More advanced Medieval armor?
- Thread starter Onyx
- Start date
Plate armour is EXPENSIVE. It needs to be made for each individual soldier, it needs a VERY skilled smith to make that amount of steel armour, and every time it is damaged, it needs the same VERY skilled smith for repairs. Lamells, you need to replace a few, if you have some spares of this standardised small plate, which most smiths capable of making steel can make, you can do it in the field.
Actually, I'm not convinced the technology for making plate was 'there' (in the sense of widely enough available) that early. Making useful plate armour is quite difficult. What I could see is armourers in the Middle East developing their own version (they had the technology to make larger sheets of armour earlier than in the west, but used them differently). But I'm not at all sure even 1200 is feasible without an early divergence in technology.
At least according to my reading the capacity did exist for making breastplate size pieces of steel, what was lacking was the diffusion of that skill out from a limited number of artificer and siege workshops into the general armour industry, and that was driven by a lack of demand. If you look at the timeline as soon as crossbows and longbows capable of punching though mail came on the scene plate armour appeared.
Paul MacQ
Monthly Donor
Post 1430 it was cheaper to make than chain with the greater the use of water wheel Powered Bellow forge and drop hammers. It did take skilled workers to create. Loves my Milanese style plate for heavy fighting . I have to totally disagree regards Repair. Getting dents out of plate is not that hard. It is not like we are talking about face hardened steel here
Exactly what I would say myself absent any claim of ownership of Milanese plate.
Once the metallurgic processes are there, plate isn't too hard to show up. In my TL I had them start coat-of-plates by 1000s and by 1190s plate (with some limitations) is standard for rich/important people, and good cuirass-like plate used by the best of the infantry (front line of an elite pike unit for instance).
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It wasn't just the plate armour got cheaper over time, mail did as well. There was a vast difference between the plate armour that a common mercenary wore and that used by a Monarch. You could get a relatively cheap and cheerful breastplate and some leather tassets and pauldrons, it would still be a labourers pay for a year but considering a mail coat was two years pay for a labourer everything is relative.
Honestly, given the expertise and intricate nature of making plate armour, I think that the craft advanced about as far as it could, as quickly as it could - same with swordsmithing. Both are very specialized arts, and require a lifetime of experience, and you can't really have people simply kind of "make" an advancement that frankly, comes about exclusively through trial and error, not some sort of genuine scientific breakthrough. Thus, any breakthrough requires generations of smiths working their whole lives in their respective arts, learning what works, what doesn't, and sharing those things, and then incorporating them into their arms and armour. It's simply not the sort of thing that, even in the best of circumstances, can happen "quickly".
not unless you have an atmosphere of near-constant warfare but still relatively safe and lucrative enough for armorers to set up shop nearby.
Yes, but by the mid-1400s, plate mail was the standard heavy mail - the original question was how to advance armour quicker. Before the mid-1400s, plate mail was prohibitively expensive.
And you fix a hole, how? By replacing the entire plate. A hole in a lamellar or chainmail armour can easily be fixed in the field. Armour of the time WAS more or less face-hardened - you wore thick linen or wool cloth beneath the metal armour, and for arrows and spears to penetrate the steel but not the cloth beneath was not uncommon. Byzantine cataphracts are said to look like hedgehogs coming back from battle, but being unhurt. Similar has been said of French knights, in full plate mail, at the later stages of the 100 years' war.
Which is something, frankly, which I imagine as being extremely difficult to engineer. Not impossible, but very difficult.
The alternative I suppose is a longer-lasting stronger Rome that has a far more sudden collapse, not that long decline that was visible in the return to chainmail and lower quality metals. I think that if Rome collapses over night pretty much wit, say, 200AD levels, and somehow in this collapse, the Dark Ages are avoided, with continual advances of the Roman metallurgy...it'd be possible to make far more advanced metal armours by 1100 or 1200. Of course, given the Roman basis, I can see something far closer to a lamellar style armour than anything else.
Even that though is nigh-ASB I suppose...so again, all but impossible given the nature of the metalsmithing trades.
I think he as suggesting OTL where you had exactly that. Constant low level warfare but just enough stability to keep a reasonably functional economy going.
Paul MacQ
Monthly Donor
Well a hole is rather more rare than you let on as most deaths when wearing plate is a weak spot has been found. Though a hole is hammered flat and a small plate is reverted over it, really simple. Though it was more aesthetic to hammer flat and weld put in place and then polished over to get as close to smooth finish again . The water wheel being used for what was more common in 1400's is not that much of a stretch earlier
I do have to admit favorite Armour is coat of plates ( plates between leather )
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