[Reje K.]

With all the advantages of full body plate over other armor types, how did it take so long for it to be to the top full body armor type for nobles and/or professional soldiers in Europe after the Ancient Greeks' time? And why didn't China have any?

If the Greeks could have had the Dendra panoply then I don't see why the Romans or the Han couldn't have developed something like it.

[Dan Howard]

There had to be a lot of social and technological advances to come together in one region for the development of a fully articulated plate harness. Firstly you need large and reliable supplies of good quality iron. Then you need to have the infrastructure in place - in Germany and Italy there were entire towns devoted to making nothing but armour. Those towns also competed with one another constantly driving the advancement of military technologies. There were a lot of masters famous for making armour who were competing against one another for patronage. Industrial advances such as the water powered trip hammer and blast furnace increased economies of scale and drove down manufacture costs and times. There were neat inventions such as the sliding rivet that made true articulated plate a possibility in the first place. There were a lot of mercenary condottas who tended to purchase better armour for their members than regular armies. The banking sector was becoming fairly sophisticated enabling speculation on experimental military techonlogies and more effective supply of equipment for armies.

[Edward Lee]

The closest thing China had in terms of protection was Bu Ren Jia from Song dynasty, meaning infantry armor. It's a typical lamellar armor but heavier and with more plates, so the protection level increase along with the weight, but it's still not as good as late 15th century European armor.

[Matthew Amt]

Yeah, it's kind of a question of the evolution of the world, rather than the evolution of armor! The Dendra panoply was designed for a noble charioteer, as was most armor of that time. As chariots lost their dominance on the battlefield, nobles fought on foot and wore less extensive armor for better mobility. They also had shields for better protection. For a long time, armor was limited to the men who could afford it, and even those who could afford a LOT also had to consider weight, mobility, heat, and fashion. Not to mention that at that time, the shield was the first line of defense, and armor was always a backup to that.

It's interesting that in the Late Roman and post-Roman era there certainly were bits and pieces of plate armor here and there, aside from helmets. There was certainly no technological reason for more plate armor to be made for those who could afford it. And yet for centuries the warrior classes were content with a shirt of mail, a helmet, and maybe greaves or the like. To them, that was pretty thorough coverage, and adequate for their purposes.

In any discussion on armor, we should always avoid the urge to see "full plate armor" as some kind of obvious default that any man swinging a sword would naturally want, and that anything less than that was some kind of disadvantage. For a long time there simply weren't many weapons that had a significant chance of penetrating a mailshirt, so very few men saw a need to supplement or replace it.

Bottom line, it worked for them!

Matthew

[Graham Shearlaw]

I reckon that it's part technology, you need a big forge to make a breast plate and there costly and rare.
Now you can make a suit of armor without large plates just useing mail or lamellar.
Doing so has it's advantages, articulation is simpler for a start but you dont get the stiffness of solid plate.
That stiffness is ultimately needed to spread out the impact of later two handed weapons.

This is the best example of a full chain mail suit i've seen in RL

[Matthew Amt]

[Dan Howard]

Bronze Age plate armour such as the Dendra Panoply is very crude and cumbersome compared to European articulated plate. There are three main differences

1. The armour was lined with a few layers of cloth and then strapped to the body rather than being pointed to a properly tailored arming doublet..
2. The plates are attached to each other with leather lacing instead of being articulated with sliding rivets.
3. They didn't have mail.

It might have a superficial resemblance but, functionally, it is completely different.

[Timo Nieminen]

Flexible armours made of iron/steel plates resist penetration by arrows better than iron/steel rigid plates of the same thickness. So for some purposes - very important battlefield purposes such as keeping arrows out of your torso - you can get better protection for the same weight by using brigandine instead of plate.

This might have contributed to Chinese use of brigandine.

The types and numbers of gunpowder weapons matter too. If there is likely to be somebody who will shoot through "typical full plate", perhaps one might be better off with a heavier breastplate and partial armour instead of "full" armour.

The large numbers of guns in Chinese armies by mid-14th century would have made "full plate" less attractive. Already in the mid 13th century, one sees mention of guns that would pierce any armour on the battlefield.

But cost will matter. How closely the armour needs to be fitted to an individual will affect the cost. Do we see munition full plate anywhere?

[Dan Howard]

[Benjamin H. Abbott]

I do suspect that European plate armor from approximately 1425-1625 gave the best protection of any historical armor per unit of weight at any given level of metallurgical quality. At the end of sixteenth century, Humphrey Barwick considered brigandines and coats of plate inferior armors and gave an example of a presumably couched lance piercing a coat of plates front and back. Of course, that's in the context of cavalry breastplates expected to stop a pistol ball at point-blank range. Against anything other than couched lances, guns, heavy crossbows, halberds, and maybe pikes, armors like briginadines and mail probably got the job done just fine. (Sir John Smythe did insist that pikers in the front ranks wear plate arm defenses rather than mail.) Brigandines, mail, and similar armors have advantages over plate: they're easier and quicker to put on, they're more comfortable to wear, they're easier to repair. Various sixteenth-century writers wanted mail, brigandine, and buff armors for their lighter troops. In theory, plate might be the best light armor, affording the most protection at the lowest weight, but for whatever reason folks in practice preferred other armors. I imagine these armors were easier for lighter troops to manage and manufacturing suitably light plate armor was difficult. For earlier times, as I'm sure Dan will let us know, heavier version could be made, to the point of resisting at least some lance strokes. So until the fourteenth century or so, a European warrior would make do with mail and perhaps a few reinforcements.

I'd love to see more tests on quality non-plate armors to get a sense of how they performed in the past. I recall reading about a test in which a reconstruction of Chinese armor performed better than any other armor tested at resist projectiles, but unfortunately I've never been able to track that down. I'm particularly intrigued by the mail-and-plate armor used by the Ottomans and others. I bet such armors did their jobs rather well.

[Timo Nieminen]

[Benjamin H. Abbott]

Barwick wrote that brigandines and the other non-plate armors recommended by Sir John Smythe would protect best against arrows if against anything. This was the opposite of a ringing endorsement and more of a claim for the inferiority of both arrows and those armors.

Assuming equal metallurgy, I doubt that any brigandine provides more protection per unit of weight. Based on Alan Williams's figures, metal plate already provides impressive protection against arrows. By those numbers 2mm of even low-carbon steel require 131.25 J to defeat with an arrow, which with padding is basically proof against any European-style bow (not necessarily crossbow). And that's with a perpendicular hit, which the shape of the armor would make less likely. Such a 2mm breastplate would only weigh about 5lbs.

Again, more tests woulds be great!

[William P]

[Dan Howard]

That doesn't help much. Solid plate of the same weight or even less would stop the same weapon.

[Lafayette C Curtis]

Decent plate armour would have bounced the arrows off too -- that's what the smooth, rounded glancing surfaces are for. On the other hand, while a properly-made plate would still provide better protection than the same weight of brigandine, if it's true that brigandine cuirasses were heavier than contemporary plate cuirasses on average then it's still possible that they'd be more protective against arrows by virtue of simply having more metal between the arrow and the wearer. A more appropriate comparison would be against later, thicker plate armour from the late 16th or the 17th century that would have had the same thickness as the aggregate of all the overlapped plates at a given point on the brigandine.

[William P]

i see your point about the benefits of larger plates, however
im not talking about arrows being simply deflected which all armours should do im talking about rebounding the projectile back the way it came... like what happens then someone is jumping on a trampoline. although with not as much force on the return... this imples a very different way of absorbing and dealing with impact forces.

however one benefit of making armour out of smaller pieces is that smaller pieces are much easier to control the thickness, quality of the iron, and the heat treatment in smaller pieces than a large single piece. which would explain why in the 16th and 17th centuries, cuirasses of horizontal lames were adopted in some cases instead of a single solid breastplate. as is the case for the garniture of henry herbert the earl of pembroke. http://media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/236x/b5/67/...fcdae0.jpg

[Bart Jongsma]

The main reason I've seen being cited is a metallurgical limitation. To make plate armor of a suitable thickness and square footage, you need large blooms of base wrought iron that is quite low in silica and other inclusions and impurities. I think we're talking in the region of 8 kg for a breastplate. The furnaces that could produce high quality iron in that quantity were simply not available until the late 13th-early 14th centuries, or perhaps even later, I don't have the exact figures in front of me.

Good books to consult on the development of metallurgy and the congruent development of arms techonology are The Knight and the Blast Furnace and The Sword and the Crucible.

EDIT: dating nuance

[Kai Lawson]

I think it's important to remember that while some early breast or breast and back plates were covered, many later examples were not, and as such give the heads or points of incoming weapons of all types less 'grip' when struck initially. This is notable especially in terms or striking faces on polearms and blunt trauma weapons.

There are also of course factors like manufacture, consistency of material, social structure allowing for and supporting increased purchasing power, potential shifts in the nature of conflicts and whole hosts of other factors.

[Matthew Amt]

[Philip Dyer]