Low-Tech Armor with the Strength of Ten Men
 

Using only LT armor (and Pyramid) and aiming for some realism, how thick could you get armor if the warrior was magically "as strong as ten men" (that is, has ST 30-33 range). Assume it's magic or divine gift, so the warrior is the size/bulk of a normal person, and not as bulky as ten men.

Note: Edited to improve the question

Re: Low-Tech Armor with the Strength of Ten Men
 

Also applies to ogres and giants. I very much doubt a twenty foot tall giant with ST 30 who is wearing plate only has DR 6.

Re: Low-Tech Armor with the Strength of Ten Men
 

Freedom of movement will be a consideration, so joints will have to be less protected.
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_2a4y-KC071...as-Story-2.jpg

Re: Low-Tech Armor with the Strength of Ten Men
 

Yeah, I might take into account the ergonomic restrictions of thicker armour at joints, by saying some chinks are less than half DR in order to keep them ergonomically viable. But in reality we're not talking that thick.

Another factor might be armour plates of certain types may only be manufactured up to certain thickness (but well duplex plate would possible help with this).

and some armour can't be made thicker and thicker indefinitely and maintain certain characteristics e.g I think Mail can only be made so thick or dense before losing flexibility

But the reality is a human with ST30 will has a ludicrous power to weight ratio, and in real life some bits of breast plates got up to 8-9mm or so. So I think in general the answer is pretty damn thick

Re: Low-Tech Armor with the Strength of Ten Men
 

TBH I know the OP stipulated only using LT, but I'd really recommend using the Pyramid articles for armour design

Well maybe yes, maybe no, a twenty ft humanoid has to cover a lot of surface area!

Re: Low-Tech Armor with the Strength of Ten Men
 

going for a straightforward shot at this...

Basic lift will be 180. We can use a good deal more weight that basic lift. I'm going to go for 3x basic lift, to leave him at medium encumbrance even when lifting massive weapons and carrying some gear. So our target weight is 540 lbs.

In low tech, all armor locations together are 300% of a torso piece, and all weights are for torsos.

On page 109 of low tech, its says +50% cost and weight per +1 DR. Witch is probably going to give us strange results, but here we go:

If you use heavy plate, adding +9 DR will give you 18 DR for a torso weight of 176 and a total weight of 528 lb. it costs 660k$.

If you use light plate, adding +43 DR will give you 46 DR, weight 540 lbs (exactly on target), and cost 675k$.

I do not think this system was meant for such cases, however.

Re: Low-Tech Armor with the Strength of Ten Men
 

RAW in Low-Tech ("Heavy Plate", p109) is to increase weight (and cost) by 50% per +1 DR.

DR is in general rated per inch of material, so by that rule in Basic (B558), doubling the thickness of armor would double the DR, and also double the weight. (You'd have to work the numbers backwards to find out how thick the starting armor was. The LT rule is assuming realistic plate armor and starting with an assumed thickness for "normal" plate to get that +1 DR = 50% increase.)

A ST 30 human has a BL 9 times that of a ST 10 human. If we assume that the proportion of BL devoted to armor remains the same, then the armor weighs 9 times as much. By the LT rule, that's +16 DR (or DR 23 if we start with the Basic "Heavy Steel Corselet"). By the Basic structure DR rule, it's 9 times the thickness (whatever that may be), so 9 times the DR, or DR 63 for that Heavy Steel Corselet.

Yes, at some point the armor becomes so thick that you start having to redesign it, as the shape becomes wrong.

I'm also assuming the ST 30 human is of normal human size. LTC2 has rules for scaling armor to different Size Modifiers, if your goal is to armor ogres or giants or Galactus.

Re: Low-Tech Armor with the Strength of Ten Men
 

Any thoughts on how much less than "half"? Think there might be a maximum DR for joints instead of half?

Also, does anyone think that adding multiple layers of grand guards might be workable? It seems like it should be ok as long as you pay the cost for it; and it solves the problem of joints having too much DR, since only the base layer would be counted for joints.

Thanks for pointing that out. I edited the message to include Pyramid articles as ok. I meant only LT as opposed to Basic or UT.

Re: Low-Tech Armor with the Strength of Ten Men
 

Using Light Plate as the base is correct, as that's how Medium and Heavy are calculated.

But from a realistic point of view, 40+ points of DR would be over half an inch thick, which is no longer in the realm of thin-walled cooling (from an engineering perspective), and this slab armor is far too thick to hammer or shape by hand. This might require industrial machining and manufacturing.

So how would that affect fabrication?

Re: Low-Tech Armor with the Strength of Ten Men
 

If you look at the examples in the book what Dan's done is add 50% of the cost and weight of light armor to the armor. Note that this goes for plate only - it does not work for e.g. mail. The text also says that the highest DR for torso armor is DR 14, and for other armor is DR 10 - anything else is too cumbersome and difficult to articulate.

My personal house rule is that you can increase the armor one step more for each +1 SM - so a SM +1 character could have extra-heavy plate (DR 12) or extra-heavy segmented plate (DR 6).