Quote:
Originally Posted by mlangsdorf
Ballistic black knight harness, take 2:
DR 20 polyurea coated light steel armor solid skullcap: 1.4 sqft, WM 0.3, CM 40, CW 1, CC 1, DR 20: 8.4 lbs, $340
DR 5 transparent laminated polycarbonate eyeslits: 0.1 sqft, WM 0.25, CM 50, CW 0.8, CC 5, DR 5: 0.1 lbs, $25
DR 6 hard steel plate neck and face: 1.3 sqft, WM 0.5, CM 3.5, CW 0.8, CC 5, DR 6: 3.15 lbs, $55
DR 20 polyurea coated light steel armor plate over the vitals: 1 sqft, WM 0.3, CM 40, CW 0.8, CC 5, DR 20: 4.8 lbs, $960.
DR 12F/6B hard steel plate torso other than vitals: 6 sqft, WM 0.5, CM 3.5, CW 0.8, CC 5, DR 9 (average for calculating cost/weight): 21.6 lbs, $380
DR 8F/4B hard steel plate arms, legs: 10.5 sqft, WM 0.5, CM 3.5, CW 0.8, CC 5, DR 6 (average for calculating cost/weight): 28.35 lbs, $500
DR 4 hard steel plate hands, feets: 1.4 sqft, WM 0.5, CM 3.5, CW 0.8, CC 5, DR 4: 2.25 lbs, $40
DR6 improved kevlar undersuit: 21.35 sqft, WM 0.08, CM 120, CW 1, CC 1, DR 6: 10.25 lbs, $1230
Total is 78.9 lbs, $3530. A little over weight and budget, but the protection is good. The important parts are completely resistant to 7.62mm rounds and the arms and legs are nearly resistant to 5.56mm rounds from the front. You can stand in a fire for 45 seconds without worrying about burning or heat. The biggest weak point is the eye slits at DR 5.
against bullets and axes (-4 DR against other damage types)
DR 26 over the skull and vitals, DR 21 over the rest of the front torso, DR 15 over the face and neck, DR 14 over the arms and legs from the front, DR 10 for the hands and feet and back of the limbs, DR 12 for the back torso.
|
This is very much the kind of thing I'm considering, yes. Thank you.
Now, to get something like this in the real world, how plausible is that?
The price, first of all. The calculated prices in the article are probably meant to be for commercially produced pieces of armour, I imagine. Or, at least, there should be a major difference in price between something that is manufactured in the hundreds of thousands to equip a military and something that is custom-made for a crazy re-enactors.
I might need to hit the Knight Templars with a
huge price increase for any piece which they cannot get mass-produced from a factory somewhere and modify to fit into their panoply.
Any non-standard tailoring, like a ballistic vest that also includes sleeves and material to cover the abdomen and hip area, will probably mean a price increase if they buy custom-made commercial designs or require them to obtain the kind of machines which can cut Kevlar or other aramids into the desired shapes.
And I'm pretty sure that an articulated Plate fauld over the Abdomen is more expensive than a breastplate, ounce by ounce, as it requires a much more complex shape and design not to cripple mobility.
To avoid massive Cost increases for realism purposes and/or massive penalties to mobility, I would be fine with armour that doesn't actually have 100% coverage. Chinks in armour or even Partial Coverage for certain, hard to armour locations, might well be the only solution for the ballistically useful parts of the armour.
Coverage in line with a historical knight
might be achievable, but would probably need to be bought from a company specialising in re-enaction armour or similar and could only be made form materials that their production methods could handle. This probably means good steel, but not the hardest possible alloys or anything that you couldn't work with using whatever tools such companies own.
Well, unless I'm wrong about how hard it is to work AR500 and similar steels. If you can custom order them in any shape you want, as opposed to just sheets or gently curving sheets, that would change things. Does anyone have data about how hard it really is to work?
Or if anyone could find links to or even anecdotal evidence of real world blacksmiths, machinists or custom shops who offer to make armour or other complex shapes out of steel alloys with this kind of hardness.
Quote:
Originally Posted by mlangsdorf
An obvious way to save weight would be to replace the steel on the limbs with aluminum, but at 3.5x the cost of hard steel, it wasn't feasible for the $3000 budget. Dropping the limb armor down to DR4, front and back, would also save about 10 lbs and DR 10 is sufficient to stop 9mm bullets.
At the upper level of protection, titanium composite is 40% the weight of hard steel but 30x as expensive. Using titanium composite for the limbs would drop the weigh by 17 lbs, but would raise the cost by over $14000, so it's not really feasible.
|
Considering that the opportunity cost* of each military Type 56 rifle being used to equip the full-fledged cartel soldiers is at least $2,500+ and gunmen senior enough to consider having such armour would probably carry a much more expensive Norinco CQ-A clone of the M4A1**, $3,000 isn't really that high. I could see the final price being higher than $3,000, easy.
However, as I said, I think custom designs ought to carry a mark-up over mass-produced ones, so what the design system calls $3,000 might well come out to $10,000+,
if someone had it made in real life.
I'm trying to apply the rules in the article to designs that are not merely mechanically legal, but would actually work in reality. This means that
total coverage is probably extremely expensive and comes with significant heat and mobility drawbacks.
As a design goal, we should look at equivalent coverage to actual military TL8 ballistic armour for the stuff that actually stops bullets, with lower DR steel, maybe thin Kevlar or something even easier to work with, being used to cover the more complex areas of inconvenient shape.
*Regardless of what you paid for it, you could sell it on the black market in northern Mexico at $2,500 or more.
**Opportunity cost might be $5,000+, as that's what you'd probably be able to sell one for, given that semi-automatic Colt L6920 carbines that are neither selective fire nor with the more tacticool shorter barel are selling for $3,000+.