[LT Armor Loadouts] Expensive Greaves

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by DanHoward

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

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.

[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.

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by Varyon

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.

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.

[cptbutton]

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

[RyanW]

Originally Posted by Anthony

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.

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).

Originally Posted by cptbutton

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

Or maybe primitive reactive armor.

[Rasna]

Originally Posted by CarrionPeacock

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...

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.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by RyanW

Assuming the change in material doesn't change the labor.

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

[evileeyore]

Originally Posted by cptbutton

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

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

[AlexanderHowl]

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).