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

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by Polydamas

You could ask David Pulver, but for a project like this I would just be inclined to treat plate as Plate [..]. After all, you can get real prices and weights online, you don't need to calculate them!
[...]

You could probably fit trauma plates to the flatter kinds of pairs of plates or brigandines without anything going too badly wrong

I agree that using 'Segmented Plate' produces very wonky results. I might come up with an alternative to 'Plate', though, used for TL4 brigandines and faulds, as the areas harder to armour with larger plates will usually have reduced protection for similar weight. Call it 'Overlapping Plates'.

If we base the stats on 'Brigandine' and 'Segmented Plate' compared to 'Plate' in Low-Tech (with Dan Howard's corrected 'Segmented Plate' weights), 'Overlapping Plates' would have about CW 1 and CC 3. That sounds like a fair way to reflect the fact that it's cheaper and easier to make armour from multiple smaller plates than larger single pieces, but it will always be heavier for the same protection than well-made 'Plate'.

By Low-Tech (as corrected by Dan Howard), 'Scale' should have a similar CW as the 'CEAD' construction of 'Segmented Plate', i.e. around CW 1.4 ('Segmented Plate' has CW 1.45 in the ´CEAD´). The CC should also be similar to the 'Segmented Plate' in 'CEAD' (is CC 1.5, calculated would be around 1.6-1.8). I think using the 'Segmented Plate' stats in the Pyramid articles to reflect 'Scale' construction would not be unreasonable.

Roman lorica segmenta could then be represented as 'Overlapping Plates' made from cheap iron or as 'Segmented Plate'.

Originally Posted by Polydamas

That "double the thickness" was my best guess "considering all the factors, [..]For a better guess you would have to talk to a plate armourer.

Ok, thanks.

Originally Posted by Polydamas

The Wallace A281, a jousting gauntlet [..], is 1215 g so about twice as heavy [...]

Loadout gives a lot of historical examples pretty hefty penalties to many tasks, with tournament fighters simply accepting that penalties to anything else than their particular sport was pretty irrelevant, as they weren't using their jousting gauntlets if climbing walls, hunting or even fighting with swords on foot.

Originally Posted by Polydamas

Bulk and flexibility are two issues, but another is that moving mass at the end of a long lever arm tires you out and slows you down. Fighting in heavy greaves or gauntlets is like running in heavy boots. [...]

I'm pretty sure that Vargas will accept that random shots to his feet or hands will penetrate and just want protection from knives and swords.

He might want some protection over the areas of the hands most likely to be exposed when firing a rifle, but only if it doesn't interfere with using his hands pretty freely. And I expect he'll just wear heavy boots, maybe with kevlar inserts or something for protection against swords.

As you say, heavy gauntlets and sabatons have so many annoyances that come with them that I can't imagine them being very popular outside of tournament venues. So even if he might own thick gauntlets and sabatons, those, at least, he'd leave behind when he took his armour into real combat.

Originally Posted by Polydamas

I don't know as much about titanium, I think it was controversial in the HMB world.

What's the controversy?

Originally Posted by Polydamas

OTOH, if they are playing around with different alloys and heat-treatments and then beating each other senseless, there will probably be plenty of shattered and discoloured armour lying around. Even today, its easy to leave the metal hard enough that it shatters.

Oh, certainly. Especially if the armourer, machnist and mechanical engineer have come up with a cost-effective way to fabricate a fairly close copy of a hand-made reenaction harness from materials adequate for live steel fighting. In that case, people who otherwise wouldn't have had the interest or money to order a hand-made suit from Eastern Europe might have sprung for one.

It would do a lot to popularise their invitation-only, sicario drug warrior, informal 'league' of HEMA/SCA/HMB-fighting. New recruits (mostly 17-25 year old), who may be former gang members who showed promise, ex-soldiers or police or sicarios from other organisations that Vargas has defeated, are much more likely to take part in a hobby that is likely to get their boss to notice them if the cost of beginner's kit is about half a month's pay, rather than 2+ months.

Vargas pays his soldiers lavishly. Trainees receive five times the salaries of Mexican soldiers or police, full sicarios are paid about five times what Mexican Special Forces and elite police tactical team members are paid. Those who are selected to join his personal Grupos de limpieza ('Cleansing teams') or his household guard will receive a minimum of ten times what members of special operations units in the Mexican military do.

Unfortunately, having salaries that are many times the local norm is worth less when the average household income in Mexico is $10,000 to $14,000 a year (usually more than one person earning income), depending on the method used to convert buying power form pesos to dollars.

Factory workers in Ciudad Juarez, an hour's drive away, and about the best plausible alternative employement for many of the recruits, receive between $5,000 to $6,000 per year. That's for the very lucky who have a full-time, relatively high-paying job, working insane hours to stay afloat. The hourly wage for Mexican factory workers is about 60% of what Chinese factory workers receive. More than half the Mexican workforce falls short of making $2,000 a year.

Engineers, college professors, lawyers and doctors may often make less than $15,000 a year, unless they are lucky enough to be working for foreign companies or clients. Police chiefs are paid less than $10,000 per year and from what I can tell, prosecutors are barely making any more.

So even with high salaries by local standards, sicario trainees are only getting about $15,000 in total for the six months they attend training camp. The sicarios who are accepted as full-time soldiers for the Caballero Templarios cartel have a yearly salary of $40,000 to $50,000. Those who finish training, but don't meet Vargas' approval, are often allowed to join allied or subordinate organisations, where their pay might be half that.

Vargas pays considerably better than the $15,000-$25,000 that even highly skilled former soldiers and police are getting as sicarios for many other cartels and much more than what Central American or local teenagers who have been run through training camps for Los Zetas will ever get. It is, however, not quite enough so that having a custom plate harness built by a skilled armourer is feasible as an impulse purchase.

Only Vargas' long-time personal guard and the full-time members of his most elite commando teams are making anything that would be considered good money on the other side of the border, at $80,000 to $100,000 a year. That's awesome, but still makes buying a $20,000-$40,000 custom made plate harness from a sought-after armourer in the HEMA/SCA/HMB world a purchase equivalent to the average American buying a new motorcycle.

Sure, this is all tax free and if they don't want to make any private living arrangments, they can probably get free room and board most of the time (all of the time for those assigned to Vargas' protection), but if you want to live a life of luxury, importing expensive toys for hobbies, it will run out pretty quickly.

And it's not as if they have good credit ratings, as all their cartel money is off the books and they are either officially unemployed, not registered anywhere for the past several years or with unskilled cover jobs that pay only slightly over minimum wage, i.e. maybe about $5-$6 a day. Even those with cover jobs as legitimate mechanics or something will still have tiny incomes, officially.

One of the reasons Vargas pays well, albeit mostly in cash, is that several of his men are former soldiers from various Latin American militaries and are formally without any criminal records. He has to pay them well, as some of them have previously worked for Blackwater/Xe/Academi, Triple Canopy and other international private security companies, and might well entertain offers from them in the future.

Originally Posted by Polydamas

I am just saying that in CEAD, you can get a surprising amount of bullet-resistance from a not crazy thickness of forgeable steels. I am not saying that those alloys and shapes will really do that, I am just talking about how I read those rules.

Back in the 1920s, the rule of thumb was that steel needed to be as thick as the calibre of the round it was meant to stop, and AP rounds doubled that.

Yeah, I don't think it's unrealistic for steel armour to stop pistol or even rifle rounds. I just think that wearable armour that does it will be much heavier than tactical gear + trauma plate inserts. I'm basically just closing the gap slightly, making Vargas still crazy, yes, but not quite as crazy as he seems. At least not when it comes to tactical issues.

Megalomaniac? I'm pretty sure the answer is yes. Thrill-seeker who'd risk his life for fun? Yep. Someone who'd wear impractical armour because it contributes to his legend and he thinks it's really cool? You got it. But he's at least someone who'll make an effort to make his eccentricities less suicidal than if he were less trained, experienced and capable.

[Polydamas]

Originally Posted by Icelander

The hypothetical Ukrainian armourer NPC that this thread has given me the idea for would be from the Crimea. An apprentice at one of these armouries in 2011-2012, something like that, when Vargas was first reaching out, seeking to have armour for him custom made. HEMA/HMB style fighter, gamer, re-enactor and generally someone who'd be posting to this thread if he was real.

Maybe he was a machinist during his conscript service, if they trained conscripts in useful trades in the 2000s/2010s in the Ukraine, that is. Smart, imaginative, chronically short of money to do all the really cool things he wants to do. Maybe less wise than he is smart, with a penchant for getting into trouble and making ill-considered decisions that, in retrospect, might have had a bit of a skewed risk-reward analysis going on.

During his time as an apprentice with a custom armoury which Vargas was trying to get to build him a rifle-proof medieval-style plate harness, this NPC would have been really into the challenge and the cool factor of building a plate harness from high-tech materials, with modern manufacturing methods. With one thing or another, after having done some work for Vargas and his men for several years, he would eventually have moved to Mexico for the chance to put together his own workshop, working with some people skilled in using higher-tech manufacturing methods.

Also, there might have been other reasons he was not eager to stay in his home country after 2014. Not so much the chance of personal danger, which he quite likes, on occasion, but more painful personal experiences having to do with political and ethnic division amounting to civil war in some locales. It can be exciting in the abstract for a young man to contemplate going off to war to test his skills and match his courage against some imaginary scowling, ugly foeman with no discernable human characteristics. It's no fun at all to have to consider the reality of maybe having to shoot and be shot at by old school friends, a favourite coach, his in-laws or some distant cousins.

Background sounds fine.

Armouring is kind of like music or acting or writing novels, in that it attracts a lot of clever and idealistic (but not necessarily educated) people who throw their teens and twenties at it like the French threw themselves at Loraine in 1914. The best can make about rich-country minimum wage with long hours as long as they are good at business.

A common failure mode is what we call armourer's disease: they don't raise prices fast enough, or just don't charge enough in the first place, and then they get injured or sick or have a project go overbudget, and it occurs to them that if they just accept a few more orders they can use the down payments to cover the hole ... In eastern Europe sometimes their financier or speaker-to-Anglos swindles them.

Originally Posted by Icelander

Awesome. I assume his name is like a SCA-handle or something, rather than him actually being Icelandic?

I think it is his SCA name, I never met him though. He lives somewhere midwestern and works somewhere automotivey or machineistey.

Originally Posted by Icelander

What's the controversy?

If I knew I would have said so! I have a general idea of the kinds of things that people in different armored combat worlds look for, and the kinds of techniques and materials which they use, but the end I am in is focused on learning how the originals worked and learning how to put points into the gaps in them. So the high-tech alloys and fancy heat treatments are not really my area of expertise.

These threads are a good excuse to geek out and think of elements for games and stories, but at the same time organizing what you know and double-checking it takes time and concentration and research. Some of your posts have half a dozen questions, each of which would take days to years to answer in a really solid way.

[DanHoward]

Originally Posted by Icelander

What's the controversy?

In order for titanium to provide similar protection to steel it has to be so thick that it actually weighs more.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by Polydamas

If I knew I would have said so!

Originally Posted by DanHoward

In order for titanium to provide similar protection to steel it has to be so thick that it actually weighs more.

I see.

Going by David Pulver's stats in 'Cutting-Edge Armor Design', there exist titanium alloys which are significantly more protective for their weight than RHA steel, albeit slightly less protective by thickness. Would you consider that unrealistic?

And, of course, titanium composites really do perform well against ballistic threats. I've seen video of tests where a technically wearable titanium composite plate stopped .50 BMG black-tip armour-piercing rounds, though I'll acknowledge that 'wearable' is a bit of a stretch for a rigid plate over an inch thick.

[DanHoward]

Originally Posted by Icelander

I see.

Going by David Pulver's stats in 'Cutting-Edge Armor Design', there exist titanium alloys which are significantly more protective for their weight than RHA steel, albeit slightly less protective by thickness. Would you consider that unrealistic?.

Why compare an armour-grade titanium alloy to RHA? A realistic comparison would be with armour-grade steel.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by DanHoward

Why compare an armour-grade titanium alloy to RHA? A realistic comparison would be with armour-grade steel.

RHA is armour grade steel, at least as far as a lot of 20th century fighting vehicles are concerned.

But the 'Titanium Alloy' in Pulver's article is actually given better DR by weight than the best steel alloy he gives stats for, except cutting-edge things like nanometric steels, nano-crystalline or 'triple hardened' armour steel (BHN 500-600, applications in shaped armour are few and expensive at our TL, due to the difficulty of working with it, but include part of the composite armour of the French Leclerc and the German Leopold), which protect equally well as titanium alloy by weight. Titanium alloy gives worse DR by thickness than any TL6+ steel at all likely to be used in armour, however.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by Polydamas

Background sounds fine.

Do you wish to name him and/or suggest some traits he might have or additional background? You could honour..., or mock, some acquintance who actually is an armourer.

As with all other NPCs, he'll also receive a 'casting photo', i.e. a link to a picture of an actor, model or even just random person found using Google Image Seach, who'd be have the appearance that we'd be looking for if he were being cast for a TV show. Basically, who does he look like?

No need to provide name, quirks or casting if that doesn't amuse you, just thought I'd offer if you wanted. Other forumites should also feel free to suggest names, quirks or casting photos for any other NPC implied by the discussion about how the CT cartel will develop Vargas' dream armour.

Originally Posted by Polydamas

Armouring is kind of like music or acting or writing novels, in that it attracts a lot of clever and idealistic (but not necessarily educated) people who throw their teens and twenties at it like the French threw themselves at Loraine in 1914. The best can make about rich-country minimum wage with long hours as long as they are good at business.

A common failure mode is what we call armourer's disease: they don't raise prices fast enough, or just don't charge enough in the first place, and then they get injured or sick or have a project go overbudget, and it occurs to them that if they just accept a few more orders they can use the down payments to cover the hole ... In eastern Europe sometimes their financier or speaker-to-Anglos swindles them.

With that in mind, what kind of tax free salary (with free room and board included) would he likely need to be willing to overlook the fact that he'd not only be working with hired killers for a drug cartel, he'd be living with them?

I mean, yeah, passion for the project and the chance to have a workshop he never, in a million years, could have afforded on his own, would have been powerful motivators. But even if the worst of the crimes the Caballero Templarios are responsible for aren't usually committed at their Jefe's home, anyone living there for more than a year is going to see and hear things that most people would find it very hard to rationalise away.

Assuming that he wasn't actually directly exposed to murder and torture and that he didn't have a moral objection to drug dealing, he could probably accept that the men he dealt with were soldiers in a war against a corrupt government and much 'worse'* criminal organisations.

And a lot of men somehow manage to purchase the services of prostitutes in many places in the world where it is nearly certain that some of them have been forced into the work, without ever learning or wanting to learn of the crimes committed against the girls to ensure their compliance. So he doesn't necessarily have to know about the terrible background of some of the girls who are provided for parties and relaxation.

But with Vargas being a Bully (SC 12 or 15), Callous, Lecherous (SC unknown) and a Sadist (SC 15), as well as probably Megalomaniac**, it's pretty much certain that he's done something to give pause to anyone not a total sociopath within, at least, the hearing of anyone who lives at his hacienda.

Even if Vargas' Charisma has improved from the Charisma 2 he had before acquiring superpowers and the hypothetical armourer could possibly be affected by his Tough Guy Talent 3, the odds are that any reasonable person would come to the conclusion that working for Vargas was a bad thing to do.

So the compensation has to be lavish by the standards of what he could make anywhere else, in order for the armourer to stay there. Yes, I expect fear plays a part, because how do you tell Vargas 'no' now that you are living with him, but we can't make things too easy for the PCs. If they want to turn anyone in his household against Vargas, they are going to have to use social engineering, not just catch him when he throws himself at them, sobbing in joy to find some way out.

*Or so they'd no doubt tell him.
**He was Overconfident before and a lot of people who have been through Project Jade Serenity have exhibited some mental issues. The rumours about Vargas in Mexico certainly suggest Megalomania.

Originally Posted by Polydamas

I have a general idea of the kinds of things that people in different armored combat worlds look for, and the kinds of techniques and materials which they use, but the end I am in is focused on learning how the originals worked and learning how to put points into the gaps in them. So the high-tech alloys and fancy heat treatments are not really my area of expertise.

These threads are a good excuse to geek out and think of elements for games and stories, but at the same time organizing what you know and double-checking it takes time and concentration and research. Some of your posts have half a dozen questions, each of which would take days to years to answer in a really solid way.

Ah, but I don't need perfect answers, just improvements on the plausibility of whatever I could come up with thinking of these things by myself. SJGames forums are sure to have someone inordinately interested in almost any geeky subject, making them perfect for such brainstorming.

[DanHoward]

Originally Posted by Icelander

RHA is armour grade steel, at least as far as a lot of 20th century fighting vehicles are concerned.

Apologies. I was thinking of something else - homogeneous steel, not rolled homogeneous armour.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by DanHoward

Apologies. I was thinking of something else.

Mind you, 'Cutting-Edge Armor Design' doesn't give stats for many common TL7 or TL8 steel alloys, just two grades of TL6 steel (RHA and 'Hard Steel', a generic grade to be used for slightly more protective, hardened armour steel at that TL) and the exotic, very late TL8 'Ultra-Strength Steel'.

As I'm basically considering using TL8 materials and manufacturing to make armour that looks TL4, I've been looking into what materials could be used that wouldn't be implausible to be able to work into form-fitting armour at the budget I discussed.

The highest hardness steels used as ballistic protection appear to be too difficult to work to be practical, but, as you kindly pointed out, bainite flash hardening might allow decent TL8 steel with a fairly good DR without making it prohibitively difficult to work. Stats that either match TL8 'Ultra-Strength Steel' or, at least, provides significantly better performance against ballistic threats than the best steel used to make armour at TL4 (or TL6, for that matter).

And, obviously, so that Vargas could have decent protection against bullets, the padding under the armour would be the best ballistic polymer available to him, to act as a spall liner. Probably a custom order bodysuit, with fastenings for the armour, very likely from Miguel Caballero or a less famous, but equally expensive, custom and exclusive designer (who might be reputed to sell to drug lords).

I'm willing to be shown that this is simply impractical if any kind of rifle protection is desired for the chest and skull and the best way to do it is to use advanced ceramics and composites, either painted to look like steel or with a thin layer of steel on the outside, to look right. That is, if I'm convinced that 'flash bainite' can't give the hardness needed while also yielding steel shaped into the requisite stylish plate harness form, I might reconsider using any kind of advanced steel, just use simple steel as decoration.

But if we assume that Pulver's design system is basically valid, if simplified, and that it is possible to make plate harness from steel giving significantly better DR by weight and thickness than RHA, such as using flash bainite, then someone massively strong for their weight, like Vargas, appears able to wear such armour that provides enough DR to rate NIJ Level III or higher over significant parts of his most vital anatomy.

[Icelander]

I've found evidence that flash bainite treatment is currently being used to make the production of ballistic steel trauma plates cheaper and simpler, which makes me optimistic that the solutions discussed are practical. They even offer custom sizes and shapes, but only in very limited configurations and with great trouble even for fitting the armour to a boxy vehicle, so they might still count as limited to Solid only in Pyramid #3/85 'Cutting-Edge Armor Design' terms. At least they cannot combine the BHN 500-600 hardness with steel alloys that they can form into very complex shapes and any type of welding will create a 0.75-1.5" join area where the hardness suffers significantly and heavy caliber AP rounds can penetrate in that area.

From the guys who trademarked the name 'Flash® Bainite' for the process, they take custom orders by request in e-mail or phone communication and also sell pre-made plates at gun shows. Usually, their plates are of BHN 500 hardness and 1/4" plates provide protection well beyond what NIJ Level III requires. They do weigh almost ten pounds per square feet, though. Source: Gary M. Cola, at Flash Bainite / SFP Works LLC / Sirius Protection LLC.

The US Military has tested similar 'Flash® Bainite' armour plates in 2010, specifically an alloy the manufacturer simply calls AR600, due to the BHN hardness (but the US Army referred to in more complicated terms, of course), and according to Gary Cola, the flash bainite plates passed. The Army found plates weighing 10 pounds per square foot of protection proofed against point blank M2AP .30-06 (APHC doing 25+ damage in GURPS, translating to DR 48-52) and 20mm Fragment Simulation Projectile (FSP), which meets or exceeds NIJ Level IV. In comparison, 20% to 60% more material by weight was required to match this performance in plates made from titanium and hardened steel alloys used for vehicle armour (inc. commercial AR500 and the mil-spec equivalent).

Later tests apparently show that their Flash® 500 steel can stop M2AP .30-06 at lower speeds (2100 fps), ca 200-300 yards range for a typical .30-06 rifle firing military M2AB ammunition, and 20mm FSP at typical fragment weights, at that same areal density. The lower hardness steel may not resist fast-moving APHC rounds as well as the higher hardness AR600 steel from Flash® Bainite, but 10 pounds per square foot of it are apparently enough to rate NIJ Level III and get around DR 28-40 in GURPS. Unofficially, this level of protection has been tested against .50 BMG and can stop them at long range, but not point blank. The harder Flash® AR600 'should' stop .50 BMG at point blank, based on the performance against M2AP, but as far as I know, no scientific tests have been carried out in that caliber.

I've got some information related to 4130 steel subjected to flash bainite, which was apparently provided to US Army ARDEC for evaluation, in a PDF hosted on the Google Drive Folder and Dropbox Folder for the Jade Serenity campaign. It's not got the actual testing data for the ballistic tests performed at Aberdeen and three other labs. The test results themselves are classified (probably just SECRET) and NOFORN, due to the testing of mil-spec alloys alongside it. General information about the results is available in numerous commercial publications by Flash Bainite, which still doesn't constitute independent verification, but I see no special reason to doubt that the armour passed testing.

There doesn't appear to be any good reason why flash bainite could not be used to make slightly less hard alloys to make a complete set of field plate armour from. It wouldn't have the WM 0.2 implied by the tested performance of the Flash® Bainite AR600 steel, as that appears to be a real hassle to form into anything but simple shapes, but it should be able to get WM about equal to titanium alloys, while still being cheaper to make. Hell, Flash® 500 gets around WM 0.27-0.29, which is better than the 'CEAD' 'Titanium Alloy' at WM 0.35, and both AR600 and Flash® 500 have DR/inch well over what 'Ultra-Strength Steel' gets, at least against small arm threats (i.e. piercing). As noted earlier, I wouldn't object, on realism grounds, to giving such very hard steel alloys 50% to a 100% higher DR against piercing than against the cr, cr ex, burn, imp of many other types of battlefield threats. That would mean their DR against anything other than HVP ballistic threats would be divided by 1.5 to 2, making their WM for all other purposes effectively WM 0.3 to 0.45.

According to "The Science of Armour Materials, 1st Edition” edited by Ian Crouch (1 page excerpt in PDF form): "Commercial off-the-shelf steel sheet, plate (up to 61 mm wide and 6.6 mm thick), and tubing (12e63 mm in diameter) can be transformed to flash bainite." Tjhat may have been true when he wrote it, but larger and thicker plates have been transformed into flash bainite by now.

SFP Works LLC / Flash Bainite have extensively tested the flash bainite process at armour thickness of up to 3/8" flat or gently curved plate, i.e. Solid, in GURPS 'CEAD' terms. That's far thicker than anything that Vargas would wear and it neatly fits the thickest plates that civilian trucks with added armour are likely to need/want. 1/8" flash bainite AR500 steel stops 7.62x51mm NATO APHC rounds at the speeds where they are going subsonic, which translates into about DR 15-25 in GURPS, probably around DR 18-20.

4 mm to 5 mm armour plates made of flash-bainite AR500 steel would reliably stop any rifle round that you could expect to face in Mexico, and with a good ballistic polymer underlayer, even 3 mm armour of slightly less hardness should give decent protection from common hunting or military surplus 5.56x45mm and 7.62x39mm rounds. Perhaps not complete protection, but enough to make the vast majority of hits that don't completely bypass the armour survivable.

One new product from Flash Bainite is allegedly tubing of up to 1800 MPa, room temperature stampable and readily weldable steel. 'Flash 1800' is supposed to be stronger than titanium, lighter than aluminum and lower cost than high strength steel. It sounds like a very good candidate to cover areas that need complex shapes and where less than NIJ Level III performance might be acceptable. 'Flash 1800' only become available at the end of 2016, though, so is probabaly not be available to the Caballero Templarios in February 2017, at least not for them to play around with making themselves (I expect they can order it directly from the factory). In any case, they need other shapes than tubing, I should think. But it demonstrates the flexibility even of tough steel from Flash Bainite.

The machinery to make steel for various purposes, like 'Flash AR500' and a variety of tool steels, would have been available to license in 2015 and the CT cartel could have been playing around with them since that time. That includes, as far as I can determine, making very strong steels that can still be formed into nearly any shape, from AISI-1020 or AISI-4130 steel alloys.

That is assuming that Flash Bainite will sell machinery capable of doing almost everything they can do at their factory to a cover company in Mexico, probably a chain of mechanic workshops pretending to be branching out into being a very custom car detail shop. While I can't speak to their willingness to do anything shady, Flash Bainite has no inherent objections to marketing their process to companies involved in the civilian LAV (Light Armoured Vehicles) industry in Colombia or Mexico.

They are not allowed to export their 'AR600' steel outside the continental US, as that has been certified as MIL-DTL-46100E armour steel by the US Army. Some issues would also apply to any technology specifically related to the heat treatment of that high hardness steel, but everything else they make can be exported anywhere. That includes flash bainite AR500 and any hypothetical slightly softer steel that would be formed into a black plate harness for Vargas.