Very interesting discussion. Thank you gentlemen.
Hi!
Yes, a frenchman (Sorry, couldnât resist), and if you maintained your armour correctly it wouldnât happen, waging war takes your mind away from things.
Correct.
Agreed. And goodnight/
Regards,
Warrior Rose
well well well look who it is 
maybe certain more assassin based skills would be affected? i mean, your definitely going to stick out in a crowd, its not the best camoflage, and i would imagine lockpicking with gauntlets would be significantly more difficult without tactile feedback. and as for the bard oriented skills, maybe make it significantly more difficult to âcharmâ people, while intimidation is more successful
Hi!
No idea who you are anymore, probably someone from the old project of SRP Iâm guessing?
Regards,
Warrior Rose.
That definitely makes sense and I bet the devs would implement such concepts. Maybe it is the relationship of clothing/armor to AI and reactions of NPC what they would share with Star citizen. (But they probably talked about layering and clipping, didnât they?)
Well it wasnât like they fought every day, itâs just use that degraded the armor slowly but surely.
Anyways I think the French build something good.
Some time ago
Somewhere
Maybe?
Hi!
No. 
And Iâve had a full harness for a long time now, all the same pieces (A few dents here and there, but Iâve repaired the major ones) and rust is not an issue, it gets rusty, you clean it; only takes 10 minutes at best! Even while using authentic cleaning methods. To ruin armour, youâve got to leave it out in the rain to rust for a long time before it becomes brittle of rust, if plate armour was so hindered by rust, why are there vast surviving samples of plate armour (That have been left alone for a good few hundred years)? Yes, rust looks not so great but it wonât ruin your armour unless unchecked for literally years; and even if you werenât the sort of guy to clean armour, thereâs clear evidence to support knights painting their armour to stop rust, and some cool patterns to! A knight wouldnât and shouldnât neglect his armour, itâs like saying âHey, I just bought a 600k Ferrari!! Lets drive it through a boggy field and then throw things at it for fun!â, armour costs alot why waste alot of money by not maintaining your armour?
Have any questions, ask away!
Regards,
Warrior Rose.
Oh yes, they did. Unlike the English. 
Itâs not just rust, leather strap rotting away, dents and holes being patched up to often. I wasnât there though so I donât know what they did that ruined their armor.
However seeing how fast armor style change during the period 1450-1550 iâd say most Men-at-arms went through at least two and possible three sets of armor. More so if the guy was rich and had multiple sets.
Hi!
Leather straps are easy to replace, I do it every few years to ensure mine donât snap on me while Iâm on field. Or just use saddle-soap and keep them looking nice and well maintained (Modern way obviously). If the armour gets a hole in it, depending on the size Lets say an penetrated arrow, you just hammer it flat, or heat up that area and whck it back to make it nice and new, when you punch a hole through a material, the hole doesnât mean that material is now just gone, itâs often bent backwards, so whack whack it and youâre fine.
And just because armour styles changed, it doesnât mean the older styles became useless or ineffective. Theyâd still be used for a long while even when theyâre out of fashion because they work. And thatâs a hundred year mark there mate, thats a long time. Besides, most people were just given a gambeson and only a bit of plate if lucky, or could afford if themselves theyâd buy a nice harness but thatâs the wealthy not common man-at-arms or billmen (Or whatever).
Regards,
Warrior Rose.
Well you would be annealing the material by doing that and if you attempted to temper only that part you would risk warping the whole piece of gear. Not tempering it would create a weakness in the armor.
Anyways I think you are missing the point, if the writer who was there wrote down that after two years the armor needed replacement than I am going to take their word over yours seeing how he was actually there. This game will also feature wear and tear (and possible a cleaning mini-game) so this is really a closed case. Armor degrades and that will be a feature in-game to balance expensive armor.
Hi!
Better than a big hole in it And Iâve not noticed any warping in my breastplate, other than dents which were by lance.
And yeah, I donât dispute that armour gets rusty, or the writer himself. And a game featuring wear and tear is going to be fun Whoever find cleaning armour fun can clean my harness until itâs flawless
Regards,
Warrior Rose.
Did you anneal the whole breastplate before trying to temper it again?
If you did it that way than itâs not a problem but itâs not the easiest process, certainly not on the move with an army and just the household horseshoe blacksmith.
Hi!
Most of the damage sustained to my breastplate are dents, and are hammered out, and on an old breastplate, Iâve shot at it with a high poundage warbow, with war arrows to test a few theories, and then it was repaired by a smithy under my guidance as it achieved full penetration (Now my back-up breastplate). But some Partial Penetrations of arrows, I just hammered them flat again which works well enough for what I do. To myself it looked like he only heated up a specific area and gave it a few whacks to seal up the hole (Probably made the gauge higher but doesnât matter itâs a back-up one).
And if it seems iâm disputing history, Iâm not; just the armour being thrown away so easily but then heâs probably rich enough to do that.
Regards,
Warrior Rose.
Oh thatâs rather interesting, what did you test? What poundage was the bow and what breastplate did you have.
Regarding the whole metal breastplate, if you heat it up and dump the breastplate into a liquid substance it will cool down quick and make the metal hard and brittle. If you on the other hand heat it up and let it slowly air cool then the metal will become more ductile (soft).
In armor you want to strike the right balance between hardness and flexibility so you usually first heat it up to a very high temperature and quench it in a liquid such as oil or water. This leaves you with a hard albeit brittle piece. Then you heat it up again to a lower temperature and quench it again making it somewhat softer again. The idea is to use this method to reach a certain balance between the two factors mentioned above giving armor great strength. Now what your smith did was reheated one spot on your armor to fix it and then let it slowly air cool again. What this does it make the steel softer there than in the rest of the armor creating a weak spot. Now you probably donât use 150 pound warbows or sharp pollaxes in reenactment, but if a crossbow quarrel, arrow or even the spike of a pollaxe would hit that exact spot then it would have a higher chance of penetrating the armor than the rest of the breastplate. Again probably not significant in reenactment.
Itâs not that simple, in my opinion. Steels in more rigid state are indeed hard, but also brittle, and breaking through this might require less energy than doing so in âsoftâ steel. In the end, the hard steel wonât bend, but when it breaks, it also wonât show any resistance further down the road, because it will not be able to deform, which would dissipate energy.
On the following tensile diagram (sorry about that, itâs around 2:00 a.m. here ) we can see that a hardened steel indeed has a higher point of flowing (damn, I do not know any of these terminus technicuses in english), so, it requires a higher force to penetrate, but if we look at the area below the diagram, we also see that overall it requires a smaller amount of energy.
(http://www.kephost.com/images/2014/10/12/steel.png)
Basically, if your hard steel armour gets broken, you might as well start prayingâŚ
We should also take in mind that metallurgy, steel refinery and the manufacturing process got some advancement in the previous hundreds of years. Very often authentic blacksmithing technologies wonât give the exact results without authentic materials - and the latter is really, really often does not stand. We also have some issue with the process itself - or at least, I rarely ever see blacksmiths who does nitridation in a pile of manure. The ability for reproduction and getting rid of the problematic components in the steel were not of todayâs standards. I also made tests with a composite bow against a lamellated steppe armor, with the best reconstructed arrowheads available, but an S235 is an S235 none the less.
But then again, my point is that we should be veeery careful with these tests on modern replicas.
That is (almost) exactly what I said.
Thatâs why I am referring to the work of someone who did test hardness etc. on authentic armor.
That´s only true if you are use metal with the right content of carbon in it. about 0.4 - 0.5 % of carbon content (that´s 1050 or C40 Kind of sheet metal).
It´s right that you have to heat it to the right temp, then quench it in water or oil and after that temper it.
Normaly to a hardness of about 42-44 Rockwell. Most of the Armour you can buy - even a lot of the âreenactment gradeâ stuff is NOT the hardened! You can heat it and quench it all day and it won´t change a thing! Except the color of the piece of cause 
You can assume that a lot of the munition grad stuff in period - the âof the peg kind of armourâ wasn´t hardned armour either. These armours got their structural integrety by shaping and the thickness of the metal. These glancing surfaces where there, because they worked. If your force is deflected, you won´t need as much thickness to the metal. And if you try to stick a spear into a breastplate even a 1mm thick plate is a Problem. Been there, got the T-Shirt.
You are comparing all these things to the âstate of the artâ armours, the high and mighty where using. Yes, a nice gothic rig is hardened ⌠yes, the âAvant armourâ is hardened, but the armourers of milan could equip an army of 4-5000 men in a month. These woundn´t have been all hardened armours. Why? Because it takes way to long in the hardening process. Oh, and by the way the Armour from the Duke from Matsch from Churburg Castle, a twin to the Avant Armour wight´s with all the padding and the chain voiders at 42.5 KG, Standing 2.03 m tall.
And around the question of the garniture of the frensh men that gave out after two years of use ⌠I don´t think it was defunct after the campain. Just think about an billionär after two years with the same car ⌠the ash tray is just full and you can´t use a car with a full ash tray
Or why do you think the end of the line guys in the justing community like Tobias Capwell or Alex Wenzel use their harnesses for way longer?
Greeting
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âThat is (almost) exactly what I said.â
You did not. You said it creates a weak spot. I technically wrote that it indeed changes the crystal macrostructure, but probably thatâs all you can safely state. What do you call a âweak spotâ, easier armor penetration or bigger chance for the guy underneath the spot to get wounded? The two not absolutely and necessarily correlates imho.
Also, on the book review: âWilliams does offer examples of some armours for which he has been able to analyse several pieces, in which all the various elements are made from broadly similar materials and have broadly similar heat treatments and from this he concludes that the analysis from a small sample is indicative of all armour production.â and "Indeed, detailed work by this reviewer has shown that the surface hardness of a single breastplate can vary very widely over its entire surface."
Please, compare this with what I wrote, âThe ability for reproduction and getting rid of the problematic components in the steel were not of todayâs standards.â To put it simply, we should not generalize in terms of armor quality, material quality or success of heat treatment (since different steel qualities react differently to even the same heat treatment plan, IF you have equipment to precisely control both temperature and heating time and speed, which is not the case), because of the lack of uniformity and the ability of keeping every parameters precisely at bay.
So one thing is what âyou wantâ in armor, and an other thing is what you might achieve, also a whole lot different from what you might be able to afford. Therefore running some tests and making inductive, global conclusions⌠well, not wise. For starters, there is not only two parameters (bow poundage and type of armor), but we can go on like shooting distance, angle of impact, mass of the arrow, efficiency of the bow (~arrow speed), draw length of the shooter, shape and material of the arrowhead, thickness of the spot - and even then, you still donât know the exact macrostructural properties of the (inhomogeneous) armor. This problem could be somewhat solved with simply a vast amount of data and statistical analysis - but as of that, a Vickers hardness tester is not an arrow.
Again: âNot that simple.â There is a difference between âhaving some numbers floating in the airâ and âknowing somethingâ. In this show, it is easy to prove one thing, and doesnât take much to prove the opposite as well.