lorica segmentata

[NeoSpartan]

Oh come on guys not again, not again its like the 3rd time this S*T comes up since I've been here.

[Zaknafien]

hehe. (someone shouts) but what about lorica musculata?

[antisocialmunky]

Linothorax all the way!

[edyzmedieval]

This is one of the hottest threads about EB. Why no Lorica Segmentata?

Gotta ask it too.

[MarcusAureliusAntoninus]

[Watchman]

"'Cause it's so next century."

[mAIOR]

Well, I believe there's alot of misconception about steel in the Classical era. Most people say that steel was invented in the 18th century however this is untrue. In the 18th century people started to produce Steel in industrial quantities. Steel is a junction of iron and carbon so, not very hard to discover.
Now steel is believed to be around long before that. I don't know if Roman armor or weapons were steel I never read anything regarding that subject. But, finelly tempered iron can be tough as hell. And, as Watchman pointed, Longbow is way over rated. The best bow around is the composite bow eastern style. And, plate armor was always at advantage regarding chain. You said that from experience mail is more flexible. Can you assure us that the LS shirt you used was built on Roman standards? For you to have a Clue, a 16th century fully incased warrior had less weight on his shoulders than a British WWI soldier with full gear. So, they had plenty mobility as you can see. Now, LS in general I saw some schematics in a book I own and only 2 layers in fact overlap exept in the shoulders where you can have as much as 4 and the unshielded arm would be a much valued target as it would be the most xposed part of the body.


Cheers...

[Watchman]

Europeans came up with a better furnace around the 1300s AD that, unlike the earlier ones, allowed the production of reasonably homogenous steel in reasonable qualities; plate armour would not have been viable otherwise. The earlier bloomeries just produced small amounts of steel as a side effect, and getting it out of the chunks of iron was a trick by itself. The edges of weapons and so on could be "built up" of such small bits and pieces, but making armour out of them was somewhat hopeless.

Now, there are of course other ways to temper iron into steel, and those were widely enough known and used. The trouble was that it was very difficult to control the processes closely enough to result in homogenous results in larger pieces (one reason why long swords were so much more expensive than short ones), and indeed even after the developement of tempered steel plate armour laminated animé cuirasses were sometimes used simply because it was by far easier to keep the metallurgy even across a single lame than an entire breastplate...

Mail is neat stuff, and its flexibility (comparable to that of heavy cloth AFAIK) kept it useful for joint protection and such even after as-such more efficient forms of protection (like solid steel plate) became available. Its downsides include a somewhat time-consuming manufacturing process, a certain inherent vulnerability to pointy stuff that can get right into the links, fairly hefty weight, and the blunt fact that by itself a shirt or hauberk will hang from the shoulders and as such burden them with more or less its entire weight. This can be partially mitigated by transferring some of the weight to the hips with a belt, but was nonetheless a bit of an insoluble problem. Stiffer forms of armour could be easier "wrapped" to the relevant body parts, spreading the load more evenly, or simply had better weight/protection ratios (like solid steel plate again - there were good reasons why that became the military norm as soon as economic considerations allowed), but as usual it was ultimately always a question of what facet you wished to emphasize and at what cost.

[mAIOR]

And not to forget, mail can be easilly torn and shred by a long weapon (espetially pole weapons). And I meant those processes of tempering iron (not sure you can call tempering into steel as steel was achieved previously when melting and forming the iron)... Anyhow, LS in my view was superior in terms of protection to LH and all the facts stated here lead to that opinion.


Cheers...

[hoom]

I dunno what the EB guys say but its my understanding that Carthage had furnaces of a type capable of producing quite significant amounts of at least high-quality Iron & with indication that it was pretty much good steel that was coming out of them.

Certainly the Romans were very careful to capture & put to work the metalsmiths of Carthago Nova.