lamellar armour

[artavazd]

i know what scale armour looks like, and i understand what it is, but i dont fully understan what lamellar armour is. Can someone educate me on this

[Watchman]

Put simply, it's a lot of small metal plates with holes drilled in the edges, threaded together with something suitable in horizontal rows which are also threaded into each other by their upper and lower edges. Normally made so that the upper half of each row overlaps the lower half of the row above it; I'm not entirely familiar with the reason for this, but as it seems to have been very much an universal way to put the things together the reason must have been sound.

I once knew an article that did a *very* good job explaining the construction of the stuff; I'll see if I can hunt it down.

[artavazd]

sounds very much like scale armour. Scale armour goes vertical, and all fo the metal pieces overlap. from what i understand lammellar armour goes horizontal, and only the top metal overlaps the bottom one. In scale it overlaps horizontaly and verticaly. am i correct on my assumtion?

[Watchman]

Not quite. Individual lamellae also overlapped the one next to them - else there's been gaps between them, after all.

Probably the most important difference between scale and lamellar is that scale is fastened to some sort of backing - clotch, leather, hardened leather, whatever - whereas lamellar armour stays together by the threading that connects the lamellae to each other.

I couldn't locate the article I was thinking about (which had a detailed description of both the "international" lamellar and the improved version developed by the Byzantines), but found a few others:
http://www.regia.org/lamellar.htm
http://members.tripod.com/DeTyre/Articles/lamellar1.html

EDIT: Ah, this (http://www.levantia.com.au/military/KKK.html) would seem to be what I was looking for.

[artavazd]

intrestting. I think scale armour would be more effecient becasue it is already attached to a backing so all u hve to do is just wear it like clothes. since it is the same amount of armour ( the strenght), i thnk scale armour would be more effeceint

[Watchman]

It's not. For one, it notoriously has an issue with upwards stabs that slip between the scales... All the sources I've read suggest that per unit of weight (and assuming equal coverage and materials, the two types weigh roughly the same) lamellar is by far better at keeping you alive.

It is, alas, also rather more expensive. Scale armour is ultimately pretty simple to make; lamellar gets... complicated, which amounts to specialized know-how and so on which always raises the price. The amount of time spent drilling those holes in the umpteen small lamellae doesn't help at all.

As for "wearing it like clotches", no; the only metal armour (note that both scale and lamellar can and were made from other materials too) with which that is even remotely possible is mail, which for the most part behaves like heavy, thick clotch. Both lamellar and scale are by the necessity of their construction fairly stiff - lamellar by the need to pull the threads tight so the lamellae sit snugly together, scale by the virtue of the fact that most of the methods possible for attaching the scales to their backing end up puckering and otherwise "constraining" softer materials, resulting in a rather stiff overall piece.

Mail can be referred to as for example "shirt"; scale and lamellar of the same coverage are invariably called "corselets", for a good reason.

[artavazd]

thank you for the information. Since you have a good knowledge of the armour types would u by any chance know the type of armour cataphracts ( iranian and the armenian kind) wore. I know scale armour was populare and as you said easy to construct, but i have been doing research on trying to see the diffrence between iranian, and armenian forms of cataphracts. Im coming to the conclusion, that they both looked very similar( both had the horse coverd in armour), with only one diffrence that i have been able to find. For armenians, the conical helmet was popular and the iranians wore chain veils on their faces. I have always been intrested in trying to see if there was a diffrence between these two forms of cataphracts, since they are militarly closly linked to eachother.

[Watchman]

AFAIK those fellows tended to have lamellar corselets backed by mail for body armour, whatever they considered the de rigeur sort of helmet (pendant mail veils to defend the face were popular at few points, but at solid face masks were AFAIK also used), and most representations I've seen of them have had their limbs protected with what is known as laminated armour - a series of overlapping narrow horizontal plates (lames, hence the name). The Romans used that construction too, both for the odd limb defense and for the famous lorica segmentata corselet.

AFAIK the horses tended to have bardings of scale, lamellar or laminate.

Note that this is purely generic and individuals might wear *very* different armouring schemes, the same way European knights did; to my knowledge standardization wasn't exactly the order of the day.

Functional differences between the many variations of the basic cataphract/clibanarius principle in the region were probably slim; warriors from different cultures and times would don gear that suited local and personal preferences, but the underlying concept of a very heavily armoured cavalryman on a barded horse wasn't compromised. The details of weaponry and tactics might be another thing, but those I don't know too much about (save that maces had long been popular in the Middle East as both status symbols and armour-busters, and lances were predictably ubiquitous).

[Kraxis]

THe point with scale amour among those cultures was rather simple. They used to fight in and against armies that used archery as the main means of damage. Against that scale is actually just as good as lamellar, some argue it is better but that is details. So the melee cavalry would need to get a lot of armour to survive in these archerydense battle. Since the opponents weren't often strong in melee the need to for a good melee armour wasn't all that vital and the scale fits these requirements very well on top of being rather cheap and easy/fast to make.

One should also consider the fact that while lamellar plates individually support each other in case of impacts the scales do not, given they are attached to a 'soft' backing that will bend away, moving the scales enough apart to disrupt the 'plate' of scales. So when it comes to a thrust or a heavy swing, the lamellar armour of equal weight can protect it's wearer much better.

[Steppe Merc]

Early Parthians and Armenians had scale (mianly because lamellar didn't really exist, or was very rare), as did other early Iranians. By the end of their rule, they started to convert to mail and lamelar, then totally did by the time of the Sassanians.
However some places continued to use scale, though lamellar became more popular (and it's prettier too, because you can alternate colors of the plates, either with different metal or laquer).

edit: artavazd, any chance you can come back to EB? Armenia's hurting for descriptions...

[Watchman]

Scale and lamellar are probably the oldest types of metal body armour known, anyway. The former was certainly known already in ancient Egypt (and the other chariot-using cultures of the region) thousands of years ago, and there are some hints lamellar may be only a slightly younger design.

[The Wizard]

Lamellar was first used by the Assyrians, as far as I know.

You could see lamellar armor as scale with rectangular instead of triangular pieces, riveted in the exact opposite way as scale. See it this way: scale faces downwards, lamellae face upwards.

I do not know which is better. Lamellar armor was used for a very long time -- Caucasian armies seemingly using it straight up until the 19th century, while the last military success to embrace it was Nadir Shah -- and was often combined with mail. Perhaps it was easier to make, or it offered better protection? Scale does not seem to have been as widely adopted, or used as long (it experienced a revival in brigandine armor, however).

[Watchman]

"Brigandine" (properly speaking coat-of-plates, but anyways) and scale are somewhat different - but related - animals. While their basic construction follows the same general principles (ie. many small plates attached to a base, usually by riveting) the practical differences are quite considerable.

Lamellar, in its standard "international" version, never even saw rivets. AFAIK it was fairly difficult and expensive to make, but on the flip side provided quite good protection. Scale was much easier and cheaper, but not as good. That didn't keep it from being used, though; aside from the uncommon solid-plate cuirasses it was about the dominant form of Bronze Age metal protection (lamellar being a close second), was widely used by the Romans side-by-side with mail and laminate, and generally popped up about anywhere and anytime you care to think about where metal body armour now was used at all. In some places people made scale armour the *really* old-fashioned way - they used pangolin hides...

[The Wizard]

Yep, the early Parthian nobles used horn or hoof to construct their scale corselets :yes:

Riveting, lacing, wo'eva, I know little of the fine points of armor making :san_grin:

[Watchman]

The Sarmatians, too. But then again back in the Bronze Age people had been making helmets out of boars' tusks... actually I think the Sarmatians did that, too.

Anyway, it's a bit of a question of using what works and is available. And horse nomads obviously had a much easier time coming by horse hooves than enough metal to work into armour...

[Steppe Merc]

Well they certaintly did have metal armor and weapons, but it was a lot easier to use horn or leather armor.

[Watchman]

Steppe nomads always had bit of an issue with metal supplies (it's not like their lifestyle was exactly conductive to extensive mining operations). AFAIK they usually had to trade or loot them, so naturally they used serviceable subsitutes fairly often. Medieval Middle Easterners got pretty good with applied leatherworking for about the same basic reason, although *their* problem was a blunt lack of deposits...

[Steppe Merc]

Well I know the early Turks for example were know for their metal working skills by the Chinese...

[Watchman]

It's one thing to be skilled at working metal once you have it; it's getting that far that was always slightly problematic for them... Of course, over time good old accumulation did its job.

[Kraxis]

One could even argue that the lack of metal forced them to be good with what they had. They couldn't just waste it...