Scale mail in the modern age

[Gez]

Your average man has a mass of about 70 kilograms.

That's for an adult who is rather slim and not particularly muscular. For a soldier, you can safely add 20 kg of muscles -- and then you've got the equipment.

 

[Gentlegamer]

However, you can have a group of fully trained musketeers ready in a month. With such an ease of training, armies were able to have fields of these guys. And if you lost a bunch of them you could replace them quickly.

So lets say you have a division of knights vs 5 divisions of muskets (no where near accurate, but just as an example). That division of knights might ultimately win the day because they were the elite powerhouse of the times. However, a king could replace those 5 divisions of muskets faster than all the dead knights. Eventually the economy of war favored the musket.

Additionally, the musket was actually used in close combat. Musketeers were imbedded in formations of pikemen, which used their reach weapons to keep the horsemen back allowing the musketeers to fire at nearly point blank range at the armored knight. The equipment and training of the pikemen and musketeers was far less expensive than that of the armored knight.

 

[Rackhir]

thats because the bullet goes straight through...

If it hit a bone or something it would break it - thats a LOT of force required and you WOULD move backwards if the armour stopped it and transferred the force

They did an episode of Mythbusters with this and got essentially no knockback vs pig carcases that were hanging on hooks. As Umbrian pointed out, bullets simply don't hit with enough force to move back the mass of an adult human.

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

From the Pinnacle Armor website, the strongest suit of Dragon Skin armor weighs only 17 lbs in a normal configuration (front and back protection), so I'm not sure where all the conflicting information is coming from.

Also, from what I've been able to read, it seems that one of the primary flaws the Army has found deals with long-term environmental effects on the armor. That's just a hunch, but based on the Army's desire to test only several weeks after unpackaging the armor, and Pinnacle's desire to test immediately, as well as several mentions of heat-treating the armor prior to testing.

No armor will ever provide 100% protection against 100% of enemy ordnance (tactical nukes, anyone?), but I sure would feel safer with some of the modern armor available!

Great information in this thread, everyone.

IIRC (I worked at the Infantry Center during the 2006 go-round with Dragon Skin, when both the Army and Air Force issued SOUMs not to use the stuff, though on the lethality side -- I was a small arms guy, and the body armor folks were across the hall from me) the difference was about 4lbs in roughly equivalent configurations. Not immense, but significant. You can't get much truly factual information from manufacturer's websites -- they have a product to sell, and there are so many potential variations that it's hard to compare apples to apples.

Dragon Skin's problems in 2006 were at the hot and cold conditions, where the adhesive holding the scales together would come apart under impact. Army equipment has to function at a wide range of temperatures so that when the unit from Alaska deploys to the desert, they don't need significantly new equipment. Typically, the piece of equipment -- whether tank, boot, or round of ammunition -- is "frozen" or "baked" in a temperature chamber to condition it to a particular temperature, anywhere from 2-24 hours (which simulates either long-term storage at temperature, or extended use). The equipment is then subjected to whatever specific performance test is required. Guns & ammo certainly see pretty wide changes in performance at wide temperatures as powder degrades, chamber pressures rise or fall, and parts expand & contract screwing up finely engineered tolerances.

It's something medieval knights certainly didn't worry about -- not to mention something D&D glosses over. We certainly don't have rules for bowstrings snapping in the cold, or stretching too much and providing less force under hot conditions!