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Old 02-08-2018, 05:26 AM   #41
Icelander
 
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Default Re: [Cutting-Edge Armor Design] Real World SCA-legal Armour and Ballistics Armour

Quote:
Originally Posted by Polydamas View Post
For gauntlets and trigger guards ... gauntlets are great for backhanding people and looking tough. Japanese kote should work as-is since they don't enclose the fingers. Some gunmen might end up in SCA fingerless gauntlets, or the kind of gauntlet with one lame over the first knuckle of all four fingers.
You are very right. Gauntlets are cool. And they lend one's pimp hand a rare authority...

So, if at all possible, we'll want some kind of gauntlets that don't interfire with shooting, neither rifles nor pistols. And look as cool as can be arranged. Actual protective value less important, as they won't stop bullets anyway.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Polydamas View Post
For the rest, do Cartel gunmen really have great weapon-carriage and trigger discipline? Anyone can saw off a trigger guard ...
Most cartel gunmen may not exhibit great weapon handling, but a long-time veteran of US Army Special Forces and Delta Force would be pretty adamant about training trigger discipline. And he wouldn't allow anyone to wear armour that made it impossible to carry their weapons in an adequately professional manner.

His inner circle of bodyguards and the three kill teams he uses for strikes against other cartels have officers and NCOs recruited from South and Central American armed forces. Each of them is chosen for previous military or police training (or great natural gifts as a commando), ideally combat experience and willingness to obey without question. They all have at least a year with the Knight Templars, with the norm being 2-5 years.

Some of his inner circle have been working with him for ten years or more, though it is a mystery what they have been doing or where, as Vargas doesn't seem to have been reliably reported as a significant part of the drug scene in Mexico much before 2009. Of course, it's not as if they advertise and he could have been working as a secretive assassin / security chief for his cousin, 'El Chango' within La Familia Michoacán, predecessors to the Knight Templar Cartel. Some reports place him as fighting with the original Los Zetas, when they were just the enforcement arm of the Gulf Cartel, but if he did, he would have been the leader of only a small, elite force of enforcers, not an important lieutenant in the drug side of the business.

The routine of Vargas' personal household and elite strike teams, when not actively operating against hostile cartels, includes several hours per day of some kind of military style training, overseen by Vargas, by Santiago 'El Jabalí' Garcia, his fellow USASF veteran (MOS 18E, Communications Sergeant), by Miguel Angel Zamora, a former LTC of Colombian commandos (AFEUR and the 3rd Counterinsurgency Battalion of the 3rd Brigade), and by Guillermo Machado, a former First Sergeant of the Salvadoran Atlacatl Battalion.

Yeah, sure, he has trouble attracting completely sane recruits without chemical dependancies, psychological issues or the kind of childhood that makes Lifetime cry, but he has the skill set and people to train his shooters to a high standard. I expect he makes a fair bit of effort to get enough ammo to shoot live fire excersises more often than anyone local but the elite units of the Mexican military.

And Vargas really likes running tactical exercises, shooting military weapons and generally running around showing off how much tougher, fiercer and more skilled he is than everyone else, even at sixty-one (the supersoldier thing helps, his body seems not to have slowed down at all since he was 45, when he was a really fit Chief Warrant Officer in an active SF ODA). He also loves sparring, knife-fighting demonstrations, and, probably by now, trying to learn historical martial arts from watching them on Youtube.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Polydamas View Post
You might look at what IMCF/HMB fighters wear for inspiration, because I would expect that some of these gunmen are fans.
That's a good point. They could watch it on Youtube or something.

Vargas has always been heavily into martial arts (Tae Kwon Do, Combat Sambo and knife-fighting). As in, he used to compete in TKD and related sports while stationed in Korea in the late 70s and he liked to brag he could break a man's neck with one secret Spetsnaz move from Russia.

While Vargas started that whole 'Knight' indoctrination thing because the cartel his cousin was senior in already had a strange, cult-like mythology and referred to their enforcer arm as Knight Templars, and because Vargas was trained in Psyops while in the US Army and recognised the utility for propaganda and unit cohesion, he's been doing it long enough that I expect he half believes in it himself. Plus, for someone who already thinks knife-fighting and Combat Sambo are awesome, I expect sword-fighting to be even more awesome.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Polydamas View Post
More India and Pakistan I think. On the other hand, there is Iron Mountain Armoury in China which makes standardized japanese-ish armours.
I suppose some 'cosmetic'* helmets, face masks, gauntlets and other additions might have been gotten there, to go with faux-Asian resin-bonded kevlar scale/lamellar. Especially before they managed to find a good workshop in the Ukraine or somewhere to make their SCA-legal steel armour.

*Probably real enough metal and DR that may be comparable to the lower end of historical specimens, but are functionally just cosmetic when it comes to the rifle rounds that are the expected threat in pitched battle with other cartels or any gang which would dare stand up to them.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Polydamas View Post
It is pretty common that Chinese companies don't deliver the exact materials which they promised, because the supply chain there is such a mess and everything is changing so fast. I don't know anything about high-tech steels in the thicknesses used to stop rifle rounds, though.
It is ironically appropriate that issues with Chinese logistics should frustrate the Knight Templars, considering that they spent years profiting off the opaque accountability within those supply chains when they were doing all all that business with China while they more-or-less controlled the port of Lazaro Cardenas and the iron ore industry in Michoacán.
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Last edited by Icelander; 02-08-2018 at 05:44 AM.
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