Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dausuul" data-source="post: 5407772" data-attributes="member: 58197">Hey, you were the one claiming everybody was going to be shooting at the lord in his fancy armor. I was pointing out that this wasn't going to happen, because it's not how the firearms of the time were used. If the lord isn't leading the charge, it's going to happen even less, so why did you bring him up in the first place?A knight being at the front of a charge is unrealistic? Who was doing the charging then?But setting that aside--the point is that there are diminishing returns on adding weight to your armor. No matter how heavy your armor is, your horse can be shot out from under you, and once you close to melee, a guy with a halberd can snag you off your mount. If you survive the fall and are not immediately killed or captured, you will want to be able to get up and fight. War being what it is, the likelihood of this happening at some point in your knightly career is fairly high. Against that, you put the marginal increase in protection gained by increasing the thickness of your armor to ludicrous levels; at some point the tradeoff is not worth the gain, and I find it very hard to believe that it's worth rendering yourself practically helpless.After digging into it some more, I've found one mention of a suit of war armor weighing 84 pounds, from the late 16th century. (Jousting plate, on the other hand, could run up to 125 pounds. That stuff, I'd believe the need for a crane or at least a stepladder.) 84 pounds is certainly very heavy, but it's not unsupportable--once again, modern soldiers carry 100 pounds of gear on the march and can certainly get up again if they fall over.<a href="http://www.varmouries.com/vweights.html" target="_blank">This page</a> shows a comparison of modern reproduction armor with genuine 16th-century Maximillian plate. Conveniently, it includes weight comparisons. The original armor weighs in at a shade over 65 pounds.</blockquote>

Verification