[LT Armor Loadouts] Expensive Greaves
 

Because bronze plates are very expensive, there are loadouts that a good chunk of its cost comes from the greaves alone. Is that really right?

67% of Late Hoplite's cost is from greaves alone, and it costs about 58 times more than the torso armor.
Polybian Principe/Triarius has 48% of its cost come from the greaves, while it costs two thirds more than the torso armor.

This feels weird to me. What I learned from the LT book is that large plates are much more difficult to make than small ones, with cost increasing non-linearly. Wouldn't then using the price scheme of segmented plate make more sense than the full plate?
Also, I'm not a history buff so I might be mistaken but looking at representations of hoplites on internet it seems their greaves protects only the front. Is this accurate? If so, even if not using segmented plate instead of plate the cost could be reduced by half.

Re: [LT Armor Loadouts] Expensive Greaves
 

GURPS typically overcharges for plate for gamist reasons (plate is game-mechanically better than mail, but historically had a lower pricetag), and I believe undercharges for cloth armor for the same. Also, the CF system doesn't really work that well for bronze - a relatively flat addition to cost based on weight would be more appropriate, and this "error" is particularly pronounced for the more expensive armor types, like plate. Finally, bronze was a type of material that had wild fluctuations in price (largely based on the price of tin), making the GURPS one-price-fits-all approach not work that well for it. The above "errors" were most likely chosen because they work better for gaming than, but when you put it all together, you do indeed end up with greaves as the most expensive armor pieces, by far, for a late hoplite.

Of course, the greaves and helmet are also the most substantial armor for the late hoplite, and considering greaves are heavier, it makes a good deal of sense for them to be the most expensive armor pieces. The rest of the body is largely protected by the shield (and those of neighbors, in a phalanx). The principe is in a similar boat, of course, although he has much more substantial torso armor (there, the price "error" between mail and plate, as well as the arguably-excessive multiplier for bronze plate, conspire to make the greaves more expensive).

As for greave design, they were clearly more of a plate than a segmented plate design, and looking at pictures online appear to cover the lower legs from the front as well as the back. The back of the knee isn't protected, but that's probably covered by Armor Gaps (although you could shave off a bit of weight and cost by leaving the back of the knee completely unprotected).

Re: [LT Armor Loadouts] Expensive Greaves
 

I suspect that bronze plate, in particular, is overpriced- part of the reason that plate is priced so high is that, compared to other iron/steel armor at TL4, it requires the absolute best quality steel and a master craftsman, whereas (if my understanding is correct), bronze plate was not all that much more demanding compared to bronze armor assembled from smaller pieces.

EDIT: When one compares GURPS sets for a hoplite's equipment to the material wealth it says a man of hoplite status should have, there is a clear mismatch, but where the error lies is a matter to be worked out by people with more knowledge than I have.

Re: [LT Armor Loadouts] Expensive Greaves
 

It took an entire family to equip a hoplite, not one person. Unless one was from one of the elite families, it required the combined wealth of father, grandfather, uncles, and brothers to field a hoplite in bronze armour. The adoption of organic armours lowered the cost of entry significantly but nothing could be done about the greaves and helmet. A lot of these greaves were carefully tailored to fit the wearer - the plate could be sprung open and slipped onto the leg with no need for straps and buckles to hold them in place. They were not something that could be passed down from father to son.

Greaves, in general, were very difficult to make because it is hard to come up with a way to keep them in place while running or fighting. The best method is to articulate them to the rest of the leg armour but that requires plate armour that covers the entire leg, which has its own challenges. In many cultures, greaves were only worn by cavalry because they don't have to march in the things. A lot of Roman infantry had discarded them by the time of Marius but the Loadout keeps them. You can leave them out of the Imperial Legionary Loadout and still remain historically accurate. You can also change Roman armour from bronze to brass, which is a little cheaper but has similar mechanical properties. Perhaps +2CF rather than +3CF.

Re: [LT Armor Loadouts] Expensive Greaves
 

But is the +3CF for bronze plate justified? A good portion (i.e., presumably a higher portion than in relatively-easy-to-make armor like scale or segmented) of the base cost of plate armor is "labor" rather than "parts" (not to mention the mark-up in price for having to use high-quality steel when making large plates rather than the decent-quality iron one can get away with in most armor), and, even if I were willing to grant that crafting bronze plate armor is no easier than equivalent steel, I categorically refuse to believe that it is significantly harder or more labor intensive.

Re: [LT Armor Loadouts] Expensive Greaves
 

On plate, which is $125/lb, the +3 CF calls for bronze to cost around $375/lb, which seems pretty excessive. On scale, which is around $20/lb, the +3 CF calls for bronze to cost around $60/lb. That's a rather massive discrepancy. With GURPS' default of $62.50/lb for copper, the former calls for tin to cost around $3200/lb (assuming ~10% tin content) which is... quite high. The latter calls for tin to be a bit cheaper than copper. A simple +$n/lb works better. How much n is would depend on the price of bronze, and the cost of iron. Using the LTC3 Classical Mediterranean price point of $18/lb for copper and $122/lb for tin (so $28.40/lb for bronze with 10% tin), and $7/lb for the iron, making armor out of bronze would be roughly +$20/lb. If bronze instead cost $77/lb (something like the default $62.50 for copper and then $207.5/lb for tin), that would instead make it +$70/lb. Ideally, the costs for all items would be separated into materials and labor, and each could be adjusted up and down depending on various factors. Using bronze would increase material costs but possibly reduce labor costs (bronze is apparently easier to work with), making armor Tailored or a weapon Balanced would have no impact on material cost but would boost labor cost, making Hardened Steel armor or a Fine weapon would boost both material cost (they call for higher-quality starting materials) and labor cost (they are harder to make), and so forth. Such a system would be... difficult to work out, and probably more crunchy than GURPS 4e's design goals would allow for. I tried my hand a bit at making one, but never really made something satisfactory. An interesting thing I noted was that, with armor made from extremely expensive materials (spider silk, various flavors of fantastic metals, etc), the various weight-reducing enhancements - tailoring, fluting, etc - could actually cause the armor to cost less.

Re: [LT Armor Loadouts] Expensive Greaves
 

Bronze is not easier to work with. Iron can be worked hot, bronze cannot. If iron tears, it can be forge-welded, if bronze tears, the entire jobs needs to be scrapped.

Re: [LT Armor Loadouts] Expensive Greaves
 

Yes, the reason for the price difference seems to be the difficulty of forging the pieces. Scale is comprised of hundreds of small scales and, if one messes up, it is much easier to replace. Plate is made from a few large plates and, if one messes up, it is much harder to replace. In my opinion, bronze plate should probably suffer a -2 to skill to forge because of the necessary care, which would for the price discrepancy (as a smith would need to take 4x as much time to negate the penalty).

Re: [LT Armor Loadouts] Expensive Greaves
 

If the hoplites were cutting corners to save money, why didn't they replace the greaves with linen as well, or keep the better bronze corselet while replacing graves with linen shinguards (or trousers)?

I can accept working with bronze is as hard as iron, but I'm not convinced why it's not using segmented plate instead of plate. As I understand, Plate cost is due to the difficulty to make large plates like that of a breastplate with iron, while segmented plate is a "compromise" design by using multiple smaller plates, that's however with torso in mind. Shins are much smaller than torso and each segment of a lorica segmentata seems large enough to cover it. That would reduce the cost to $1,320.

Also, if greaves were such a close fit as to be unable to be passed from a father to a son, shouldn't it be equivalent to a Expert/Masterful Tailoring? That would further increase the cost...

Re: [LT Armor Loadouts] Expensive Greaves
 

The Loadouts book used historical armours, not fictional ones. If you want to use segmented armour in your campaign, go ahead.

Re: [LT Armor Loadouts] Expensive Greaves
 

I think his question is why plate for small areas is so much more expensive than segmented, when it can wind up being a smaller piece of metal than one of the "segments" on a bigger body part (the answer, I presume, being more precise shaping and so forth).

Re: [LT Armor Loadouts] Expensive Greaves
 

Interesting. I had assumed the fact bronze can be readily cast would make it easier to work with. Would you say in terms of difficulty of working with it that the ability to cast it vs the problems you mention works out to be overall easier, harder, or roughly the same (but with Familiarity penalties or similar)?

Something not well-represented in GURPS (because it's difficult to represent) is that weight on the limbs feels heavier than weight on the torso. As a result, you really want limb armor to be as light as possible to avoid exhaustion. Going from the lightest construction (plate) to one of the heaviest (linen), multiplying weight by 2.5, is probably a Bad Idea. I suspect with that kind of weight, the hoplites would likely not bother wearing the leg armor.

And while front-only armor sounds like a good idea, I doubt it works out very well in practice with leg armor. Most fighting stances I'm familiar with (which are for unarmed combat, admittedly, but maintaining balance shouldn't change too much when you've got a spear or whatever) don't involve both feet pointed forward at all times, and legs are thin enough that a decent-length swung weapon can probably reach behind the leg a bit so that even front-facing legs would be vulnerable. Actually getting 100% protection from the front for the lower legs may well require armor the reaches all the way around.

It appears to cover the entire lower leg with a single plate (two plates if it's hinged, but I don't think hoplite greaves typically were) that's around half the weight of Torso armor. That's a pretty good-sized plate, and it has less room for error when it comes to fitting compared to smaller plates. Still, the idea of basing price on the size plate(s) involved has some merit, but there are two factors to consider - the price of the plate (which increases based on absolute size) and the price of the fitting (which increases based on the relative size to the protected location). Such a system would, naturally, be rather complex to work out. I've tried my hand at it back when I was trying to create a Damage Overhaul (which I ultimately abandoned, but may come back to try and make a simpler version); it can be doable taking the approach of the Pyramid Armor Design articles. Looking at my data from there, Plate armor for the lower legs would require plates of ~SM -4 (it's half the weight of full Torso armor, which if possible would require a plate of SM +0; if it were one piece this would be SM -2, but being two pieces - due to covering two legs - makes it SM -4). I have SM -4 plates being around 45% of the cost of normal plate, but the need for a closer fit multiplies this by 1.5, for around 65% cost.

Re: [LT Armor Loadouts] Expensive Greaves
 

Exactly my point. Your presumption is actually helpful. Looking at LT again and page 113 mentions armors are already close fitted to the owner, which likely accounts for the "son can't use father's greaves" part.

I had not thought of that, thanks for the explanation.

Re: [LT Armor Loadouts] Expensive Greaves
 

Classical hoplites and their greaves may not have much to do with one-on-one combat or even swung weapons. The first reason to get greaves is so that your guys in the front rank don't get crippling leg wounds from massed archery and disrupt the formation as it tries to move forward.

I suppose some joker who thinks he's being clever could try and thrust low instead of high with his spear but in formation fiighting he's probably just sticking his spear butt into some part of a second or third rank fellow.

So your swung weapon scenario would only come to pass is single or broken formation combat. Not a high priority. Also there are questions of what weapon would be used for such ahypothtical swung attack. If you were butt-stroking with a spear you have to have switched to a two-handed grip and thrown your shield away. Not good form in the era.

If you've lost your spear some way hoplites usually did have a sword for back-up. However, if said back up is a Spartan "Lakonian" type it only has a 14 inch blade and wouldn't be anyone's choice for swinging at the leg. It was very likely to be intended still for formation combat with the user in the "press" with friends very tightly on each side of him and the enemy within range where he could "step closer" as the old instruction for use of that type of blade says to.

If the hoplite had a Khopis that is a slashing weapon but good form is usually taken to be swinging high and diagonal over your own shield. Swinging low still tends to be formation disrupting.

Some hoplites at various times and places did use a simple straight sword that was longer than the Lakonian. Some of them may even have been just long enough to be Gurps broadswords rather than shortswords.

Re: [LT Armor Loadouts] Expensive Greaves
 

Like he said. Brass and bronze are "hot short," meaning that they are likely to crack when worked near the metal's melting point.

Furthermore, brass and bronze can only be hardened by cold-working - i.e., hammering the item while the material is cold to compress the material's atomic matrix.

By contrast, steel can be hardened by annealing - heating followed by controlled cooling often by quenching the item in water or some other liquid (e.g., oil). While the smith must spend extra money to buy fuel to anneal steel, it actually saves time as compared to work-hardening the steel.

That said, tin, arsenic, and copper have lower melt points than iron, making brass and bronze slightly easier to produce. Bronze and brass also have much greater fluidity than iron or steel when melted, so they lend themselves better to casting. (Cast iron is tricky to work with because it's notorious for being hot short.)

While I don't have any historical evidence at hand, it wouldn't surprise me if some bronze or brass armor pieces weren't cast - at least in rough form - and then hammered into final form. The drawback of such a process is that there is a limit as to how thin the brass or bronze can be, meaning that the armor might be heavier than it should be.

This is particularly critical for helmets (excessive weight can cause headaches and neck strain) and greaves and sollerets (any excess weight on the lower legs or feet has a disproportionately slowing effect on movement and can mess with a fighter's mobility if he's not used to the extra mass on his feet and legs).

Re: [LT Armor Loadouts] Expensive Greaves
 

Annealing softens the metal, it doesn't harden it. It is necessary to remove any work-hardening so that the smith can continue to work it. Iron is annealed by heating it up and allowing it to cool slowly. Bronze is annealed by heating it up and quenching it in water.

Bronze can be worked just as thinly as iron. The typical thickness of the plates in scale armour was around 0.5mm. Greek bronze greaves were typically less than 1mm thick.

In any case, the CF is based purely on the material. Bronze costs four times more than iron. Any differences in construction have their own separate CFs.

Re: [LT Armor Loadouts] Expensive Greaves
 

If bronze really does cost no more than four times as much as iron, then multiplying the entire cost (including labor) by four will clearly produce an erroneous result (unless the labor requirements are, by an astonishing coincidence, also roughly four times as expensive for all types of armor), and the result will be more erroneous for armor types that require (and therefore have a cost based on) more labor or more skilled labor- which brings us right back to the start of this thread.

EDIT: My assumption that bronze is, in some ways, easier to work (although doubtless more troublesome in others) are based on this: working with iron, the difficulty in forming it into large plates was such that armor based on such did not become common until the late middle ages (and, if I am understanding correctly, tended to require a higher grade of iron/steel than was needed for mail, scale, etc.), in contrast to classical-age and earlier bronze cuirasses. If this was caused by factors other than the practical difficulties of working iron, I would be interested to hear them.

Re: [LT Armor Loadouts] Expensive Greaves
 

Today, the primary cost of an item is the labour. In the past, the cost of materials made up the majority of the price.

Mail required the highest grade of iron. Plate can be made from less refined iron. Iron plate was always possible; we have examples dating to the Hellenistic period. Anyone who can make a one-piece iron helmet can easily make a breastplate. Mail was a far superior armour until fully articulated plate suits were developed.

Re: [LT Armor Loadouts] Expensive Greaves
 

Even assuming that this generalization holds true for this particular working (which, from what you have said earlier, requires considerable amounts of skilled labor), I would point out that a majority isn't a totality- if the price were 70% parts and 30% labor, a fourfold increase in the cost of materials would lead to only a three (point one) fold increase in final price. (If it were 99% parts and 1% labor, the difficulties you bring up about personally fitting greaves would have been irrelevant- just use your grandfather's greaves as the source of the bronze, and have a new pair made cheaply).

So, bringing this back to GURPS, should iron plate cuirasses, greaves, etc. be considered TL 2 rather than TL4 as Low Tech states (it explicitly calls out such parts as being available earlier when made of bronze)?

Re: [LT Armor Loadouts] Expensive Greaves
 

Blast furnaces and trip hammer mills enabled plate to be produced more quickly and cheaply than mail.

Edit: This might prove edifying: https://myarmoury.com/feature_mail.html

Re: [LT Armor Loadouts] Expensive Greaves
 

So tell us how to put this into a book without analysing the materials/labour ratio for every item.

Re: [LT Armor Loadouts] Expensive Greaves
 

"+$X per pound". This is somewhat problematic in the case of different qualities of what is generally described as the same material, such as varying qualities of steel, or where different materials are dissimilar effort to work, but it's less likely to produce silly results than alternatives.

Re: [LT Armor Loadouts] Expensive Greaves
 

No. A technology has to be mature and ubiquitous. Iron plate body armour is rightly TL4. If you want iron plate at TL2 it should be treated as advanced or experimental.

Re: [LT Armor Loadouts] Expensive Greaves
 

Take a value that produces reasonable (and reasonably gameable) results for most armors, and take another value for those armors judged as being particularly effortful to produce. Failing that, choose a single value for bronze armor that doesn't make a hoplite-status Greek unable to afford his own armor [the armor prices are admittedly chosen more with an eye towards game balance than history anyway- and could hardly be otherwise, given how prices varied over two millennia and three to five continents]. [EDIT: I like Anthony's suggestion better.]

EDIT: So, to be clear, are you saying that iron-plate-making at TL2 was "rare because difficult and involving skills not developed", or just "rare because people who could have made it had better things to do with the metal"?

Re: [LT Armor Loadouts] Expensive Greaves
 

Iron plate body armour doesn't become mature and ubiquitous until TL4. You can justify it any way you want but it doesn't change historical facts.

Re: [LT Armor Loadouts] Expensive Greaves
 

I mean, some things with a TL were never "ubiquitous". I'm just trying to work out whether, if asked by a PC to craft an iron cuirass, a TL2 blacksmith, after being assured that the buyer really wants one and not a superior suit of mail, can produce something roughly equivalent to the TL4 version (after accounting for any differences in the quality of iron). Whether it should be called TL2, TL4, or TL4-but-they-could-do-it-at-2-if-they-want is beside the point.

Re: [LT Armor Loadouts] Expensive Greaves
 

So you would propose analysing and quantifying the materials/labour cost ratio for every item in the book?

Re: [LT Armor Loadouts] Expensive Greaves
 

If you just want a cuirass and not an articulated suit, then there is no practical reason why it can't be done at TL2. You can make mail using TL1 bronze too if you want but it never existed historically until someone invented it.

Re: [LT Armor Loadouts] Expensive Greaves
 

As far as I can see, all his proposal needs is a listed weight for every relevant item in the book- which, conveniently, is already present.

Re: [LT Armor Loadouts] Expensive Greaves
 

Hardly. Every item has a different ratio, which changes with the TL. You would also need to know the cost/labour ratio for every component. A significant percentage of the cost of mail armour, for example, is the iron wire. You need approximately 1000-2000 feet of it, which had to be hand-drawn from specially-prepared billets of highly-refined iron.

Re: [LT Armor Loadouts] Expensive Greaves
 

Hmmm... that's quite a bit different from LTC3, where iron is around $7/lb ($14/lb for plate armor and swords, but that's indicated to be due to burning a lot of charcoal rather than using better iron), while armor and weapons made from it are typically a good deal more than that ($20/lb for scale up to $125/lb for plate armor; for weapons, large knives are around $40/lb while a thrusting broadsword is around $200/lb, provided we ignore the idea that 1/3rd of their weights are apparently the sheath). That's at most 35% of cost being from material for such items, with the rest being from labor. If the bronze material is simply 4x the cost of iron, that's only a fairly small increase - +$21/lb, making bronze scale around +100% cost and bronze plate being something around +15% cost (bronze knives would be around +50% cost, bronze swords* around +10%).

Well, unless you're using something else to refer to "materials." Certainly, if your starting material is a sheet of metal from the platers or a sword blank, material cost is likely going to be more than the cost of labor. I suspect this may be the case, as you appear to be treating the materials for mail construction as the iron wire. Iron wire's high cost is, unless I'm mistaken, a combination of needing to be high-quality iron and, perhaps more importantly, the large amount of labor needed to turn that high-quality iron into strong iron wire.

*Assuming a bronze thrusting broadsword is possible; I've read before there are mechanical limitations to how large a bronze sword can get that an iron sword surpasses, but can't remember if the cut-off was a bit south of a broadsword or a greatsword.

Re: [LT Armor Loadouts] Expensive Greaves
 

You don't need to know the ratio. The cost of an item is (materials) + (labor), so if you replace one material with another material, the price difference is equal to the difference in material price.

Of course, a realistic modern figure is something like $0.25/lb for iron and $1/lb for bronze, and the GURPS constant dollar model implies that you should be able to use the same number at other TLs, which will make the cost difference between iron and bronze nearly irrelevant. That's a general problem with how GURPS does prices, though.

Re: [LT Armor Loadouts] Expensive Greaves
 

Aye. Multiply weight in pounds [1] by (price of a pound of bronze[2] - price of a pound of iron[2]) to get the additional price for using bronze rather than iron. It's not perfect (for example, some of the weight of any armor is straps and padding and so forth, and it fails to account for different qualities of iron with correspondingly different prices used in different armors), but every problem it has is one that the current system also has, so it should produce results that, while not perfect, are at least an improvement.

I certainly wouldn't use the modern price for the metals (I am fairly sure that raw metals are cheaper now than they were a thousand years ago even in comparison to other goods, so treating their current price as their historical price in GURPSBUCKS would be a poor approximation), but it should be possible to get workable values.

[1] Listed in the book.

[2] Neither of which vary by type of item or amount of labor needed.

EDIT: Low Tech: Daily Life & Economics p.22 suggests $6.90 for a pound for iron, which (assuming a fourfold multiplication for bronze) comes very close to a nice, round, $20 per pound increase for bronze rather than iron.

EDITEDIT: I see Varyon proceeds me in noting the "official" price of iron, and the values he calculates for different types of armors seem not implausible and (perhaps more importantly) quite gamable.

Re: [LT Armor Loadouts] Expensive Greaves
 

It should be pointed out that a hoplite who has a leg injured too badly to allow standing and walking is very likely to die shortly thereafter. It's a wound that's difficult to survive, because you'll get trampled during the battle, and if you're still alive afterwards, you can't march home again. Plus all the other joys of low-tech injury and medicine.

Re: [LT Armor Loadouts] Expensive Greaves
 

I misread that as "Explosive Greaves" and was picturing shin-mounted claymore mines.

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Assuming the change in material doesn't change the labor. Realistically, each material would have one multiplier to material cost and a different multiplier to labor cost, and then that could be further modified by the exact construction method (some metals do fine for bars and plates, but are lousy for being draw into wire, for example).
Or maybe primitive reactive armor.

Re: [LT Armor Loadouts] Expensive Greaves
 

For rigid armour, being of Average Quality implies that the armour is already tailored to fit a specific individual. You can see Expert Tailoring and Masterful Tailoring as a combination of better tailoring and better materials that reduces weight, Holdout and the chances to hit chinks in armour: the first of the two things makes more difficult, if not impossible, to adapt the Expertly/Masterfully Tailored piece of armour to a new wearer.

Re: [LT Armor Loadouts] Expensive Greaves
 

Sure, but we're not comparing this scheme to some ideal, we're comparing it to CFs.

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Ditto. Everytime I've seen the thread title I've thought "Explosive greaves? That puts new meaning into hop-lite..."

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Personally, I have never had much issue with the multiplier for bronze. Metals were valuable in TL4- societies. In addition, pure enough sources of tin and copper to allow for armor and weapon quality bronze were quite difficult to find, so bronze with contaminates (suitable for household items) was probably 10% the cost of better quality bronze (suitable for armor and weapons).

Re: [LT Armor Loadouts] Expensive Greaves
 

But is such a large spread between, say, scale and plate appropriate? Using +3 CF, bronze scale armor costs $80/lb; assuming the cost of labor is the same as for iron scale (which is $7 iron, $13 labor, per lb), this puts the bronze for scale at around $63/lb - just shy of 10x the cost of iron. Bronze plate armor costs $500/lb; assuming the cost of labor is the same as for iron plate (which is $14 materials, $111 labor), this puts the bronze for plate at around $389/lb ($382/lb if we assume it uses the same amount of charcoal as iron plate) - over 50x the cost of iron, and over 6x the cost of bronze appropriate for scale.

Re: [LT Armor Loadouts] Expensive Greaves
 

There are a few places where GURPS steps away from this concept. Notably, the armor design Pyramid articles, where bronze/iron/steel drop markedly in cost at TL 5 (and TL 6 for steel), and more advanced materials tend to drop in price 1 TL after their introduction. Those do still have the issue of conflating material and labor cost together, of course. For example, as per "Low Tech Armor Design" (Pyramid #3/52), high-quality bronze (DR 68 per inch) shaped to fit a vehicle (or flat-top helmet) costs $100/lb, while comparable-quality iron costs $25/lb. Taking that same bronze and shaping it instead into plate armor increases cost by $300/lb, while doing the same to the iron increases cost by only $75/lb.

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Bronze scales are easier to replace if there is a mistake and easier to work because of the flexible nature of the armor. Fitting the bronze plate to an individual requires enormous effort, probably hundreds of hours of skilled labor, as adjusting it is quite difficult. Anyway, most hoplites wore linothroax, not bronze, so it was much less expensive (bronze was for wealthy citizens, not common folk).

Re: [LT Armor Loadouts] Expensive Greaves
 

We don't have much evidence but what little we have suggests that the organic armour worn by Greek hoplites was made from hide, not linen. Most of the references to linen armour in their texts talk about foreigners wearing it, not Greeks.

Re: [LT Armor Loadouts] Expensive Greaves
 

Yes, this is a big part of why plate costs more than scale. What of this is different from making iron armor? Perhaps fitting an already-made piece of bronze is more difficult than fitting an already-made piece of iron, as the former cannot be worked hot. However, you likely don't have to work the bronze into shape as much as you do the iron - you can create a mold based on the person you're fitting the armor to, and cast the bronze into that (and then making needed adjustments), rather than having to start with a sheet of metal and work it into shape. Which method requires more labor, or do they require roughly the same amount of labor? It seems like bronze would require a bit less labor, but I may be underestimating the labor involved in making the mold, casting, and cold-working it into final shape as opposed to making iron plates*, cutting them to size, and hot-working it all the way into shape.

*As mentioned in LTC3, you typically don't have the same people making the plates and making the armor. However, as we're just looking at materials and labor, it doesn't matter that the platers and the armourers aren't the same people, their labor counts the same.

Re: [LT Armor Loadouts] Expensive Greaves
 

Not at all, you are not casting thin sheets of bronze with a person as the mold. Castings are going to be far to thick to be of use as armor until worked. Casting weapons far more practical that armor.

So no you are not talking about much difference in the amount of working.

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You're right of course, I did a very bad job of explaining how steel is hardened or softened and why brass and bronze must be cold worked.

If you want steel to cool slowly, let it air cool, bury it in hot sand, or keep it in a slowly cooled oven. (FWIW, glass and some ceramics must also be cooled in this fashion to keep them from shattering as they cool.)

This is a big issue. Remember that the primary constituent in a brass or bronze alloy is copper, which is a semi-precious metal. Historical "copper pieces" might have been bits of cast or stamped brass or bronze.

By comparison to copper and tin, iron is extremely common although deposits of iron which are sufficiently rich to make it worth the trouble of mining them are a bit scarcer.

Re: [LT Armor Loadouts] Expensive Greaves
 

One factor which hasn't been mentioned yet is that rolling mills are TL5 technology.

In ancient and medieval times the way that you got metal sheet was by having people beat thicker ingots of metal flat. This took a lot of time and was a semi-skilled trade which occupied many people, many English surnames like Platner, Hammer, Green (for greensmith - AKA coppersmith), Black (for blacksmith) attest to this. They were also called "iron beaters" resulting in the German surname, Eisenhower.

So, even though low TL labor is cheap compared to high tech labor, it's still a tremendously labor intensive job.

All that hammering had the beneficial effect of helping to drive impurities (silica inclusions mostly) out of the steel, so hammered steel stock was slightly better quality than unhammered ingots.

Another factor is that to make big sheets of metal you need big ingots, which means that you must have bigger smelting and metal puddling facilities and huge amounts of fuel to feed the kilns. At some point, the mass of fuel, the size of the crucibles, and so forth gets so big that it's beyond the scale of what artisanal smelters can produce.

Technically, it's possible to forge weld sheets of steel together, but getting a good, strong, consistent forge weld across a large area is a tricky task even for the best smith. And, until the invention of brazing, it's impossible to join multiple sheets of brass, bronze, or copper.

The later Romans and the Chinese got close to producing steel and bronze on an industrial scale, but most places it was smaller scale artisan operations.

Finally, don't forget fuel costs. Smelting ore or heating large metal items is very fuel intensive. Entire forests were cut down to feed smelters and forges, which required the services of foresters and charcoal burners. The latter was semi-skilled seasonal work, but it was still artisanal hand labor. Industrial scale metal production had to wait until the widespread use of coal as a fuel.

Re: [LT Armor Loadouts] Expensive Greaves
 

How thin can you manage to cast something? A bit of research online indicates around 3 mm using sand casting or similar, which would be DR 6 when made of good bronze. That's thicker than the greaves we're talking about, so they probably can't be cast to shape (they need to be pounded out to get to the correct thickness, and that's not going to be easy to do if they're already shaped). The question, then, is how much more expensive it is to cold-work bronze into shape as opposed to hot-working iron into shape (hot-working is faster but uses up fuel - I assume the labor savings more than offsets the charcoal cost - and apparently isn't an option for bronze).

Of course, this suggests the possibility that DR 6+ bronze armor costs significantly less per pound than does thinner armor, which would certainly cause some... interesting effects.

I'd imagine all this is why metal goods cost a good deal more prior to TL 5. However, the discussion is how price should increase when you make armor out of bronze. The only way (outside of royal proclamations or similar) for bronze items to consistently* be 4x the cost of iron armor is if bronze costs 4x as much as iron and requires 4x as much labor (which may mean 4x as many man-hours, or workers that are paid 4x as much for their time, or some combination of more man-hours and more expensive workers). I don't really see anything in your post that indicates bronze would be more expensive to work than iron (aside from large plates being impossible to forge-weld, but you can get your big plate from casting, which is why bronze was still used for plate armor at TL 2).

*Over a variety of armors, that is. Realistically, the cost of bronze itself is going to vary wildly depending on the cost of copper and tin. The cost of iron can also vary, but probably not as much as bronze (iron's a pretty common metal, once you figure out how to work it).

Re: [LT Armor Loadouts] Expensive Greaves
 

Greaves are also one of the hardest pieces of armour to make, because they are intricately shaped and very thin. Today greaves and gauntlets tend to be the most expensive parts of a kit because most of the cost is labour. A friend who reads Italian archives found one 16th century armour guild which sold armour at a flat rate per ton.

Another problem is that in real life, cuts tend to land on the extremities: the head, lower legs, and arms. This is even more true in shield fighting. GURPS just uses one 'average' set of hit location modifiers and random hit location tables, and does not try to represent how hard it is to hit someone in the Chest or Abdomen behind a large shield. So in real life, a helmet and greaves are extremely important for a shield fighter, but in GURPS they are less valuable.

Re: [LT Armor Loadouts] Expensive Greaves
 

Cast iron is also generally an alloy that is well known for being brittle - it's not suitable for weapon or armour manufacture. There are steel alloys that can be cast and which aren't brittle, of course, but they aren't TL4- alloys.