Hauberk

Plate helps considerably since it prevents the application of sheering force on your delicate insides, but padding is just hands down the best way to defend against blunt trauma. Chain does almost nothing

technically speaking, wearing anything that was meant for protection is better than not wearing anything at all against medieval weapons.

It's true for blunt trauma too. Even without padding chainmail helps. Not much though if we look at the standard 1 in 4 version, though there are way more thicker versions that could protect you better even without padding, but on the other hand heavier and it can be very comfortable if you use them without padding.
But contrary to popular belief it's not necessary to wear the padding underneath it, wearing it above is also a valid option.

Early plate armour also relies on padding but later versions and Renaissance ones are perfectly good if you only wear your civilian clothing underneath it, and by that I mean the back in the day civilian clothing which usually at least 2-3 layers of linen and 1-2 layers of wool as a minimum.
But as I said later armour had a better design, more area to distribute the force without giving it to you, etc.

May I piggyback on a historical gear thread please?

Why didn't pirates and Age of Exploration navies use crossbows? Why weren't halberds and spears used on ships to repel boarders?

>Why weren't halberds and spears used on ships to repel boarders?
they were

Mail should generally provide virtual immunity to penetration by sharp weapons. The only exceptions would be sharp spikes with more force behind them than is typically possible for a man to generate with one hand. For example, a bec-de-corbin is a spike on a long lever swung with both hands, a rondel dagger pressed down on with the whole body weight, or a bodkin shot from a longbow or heavy crossbow would penetrate most mail. However, most sword and spear thrusts would be stopped by mail.

Blunt trauma could happen through mail, although the mass and stiffness of the armour do help a bit and the padding usually worn beneath it help more. Both cutting and stabbing weapons can cause blunt trauma and the main factor is how much momentum the strike has rather than what shape the blade is. A narrow line of impact is roughly as likely to break a bone as one concentrated into a point.

All armour which it is possible to move in can leave you somewhat vulnerable to blunt trauma, but padding and rigid plates both offer pretty good protection. Generally speaking, rigid plates are better at this. They don't have to be metal, but other materials that you can make plate out of tend to be very prone to getting penetrated by sharp blades, splitting, rotting and generally being quite shit armour. Hardened leather is probably about as good as you can hope for and was still not very popular. Thin metal strips running parallel to the bone are good protection against blunt force on the limbs; this is usually called 'splint' armour.

Really? I never see it depicted.

Did it fall out of practice towards the end?

Anti cut, you also better wear a gambeson underneath or you'll just end up with all your bones shattered.

Boarding Pikes existed

well, when halberds/pikes and such went out of fashion then they went out of fashion in the naval warfare too

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1582_Cagayan_battles

basically if they stopped using a kind of weapon that either menat they found something better or there were some kind of protection against it that made it not worth to bring to the fight

The best protection against blunt is a solid plate above with padding below by an order or two of magnitude. because the two things you NEED to do to stop blunt impact is to spread the force out along the x and y axis, and absorb the force slowly along the y axis. Plate takes the hit and ensures the force is dispersed into as wide an area as possible. The padding below takes that force and absorbs energy until it gets to your insides, hopefully by that point there isn't enough force left to hurt you.

extremely heavy padding (like straight up wrapping yourself in a futon) is next down the line, then plate, then reasonable padding. But plate+padding is exponentially better than just having one or the other.

Imagine punching a pile of eggs. Putting a pillow over it would probably still let you punch through to the eggs, though it would be kind of awkward. putting a thin sheet of metal over them would probably still transfer enough force through the metal to break some of them, but if you put a pillow with a thin sheet of metal over the whole thing, it would be near impossible to crush any of the eggs.

>Not much though if we look at the standard 1 in 4 version, though there are way more thicker versions that could protect you better even without padding, but on the other hand heavier and it can be very comfortable if you use them without padding.

The density of the mesh matters at least as much as the weave pattern in determining how stiff mail is. We know that there were historical pieces tight enough that they stood up pretty much without support and were rigid enough to wear as the main armour in jousting tournaments. Mail can also soak up a bit of the impact of a blow by transferring the energy across the rings in the same way padded armour does; it's just less efficient than cloth because the rings don't all stretch like the fibers in fabric do.

>Why didn't pirates and Age of Exploration navies use crossbows?

They did use crossbows. I guess what you really meant is 'why did they seem to prefer firearms to crossbows' and honestly, I'm not sure. Everything we know about early firearms suggests they were rather crap compared to crossbows available at the time except for sheer hitting power, which was often irrelevant. However, people did use guns more than bows so there probably was some reason which isn't terribly clear to me.

>Why weren't halberds and spears used on ships to repel boarders?

They were. There were even polearms designed specifically to fight on board ships, such as the boarding pike.

slightly related, can there be a "reasonable" triangle for blunt, cut and pierce, where a certain kind of armor is resistant against one and weak against the other? or atleast a mostly agreed upon one?

> made of holes
> "is it anti pierce?"
10/10

I'm afraid I don't know much about crossbow anatomy, but were there perhaps any chance that a crossbow could get "unloaded" in the sense that the bolt could fall out of the mechanism?

I guess that could happen to a flintlock bullet as well, but at a lesser rate.

rigid plates help immensely against bludgeoning, but padding helps more.

Crossbows don't play well with damp salty conditions. The mechanisms or bow arms could rust very easily, and the bowstring itself would rot. This is an extreme problem for crossbows because they are under extreme tension at all times, even when uncocked, meaning that if they rot even a little they are likely to just snap before even using them. And if you leave them unstrung, then you have the problem of how difficult they are to string, taking a huge amount of effort or a specialized tool. So you either leave it strung and let it break, or unstrung and waste a lot of time when you probably have very little.

The other problem is that they aren't good at long distances, and aren't good at very very short distances. They suffer from pretty much the same kind of issues a flintlock pistol would have, but a flintlock pistol can be slung on a hip or in a pocket, while a crossbow is fairly large and unwieldly, fairly delicate and hard to move with, and just not conducive to using in a tiny space that's constantly moving, wet and cramped.

As for spears and halberds, well spears at least got some use, but polearms in general are most useful in formation, and not in cramped quarters. Ship's insides were tiny, and their decks not conducive to formation at all. spears would be useful in the initial boarding, but once on deck, you want something reliable that you can use in any direction with one hand. like a small ax or a cutlass.

Realistically, probably not. It's difficult to think of anything which is weak to cutting but good against piercing and solid plate is excellent against all three.

Mail is good against both cutting and piercing (some light weaves might be slightly less good against piercing, but generally you can't stab through mail; there's a good reason it was used to cover the armpits of plate suits to stop sword and dagger thrusts).

Scale and segmented plate is good against cuts and blunt (scale being a bit more vulnerable to blunt), but vulnerable to sharp blades going through the joins unless it's very well made.

Flexible leather is mostly shit against all three, but pretty good against abrasion and burning. Hardened leather is good against blunt, moderate against cuts and useless against piercing.

Cloth is good against blunt, moderate against cuts and useless against piercing, but for completely different reasons to hard leather. Some dense cloth like felted wool seems to work better against cutting. Also, fabric armour seems to work better against bullets than you would expect (still rarely enough to save you).

Exotic organic stuff like wood, paper, horn and so on mostly seems to fall into the cloth or hardened leather category.

There's also the complication that mail and scale don't totally stop sharp weapons so much as effectively make them into blunt ones.

Depends. Some, yes, others no. Clips and channels+brackets prevent most bolts from falling out.

Thanks for the info, m8Es.

Its been bugging me for a few days since I started looking at assembling an army for a Warhammer campaign.

There were mechanisms developed for crossbows used from horseback which prevented the bolt from falling out. By the age of exploration, they should have been fairly well known.

Crossbows are vulnerable to damp, but then so are black-powder weapons, so no real advantage there. Crossbows were somewhat expensive to build, but firearms were expensive to load, so no great advantage there. Both were slow to load. Both were technically complex to load but simple to fire.

Reasons which seem somewhat plausible to me:

If you already had black-powder cannon, swivel guns, etc. it might simplify logistics and training if your small-arms use it too.
Firearms had more psychological impact due to the noise and flash. This was especially helpful when facing people who had never experienced them.
Firearms could be loaded with small-shot, which was helpful for hunting (especially seabirds) and handy in a messy battle where aiming would be difficult.

Early guns were only useful because of their stopping power. If someone hit you, you'd probably die. In contrast, the stopping power of an arrow is so underwhelming that most accounts I've read regard it as unlucky to be killed by one.

There were crossbows that approached a gun's level of stopping power, but they tended to suffer from such an atrocious rate of fire, or required multiple people to reload them, so they weren't as appealing, either.

>Early guns were only useful because of their stopping power. If someone hit you, you'd probably die. In contrast, the stopping power of an arrow is so underwhelming that most accounts I've read regard it as unlucky to be killed by one.

Even modern firearms struggle to achieve reliable one-hit kills on humans and big game, so that seems a bit of an overstatement. Arrows can be fairly lethal too; they kill plenty of large deer. Still, I think 'stopping power' could well be a big factor; I'd rather have a gun than a bow when hunting boar, for example, which seem to be in the same rough category of toughness as men.

Also, an arrow isn't going to punch through the wooden walls and decks of a ship and could even be deflected by sail and rigging, while a musket ball is going straight through everything.

Navies basically used whatever their equivalent of marines used. During the Pike & Shot era, which roughly corresponds with the early Age of Exploration (depending on your definition of each), polearms and firearms were militarily popular and would be found (with varying degrees of modification) in the hands of marines throughout Europe.

As for pirates, they were hardly uniform in their armaments, so broad generalizations are prone to many specific errors. Many of the typically-romanticized pirates (the kinds from old-timey movies and whatever) were formerly navy men, and their means and methods were informed by their personal experience in the navies of their day.

>anti pierce or anti cut

Don't bring in game mechanics to real life

Hauberks were worn in period because they were the best general defense you could wear for the regional technology level.
Once people had the ability to add affordable plates to their cuirass they generally did.

>Why weren't halberds and spears used on ships to repel boarders?
They were, but since boarding actions often ended up as a clusterfuck in a very confined space, sidearms (hatches, knives, cutlass) were common as well.

this.
The only real advantage of mail over plate is that it "breaths", meaning you are slightly less likely to pass out from heat.

When you don't know what you're talking about, instead of opening your mouth, stand down and listen to other people.

> if pierce damage in particular were very effective against a hauberk user, people would use more spears.
So literally every army since rome

>When a breeze comes by and you stretch your arms out and let the cool air sweep through your mail while all the leather faggots at the larp are burning up in their inferior armor.

Feels
Fucking
Goodman

and most armies before Rome. Rome's love affair with the sword was a bit strange.

Chainmail is actually very effective against cutting, piercing and blunt force. The problem is that it is very heavy as a full suit, unlike plate. Plate, however, is relatively vulnerable to piercing and blunt force.

By combining a suit of plate and using chainmail in limited key locations to offset its weight, you get a very solid defense.

You two have no idea what you're talking about. Plate did not provide superior defense. But the advantage plate DID have is that it could be made far faster (roughly 2 weeks compared to 2 months) than a suit of chainmail and it was much lighter because it could be strapped to various parts of your body whereas chainmail would hang all of its weight from the shoulders, head and hips.

Rome only used the gladius as a main armament for a few hundred years. Stop with this meme.

Pretty sure plate provided superior defense at the very least because it was designed so that most hits would glance, which wouldn't happen with a chainmail.

>A narrow line of impact is roughly as likely to break a bone as one concentrated into a point.
You forgot a thing: "...as long as said point coincides with the position of a bone."

Also, depending upon the type of mail, you can end up with the rings embedded in the flesh.

See, there are two types of ring you can use: riveted and butted.
Butted rings are more likely to let an arrow/spear/spike through (since it's only a matter of opening the ring up), but have the major advantage of being lighter and a LOT easier to make (since it's just a matter of getting some rods cut to size and bending them to shape).
Riveted rings are slightly heavier and are harder to make (because they're made using metal heated and hammered into shape, and need riveting to actually put a piece of mail together), but have the major advantage of not bursting when hit by an arrow/spear/spike.

The thing about riveted mail is that the rings have edges. Wearing that stuff over bare flesh and getting hit is going to basically give you wounds akin to being beaten with a bat studded with washers.

They each have their pros and cons, with neither being impervious to any form of attack, but to stay plate has blatantly superior defense is false. Plate may have had glancing potential, but chainmail dispersed impact incredibly well. In the end, each one has their strengths and weaknesses and neither was phased out until that sort of body armor became more of hindrance than help in the face of advanced firearms/cannons.

>It's difficult to think of anything which is weak to cutting but good against piercing
Modern military armor.
Will stop a bullet, will stop a knife, will lose all integrity vs a boxcutter.

It's not a meme when it lasted as long as most civilizations.

It is a meme when it only accounts for a fraction of the civilization in question.

If you are being realistic, no. Chain is A+ against slash D+ against pierce and F against blunt. Really thick 20 layer linen armor (padded), is extremely underrated. It does great against everything, but degrades fast. As you sweat and it gets soaked, its blunt damage resistance goes down. Plate is best against everything, but piercing is always decent against armor if the weapon has sufficient mass.

Basically you would have to fudge something to make a proper triangle of armor. Plate good for pierce, chain for slash, and leather/padded whatever for blunt.

>Chain is A+ against slash D+ against pierce and F against blunt.
>Plate is best against everything
Stop spreading misinformation.

Firearms were easier to store and maintain onboard ship. A damp bowstring is a ruined bowstring, and you can't leave a bow or crossbow strung indefinitely or else it'll warp. A pistol, meanwhile, can be left loaded and wrapped in a bit of oilcloth for as long as you like, and powder in a sealed cask is effectively imperishable.

A pistol, meanwhile, is smaller, lighter, can be shot one-handed, easier to seal against moisture (if it gets wet, you just have to reload, not restring), much more intimidating what with the smoke and flames and noise, makes a better bludgeon when empty, and the ammunition is both less bulky to carry and more durable (no need to case about fucking up the fletchings or rusty heads).

Well to be fair, the Gladius is pretty much an elongated spearhead with a handle, and used to shank more then cut

Yeah, coincidentally during the era when they were the undisputed power in the known world.

you can literally see his skin....

Armorfag here, shut the fuck up with those ideas. There is no "either or" with maille, maille protects against both. Thrusts are potentially more damaging against somebody just wearing a hauberk, but they will need a sword or spear with a tapered point able to slide between the maille links in order to reach flesh. We know even hauberks are strong enough to withstand and turn aside couched lance strikes from Moslem accounts of the Reconquest- it depends entirely on the quality of the maille you are wearing. Poorly made maille, even riveted, forged from shitty iron will be shitty armor. High quality steel with a large carbon content is going to be expensive, but extremely good in protection qualities.

The only "weakness" of maille is that as it is not a rigid object, it doesn't absorb kinetic energy well. Meaning that if somebody swings a mace at your shoulder, while the maille will still absorb a lot of the force, you're going to have some horrible bruising at minimum. A broken bone at worst.

But "le armor weak and strengths" is fucking cancer. There is only armor. Some armor protects more than other types of armor. Some protects less. This varies even within specific 'types' of armor, as a high quality armor performs in a completely different manner to low quality.

>As for pirates, they were hardly uniform in their armaments, so broad generalizations are prone to many specific errors.

To also tack on to this, pirates (as a general rule) armed themselves to cause fear in their quarry, not necessarily to kill. This meant that they'd almost always have half a dozen weapons on them at all times - not because they planned on using them (hell, half of the pistols they often carried had maybe a single shot before they were useless) but to scare merchantmen into complying with them by LOOKING like they were hard-ass motherfuckers. As such, while they definitely carried functional weapons, they also carried a ton of additional weapons that were purely to terrify and look scary.

>The only exceptions would be sharp spikes with more force behind them than is typically possible for a man to generate with one hand.

One handed, fine pointed weapons can slip through a ring without cutting the ring. Potentially up to an inch or so of penetration. Depending upon what is worn underneath and where hit this could be no penetration of skin to small but painful wound to debilitating.

>spread the force out along the x and y axis, and absorb the force slowly along the y axis.

Spread across x and y, absorb slowly along z

Pirates used whatever they could, hunting bows and slings were common but they weren't really effective. Most pirates didn't have a lot of money to spend and most were likely to be from merchant ship mutinies than military. So, what they used was going to be what was available, cheap and even then, there was going to be a lot of homemade ammo and parts.

Crossbows are hell to try and load and for some reason people were really afraid of it accidently discharging and them losing some fingers or a hand

as a question, what would a man-at-arms do if he was out in a campaign and his armor or weapon breaks?

I am curious since I don't know if you were out like that, you were in a place where you could stop and get new shit and afford it

...

>no, but my boyfriend is
underrated response

Yes that. I'm retarded.

Mass is the best defense against blunt damage.

No its just not very glamereous to depict.
80% of qll historical innacuracies are most likely from noblemen and other learned men bullshitting to improve their cred.

Full plate?
Though it wasnt common it sure as hell wasnt easy to kill a armored knight. Really if history is to be followed they were the medeival tank, you sure as hell isnt going to with with an dinky gun unless you got shit ton of people running for the hatch.

IRL, they were extremely effective at protecting a person from arrows. Specialized arrows with needle-like heads were developed, but still were not very effective at killing people in mail.

Kind of. The balance is more weight, cost, protection, flexibility.

Chainmail was mostly common from the 2nd to 11th century, where it was in many ways the best armor available. After the 11th century it became less common as larger plates of metal could be made more easily.

Chain was pretty expensive stuff, being labor intensive to make.

Plate armor was, once the technology developed to make it, cheaper then chain armor and offered somewhat better protection for the same weight. It was expensive to shape around detailed areas though, and an articulated plate harness took more technological development and a lot of work. They were pretty rare, most people with plate armor had it over easy to protect areas (shoulders, shins, chest, back, head) and protected the rest with small plates, chain-mail and/or durable fabric and leather.

>Why weren't halberds and spears used on ships to repel boarders?
They were. "Boarding pikes".

>. Chain is A+ against slash D+ against pierce and F against blunt
>D+ against pierce
Please tell me you don't actually believe this.
>piercing is always decent against armor if the weapon has sufficient mass.
This just isn't true..
This guy is right.

Of course, sometimes they went to small plates. Brigantine armor was common and fashionable as an alternative to breast and back-plate, being armor plates riveted to the inside of a coat. These small plates were relatively flexible but provided reasonable protection at modest cost. The places where the small plates met could be pierced by an arrow, bullet or knife-point, but a well designed armor would minimize that risk.

If his armor breaks, it was most likely in a combat action, and he was most likely under said armor, so assuming he isn't dead or dying, he's likely wounded and out of the campaign for a good while.

Weapon, on the other hand? Luckily, a squire accompanies the unit a man at arms would be part of (both himself and the squire serving a knight), and would be happy to hand him a replacement if such is required.

Armor also wears out and fails just from general wear-and-tear. You'd be repairing and maintain it to make sure that didn't happen in combat.

As to broken weapons, yeah.. In fact, knights expected heavy lances to break in combat and would replace them after a charge, if the course of battle allowed.

Additionally, a cocked pistol or crossbow is dangerous in the chaotic environment of a ship under attack. Whilst cocking a pistol immediately prior to use is fairly easy the same is not true of the crossbow.

>The places where the small plates met could be pierced by an arrow, bullet or knife-point
FFS.

The places where the small plates overlapping could not be easily pierced.

mail was very good at stopping slashes, some historians claimed that your average blade couldnt penetrate it with a slash

against stabbing or blunt, it would be less effective, since stabbing can get in-between the links, while blunt attacks would not be slowed down by the flexible mail

it would still be better than nothing, but shouldnt be relied on

Very few weapons can "get between the links".

Protecting against blunt impact is about distributing force across a larger area not slowing the weapon.

BOTH but it works much better as anti-cut

on this harnmaster sheet you'll find armor values (for differing armor qualities). use these as rough guide.

Both, although getting stabbed isn't any fun in chain either.

t. someone who's been stabbed in chain

>t. someone who's been stabbed in chain
Go on, tell us the story.

Coming home from class where I'd been giving a demonstration of medieval arms and equipment for Hist 104 and I happened to have an old chain shirt. Too heavy and bulky to put it in the backpack with my book so I just wore it under my jacket. I was on my way home, saw some guy railing on a girl in a parking lot at like 9:45 at night because class gets out at 9 and I have a 9 mile bike ride. I decide to get chivalrous, move to intervene on the lady's behalf. We exchange heated words, exchange some fists, he's got me on the ropes so I hit him with a rock. He comes back and stabs me in the chest with a knife. Goes through the jacket but doesn't go through 3-link riveted maile. Dude looks at me like I'm the Terminator, hops in his car and leaves. You know what chain doesn't help against? Fists. Especially fists to the face by someone much bigger than you.

One could argue that their primary weapon was still the pilum. Used as a javelin before hand to hand combat, but accounts of it also being used as a spear exist, including as an anti cavalry weapon. Still kind of an anomaly in that regard to not just using spears as full on primary weapons

You're a retard if you think plate armor isn't more protective than mail. It is significantly harder to cut through plate. Basically, it's impossible. Even shit like axes are not going to cut through it. It is significantly harder to pierce plate, seeing as how most 15th century swords had points that are narrow enough that they would fit through the mail and be able to penetrate an inch or three, and then combined with the fact that the mail so flex and press into your flesh, a lethal thrust could be done through the mail without ever breaking any rings. Against blunt, mail is useless and it's the padding worn underneath that stops it.

Plate is more protective in every way. Stop trying to be some retarded contrarian

>get chivalrous
>defend lady's honor
>cannot be slain by the daggers of brigands and highwaymen
Sounds like you made a good choice, try getting a helmet next time.

remember that early guns were literal downsized cannons intended for use against cavalry. The slugs would be much larger than modern ammunition. Just look at civil war ammo, the balls are as big as your thumb

Well pikes were still used right up untill the Napoleonics

nigga you got some little girl baby thumbs

They weren't. They still had pikes stored in armories but professional soldiers didn't carry or use them. And no "but the officers did" nonsense.

I meant boarding pikes sorry Officers didn't use regular pikes but sergeants did

They're certainly better vs slashing weapons, but they provide decent protection against piercing weapons too, if you wear them over a gambeson.

even in napoleonic wars the dudes responsible for guarding the "coulours" (as in the flags) of a regiment would carry polearms.

partizans are not pikes

ok, how about this?

That's nifty, thanks user

The Chinese used pikes to keep Japanese, aka Dwarfs, pirates away from their vessels

>checked
They also had these nifty squads meant to delay or defeat pirates on land. Look into them

would that do it for the "which armor helps against what"-triangle?

It would. It's a bit presumptive because there is always something considered blunt that is good against any armor. Even plate. There are edged weapons that are strong enough to cut through mail, and heavy of pointy enough weapons the pierce scale and lamellar armor.

It's a good start though. Simple yet effective