[Cutting-Edge Armor Design] Real World SCA-legal Armour and Ballistics Armour

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by Polydamas

I don't have time to work back through this thread before the weekend, but if you want to get a sense of the 'high-precision tools' which the best modern armourers use, read Price's Techniques of Medieval Armour Reproduction and check out the Armour Archive discussion forum. The Pole who made my harness started from TOMAR. There are also some good armouring channels on YouTube.

Thanks.

Originally Posted by Polydamas

Robert Macpherson, one of the best American armourers, is convinced that the only reason he and his European colleagues still have business is that the Indian armourers don't find it worth their while to make accurate reproductions and higher-quality armour. As far as he can tell, they make things faster with simpler tools than anyone he knows can make them with expensive tools. Hobby armourers with the right jobs or contacts keep trying fancy tools, but so far they have not changed the basic economics.

It seems to me that this may be partially because the market for high-quality replica armour is, in the terms of markets for most other things in modern society, comparatively tiny.

If even skilled armourers are having a hard time making more than minimum wage and may not even receive all that many contracts for the highest quality work, there doesn't seem to be much incentive for them to spend years on developing an adapted process and hundreds of thousands on expensive tools in order to hypothetically be able to make armour faster and to more exacting specifications in the future. Especially not for those of them who got involved in making armour as part of reenaction, passion for traditional craftsmanship and historical accuracy.

It may be that if there were more people prepared to pay thousands, if not tens of thousands, for an authentic-appearing panoply of actually protective historical armour, there would be companies that manufactured them faster (in at least equal quality) using full-body scans, CAD and modern fabrication methods. But because demand for the highest quality reproduction armour is so low, any such company would lose money, because they'd never get enough orders to justify the investment.

It's not as if some pretty complex shapes, in high-strength alloys and other materials, can't be made faster and better with machines than handcrafting. In fields were the demand is much higher, that is, like industrial applications, mining, aerospace engineering, military vehicles, automobiles, etc.

But the high-end reproduction armour market seems to me more like the market for personalised scrimshaw art or commissioned oil painting portraits, in that very few 'manufacturers' have all that many buyers willing to pay enough to make it worth their while to create something of the highest quality, and of those willing to pay, probably a significant fraction doesn't want the same quality made with modern methods, but are paying partially for perceived artistic value inherent in traditional handcrafting.

In other words, in the real world, there seems to be too little investment in making functioning body armour look awesome and authentically historical. Or generally just making body armour that is custom-tailored and Stylish in any perceived way, like a Batsuit with nipples, rather than the much more economic and efficient ugly-but-fuctional technology militaries are interested in, for that matter. Such projects seem theoretically feasible at our level of technological debelopment, there just don't seem to be enough Bruce Waynes and Raul Vargases around to commission them.

[RogerBW]

Originally Posted by Icelander

In other words, in the real world, there seems to be too little investment in making functioning body armour look awesome and authentically historical. Or generally just making body armour that is custom-tailored and Stylish in any perceived way, like a Batsuit with nipples, rather than the much more economic and efficient ugly-but-fuctional technology militaries are interested in, for that matter. Such projects seem theoretically feasible at our level of technological debelopment, there just don't seem to be enough Bruce Waynes and Raul Vargases around to commission them.

I think you've got something similar to the shoe market. Mass-produced shoes are good enough for most people most of the time; which means that if you want a custom-made shoe, you're going to a specialist, who needs to charge a lot because he only gets five orders a year.

Most people who want mediaeval-looking armour (and there aren't that many of them) don't need it to be seriously protective too, and most people who want seriously protective armour don't need it to look mediaeval, so the demand there is even smaller.

[safisher]

Originally Posted by Icelander

I guess I'm wondering how to price suits of armour made from various steel alloys, probably softer and easier to work than the ultimate armour will be, that are made using the $500,000 of specialised workshop tools, the multi-million vehicle facility. I assume that the team will make a lot of armours to test various machines and methods, see whether some alloys work or not and similar things. They can't all spend all their time just making one perfect suit of armour, the road to making it must have been filled with time not strictly speaking spent on constructing that one armour, but on developing the methods to do so.

The workflow might look like this:

1. Using cardboard patterns, fit the cardboard to the wearer.
2. Using the cardboard as a pattern, CAD the armor and the dies for it.
3. Cut the armor pieces out with a plasma cutter: https://swift-cut.us/plasma-cutting-table-1250/
4. Print the dies, top and bottom, using a metal sintering printer or conventional cnc machine:
https://www.3dsystems.com/3d-printer...iAAEgLy8_D_BwE
https://www.datron.com/cnc-machines/m7.php
5. Finish the dies, smooth them, etc.
6. Put the dies (top and bottom) in a press: https://www.baileigh.com/hydraulic-press-hsp-200m-hd
7. Press the metal sheet in the dies.
8. test fit the metal pieces to the wearer.
9. Add belts and buckles, etc.
10. Have wearer put on armor, test fit, adjust, go back to step 1 if necessary.

If you use flash bainite, it sounds like it's easy to do that before any of the above steps. You'd just buy the sheets with that treatment from a shop doing that process.

The dies will press into the armor the fluting and create curves and arcs on the plates, as needed. There may be some manual hammering needed to fold the edges of the plates down flat after the die process -- that would use a pneumatic hammer or a hydraulic hammer. You'll need a welder to weld the larger plates together, possibly, and the helmet, if you don't 3d print it. Anyway, the above process would make the hand work almost zero, and should make the armor cost mostly in materials, not labor. According to UT, the price is actually 20-30% of retail price.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by safisher

The workflow might look like this:

1. Using cardboard patterns, fit the cardboard to the wearer.
2. Using the cardboard as a pattern, CAD the armor and the dies for it.
3. Cut the armor pieces out with a plasma cutter: https://swift-cut.us/plasma-cutting-table-1250/
4. Print the dies, top and bottom, using a metal sintering printer or conventional cnc machine:
https://www.3dsystems.com/3d-printer...iAAEgLy8_D_BwE
https://www.datron.com/cnc-machines/m7.php
5. Finish the dies, smooth them, etc.
6. Put the dies (top and bottom) in a press: https://www.baileigh.com/hydraulic-press-hsp-200m-hd
7. Press the metal sheet in the dies.
8. test fit the metal pieces to the wearer.
9. Add belts and buckles, etc.
10. Have wearer put on armor, test fit, adjust, go back to step 1 if necessary.

Ok, cool, but likely the articulated joints would require some pretty intricately shaped pieces. Probably not a problem with most steels used in industrial applications, probably requires some exotic machines or methods for steel alloys with Brinell Hardness Number approaching 500, which cannot be heated again without compromising the hardness or other material properties for which you are using them.

Originally Posted by safisher

If you use flash bainite, it sounds like it's easy to do that before any of the above steps. You'd just buy the sheets with that treatment from a shop doing that process.

I understand that the flash bainite process can transform ordinary steel alloys into alloys with desirable material properties for various different applications requiring some or all of the various mysterious atributes that steel can have that I will unscientifically term strength, toughness and hardness. These will somehow be easier to work into the shapes you need than steel alloys treated with many other, more traditional methods, for the mixture of properties that you want.

As far as I can determine, you still can't weld flash the plates of bainite steel alloys made to armour light vehicles against small arms or shape them much, at all, with any kind of tools that you could have in a small workshop... or even a small factory, it seems.

For the alloys the Flash® Bainite company usually seems to refer to as 'Flash® 500' and 'AR600', the shapes they come in are basically 'sheet' and 'gently curved sheet', no matter what method they have tried. They say that it could be used for slightly boxy looking APCs and armoured trucks, but even with laser welding, they get a 0.75" join area where the hardness and other material properties suffer dramatically and ballistic threats that the armour is proofed for will easily penetrate.

Granted, this is no worse than with any other kind of steel that is hardened to these levels and seems to be better than most, but it still means that I don't know how you'd make articulated joint coverage for body armour out of them.

They'd aim for the hardest and toughest steel alloys they could get with the flash bainite process, but still actually shape into the intricate shapes needed. If they found a way to join together many individual pieces of different steels in a satisfactory way (when you can't weld or forge one of them without ruining what you want it for), they might use the ultra hard steels for the simpler pieces of armour.

I thought they needed to get their own flash bainite equipment (which the company does license and sell in real life and specifically stated they have no philosophical objection to licensing to a Mexican company armouring light vehicles) because I was not sure whether the process was applied before or after you made the piece you wanted to treat.

In any case, the utility of a facility that can perform the flash bainite process to the actually practical business of armouring their vehicle fleet, for combat with other cartels, the police and the military, is such that the Caballero Templarios cartel would buy it even if they didn't strictly need their own flash bainite steel manufacturing capability for the 'Black Knight' armour project, even if they might have originally only learned about it as part of the research and development for Vargas' toys.

Originally Posted by safisher

The dies will press into the armor the fluting and create curves and arcs on the plates, as needed. There may be some manual hammering needed to fold the edges of the plates down flat after the die process -- that would use a pneumatic hammer or a hydraulic hammer. You'll need a welder to weld the larger plates together, possibly, and the helmet, if you don't 3d print it. Anyway, the above process would make the hand work almost zero, and should make the armor cost mostly in materials, not labor. According to UT, the price is actually 20-30% of retail price.

What kind of time frame are we talking about for that kind of process?

Assuming that we're using steel alloys that ordinary machines can handle, not the high harness ballistic steels. I expect that working at the limit of what they are capable of shaping into armour will significantly add to that time, but they might be able to make steel armour with materials equivalent to the best possible at TL4 fairly fast.

Incidentally, I'd welcome some guidelines as to the toughness and hardness of steel alloys which any decent custom workshop or quasi-industrial set-up could be expected to handle and which would require some highly specialised, advanced machines and methods.

Is 18-20% higher DR by thickness over RHA steel, or 10% lighter for the same protective value, (the Pyramid article armour design 'Steel, very hard', which is TL7) a problem to shape into articulated plate with typical machinist tools, or would it be par for the course for any TL8 armour/machinist workshop and the Mobile Parts Hospital / small factory for vehicle armour?

The TL8 'Ultra-Strength Steel' has about 66% higher DR for the same thickness and weighs about 30% less than the equivalent protection made from RHA steel. I have no problems believing that you'd need some highly specialised tooling to work that into articulated joints and other complex shapes and that this would take much longer than doing the same with softer steel.

What about, however, steel alloys that fall somewhere in between these two extremes in terms of strength and toughness?* At late TL8, what is the practical limit on functional DR per inch or by weight for steel alloys before you have to use machines and construction methods that are much slower or more difficult than what you can use with typical materials?

Obviously, the number and complexity of the pieces, as well as the exact equipment you've got, will be the major factors when it comes to the time it takes, but within the right order of magnitude, are we talking about each suit, made from steel alloys that aren't dramatically harder than what most steel manufacturing usually involves, taking a day to make, a week, a month or a year?

My Unscientific Wild-Ass Guess would be a couple of days to a week, once you have the process down, but I have only the haziest notion of what is really involved in the Riddle of Steel, at any tech level.

Crom would mock me and cast me away from Valhalla.

*I know that by the rules, any of these steel alloys can come in 'Plate' construction at no extra cost for the harder alloys, except for the increased materials cost that applied regardless of construction type. For true mass production items, this might even hold true. But as this is a custom design, where I'm trying to figure out what kind of tooling might be needed, I need some guidelines on what kind of steel alloys you can handle easily with a $300,000 to $500,000 custom workshop and access to a small factory worth a few million, all fairly specialised in working with hard steels, and what kind really requires much more expensive equipment and/or methods that make it dramatically slower or more problematic to manufacture armour from it than from softer steels.

[safisher]

Originally Posted by Icelander

Ok, cool, but likely the articulated joints would require some pretty intricately shaped pieces.

"With superior weldability, lighter weight, improved workability, and strength levels never before seen, Flash® Bainite is truly the future of steel."

This is high strength 4130 steel, perfectly useful for making exceptional medieval armor. It can be welded and will be die formed if they are suggesting using it for aurtomobiles.

The AR500 stuff is likely only going to work for a breast/back plate, I suspect.

What kind of time frame are we talking about for that kind of process?

Assuming the workflow is like I said, maybe a week.

Incidentally, I'd welcome some guidelines as to the toughness and hardness of steel alloys which any decent custom workshop or quasi-industrial set-up could be expected to handle and which would require some highly specialised, advanced machines and methods.

I don't work with ballistic steel. I can't say. I have worked with tool steel, which is very hard, and it typically needs to be annealed before working, and then re-hardened and tempered. Look up D-2 tool steel, for example.

[Micahel Silverbane]

Right. According to This video Flash Bainite steel can be cold stamped into some pretty intricate shapes.

[Polydamas]

I hope I have time for the questions about character design a few pages back on the weekend.

Originally Posted by RogerBW

I think you've got something similar to the shoe market. Mass-produced shoes are good enough for most people most of the time; which means that if you want a custom-made shoe, you're going to a specialist, who needs to charge a lot because he only gets five orders a year.

Most people who want mediaeval-looking armour (and there aren't that many of them) don't need it to be seriously protective too, and most people who want seriously protective armour don't need it to look mediaeval, so the demand there is even smaller.

Yes, with a sufficient volume of business, I am sure that a team of engineers could find a way of making plate armour which would outcompete forging just like stock removal and stamping have replaced forging in knife making (although of course some people still forge knives for people who think it is cool or don't have access to international markets). I have seen videos of the factories which made steel helmets during WW II and photos of the intermediate stages during WW I. But that volume would be more like a hundred thousand a year than a hundred a year.

Also, Vargas and his cronies would be sticking their heads in and changing the specifications every time someone shows them a cool photo.

So at this small scale, I would expect problems setting up their new manufacturing process to counter many of the benefits which it theoretically provides.

Originally Posted by safisher

The workflow might look like this:

1. Using cardboard patterns, fit the cardboard to the wearer.
2. Using the cardboard as a pattern, CAD the armor and the dies for it.
3. Cut the armor pieces out with a plasma cutter: https://swift-cut.us/plasma-cutting-table-1250/
4. Print the dies, top and bottom, using a metal sintering printer or conventional cnc machine:
https://www.3dsystems.com/3d-printer...iAAEgLy8_D_BwE
https://www.datron.com/cnc-machines/m7.php
5. Finish the dies, smooth them, etc.
6. Put the dies (top and bottom) in a press: https://www.baileigh.com/hydraulic-press-hsp-200m-hd
7. Press the metal sheet in the dies.
8. test fit the metal pieces to the wearer.
9. Add belts and buckles, etc.
10. Have wearer put on armor, test fit, adjust, go back to step 1 if necessary.

If you use flash bainite, it sounds like it's easy to do that before any of the above steps. You'd just buy the sheets with that treatment from a shop doing that process.

The dies will press into the armor the fluting and create curves and arcs on the plates, as needed. There may be some manual hammering needed to fold the edges of the plates down flat after the die process -- that would use a pneumatic hammer or a hydraulic hammer. You'll need a welder to weld the larger plates together, possibly, and the helmet, if you don't 3d print it. Anyway, the above process would make the hand work almost zero, and should make the armor cost mostly in materials, not labor. According to UT, the price is actually 20-30% of retail price.

That sounds like a 2010s version of the way German and Austro-Hungarian Stahlhelme were made from the 1910s to the 1940s (links above). I suspect it would work, although getting the dies right would take a lot of trials and machinists and CAD experts earn more than armourers.

Most plate armourers weld to save time creating deep shapes like helmets, gauntlet cuffs, etc. It seems to roughly halve the cost compared to a raised version.

4130 steel seems to be popular with the HMB/IMCF crowd today.

[safisher]

Originally Posted by Polydamas

That sounds like a 2010s version of the way German and Austro-Hungarian Stahlhelme were made from the 1910s to the 1940s (links above).

It seems that part of this cost is offset by the dastardly people taking a few select hostages and making threats to the CAD designer you want to "recruit."

The bonus is you can create dies for sizes you need and very quickly produce
body armour for your second tier people, using less costly raw materials of course.

But pressing plates like this is a routine part of manufacturing these days. I'd be surprised if the CAD software doesn't automagically anticipate the expansion, stretching, etc. and account for it.

Most plate armourers weld to save time creating deep shapes like helmets, gauntlet cuffs, etc.

Yes, it's a time saver and produces armour no weaker than trying to dish a shape out by hand. In fact, dishing by hand can really create problems by thinning the material too much.

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by safisher

But pressing plates like this is a routine part of manufacturing these days. I'd be surprised if the CAD software doesn't automagically anticipate the expansion, stretching, etc. and account for it.

It does. You still want to make a few test parts before you start pressing car bodies by the tens of thousands, of course.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by safisher

It seems that part of this cost is offset by the dastardly people taking a few select hostages and making threats to the CAD designer you want to "recruit."

Obviously, Vargas is not too moral or cautious to do so. However, as the Assistant GM for GURPS rules, Plausibility and Real-World Research, I'm assuming that the mere fact that he still remains free and clear some decade at least since the first time unconfirmed reports on Mexico's were received about his hypothetical criminal activity means he is either very lucky or at least somewhat selective about his victims.

Compared to a lot of other powerful cartel leaders, Vargas has a very professional and highly trained group of valuable commandos, which he has built up with his connections to various Latin American special operation forces and his own expert tactical skills compared to other cartel enforcers, even as compared to the GAFE Mexican Special Forces that founded Los Zetas.

Vargas has the skill set to be every bit as pivotal in the Mexican Drug War as those three dozen GAFE deserters who left the Mexican army for x5 or higher salaries and ended up founding the largest cartel active in Mexico today (and increasingly powerful in Central Maerica), unless we believe that Mexican special operation personnel have skills that long-time US Army Special Forces Chief Warrant Officers do not. But he's not yet at that level of power and influence (though he may be working on a plan to become something more than just a powerful regional warlord).

Vargas is probably not even any saner than the average narco warlord. It's just that since he's still running around free at the time the PCs are sent to meet him in February 2017, Vargas probably made the most important of his Bad Temper and Impulsive Self-Control rolls in the preceding years. Otherwise, at some point in the past six years or so, he'd probably have failed an SC check badly enough to ensure that he'd already have been arrested by the Mexican authorities, even while he's relying on his current allies in the Sinaloa cartel to bribe an enormous number of potential threats.

Essentially, therefore, simply by the fact that the PCs will be meeting him in 2017, we may presume that Vargas has suceeded over the last years in avoiding the worst mistakes to which someone with his personality might otherwise be prone. He's kidnapped, of course, but usually his victims are the defenceless, intimidated and disenfrenchised. Or those living more or less outside the law, which doesn't just mean other criminals, but also includes the vast numbers of internally displaced people and Central American emigrants who pass through Mexico on their way to attampt to emigrate to the United States.

Kidnapping people from the middle or upper class is a lot riskier. They might know bureaucrats, police chiefs, judges, senior army officers or, worst of all, reporters. Someone who matters might care about them. And professional CAD experts who live near the Ciudad Juarez/El Paso twin cities would seem to have decent odds of working for American companies or companies with extensive ties to American industry. Might even have family in the US. A kidnapping of someone well enough connected that the crime ends up getting significant coverage in the US press could create a whole lot of problems, not only for Vargas, but for his Sinaloa allies / senior partners.

And that doesn't even cover the risks involved in having someone in your own hacienda for years when you know he hates you and wants you harm. Who is to say he won't find a way to inform against you or leak details of your movements to your many enemies? And having to keep hostages for years, which, in terms of security risks, needing to acquire safe houses and changing them regularly, periodic proof of life updates, etc., as well as the requirement for several guards who do nothing else, actually probably ends up costing more than just paying a CAD expert several times what he might earn working for a legitimate employer in Ciudad Juarez.

Originally Posted by safisher

The bonus is you can create dies for sizes you need and very quickly produce
body armour for your second tier people, using less costly raw materials of course.

That's what I suspected.

Originally Posted by safisher

But pressing plates like this is a routine part of manufacturing these days. I'd be surprised if the CAD software doesn't automagically anticipate the expansion, stretching, etc. and account for it.

Are typical machinist tools agnostic in terms of high hardness steels (up to +20% or better RHA by thickness) or might there be a practical limit to to the DR by thickness or weight to avoid having to use much more complicated methods of construction?

Originally Posted by safisher

Yes, it's a time saver and produces armour no weaker than trying to dish a shape out by hand. In fact, dishing by hand can really create problems by thinning the material too much.

Okay.