Can modern-style plate carriers with plates be viably mass produced in the 17th-19th century? Just trying out some worldbuilding.
Having line infantry be able to take a musket ball to the largest exposed area and still be able to fire back sounds useful. I know 'bulletproof' cuirasses were made back then, but they are expensive; I'm imagining something for the common foot soldier, one single simple mass-produced plate that will be strapped to the front of your torso
Steel may work, but can isekai'd modern-day metallurgical knowledge be useable with their infrastructure? I imagine a viable thickness would be too heavy. Lead spalling can be taken care of by a layer of leather.
Ceramic backed by a textile composite might work too, to break the ball and then catch it, but silk is the only fabric I can think of has historical ballistics use and it's expensive. And can modern-day ceramics knowledge be useable back then too?
Modern ceramics didn't exist back then, and can't really exist without high-temperature processes that all but require electricity.
Steel existed, though, and by the 18th century it would probably be cheap enough to issue soldiers thick (6mm) breastplates of hardened carbon steel which would compare reasonably well to "AR500" plates. AR500 -- low-alloy martensitic steel -- is basically late 19th century tech.
Breastplates and cuirasses of that thickness did exist, during and even prior to the 17th century. Many of these were tested against pistols and muskets.
Even before the 17th century, there was the concept of "munitions grade" armor that was cheap and made along a one-size-fits-most pattern, for general issue.
So, thick munitions grade steel plate in a fabric or leather "carrier." Totally doable with the technologies of the time.
What this gay said.
The question is scale, practicability and unironically comfort. If you read about soldier complaints of the 18th century, the absolutely abysmal ergonomics of their kit was always somewhere on the top, along with food, shitty orders and abuse.
Most uniforms were designed with fashion, visibility and symbolism in mind, not practicability. If you try and force your soldiers to wear a somewhat heavy plate that further interfers with their daily work and life, you may run into some issues.
Also keep in mind, that most movement was done on foot. I guess you'd be adding about 3-5kg of plate armor (depending on size - why a carrier at all and not a proper cuirass?) to their daily kit. That is some serious weight. If you want them to run around in that on the battlefield, it gets even worse. And now let them fight in melee, which was still a very common occurence, with a chunk of untailored steel in front of their chest. Shit's all sorts of fucked.
Fair points
What if they followed modern day-practices on sizing, with S,M,L, XL, etc. along with the more small and nimble 'swimmer's cut?' And it may be worth the increase in production costs with double/triple curved plates for a more comfortable fit
Thanks man, that's everything I need
I wonder why we didn't think of doing that back then, or why didn't do it if we did thought of it. Seems so obvious to do with modern day hindsight
>I wonder why we didn't think of doing that back then
metal heavy
there's a story i read about some polish cavalry being given cuirasses as protection, they were, heavy, uncomfortable and almost never useful.The cuirasses all ended up being used as cooking pots or were just sold or abandoned
So all of this armor on the modern kit only started and became practical with the adoption of mechanized infantry?
Upon realizing this now I'm imagining that this '18th Century plate carrier' can will be most practical in urban/semi urban areas with road infrastructure and access to carriages. Like an elite city guard that would need the extra survivability due to tight spaces but won't be marching for miles.
absolutely correct.
there's a reason cavalry kept their cuirasses longer than the infantry
Yup. There are more reasons as to why cavalry kept their cuirass longer, such as heritage, wealth and tradition, but that's basically it.
As you mentioned, city guard would be a good fit to retain some form of armor. Potentially, maybe, you could even argue for some sort of close quarter "Stormtrooper" variant - preload a fuckton of shot in as many tubes as you like, run into an enclosed space, kill everything. But that's already stretching it.
I think a lot of it has to do with changing technologies and attitudes.
First, say armies had never moved from full power cartridges down to intermediate. It's easier to make body armor that stops 5.56 or 7.62 than it is to stop 8mm Mauser. That would have slowed the attempt to make plate body armor, but not fully.
Body armor technology improved because of better materials technology. Ceramics just weren't advanced enough decades ago. This development of body armor was driven also by the media and public not accepting massive loss of life anymore. Less soldiers died in Iraq and Afghanistan than many battles in WWII or II. So, there was an impetus to develop both body armor and medical care to save lives.
Then consider how body armor is used to save lives. Plate carriers and helmets are there to prevent serious injury to vitals. They do nothing for your extremities. Medical care on the ground level with training and kit like IFAKs are meant to stabilize a wounded soldier for medevac. You had guys get injured and flown to Germany from Afghanistan in 10-11 hours. If you were a soldier in 1780 and you got shot in your plate carrier but also your leg, you lost the leg and most likely also your life due to infection.
Only Ned survived the shootout and he had some 28 wounds. If you were on a battlefield with no hope of real medical care then surviving being shot multiple times back in the 17th-19th century might not be much better than just being shot to death outright.
The modern day equivalent to a musket ball would be a 12ga lead slug, which is stopped by level 3 and even level 3A, still going to break something though with the latter. Now I wonder how the Minie ball would fare against level 3A.
Yeah medicine back then was terrible, but the fix in a historical fantasy setting would be practically viable with surgeons scrubbing up and copious amounts of soap and distilled alcohol. Would still suck without antibiotics though. Tourniquets have been used since medieval times, and it turns out plain wound packing gauze works just fine without fancy QuikClot.
I have always found those proofmarks suHispanicious, won't it be too easy to just underpressure your BP load and make a marketable-looking dent?
>still going to break something though with the latter.
Not consistently, really.
I mean one could sew some pouches onto an arming doublet, so that thick(ish) steel plates (similar to those pectoral plates carried by the early Hastati of the Roman Republic) can be carried.
But keep in mind that modern plate carriers don't protect the complete upper body like a cuirass does and so they would be still vulnerable to melee.
This would be very important for city guards, as you have alluded to here as in a time of muzzleloading firearms the small distances of the streets alleys can be covered quite quickly.
See here the pectoral plate
how tf did I forget about the hastati when looking for the historical equivalent of plate carriers
I'm no historian but I bet a big reason why the structure changed from bolt-on plates to pocketed plates is that stitching all that shit is very expensive. A modern plate carrier is a very high quality garment.
Also everyone was cheaping out on warfare in that era, and there was a shift from more survivable armies to more lethal weapons. Armor existed, it was just expensive and heavy. Also the methods of warfare didn't involve a lot of directly getting shot at, due the the nature of trench warfare and cannons being more widely deployed. Historically, most soldiers of those times were dying of disease and improper treatment of minor injuries (buddy gets one piece of shrapnel and half a twig in his hand, it goes septic, hand either comes off or he dies, and he probably dies even with the hand off anyway(or he just drinks from the wrong stream and shits so hard he dies))
>or he just drinks from the wrong stream and shits so hard he dies
and the more he drank, the more he shat
but people weren't averse to making gambesons, which were tens of layers of linen quilted together, stuff was a massive pain to sew together with big needles that wont break and all that textile was very labor and land intensive to produce.
yes, and gambesons were suitably expensive. now consider the same kind of garment, but now it has a million pockets, loops, and is made out of even tougher fabric. in an era where the average male child wore a dress because pants were considered too expensive to produce for a kid who's just going to outgrow them
They did during the ACW and stopped due to concerns of practicality.
ACW is a really terrible example of damn near anything, because the combatants were mostly retarded. It's the rifle musket edition of "all the gear no idea".
Yes, by the time of WWI there were some limited runs of body armor and some of it was quite decent for the time. Bashford Dean did a lot of experimental work on it. But you have to remember that the armies back in the 17th and 18th centuries didn't care about massive losses of troops as much as we do today. There were plenty of unemployed and unskilled laborers to send to their deaths. Any mass issuing of plate is going to put a strain on budget and logistics. They had a hard enough time feeding all of their troops then and more of them died to disease than gunfire in most cases. Also most armies made you pay for all of your equipment and food. Soldiers already barely made any money, so I doubt many would want expensive armor that would be likely to be abandoned in retreats.
Ned Kelly's armor was 6mm and it was good at stopping common rounds in 1880. It also weighed 90 pounds because it was crude and covered a significant amount of the head and torso. Just a front and rear plate wouldn't be too heavy though.
now i'm imagining "cavalry" shock troops made up of men wearing kelly gang style armor, riding along in cart-before-the-horse wagons, 3-5 men per wagon, armed with halberds or double barrel muzzleloading shotguns (or both)
the men will be driven up to enemy formations, fire the first barrel, dismount, fire again and get stuck in with halberds (or just tell the horse to back up and leave)
anon, carts are excruciatingly slow off road.
they wouldn't be shock troops, they would probably be slower than the infantry
why real life have to be so boring?
i dont know anon, it sucks
Hello, you reinvented Reiters.
https://mindhost.tumblr.com/post/126333720067/armoured-cavalry-and-firearms/amp
Except where the reiters could just smash into the enemy formation with all the weight of their horses to help them, his troopers would have to dismount under fire and then bumble into the enemy on foot, assuming they didn't get bum rushed during the dismount phase.
>more of them died to disease than gunfire
not only more of them, but many times as many. in some cases it could be a question of 10 to 1.
a plate carrier doesn't make sense when the number one killer of your troops is disease due to poor nutrition and hygiene.
it would save a lot more lives to just issue a bar of soap to each soldier, or some lemons.
>But you have to remember that the armies back in the 17th and 18th centuries didn't care about massive losses of troops as much as we do today.
Not only that, but from the 30 Years War on people developed an almost reformer tier fetish for mobility in warfare
How would such armors hold up to larger firearms - like wall guns?
I feel like whenever such questions (Why didn't line infantry use shields? Why weren't line infantry armored?) are asked, the counter reactions are conveniently not noticed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=U2GLbXR3-HI
They wouldn't have, most likely.
Look into the origins of the word "Proofing" in the context of armor. Look at the damage armor sustained against everyday firearms. It's very unlikely, that armor would be able to handle a significant increase in firepower.
The issue here is the same as with armor though. Carrying full kit for a musket is difficult as it is, remember there's no Humvee to get you to the line. If you significantly strengthened your weapons, it'd be more weight, heavier kit, less ammo, much more expensive etc.
> Carrying full kit for a musket is difficult as it is, remember there's no Humvee to get you to the line. If you significantly strengthened your weapons, it'd be more weight, heavier kit, less ammo, much more expensive etc.
Yes, but a heavy musket is still easier to transport than whatever "plate carrier" one wants to utilize and has more general utility.And casting larger lead balls is not as resource intensive as producing heat treated steel shaped into a certain form. The only downside could be powder production and mobility - which in turn can easily be solved through a dedicated weapons team.
>If you were on a battlefield with no hope of real medical care then surviving being shot multiple times back in the 17th-19th century might not be much better than just being shot to death outright.
Good consideration as well.
>I have always found those proofmarks suHispanicious, won't it be too easy to just underpressure your BP load and make a marketable-looking dent?
Wasn't it the case that most proof marks were made by pistols or at best carbines and not full muskets?
They wouldn't. Even the regular musket was a problem for the thickest armors of the day. (Which maxed out at around 6mm)
No problem.
If you want something exotic and alternate-history-style, consider ballistic armor made from rock and silk.
Quartzite is basically a ceramic-like material that has been examined for use in modern armor. It's 3x less dense than steel, harder than steel, and works quite well. It's possible to imagine "light" plates made of 6-10mm quartzite over a silk or thin steel backer.
There are quartzite deposits all over Europe's hill countries. Cutting and sculpting the hard rock would be laborious, but well within the capabilities of 17th century Europe.
>quartz armor plates
I love my plates shattering violently and generating 600 volts when i get hit in the chest
>(Which maxed out at around 6mm)
I've never heard of a pre-modern plate even hitting 5mm
Here you go, bro.
This is from "The Knight and the Blast Furnace" -- an exhaustive review of body armor from the middle ages to the early modern period.
6mm was pretty much the peak, but there are weird examples at as much as 8mm.
Today's "rifle rated" (not really) AR500 plate is about 6mm thick.
well, that's certainly interesting. I should ask, has there been any testing of the hardness of the armor on the Brinell scale?
The average is around 280 on the Vickers scale or about 28 HRC, because a lot of armor wasn't properly quenched or was over-tempered.
Some pieces are a lot harder, in the 50 HRC range.
Some are a lot softer, like the famous Churburg breastplate in picrel. It's not much harder than mild steel.
Thanks, that's very interesting. I'll have to read the book.
Even if its a scale issue, I'm surprised they didn't give anything like that to officers or other people of similar importance. They wouldn't need to wear it all the time marching, they'd probably have enough time to just strap something on before a battle. Even something that couldn't stop a point blank musket ball would probably be pretty effective at a few hundred yards
Yes. You could make chest armor capable of stopping any musket round, though it'd be absurdly expensive to outfit more than some kind of shock troop or honor guard with it. Aside from the cost it would slow down the army, not so much in an individual battle, but moreso over land day to day, just one extra big piece of luggage, one more thing for the men or the horses to carry around, meaning they have to rest more often or at the very least eat more to keep their energy up.
Completely throwing cost out the window, High quality silk, layered over and over, is actually a very good bulletproofing material. There are many accounts of musketballs punching into the body having not even torn through a thick Silk garment, while that's obviously not the effect we're after, any fabric that consistently holds up to that abuse could be made into a fantastic armor by increasing the layers. Non conical musket ammunition, lead spheres essentially, are absolutely absolutely atrocious at punching through soft armor on an efficiency basis.
It's theoretically possible that even a traditional set of plate armor could be proof against even powerful musket-shots if there were a few layers of silk on the *outside*, which might strike you as odd because flexible components of composite armor normally goes on the inside, but in this case we're optimizing against a blunt projectile with high momentum and poor sectional density, the exact opposite of what those modern composite armors are meant to deal with.
It would theoretically be possible to produce ceramic plates that, while a far cry from modern ceramics, would demonstrate a similar effect with the very soft, very short projectiles of the day. i.e. some kind of coat of porcelain tiles wrapped in silk at a similar scale to modern level IV armor would probably be quite bulletproof against anything man portable.
See
Quartzite is far better than porcelain. Even glass would probably be better than porcelain. But, yeah, something along those lines would have been possible, had anybody thought of it.
Fair enough I hadn't even considered cutting natural materials to shape.
I've never seen anything resembling a study of the physics of how Chainmail interacts with bullets. We all know that existing pieces of chainmail can't stop most musket rounds, but I've always been very curious how the quality of the rings, ring layout, ring size, ring shape, and even ring attachment method (There are double-riveted rings found, and suits that are half riveted half solid) effects this, across the variety of bullet sizes.
Obviously it would be obscenely expensive to test. You would have to have multiple layers of each variety and see how many layers it took to stop a given bullet.
I would be curious to see how the weight-per-protection, and volume per-protection scaled between a solid plate and layered chainmail, because ratios like that based on one type of impact (i.e. arrows) don't always translate to another (i.e. a round ball). After all, it's easier to penetrate a Kevlar panel with an arrow than a lead ball.
Congratulations, this is the most retarded thread on PrepHole currently
Yes of course you can make steel plate. 8 mm of low carbon steel or 6mm heat treated steel would be enough. 16-17th centuries had many examples of bullet proof plate armor parts (breastplates, helmets etc). Mostly for horsemen. See heavy ones 0.25.-0.30" thick.
https://www.allenantiques.com/Armour-Breastplates-Collection.html
Problem with equipping of infantry with the bulletproof armor is the weight. Large cover suite is too heavy for infantry, small SAPI style plate is too small to provide meanegfull coverage.
Huh? American revolutionaries crated more or less a proto special forces group because of Washington
They kind a shirt on then overalls above the knee boots but stops above their knees from foot down. It was like modern day NFL player/WW1 wrap. They'd have a kind of long sleeve on top of that with a coat sometimes on top of that was their armor most which was stolen from Brits. It it was usually 8 plates with bends shaped around the torso arms free. Using that meta vesta they'd attack their pre prepped rounds so they could just jam it all it
They more or less looked exactly how they do now with waist up. Even the helmets are pretty close. Washington had them cut the ears and fronts up it was very Spartan but keep looikhv
Remember kids, this is what just one puff of Marijuana does to you! Still think it's cool?
sauce on that? I want to read about it
They had "bulletproof" breastplates back then. If you made it modern then you would just lighten it by reducing the full round coverage for a smaller plate.
The gun being invented actually made plate armor MORE important and sought after. Most infantry would wear maille or treated leather since it was cheap and effective, and actually is better than plate against certain things since it dissipates energy better. But you can't rely on it to stop a bullet, so plate cuirasses became basically mandatory. The word "bulletproof" is from that era, in fact.
Also while modern plate carriers are structurally different, medieval and renaissance plate armor is a similar concept. It's not a bunch of jointed plates you wear as-is, you would wear a gambeson under it and have lots of straps and loops and stuff for the plates to hook onto. Parts like the arm sleeves would be largely one piece and jointed, but the chest, limbs, and obviously helmet are all different pieces that don't interface with eachother, much like how modern plate carriers are a soft kevlar vest with optional extra padding that you "attach" the actual armor plates to (by stuffing them in a pocket rather than clipping on, but still)
a gambeson and plate carrier also fulfill similar purposes as armor. plate carriers can stop low energy rounds and shrapnel, and actual gambesons made properly were sufficient to take a beating with a club or stop poorly made arrows.
not really
steel couldn't be produce in any large quantity before bessimer and by the 1860s you had shit like level actions and trapdoor guns that were fast firing and accurate enough to make it not nearly as effective.
also only Britain would be using it since they produced like 90% of the worlds steel during that period.
Is this a troll post? Even the Romans made enough steel to armor their legionnaires.
Also, until the 18th century, Britain was primarily an importer of steel from continental Europe: https://books.openedition.org/pumi/37703?lang=en
roman armor is way thinner than rolled plate that would stop bullets and they had to supply much less troops for campaigns than a lot of 19th century battles
>Also, until the 18th century, Britain was primarily an importer of steel from continental Europe
yeah probably why I was talking about the 1850s you retarded fucking moron. its almost like there had been an entire industrial revolution and a massive leap forward in steelmaking in that gap (invented in one particular country) that increased the output of steel making by orders of magnitude.
NTA
How thick was that roman armor?
lmao, you literally don't know anything about this topic.
> yeah probably why I was talking about the 1850s
OP is talking about the "17th-19th century." You're focusing on 1/6th of that, and pretending to be some sort of authority?
And you also claim that what OP is suggesting wouldn't be possible in the 1850s, when it would be possible even in 1650?
50IQ detected.
> roman armor is way thinner than rolled plate that would stop bullets and they had to supply much less troops for campaigns than a lot of 19th century battles
A lorica segmentata cuirass weighed ~20 pounds, which is a couple pounds more than a 10x12" frontplate and backplate would be if they're 6mm thick.
See: https://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2004/2004.02.49
Other forms of Roman armor, such as their chainmail lorica hamata, weighed considerably more. They also had hundreds of thousands of men in the Roman army, at times.
They had the steel for that. The early Empire was producing approximately 165,000,000 pounds of iron per year:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_metallurgy
bro u dumb
If you care that much just make 3 sizes of munitions plate breastpieces for your dudes.
yeah, but I'm just wondering if the much cheaper and simpler modern day form of chest armor can be viable back then.
Do you mean a plate carrier that plates slot into, or modern ceramic plate?
modern ceramics no, plate carriers with steel plates probably but they would be prohibitively expensive.
%3D
Modern steel (not armor quality but modern nonetheless) but an interesting video regardless.