07-15-2008, 10:04 PM
Quote:His estimations are very inaccurate I'm sorry to say.
In what way are they innaccurate, Erik? David Sim is normally very careful about recording the times it takes for him to perform every manufacturing process - he is, after all, a very experienced blacksmith. His explanation of the method for producing butted mail seems entirely logical to me - but then I have no experience at all at working with iron!
I agree, of course, that the size of the links makes a great difference to the length of time to produce a suit of armour. The only thing that I can see is a possible error is his summation for the time it would have taken to equip an entire 5,000-man legion with a hamata suit, where he assumes that there would be a suit for every man and a spare suit in the stores - and he comes up with an estimated time of some 29,000,000 man-hours for the entire job! Five thousand spare suits of lorica hamata would have taken some storing!
Are you perhaps saying that he is over-estimating the number of links of, say, 7mm OD, in the suit? That would make a certain difference to the completion time, I would think.
Caratacus/Mike Thomas
visne scire quod credam? credo orbes volantes exstare.
