The Armour Archive

Adriano

I think spring-loaded "gonnes" would add a superfluous air of silliness to SCA battles. Consider: whether you like combat archery or not, at least mechanically it looks right â€“ an archer draws his bow and shoots an arrow. But when a group of "gunners" load and "fire" their rounds, youâ€™re going t...

Adriano

Of course, somebody with an 11th century Norman persona might not like being taken out by a 15th century gonne...

Adriano

So it looks like we've got a fairly realistic standard regarding spears and helms, but a ridiculous standard when it comes to single-handed swords. (Scene in an armourer's workshop, c. 1400: "Congratulations, good sir! You now possess the finest helm to be found in Milan! Lances and arrows alike wil...

Adriano

I've fared pretty well in melees with a bastard sword -- as long as it's not a static line fight, and you can close with your opponents.

Adriano

Posted by Animal: LOLOL Its rules that let a weapon be effective! Goodness sakes, maybe the fighter that is using it or the people he's fighting against? Nah, what was I thinking?!? Yes, exactly: the particular set of rules under which SCA fighting is con...

Adriano

Good luck, Animal; just keep in mind that a number of us in the SCA have made it our business to learn all sorts of ways to defeat a madu, just because they're annoying. In any case, using a legal weapon within the rules is in now way "cheating"; if some of us are unhappy to see madus, we should try...

Adriano

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:<HR>What scared and annoyed me at this years pennsic was the fact that noone took face shots from my spear... I used the "positive force" with maybe 10% extra force. Throughout the entire war a total o...

Adriano

When I went to East Tennessee State University, I remember going out to the football practice field and using the tackling dummy as a pell. Probably should have asked permission.

Adriano

Crichton's books make better movies than books because you can't see the awkward writing style on the screen. Timeline kinda sucked; Crichton has not learned, in the thirty years he's been putting out best-sellers, anything beyond the simplest kind of characterization and plotting. What amazes me is...

Adriano

I've seen his stuff up close and it looks lots better than the stuff they're mass-producing in India. As soon as I sell that first novel...

Adriano

Kick-ass kit! Makes me think about making lamellar.

Adriano

I haven't weighed the individual pieces, but I weighed my plastic armour tote with everything in it, and it came to 58 pounds. Not bad; I weigh 250, would like to get down to 200. I recently dropped my 30 pound butted haubergeon and made a 12 pound coat of plates, otherwise it'd be 76 pounds. The we...

Adriano

In Meridies, only thrusts to the face count. This applies to any thrusting tip, also to arrows, and I assume to javelins. I was told that this was intended to correct a problem, which was that previously, guys were getting blindsided with spears and in danger of whiplash from hard thrusts. So the ru...

Adriano

Bragging is by no means limited to Tuchux. Last time I was at Pennsic, I listened carefully to guys talking about the fighting; in the large battles, apparently everybody killed at least six guys before being taken out. It's a mathematical paradox.

Adriano

Good going, Tuchux; I'm gonna take back at least 60% of the stuff I've said about y'all. Wish I had been there.

Adriano

I was in the SCA for years before I saw any mail at all. It was more years before I found out that some people were going to the trouble of making it with rivets. We can dream of the day when the biggest armour authenticity issue in the SCA is somebody having the wrong kind of rivetted mail for a gi...

Adriano

Medieval narrative poems are notoriously vague about geography and dates; I think they just wanted to tell a good story.

As I recall, Robin Hood dates from the late 1950's. (Robin Hood, Robin Hood, riding through the glen...)

Adriano

You can also get thick felt boot liners through military surplus suppliers. That might not be cost-effective, though.

Apparently my mother's ancestors were felters back in Suffolk. Doesn't help in this case.

Adriano

I forgot to mention Willow . This is pure fantasy, so historical accuracy doesn't apply. They used a variety of Eastern-looking pieces, including, if I recall, some nice "pot lid" stuff; I also remember one character using a gauntlet sword. In The Agony and the Ecstasy , the Charlton Heston movie ab...

Adriano

Impressive!

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"Come, winds! Blow, wrack! At least we'll die with harness on our back!"

Adriano

As it happens, I just recently saw that version of Macbeth. Great scenery indeed, including Francesca Annis as Lady Macbeth, sleepwalking stark freakin' naked.

Adriano

Well, with rivetted mail you can use fairly thin wire (say 18 gauge) and the rings will still hold together because, of course, they're riveted shut. With butted mail, you have to use heavier wire (in my case 14 gauge) because otherwise the rings will easily open up under stress, and the whole thing...

Adriano

I don't know if it's fair to judge Arthurian movies this way; they can be anything from sheer mythic fantasy (like Excalibur } to sheer crap ( First Knight ). Anyway, usually they aren't set in a specific real time. Sword of Lancelot , with Cornell Wilde, went for an early 13th century look, and it ...

Adriano

Maybe it's still possible to get this thread back on track.

My favorite armour myth is that it's possible to impregnate John Boorman's daughter while wearing it. Okay, maybe that's not a myth.

Adriano

Bedford. Okay; I guess he will be named here. My (least) favourite is when I fight two sword against a polearm fighter and I get into my range, about 1" away, hammer him / her with several blows to the legs, body, and ...

Adriano

Well, I've been thinking of just wearing a skirt of mail over the gambeson, under the coat of plates. Just a bit reluctant to cut up my haubergeon, considering all the hours I put into it.

Adriano

Evil_Merlin, no offense taken, Dude. That episode of "Conquest" on the History Channel made it look as if mail wasn't worth the bother of putting on. (They hung up a lightweight butted shirt and demolished it with an axe.) But on the PBS show called, if I recall, "Warrior Challenge", in the Viking e...

Adriano

Posted by Michael: The other was, oh hit my belt buckle. Which inspired the famous song, Sue of the magic belt buckle and the plan to make suits of proof amour out of buckles. That's pretty hilarious, Michael. In the SCA there's an epic poem called "The M...

Adriano

Evil_Merlin , please know that I wasn't saying that I think anybody's wearing mail in the SCA as a status symbol; in fact such a thing never occurred to me. But when I saw the thread title, for some reason I thought of the SCA instead of military history. (Probably something wrong with that.) I lov...

Adriano

No armour is perfect; at best it improves your chances of walking away after a battle. Expensive armour is certainly a status symbol, but I can't believe one type (mail) would be worn for so long, over such a wide geographical range, by everybody who could afford it, if it didn't give you that bette...

Adriano

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:<HR>on the subject of myths i have heard that at the battle for antiach the crusaders were suffering from such bad cases of disentery that geodfrie cut the bottem out of his armour so he wouldn't have ...

Adriano

I try to bat his sword away with my shield (to the left) and go in for the kill with my short sword on his right. Try to make those actions as simultaneous as you can. There's got to be at least a moment of time before his sword is in position again; make...

Adriano

If you practice footwork enough, you'll be able to do it without even thinking about it, and you won't have to compromise your defense. Also, even though the convention in the SCA is that a shield is proof against everything from swords to large meteorites, remember that your shield is a defensive w...

Adriano

As many have noted, there's a real tendancy for a line to come to a screeching halt at spear-range and stay there for some time. If I don't have a spear, this makes me feel pretty useless (especially without a shield); if I do have a spear, I try to get the opposing spearmen, but it feels like I'm n...

Adriano

No, just a different kingdom.

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"Come, winds! Blow, wrack! At least we'll die with harness on our back!"