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02-07-2018, 01:36 PM | #11 |
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Austin, TX
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Re: [Cutting-Edge Armor Design] Real World SCA-legal Armour and Ballistics Armour
So on the availability of full body kevlar armor: I'm not aware of any. But you can buy fencing jackets made from Kevlar or Spectra, and you can just buy bolts of kevlar fabric, so there's no reason why you can't make your own body armor.
I went for a mid-end design that bounces bullets everywhere at great expensive. What can we do on the low end? DR 15 improved kevlar vitals protector: 1 sqft, 1.2 lbs, $144. DR 9 improved kevlar vest with groin and rib cover: 6 sqft, 4.3 lbs, $518 DR 4 Hard Steel Breastplate with gorget and fauld: 7.7 sqft, 12.3 lbs, $220 DR 4 Kevlar arms, legs, balaclava: 12.6 sqft, 5 lbs, $80 DR 4 Kevlar gloves, socks: 1.4 sqft, 0.6 lbs, $45 DR 3 mild steel arms, legs, gauntlets, boots: 14 sqft, WM .7, CM 2, 23 lbs, $230 Buy an off-the-shelf riot helmet with a ballistic helmet's visor for 4.4 lbs, $400. Total is 50.9 lbs, $1960. This is a lot less effective, but much simpler, than the previous example. It isn't effective against 7.62mm rounds anywhere and most of the limb armor is for show: it's effective enough against animal attacks and it looks intimidating, so hopefully most attackers won't bother trying to penetrate it. It will protect against light pistol rounds to the limbs, and heavy pistols to the torso, but 5.56mm rifle rounds will break through the weaker side protection. The combined thickness of the armor on the limbs is less than half the maximum, so it shouldn't be too encumbering. You could make this armor by cutting the kevlar sleeves and leggings from bolts of fabric, attaching them to an Interceptor vest or equivalent, and then adding some mid-range SCA armor*. * I do not believe you can get SCA legal steel armor for the limbs for USD 230, so adjust prices to match your expectations of reality.
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02-07-2018, 01:46 PM | #12 | ||||
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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Unless I can confirm that the cheaper very high hardness Abrasion Resistant steels are equivalent in protective value against all threats as vehicle armours made from triple-hardened steels or nano-metric/nano-crystaline steels, I'd be loath to give equivalent or better stats to AR500. We know the DR against piercing damage, but isn't it possible that such very high hardness steels are actually more protective against typical fast-moving, light penetrators made from, generally, softer materials, than they are against some other types of damage? In other words, maybe a 5.5 lbs., almost 1 square feet, NIJ Level III certified plate of AR500 should have DR 25 against piercing (and possibly cutting), but only modestly better DR than an equivalent thickness and/or weight of TL6 'Hard Steel' would have against other threats. I mean, should it resist collisions (cr), cutting torches (burn), HEAT (cr ex) or explosively-formed penetrators (imp) any better than the kind of steel used for TL7 and TL8 APC or tank armour? Quote:
Machinists, smiths, speciality stores or custom workshops buy high hardness Abrasion Resistant steels, they don't make the alloys themselves. And it looks like you can only buy AR500 in sheets, targets, trauma plates, i.e. what 'Cutting-Edge Armor Design' calls Solid. Maybe you can get some other kind of very hard steel made in specific shapes, but I suspect it would be very expensive to do so for a few suits of armour. Maybe if you were looking to buy enough of each part to make a line of wear-resistant power tools or Caterpillar attachments. Quote:
Which is why I think that only Raul Vargas, the undisputed leader of this surviving subgroup of the Knight Templar Cartel, has any chance to have a custom-made plate harness out of a steel hard and tough enough to have meaningful ballistic resistance. The rest should find other methods of sort of looking like Knights, while being protected at least as well as if they were wearing tactical vests with trauma plates. Quote:
There's probably about a dozen men close enough to the leader and crazy enough to buy into his 'Knight Templar' propaganda to the extent that they attend banquets wearing faux-medieval armour. Say about twice that who'll pay it lip service and attend wearing more-or-less medieval movie-setting appropriate clothing, but not functional armour. And maybe thirty or forty loco gunmen who mix this sort of Ren Faire aesthetic with their norteño or narcocultura aesthetic in the hope of currying favour with the Jefe (or because they are crazy and have been with the Knight Templars for five years, which for some of them might have been since they were ten years old, so some of them probably swallow the entire 'Knights' bit whole). Drug baron Raul Vargas is not going to finance full plate armour for all these men. He needs his money! For operating costs, for bribery and gifts to important people in allied Drug-Trade Organisations (DTOs) to increase his power, for investments in a huge real estate development that he hopes is going to make him a legitimate billionaire one day, etc. Not to mention absolutely ridiculous amounts of cocaine, methamphetamine, top-shelf booze and other luxury goods for personal use. Vargas might be willing to pay for cool knight armour for his bodyguards and those of his lieutenants who take the 'Knight Templars' bit seriously, but that's always going to be less than twenty suits. But he is absolutely going to have a personal full plate harness that incorporates as much actual ballistic protection as possible, because while he is crazy, he is crazy like a fox. He likes stuff that skirts the line of 'Awesome but Impractical', but is actually somewhat effective, if much more expensive than a less cool way to do it.
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Za uspiekh nashevo beznadiozhnovo diela! Last edited by Icelander; 02-07-2018 at 01:55 PM. |
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02-07-2018, 02:22 PM | #13 | ||||
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 fencing jackets are meant to protect from accidental contact by fairly blunt tips of broken swords, most often the equivalent to draw cutting motions. They are woefully lacking as actual armour when encountering actual, sharp-edged knives. I think working with and sewing kevlar and other aramid fabrics gets progressively more difficult the thicker and more protective they get. You might need special tools to cut and tailor kevlar fabrics that actually grant a significant DR. Which I'd guess they'd invest in, as inexpensive kevlar kit sounds like a worthwhile thing to have their kidnapped maquiladora sex slaves work on during the day. They could even sell home-made vests on the black market, at least to more-or-less allied DTOs or gangs, and make a profit. Assuming that the machinery required to work with Kevlar thick enough to be rated as DR 8 or higher isn't prohibitively expensive, hard to acquire or requires a huge factory, or something. Quote:
We'd want to tweak the cosmetics a little. Maybe we could build a plastic or even metal cosmetic chassis to cover the riot helmet, make it look like a Conquistador morion helmet. Quote:
That would give us rifle-proof armour over the mid-chest area and maybe even the back, if we go back and breast. Of course, wearing ballistic steel trauma plates under a soft steel back-and-breast plate might get bulky. And heavy. We could drop gauntlets (couldn't shoot well in them anyway), sabatons (couldn't run well) and the Kevlar underlayers for these areas, to compensate for the weight. You'd pass out eventually if there are no areas uncovered, anyway. There's no way to compensate for the bulk, though. Could you wear a 1/4" abrasion resistant trauma plate under a 16G back-and-breastplate? Or would that require an absurd shape or far too much extra material for the back-and-breastplate? If you couldn't, you would basically have to replace the back-and-breastplate with a brigandine design, where you'd sew ballistic plates of high hardness steel over 11" x 14" in the front, 12" x 10" in the back and the smaller areas covered by the two side plates. Then cover what remains unprotected with custom-made soft steel plates made by a SCA-legal armourer. Quote:
Custom-made medieval style armour today seems to come out with a +2 to +3 CF for rarity and very specialised market, at least for limb armour.
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Za uspiekh nashevo beznadiozhnovo diela! Last edited by Icelander; 02-07-2018 at 02:41 PM. |
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02-07-2018, 02:50 PM | #14 |
Join Date: Jan 2010
Location: Brighton
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Re: [Cutting-Edge Armor Design] Real World SCA-legal Armour and Ballistics Armour
Cool subject (and I'm a big fan of the armour design articles)
Out of interest what kind of money does this splinter cartel have? Because my gut* over all feeling here is if your chap is willing to spend enough money he'll have no issue being able to entice a series of specialist relevant companies to solve the various issues mentioned. Even if they charge massively inflated bespoke "who is this crazy idiot, not our usual work" mark up prices Basically I realise we're not talking about the Medellín cartel here who could write off $2bn a month to loss by mould and rat gnawing, but how splinter is splinter, how tight are resources? basically people with large amounts of money have spent large amounts of money on to outside eyes weird and wonderful projects for as long as there's been people and money! What I would say is I think the various tailoring options In LT would actually be pretty appropriate in this context as you will be levereaging really bespoke skill sets! *FWIW I work for a company / industry that makes bespoke equipment that is heavily involved in engineering, tooling and material science. Yeah of course there are limiting factors to what can feasibly done, but one of the big ones is having a big enough desire and wallet to back it up and leave concerns of cost effectiveness in the rear view mirror! Last edited by Tomsdad; 02-07-2018 at 02:56 PM. |
02-07-2018, 02:53 PM | #15 |
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Austin, TX
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Re: [Cutting-Edge Armor Design] Real World SCA-legal Armour and Ballistics Armour
Poking at this some more:
I wanted to link in a nice HTML table of the material cost and weight per point of DR by armor type, but the HTML isn't working. So linking here: http://westmarchsaga.wikia.com/wiki/GURPS_CEAD The key take-away is that for up to DR 11, polymer composite scale is 60% lighter than steel plate but only 10% more expensive: 0.24 lbs and $7.7 per DR per sqft, versus 0.4 lbs and $7 per DR per sqft. So if you don't mind going for more of a Japanese samurai aesthetic than European knight, you can make your own armor out of resin-bonded kevlar scales. Mythbusters showed this is tedious but not hugely difficult*: buy sheets of resin-bonded kevlar, cut them into scales, drill holes into them, string them together with kevlar yarn. Assuming you can cut through 1/2" sheets of resin-bonded kevlar with a band saw (I think this is a safe assumption; we cut through steel pipe with a band saw in high school 20 years ago), this entire operation can be done with a high school machine shop. Anyway, a DR 5 poly composite scale suit is roughly 26 lbs, $830. Plenty of cash and weight left over for a kevlar undersuit, which could be as simple as the best commercial vest you can buy and some home made leggings and sleeves. As far as working thick sheets of kevlar goes, I don't think it requires radically specialized equipment. Powerful sheers and a sewing machine with a long needle and a lot of torque driving it through the fabric should do the job. There are a lot of companies that make kevlar vests, after all, and I don't think that they're buying crazy exotic equipment that only the US DoD sells. Find one that's going out of business and buy up their gear. * The episode on paper armor which basically did the above process but with paper.
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02-07-2018, 03:24 PM | #16 | |||
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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This means that the combined revenues of everything everyone who takes his orders is doing is much higher, of course. They buy drugs for many millions per month and sell them for more than that. However, their access to the drug territory and ability to collect the revenue is contingent on their willingness to kill the enemies of the Sinaloa cartel. So actual, practical things like paying soldiers, lookouts, vendors and mules, buying vehicles (frequently lost), ammo and functional firearms, as well as all the other costs involved in running both a drug business, extortion business and what amounts to a small, elite mercenary group, exists outside Vargas' personal budget. And while normal TL8 body armour might be a part of that budget, 'Black Knight' armours with ballistic protective capabilities are certainly not a normal operating expense. They are a luxury and come out of Vargas' personal money. Or the personal money of those of his men who are trying to impress him, maybe. Essentially, Vargas has $50 million a year to run his personal 'household' and to use it to grow richer. He is not going to be willing to spend more than about 5-10% of this on gifts of various kinds to his household and lieutenants, who are supposed to be already loyal, and besides, too afraid of him to need much keeping sweet. Besides, most of them would probably appreciate other gifts than just one awesome armour. You know, new cars, gold-plated Colt 1911s, horses, that sort of thing. On the other hand, Vargas' has had a personal income probably exceeding $1 million per week for maybe six or seven years, with fluctations. There was probably a time in 2010-2012 when he earned several times that and probably a time in 2014 where he was essentially using his entire income (which might have been lower, as well) to keep together a core group of his best fighters, while they were essentially cut off form all their more powerful support. He's been in his current position for maybe two or three years, making an average of $50 million per year, but he's expecting a large payout within a couple of years from his real estate scheme.* So, if we assume that he's been willing to devote ca 0.5-1% of his household budget to 'Project Black Knights' over the past two and a half years, he's maybe put a million dollars into it, total. That's a lot, in one sense, but it's not 'set up a factory' a lot. Of course, he might have already started some work on it while he lived in Michoacán, which might mean a couple of million at that time, but it's far from certain that he managed to finish it that time or that he would have been able to take with him everything that he did have. *Him and about every other well-connected criminal in the region, as they are all part of a very dishonest, very ruthless, very large scheme to dispossess a lot of people so they'll profit from an ancipated oil pipeline. The oil pipeline is a multi-billion project and Vargas hopes to gain a significant chunk of that. Realistically, success would mean several hundred millions for him, in legitimate money. Quote:
It's highly unlikely that anyone doing business with Vargas will not realise pretty quickly that he is a drug lord, so unless the stuff can be ordered by a flunky from an online catalog or by the one of the few grey market contacts he retains who have an in with several Chinese businesses*, he'd need to deal with someone who was cool with designing armour for a scary drug lord. What kind of money are we talking to make this an attractive proposition? How much of it would be the cost of one custom-made armour, with possibly a couple of failed or unsatisfactorily prototypes on the way there, and how much could you get cost per unit down for about a dozen less fancy ones once you have the techniques down? And what kind of materials, coverage, design, etc. would be realistic? If we want something that looks like movie-armour for knights, but functions as well as we can within a plausible budget?** *Mostly, but not exclusively, representatives of huge conglomerates who'll buy iron ore by the shipload despite having to fake some paperwork, because it's stolen, untaxed and being sold by gangsters. Also, representatives of companies, possibly the same ones, who sell tons of chemicals useful as methamphetamine precursors. And a few people with connections to Norinco, at the very least, to logistics companies that transport weapons from China for export. **He might spend as much on his own armour as he'd spend on a really pimped-up luxury truck, with gold decorations and other insane stuff, if the mood should strike him. He's probably not going to pay for twelve truck-equivalent armours to give his lieutenants and bodyguards. Quote:
In actual fact, he and his men are a semi-independent group of enforcers for the Sinaloa cartel, geographically limited. In that respect, they are about the size and power of La Línea in Juarez, at the height of their powers, though working for Sinaloa, not Juarez. Though Vargas' Caballero templarios do not hold territory within Ciudad Juarez (though they do not hesitate to operate there if given targets), but rather in the Juarez Valley to the southeast of it, and as far out from there as they can enforce their will on the Los Zetas and other rival cartels in that direction. Practically speaking, this currently extends to the Ojinaga plaza, where the locals now operate under their authority and pay them tax.
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Za uspiekh nashevo beznadiozhnovo diela! Last edited by Icelander; 02-07-2018 at 03:39 PM. |
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02-07-2018, 03:33 PM | #17 | |||||
Join Date: Oct 2004
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Re: [Cutting-Edge Armor Design] Real World SCA-legal Armour and Ballistics Armour
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02-07-2018, 03:41 PM | #18 |
Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Iceland*
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Re: [Cutting-Edge Armor Design] Real World SCA-legal Armour and Ballistics Armour
I'll get to the rest of the post later, but I understand that abrasion resistant steels with a hardness around 500 are usually alloys of high-carbon steel, chromium-molybdenum, manganese and maybe a few other things. They are usually proprietory by manufacturer.
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02-07-2018, 04:00 PM | #19 | |
Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: Berkeley, CA
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Re: [Cutting-Edge Armor Design] Real World SCA-legal Armour and Ballistics Armour
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On the other hand, this may not be needed. Just buy the large pieces in the desired shape (a commercial armor plate may do the job) and link custom parts on for the areas not normally covered. |
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02-07-2018, 04:13 PM | #20 |
Join Date: Jan 2006
Location: Central Europe
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Re: [Cutting-Edge Armor Design] Real World SCA-legal Armour and Ballistics Armour
A really nice historical-style harness costs in the low tens of thousands (Jeffrey Hedgecock was quoting 20-40k USD for a 1470s kit last time he was making custom armour), so budget should not be an issue for a drug cartel. There are plenty of skilled armourers in eastern Europe whose customers play games on the edge of the law, and it is so hard to make a living as an armourer that I don't have trouble imagining a shop in Russia selling a dozen harnesses to a Special Client. But working with fancy alloys in the thicknesses you need to stop modern rifle rounds is its own game. Spring stainless destroys smiths' elbows, but many sports armourers work in it, at least while they are young and foolish.
One simple option would be having someone make the helmet, bevor, breast, and back in thick special alloy (probably using machines not hammers and getting shapes which look wrong but will be wearable), and a different someone sew an arming doublet of ballistic fibres (I think that there are already businesses which will tailor a blazer and interline it with with kevlar), then have a regular armourer fit arms and legs in spring stainless to that. Those parts will be about 1 or 1.5 mm thick, so no good against bullets. It is the shops in places like Ukraine and Russia which have the capacity to make a dozen kits on short notice anyways.
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cutting-edge armor design, hema, jade serenity, pyramid #3/85, sca |
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