Horse Armor in Low Tech

[Vaevictis Asmadi]

Many people have remarked how the armor in Low Tech is inaccurate. There have been some very good articles in Pyramid, and posts on this forum, giving better armor rules. But I don't think I've seen any analysis of the horse armor (barding) in Low Tech.

(At least, I'm pretty sure it is in Low Tech. IDHMBWM, but I copied the armor tables into my computer a while ago.)

I've extrapolated the DR for horse armors from the torso armor of the same type, but I am wondering whether the weights and costs given in Low Tech are accurate or not? I'm guessing they are not.

Is there any way to calculate the weight and cost of a piece of barding from the cost of that armor for humans? For example, take Heavy Scale Corslet, and multiply the weight and price by some factors to get the weight and price of Full Heavy Scale Barding?

Or is there any way to calculate the weight and cost of a single piece of barding (such as the chanfron) from the weight and cost of the whole barding set? For the RAW weights, leather chanfron and plate chanfron are 10% the weight of full barding, but the mail chanfron is only 8.6% of the full weight.

[RobKamm]

A few historical figures from "The Armored Horse in Europe 1480-1620," from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Shaffron, plate: 3lbs 2oz, 3lbs 14oz, 3lbs 15oz, 4lbs, 4lbs 5oz, 4lbs 8oz, 4lbs 11oz, 4lbs 14oz, 5lbs 3oz, 5lbs 13oz, 7lbs 2oz

Half-shaffron, plate: 2lbs 11oz, 2lbs 13oz

Crinet, plate & mail combined: 9lbs 10oz

Crinet, plate only: 6lbs 14oz

Peytral, plate: 8lbs

Sadly none of the armours for the main body of the horse are given weights. As you can see historically the pieces varied quite a bit in weight (to be fair, the heaviest of the shaffrons is listed as a "blind shaffron from the joust," and I'd bet some of the lightest were parade armours). While this isn't a direct answer to your question it at least sheds a little light onto what such numbers might look like.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Vaevictis Asmadi

Many people have remarked how the armor in Low Tech is inaccurate.

By the way, it's the armor weights in _Basic_ that are inaccurate. Low Tech was just not allowed to change them.

[Vaevictis Asmadi]

Wow, well those plate weights are only a fraction of what I got from Low Tech. If a chanfron is only 10% of the barding weight, then the full plate would be no more than 70 lbs, and probably closer to 45.

Plus the weights from Low Tech don't add up... full leather barding is supposed to be 30 lbs, but the individual pieces add up to 39 lbs! So either their ratios to each other are totally off, or all of them are too heavy.



EDIT:
Low Tech lists full leather barding as 30 lbs, which looks reasonable to me compared to 20 lbs for full human leather armor (I think from that one Pyramid article, the one not by Dan Howard). Low Tech also apparently lists it as 39 lbs, which I treated as the "uncorrected" weight.
Using the weight ratios for corslet+legs+arms for human suits of heavy leather, medium mail, light scale, and light plate, and starting from the 30 lbs for full leather barding, I estimated the weight of each full set of barding.
Then I had to add some weight to the plate set to account for the legs, which are not included in other sets, based on the weight ratio of plate leggings to the rest of the plate barding set.
Next I took the weight ratios of the pieces in each set of barding, and used that to re-calculate the weight of each piece from the new total weights for the full sets. For Light Scale Barding, I used the weight ratio for the pieces of Medium Mail Barding.
Then I used the weight ratio of Heavy Scale Corslet and Light Scale Corslet (from Dan Howard's Pyramid article) to estimate the weight of Heavy Scale peytral, crupper, and flanchards, and calculated the full weight of a "heavy" Scale barding set.
The final weights I got look like this:

leather chanfron = 1.5 lbs
leather crinet = 4.5 lbs
leather peytral = 8 lbs
leather crupper = 8 lbs
leather flanchards (pair) = 8 lbs
leather barding, full set = 30 lbs

mail chanfron, medium = 4 lbs (medium is the ring size)
mail crinet, medium = 8 lbs
mail peytral, medium = 14 lbs
mail crupper, medium = 9.5 lbs
mail flanchards (pair), medium = 9.5 lbs
mail barding, medium, full set = 45 lbs

scale chanfron, light = 4 lbs (light is the scale weight)
scale crinet, light = 8 lbs
scale peytral, light = 14 lbs
scale crupper, light = 9.5 lbs
scale flanchards (pair), light = 9.5 lbs
scale barding, light, full set = 45 lbs

scale peytral, heavy = 21 lbs (heavy is the scale weight)
scale crupper, heavy = 14.5 lbs
scale flanchards (pair), heavy = 14.5 lbs
scale barding, heavy, full set = 62 lbs

plate barding, full set = 61 lbs


However, I got very different numbers for Light Plate barding when I used the real-world numbers RobKamm gave me. Removing the heaviest and lightest (jousting and parade) chanfrons, and the combined mail-and-plate piece, and using the mean weight of each piece, calculated the weight of each piece of plate barding, and of the full set. I used the weight ratios of the pieces to one another from Low Tech. I ended up with this:

plate chanfron = 5 lbs
plate crinet = 7 lbs
plate peytral = 8 lbs
plate crupper = 8 lbs
plate flanchards (pair) = 8 lbs
plate horse leggings = 6 lbs
plate barding, full set = 42 lbs

So clearly, these two methods don't match: 61 lbs vs. 42 lbs for plate barding. Either 1. my methodology (such as the assumed equivalence of ratios) is off, or 2. the figure of 30 lbs for full leather barding is wrong, or 3. the weight ratios of different pieces are wrong, or 4. I failed to exclude plate chanfron figures that were parade armors instead of combat armors, or 5. some error caused by different sized horses.

I'm not sure where to go from here.

[RobKamm]

Personally I would fudge all of those museum pieces up to get the weights for working historical pieces. Few of them have more than scraps left from their linings and none of them had arming points or straps. Additionally I wouldn't be at all surprised if some of them were missing lames or other parts. This wouldn't bump anything up to the listed levels, but should be considered when picking the values that you want to use for your game.

[Vaevictis Asmadi]

I could always fudge that the weight of the missing lining and straps is exactly equal to the weight of the corresponding leather element.

And look at that:

plate chanfron = 6.5
plate crinet = 11.5
plate peytral = 16
plate crupper = 16
plate flanchards (pair) = 16
plate horse leggings = 12 (a guesstimate)
plate barding, full = 62

Still no telling how accurate the leather=30 lbs assumption or ratios are, but at least now they match! Thanks again, RobKamm.


EDIT: I am starting to wonder if a heavy-scale peytral is impractical. I might change it to light scale.

EDIT 2: Would a cloth caparison (horse robe) provide any DR?
And does anyone know anything about elephant armor?



EDIT 3: I found three pieces of elephant armor: full scale was 260 lbs, full lamellar was 448 lbs, and a modern copper parade nettipattom (chanfron) is 11 lbs. I'm not sure if the scale and lamellar examples had all their padding and other parts when they were weighed, but assuming they were, and using the ratios from earlier, I estimated the following:

elephant riding blanket (TL2) flanks, DR1, 14 lbs
leather elephant chanfron (TL2) face, DR 2, 40 lbs
leather elephant body armor (TL2) flanks, chest, rump, DR 2, 133.5 lbs
plate elephant leggings (TL2) lower legs, DR 5, weight ??
scale elephant chanfron (TL3) face, ears, DR 4/2/2*, 60 lbs
scale elephant body armor (TL3) flanks, chest, rump, DR 4/2/2*, 200 lbs
lamellar elephant chanfron (TL3) face, DR 5/5/3*, 103 lbs
lamellar elephant body armor (TL3) flanks, chest, rump, DR 5/5/3*, 345 lbs
plate elephant chanfron (TL3) face, DR 5, 70 lbs
plate elephant peytral (late TL3) chest, DR 5, 67 lbs
copper nettipattom (TL7) face, DR 2, 11 lbs (the nettipattom is probably pretty thin, it's entirely decorative)

*DR is versus cutting/crushing/impaling