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Post by Deleted on Aug 29, 2010 22:47:50 GMT
here's is a pic of a brigandine from an Osprey warrior book. It seems as if it's an "armored tunic" if you will. The book does not specify whether this specific one would be worn over or under mail, but both were possible. @ john: technically speaking, but you'd need to have the ready-made plates and tools to make holes on them which you'll need to get them into the fabric
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Post by Deleted on Aug 30, 2010 0:14:50 GMT
so if i could get the plates then i could in theory do it
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Post by Deleted on Aug 30, 2010 0:45:23 GMT
yea, if you can rivet them (which can be done fairly easily, but, of course, if you're using leather on both sides or even one, you'd obviously need to know how to work with leather).
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Post by Deleted on Aug 30, 2010 3:44:20 GMT
Brigandines were popular, but they are nothing like what MRL sells. Here is a typical brigandine such as was found as Visby: Visby BrigandineThe historical record has very, very slim pickings on leather armor (as stated above) for us to study. In fact, leather seems to be used suprisingly little. There are alot of misconceptions that the Vikings, Huns, etc used leather - like in the movies. This was not the case. By far and wide the most used armor would have been maille, followed by the implemention of plate elements. Early on this was bronze, then iron, then steel. Depending on what period you want to represent, the armor varied greatly. If you were a Viking, you would want a maille hauberk. If you were an early crusader, you would want a hauberk with mittens, coif, and maille leggings (chausses) - along with a transitional helm. If you were an early 1400s mercenary, you might want a brigandine, transitional arms and legs (leather with steel bands), and a klappvisor or pigsnout helm. If you were a later period, you might want a whole plate harness with no leather at all. It all depends on the period. From what I know: SCA armor is much, much thicker than actual historical armor, and is not very accurate from what I have seen because it is geared to prevent injury in sport fighting. The suits I have seen are poorly articulated and the armor does not always offer a good fit - which is essential to distribute weight properly. This mainly always comes back to the fact it has to be much thicker than armors of antiquity. I have seen good sets of SCA plate armor on rare occasion, but these are custom jobs typically running several thousand dollars. By far and wide, most of the stuff I have seen looks like a hodge-podge of 6 different armor sets from 4 different historical periods. Good luck in your search... The thickness would have varied somewhat. Breastplates and helmets could be over 3mm thick in places, while limb armour seems to have been roughly 18-20 gauge in thickness. (Most of the measurments I have seen are from post-medieval armour, older armour may or may not have been thicker.)
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Post by Deleted on Aug 30, 2010 11:48:48 GMT
Try even lighter, Xerxes. 18-20 Gg for breastplates and Helms. Even less for non-vitals. Refer to the thread about cutting through helms into the head as shown in the Bayeaux Tapestry.
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Post by Deleted on Aug 30, 2010 14:20:51 GMT
I have never seen a helmet or breastplate measured anywhere near that thin, except at the edge, where they were intentionally thined. The Avant harness breastplate is around 4mm thick at the front, and several lames were measured at between 1.5-1.8 mm thick. The Avant harness is somewhat thicker than most surviving specimens, though it is also the oldest near complete suit, and one of the few actually from the Middle ages. Very little, if any, armour survives from the time period you reference, so any thickness estimates on armour that old would be mostly hypothetical. (The oldest Medieval armour I've seen measurments of are the weights of Great helms, many were lighter than SCA helms, though at least one was over 10 pounds, and it was missing a plate, as well as being corroded. It would have been heavier when new.)
Period art showing swords cutting through helms is probably artistic liscence, similar art shows type X swords sticking though both sides of people wearing mail, which I find unbelievable. (From the measurments posted on Allen's site, I would say 18-20 gauge is a normal range for later limb armour.)
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Post by Deleted on Aug 30, 2010 15:55:24 GMT
1440 was late period. Armour quality, style and thickness had all improved/increased significantly over the course of the 100 Years' War. And Llames have always varied wildly in thickness, as in every other dimension.
SCA combat rules are based on the Norman harness of circa 1066. Never assume Medieval art or literature to be fanciful due to artistic license or anything else. Too much has already been proven accurate. And there is testing within the SCA going on involving exact recreations of extant pieces from across the middle ages. Thus far it appears that armour was pretty much a 1-shot deal. It'll stop 1 hit in that location, maybe, but no more. "Maybe" is because a lot of the time, the armour only lessens the damage to the body.
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Post by Deleted on Aug 31, 2010 1:54:13 GMT
helmets are the thickest part of any harness, so it's safe to say they'd be 12-14 ga. Breastplate probably 14 ga. too, afterward, probably 14-16 ga. I don't think 18 ga would be good enough, but then again, you probably would have maille and padding under that, so...
I have to say though, I wouldn't take SCA as a basis for much... it's cool and everything, but their attention to historical detail is lacking... I mean, I've seen guys in the SCA with Corinthian helmets and two swords, so...
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Post by Deleted on Aug 31, 2010 2:15:10 GMT
helmets are the thickest part of any harness, so it's safe to say they'd be 12-14 ga. Breastplate probably 14 ga. too, afterward, probably 14-16 ga. I don't think 18 ga would be good enough, but then again, you probably would have maille and padding under that, so... I have to say though, I wouldn't take SCA as a basis for much... it's cool and everything, but their attention to historical detail is lacking... I mean, I've seen guys in the SCA with Corinthian helmets and two swords, so... Elbow/knee cops might have been 16 gauge sometimes, though I think it would be uncommon for most limb armour to be thicker than 18 gauge. Then again, thickness measurments on older armours are generally lacking, so I'm just guessing. (even a crudely formed 20-gauge mild steel knee cop will stop a machete, and mild steel is barely stronger than iron) I'm sure helms (more likely in earlier periods) were occasionaly cut into, though in the Maciejowski Bible it seems to be shown multiple times in many battle scenes, which is almost certianly an overdramatization. Armour was expensive to make, and wouldn't have been used if it was useless.
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Post by Deleted on Aug 31, 2010 2:49:36 GMT
well, just because it deforms, it doesn't mean it's bad. Though they had some kind of steel in use for weapons, Greeks preferred bronze for armor because it would deform rather than break, so, again, a lot of it depends on your mentality... but then again, chances are (good) armor would probably be tempered
Also, in "Weapons that made Britain" they actually try to recreate one of the scenes from the Bible... needless to say, it fails. The strength of the helmet does not only come in its thickness/material, but also from its shape. Going back to the Maciejowski Bible, cutting into a spherical object (unless you hit at the plane where the imaginary circle is perpendicular to the ground and your sword comes down directly straight) is very hard, the blow is most likely to glance off. As I said once before (when we were talking about someone cutting through a machine gun barrel with a katana), it's not that easy to cut a piece of steel with steel, especially when the first piece of steel is designed not to be easily destructible...
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Post by Deleted on Aug 31, 2010 4:39:50 GMT
well, just because it deforms, it doesn't mean it's bad. Though they had some kind of steel in use for weapons, Greeks preferred bronze for armor because it would deform rather than break, so, again, a lot of it depends on your mentality... but then again, chances are (good) armor would probably be tempered Also, in "Weapons that made Britain" they actually try to recreate one of the scenes from the Bible... needless to say, it fails. The strength of the helmet does not only come in its thickness/material, but also from its shape. Going back to the Maciejowski Bible, cutting into a spherical object (unless you hit at the plane where the imaginary circle is perpendicular to the ground and your sword comes down directly straight) is very hard, the blow is most likely to glance off. As I said once before (when we were talking about someone cutting through a machine gun barrel with a katana), it's not that easy to cut a piece of steel with steel, especially when the first piece of steel is designed not to be easily destructible... I actually saw that on youtube a little while ago, that's about what I think would have generally happened. The helmet they used in the test didn't even seem that thick, either. An armours shape is just as important as it's thickness. Which is probably why bascinets evolved to be so pointy they looked like coneheads. During the middle ages, Italian armour tended to have the best temper/metalurgy, which is probably why it was exported so much. (As was their soap )
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Post by Deleted on Aug 31, 2010 10:04:34 GMT
Here's an armor from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC. You can see where the plates are riveted(?) to the tunic.
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Post by Deleted on Aug 31, 2010 23:03:47 GMT
helmets are the thickest part of any harness, so it's safe to say they'd be 12-14 ga. Breastplate probably 14 ga. too, afterward, probably 14-16 ga. I don't think 18 ga would be good enough, but then again, you probably would have maille and padding under that, so... I have to say though, I wouldn't take SCA as a basis for much... it's cool and everything, but their attention to historical detail is lacking... I mean, I've seen guys in the SCA with Corinthian helmets and two swords, so... The thicknesses you just listed are the common thicknesses for those pieces in the SCA. Several major reasons we wear such heavy gear and they are the same reasons late tourney gear was so heavy. First, we don't wear it for very long. A couple hours at most. So how quickly it wears us down isn't as important. Secondly, we're protecting purely against blunt force trauma and we're far less interested in any injuries of any kind than medieval fighters were. They wanted to survive, primarily, without major, crippling or disfiguring injuries, secondly. Third, we don't usually wear all the padding underneath that, historically, would have been the blunt force protection and would have added additional protection against piercing and cutting. And, finally, Steel was Inordinantly expensive in the Middle Ages. It's far more affordable to us now. We can Afford such big, thick pieces of steel. So we use them. Only the late tourney gear even Approached the thickness of metal that we use in the SCA (and often exceeded it). There is currently a small but growing movement toward more historically accurate gear. The folks I have spoken to regarding it say it's mostly because of how hard we hit. That's what drove them to do the initial testing of historically accurate arms and armour. There was an argument about whether we were historically accurate with how hard we hit or not. The argument grew out of some people not liking being hit so hard. Broken arms and thighs and collar bones from rattan. The answer is that we Don't hit with historically accurate force. We hit FAR harder because we use far thicker, heavier armour. And, finally, with the extant pieces from the 14th century and older, metal thickness rarely exceeds 16Gg, even for helms and breastplates and is Usually lighter.
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Post by Deleted on Sept 1, 2010 1:18:09 GMT
All the bascinet thickness measuements I've seen were thicker then 16 gauge at their thickest. The ones I saw listed ran about 2 - 2.5 mm at the front/top, thinning out to about 1.2 - 1.5 mm at the bottom/sides.
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Post by Deleted on Sept 1, 2010 4:21:32 GMT
At points, perhaps. But certainly not throughout. As with the rest of the body, the most vulnerable/vital areas would get the heaviest armour. Weight and fatigue were extremely important to the warriors of the day.
But you're just not getting 4.5 Pound helms from 14-16 Gg steel. I wear 14 Gg and even without the plate aventail, it's more than double that weight. Pretty close to triple. That seems to be a pretty typical weight for bascinets with the rare occurrence running up to almost 13 Lbs including aventail (Churburg #13, Deutsches Historisches Museum). That may be 16Gg, but it's still a touch light, imo.
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Post by Deleted on Sept 1, 2010 15:57:11 GMT
Someone on MyArmoury posted he had made a bascinet with a 14 gauge skull and 16 gauge sides, and it came out at about 5 pounds, which he said was a weight within the range of pieces he had examined. GDFB lists their 14 gauge bascinets as 6 1/2 to 7 1/2 pounds including the visor. Assuming that's accurate, I could attatch a 7 pound bascinet to a 5 pound aventail and still be within the upper historical weight range. (heaviest mentioned on MyArmoury's bascinet feature is 15.69 lbs with aventail.) And historical aventails were probably only around 2.5 - 4 pounds. given how light accurate reproduction mail can be.
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Post by Deleted on Sept 1, 2010 16:10:15 GMT
IMO, the Braveheart Brigandine is not accurate, especially for the turn of the 14th century. Get it if you like it, though I doubt it was intended for historical reenactment groups or SCA.
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