[Icelander]

Originally Posted by Polydamas

The email exchange between these guys and an Indian armourer with great photos on their Facebook page or ebay account would be the stuff of dark comedy.

I'm betting they still retain connections with the shady Chinese business executives who used to buy the shiploads of iron ore they shipped out and sell them... a wide variety of things in return, i.e. precursor chemicals for making meth, knock-off fashion clothing, pirated entertainment, unlicensed electronics, and, of course, export military equipment with, eh, less-than-accurate end-user certificates.

So, basically, I imagine that they got a lot of their normal TL8 tactical wear through some corrupt middle-men who knew a guy, who knew a guy at the factory or in the logistics chain, who could divert a part of a shipment of Dyneema ballistic panels, trauma plates or a few hundred meters of Kevlar fabric.

Trying to work this network of shady middle-men, who might not even want to know about the ultimate destination of the diverted goods, would be pretty frustrating if you want something made to exacting specifications. I imagine that eventually, their primary contact into the shipping on the China to Lazaro Cardenas sea route hired some kind of fixer based in China (or whereever appropriate factories could be located) to arrange for those special orders they'd need.

Special steels ought to be easy, they were selling iron ore to conglomerates that sometimes own mining and smelting corporations as well as manufacturing stuff like ships, cars, construction materials, power tools, firearms, armoured vehicles, etc. On the other hand, I don't know if there is much SCA armour made in China or if there would be some other good way to make contact with people there with the appropriate skills, tools and inclination for experimentation.

Originally Posted by Polydamas

Whatever these guys get might well impose a DX penalty or excess FP-loss,

Granted. For mostly rifle-proof chests and decent protection elsewhere, -1 DX and a higher rate of FP loss might even be acceptable.

Originally Posted by Polydamas

have unnecessarily large Chinks in Armour or exciting mechanical failures,

I see large and obvious Chinks in Armour as par for the course for the cheaper kit-bashes, essentially TL8 tactical gear with cosmetic medieval/Ren Faire flair, adding some mild steel armour pieces.

It might not apply as much at the higher end of ingenious work-arounds, like quite clever things like brigandines made of a combination of ballistic fabric, high hardness steel alloys and softer steel worked into the curved plates. Though these would probably not even aim for total coverage of the limbs, except possibly by light bracers and greaves backed by thin ballistic fabric, leather or velvet, useful against knives, machetes and wild dogs, as well as looking dope as fornication.

Originally Posted by Polydamas

but buying armour which more-or-less works is not that hard. I am not sure about the rifle-resistant part, but regular plate armour is a buyer's market.

Rifle-resistant trauma plates are cheap and fairly effective. There's spalling, of course, but I imagine that this is less of a problem when you incorporate the 2-4 trauma plates of extremely hard steel into a full suit of some combination of ballistic fabric padding and underlayer, steel of a lesser hardness which allows it to be shaped into armour and maybe even other trauma plates behind the milder steel on the sides or abdomen, to add ballistic protection (if Semi-Ablative).