Designing a Perfect Suit of Armor

Hey! I m sorry about this paper being late, yesterday my friends parents took us rafting. Today we have a follow up on my last paper looking at armor effectiveness throughout history. We are going to be looking at these various elements of armor and judging which we deem is most effective, and how these element would go together to form a perfect suit of armor.

As I stated last time, there are three costs that armor comes with- cost, weight, and maneuverability. Cost is simple- a lot of kinds of armor are hard to manufacture because they have complex designs, or just take up a lot of the recourse required. This means they are more expensive. Weight is fairly easy to understand too- thicker or heavier materials will wear down the user and exhaust them. The final, and most complicated, is maneuverability. Many forms of armor may be good in the other senses, but it is hard to design armor well and give the user complete maneuverability.

Just for reference, here is a full picture of the suit of armor I drew:

All right. Lets take a look at him. The first layer of “armor” he has on is a simple set of clothes. I made them thick and slightly baggy and so it would keep the soldier warm and cushion him to an extent. The only place you can see his original clothes in is his pants. The next thing he would put on would be a chain shirt. Not only was this cheap as it only covered half the body, but it would also protect against hacking attacks to the shoulder, elbow, or plain old stomach. Next would be his tunic. A tunic does a lot of small favors, but mainly it obscures ones armor. If you don’t have a tunic, the opponent can see where your armor is and attack your weak points. Plus you get too display a cool insignia.

Over that he would put on his belt and his boots. Belts can store food, small tools, and sidearms, and are very useful. His boots are made of thick leather so he can walk on rough or spiky terrain without feeling much pain. If you look closely, you can see that they have iron studs at the bottom to elevate them, so he can march a lot without wearing his boots out. He also has a metal plate strapped to the back of his hand so you can’t stab/chop off his hand.

Lastly, his head. He has a basic chain coif which will will protect his head and neck and reinforce the chain shirt on his shoulders. But the chain coif always had a weakness: The face. In pike warfare, the face is an easy target. So I gave him a mask. The mask is not attached to his coif, as that could be hard/expensive to forge, but rather snugly strapped around his head. This masks craftsmanship is simple: An oval sheet which sticks out in the middle to deflect blows. It has two eye slits and some breathing holes. It will protect the face well. Plus it’s pretty intimidating. Lastly, I gave him some weapons. I gave him a halberd, but it looks like an axe. It is supposed to be 15 feet long. Halberds were heavy, but also quite dangerous because of their weight. They could bludgeon through chain and sometimes even plate. I also gave him a dagger, which was an extremely useful tool. If you knocked an enemy in plate on the ground, you could get in between the plates with the dagger.

All in all, this armor was quite cheap. A chain shirt, chain coif, and simple mask. It was very maneuverable, and the only thing heavy about it was the halberd. I found it to be quite protective, warm, comfortable, and intimidating, (though the last was not necessary.)