Armour Flexibility

[Achilleus]

Irrelevant since today the proportional cost of the materials is much much lower than it has ever been in the past.

Do you realize how contradictory that statement is?

Ask them how much they would charge to make riveted mail using historial links, not the links imported from India. People doing this kind of work charge $2,000-5,000 just for a hauberk. Double this if you want leggings too.

I did, and it would cost ~1,200 euros for a steel riveted chain mail hauberk + hood & leggins, where'as a full set of steel plate armour (incl. a salad helmet) would cost me ~5,000 euros.

Plate can be made from poorer quality iron. You need finely refined iron just to enable it to be pulled through the draw plate otherwise it continually snaps. The cost of the raw iron is more expensive for mail than plate.

First of all metallurgic analysises of roman ferrous plate and chain mail have shown that Roman ferrous plate usually was of higher quality iron (even steel) than the sampled chain mail. So the Romans didn't use higher quality iron for their chain mail than for their plate armour, same story is true for the middle ages where plate armour was made from either the same or better quality metals than chain mail.

It takes much more time for someone to draw down a kilometer of wire compared to running a few billets through rollers. The cost of iron wire is more expensive than a similar weight of plate.

The fittings for segmetata are more varied but there are only a few dozen of them. Mail requires thousands of individual components all made by hand.

After the components are made it takes a day to assemble segmetata compared to around 20 days for a hamata. Assembling mail costs more than segmentata.

So in all stages mail costs more to make.

Mail takes time to make, but it isn't very complicated to make, which means you could use slave labour to manufacture it, esp. since most cultures were familiar with this old technology, saving the Romans a lot of money in the process. The same couldn't be done with much more technologically advanced ferrous plate equipment, esp. not back in the ancient period where the manufacture of plate armour was a far more tedious affair than in the middle ages.

Slave labour was used in most industries including both mail and segmentata fabrica.

The manufacture of ferrous plate demands skilled smiths as-well as an advanced infrastructure to achieve in a mass scale, it couldn't be left to slave labour. This increased the cost, and was probably the main reason that the segmentata fell out of use, it being too difficult and expensive to continue to make with the increasing financial and manpower problems plagueing the Roman state from ~300 AD onwards.