If body armor could stop musket balls why did everyone stop using it for so long?

Steel cuirass remained in use up until WWII, primarily by cavalry. By that time, rifles and machine guns were firing bullets that were moving much faster and had more penetrative power, meaning that armor had to increase in size and weight to be effective. For example, Germany produced 500,000 suits of torso armor that weighed around 22lbs. It was only used by sentries and machine gunners due to the weight. As such, you see a general decline due to lack of practicality.

However in WWII the Russian military continued to produce steel breastplates. They were one-sided pieces of chest armor and consisted of a chest plate and a groin-thigh plate and weighed around 7lbs, they could stop a 9mm bullet from a MP-40 at 100m, and were primarily used by assault engineers and such.

>Senegalese Tirailleurs are addressed by an armored French Cuirassier at a 1913 Bastille Day parade.

Look up Demi-lancers
>armor was concentrated into the chest and shoulders with the intent of, at least, stopping a pistol shot from close range

Calvary could always wear heavy armor. The footman could not, and guess what the majority of armies turned into? Footmen.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but by WW1 even the French only wore the front cuirass, and only for show.

don't care if im late for the thresd but that is a cool cool photo

Pretty much. Those weren't for any sort of real protection just there because of tradition. The armor that he's talking about that were produced by Germany in WW1 and Russia in WW2 were only used by special troops, the standard infantryman did not use them. As far as I know, the entirety of a modern standard infantry fighting force wouldn't adopt widespread body armor until 1952 when the USMC adopted the M1951 flak vest, but even then it was only designed to stop fragmentation and it had no steel parts in it.

They would only realistically protect the men at longer ranges. At Short range armour is hopeless so many just stopped using it. Even in WW1 german centuries where issued with steel plate armour which could stop rifle shots under certain circumstances and generally was effective at stopping pistol rounds but it was just not worth the material costs or the extra weight.

You can take a 9mm to the gut with some kevlar but it still feels like a 90 mph baseball hit you in the gut and knocks the wind out of you.

youtube.com/watch?v=q-bnM5SuQkI

>not linking museum-sponsored footage using actual historical armor
youtube.com/watch?v=5hlIUrd7d1Q

Flak jackets were pretty common in ww2, and there were a few kinds of practical armour in use in ww1 but they werent common equipment

>flak jackets in WWII
For airmen, not infantry.

Just make it yourself!

Yeah, I know flak jackets were common among air forces in WW2 but I kinda meant for ground troops body armor wasn't really common. But actually the US flak vests for aircrewmen in WW2 were more like older armor because it was actually made using small interlocking plates of steel covered by fabric.

When bullets decreased in diameter this kind of armor became more and more useless, also it was expensive to manufacture and exhausting to carry, I guess.

Just a thought on this, seeing as the metal cuirasses were effective at stopping musket rounds but, from what i gathered here, too heavy/logistically clunky to equip whole armies with, how come the silk shirts used by the Chinese since fucking 0AD werent adopted in the west? You know, the kind where if hit by an arrow (or, lets assume, a musket ball) The projectile would penetrate, but the shirt would remain intact, immediately "dressing" the wound and greatly assisting removal. We know silk was traded from the east-west since forever, and i find it hard to think no westerner ever saw its effectiveness

Silk bulletproof vests were sold in the US in the 20s that could stop a pistol round. Thing is, they were $500 at the time, which I think was about the price of a new car. That, and it only worked because .32 ACP was popular at the time. I don't think 9x19 Parabellum or .45 ACP were common yet.

Sorry, checked my notes. They read
>Silk bulletproof vest: $800
>Thompson Submachine gun: $200
>Ford: $400

So twice that of a new car.
I'm not sure what armor you're talking about, I'm not well versed on the East, but I assume that the difference between stopping a handgun round and musket shot is comparable, somewhat.

IIRC Archduke Franz Ferdinand was wearing a silk bulletproof vest when he was assassinated.

It didn't help him because Princip shot him in the neck.

Those things work not because of any inherent property of silk, but because of how they're twisted and reinforced. A silk shirt won't stop an arrow.

And Europeans had been making linen gambesons for a long, long time, and they were very, very common at least when armor was being worn. Not entirely sure why they declined myself.

>gambesons
Replaced by buff coats, weren't they? I think it would have something to do with ease of manufacture, since it's just processed hide cut and sown according to a template.
Easier than sowing the fabric together and quilting up the gambeson I'd think.

That, and looking at portraits the buff coat seems to hang looser than the gambeson, which was known to get hot.

A book I'm reading mentions Germans repelling a French cavalry attack by someone who participated since the beginning.

After slaughtering the cavalrymen with rapid rifle fire and MG's they were sent to help the French wounded from the gruesome site. The French were talking madly, not angrily at the Germans the author supposed, but in a stunned and overwhelmed way. The author wrote that he didn't understand what they were saying but it was probably about how at one moment they both went to kill each other then the next moment were caring for each other.

It was sad, a good many of the French cavalrymen did not survive.