5 ms·
Personal body armor, plate armor anyway, had utility very much into the smoothbore era, proof against pistol at any range and most long-barrel weapons outside o
by MilStdJunkie 3y ago
Personal body armor, plate armor anyway, had utility very much into the smoothbore era, proof against pistol at any range and most long-barrel weapons outside of what would be considered today quite short range - 50m or so. Since the fit between ball and barrel was looser - to accommodate greater rate of fire - there was a huge amount of energy loss from gases going around the ball. Also can't disregard the relatively poorer accuracy of a ball ping-ponging down the barrel before it exits.
Gunpowder weapons in the earliest of early Modern conflicts, pre-1550 or so, one gets the feeling that their dominant utility in turning a battle was "scaring the hell out of horses". Battlefield archaeology, sites from the late 100 Years War to 30 Years War, if you died from violence on the field, the most likely cause was "a horse fell on you". Also, more substantially I suspect, the morale effect. Nothing in the late medieval world was as loud as cannon. Not thunder, not anything. It's hard for us to imagine. It must have been terrifying. I suspect the closest contemporary experience is being hunted by UAS as a foot soldier.
Rifled muzzleloaders had a lot more energy, sealing the barrel. They also fixed the accuracy problem, as the projectile had to be swaged down the length of the barrel, engraving the rifling on the projectile as it went, but they had terrible rates of fire. It took work to push that lead into those little grooves.
With improved methods for loading rifle barrel weapons - like the 1772 Ferguson rifle and the Minie ball, two different solutions to the same problem - and conical projectiles like the 1836 Greener bullet, personal armor was having a more and more difficult time keeping its integrity. Furthermore, near-penetrations were just as if not more devastating than an unarmored hit, with dreadful spalling on the backside of the plate. Rifled barrels were also becoming more easily produced en masse, with the Bessemer/Siemens processes and Maudslay's lathe improvements.
Parallelling all of this, and probably of greater importance, is the growth of the conscript army post-1800. Firearms are very cheap, relative to other missile weapons. Conscripts too. Put those together and . .
By the era of smokeless powders, the jig was definitely up, apart from exceptionally specialized personal armors we saw occasionally in WW1, like the Brewster body shield or Sappenpanzer. Conscripts were too cheap, and offensive weapons too powerful. We'd have to wait for composite technology to catch up - and for the return of the full-time, non-conscript volunteer military - before we saw personal armor on the field again.
- hef19898 3y agoOne constant through all of this, across millenia, is the helmet so. Something modern armies re-learned the hard way in WW1. After all, despite what fantasy and roleplaying games say, a helmet is and was the most important, and first, piece of armor to get.
- thechao 3y agoAnd spears! Helmet + spear (with a shield of some sort: on the arm, in a trench, composite) is as near to the Universal Hominid Combat System as I think possible.
- bane 3y agoI agree. One thing that many people don't really comprehend was how little combat occurred with swords vs how much occurred with spears and ranged weapons. The typical view of a samurai or a knight in heavy armor swinging a sword around is a view of that soldier at likely their last moments. They most likely had started with weapons that provided greater standoff from their opponents and only when those weapons were irretrievably lost would they have drawn their sword. Weapons form part of systems, and for thousands upon thousands of years, a pointy bit at the end of a long stick dominated most systems across the planet. The Ancient Chinese called the spear the "King of Weapons" and over the centuries developed a very large number of variants and included shield and armor. The Europeans likewise underwent a period of rapid polearm evolution from the Renaissance to almost WW1. Shaka Zulu, one of the great military minds of Africa became famous in part for reworking the traditional spears of the Zulu into hybrid spear/swords backed by shields in tight formations. Prior to this the Phalanx was a spear-first strategy, and the Roman Infantry worked with more flexible spear and shield configurations -- the gladius was not a deciding weapon and may have been kept so short in order to support close-in work behind the shield wall of a Roman formation. So dominate was the methods for employing spears in combat that armies that went all-in on firearms still marched in the same type of formations as they had with spears well into the 19th century. The World Wars finally broke that habit.
- hef19898 3y agoSpears, true, those aged incredibly well. And shields, used by police forces to this day, either for crowd control of tactical interventions.