Metallurgy just wasn't really there to make it practical on an individual level without weighing a fuckton and being impractical. Just look at the Korean and Vietnam era flak vests, even they were bulky and couldn't take a bullet. Add into it resource scarcity that could go towards armaments and it's really a no-brainer.
My dad had a chicken plate in Vietnam, but he was a door gunner. Said it weighed a lot, and they usually sat on it because most shots would come through the bottom of the helicopter. He saw one guy get knocked out of his seat when a bullet hit the plate he sitting on, but it stopped it.
They were, though they were thinner and primarily meant for shrapnel protection and limited bullet resistance. Also have you never heard of Ned Kelley? The thought of using metal plates to stop bullets is far from a new idea
As people have already said, the metallurgy is child's play compared to today, the bullet loads back then were not like they are today, as chambers couldn't handle the immense pressure
>the bullet loads back then were not like they are today, as chambers couldn't handle the immense pressure
that's bullshit. there even were tungsten core bullets going nearly 2900 fps.
>the metallurgy is child's play compared to today
lmfaoooo
You don't really know anything, do you? The German helmet steel was as much as 54 rockwell C, which is well beyond AR500.
If anything the people designing steel armor back then knew a lot more about metallurgy than the total retards at companies like AR500 and Spartan Armor.
german helmets were also dogshit for protection and they knew it, they had plans drawn up for a helmet that might actually survive something bigger than a BB hitting it.
Yes, but you need to realize that without rare tungsten AP ammo, the next Caliber that can reliably pen lvl4 with steel AP ammo is 338 lapua magnum. There is no lvl5 because threats that can defeat lvl4 would be rare even if you fought the US.
>the armor soviet sappers wore was capable of stopping 9mm out of an mp40
So did the reserve parachute of paratroopers
I read a story of one which landed almost on top of a german soldier with an mp40 and got magdumped from 3-5 meters
He still got one in his leg and arm but the parachute stopped the rest and he managed to shoot him while he reloaded
As lame as steel armor is, modern steel body armor typically has a hardness between BN 450 and 550, which while cheap today was quite difficult to produce in the past.
>As lame as steel armor is, modern steel body armor typically has a hardness between BN 450 and 550, which while cheap today was quite difficult to produce in the past.
So many people write shit like that but what did they actually change?
I wanna know what's in the magic modern steel just in case I travel back in time someday
Literally nothing. It's the same steel that's been used in tractors and armor for the past 100 years.
AR500 is simply Abrasion Resistant 500 BHN. It's been in use since ~WW1 for mining and industrial use.
Look, I don't think Krupp's gonna be very impressed when I tell him that while trying to convince Hitler and the boys that every tank needs to start out with a 75mm cannon.
>But sure SOME metallurgy advances have been made, how'd humanity manage to do that?
There are new tool steels and high-speed shit like CPM Magnacut and a bunch of others, but "AR500" and "AR550" are literally 110-year-old tech.
>There are new tool steels
Anything that would be of interest for a time traveler?
3 weeks ago
Anonymous
Maraging steels, Titor. They date to the 1960s-1970s, and they're fantastically useful in tools and aircraft parts. Too expensive for armor, though, and also ITAR-controlled because they can be used in nuclear centrifuges, so they're tough to get.
3 weeks ago
Anonymous
>Maraging steels
That's cool as fuck anon, thank you.
3 weeks ago
Anonymous
Not really, they use technology like Powdered metallurgy, and materials like vanadium, nitrogen, and other materials pretty much impossible to isolate with old tech. Plus the accuracy of modern heating and such, makes modern steels purely possible with modern tech.
New techniques and better understanding of metallurgy. As well as better tools to examine metals.
High end kitchen knives for example, have the engineers behind them focus on the microscopic grain a specific steel blend creates when developing a new blade line. These days the focus is on reducing the size of the chromium granules that exist in stainless steel blends especially.
They were , kindoff, but compared to the Ass Ramming 500 steel, they were shit. Aluminum was not common enough to replace it and various alloys probably werent invented
Ww1 You have a silk fragmentation vest by the britbongs, Bashford and dean prototypes that never saw action, german panzergraben (lobster plate ), portable sniper shields, and various home bought silk, and/ or steel vests.
Ww2 canucks had some steel plates just before the end of the war. >pic related
And Burgers had their pilots use steel and nylon flak jackets to stop flak from flak cannons that fired areal flak shells
I think the next item is the smith and wesson bodyshield , nylon (38 sp proof) and steel plates (30 carbine) but im not sure.
/k/orean war: Then you get properly designed infantry flakjackets (m55 vest) that had aluminum plates sandwitched between doron,
>This is when people started figuring out how to make infantry bodyarmor due to aluminum and nylon starting to become the wundermaterial of the time. It existed before but (if I had to guess) production was ramped up during ww2 due to incredible consumption and more people worked with them and started to see their potential so somebody thought making bodyarmor out of those might be a decent idea
Vietnam m69, then later some aluminum oxide ceramic overvest similar to what you see on motherbase solders in MGSV GZ
>composite plate >becomes useless after taking 1 shot and has to be replaced >steel plate >can take many shots and still be worn
so why aren't steel plates more common? Is it because of spawling?
Modern composite plates aren't useless after 1 shot retard. Many of the Nij standards literally require multi hit. Spalling is not the primary reason they aren't used. The main reason is a steel lvl4 plates weight would outweigh any benefit. Steel simply can't be made that hard. Atleast not any steel that could be produced at the scale required. Steel plates, weigh more, are inferior performance wise, and spall.
I believe the largest issue is it took till the 2000’s to realize an armor plate only needs to cover 8”x11” of chest to save the most lives and being lightweight enough for a soldier to deal with. It’s very difficult to convince generals with injury statistics and armor autists wanted to cover as much as possible. When the steel helmet was introduced, head injuries skyrocketed and generals had to be convinced that those head injuries would’ve been deaths without the helmets. Also the reason why we can reduce armor size to just the instakill regions is because we’ve honed logistics so much we can get someone wounded on the frontline to hospital grade care in an hour. That didn’t exist till the end of the 20th century so even if you dumped a bunch of level IV plates in WW1 it might not make a noticeable difference.
They were initially used for spying on enemy troops before their combat potential became realized later into the war, similar to how prior methods of human flight like hot air balloons were utilized before. As such, planes weren't actually fitted with any armaments at first, it was just a pilot and maybe a copilot with a camera to take aerial photos of enemy lines. The first dogfights were between spy planes who'd spotted each other. The crew began carrying guns with them on missions to shoot at enemy spy planes, as well as for personal protection if they were shot down and survived the landing. I faintly recall hearing that some brought grenades and other explosives up with them to drop on enemy soldiers, but I don't remember where I heard that.
So imagine the pilots with pistols and carbine rifles taking potshots at enemy planes who did the same to them. Maybe they managed to shoot the other pilot and down the plane, maybe they shot out the engine, maybe they both just missed every shot and returned to base bragging about how they totally domed that enemy pilot with just a pocket pistol. Regardless, this stuff eventually made it's way back to the guys in charge who believed nothing had changed since the Crimean War and someone started mounting guns and some primitive bombs to planes.
I feel like cutting out holes for the eyes is probably worth it.
3 weeks ago
Anonymous
Maybe they just tilted the visor up on their head by pushing the helmet back, similar to some ancient helmets.
3 weeks ago
Anonymous
>post a helmet with no visor
Bad example, those eyeholes are purely for decoration.
3 weeks ago
Anonymous
Yeah, I know, I just didn't have what I wanted on hand. I would've posted one of those Greek statues with a Corinthian helmet pushed up on top of the head, but I don't really have one and I'm too lazy to look at the moment.
More on the topic of this thread, I have this. Dunno if it's real or based on something that is. I was going to use it for some autistic space opera thing I had in mind as the basis for some soldier's armor, but I can't quite draw the helmet right. Body armor drawing is kinda off too in places. No idea where I put those sketches, I haven't done anything with them yet because I can only write lore, not stories about individuals. Autism, I know.
Attacks were usually signaled by artillery stopping (for a little bit), a whistle being blown, and a bunch of guys running at you en mass while shouting. machine-gunning was mostly a matter of pointing it at the noise and pulling the trigger.
It's a bunch of dudes wearing monocolor uniforms (not even something that blends in most of the time) charging at you across an open, muddy field and probably screaming at the top of their lungs. If you can't aim at the colored blotches and hose them down until the screams stop, you're both blind and deaf.
The slats are enough to see through but the wearers often took so much shrapnel to the face that the masks were the only thing keeping their eyes intact.
They'd usually give you something of the sort if you were part of an assault team or something. Say if you were sent out with a few picked men in the night to raid an enemy trench, or if you were sent out to assault some fortified command post in Stalingrad. For most other men, not really the best application as far as the leadership was concerned. Shit like the Nivelle Offensive should tell you that they valued a hunk of steel more than the lives of the men they commanded most of the time. Better to let the unarmored bulk of the grunts certainly die in some poorly-planned charge straight into an MG nest than fit them with something that might save some of them during this.
Up until Vietnam most infantry soldiers were conscripted and only given a few months training. So replacing individual losses wasn't a massive issue. In Vietnam you see a shift towards professional soldiers with significantly longer training times meaning you can't just indefinitely replace losses. Same reason SOF get NVGs that cost 40k vs 5k for NG infantry.
Because people had reasonable suHispanicion that tinny plate ain't gonna help charging machine guns.
They tried larger coverage armor but it was too heavy.
No much changed since.
They were.
Literally this, OP is a hoholshill tourist.
https://militarymatters.online/military-history/the-development-of-helmets-and-body-armour-in-the-first-world-war-a-history-of-what-ifs/
are those hoholshills in the room with us right now?
Metallurgy just wasn't really there to make it practical on an individual level without weighing a fuckton and being impractical. Just look at the Korean and Vietnam era flak vests, even they were bulky and couldn't take a bullet. Add into it resource scarcity that could go towards armaments and it's really a no-brainer.
My dad had a chicken plate in Vietnam, but he was a door gunner. Said it weighed a lot, and they usually sat on it because most shots would come through the bottom of the helicopter. He saw one guy get knocked out of his seat when a bullet hit the plate he sitting on, but it stopped it.
>He saw one guy get knocked out of his seat when a bullet hit the plate he sitting on, but it stopped it.
did he break his ass, or was he okay?
He shit his ass for sure.
>A bullet came trough the seat right up in timos ass
They were.
They were, though they were thinner and primarily meant for shrapnel protection and limited bullet resistance. Also have you never heard of Ned Kelley? The thought of using metal plates to stop bullets is far from a new idea
Was it just shitty bullets? WW1 and 2 weren't using some piddly 556. They were using real rifle bullets.
As people have already said, the metallurgy is child's play compared to today, the bullet loads back then were not like they are today, as chambers couldn't handle the immense pressure
that's pretty strange as Gewehr 98 had both faster and heavier projectiles than today's rifles - how did they do that with lower chamber pressure?
>the bullet loads back then were not like they are today, as chambers couldn't handle the immense pressure
that's bullshit. there even were tungsten core bullets going nearly 2900 fps.
>the metallurgy is child's play compared to today
lmfaoooo
You don't really know anything, do you? The German helmet steel was as much as 54 rockwell C, which is well beyond AR500.
If anything the people designing steel armor back then knew a lot more about metallurgy than the total retards at companies like AR500 and Spartan Armor.
Yeah ok bro
german helmets were also dogshit for protection and they knew it, they had plans drawn up for a helmet that might actually survive something bigger than a BB hitting it.
But we still use stopping M2 armor piercing rounds as the standard for lvl 4 plates?
Yes, but you need to realize that without rare tungsten AP ammo, the next Caliber that can reliably pen lvl4 with steel AP ammo is 338 lapua magnum. There is no lvl5 because threats that can defeat lvl4 would be rare even if you fought the US.
the armor soviet sappers wore was capable of stopping 9mm out of an mp40
>the armor soviet sappers wore was capable of stopping 9mm out of an mp40
So did the reserve parachute of paratroopers
I read a story of one which landed almost on top of a german soldier with an mp40 and got magdumped from 3-5 meters
He still got one in his leg and arm but the parachute stopped the rest and he managed to shoot him while he reloaded
Folded up parachutes are good at stopping bullets in general, anon.
A folded up parachute is basically a kevlar vest.
Plausible if it's silk or nylon. The trick was layering it. Get enough layers of even paper and you can stop a bullet.
Wouldn't some fragmentation find his chin?
They were.
>1917
>still no armor made of steel
retard
There was steel armor in the fucking civil war.
As lame as steel armor is, modern steel body armor typically has a hardness between BN 450 and 550, which while cheap today was quite difficult to produce in the past.
>As lame as steel armor is, modern steel body armor typically has a hardness between BN 450 and 550, which while cheap today was quite difficult to produce in the past.
So many people write shit like that but what did they actually change?
I wanna know what's in the magic modern steel just in case I travel back in time someday
I will not tell you
Literally nothing. It's the same steel that's been used in tractors and armor for the past 100 years.
AR500 is simply Abrasion Resistant 500 BHN. It's been in use since ~WW1 for mining and industrial use.
But sure SOME metallurgy advances have been made, how'd humanity manage to do that?
Fuck you, I'll find out where you live and if I travel back in time your ancestors are getting genocided.
Process improvements have been made. The biggest innovation in the past 150 years has been testing methods.
Look, I don't think Krupp's gonna be very impressed when I tell him that while trying to convince Hitler and the boys that every tank needs to start out with a 75mm cannon.
>But sure SOME metallurgy advances have been made, how'd humanity manage to do that?
There are new tool steels and high-speed shit like CPM Magnacut and a bunch of others, but "AR500" and "AR550" are literally 110-year-old tech.
>There are new tool steels
Anything that would be of interest for a time traveler?
Maraging steels, Titor. They date to the 1960s-1970s, and they're fantastically useful in tools and aircraft parts. Too expensive for armor, though, and also ITAR-controlled because they can be used in nuclear centrifuges, so they're tough to get.
>Maraging steels
That's cool as fuck anon, thank you.
Not really, they use technology like Powdered metallurgy, and materials like vanadium, nitrogen, and other materials pretty much impossible to isolate with old tech. Plus the accuracy of modern heating and such, makes modern steels purely possible with modern tech.
standardization, industrialization. replaceable parts are a 20th century invention, replaceable steel included.
>t.
everything you just listed was 19th century
attempts were made, yeah. 20th century is when they succeeded.
... no they succeeded in the 19th century.
nope
wallow in your ignorance then, dipshit.
New techniques and better understanding of metallurgy. As well as better tools to examine metals.
High end kitchen knives for example, have the engineers behind them focus on the microscopic grain a specific steel blend creates when developing a new blade line. These days the focus is on reducing the size of the chromium granules that exist in stainless steel blends especially.
The brits and dominions issued them quite widely, but they are usually worn under the clothes so you don't see them much.
They were , kindoff, but compared to the Ass Ramming 500 steel, they were shit. Aluminum was not common enough to replace it and various alloys probably werent invented
Ww1 You have a silk fragmentation vest by the britbongs, Bashford and dean prototypes that never saw action, german panzergraben (lobster plate ), portable sniper shields, and various home bought silk, and/ or steel vests.
Ww2 canucks had some steel plates just before the end of the war.
>pic related
And Burgers had their pilots use steel and nylon flak jackets to stop flak from flak cannons that fired areal flak shells
I think the next item is the smith and wesson bodyshield , nylon (38 sp proof) and steel plates (30 carbine) but im not sure.
/k/orean war: Then you get properly designed infantry flakjackets (m55 vest) that had aluminum plates sandwitched between doron,
>This is when people started figuring out how to make infantry bodyarmor due to aluminum and nylon starting to become the wundermaterial of the time. It existed before but (if I had to guess) production was ramped up during ww2 due to incredible consumption and more people worked with them and started to see their potential so somebody thought making bodyarmor out of those might be a decent idea
Vietnam m69, then later some aluminum oxide ceramic overvest similar to what you see on motherbase solders in MGSV GZ
Then pasgat AESTHETIC commeth
Interceptor vest
Modern plate carriers
Before the interceptor delta SOP used these.
Btw what are the closest things in today's market to picrel?
you need to be 18 or older to post here
>composite plate
>becomes useless after taking 1 shot and has to be replaced
>steel plate
>can take many shots and still be worn
so why aren't steel plates more common? Is it because of spawling?
heavy, spalling, lesser resistance to AP projectiles
Modern composite plates aren't useless after 1 shot retard. Many of the Nij standards literally require multi hit. Spalling is not the primary reason they aren't used. The main reason is a steel lvl4 plates weight would outweigh any benefit. Steel simply can't be made that hard. Atleast not any steel that could be produced at the scale required. Steel plates, weigh more, are inferior performance wise, and spall.
I believe the largest issue is it took till the 2000’s to realize an armor plate only needs to cover 8”x11” of chest to save the most lives and being lightweight enough for a soldier to deal with. It’s very difficult to convince generals with injury statistics and armor autists wanted to cover as much as possible. When the steel helmet was introduced, head injuries skyrocketed and generals had to be convinced that those head injuries would’ve been deaths without the helmets. Also the reason why we can reduce armor size to just the instakill regions is because we’ve honed logistics so much we can get someone wounded on the frontline to hospital grade care in an hour. That didn’t exist till the end of the 20th century so even if you dumped a bunch of level IV plates in WW1 it might not make a noticeable difference.
Yeah who cares about spine protection FUCK that, let's just cover your lungs and heart bro.
Anyone dying of a shot from behind was a coward anyhow.
>steel plates
Plates couldn't even stop 9mm back then
is he okay?
that's gotta hurt
>9mm
That's obviously 45 ACP.
A 45 would not blow the lungs out of the body. It was a 9mm
>you are fake news
45 can't penetrate shit.
that's a .22 it bounced back and forth like a boomerang. Happened to a buddy of mine
Why werent planes used in ww1 tho?
More kino options were available.
They were initially used for spying on enemy troops before their combat potential became realized later into the war, similar to how prior methods of human flight like hot air balloons were utilized before. As such, planes weren't actually fitted with any armaments at first, it was just a pilot and maybe a copilot with a camera to take aerial photos of enemy lines. The first dogfights were between spy planes who'd spotted each other. The crew began carrying guns with them on missions to shoot at enemy spy planes, as well as for personal protection if they were shot down and survived the landing. I faintly recall hearing that some brought grenades and other explosives up with them to drop on enemy soldiers, but I don't remember where I heard that.
So imagine the pilots with pistols and carbine rifles taking potshots at enemy planes who did the same to them. Maybe they managed to shoot the other pilot and down the plane, maybe they shot out the engine, maybe they both just missed every shot and returned to base bragging about how they totally domed that enemy pilot with just a pocket pistol. Regardless, this stuff eventually made it's way back to the guys in charge who believed nothing had changed since the Crimean War and someone started mounting guns and some primitive bombs to planes.
Cool looking but retarded, being able to see well is literally the most important thing on a battlefield.
This type of equipment was usually for machine gunners and sentries.
Don't both of them actually need to see shit?
Like, particularly sentries?
To some extent, but not certainly dying when you inevitably get sniped, or at least thinking you might not, is valuable.
I feel like cutting out holes for the eyes is probably worth it.
Maybe they just tilted the visor up on their head by pushing the helmet back, similar to some ancient helmets.
>post a helmet with no visor
Bad example, those eyeholes are purely for decoration.
Yeah, I know, I just didn't have what I wanted on hand. I would've posted one of those Greek statues with a Corinthian helmet pushed up on top of the head, but I don't really have one and I'm too lazy to look at the moment.
More on the topic of this thread, I have this. Dunno if it's real or based on something that is. I was going to use it for some autistic space opera thing I had in mind as the basis for some soldier's armor, but I can't quite draw the helmet right. Body armor drawing is kinda off too in places. No idea where I put those sketches, I haven't done anything with them yet because I can only write lore, not stories about individuals. Autism, I know.
Attacks were usually signaled by artillery stopping (for a little bit), a whistle being blown, and a bunch of guys running at you en mass while shouting. machine-gunning was mostly a matter of pointing it at the noise and pulling the trigger.
It's a bunch of dudes wearing monocolor uniforms (not even something that blends in most of the time) charging at you across an open, muddy field and probably screaming at the top of their lungs. If you can't aim at the colored blotches and hose them down until the screams stop, you're both blind and deaf.
The slats are enough to see through but the wearers often took so much shrapnel to the face that the masks were the only thing keeping their eyes intact.
They'd usually give you something of the sort if you were part of an assault team or something. Say if you were sent out with a few picked men in the night to raid an enemy trench, or if you were sent out to assault some fortified command post in Stalingrad. For most other men, not really the best application as far as the leadership was concerned. Shit like the Nivelle Offensive should tell you that they valued a hunk of steel more than the lives of the men they commanded most of the time. Better to let the unarmored bulk of the grunts certainly die in some poorly-planned charge straight into an MG nest than fit them with something that might save some of them during this.
Up until Vietnam most infantry soldiers were conscripted and only given a few months training. So replacing individual losses wasn't a massive issue. In Vietnam you see a shift towards professional soldiers with significantly longer training times meaning you can't just indefinitely replace losses. Same reason SOF get NVGs that cost 40k vs 5k for NG infantry.
The modern ukrainian army ( for example ) mostly consists of conscripts yet they are regularly issued body .
... armor
That's really not much money at all, absolute bargain for a human life
They are overcharged! I can equip you for less than 5000 yuan, very good quality, cheap!
Don’t listen to him I can get you 2 full sets for less than 60000 rupee!
Forget about it Brownies, I already have the contract at 12000$ per sets.
Are you asking why they werent used earlier or why there wasnt more widespread usage earlier?
The latter
they were you absolute retard
Because people had reasonable suHispanicion that tinny plate ain't gonna help charging machine guns.
They tried larger coverage armor but it was too heavy.
No much changed since.