Some questions about armor and combat

[Christopher Ross]

Hello, new to the ARMA forums. I'm trying to put together some suggestions for a sim game by the name of Dwarf Fortress about improving combat and material mechanics in it. The game is aimed at being quite realistic, and already has possibly the most complicated creature system in any game, with individual tissues, organs, and so on.

Anyways, the current system is... faulty to say the least. Some of it is simply 'bugs', and some of it is a lack of design.

Starting out with some stuff people might have personal experience with:
1. How does it feel to take a hit in various types of armor? Or, stood on its end, how do various types of armor affect impact mechanics, roughly speaking. For example, in plate, even if the plate is not deformed by a blow, how localized is the force that carries through?

2. Time: How long would you rate some general levels of competency in fighting? Not to any specific system, just in your own idea and words. An example might be on a scale of "Able to readily beat the untrained" to "the best there is". This is for an RPG skill system, so it has granular "steps", and is not a smooth and continuous thing.

In conjunction with this, what is a reasonable time to expect a raw recruit into a standing army to spend training? For example, 10+ hours a day, 7 days a week? How much breaks down into individual drilling, sparring, and demonstration? How much does 'teaching ability' play into training someone: Would skill be more important than good teaching sense? Finally, if no one is particularly trained in combat, but they are dedicated and have access to information, such as manuals, how much slower would it be for them to learn that way?

Finally, what are some rough time frames for creating weapons and armor? edit: Was reading on mail armor, and there is the figure of taking 2 months to make mail armor for the torso, compared to only two days to make a breastplate. How does this compare over various levels of tech, and for more complicated plate pieces?

3. Considering that combat in DF generally takes place between small, elite groups that are well equipped, due to population size, soldiers are similar to knights in terms of training and armor. Given this, what would be the most expected weapon? Would it clearly be something like the poleaxe or warhammer, or would there be a mix by personal preference?

Moving into more abstract or theoretical stuff:
4. From research, personal experience, and anything else, what sort of damage can be expected from less obvious injuries, such as broken bones and heavy bruising?

That's all I can think of for now, I'll add more if I can think of more things.

Edit: Added something to training

[Andrew F Ulrich]

Hey Christopher, welcome to the forum.

Coincidentally, there was a recent thread here on this very topic:
http://www.thearma.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=24278

As for your specific questions:
1. Plate armor is designed to spread an impact over a large area if not deformed, thereby decreasing the pressure, and therefore the damage, on the person. So it would probably feel like the plate hitting you rather than the end of a weapon. As an example of the reduction of impact of a type of armor, I recently read that a 95 mph fastball can exert 1400 psi of pressure upon impact, enough to crack a human skull. However, a baseball helmet will reduce that by as much as 50%.

Of course there are more sensitive areas, such as the head, where a blow would have a greater chance of temporarily stunning or distracting.

4. depends on what he's wearing. One tidbit that you might go on is the excavated remains of battles such as the one at Towton. We see in that and in eyewitness accounts that men would most commonly be injured on the head and hands.

You might also find this thread helpful for question 2:
http://www.thearma.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=24159

[Christopher Ross]

Thanks for the reply.

The skill system is already fairly good compared to many RPGs, as it uses generic "fighting", "armor", etc skills, with specific skills for a class of weapons.

As to 1, if anyone here has experience in taking a good hit in plate, particularly a large area like torso, please share! We're trying to puzzle out how to handle penetrating force when we have to deal with materials that are much, much stronger than real ones: adamantine is several times stronger than the steel of the game, and is basically inelastic. We were trying to figure out how a nearly undeformable plate would affect extremely hard blows.

As for training, it was useful looking through there, though some personal experience on training would be nice! I know that watching a video on youtube of someone with only 4 months of (casual?) longsword training was quite impressive.

[Stacy Clifford]

Keep in mind that good plate armor is designed with peaks and angles to deflect blows, reducing their force by redirecting them instead of just absorbing the full force. That said, if you were to take a very powerful direct blow to the chest or back of an undeformable breastplate from, say, the club of a troll, it would probably be something like getting shot in the chest with the broad side of a manhole cover. Enough force could still potentially crush you against the inside of your own armor due to sheer acceleration, but it would take a lot because the impact would be spread out. You could potentially have problems with peripheral injuries to the parts that poke out of the breastplate, such as whiplash, dislocated shoulders, or groin injuries. Even if you take crush damage out of the equation, you still have to deal with G-forces.

[Christopher Ross]

This is definitely the sort of thing that we have to think about, given how extremely flexible the 'raws' are for the game.

Currently, one issue we have complained of is that there is no injury through plate unless it deforms, which leads to the rather strange case of, say, a small armored target easily withstanding blows from a maul.

If the blow isn't strong enough to deform the [breast]plate, will it tend towards actually pain and bruising, or just knocking the wind out of you?

I certainly agree with your assessment of the near-indestructible armor. This leads to another question: How do you think weight would affect the protective properties of armor? For example, in firearms, weight can be the different between controllable recoil, and the weapon flying from your hand. Has there been similar notice that the weight of armor actually confers some advantage?

[LafayetteCCurtis]

In conjunction with this, what is a reasonable time to expect a raw recruit into a standing army to spend training? For example, 10+ hours a day, 7 days a week?

This question isn't entirely relevant to medieval armies, since these forces generally did not take "raw" recruits. At the top of the line, commanders, knights, and other men-at-arms acquired their fighting skills as a natural part of their upbringing, so by the time they joined an army they would have required little more coaching in individual combat skills. They might still have had to learn unit discipline, formation tactics, and other military skills like how to conduct patrols and post pickets or security detachments, but even then it's likely that they had learned these skills to some degree in hunts and tournaments. As for the lower-class soldiers, there was usually a limit to how low you could go before you were considered fit to wield a weapon--the common soldiery was made up more of the middle classes than the lower, if I may put it that way--and these people usually had a bit of spare money and time that they often put into learning things like martial arts, especially when the city or the village they lived in required them to be part of a watch or militia unit. It's also worth noting that calls for volunteers or levies for mobile field armies tended to skim off the best warriors (or warriors-to-be) in the society; the performance of the English longbowmen left at home to fill the ranks of the local defence forces were noticeably poorer than that of their counterparts in the companies that went to France.

How much breaks down into individual drilling, sparring, and demonstration?

There's usually more individual practice than most non-martial artists realize, unlike movie training where it's practically all about sparring.

How much does 'teaching ability' play into training someone: Would skill be more important than good teaching sense?

You need both, period. But then, you usually learn both (to varying degrees) as you progress in the art, since after all you're aware of your own learning process and should be able to use it as a reference in teaching others. Of course, this doesn't mean that the best martial artists are automatically the best teachers or vice versa. Everybody learns differently and if the student's learning style is very different from yours then you're going to need a lot of adaptation and communication skills in order to develop a relevant teaching method!

[LafayetteCCurtis]

How do you think weight would affect the protective properties of armor? For example, in firearms, weight can be the different between controllable recoil, and the weapon flying from your hand. Has there been similar notice that the weight of armor actually confers some advantage?

There were two ways to strengthen armour against attack. One was by utilizing better construction (such as face-hardening to give a hard outer shell backed by a softer interior), while the other was--predictably--by adding weight. So it'd be reasonable to assume that high-quality armour could be lighter and yet possess similar protective qualities to a cheaper model. By the time firearms became dominant, though (say, from the second quarter of the 16th century onwards), adding weight had become to predominant means of providing more protection against the increasing power of personal firearms, and they ended up with suits that were much heavier than late-medieval or early Renaissance types but provided rather less coverage. How this applies to the game would depend on the technology level--if the weapons were still predominantly human-powered then the two methods would be equivalent, while if firearms had become an important factor then more weight would probably be the more economical way of adding more protection.

[Christopher Ross]

Thanks for the info.

I had thought that standing armies were just not in use, but I was unaware that people of the time would actually spend free time training.

So part of the divide is that, in DF, armies are closer to a modern standing army, where you take in raw recruits, and train them. As is, there is individual drill, sparring, and demonstrations, where one unit using hiss relevant skill and teaching skill will lead a demonstration, while others using student skill will 'watch' it and gain experience. Things are fairly abstract, so it can be assumed they're also following along, etc.

Which leads to the question about training time: Is it still mostly individual practice if you have someone ready and willing to devote full time to teaching? Or might that need a sort of fourth category, "managed individual drill" which would be training while a teacher looks on and corrects?

As for armor, I knew that of course making it thicker or of better construction would help. The question comes from this: If you could have an armor that is similar in strength to steel, but feather-light (1/40th the weight, roughly) would it always be better? Or would that extra weight sometimes be preferred? Put another way, can armor ever be "too light"

[Stacy Clifford]

Some extra mass is not necessarily a bad thing to have in armor, because mass resists movement. You obviously don't want it to be too heavy because it slows down the wearer, but extra mass allows you to do things like bull rush forward like a tank or hit with a metal fist much harder than you would with a bare one. Would the punch still hurt if the gauntlet weighed as much as a paper cup? Yes, it's still a fist covered in hard stuff, but it doesn't have any more momentum behind it than the mass of your own flesh and bone gives it. Armor's main purpose may be defensive, but the armor itself can also still be a very effective weapon. What you sacrifice in speed to have it, you gain in the amount of force you're able to apply against your opponents due to the extra mass. Ultimately it boils down to what you intend to use it for. If you're a hit and run fighter, you might go for the lightest weight you can get. If you prefer a frontal assault, being a tank is not a bad thing.

[LafayetteCCurtis]

I had thought that standing armies were just not in use,

Standing armies actually existed to some degree. Perhaps it was not officially designated as such, but there were aggregations of companies that stayed together for years on end and were eventually maintained after the end of immediate hostilities to serve as a rapid-reaction force of sorts. This was by no means an unusual thing in history. The Roman word legiones originally meant "levies" and were just that--temporary levies of citizen-soldiers. But later on they began to serve for longer and longer periods and get paid and became standing armies in all but name long before the Roman administration officially recognized the transformation.

Which leads to the question about training time: Is it still mostly individual practice if you have someone ready and willing to devote full time to teaching? Or might that need a sort of fourth category, "managed individual drill" which would be training while a teacher looks on and corrects?

Yes, supervised drilling is an immensely important part of training. I'm not sure that it should be separated from individual drills at all since, ideally, students should not be allowed to do unsupervised practice at first--a pair of experienced eyes watching and giving corrections was and is the best way to prevent mistakes and bad habits from becoming ingrained to the degree that the student would have to spend loads of time unlearning them before he/she could progress to the next level. Maybe unsupervised practice of any sort (whether individual or partnered, choreographed or not, or oven just watching) should be the fourth category, which includes some sort of rather brutal randomization so that it also has a chance of actually reducing the student's fighting efficiency. Of course this chance should probably drop damatically as the student progresses further, since with sound basics he/she is more likely to be able to self-detect and correct potential mistakes, but I think it should never be zero.

As for armor, I knew that of course making it thicker or of better construction would help. The question comes from this: If you could have an armor that is similar in strength to steel, but feather-light (1/40th the weight, roughly) would it always be better? Or would that extra weight sometimes be preferred? Put another way, can armor ever be "too light"

Well, an armour that light cannot avoid having some other disadvantages that make it less effective than steel in some specific situations. For example, Kevlar is five times stronger than steel of the same weight, but unlike steel it can burn (though it stops burning when the heat source is removed), can be degraded by chemicals and ultraviolet rays, is much less effective when wet, and (most importantly) is much more expensive than steel, especially when it has been given special treatment to deal with the abovementioned weaknesses (waterproofing, anti-UV coating, layering with different layers having the weave going in a different direction, etc.). The bottom line is that you don't have to compensate for a fantasy armour material's unusual strength along the same restricted spectrum of mass vs. bulk vs. protection and all. You could also give it somewhat less "direct" weaknesses like being ineffective during the new moon (the astronomical new moon when the Moon is not visible, not the traditional new moon when it's literally starting to get visible), more vulnerable to particular types of magical substances or attacks--perhaps catastrophically so (Dune has the most spectacular example of this, with personal shields causing miniature nuclear explosions when struck by laser beams), or having a distinct signature that's much, much more visible than steel to certain creatures with the ability to see magical emanations to one degree or another.

[Christopher Ross]

Thanks for the detailed replies!

As for the material, I think I said earlier that adamantine is basically just under 4x stronger than the steel of the game, and is completely inelastic- basically it will suffer tremendous impacts, pressure, etc, and not give at all under it breaks entirely.

I certainly agree on the individual training: As is, it's very slow, and just something they do on their time off.

The point about the Romans reminds me: What sort of time would be expected to train a soldier to fight like that, as opposed to the sort of extreme individualistic skills?

It is interesting to hear that the weight would actually be useful.

Will probably be back some time in the future with more questions, but this has been helpful.

[LafayetteCCurtis]

As for the material, I think I said earlier that adamantine is basically just under 4x stronger than the steel of the game, and is completely inelastic- basically it will suffer tremendous impacts, pressure, etc, and not give at all under it breaks entirely.

Sounds a bit like . . . glass?

The point about the Romans reminds me: What sort of time would be expected to train a soldier to fight like that, as opposed to the sort of extreme individualistic skills?

To fight like what? Large close-order formations? This is a bit hard to determine, since Roman legionaries (or at least the ones who weren't veterans whose service were being extended for one more term) trained constantly during the march to the theatre of war and even inside it whenever they were not actively engaging the enemy. The only thing we're sure about is that it usually took a while--consuls told to command raw troops were normally given weeks or even a couple of months to prepare and drill their men, and that's really just to get them to a barely-passable level. Turning the men into serious, experienced troops usually required the involvement of some actual combat experience.

[Christopher Ross]

Interesting. So to train them to fight in formation like that is probably a similar amount of time to train them to simply be good general fighters?

(As for adamantine, don't think too hard about it. We had a hell of a time trying to figure out how it's supposed to work. The best we've come up with is that the fibers are heated, woven, and then cooled, and the pressure from their shrinking allows them to form solid plates.)

[Stacy Clifford]

(As for adamantine, don't think too hard about it. We had a hell of a time trying to figure out how it's supposed to work. The best we've come up with is that the fibers are heated, woven, and then cooled, and the pressure from their shrinking allows them to form solid plates.)

You should find this interesting then:
http://media.caltech.edu/press_releases/13397

[Christopher Ross]

Amazing, I'm surprised I haven't heard of this before. Reminds me of a finding of an Israeli group that created a tungsten nanostructure similar to buckyballs that was incredibly resilient, and they were thinking of trying to make armor of it.

Haven't heard anything of it since, but the original articles still come up in google such as this one. It would be... strange if solid metal armor came back in use amongst infantry.

As for the metallic glass, it's a shame we didn't see any hard numbers! I would be interesting to work out how resilient that stuff could be. As a little bonus, the material is also gorgeous.