Quote:Dan, have you got documentary proof that Indian/Afganistan steel ring chain mail was ineffective against arrows?
Are you talking about historical mail used in this part of the world or the mail that is commercially produced in this region today?
Quote:As to the skeletons showing the distribution of wounds mainly to the head, arms and legs. This corresponds to the comments of Ammianus who gives graphic accounts of the Romans chasing after their routed opponents and slashing at their necks, backs, thighs, legs and arms. I suppose hacking at whatever you can reach with your sword is the natural action to take rather than trying to run through your opponent whilst runs away.
IIRC part of Thordeman's analysis was the determination that most of the victims were not fleeing.
Quote:I may be imagining things, but I though I read somewhere that seg. became popular with Caesar's troops because of the number of debilitating wounds they were receiving to their shoulders and collar bones in Gaul due to overhead blows from longswords and projectiles during sieges.
It is likely that Caesar died before segmentata was invented so it would have been pretty hard for his troops to use it in Gaul. In any case, mail was perfectly capable of protecting the shoulders from anything that the Romans faced in Gaul or later in Dacia - especially the Greek-style hamata with the shoulder doublings.
Quote:Magister Militum Flavius Aetius post=347955 Wrote:Not all of the Indian Chainmail is bad. Al-hamdd uses historically correct stuff except for their ring sizes, which are about 2mm too large.
I'd love to see a single museum example that looks anything like the Al-Hamdd mail.
It's better than the other stuff you can get, just saying. Hard to find a truly accurate set made.
Depends on what you mean by "better". I can distinguish the Indian riveted mail even on TV. A lot of it looks like soda can ring tabs and looks nothing like any kind of historical riveted mail.
If you want mail that looks like Roman armour at a reasonable cost then you are better off with butted mail since you need to get pretty close to tell that there aren't any rivets. A properly-tailored hamata made from alternating rows of butted and solid links of the correct size looks very, very nice.
Protection-wise, the Indian links are way too thin and the riveting is substandard. It is better than butted mail but that isn't saying much. It is fine for SCA and blunt steel combat, but useless against points
If you want mail that gives the same protection as Roman armour then there are a few options such as welded links. But welded mail costs more than butted mail and isn't any more historically accurate.
The best option is to contact one of the few mail-makers who specialise in restoring pieces for museums and private collectors and convince them to make a shirt for you. Be prepared to spend many thousands of dollars. You would also need someone like this to make any test pieces if you want a decent "weapons vs armour" test.
Quote:Be prepared to spend many thousands of dollars.
And there goes the dream of an authentic reproduction out of the window.
I dunno... I bet I could throw a suit of mail together if there's a place to buy authentic links.
Quote:I dunno... I bet I could throw a suit of mail together if there's a place to buy authentic links.
Imagine some women and house wifes would put together an authentic lorica hamata for a living instead of crocheting in their leisure time. They could make some money on the side while watching TV in the evening.
Hey, thinking of it this could be a fine business plan! You only need to somehow acquire a pool of workers via ads and then train the workers and allocate the work. Seriously. :!:
Erik reckons that, once you get up to speed, that it takes about one minute per riveted link to do it properly. If you are using 6mm OD links then you'd be looking at 30,000+ links for a sleeveless hamata. That's a minimum of thirty thousand minutes or 500 hours plus materials. Even at $5 per hour you need to charge more than $2,500. You could cut down the time by about 1/3 if you used alternating rows of solid links rather than all-riveted because you are inserting two links at a time and only have to rivet one of them..
Quote:Erik reckons that, once you get up to speed, that it takes about one minute per riveted link to do it properly. If you are using 6mm OD links then you'd be looking at 30,000+ links for a sleeveless hamata. That's a minimum of thirty thousand minutes or 500 hours plus materials. Even at $5 per hour you need to charge more than $2,500. You could cut down the time by about 1/3 if you used alternating rows of solid links rather than all-riveted because you are inserting two links at a time and only have to rivet one of them..
That makes the nearly 170 hours of work to make my scale armor look like a cake walk..... (Not including production time to make each scale). No wonder armor was expensive!
It is interesting that even today there seems no automated system to put together mail armour.
I have a vest that I made from 5mm links. I'm pretty skinny, it barely touches my thighs, it has no sleeves or shoulder doublings, and it still has over 50,000 links in it. It took me over a year to make it - a few hours each night in front of the TV. A long-sleeved hauberk would have closer to 120,000 links.
Here is an example with even smaller links
http://www.pinterest.com/pin/7881368071683595/
AER sells mail, I bet their's is better than Al-Hamdd's.
As for Automation, I know engineering and you can't develop an automated process for anything more than stamping the links. A machine can't put the links around the ring, press it together, and then insert the rivet, or at least not with iobjects that small in size.
I don't know the quality of the mail used in this test but it is very impressive what the riveted mail can actually stop. Unfortunately nowhere on the video does he try stabbing through the riveted stuff, only the butted piece.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=juIw20z5p0c
Quote:That makes the nearly 170 hours of work to make my scale armor look like a cake walk..... (Not including production time to make each scale). No wonder armor was expensive!
I may just be blanking something obvious here but what sources do we have for the actual cash cost of armour in the Roman world? My assumption is that as an investment, a coat of mail would be equivalent to a modern house or specialised work vehicle; essential for the soldier's profession, but certainly representing a huge material and labour cost to produce. This would be partly mitigated by being usable for many years, and perhaps also sold on.
A slave would cost about the same thing than a car today. Buy one slave, and put him doing your hamata during one year.
So the cost of the hamata is : the cost of a slave + food and housing the slave during one year. But your slave, at the end of the work, you can sold him again, maybe for even more money (now, it's a well trained slave in doing hamata...).
So what would be the cost of a hamata? Not that much. It would simply take a lot of time to have it.