Steve Jackson Games - Site Navigation
Home General Info Follow Us Search Illuminator Store Forums What's New Other Games Ogre GURPS Munchkin Our Games: Home

Go Back   Steve Jackson Games Forums > Roleplaying > GURPS

Reply
 
Thread Tools Display Modes
Old 02-04-2023, 07:47 AM   #31
DanHoward
 
DanHoward's Avatar
 
Join Date: Mar 2005
Location: Maitland, NSW, Australia
Default Re: [Low-Tech]Question about silk horse armor

Quote:
Originally Posted by Pursuivant View Post
Beating lumps of bloom iron into iron plates to get the slag inclusions out requires much bigger chunk of metals to start with and much more human and thermal energy.
Mail requires the metal to be highly refined so that most of the slag has either been removed or finely distributed throughout the metal. Otherwise it can't be pulled through the drawplate. Plate can be made from poorer quality iron.
__________________
Compact Castles gives the gamer an instant portfolio of genuine, real-world castle floorplans to use in any historical, low-tech, or fantasy game setting.
DanHoward is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 02-04-2023, 07:49 AM   #32
DanHoward
 
DanHoward's Avatar
 
Join Date: Mar 2005
Location: Maitland, NSW, Australia
Default Re: [Low-Tech]Question about silk horse armor

Quote:
Originally Posted by Inky View Post
I've possibly read somewhere (Wikipedia possibly) that mail armour might in fact have been cheaper than plate armour in some times and places.
The cost of mail and plate is covered here.
http://myarmoury.com/feature_mail.html

The only plate that is more expensive than mail, is a custom tailored fully articulated suit.

Giovanni Michiel was a Venetian Ambassador to Queen Mary and King Philip. This comes from his "Report of England", written to the Venetian Senate on the 13th May, 1557. He is describing what regular English fighters wore to battle and tells us that plate armour was the least preferable of all the armours available - only worn by those who couldn't afford something better such as mail or a jack or a padded doublet.

"... and for the body they either use some sort of breastplate (qualche petto di corsaletto) which guards the forepart, although indifferently, or else more willingly (especially those who have the means) some jack (giaco) or shirt of mail (camicia di maglia); but what they usually wear are certain padded canvas jupons (giubboni di canevaccio imbottiti), each of which is double high, two fingers or more in thickness (doppi alti due dita); and these doublets are considered the most secure defence against the shock of arrows. Upon their arms they place strips of mail (liste di maglia), put lengthways, and nothing else."
__________________
Compact Castles gives the gamer an instant portfolio of genuine, real-world castle floorplans to use in any historical, low-tech, or fantasy game setting.

Last edited by DanHoward; 02-04-2023 at 08:00 AM.
DanHoward is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 02-04-2023, 07:53 AM   #33
DanHoward
 
DanHoward's Avatar
 
Join Date: Mar 2005
Location: Maitland, NSW, Australia
Default Re: [Low-Tech]Question about silk horse armor

Quote:
Originally Posted by Anthony View Post
Well, the main historical reason is that for most of TL 2 and 3 large iron or steel plates simply weren't available and mail compares well to the various armors that are made of small plates linked together. Once large plates were available the point of mail became "I want flexible or concealable armor".
The size of the bloom required to make a breastplate isn't much larger than one to make a one-piece helmet. The skill required to make the helmet is greater than that required to make a breastplate.
__________________
Compact Castles gives the gamer an instant portfolio of genuine, real-world castle floorplans to use in any historical, low-tech, or fantasy game setting.
DanHoward is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 02-04-2023, 12:57 PM   #34
malloyd
 
Join Date: Jun 2006
Default Re: [Low-Tech]Question about silk horse armor

Quote:
Originally Posted by Donny Brook View Post
Was the utility consideration applied to other prices? Weapons? Tools? Adventure gear? Is there a formula readers could use to unpack the utility factor to derive a more historical price?
The point here is there is no such thing as a historical price to be derived. Or a modern one either. The price of everything varies all over the place all the time with (sometimes hyperlocalized) supply, demand, and availability of information.

People throughout history have wanted there to be a just or fair or true price of things, but it's a fantasy and always has been. I've said before than I think game prices would be more "accurate" if they were all rounded to the nearest power of 10, but nobody would stand for that.
__________________
--
MA Lloyd
malloyd is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 02-04-2023, 02:03 PM   #35
Anthony
 
Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: Berkeley, CA
Default Re: [Low-Tech]Question about silk horse armor

Quote:
Originally Posted by DanHoward View Post
The size of the bloom required to make a breastplate isn't much larger than one to make a one-piece helmet.
And when did one-piece helmets become standard? Looks like early helmets (unless bronze) were more likely to be constructed of multiple pieces (spangenhelm).
__________________
My GURPS site and Blog.
Anthony is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 02-04-2023, 02:23 PM   #36
sir_pudding
Wielder of Smart Pants
 
sir_pudding's Avatar
 
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Ventura CA
Default Re: [Low-Tech]Question about silk horse armor

Quote:
Originally Posted by malloyd View Post
People throughout history have wanted there to be a just or fair or true price of things, but it's a fantasy and always has been. I've said before than I think game prices would be more "accurate" if they were all rounded to the nearest power of 10, but nobody would stand for that.
That would make quite a lot of useful things free.
sir_pudding is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 02-04-2023, 03:53 PM   #37
RGTraynor
 
RGTraynor's Avatar
 
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Pioneer Valley
Default Re: [Low-Tech]Question about silk horse armor

Quote:
Originally Posted by Donny Brook View Post
Was the utility consideration applied to other prices? Weapons? Tools? Adventure gear? Is there a formula readers could use to unpack the utility factor to derive a more historical price?
Look, in too many cases, it's a fiat, and we just have to go with it. This is, after all, a field where some of the more honest medieval economists put in the prefaces of their books that so much of what we "know" are in fact educated guesses ... from the availability of goods, to the value of coinage, to what things were.

Case in point: one of my more prized volumes is Medieval Trade in the Mediterranean World, by the eminent economic historians Robert Lopez and Irving Raymond. It's largely commentary wrapped around hundreds of original documents and sources, which I appreciate -- I want to read the original documents for myself and make my own conclusions. Among the many documents in the book is a comprehensive list of nearly three hundred trade goods as given in Pegolotti's 14th century Florentine text The Practice of Commerce.

There are over three dozen footnotes in the section, either giving the authors' interpretation (or best guess) of what they think a particular item is, or in a number of cases leaving the term untranslated from the original Italian, conceding that they had no idea what it could have been.

And this from two of the most eminent medieval economists of the past century. So I'm thinking, with the best of intentions, that we aren't going to come up with more accurate answers among us for some of these thornier questions.
__________________
My gaming blog: Apotheosis of the Invisible City

"Call me old-fashioned, but after you're dead, I don't think you should be entitled to a Dodge any more." - my wife

It's not that I don't understand what you're saying. It's that I disagree with what you're saying.
RGTraynor is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 02-04-2023, 04:00 PM   #38
malloyd
 
Join Date: Jun 2006
Default Re: [Low-Tech]Question about silk horse armor

Quote:
Originally Posted by sir_pudding View Post
That would make quite a lot of useful things free.
Nah, there is no power n such that x^n = 0 for x !=0.
It does make cheap useful things cost $10 or $1 or $0.1.

And yeah, it flattens out a lot of resource allocation decisions when most hand weapons cost $100 and most good armors cost $1000, but that's sort of the point about unrealistic pricing by utility, it's largely there to [enable] those kind of play issues, which may well not be realistic.
__________________
--
MA Lloyd

Last edited by malloyd; 02-04-2023 at 04:08 PM.
malloyd is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 02-04-2023, 04:27 PM   #39
DanHoward
 
DanHoward's Avatar
 
Join Date: Mar 2005
Location: Maitland, NSW, Australia
Default Re: [Low-Tech]Question about silk horse armor

Quote:
Originally Posted by Anthony View Post
And when did one-piece helmets become standard?
The Romans turned out thousands of them.
__________________
Compact Castles gives the gamer an instant portfolio of genuine, real-world castle floorplans to use in any historical, low-tech, or fantasy game setting.
DanHoward is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 02-04-2023, 04:41 PM   #40
Polydamas
 
Join Date: Jan 2006
Location: Central Europe
Default Re: [Low-Tech]Question about silk horse armor

Quote:
Originally Posted by malloyd View Post
The point here is there is no such thing as a historical price to be derived. Or a modern one either. The price of everything varies all over the place all the time with (sometimes hyperlocalized) supply, demand, and availability of information.

People throughout history have wanted there to be a just or fair or true price of things, but it's a fantasy and always has been. I've said before than I think game prices would be more "accurate" if they were all rounded to the nearest power of 10, but nobody would stand for that.
Yes, prices can be generic and universal or they can fit a specific place and time but not both. There is no way to square that circle. In addition, games only represent some of the reasons people choose object A over object B, so for game balance it would be necessary to tweak prices anyways.

Around the year 1500, Henry VIII's Great Wardrobe paid about 4s (48d) a yard for the cheapest silks (saracenet, perhaps similar to modern taffeta), and 6d an ell for basic linen shirting. The linen was probably 50-100% wider than the silk and an English ell is longer than an English yard, so that gets you silk being ~10 times as expensive as linen. Source: Caroline Johnson, The King's Servants
__________________
"It is easier to banish a habit of thought than a piece of knowledge." H. Beam Piper

This forum got less aggravating when I started using the ignore feature
Polydamas is offline   Reply With Quote
Reply

Tags
low-tech, silk road

Thread Tools
Display Modes

Posting Rules
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts

BB code is On
Fnords are Off
[IMG] code is Off
HTML code is Off

Forum Jump


All times are GMT -6. The time now is 03:09 AM.


Powered by vBulletin® Version 3.8.9
Copyright ©2000 - 2024, vBulletin Solutions, Inc.