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Originally Posted by Pursuivant
It's depressingly easy to drive a bodkin or target head arrow through unpadded riveted iron mail, whether or not it's mounted on a board or worn.
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Hardly. Properly riveted mail is very hard to penetrate even without padding. Mail saw continuous use for two thousand years and during that whole time the most common threat was from spears and arrows. The crappy riveted mail that is imported from India has little in common with extant museum samples.
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That's one of the the reason that mail was padded
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Mail was padded mainly to protect against blunt trauma. On a human body it protects fine against points with just a layer of clothing underneath.
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and it's also one of the reasons that mail was abandoned in favor of lamellar or plate.
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Mail was replaced with plate because plate became cheaper to make. Mail was never superseded by lamellar. Lamellar was usually only used when mail was unavailable or unaffordable.
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Bodkin head arrows have been found on medieval battlefields, in some cases imbedded in dead bodies.
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None of them were wearing mail.
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There have also been sheaves of bodkin point arrows found aboard the Mary Rose (16th century English warship, sank in battle with archers aboard).
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IIRC there were no arrowheads found at all. The types of arrowheads were guessed by the outline of rust impressions on the material on which they were resting
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So, that's pretty good evidence that they were either designed for, or could be used in, battle.
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They were used in battle but I can build a solid argument that the bodkin was intended for warbow flight arrows - not armour piercers.
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As for the mail, we both know that historical mail could have different diameter rings. He chose cheap mail with relatively large links. In GURPS terms, let's call it "Light Mail."
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Low-Tech would maybe call it "cheap" light mail. It can be torn apart with bare hands. This Indian mail is useless against weapons and I haven't seen an extant example that even vaguely resembles this stuff so put it in Fantasy-Tech, not Low-Tech.
Read this
http://www.myarmoury.com/feature_mail.html
and this
http://www.myarmoury.com/talk/viewtopic.php?t=19189