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Old 09-24-2019, 08:08 AM   #27
Tomsdad
 
Join Date: Jan 2010
Location: Brighton
Default Re: [Low-Tech] Padded Cloth and Layered Armour penalty

Quote:
Originally Posted by Flyndaran View Post
I'm looking into some history, but am still quite the novice idiot. So everyone correct me when, not if, I'm wrong.
But it seems like as plate started to get more prevalent, people began to add it piecemeal over suits of mail around the 1300s. But by the 1400s, they quickly began to just stop wearing the mail underneath except for the gaps.
It seems like that would make most sense if they realized that it was more weight/protection efficient to only wear one layer of armor.
Is this a valid assessment?

(I know that over time, plate became less expensive than mail, but that happens a bit later than when much of this cross over seemed to have occurred.)
The thing is in terms of like for like protection (i.e DR in GURPS terms) plate is lighter and a lot of the time cheaper than mail, so in abstract if you can do plate, you do plate.

Mail had other advantages though, being flexible it's great at covering hard to armour locations. But again as plate developed Plate was also able to do this (not 100% as well which is why as you say you kept mail voiders etc).

Side note mail isn't great against maces etc, so that was another factor that favoured plate over mail. It also not great against bullets! (plate can be depending on what bullet and what thickness of plate)

On top of that plate also got generally speaking better in terms of protection for weight, as better steels and better processes become more available (or more able to be reliably made in greater amounts and thus more available/affordable). This allows better plate to be made that offered better protection without proportionally increasing the weight as a much.


Not all of these are absolutes, some early plate was very good, some later plate was less good, some mail types can get pretty rigid, some very expensive plate armours made by the best craftsmen had plate voiders, not all types of armour were available to all people all the time for specific reasons other than what's the most cost and weight deficient way to get DR etc, etc.


The head is a slight special case here due to the issues of vision, mobility and high value target.


Look at the various loadouts in Dan Howard's loadout books, the French Chevalier is wearing one of the heaviest sets with layers of plate and mail (and some quite impressive layered DR at points). The German Ritter a century later is wearing a set with way less mail, less layers and less weight but IIRC better plate coverage and pretty comparable protection. The Italian a hundred years after has a few extra developments over the Ritter in terms of head, throat & joint protection. Otherwise its pretty similar to the Ritter, apart from the fact that his suit is heavier because overall thickness has increased. But in terms of protection by weight the increase in protection outstrips the weight increase. It still lighter than the Chevalier's though!

The London Lobster (ECW) gets heavier but still lighter than the Chevalier, and has a DR12 proofed Breastplate!


But the point that's perhaps more relevant here for looking at armour effectiveness in GURPS is that historically once you have a suite of plate that has got around the coverage issue and is of reasonably good steel that gave you pretty damn good protection* against pretty much all hand held weapons until guns got better (and even then certain bits of plate got thicker to compete with guns for a while).
So they didn't need to layer because they didn't need the 2nd layer for coverage, and they didn't need to layer for the extra protection that layer would give.


But as we all know from umpteen threads on the subject, that effectiveness in terms of protection isn't always matched in the GURPS system. And while I'm not looking to reignite that debate, it is I think fair to say that because of that fact we often look at armour's performance in GURPS and things like layering with that in mind. And so the "Historical record" and the "GURPS record" at our tables, don't always exactly line up! But of course GURPS has a far wider remit than to only provide exact historical armour performance, and has to accommodate a much wider range of results within the same overall system so yeah we get overlap in those results**!



*generally speaking forcing people to go around it and more complete coverage makes that harder

**and example of this is 'Blade of the Iron Throne' (a system that largely came out of 'The Riddle of Steel'). This system is a kind of sword and sorcery game pretty much aimed at "realistic" one on one fights between largely human combatants (it can do more but IMO breaks when it tries). It basically says a lot of blade's can't cut through amour of a certain type. Now that doesn't those blades are of no possible use, but they have to either go around the armour of they functionally turn into sub optimal bludgeoning weapons. And well OK that blanket ruling works when your only talking about vaguely realistic humans hitting other vaguely realistic humans in armour. But GURPS doesn't have that luxury, because while yeah OK It's extremely unlikely that a human can cut through a 2mm steel breastplate with a sword for any effect, what about a 12ft tall ST25 ogre with 8ft, 15lb sword he might be able to rather more easily
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Last edited by Tomsdad; 09-24-2019 at 10:05 AM.
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