Desert Armor Thread (Rerail Edition)

>grew up in florida
Touching the metal end of a seatbelt was asking for a first-degree burn. I kept gloves in my car for the steering wheel in summer. Any outdoor metal surface (like a handrail for example) had to be coated or painted matte.

I imagine all that shit is even worse in a desert; Florida isn't as hot temperature-wise as most hot deserts. And I imagine armor would get that hot, too.

It's worth mentioning what was said last thread about armor in the desert. Tabards and the like were to prevent the metal from heating up too much. Chainmail, with a tabard and its somewhat porous nature, actually ended up creating a convection effect and cooling the skin. It's possible to wear metal in the desert, but you have to be smart.

Does anyone have a technical explanation why people wear full coverage in the desert in like the Middle East and whatnot, and why sometimes it's better to wear black? I have a general remembrance why, but not enough to write it out.

You know those long robe things arabs wear? They're traditional arabian dress for a reason - it's really practical in a desert. You'd think long cloaks would be the hottest shit in the desert, but white color reflects sunlight and long concealing clothes keep the sun off your skin, because you will burn like a motherfucker in the desert.

White is best when in direct sunlight, because white reflects the most light. Black is best when not in direct sunlight and when there's a little wind or something, so along the coasts or something in a desert climate, because black radiates the most heat - after all, our bodies create heat too, and long robes do trap it just like a blanket does.

The extra heat absorbed by black robes is lost before it reaches the skin.

>Black is best when not in direct sunlight and when there's a little wind or something
to explain further: white lets some radiation through, and reflects some, black absorbs basically all of it and then emits it. Without wind factored in this means white clothing is better, however with a breeze the black is going to be emitting much more of its absorbed heat on the outside, making it more effective.

> Bare skin in the desert
There's a reason desert people either wear flowing robes like the Arabs, or are very black like equatorial Africans.

Black radiates the heat away faster. Note that arab men wear white outdoors, and the women, mostly indoors, wear black.
Full coverage is to keep the bloody sun and sand off your skin. Arabs aren't very dark-skinned.

Desert caravans and travelers mostly travel in the early morning and late afternoon, sometimes into the night. You absolutely cannot travel in midday or the sun will fucking kill you. Because most deserts are near the equator, there isn't much of a difference in seasons in most deserts, though this obviously varies based on location.

Also, there's a reason they use camels. Horses can in fact work in a desert, but they don't have the camel's sun tolerance and stamina, if you ride them hard they'll die. Camels are slow, they only walk at about a human walking pace, but they can go for two weeks at idle or more like 3-4 days working hard without water, and can also survive off of stored grains - whereas horses will get sick without grazing, only modern feeds can mimic the roughage horses' systems need.

Remember, deserts are super inhospitable and there's a reason they're vast unpopulated areas. Most deserts have 99+% of their population in a very tightly concentrated fertile region around rivers, and outposts or small towns around natural oases where there's groundwater that springs up. Actually crossing the desert sands is very unusual and something only done on well-defined paths and routes that go from station to station.

That said, there are amazing trans-saharan caravan routes that truly are incredibly arduous journeys even with modern vehicles and tech; the fact that north africans have been going those routes with camels and shit for millennia is kind of amazing.

Is there anything more comfy than coming across a caravanserai in the desert?

Yep. That reason is that they're disgusting lvl 1 commoners.

more than color, the main fact about boubous is that they are made of very light cloth. ANd aren't tight.

>Is there anything more comfy than coming across a caravanserai in the desert?
One that isn't filled with fucking arabs?

>and sand
Important to remember. Anakin was right - sand is the fucking worst. It gets in everything, it irritates the skin, it gets in food, it gets in water, it covers shit up, and that's before you get into sandstorms.

By the way, sandstorms are terrifying in person but honestly not all that bad if you're indoors.

>lvl 1 commoners
FOE, GYG
they are level 0

Would you rather they be filled with fucking jews? Because there were a lot of those too.

Saharan sand is a fucking bitch even here in britain. It gets picked up by the wind and then dumped fucking everywhere. Mostly all over my fucking car. We even had a mini snowstorm last year, where the sky was turned red by the sand.

Jews at least stock booze.

>Saharan sand is a fucking bitch even here in britain.
What the fuck. Seriously?

Or is this a /pol/ metaphor

The wind picks it up and dumps it everywhere when the conditions are right. Forms the worst mud when combined with a little water, too.

It doesn't really matter if you're wearing armor, you're going to get cooked no matter what if you're out in the sun. It doesn't even have to be a desert either - the Mediterranean was more than hot enough to roast you on some days.

The issue is that you can't exactly wear armor for too long regardless of the temperature. It's heavy, it's exhausting, and it restricts comfortable movement when traveling. A desert could make it worse, sure, but the bigger problem for heavily armored warriors was the logistics involved at all levels.

It took time to take off or put on armor, and in that time the enemy might either escape or ambush you. This was less of a worry for a soldier marching in densely fortified territory with extensive lines of communication between dozens of castles giving forewarning, but a very big issue for those in North Africa or the Middle East where fortifications were more spaced out. That's not to mention the lack of resources for repair or replacement or the concentration of labor capable of such work in only a few urban centers able to afford them.

Tabards weren't a matter of life and death, but rather more fashion and style. It was more than feasible to fight without them in a desert, as was done for centuries in the Middle East. Being cooked alive by the sun in your armor was more likely to happen because you're forced by circumstance to march as much as you can during daylight without the security or time or ability to take off your armor and haul it with you without fear of needing it at a moment's notice.

go.nasa.gov/2BR3MHe

Fashion and style usually follows pragmatic rules, even if they can get formalized and distorted over time.

For instance, you see fundamentalist muslims in other countries sometimes wear traditional islamic dress, even though as previously stated in this thread they have their origins in desert garb and aren't really logical in other climates.

>For instance, you see fundamentalist muslims in other countries sometimes wear traditional islamic dress
Typically for going to the mosque on fridays, kind of like wearing your sunday best for church.

>aren't really logical in other climates.
They wear it a lot in a british summer. Hot sun, humidity, urban heat island? Makes a lot of sense then. But you sure as fuck see them shivering when they come out of the mosque in the middle of winter wearing all that thin flowing stuff when there's ice on the wind.

>heat + humidity
>long concealing clothing
That cannot possibly be comfortable. I'm practically sweating just thinking about it. Those things can't get good airflow, since they're designed to keep sand off of you, if they were too open they'd be giant sandtraps - right?

They don't look uncomfortable, and they're wearing them on more than just the friday. Logic dictates it must work better than western clothing.

>Typically for going to the mosque on fridays, kind of like wearing your sunday best for church.
That's the point - an article of clothing that has a practical purpose gets formalized over time.

Tabards had practical purposes, even if they might have become more stylized later on. It wasn't a matter of some knight going "You know what? My armor would look fucking awesome with some cloth on it." They had a purpose, and that purpose involved the hot sun and wearing metal.

>Remember, deserts are super inhospitable and there's a reason they're vast unpopulated areas
interestingly the border regions on the south of the Sahara desert's local name roughly translates to 'shore' because the desert was so difficult to travel across it was basically treated as another ocean for the purposes of borders and travel

telegraph.co.uk/news/weather/11525166/Blood-rain-to-fall-on-Britain-as-red-Saharan-dust-blows-in-from-Africa.html

>europe still manages to acquire african clay
fucking colonialists

>Fashion and style usually follows pragmatic rules
Said pragmatism isn't as straightforward as that, however. The origins of modern Gulf Arab fashion is more removed from Bedouin concerns of practical dress than is obvious, and it has more to do with urbanizing Arabs adopting pilgrimage and upper-middle class fashion than comfort.

As for tabards, there's some problems with seeing their origin in protective desert clothing for soldiers when Arabs had been going without them for centuries. It was more common for Turks, who are not a desert people, and if Latin Crusaders did adopt them from the east then it would have been for the same reasons the Turks did: to showcase robes of status and honor on the battlefield. It's surely no coincidence that surcoats and tabards acquired the same importance for Europeans.

It's not like we want it!

This isn't a Man of War album cover, dog. If you oil yourself up you're going to get completely covered in sand

>booze
>in the desert

>>booze
>>in the desert
Why not, if you don't mind my ignorant ass asking?

>sand
>"clay" not mentioned anywhere
Fucking retards.
Sand is too heavy to cross seas and oceans, clay on the other hand is thousands if not millions of times smaller and lighter. It's also what causes rain to be red, and sometimes even snow (like in Russia).
The shitty thing about clay is that it absorbs radiations. Remember those nuclear tests made by France in the 60s ? Coupled with the fact that mushrooms absorb clay and radiations, and that people in Southern France LOVE Picking shrooms and eating them... this could explain why there are more thyroid cancer cases in the South and the West although it's further from Tchernobyl. Also most of French people who have thyroid cancer weren't young enough to be affected by Tchernobyl radiations, but if you take nuclear tests in the Sahara ? It fits perfectly.

That's how much the Sahara desert sucks.

Dehydrates like crazy. Not the best thing to drink in an environment mainly known for lack of water and heatstrokes.