Segmentata - with or without subarmalis?

[Sextus Saturninus]

If you were wearing a thin subarmalis under mail, and then was hit with a mace, you would get tremendous blunt force trauma that would probably kill you. So why would you wear a thin subarmalis? I would wear a very thick one myself if I was in a similar situation.

[Bryan]

If you were wearing a thin subarmalis under mail, and then was hit with a mace, you would get tremendous blunt force trauma that would probably kill you. So why would you wear a thin subarmalis? I would wear a very thick one myself if I was in a similar situation.

What if someone swung an even larger than normal mace at you? Would your mail and thick subarmalis stop that? If not, would you add more layers to the subarmalis? Or just accept that your armor is mostly psychological and is supposed to make you feel invincible, not actually make you so.
(BTW, were maces something commonly faced by a Roman infantryman?)

From my own experiences in the military, in a day and age when we were forced to wear an excessive amount of ballistic armor out of legal/risk management/CYA reasoning, even then the armor wasn't rated to stop everything we faced, just the average stuff. If it was designed to stop everything, our armor, which was already heavy to make us barely able to perform most normal duties, would have been even more cumbersome. Not to say we wouldn't have been able to hump it, but every extra thing you force a soldier to carry, is extra weight they have to carry while fighting, which is generally a very physical activity, with lots of moving around. Ounces turn into pounds, and no one likes being immobile, slow, and/or uncomfortable, especially if they aren't worried about the additional threat.

[Dan Howard]

There are extant arming garments in various museums and plenty of pieces of armour with integrated liners all over the world dating over a period of thousands of years. Find one example that is thicker than I have said. I can't think of anything heavier than the liner on Tut's leather scale cuirass which was six layers of linen and a seventh of fine leather. Standalone armour is at least twice as thick consisting of a dozen layers or more.

Edit: This thread is relevant
http://www.romanarmytalk.com/17-roman-mi...iners.html

There are plenty of extant bronze cuirasses with holes around the perimeter for attaching a liner and some were found with fragments of textile still attached. Here is the liner on my cuirass. The shoulder section is six layers of linen, the rest is three layers.


I have worn mail with a liner made of six layers and have been hit with a baseball bat. I had a bruise where you could make out the shape of the rings but nothing more serious. Mail is vulnerable on spots with exposed "boney" parts such as the hip, elbow, clavical, and skull, but thicker padding doesn't really help here. You need rigid protection.