02-17-2018, 03:50 AM | #181 | ||||||
Join Date: Jan 2006
Location: Central Europe
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Re: [Cutting-Edge Armor Design] Real World SCA-legal Armour and Ballistics Armour
Ok, so this thread has many interesting tangents, but I am trying to spend less time in front of a keyboard. seycyrus, DanHoward, Safisher and I all have slightly different perspectives that come from our experiences so are hard to explain in words, and trying to iron them out would distract from the fun of the awesome ideas in this thread. So I am going to focus on answering Icelander's questions about Vachyslay on page 14 where we cross-posted:
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One of the pictures I pulled up checking how those Stahlhelme were made and how thick they are is someone at the Euromaidan in camoflage jacket and a Stahlhelm plastered with double-lightning-bolt SS, a Kalashnikov crossed with a MP40, and a Cyrilic label saying something about Putin and Hitler. So there is definitely some mixing of symbols! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:E...3-23_13-08.JPG Quote:
I would guess a few years working for that shop in Kyiv: one armourer got a Bachelor's Degree in art metalworking, another in Germany went through their Lehrling system, but mostly armourers teach each other and take classes on coppersmithing or blacksmithing and watch videos. Quote:
After living in Mexico for a while, he might have heard of Ugo Serrano who is involved in the film, fetish, armouring/armoured combat, and wild-party world in California http://ugoserrano.net/bio/. Quote:
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Maybe his quirk could be "susceptible to flattery" instead of "sensitive to social slights"? That might work better for someone with a basically cheerful disposition who knows that he is a great armourer and that is what matters. Vargas' 'social secretary' or 'handler' could assign a couple of thugs and a handful of party girls to tell Vyacheslay how awesome he is and steer him away from Vargas when il Jefe is in a bad mood. I would give someone a bonus to their self-control rolls against Bad Temper to avoid offending their boss the violent psychopath. Quote:
Some of the party girls could have been assigned to help Vyacheslav with his Spanish and cheer him up after that thing with the pit bulls and the meatgrinder, and then one evening over irregular verbs and tequila his favourite started hinting about how Vargas and his sicarios break new girls in. So that could work with your idea that he wants to save his favourite girl, and maybe cut a bloody path through the narco hordes.
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02-17-2018, 04:09 AM | #182 | |
Join Date: Jan 2006
Location: Central Europe
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Re: Expert Tailoring, Fluting and Masterful Tailoring at TL8
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I would say that saving 10% in weight is routine, the really good armourers today can probably save 20%, 30% makes me want to sing "we wouldn't say you're lyin' but we'd like to see it done (and you'll never meet your bounty on this hitch)." I wouldn't say its impossible, but I would not want to bet on it given the kind of time scale and budget you are talking about (especially since they don't have access to originals, and don't have good ways to geek out with other armourers, and they don't have a boss who understands that every change to the specification sets them back).
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"It is easier to banish a habit of thought than a piece of knowledge." H. Beam Piper This forum got less aggravating when I started using the ignore feature |
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02-17-2018, 04:36 AM | #183 |
Join Date: Jan 2006
Location: Central Europe
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Re: [Cutting-Edge Armor Design] Real World SCA-legal Armour and Ballistics Armour
For a quick reality check, the Wallace A62 'Lord Buckhurst', which probably has those kinds of thicknesses (maybe a bit heavier in the arms, shoulders, and upper legs), weighs 36 kg with the reinforcing over-breastplate against bullets. These guys have better steels and heat-treatment than they did in the 1580s, and are probably just aiming to make the arms and legs proof against swords and fragments (some of those links early in this thread showed 40mm grenade launchers) but they don't have the living craft tradition or the community of peers or get to make nothing but 1580s English armour.
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02-17-2018, 06:28 AM | #184 | ||
Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Iceland*
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Re: [Cutting-Edge Armor Design] Real World SCA-legal Armour and Ballistics Armour
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The team, as I currently imagine it, consists of Caló, Vyacheslav and two to three others, as well as any number of assistants with Machinist. The other team members would be the Texan machinist-fabricator, and a former mechanic / current grad student in metallurgy that Caló sent to college in 2012, to educate him as a potential senior assistant at the light armoured vehicle workshop, as well as help on the 'Black Knight' project. I might also have that guy have a friend from school, college girlfriend or thesis advisor he's recruited to provide expert advice on the metallurgy behind adapting the flash bainite process to making body armour as well as vehicle armour plates. I do want Vyacheslav to have, in game terms, rolled a critical success when he built Vargas a suit of Gothic plate at the workshop in Kiev around 2011-2013. It explains why Vargas picked him as the armourer he believes in and why he is much more friendly with Vyacheslav than the other members of the team, all with much more marketable skills and higher paid. Caló probably handled the contracts, but Vargas has probably given Vyacheslav much more lavish gifts than the others, their value coming out of Vargas' normal household budget, not the ca 1% of it I've specifically dedicated to making the armour, as the gifts weren't a part of the cost to get a live-in armourer, they are just Vargas amusing himself by gifting the out-of-place foreigner with fine stallions, expensive furs, gaudy jewelry and authentic historical artifacts bought at online auctions, like White Russian heirloom swords. As the most perfect example of Vyacheslav's talent and the final flowering of his traditional armourer's craft before he switches over to harder alloys and other materials which he cannot work with without developing and learning new methods, which Low-Tech options would it be plausible to apply to it? I was thinking it wouldn't have any exotic alloys, just the best steel he could forge in a classic forge, and it didn't come with gold, silver or diamond decorations, but was instead subtly beautiful for the elegance of its craftsmanship. It would be made of thick steel, pistol proofed as widely as possible, and the cuirass and massive helmet would be as protective as 'normal' alloys could make it. Not a direct copy of an extant plate harness, but an inspired combination of the best design features Vyacheslav had seen in all historical armour he had ever examined, online or in person. The armour would have been contracted to be built, in name, by Vyacheslav's employer at the Kiev workshop, someone with a very good reputation in the field, but during regular email exchanges and then Skype talks over the course of the construction process, Vargas would come to see that the vision, commitment, passion and superior artistic talent were all coming from the less senior employee who handled the day-to-day work, and demand that Vyacheslav be officially put in charge of finishing the armour. In effect, the armour would have been his 'masterpiece'. Vyacheslav would have finished his masterpiece at the end of 2013. No matter the craftsmanship and the best hardening possible with traditional forging, Vyacheslav couldn't have promised that steel used would be completely proof against rifle fire, however, not even the thick breastplate. Experiments with the same alloy, hardened to as similar levels by Caló Renteria and his assistants, would have shown that high-powered rifle rounds would penetrate that thickness of steel, though they might not always penetrate a backing of ballistic fabric afterwards. The thinner armour elsewhere, however, would probably not be thick enough to stop any rifle round and even with ballistic fabric backing, would probably inadequate protection from typical threats. Which is why Vargas continued his project despite having gotten the GURPS equivalent of Very Fine plate armour and, when circumstances altered in Mexico between 2014-2015, and Vargas found himself moving to a new place, with more power and autonomy, if technically slightly less revenue, convinced Vyacheslav to move there and see if he could not improve on his masterpiece armour using the best modern tools, methods and materials. I guess I want Vargas and Vyacheslav to be friends, as far as Vargas is capable of friendship, and give Vyacheslav reasons to love Vargas for his open-handedness, charm, shared hobbies, demonstrated trust and genuine, if untutored and unsystematic, appreciation of his craftsmanship and the artistry of a traditional armourer. I think it makes for a far better dynamic if Vyacheslav loves his charismatic, domineering and mercurial patrón almost as much as he hates the horrible, despicable things he comes to learn Vargas does. Especially if Vyacheslav is romantic enough to be considering a range of dangerous actions to rescue his Dulcinea even before maybe encountering PCs, and, in imaging a cinematic mano-a-mano confrontation between the wicked patrón fallen from his pedestal and his rebellious subject filled with justified wrath, thinks that having studied historical swordsmanship much more intensively than Vargas will somehow matter in a real fight to the death with a hardened killer who uses machine guns for actual combat. Always good to give players the possibility of potential allies who bring almost as much trouble as aid.
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Za uspiekh nashevo beznadiozhnovo diela! Last edited by Icelander; 02-17-2018 at 09:53 AM. |
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02-17-2018, 07:30 AM | #185 | |
Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Iceland*
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Re: [Cutting-Edge Armor Design] Real World SCA-legal Armour and Ballistics Armour
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The flash bainite process can be used to turn out various different grades of armour steel in GURPS terms. Anything from the equivalent of TL4 armour steel or the equal of RHA steel to TL6 'Hard Steel', TL7 'Steel, very hard' or TL8 'Ultra-Strength Steel' in terms of David Pulver's Pyramid articles on armour design. I'm looking to determine which of these approximate grades are easily shaped into articulated plate armour with high-quality, but commercially available, tools and machines suitable for a finely appointed custom machinist workshop or specialised small factory at late TL8, and at what point the hardness levels are high enough to require literal cutting-edge steelworking technology, usually present only in very large, high-tech manufacturing applications, with factories costing hundreds of millions of dollars.
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02-17-2018, 11:40 AM | #186 | |||
Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Iceland*
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Re: Expert Tailoring, Fluting and Masterful Tailoring at TL8
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Or would it be TL6 'Hard Steel', slightly more protective (ca +10-20%) and slightly more expensive ($3.50 vs. $3 in 'CEAD') than RHA steel? I expect that the flash bainite process effectively upgrades it by a grade or two in 'CEAD' terms. So 4130 steel treated by the flash bainite process will be somewhere between the protective value of TL 6 'Hard Steel' and TL8 'Ultra-Strength Steel', very probably and conveniently somewhere about the value of TL7 'Steel, very hard'. Quote:
Going by side by side ballistic armour testing and other comparisons I can find to titanium-6Al-4V (which I figure is the TL7 'Titanium Alloy' in 'CEAD'), 'Flash® 500' has the stats of TL8 'Ultra-Strength Steel' (it seems to be within 1-2% for all points of reference I can find). Would it be possible to use the flash bainite process to harden finished pieces of armour, rather than starting with very hard steel alloys and trying to work them into complex armour pieces? *Going by its performance in US Army testing, AR600 would have WM 0.2 and DR 200+ per inch, at least for ballistic threats, though possibly it has higher DR against piercing than crushing, with maybe 'only' effective WM 0.3 and DR 120-150 per inch for other threats. Cool, so most likely anyone among the senior leadership and full-time sicarios of the Caballero Templarios who wants a functioning plate harness for live steel fighting has one that was made in house, by this time. They've had their full set-up, including specialist body armour workshop and the light armoured vehicle factory, with its licensed tooling and machines for the flash bainite process, up and running for more than a year by the time our characters visit Mexico. I expect that the less senior sicarios have opted for simplified designs of plate armour, made out of whatever steel alloys allow the fastest and most efficient manufacture. That will probably be, in 'CEAD' terms, either TL6 'Hard Steel' or TL7 'Steel, very hard' (from Pyramid #3/52) for the articulated joints and other hard to armour areas and/or maybe smaller plates of high hardness steel, in a brigandine design of overlapping plates. Quote:
WM is the weight per point of DR of a square foot of protection. DR/inch, is, well, the DR for an inch of armour plate made out of that alloy. 'Iron, cheap' (TL2): WM 0.8; DR/inch 52. 'Iron, good' (TL2): WM 0.6; DR/inch 68. 'Steel, strong' (TL3): WM 0.58; DR/inch 70. 'Steel, hard' (TL4): WM 0.5; DR/inch 81. 'High-Strength Steel' (TL6): WM 0.58; DR/inch 70. 'Hard Steel' (TL6): WM 0.5; DR/inch 82. 'Steel, very hard' (TL7): WM 0.45; DR/inch 90. 'Ultra-Strength Steel' (TL8): WM 0.35; DR/inch 116. For comparison, some other alloys: 'Aluminum' (TL6): WM 0.45; DR/inch 31. 'High-Strength Aluminum' (TL7): WM 0.4; DR/inch 35. 'Titanium' (TL7): WM 0.4; DR/inch 57. 'Titanium Alloy' (TL7): WM 0.35; DR/inch 66.
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Za uspiekh nashevo beznadiozhnovo diela! Last edited by Icelander; 02-17-2018 at 11:53 AM. |
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02-17-2018, 12:05 PM | #187 |
Night Watchman
Join Date: Oct 2010
Location: Cambridge, UK
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Re: [Cutting-Edge Armor Design] Real World SCA-legal Armour and Ballistics Armour
If you're willing to dig into armour technology beyond the simplified GURPS model, it may be worth considering "cemented" steel. This is somewhat similar to what the flash Banit process is doing, but also involves adding carbon to the outer face of the armour.
This can produce a surface that is very hard indeed, and can only be worked by grinding, so you do it after shaping the armour. The downside is that the very hard face is somewhat brittle, which may mean you end up with a split DR, higher vs piercing than cutting or crushing. The canonical process for this is Krupp Cemented armour. It was devised for warships, and may not be practical for human armour, but failed ideas at least add detail.
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02-17-2018, 03:24 PM | #188 | ||||||||
Join Date: Oct 2004
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Re: Expert Tailoring, Fluting and Masterful Tailoring at TL8
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WM is the weight per point of DR of a square foot of protection. DR/inch, is, well, the DR for an inch of armour plate made out of that alloy. Quote:
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02-17-2018, 04:28 PM | #189 | |
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Wellington, NZ
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Re: [Cutting-Edge Armor Design] Real World SCA-legal Armour and Ballistics Armour
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My main concern with face-hardened armour for body armour is that it'll be quite hard to effectively do to thin pieces, and as there's little research on such applications just how deep to infuse the carbon and how hard to temper the face will be entirely novel territory for the armourers. Also, face-hardening all those intricate parts of a plate harness would be a right pain, and has to be done after they are shaped.
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02-17-2018, 04:55 PM | #190 |
Join Date: Oct 2004
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Re: [Cutting-Edge Armor Design] Real World SCA-legal Armour and Ballistics Armour
A lot of tools and knives are case-hardened like this. Differential heating will cause problems in any heat treatment, and alloy steels like 4130 are tricky. (knives are easier than swords because of this.) What's needed is a forge big enough to put the whole pieces in and most forges are not that big. Mine is about a foot square. I could do bigger pieces in my coal forge, but I have less control over my coal forge. (It's a real pain to work with!) So to do this sort fo face-hardening you need a special forge and a special craftsman than can figure out how to face-harden very thin pieces without differential heating and without burning the plates all the way through. Tricky! Flash bainite looks better all the time.
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Tags |
cutting-edge armor design, hema, jade serenity, pyramid #3/85, sca |
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