[LT] Leather (& Textile) weight issues and Scaling to size.

[Trachmyr]

I've been trying to put together a comprehensive set of leather (& Textile) clothing/armor creation rules, but I am having serious trouble reconciling them with Low-Tech.

Standard Armor-Weight leather is 13/15 oz, this is per square foot. Lighter Leather would be 7/8 oz for DR1 versions (recently often called LARP weight), 3/4 oz for heavy garment/moccasin weight (DR0* +1 vs. Cutting), and 1.5/2.5 oz for Garment weight (no DR, treat as Ordinary Clothing).

Low-Tech seems to base armor on using 13/15 oz armor-grade leather weight at over DOUBLE the the surface area of a male.

For example, if I were to make in actualtity, a real, but simple leather curiass, from armor-grade Leather (13/15oz per square foot), I would need a 28in x 44 in project piece. This would leave the arms bare at the shoulder down, and would cover the chest and abdomen, but not groin. Total material weight would be 7.5 pounds without removing material for fitting... which with my skill level (Dabbler w/ Decent IQ & Taking extra time), would be a wash with the straps and buckles I would need to add. By Low-Tech, a fitted curiass covering those regions would weigh 11.4 pounds, maybe a bit less if I consider that it doesn't offer full protection to the abdomen, at 3in6 coverage (which is definately less than what my example is) this still would be 10.2 pounds, more than a third heavier!

Here's a simple one, a pair of vambraces, I would start out with two rectangular pieces of 13x10 inches, and 13/15oz weight. Weight would be about 1.6 pounds after removing trimmed material towards the wrist, but adding cords and eyelets. By Low-Tech, the weight would be 2.4 pounds! I'm constantly finding Low-Tech to be about 50% heavier than simple, barely-fitted, amateur efforts in the real world.

...and that's not taking into effect that I'd be a ST-12, 225-pound guy by GURPS rules... trying to outfit a 130 pound woman gives you extremely HARSH numbers.
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If there are any folks who were part of the playtest for LT (or Dan Howard, if you're reading this), I'd really love to know what assumptions you made to get the numbers you have for Leather.

As for fixes, I dunno, I could simply use lighter weights, but this would skew all the other armor types, making Leather & Textiles superior to many other versions... even after Dan Howards' suggested correction for Scale and Segmented plate.

One thing would be to scale weight based on HP (then assume the Table uses base weights for characters larger than 10HP). Scaling has been discussed before, and generally arrives at overly-harsh effects for high HP. However, if we were to assume that RACIAL weight is found by using the Cube-Law, but individual Weight is found by a Square, taking into account for increase in mass and efficiency (which also jives much better with the Height & Weight chart), then we could extrapolate a linear sizing increase amongst individuals of a race. 10 HP gives 1.0x armor weight, 13 HP gives 1.3x armor weight, HP 8 gives 0.8x Armor weight. Lowered weights would have the same cost*, and increased weights would have a a similar increase in cost but -30%* (no less than 100%). In this case, if most armor on the table assumes a ST/HP 12 man, we could reduce weights across the board by 1/6th to find new bases.

I would then reccomend using HP rather than ST in calculations involving mass, such as damage threshold for knockback. [I]* And I would use the smae effect on cost as weight if the value of the armor or clothing is primarily due to material (i.e., Bronze or Silk).

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Edited to Add: Ofcourse, I must give "room" in any base weights to allow for tailoring's reduction of weight, but given the large CF for tailoring, I can't assume that "Typical" fitted armor would include it.

This is the number I worked out:

Assuming a base of about 20.5 square feet for the average human (actually, the avergae man, women are about 17.4, but this can be chalked up to a lower average Mass/HP), and the Toso having about 36% of that surface area (Burn Victim claculations), this gives 7.4 square feet for the torso. Let's assume that a Expertly fitted armor will require about 5% more material than skin surface area, bring this to 7.8 SF, then divide by .7 to account for Expert Tailoring, we get 11.2 square feet. Multiply this by 14 ounces per square foot, and we arrive at 9.8 pounds. Let increase this to 10 pounds to accomodate fastners, laces, etc. IF we rule that the table in Low-Tech assumes HP12, then we would be right on target.

So it appears that reducing Weights in the table to 5/6ths listed, and scale linearly with increase or decrease in HP, we would have numbers which match the real world. However, Tailoring then becomes an issue, it's simply too costly, and should be avialble earlier on. Additionally, a cheap version of armor that increase weight by about 20% should be available (-0.2cf). I'd reccomend Tailoring to use the following, and allowing it for TL0:

Tailoring TL0
Flexible Leather/Textiles: Cost is +0.05CF per % of weight reduction up to 20%, plus +0.1CF per additional % of reduction up to 30%.
Ridgid Leather/Textiles & Flexible Others: Cost is +0.1CF per % of weight reduction up to 20%, plus +0.2CF per additional % of reduction up to 30%.
Ridgid Others: Cost is +0.15CF per % of weight reduction up to 20%, plus +0.3CF per additional % of reduction up to 30%.
Expert Tailoring TL1: Min. Weight reduction is 15%, and double the CF. Gives -1 to Targeting Chinks in armor, bonus to holdout, etc.
Masterful Tailoring TL1: Min. Weight reduction is 25%, and CF is 5x normal. Gives -2 to Targeting Chinks in armor, bonus to holdout, etc.