze blades against iron ones, and the bronze did a lot better than expected.

>>34850777
>Did they pin down where exactly it came from?
Not exactly, geographical distribution of european blades with crucible steel blades do indicate that the material came into the Baltics first, which would indicate a link to the Volga trade route and the Caspian see, so north Persia is most likely guess. This would fit the bill as Persia was producing quality wootz at the time.

>>34850666
muh 1000 folds of nipon steel europ edition

>>34850814
>>34850817
/wrinkles nose

Meh. I don't know if I buy it.

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>>34850765
>That's what I thought, but I didn't know

here's a pic of the inside of the really cheap stuff - "almain rivet"

but the important thing is, as soon as you make the jump from this, which is just gutter-shaped strips and straps, to enclosing plate, it rapidly became far more complex, with no middle ground. Because that middle ground is where you're wasting a lot of time making the shaping of all the bits like lames and rivets etc (and remember, you have to make the rivets, if its a crude harness, or a complex one, and both take the same effort there), but crude shaping doesnt confer much advantage for a lot more work, compared to the little bit extra work for refined shaping that gives good coverage.

>>34850862
>Meh. I don't know if I buy it.
Doesn't really matter, they tested over a dozen historic Ulfberts to be crucible steel, a material at the time unknown in Europe. And Alan Williams is not just someone but the patron saint on metallurgical analysis of historical weapons.

>>34850836
On that, all crucible steel blades have been dated to exactly the time slot when the Vikings opened the Volga, once the route is closed no more blades are found.

>>34850669
That is speculation without a shred of evidence behind it.

In fact, the manganese content of the swords completely contradicts it.

>>34849623
Guns weren't new in the 15th century. By the late 15th century the Ottoman Empire was using them to equip their regular army.

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>>34850850
>muh 1000 folds of nipon steel europ edition

actually, if you'd read what I said, the opposite.

Medieval hilts are flimsy. skinny. they're not the big, bulky stuff you see in repros. Blades are much more subtle.

it has nothing to do with "folded 1000 times". its about subtle details. minimalism. Real swords are not bulky, not thick hefty chunks of iron for a cross. Surviving grips are small - a lot of singlehanders are really tiny grips that you squeeze your hand round, where repros are too bulky and long.
Real armour is the same. knees, for instance - real ones are really thin, skinny. modern cheap repros are far broader, so there's space for padding under them. real ones didnt do that. same with sabatons, most makers do them to fit over a modern boot, so they look like clown shoes. picky little details get missed out, because it saves time, and time is money.

You know how games and comics make guns way too big, or stupidly over-bore barrels etc?
well, most modern repros of armour and weapons are as exaggerated from the real stuff, as those comic guns are to real ones.

Real stuff is slim, light. even flimsy at times. its subtle.

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>>34850810
*Speculation intensifies*

>>34849676
They had armor that could stop longbow shots on already

They weren't worried about it going through armor. They were worried that the sheer volume of arrows would cause the arrows to have the 1 in a million chance of somehow getting into their eyeslits while they had their heads facing the ground

>>34849921
>iron and carbon is what stainless steel is
iron and carbon is what ALL steel is by definition.
chromium & nickel are the two major additives that make it stainless.

>>34850944
>That is speculation without a shred of evidence behind it.
There is quite a bit of evidence, for example Lang, Craddock & Simpson "New evidence for early crucible steel"
One of the finest examples of a Ulfberht with crucible blade is the Stuttgart blade no 1973-70, hypereutectoid steel clearly made in a crucible.
Please post a source for your manganese content.

>>34850666
Nice trips. Also, new copypasta

>>34850974
so if I take a scythe and turn the blade vertically is that subtle and nuanced enough to be "real" lol. What if I make a pike? is it not real because they were easy to make? What If I just use a mold to cast a bronze sword? I know im just a shithead thanks for trying to educate me.

>>34850971
Guns where new in the 15th century warfare, artillery has just begun to develop and first man portable weapons where developing.

>>34850666
I maintain it would be a fun project to take a blade of acceptable quality and then try to make it something not shit.

I feel a lot of the 1000 dollars goes into knowing where to leave bulk on and subtract it and that can be done at home for a lot of time but also rather cheaply

But then again I'm also the kind of person who would be into hot rodding saturday night specials if they weren't pretty much banned in my state.

>>34851079
It can be done to an extent

The problem is most repros are too thin at the crossguard and you can't add steel back

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>>34850832
Well, the data there shows the pattern welded specimens to be weaker, both in terms of yield strength and ultimate strength. Impact toughness is where the pattern welded specimens won. As they point out that this is likely due to inclusions and crystal size. Given that historically all material (outside of the crucible steels) would most likely have been extensively (sufficiently) folded, these differences in grain size and inclusions probably wouldn't have been present there. Perhaps the fibrous, crack-stopping, nature of the pattern welded material may also be seen in folded steel. Thus the relevance of these tests to a historical context becomes highly questionable. I'd also question the comparison of a mix of metals A and B to A alone, rather than a happy medium of the two.

>>34850836
That'd seem to make sense.

>>34850944
So where would the manganese content point to?

>>34851039
Okay, so.... if Iranians were making this superior steel, how did they forget?

>>34851113
Blacksmiths were a secretive bunch who never shared their secrets with anyone. A bunch of them probably kept rediscovering the same techniques over and over again over the past thousand years yet never told anyone.

>>34851085
If it is a balance issue maybe langets could be added? Or is it more a matter of strength and stiffness

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>>34851090
on the pattern welding my personal guess it is started as using up the scraps of metal you had at hand. like iron and steel are real expensive and you have to hammer a sword together from the leftovers you have. You have to forge weld it together anyways, so why not make a fancy pattern to charge extra?

Also, this is speculation, but for the earlier wurmbunt type blades which are are high quality folded steel constructions, those showed a delicate grain structure just like japanese blades and where highly polished. Likely pattern welding was also a cheap imitation of those blades.

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>>34851052
Once again you refuse to take the historians perspective. Your scythe or pike is real, in that it exists. But the historian isn't interested in what you have brought into existence today. He's interested in what existed back in historical times, and that which is created today is only relevant if it's an accurate recreation of that.

>What If I just use a mold to cast a bronze sword?

That's how swords, and other weapons, were made in the bronze age. You have half of a spear head mould at the bottom here.

>>34851134
Furnaces are not mom and pop operations. They require this big medieval-military-industrial-complex chain of being. The only references I can find offhand to MUH SUPERIOR ISLAMIC STEEL derives from people with Persian last names, and they run closely ahead to the number of hits telling me Ulfberht swords had carbon nanofibers made by space aliums.

>>34851090
The manganese content means that it's without a shadow of a doubt from somewhere in Europe. Some researcher at the university of hannover drew the conclusion that since the guard and pommel both point to the area around Frankfurt, it's likely that the blade is from there aswell.

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>>34851113
Well, actually the Indians started it around 300 BC, the process later spread to the Persians.
They made small scale crucible steel, a very expensive endeavor, you need tons of coal and work. Likely industrial revolution killed them small scale steel makers once English shear and crucible steels flooded the markets.
Crucible steel is not magical or something, it just means the metal was in its liquid form, which helps to reduce slag and homogenize material properties.

Indo-Persians backed little steel cakes, which then got made into blades or traded for export.

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>>34851113
The steel probably wasn't all that superior for one thing. Very good, but IMO probably "only" on par with the best made in Europe.

These methods were in use until at least the 18th, and probably 19th century, where European industrialisation could flood the market with iron and steel, rendering them obsolete.

>>34851147
Early iron and steel smelting furnaces didn't make metal pieces large enough for a sword, so you had to weld pieces together. The shift form the earlier piled/stacked/straight lamination to early twisted pattern welded may have been so that a crack along a bad weld could only run through part of the blade, instead of splitting it in two. So we certainly have a very plausible way for pattern welding to be created without it strengthening the bulk metal.

>Likely pattern welding was also a cheap imitation of those blades.
I'm not so sure, since the material sued in the pattern welded blade should have been folded as well.

>>34851039
>New evidence for early crucible steel
That does not support your statement. It's a paper that states that crucible steel was made in the east.

Nobody is arguing whether the ulfberht swords are made from crucible steel, they are, what people are arguing about is whether its made in europe or imported from asia.

>>34851210
Sauce on all of this, please. For future perusal.

>>34851246
That doesn't surprise me. Most of the accomplishments Muslims brag about were lifted, purchased, or stolen from India.

>>34851267
Any evidence of crucible steel manufacture in or along the Rhine? Does crucible steel *require* coal? IF so, have we found the mines? If not, could you log small forests and send them downstream to use for fuel...?

My medieval areas of expertise are more food and medicine than metallurgy, so bear with me on all of this.

>>34851173
There you wrong, at least in the ancient world. Indian steel furnaces where powered by constant monsoon winds, and they baked cup cake sized steel ingots, like they had hundreds of little crucibles, and the constant wind enabled them to bake the steel at a high enough temperature for a long enough time to get into liquid phase and impurities and gases could escape. later this was done with large bellows, but most producers where exactly that, mom & pop operations where the same family or clan members would work.
Iron/Steel making only became a industrial venue with the development of the blast furnace.

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>>34851173
>Furnaces are not mom and pop operations.

While probably not relevant to the Viking crucible steel question, we had plenty of furnaces in Sweden run by individual farms into the middle ages. Gave the farmers something to do in the winter.

>>34851210
>The manganese content means that it's without a shadow of a doubt from somewhere in Europe.
Thats plain stupid, manganese is common all over the world.
>Some researcher
state a source or fuck off!

>>34851302
Here Phil, this is a surprisingly good read on the history of steel and sword blades: https://www.tf.uni-kiel.de/matwis/amat/iss/index.html
Also, it was Christians who dubbed Oriental crucible steel "Damascus steel", and to be fair, at that time the Muslims mastered the technologie for at least 500 years.

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>>34851302
>Any evidence of crucible steel manufacture in or along the Rhine?
None that I know of.

>Does crucible steel *require* coal?
Well, you're not getting it done with fiery language. Odds are that it'd be charcoal though, not coke, so don't look for any mines. Chopping down entire forests was something that happened, a big part of the reason they figured out who to use mined coal in England was because their iron industry had consumed all the forests. Sending things downstream is an option, but if fuel and ore aren't found together then it'd probably be easier to move the ore than the fuel. You use up enormous amounts of wood for these things.

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>>34851321
Now, now. Let's keep this one thread civil. We're all learning stuff.

>>34851347
Thank you.

>>34851113
>>34851173
Turns out if there is no good medium of storing, and you have a generation of drought(lower supply needs, or inability to get supplies), knowledge isn't passed on.
That, or the steel quality is average for high grade steel, and the big meme was that the extreme high end got exported during some period of lower economical activity.

>>34851302
>Any evidence of crucible steel manufacture in or along the Rhine?

absolutely no archaeological evidence of the process being used in western europe before the 18th century.

now, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, that's rule #1 of archaeology. but it is very compelling data to indicate that it simply was not the method used in europe.

>>34851347
>Muslims mastered the technologie for at least 500 years
I thought they made their famous swords from Indian blanks imported over the Silk Road. Was I misinformed?

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>>34851173
>Furnaces are not mom and pop operations.

The Iron Industry was a big thing here in Central PA in the 18th and 19th century. Some of the furnaces around here are larger than many houses but there was also a multitude of small mom and pop operations that just haven't survived the ages like the big ones have.

>>34851302
>Any evidence of crucible steel manufacture in or along the Rhine?
nope, we don't have any finds
>Does crucible steel *require* coal?
It requires hardwood charcoal with a high BTU content to reach the temperatures. Fossil coal would theoretically work, because the crucibles are sealed, otherwise the sulfur would fuck up your steel. Fossil coal was not used for Metallurgy until the 17th/18th century.

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>>34851387
They probably made use both of imported and locally produced steel.

>>34851387
Quality blanks where always traded, but for example Khorasan made an excellent quality of crucible steel at the time. And likely they did that before and after they became Mulsim, so it has not much to do with metallurgy.
P.S. from the 15th century onwards European blades where traded to India, they liked them a lot.

16th century the best

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>>34851452
pic didn't upload

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>>34851464

>>34849805
But longbows did NOT pierce French cavalry armour, there are records of them charging when being pelted by hundreds of arrows and it doing minimal damage.

You can read into the myths of the longbow, its not even that great of a bow compared to composite recurves. They did work, but its not as amazing as everyone makes them to be, the effectiveness was mostly in the hands of people who constantly practised with an ok tool, it wasnt the tool itself.

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>>34851506
Yes? That's pretty much what I said. Without armour, get shot, with armour, you make it to the English lines.

The Battle of Patay shows us how well the English archers did when caught without a defensive position and knights to shield them (the French vanguard obliterated them) and in the Battle of Castillon it's the English who try to storm a well prepared defensive position. Deposit a lack of French longbows, they don't manage it either.

>>34851506
This is a stupid question but why weren't blades case hardened? It seems way less labor intensive than pattern welding and apparently they were making files like that for a long time.

>>34851534
>case hardened
They kinda did, a majority of blades in Europe where slack quenched, and fully quenched& tempered blades are exceptionally rare until the early modern.
Most smiths played it save, only very few masters would fully harden their blades.

>>34850369
noted

is that one of todds mace heads?

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>>34851534
Some where. This image shows you the distribution of blades from various centuries into groups based on construction, group IIIB being the case hardened ones, and IIIC probably including some. Each * is one sword.

"Hardened" here can be either slack quenching or a full quench, the latter being very rare until the 15ht century.

Info from "The Sword and the Crucible".

>>34851562
Slack quenching is somewhat different form case hardening. In a slack quench you let the blade cool a bit before you quench it. With case hardening you take a blade with little carbon in it, wrap it up in carbon-rich material, and heat it for a while so that the carbon migrates into the surface of the blade, giving you a thin layer of higher carbon steel. This can then be quenched in whatever way you desire.

>>34851604
afair they did case hardening since roman times, especially with stacked blades, however the achieved blade quality was never really high.

>>34849727
Technically speaking pure Iron is shit material for anything. What commonly is known as Iron, is just really low carbon steel.

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>>34851594
Yep. Shaft length and the use of paint based somewhat on the Maciejowski bible, with a glance at the Bayeux tapestry.

>>34849969
And jousting armour, that was very inflexible/immobile and heavy, meant to protect the users in competition.

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>>34851620
Case hardening appears to have been more common early on, yes. With steel gradually becoming more available, we see a shift to welded on edges and later all-steel blades, as the extremely thin steel layer created by the carburisation doesn't help all that much.

>>34851622
pure iron is still pretty decent, on par with high end bronze, the problem is impure pig iron full of slag, and thats what you get out of a bloomery, is indeed pure shit, you need to work it first to turn it into something useful.

>>34851636
nice, i may well wind up buying one of his works before i get a proper sword, unless i spot a particularly nice 1796 going cheap on matts site.

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>>34851653
>the problem is impure pig iron full of slag, and thats what you get out of a bloomery

Pig iron is a very high carbon material (more carbon than steel), that comes out molten and is cast into ingots, aka pigs. Thanks to having been molten, it's relatively low on inclusions, but the extreme carbon content makes it unforgeable, so instead of beating out the impurities you have to fine it to burn off the carbon instead.

Your basic bloomery runs too cold to make pig iron, you get regular plain old iron out of that instead, containing very little carbon. And as it was never molten, it'll be quite rich in porosity, inhomogeneities, and slag inclusions, requiring extensive folding if you want to make sword-grade material out of it.

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>>34851686
>a particularly nice 1796 going cheap on matts site.

>>34851649
later on yeah, but not necesarrily in the beginning

>>34849655
Not really, the bassinet provides far superior protection than the sallet. However, the sallet is much lighter and more comfortable while provided a decent level of protection, that's why it was much more popular.

>>34851709
Sorry, my bad, had a german therm in mind.
What is the correct word for raw bloomery iron?

>>34851717
i like my sabres senpai, and its not like i can get a good modern 1796

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>>34851807
I think "bloomery iron" is the best the English language has to offer here. The German translation bit does explain why I see this mistake every now and then at least.

>>34851810
Not a proper one at least, that's true. I just fear you'll have to wait a very long time before you'll see a very nice specimen of a very well known and popular sabre go cheap on the site of someone who's a bit of a celebrity in these circles.

Which is a shame, because I want one too.

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>I can feel deep inside me that I need a Schnepf
>Can't decide which one
>Know both originals, both make me diamondick
What do?

>>34851850
could be worse, have you seen the price 1803s go for?

>>34849627

serious lack of GroinPro

What sort of care did those armours and weapons took?

Waxing? Oiled?

>>34851926
mostly this, blueing/blackening was common for field armor.

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>>34851869
Does the original that Cervenka copied there really have that odd interrupted fuller?

>>34851883
Well, the favourite here in Sweden (Drabantvärja m/1701) usually hits 12500EUR.

>>34851886
You have your 1400lbs CrotchStallion to fit there.

>>34851970
>that odd interrupted fuller?
no, it doesn't.
https://www.yumpu.com/de/document/view/21925203/jahrheft-2012-ritterhaus-bubikon
>page 19

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>>34851988
Thanks, that's one old question mark laid to rest.

>>34849957
Minoan armor and shield could be really fucking crazy.
But it was the minoans...

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>>34852259
Bronze age stuff is wild

>>34852313
How do you pee in that thing? Like a girl?

>>34850524
Deflection is avoided because ricochets can fucking kill you. Rounds ricocheting into your arms is actually a major concern with steel plates, and is a major part of why we spall coat them.

>>34851970
damn, thats some expensive shit

>>34852355
Hopefully with a few pages/slaves to complete the job

>>34850810
>If i turn the question around, why would there be crappy armor? Who would pay for it or want to wear it?
People looking to outfit large numbers of soldiers.

Soldiers who could not afford high quality armor in a reasonable timeframe.


Is it hard, being an idiot?

>>34850722
St. Maurice

>>34852560
It's always Maurice... it's getting boring quick.

>>34851636
I was always curious about stuff like that being used as a reference for weapons and armor. What guarantee is there that artists didn't regularly take liberties? After all, if one were to look at artistic depictions of military hardware and stuff nowadays they would be filled with inaccuracies. Has there ever been reason to believe that works of art of that day were accurate?

>>34850346
For homeless people.

Maybe they could tell the future?

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>>34853373
its not accurate.

simple as that.
for instance, you get biblical scenes with contemporary equipment. the modern equivalent would be pictures of romans with AR15s.

but, at the same time, it is representative. As a historian, I can look at an image in say a 13th C book, or a 15th C sculpture, and as a historian, I can pick out which elements are accurate to reality, and which are that somewhat mythological element. falchions are a good example of that. you see them in medieval art, and they are used as a sort of visual metaphor in the art. In that, they're very similar to the "black hat" baddies in 1950's westerns. (black hat = baddie, white hat = hero. Curved sword = un-christian, wicked, or evil, Straight sword = christian or good.) - so you see Goliath in the old testament, with a falchion. that, itself is utterly nonsense. but you look closely, and the falchion depicted is pretty damn accurate to the real things, and the details change as the real ones do over time.

armour, weapons, equipment, all follow the same way. So its not perfectly exact - you dont make a perfect 1:1 recreation of an object in art. but what you can do is look at the object, look at a real one of a similar type, and you can extrapolate that this armour breastplate that hasnt survived was probably sort of like this or that. and so on. We can use medieval art as a very reliable guidebook to understand what's fundamentally right in terms of style and look, based on the art.

the hard part is, you have to know both what the subject is, to understand what is depiction and what's allegory, and you have to understand where and when the art was made, to be able to reference the details.

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>>34853705
What can you tell me about fanny packs and bollock daggers from this pic?

fucking bump!

>>34849623
>Can you imagine how much more armor would've evolved if gunpowder was never discovered?

Sarcasm? The armour in your post was built precisely to be proof against firearms.

>>34855424
actually no, the breast plate at best. you likely confuse this with the 16th century.

>>34850383
Show me how you can produce a sheet of such even thickness just using hammer anvil and play-doh, you dyslexic retard.

>>34850974
>Real stuff is slim, light. even flimsy at times. its subtle.
people were a lot smaller then. And maybe, just maybe, the stuff back then was just shit ergonomically, no matter how elaborate the workmanship. If you gave those guys some of the good modern stuff they'd probably say "holy crap, this is so much better and more comfortable than what I had back then at Agincourt". "Real" stuff isn't automatically better stuff.

>>34852313
I think I saw a drawing of an identical suit in some book, many years ago ... both the drawing and the replica seem to have an actual historical example ...? BTW that helmet was made from boar tusks.

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>>34853373
Better than me just making shit up.

>>34856074
>both the drawing and the replica seem to have an actual historical example ...?

Here's the original.

>>34852355
Stop assuming their attire!

Those people were probably pants neutral!

>>34849623
Ya know, if you could probably make a suit of armor resistant to stuff like that yet still wearable/moveable. It won't be cheap or practical, but it'd be kinda cool.

That said, you wouldn't mind cutting up and adjusting various metals, polymers, and ceramics, would you?

>>34851747
> far superior protection
How so?

Part of the problem I'm having is that theres no strict definition of the different types. At the extremes of the designs, a sallet can look a lot like a bascinet and vice versa. You get Sallets with pointed crowns, bascinets with tails and armets and close helms that look like bastard sons of both.

>>34849689
Knights were on horseback

>>34849683
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZnsI4SgXlU

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Where's a good place to look if I want to buy a set of armor that would be fun to fuck around in just for fun. Doesn't need to be perfectly realistic, but preferably just authentic looking enough to not trigger my autism.

>>34849623
>Can you imagine how much more armor would've evolved if gunpowder was never discovered?

If guns were never invented then you Europeans would've never been able to colonize much of Africa and America. Face it, gunpowder did you favors. You would've been stuck at Europe at the mercy of Muslims if it weren't for gun technology.

>>34858201
>How to Google
However, note that no plate armor has ever been "cheap" by any stretch because they have to be fitted to the user. The Imperial Romans got away with rough fits because they made a whole lot of metal bands of different sizes and put together semi-customized suits when requested. However, those are cost savings at scale, so it doesn't apply to you the individual buyer.

Even maille needs some level of tailoring to be good but it is still much cheaper to do so. Keep that in mind when shopping around.

>>34850418
b-but muh great helm is the most aesthetic desu

>>34855722
Producing good Steel is one of the things that got reintroduced to Europe by the crusades.

Its takes a lot hammering grinding and filing for the shape and size. Then for the sheen, several rounds of heat treats and and quenching then actual polishing. It took teams of smiths and metal workers each with specialized task to make plate armor.

>>34850418
I too love helmets that i can use as a cooking pot.

>>34850376
>When someone posts a picture of people in medieval armour and you recognise them

Time to kms

>>34855722
>Show me how you can produce a sheet of such even thickness just using hammer anvil and play-doh, you dyslexic retard.

and this is why it took 7 years as an apprentice to become a journeyman in the Guild of Hammermen in scotland, of the armourer's guild of Nurnburg. And then it took another 7 years as a journeyman, before the person could _apply_ to be a master. Start at 14 years old, wheeling the bits of iron between the giant waterwheel-powered drop hammers, or powering the forges. probably first work as a striker in a team of 5, hammering under the tuition of a master.

All that, to learn how to make sheet. more than a decade of practice, 5 days a week, week in week out, for years at a time, all at the anvil, learning.

the only "retard" here is you for assuming that any idiot without any experience would suddenly just churn out sheet steel.

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>>34850524
Things is bullets are too strong. To stop AP rifle rounds (level IV NIJ) you need 12mm+ steel plates. Too heavy even fro breastplates, not even for full suits. Ceramics come to the rescue with weight, but composite ceramic plates are even thicker 15-25mm. You can't make usable wraparound articulated joints from such thick plates. Also ceramics have issues with edge hits and behind armor deformation, all theses problems are magnified with small plates. So armor makers stuck with orcish "one big square plate" design.

Soviets had 6B4 vest with design similar to lamellar armour (same idea to make it flexible), with small overlapping boron carbide plates
http://www.russianarms.ru/forum/index.php?topic=2366.0
It stopped bullets but it was found that against 7.62x54R hits behind armor trauma was between "heavily wounded - dead"...

>>34856638
>better than me just making shit up

O I absolutely agree. I was just curious if that sort of thing was always taken with a grain of salt, or it's expected to be close to realistic, or what have you. One thing that fascinates me about historical artifacts is that they give you an idea of what people were like in their time, and imagining what life may have been like for them. It's helpful for me and seems accurate to imagine people as being mostly the same fundamentally, which causes me to question alot of the things they write and paint as possible artistic liberties. Without a background as a historian though I can't really go any farther than guessing

>>34858287
I don't know about all of that. The crusades saw Europe wipe the sands with Muslim blood a number of times. It took a kurd coming in and whipping the Arab armies into a respectable fighting force to actually see the crusaders take a good thrashing. Obviously gunpowder helped a great deal later on and especially so in the colonial era, but European armies by that time had become well organized enough to take on savages with hide shields and spears, or nearly naked wooden club wielding madmen. Just an uneducated guess on my part, but I'd say the biggest savings was in manpower. You could use far fewer men to control much greater areas, because the killings power of a single man was increased by so much. This of course allowed smaller countries like GB to control large populations of natives despite the relative disparity of manpower between the two.

In short, it helped build empires but it's far from the only reason Europe belongs to the Europeans

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>>34859057
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Lepanto

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>>34849623
Fucking useless
why? pic related

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>>34858201
I bought this on eBay for $550. Yeah it's cheap but for that price I can't complain.

>>34851113

Persians were white, so short answer is they were smart enough until they interbred with sand monkeys, then it all went downhill a la Egypt.

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>>34859009
As has been pointed out above, a proper historian will be very careful with his sources, be they artwork, texts, surviving artefacts, or whatever else. I'm not really at that level, but then again, this wasn't exactly a project that demanded the best academic standards either. The Maciejowski bible supposedly does stand up well to scrutiny though, or so is its reputation at least. Then again, it also does contain some things which are almost guaranteed to be artistic embellishments, people cut in half despite a full hauberk, and as always we have Goliath's shin guards.

>>34859301
A blunt weapon won't suffer from armour negating its edge. But armour will still provide plenty of protection by spreading the blow out, adding inertia to withstand concussion, letting some impacts glance off, any padding can soak up some of the energy, and such. Riot police strap on hard plastic plates to deal with thrown cobblestones, hard hats are considered useful against against falling hammers and spanners, etc.

>>34859329
"I've seen worse" is probably the kindest thing I can say about it. Clearly based on Maximilian's high Gothic harness, so see the first three posts of this thread for a look at what it tries to be.

>>34859184
Is this supposed to prove something? The ottomans had guns as well. I thought we were talking about "a world in which gunpowder had never been discovered"

>>34859603
>The ottomans had guns as well.
There were guns and there were guns. Holy League introduced thing that was essentially a battleship.

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>>34859445
Yeah I was the guy who made those threads last week about ebay replica armor, figured it was the only one that actually tried to look like something real instead of being a mix of armor from different time periods.

>>34859445
How widely were kettle helmets used with full harness like that if at all? Also on the surface of it, sallets seem kinda like a more protective evolution of kettle helms. Is there any truth to that or am I speculating out my ass?

>>34859647
That's still quite a stretch to assume all of Europe would be conquered had it not been for gunpowder being discovered. It's also a silly point to make in general. Arbitrarily setting circumstances and claiming it would have made X difference historically is pure speculation. That's basically "Man in the high castle" fantasy teir.

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>>34850460
>functional bio-mechanical art will never reach these heights again
Wrong. Ballistic armor is on the verge of a renaissance.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKcqHaPhkkM&t=17s

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>>34850524
Pic related is the US Army's new armor system. it's combination of ceramic plate and soft armor.

http://taskandpurpose.com/soldiers-tep-new-body-armor-2018/

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>>34859956

>>34858491
That sounds more like monotonous labour than learning.

>>34860421
So two different approaches from a common ancestor, interesting

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>>34859956
IIRC the sallet is to have evolved out of some basic skull cap, possibly taking a detour over the Italian variant called celata or some such. Given what we end up with if we take an open faced one without any tail in the neck and where we may roughly be in time here some influence form the bascinet wouldn't surprise me either, but that's in deep speculatory territory for me.

>>34860421
That illustration may have been representing good research when it was created somewhere in the early Jurassic, but things like the kettle hat not being around before the 15th century, or having the frogmouth as a separate branch instead of a pretty direct continuation of the great helm shows us that it hasn't aged well.

>>34860447
To learn, you must do, and that repeatedly. This even goes for math.

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>>34860410
Marked for visibility areas that can stop AK™ brand AK™ rounds.

>>34860379
Give them another 30 years and maybe they will finally reinvent peascod cuirass. Or maybe not.

>>34860379

i dont know much about that armour

but doesent it leave the belly heavily exposed? it looks like just cloth

>>34850026
Ye old lobstered plate

>>34859855
Wonder how much it would be to get an armored to tailor it and if it would be any cheaper than getting it handmade

>>34850092
I love how this suit completely covers the body, I counted 19 individual pieces of armour to make the join for the back of the knee. This shits insane. I have a load of pics of it somewhere

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Later armors were even more articulated. Early 17th century is the ultimate state of armorsmithing.

>>34849737

that heavy DS roll at 1:34 is great

>>34858369
>Producing good Steel is one of the things that got reintroduced to Europe by the crusades.
Nope. Balst furnace technology developed in Sweden independently from the crusades.

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>>34850836
Brand new book coming through.

>>34864131
care to give a short review?

>>34864198
Still reading.
From the publisher:
A Study of the Eastern Sword, by Kirill Rivkin and Brian Isaac, attempts for the first time to consider evolution of swords in Asia over the course of the last two millennia as a whole – from Scythians and Sarmatians, to East Asia and Japan, then back to the nomadic routes and the Pontic-Caspian Steppe of Khazars and Cumans, and then towards the whole consequent diversity of forms, employed in Persia, Mamluk Egypt, Turkey, Russia, Caucasus.

360 pages with 182 illustrations, consisting of hundreds of individual photographs. Some items, such as the famed sword of Charlemagne, were published numerous times, but never in detail and quality available in this book. Others, such as unique 14th century Mongol period examples, were never publicly displayed before, and don’t even have known published analogues. From the sword awarded by General Denikin at the height of the Russian Civil War, to the one attributed to Albania’s Skanderbeg, or European Crusader blades, carried by Mamluk dignitaries, many examples chosen for this book are some of the most prominent, artistic, and scientifically important in the field.

The analysis presented demonstrates a clear continuity in the development of a single edged long sword. It shows how this form evolved over time, and provides extensive guidance on attribution and dating of swords. Various technical, in particular – metallurgical, aspects involved in sword making are also discussed, including historical evidence related to the earliest wootz (bulat) making and the consequent evolution of this technology. There is also a somewhat controversial attempt to identify six distinctive periods in the history of Asian swords (and other aspects of material culture), and to relate transitions between them to competing forces of globalization and regionalization.

>>34865529
>360 pages for the entirety of asia
This guy's has some massive balls, how well do you think he pulled it off?

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>>34858787
>12mm+ steel plates
You can do it at 9mm if the plates have dual hardness instead of just high hardness. Problem is that dual hardness steel plates are twice as expensive as high hardness plates which are themself also twice as expensive as normal RHA steel plates.

>behind armor trauma was between "heavily wounded - dead"...
That has more to do with it being rated for 7.62x39 but still being able to stop larger rounds with the result of having severe blunt trauma. Reminds me of the storys in the US where cops in the early days of soft armor designs survived getting shot with 44 magnum and such when the vest was not rated for it at the cost of having internal bleeding and broken ribs. Still gotta hand it to soviets since they before afghanistan were running around with no body armor in the field while having 6B1 flak vests in some storage house to suddenly running around with "modernish" flak jackets with rifle plates capable stopping 7.62x39.

>>34849766
I already knew what those were, but it literally just got me that that's where Sabaton got their name.

>>34859057
>missing the point
No, I'm not talking about Europe beinv overrun by muslims. I'm talking about Europeans stuck at Europe until God knows what at the mercy of muslims. Remember that Europe was a backwater continent where muslim countries essentially blockaded your continent. Spain was under Muslim lands and the muslims made it as far as the Balkans and Greece. Were it not for the invention of guns, you would not have been able to colonize much of the world with what little manpower you had. Also, are you really bringing up the crusades? Aside from the first one, you do know the rest were failures, right?

>>34866448
The first three were actually quite successful they achieved the purporse of getting muslims to stop killing christians in the holy land, as well as attacking crusader countries. A foothold was maintained in between each one.

>>34865765
Didn't the Soviets develop titanium armor as well? were they good?

>>34866685
>titanium

Lol what? That's a super metal. Rare and tough. SO tough that it would be impossible for medi evil people to melt it down and do stuff with it.

>>34866786
to be fair even today titanium is a bit of a bitch to machine

>>34856229
It even comes with a back scratcher.

>>34866786
Titanium isn't rare. Its just horrifically difficult to work with.

>>34867530
Not rare per say but depostis are concentrated in only a few areas of the earth and due to political reason only available sometimes. Also it is rare compared to other construction materials

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>>34849737
Makes you wonder how long and laborious melees must have been between armored opponents, if even the armpits and groin were protected by mail. It is nothing like the one-hit-one-kill fantasy that's shown in the movies, it's more like Greco-Roman wrestling with daggers. Ouch.

>>34865765
>hat has more to do with it being rated for 7.62x39
6B4 was rated up to 7.62x54 LPS round.

>>34866685
6B2 - "super flak vest" with lammelar 1.6mm titanium plates (was basis of CRISAT NATO standard)
6B3 - bullet proof body armor with lammelar 6.5mm titanium plates on front rated up to 7.62x54 LPS
6B4 - ceramic slightly lighter version of 6B3.
6B5 - basically 6B2, 6B4, 6B5 combined into one. Unified soft body armor, but pockets can be equipped with combination of titanium, steel and ceramic plates to achieve different levels of protection, weight and cost.

>>34866786
Still cheaper than ceramics, especially for soviets and Russians who had up to recent times minuscule armor ceramic production capabilities.

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>>34860518
You
Fuckin'
Know it

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>>34864131
Currently I'm reading pic realted

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>>34849737
That fucking combat roll

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>>34865529
>>34864131
How much did you pay for it ? If it was less than 50€, I would be very interested in it.

>>34868202
>$95 on amazon
why are antique arms books always so expensive?

>>34868265
Aww, too bad. I suppose it is because you aren't paying as much for a book as you are paying for the whole study.

>>34867897
>6B4 was rated up to 7.62x54 LPS round.
Well that is awkward. Were the Soviets protection rating based on bullet stoppage with no regard to blunt trauma? I have also read that 6b3 vests did not stop 303 rounds fired from enfields according to the afghan rebels but did stop 7.62x39 rounds.

>>34849737

Fucking noob going over 70 equip

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>>34868581
>PvPfag

>>34849623
>Missing codpiece
Must be mounted armor with that part in the saddle

>>34850055
there is such a thing as a mature technology and if you are into engineering you should know that

>>34866448
Almost one out of 3 human being was European by 1500, that's not "little manpower"

>>34868719
No

>>34868719
Don't respond to the turk revisionist. He's upset that the ottomans slowly turned a former superpower into a theocracy that hemorrhaged money and power, and encouraged depravity and dehuminisation. It puts his mind at ease to rely on revisionist history, and no one should interfere with his safe space

>>34868554
>Were the Soviets protection rating based on bullet stoppage with no regard to blunt trauma?
They had 3 tiers of behind armor trauma and they were specified separately from ballistic resistance in the armor specification. 6B3-5 series body armors allowed up to 3rd tier of BAT (full loss of combat functions, requires hospitalization, possible death). This sorta sucks so latter body armors went away from this paradigm and allowed only 2rd tier of BAT. But this comes at the price of reduced coverage as they use 1-2 large plates and they can't cover abdomen as good as 6B3-5 series because they are not flexible.

>>34868834
Interesting, do you have any english links/sources that I could read regarding soviet body armor specifications & history? If not then russian links will do.

>>34868265
Limited demand.
Swords are quite non-PC these days.

>>34859329
Why would the seller spary coated the armor?

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>>34861952
fucking leeds royal armoury senpai, makes me wish id taken history at uni instead and offered to suck tobias capwells dick to be his PhD student

>>34868608
Codpieces came in during the 1500s mostly
Mail was mostly used for groin armour during the late medieval period, since codpieces weren't part of fashion at this time.

The best way to tell beyond the actual armour is pointy shoes or sabatons = Medieval, stubby square shoes or sabatons = Renaissance

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>>34871429
The Musée de l'Armée in Paris has a pair of suits in the same vein on display as well.

>>34860908
Yes. Plates end right around the navel. You can't bend otherwise.

>>34849623
Best gearqueer thread in ages

>>34866786
>Lol what? That's a super metal.
No it isn't.

>>34851622
If I'm not mistaken pure Iron makes pretty decent protection when it comes to strength to flexibility. Early ship armor was made of iron as opposed to steep as it was both hard to make steel in such large quantities and harder to make steel that wouldn't shatter to impacts, while iron just deformed. Obviously, pure iron didn't deal so well in seawater, but none of the ships were intended to serve longer than a decade in the first place.

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>>34851622
Well, what's sold today is mostly steel of varying grades. Old armour on the other hand is often so low on carbon that we can't really call it iron (though compared to modern lab grade material it most definitely wasn't pure), and of that which is steel plenty is so low in carbon content as to be far more akin to iron than hat treated steel. Now while medium carbons steel would have been better, the iron made for quite serviceable armour too. Even with a somewhat thin plate of iron, it takes a lot of effort to punch through relative to what the human body can deliver. Drawing wire for mail may be considerably easier with iron as well.

The use of steel peaked somewhere in the 15th century or early 16th, and then declined throughout the 16th century. Part of this is probably due to the need to start increasing plate thickness to ward of bullets, as the resistance of the plate increases much faster than linear with increased thickness. Thus as plates got thicker, making them a tad bit thicker still to compensate for softer material became a very minor thing, but it would have saved a decent bit on the cost.

There's also some thought that went right through my head and is now forgotten. It seemed like an important thing to include, but Hephiastos knows what it was.

>>34871530
>The best way to tell beyond the actual armour is pointy shoes or sabatons = Medieval, stubby square shoes or sabatons = Renaissance
what about english armour?

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am i allowed to post this?

i-it's sorta medieval r-right??

>tfw favorite armor design in fiction and non fiction

>>34859329
Is that made from plastic? Because it look like it is.

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Does /k/ have any recommendations for good movies with lots of medieval armor action? Aside from the typical Hollywood stuff, the only other movie I've found is this rare one called "The Profession of Arms". The whole movie is on Youtube but the quality is poor, there's a better quality copy on Avaxhome but the download is slower.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZM4HDRK55s

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It's one of those really rare movies that's historical and set in the 16th century when gunpowder was starting to make armor obsolete.

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>>34858386
>mfw harlots chase me because they love the scent of pot roast in a my hair

Bitches love the smell of a well fed man

If gunpowder never came about we would have had aluminum and titanium armor.

>>34873972
Excalibur

>>34851464
my dick

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What do you all think of A E S T H E T I C 15th century Okegawa-do gusoku armor?

>>34878153

Pretty good, i also like that samurai used ranged weapons unlike the knights, if a knight was swole as a longbowman, that would be scary af.

>>34849747
>>34849752
It was stylistic/peasant prodders while on horseback. You wouldn't wear them in battle or on foot. They literally have a quick release

>>34858433
>admitting to being part of the SCA

>>34852536
you don't get it. Which costs more before the 19th century and bessemer process; labor or materials? If you answered anything but materials you're a fucking retard.

Why take iron or steel and turn it into shitty arms and armor? Labor is cheap as fuck; It gets more expensive after the black death and leads ironically to a larger freedman/burgher class with more money, property, and arms/armor.

Almain rivets from the 16th century are "crude" but the focus is on articulation and ability to mass produce fittable armor for the contract armies of the period. Some "crude" armor like this is very well designed and finished with full fluting and such but still designed to let you pop it onto a random guy and move some strapping to make it fit correctly.

>>34878243
>Implying the SCA isn't fun as fuck
Full of genuinely mean people, but still a good hobby.

>>34855894
>off the shelf indian garbage armor wuld be better than period hand fitted harnesses

it would be funny to see a medieval armorer grabbing your monosteel overbuilt poorly articulating leg armor, completely dismantling it, and then using the steel itself to make a real set half as thick and 3/4 as heavy with full articulation and fitment.

>>34878313
I would then trash it, 3/4 has no use for someone who asked for something else.

>>34878320
then you're fucking retarded
repro armor is ridiculously overbuilt compared to period pieces. mainly due to modern flat steel sheet being a poor substitute for an armorer hammering the armor thick where necessary, thin where not, and fluting according to style and purpose.

also because larpers, SC(G)AY, and real practitioners of hema/HMB/ACL don't have access to armorers to constantly repair their shit when it dents period correctly so build everything heavy as shit so your foam swords/wood axes don't fuck it up too badly.

>>34851031
That or killing/wounding the horse and tossing you into the mud where a englishman shanks you.

>>34878353
>SCA is shit but HMB/ACL is "real"
I'd respond to your comment explaining why modern people need thicker armour, but you probably wouldn't read it.

>>34878353
>ablobloblo: the post

>>34878364
>I'd respond to your comment explaining why modern people need thicker armour...
because dull axes chew up armor and HMB style fighting while fun is fucking stupid from a combatives perspective? Because people don't want to have to planish out a bunch of dents so make everything out of 14-12ga spring steel? I know why we do it, I also know why it is ahistorical and negatively impacts your ability to fight in armor correctly. Having your harness weigh twice as much due to shitty off the rack fitment and thicker materials is stupid and common. Being common doesn't make it not stupid.


>Society of constant asshurt detected

>>34878402
Did you maybe think it's because we fight for 4 hours a week while period soldiers would maybe spend that much time fighting over a couple of years?

Did you consider that we'll keep fighting more rounds after we "die"?

Did you consider that we have to go back to our jobs the next day and can't spend 6mo off work with a broken tibia?

>>34878419
>I use my pots and pans more than a period soldier who trained constantly in full harness because I go to an event once a month and hit it with a rattack stick wrapped in duct tape
>armor was never repaired, reused, and I think that a properly formed harness can't take a sword or axe blow because reasons.
>fitting armor will get you hurt

>>34878444
I don't think anybody's ever died in SCA or HMB, but I'm pretty sure a few soldiers in full harness have died.

I'd rather take my chances with the safer but less comfortable armour. Try taking a full force hit or two in $20,000 18ga armour and then let me know what you think about cheap and thick stuff.

>>34878557
>I'd rather take my chances with the safer but less comfortable armour
>safer

>no one has died...
blunt weapons, no stabbing, controlled power, and in your case literal fucking broom sticks being called "swords"

>thinks properly made armor won't stop blows
this is why everyone makes fun of the SCA

real armor isn't mono-thickness. 18ga spring steel is more than enough for everything but a helmet going by modern materials.

>>34878592
>No stabbing
>Controlled power
Why do you spend so much energy hating something when you don't even know a single thing about it?

SCA allows stabs, and most beginners spend a lot of time learning how to hit harder before they even think about winding it back.

And no, properly made armour doesn't completely stop damage. It reduces the risk.
Since we're interested in it for fun rather than work, we want to turn a small chance of death into a 0% chance.

Are you seriously suggesting that nobody died when they went to war? Or are you just suggesting that modern sports should have a non-zero risk of death?

>>34867701

It's all about leverage. Mail and even plate isn't actually all that good about directed energy, when it focuses more on stopping slashes and errant strikes. Armored melee is (more or less) about knocking your opponent over so you can stab and/or crush through plate, which is a lot easier when they're on the ground and can't move backward. It's just really hard to bring that much force to bear when your opponent is standing and moving freely.

>>34878626
>SCA allows stabs, and most beginners spend a lot of time learning how to hit harder

with

a

stick

>r u sayin
that full armor of historic thickness before the wide proliferation of firearms and and changing battlefield tactics did in fact make you VERY if not entirely invulnerable to anything but polearms and lances everywhere it covers. Even at the battle of visby in the 14th century had most of the gotland militia getting thier UNARMORED LEGS hacked up. the CoP and other armor recovered in the find was mostly in serviceable shape and only left due to being old and the swollen corpses inside it not making it worth salvaging.

you can wail on a period suit of iron munitions armor as much as you want but besides potentially denting it you aren't going to manage to cut through it or make it catastrophically fail. historical thickness armor with modern steels gives you the proper weight as well as less of an issue with your armor getting cosmetically damaged.

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>>34878660
Yes, with a stick.
A 1kg+ stick which has the same balance and similar vibrational properties to a steel sword.
If you want to discuss details, the main difference when it comes to being hit is the softness of the wood and the larger surface area.

>VERY if not entirely
There's a very big difference between the two.

>anything but polearms and lances
Good thing we don't use polearms.
Oh wait

>besides potentially denting it
You act like this isn't a problem. Do you actually think we have entire armies of professional armour smiths repairing everything for us between every round? You need to calm your autism and think a tiny bit practically about this.

>>34878660
Oh, and for the record, Visby-style coats of plates are some of the most common armour in the SCA.

Please explain to me how, apart from the use of modern materials and techniques, a modern SCA coat of plates is inferior to an example in the specific battle that you brought up.

A well trained samurai with a good quality katana can cut this armor in half.

>>34849649
>late 15th Century Gothic armor
>battle that the took place in 1415, in the early 15th century
Que

>>34878695
>Do you actually think we have entire armies of professional armour smiths repairing everything for us between every round
good thing your "armor" is made of cut up 55 gallon plastic drums and pleather, much more durable than 18ga springsteel formly fitted and properly articulated.

>broomhandles are hardcore
>but if you use a real sword you must be holding back because a real sword (das just a same as my stick!) folded 1000 times will cut right through a suit of armor!

>a sharp polearm may do _____ and a dull one will knock a guy over in ACL style combat
>my slightly larger stick wrapped in duct tape will totally do the same which is why I need to make a bucket helmet out of 12ga mild steel to go with my plastic armor!

>>34878715
>Please explain to me how, apart from the use of modern materials and techniques, a modern SCA coat of plates is inferior
usually made wrong from material to design to facing material and too heavy. Only aggravated by the fact that you fucks are all so fat that you can't fit into properly proportioned armor and square cube law means that it is significantly more heavy

>>34849623
Gunpowder was used long before the high middle ages in europe.
Armor declined because people of value no longer were endangered by virtue of not going to war themselves.
With huge states being able to muster permanent armies you no longer needed the local noblemen to join the frey and lead by example because now a infrastructure could be maintained that kept the soldiers in line by offering relatively lucrative careers doing so.

>>34849649
Good point tho even if wron era.
Plate armour was demise of many a nobleman at agincourt.. That an the lacking capabilities of the british to safelyhold their prisoners at that time.

>>34878897
I think you'll have to cite sources other than casual observation for that one. Well into the colonial era and even up to WW1 high society and military leadership remained synonymous. The biggest reason full plate fell out of use was in fact the expanding use of gunpowder rendering armor obsolete. Yes, it had been used for quite some time, but not on the same scale. They didn't go straight from the first hand gonnes to 20lb flintlock line muskets. Firearms were big, expensive, unwieldy, inaccurate and unreliable for a long time

I think the other factors explaining the fall of armor usage are the switch from small bands of professional warriors to large standing armies making the cost of equipping everyone with cuirasses prohibitive, for one, and for two the expansion of nation-states borders increasing the need for a more mobile force.

Note that this only concerns the infantry and light cavalry : heavy cavalry kept using armor up until the 1870s...

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>>34878897
>Gunpowder was used long before the high middle ages in Europe.
No

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>>34878175
>if a knight was swole as a longbowman, that would be scary af.

With more regular practice and better food, odds are the knight is in better shape than the longbowman, and having trained for melee, his strength will probably be more useful there. They too can have their skeletons shaped by their training, though perhaps the biggest thing about that is that your skeleton isn't all that difficult to shape. Future archaeologists will be able to date things quite well by the rise of computer mouse shoulder and cellphone thumb.

>>34855894
>And maybe, just maybe, the stuff back then was just shit ergonomically
Do you have anything backing this other than rampant speculation and, perhaps, wishful thinking?

>>34878557
>I'd rather take my chances with the safer but less comfortable armour.

That it's all about the armour when people aren't killed in a sporting event where there is no intent to kill and the "weapons" are designed to be reasonably safe seems a pretty ridiculous statement.

Well made SCA armour may perhaps be more suited to SCA combat than any real harness. But I don't see it being shaped any better, in thickness, weight or articulation, for the purpose that the old stuff was made for than that old stuff.

>>34878923
>Plate armour was demise of many a nobleman at agincourt.
Given their advance on foot against a large number of archers, I would suspect they would have died even faster without their armour. The tactics the English sued there had already proven themselves to work in just the same way against the Scots, where the infamous mud was far away and the armour worn may have been rather less.

>>34879176
>Firearms were big, expensive, unwieldy, inaccurate and unreliable for a long time
Firearms were generally cheaper than crossbows by the 15th century, and the infantry long gun was ballisticly pretty much mature by the early 16th century. Gunpowder prices were initially high, but were falling rapidly around 1400..