[LT Armor Loadouts] Expensive Greaves

[ravenfish]

Originally Posted by DanHoward

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

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.

[DanHoward]

Originally Posted by ravenfish

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.

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.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by DanHoward

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.

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.

[ravenfish]

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.

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by Anthony

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.

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.