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Armour Flexibility
#46
Quote: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?

Quote: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.

Quote: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.

Quote: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.

Quote: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.
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#47
Quote:
Dan Howard post=316969 Wrote:Irrelevant since today the proportional cost of the materials is much much lower than it has ever been in the past.
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.
We already covered this. Those links are imported from India and are nothing like historical mail. If you want mail that even remootely resembles museum samples it will cost 3-4 times that much.

Quote: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.
Cite?

Quote: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.
The advanced infrastructure significantly decreases the cost of the product.
Author: Bronze Age Military Equipment, Pen & Sword Books
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#48
Quote:I would have to agree that plate armor was more expensive due to the nature of the design it can only fit certain body types. Because of the nature of the construction of segmentata, the wearer only needs to have their chest fit into seg, or a manica armguard, which being adjustable could accommodate several different sizes. A gauntlet or arm/leg pieces can only fit a certain height/weight. If I'm wearing leg armor meant for someone 6" taller than me, I won't be able to bend my legs properly. Quality medieval armor was tailored to an individual who was trained to be just as nimble in it as they were out of it.
Cite? I have already presented several sources suggesting that mail cost more than plate.
Author: Bronze Age Military Equipment, Pen & Sword Books
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#49
Quote:We already covered this. Those links are imported from India and are nothing like historical mail. If you want mail that even remootely resembles museum samples it will cost 3-4 times that much.

No, it was not going to be made from links imported from india, he made the links himself.

But please find me a smith that charges 7,000 euros for an authentic steel chain mail hauberk + hood & leggins then. That's an insane amount of money even for a steel riveted mail suit.

Quote:Cite?

http://www.ancient-egypt.co.uk/people/Re...ritain.pdf

Quote:The advanced infrastructure significantly decreases the cost of the product.

Not really as it demands a skilled and payed workforce not just to operate but also to administrate, plus a series of advanced buildings, something that can't be setup everywhere, which again is going increase costs as this entails long supply lines.
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#50
Errm... Kristian, did you actually read the article you are giving as reference here? It states in the conclusion that it is not representative due to the small number of objects investigated and due to the fact that most of these objects are poorly provenanced. I also suggest you read Sim / Kaminski. It is really enlightening.
The best infrastructure read EVER:
http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/sociology/pa...ontrol.pdf
:-)
Christian K.

No reconstruendum => No reconstruction.

Ut desint vires, tamen est laudanda voluntas.
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#51
Quote:Errm... Kristian, did you actually read the article you are giving as reference here? It states in the conclusion that it is not representative due to the small number of objects investigated and due to the fact that most of these objects are poorly provenanced. I also suggest you read Sim / Kaminski. It is really enlightening.
The best infrastructure read EVER:
http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/sociology/pa...ontrol.pdf
:-)

There are other surveys as-well caius, with samples from finds not just from Britain but also from Germany and other places. However I'm having trouble finding it on the internet atm. But again, it reveals that Roman ferrous plate equipment was made from higher quality materials than roman chain mail.
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#52
Quote:No, it was not going to be made from links imported from india, he made the links himself.

But please find me a smith that charges 7,000 euros for an authentic steel chain mail hauberk + hood & leggins then. That's an insane amount of money even for a steel riveted mail suit.

This seems a good place to raise my hand and say "here!" My thanks to Dan for bringing this thread to my attention. Wink

I am sure everyone reading this thread would like to know more of the details surrounding this mail-maker you are referring to. €1200 for head-to-toe mail coverage constructed of hand-crafted riveted links seems to stress credulity to the extreme. I'm not saying you're pulling our collective legs mind you, but you have to admit that this does sound too good to be true. Cheaply crafted Indian mail is higher priced than this and they have a good system of producing their product rather quickly. How is it that this gentleman can do something of this magnitude for so little? Especially when you consider the fact that the links look identical to what is being done in India.

From my own calculations of having done such a project I can say that working at around ten to twelve hours per day it would take approximately seven months to complete this kind of project, give or take.

This is just an observation, but it would appear that you do not value another person's labor as much as your own. In all honesty would you work for several months for only €1200?

Throughout history mail-manufacture has been a huge industry. It had to be in order to create the amounts of mail that were produced. The concept of the lone smith working in his shop is something only seen in movies. Wink This can be said for plate armour as well.

You stated that you've been led to believe that plate was always more expensive than mail. There are numerous records from the middle ages that tell a different story. Dan has provided a few. The 15th century Howard Household Accounts are another good reference. There are other accounts that would boggle your mind such as one for an order of ten thousand mail shirts to be delivered in six months. This is one order by a single customer. Plate armour seems to have always been rather low on the armour want list when compared to other forms of protection in spite of it being rather expensive.

You seem to imply that mail manufacture was more or less unskilled labour. That just about anyone could do it quite easily. My response to this assertion is yes and no. Yes, any fool can weave links together, add a rivet and squish it with pliers. But, it is in the creation of the links to begin with where the skill truly lies.

As has already been noted, plate could be made with lower quality iron/steel. Wire cannot. Take a segmentata plate for example. The metal used in its construction could not be used to make wire because it could more than likely not be drawn without breaking countless times. However, the ability to draw wire to a decent length is only part of the equation. Poor metal can sometimes be drawn to a surprising length, but it is the piercing/riveting operation of link making that truly tells the story. This is due to the fact that if the wire is not of a high enough quality, it cannot be pierced/riveted because of the possibility of the link splitting. Even with quality wire it takes a very keen eye and motor skill to be able to perform these tasks adequately. When you think of mail-making, you need to view it not so much as armouring per say, but more along the lines of jewelery making.

You see, the vast majority of tests that have been done on original pieces of mail have been limited to a few broken links here and there. Nobody is going to let someone remove a few hundred links from a shirt and subject them to destructive testing. For this reason we are left with massive amounts of speculation. As I've said before over the years, each mail link is a piece of armour in itself and should be viewed in that context. Much of the metallographical work done on plate armour is similar. A few 1mm square pieces cut from inconspicuous places around the edge of a piece are not going to give you the whole story as it were.

Anyway that's my take on things... 8)
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