Low-Tech Armor with the Strength of Ten Men

[Varyon]

I've always interpreted the Max DR values from the armor design articles in Pyramid to correspond to the maximum thickness before you run into DX penalties. One of the later articles allows twice this for the Head, and personally I'd allow this for the Chest as well, at least for 5/6 or less coverage. Reduced Max DR near the joints might also make sense - maybe somewhere around 2/3-3/4 the nominal Max DR. In theory, it should also be possible to design armor that can be layered without a DX penalty, but if you then wore the outer layer without the inner (or with an inner layer of a different thickness) you'd suffer DX penalties for wearing armor that doesn't fit properly. For determining how thick you can get without a DX penalty, flexible materials seem to go out to around 0.5", rigid out to around 0.2". For purpose-designed layers of flexible + rigid, for simplicity I'd just require the rigid layer to not exceed 0.2" and the combination to not exceed 0.5". Going beyond this is probably at least -1 DX per +1 SSR (x1.5, x2, x3, x5, etc), and honestly I'd expect the penalties to build up faster than that.

For a normally-sized person with the strength of 10 men, he has BL 200. Going with the above and maximum thickness, his armor is 0.4" thick on the head (I'd personally do it 0.4" on the skull, 0.2" elsewhere), 0.4" thick for 5/6 coverage on the Front Chest, 0.15" or so thick near the joints, and 0.2" thick elsewhere. It'll be Plate, and he'll be wearing an arming garment with voiders of DR 4/2* mail (the mail is such a small amount of weight I'm assuming if heavy mail were an option, it would have been used). Realistically (based on previous comments from Dan Howard), Strong Steel with a layer of Hardened Steel is the best that can be managed at TL 4, with the latter giving +1 DR, but we'll ignore that for now and just go with Strong Steel. That's DR 28 armor on the Skull (total DR 30) and for 5/6 protection for the Front Chest, DR 11 near the joints, DR 4/2* for most of the armor gaps, and DR 14 elsewhere. Total weight for plate is somewhere around 210 lb (so long as the rest of his gear weighs no more than 190 lb, he's at Light Encumbrance), with a price tag of around $52,000. Ignoring Ornate, a tricked-out version would be Masterfully Tailored, Fluted Duplex Plate, with Hardened Steel for the voiders (note Duplex Plate is basically Hardened Steel +). That drops weight to around 105 lb (with 95 lb or less of other gear, he's at No Encumbrance), boosts all DR by +1, makes it harder to target chinks/gaps in the armor, and increases price to around $2.2M. Do note such a character is very nearly immune to musket fire (most of his DR is 15, while the musket averages 16 damage), and the thicker pieces of his armor can protect against small cannon (the falconet and smaller, and the swivel-gun).