09-10-2016, 04:50 PM
(09-10-2016, 12:38 AM)Dan Howard Wrote: A cloth or leather T-Y should end at the navel and floating rib - just like a metal cuirass. If you can cinch it at the waist, it is too long (and too thin and flexible). But a cuirass performs better if you have some flexibility over the ribs, which is why scales are better than cloth or leather, and mail is best of all. Ideally you want flexibility all the way round but the right side is more important.
Yes, mine does, above the hip bone. Because it is a tube you can cinch the waist by increasing the level of overlap of the two free ends, just as you can roll thick gauge metal. I have not worn a scale corselet, but I have held them, and like mail it would seem that all of the weight hangs from the shoulders. My T-Y when allowed to hang opened at the side hangs like this and was not something I would want to wear for any length of time. I agree that the T-Y is far more like a metal cuirasse than mail or scale armor. The other problem I have is why bother with Pteryges if the leather backing is supple and could be worn like a skirt as in middle eastern scale armors and mail. We even have images of Greeks in something like this, see below. Again, the covering on the shoulders and upper body in scales and the lower body without does not speak to a flexibility advantage to me, see below. Maybe the scale covered T-Y was not the same as other scale armors with a thin backing.
On another note, this image has always bothered me. It is not a T-Y, yet its material is thick enough to be cut into Pteryges. It is patterned in the manner we see many textile garments. Surely this could be a "linothorax". Which would mean that there was a linen armor, but it was not, or at least not always patterned as a T-Y.
