Quote:
Originally Posted by Icelander
Well, give me some idea on what would be realistic to commission from a legitimate company or how they might have an 'in' with a company willing to be less-than-legitimate.
It's highly unlikely that anyone doing business with Vargas will not realise pretty quickly that he is a drug lord, so unless the stuff can be ordered by a flunky from an online catalog or by the one of the few grey market contacts he retains who have an in with several Chinese businesses*, he'd need to deal with someone who was cool with designing armour for a scary drug lord.
What kind of money are we talking to make this an attractive proposition?
How much of it would be the cost of one custom-made armour, with possibly a couple of failed or unsatisfactorily prototypes on the way there, and how much could you get cost per unit down for about a dozen less fancy ones once you have the techniques down?
And what kind of materials, coverage, design, etc. would be realistic?
If we want something that looks like movie-armour for knights, but functions as well as we can within a plausible budget?**
*Mostly, but not exclusively, representatives of huge conglomerates who'll buy iron ore by the shipload despite having to fake some paperwork, because it's stolen, untaxed and being sold by gangsters. Also, representatives of companies, possibly the same ones, who sell tons of chemicals useful as methamphetamine precursors. And a few people with connections to Norinco, at the very least, to logistics companies that transport weapons from China for export.
**He might spend as much on his own armour as he'd spend on a really pimped-up luxury truck, with gold decorations and other insane stuff, if the mood should strike him. He's probably not going to pay for twelve truck-equivalent armours to give his lieutenants and bodyguards.
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Right OK first off I guess I should go into a bit of detail of my thinking about this question.
So as a project what your really trying to do here is find, access and employ a series of pretty bespoke skills and resources in the right order. The two main parts are going to be (obvs) design and manufacture. (The later decaling etc is in terms of resources and accessibility is IMO practically an afterthought!)
Now as much as I love the armour design articles they kind of deal in raw manufacture detail. And that's fine for established mature technologies in ongoing industries. Also TBH there are posters in this tread who have more knowledge then me in material science and specific tooling processes who can explain the detail of how that works. However my POV is unless were dealing with incredibly expensive materials or accessing incredibly expensive tooling or developing new materials from scratch. The actual cost of material, workshop and tool time is not going to be the real cost here. For me the real cost is actually going to be whatever the figure is that keeps the company on the phone long enough to really consider the project. In my mind you have two ways to go with this:
1). companies who are in an industry that just happens to involve the materials you are talking and working them into things. The problem here for you is there is no such thing as a modern day industry for plate armour of the spec you talking about. (The modern day equivalent is of course the modern day body armour industry which you already mentioned and repurposing what's commercial available is an option I think). So we are talking about them having to work out if they can do it, then working out what the value for the hassle of doing so.
Honestly I think that's a calculation more based on percentage of annual turn over and company size than actually unit cost of making TL8 modern plate! I'm pretty certain for example where I work we wouldn't even look at this for anything less than a couple of million. But we're not that small, and you'd be gettin in the way of regular ongoing business and we'd make you pay for that. But the slight silver lining there is that price probably wouldn't change that much depending on how many you wanted and how many trial pieces we'd make (in terms of the numbers you've mentioned anyway)
2). bespoke small workshops who's bread and butter is hyper specific special jobs. They'll be more accommodating but will charge you for that. Now I don't work for such place so no real idea of price but you pay for the flexibility and specialism. This might be cheaper depending on their size but I think your options for people who can do it more more limited.
Right so there's also the design phase, this I think will be easier, not because the skill and knowledge is easier, but because the industries that work in human ergonomics and CAD are more insync with what you want than the manufacturers.
Although to be fair as CADCAM gets more integrated the line may well blur more and more between these two parts!
Sadly I can't help you here really. The last time I worked with freelance designers directly was in the early 00's and it was in different area all together. But my instinct is this is going to be more about billable days on agreed contractor rates and not "they what us to do
what...?!" pricing, so I want to say $10,000's? But again I think a lot of this is going to be an upfront cost of the whole project not really about per unit.
One aspect IME people with skills who use them to make stuff day to day that doesn't necessarily interest them often like fresh interesting challenges to those skills!
On the legality thing, OK TBH I don't think its going to be that much of issue so long as they're not daft about it.
1). Criminals and criminal organisation buy stuff all the time from legal businesses. IMO the key factor here is what the product or service is, and how dual purpose it is. Ultimately most industries sell according to the limitations and regulations that are on them. And well to be frank people are often willing to rationalise perceived grey areas in the face of wads of cash.
So for instance drug cartels were quite heavy purchasers of security equipment, like doors, fences etc. Now some times that's because you want your family in your drug funded mansion to be secure from the occasional cartel hit squad, but sometimes it's because you want to ensure your brothel full of child sex slaves don't escape. Many companies don't look too hard or try not to imagine the worst case scenarios.
For a larger scale example British companies were quite happy to sell anti riot equipment to various countries around the world, Police forces need anti riot equipment right, it's a legitimate need? But they looked a bit green around the gills when their stuff was later shown to be cracking pro-democracy demonstrators skulls on youtube.
We're talking about armour, not industrial chemistry sets to manufacture drugs, or spiked toddler fighting suits. On top of that we're talking specifically weird anachronistic armour. Some willing parts of the process might well just say to themselves "well it's not like I'm making the guns they'll be firing back at those this armour is stopping" or "well this armor can't be helping the that much it's olden days stuff".
On the dual purpose thing here with armour. So I'm willing to bet that is parts parts of the world were there are restrictions on the body armour industry on who they sell their products to. Or at least some due diligence is required. But well we not talking about the body armour industry here, we talking about weird high spec replicas of plate armour which while in terms of actual capability might be a distinction without a difference but when it comes to industry standards and due diligence (and sleeping well at night) it can make a difference
2). Don't have some chap with the last supper tattooed on his face turn up on the doorstep! (not that I think you would). Have some agent pose as a representative for some eccentric oil prince. And well you are making weird body armour for the security detail of an eccentric SWAsian playboy. Everyone "knows" these rich oil princes splurge huge wads of cash on weird, bizarre and impractical things right? People often just like a plausible story to hang on their weird but well paying customer.
(Real life example of splurging. My mother in law's boyfriend is a skipper who teaches sailing and has been in the community for decades. He and I were in a pub chatting to some bloke who works for a company who refits luxury yachts. Now the project that was basically funding the company that year was swapping all the wood out of someone's super yacht to the tune of £10m's. This was being done because the old wood that had cost a fortune to put in in the first place, was apparently not the fashionable wood for super yachts!)
Now not all parts can be kept so separate, those scary chaps with tattoos are going to have go for fittings etc, but I think you'll still be able to box off the different aspects enough so that the minimum amount of people on the project know the real story.
Right anyway sorry I realise I've gone on a different tack than most in this thread, those are my thoughts.
But again this sounds like a cool setting! Good luck with it