[TML] Personal Armor Noise was Re: Current USAF fleet

[Tom B]

>  Ah but maces and clubs have go waaay back.

Well, this is why I qualified it. For almost any point you can make in
generalization, there's competing data.

 Plus while mail does a good
>  job of protecting against edges they're not as good against points.
>  You'd want someting underneath to stop those over-penetrations.

The other way I didn't allude to of beating mail was things like
stilletos or very thin swords. Of course, a lot of the European swords
(broadswords, claymores, zwiehanders, flamberges, etc) would have had
to get the job done vs mail by bone breaking (so better off using a
spiked mace since you also get puncture). I think mail stops a lot of
slashing swords (and those with broad tips even with the point).

The other factors I didn't allude to in historical deployments and
developments of armour/weapons include:
economics (who can afford them)
social (who is allowed to wear what and what social expectations are
there regarding weapons - in some places, only certain castes could
carry swords or even bear weapons)
technological (for a long time, we had crappy crossbows and bows, but
eventually standards of manufacture and quality arrived to allow mass
manufacture of decent enough military weapons with good penetration)
craft-oriented (In Japan, swords were made very particular ways, so
they were very expensive... this is one of the reasons, along with
cultural/legal, that most people didn't have a samurai daisho set...
in European context, sometimes the quality of metallurgy wasn't all
that good or the quality of smithying...)
temporal (If you've got a serf army led by knights, the serfs tend to
be poorly armed and training non-existent... the only
semi-professionals are the knights and even they may be short on real
training... one of the reasons Sparta put the boots to people was
having a professional-ish army while others did not and thus they just
couldn't execute certain tactical plans.... similar to why other long
service forces could do formational things part-time soldiers just
could not)

All together, there are a collection of things that go together to
make up history. Generalizations often come up wanting. There's
usually multiple causes to any trend and sometimes they aren't just
the military or technical.

>  > The thing to keep in mind about history:
>  >
>  > 1) Those that were there may not have documented completely
>  > or without a slant.
>  >
>  > 2) Those that are researching it may drop the ball noticably
>  > much like the assumptions about the actual size of medieval
>  > knights as being all small guys based on limited evidence and
>  > assumptions that you couldn't move nimbly in plate mail,
>  > subsequently disproven by further research.
>  >
>  > So you have to read a lot of sources, study and allow for
>  > bias and other issues, and make sure a whole bunch of
>  > secondary or tertiary sources aren't drawing conclusions from
>  > the same primary source. This means most conclusions about
>  > how things were should be somewhat guarded, even if some
>  > academic somewhere said it was so in a book.
>
>  No arguements there, like I said it's a theory on how people
>  killed/attempted to kill each other back then. It gains some credence
>  from Napoleonic/American Civil War accounts where bayonets injuries were
>  a significantly smaller amount compared to cannon or musket ball. It's
>  not easy to convince your group of men with sharp pointy objects to
>  close mano-a-mano with another group of men holding sharp pointy
>  objects. Most of the time they'd halt and begina musket duel. But until
>  someone invents a time machine, we'll never know how ancient/medieval
>  battles actually were fought.
>
>
> _______________________________________________
>  TML mailing list
>  TML at travellercentral.com
>  http://lists.travellercentral.com/mailman/listinfo/tml
>



-- 
"Now, I go to spread happiness to the rest of the station. It is a
terrible responsibility but I have learned to live with it."
 Londo, A Voice in the Wilderness, Part I

"To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like
administering medicine to the dead." -- Thomas Paine

 Thomas Paine