Racing Turtles

Since people seem to like my pride outfit!

Woah woah this has 1000 notes. I'm super flattered and I will bench press each and every one of you.

How to ruin your historical enthusiast fan's trust

Dudes being pals. Birthday gift, fineliners and markers on cotton paper.

no one talk to me ever again I have died one hundred times over

why don't people in zombie apocalypse stories ever just wear suits of armor? you think any zombie is gonna get their shitty rotting jaws through this?

I'm gonna rip and tear my way through the zombie apocalypse completely unharmed because none of the undead hoards will be able to get through my plate mail

everyone else is like "oh we gotta stay inside the most secure places possible and never leave" and I'll be storming through the wastelands in my bloodstained suit of armor, blasting the Doom (2016) OST and plowing my way through waves of the undead. one of them tries to bite me but his shitty rotting teeth don't even leave a dent in my armor before I turn his head into paste. I'll be unstoppable until I die of dehydration or something like an idiot

this goes along with my other pet peeve about zombie apocalypse stories, namely: why does no one ever think to ride a bike? 

bikes are quiet- if the zombies react to loud noises, they won’t hear you on a bike the way they might hear you in a car. bikes don’t need gas, meaning you won’t be stranded if you run out. bikes are much, much easier to maintain than a car- there’s no computer that can short out, no fiddly engine bits that could kill you if you mess with them wrong. you can learn how to maintain a bike with a couple weeks’ worth of classes. almost every adult knows how to ride a bike, and without cars on the road, it’d be much safer to do. 

what i’m saying is

American author Mark Twain (b. 1835) lurches from his grave only to give you a massive thumbs up and die again

Mark Twain essentially invented the genre of a bystander sent into a time-travel sci-fi plot just to get someone to draw this image for him. And today we can simply search for such a picture. It is a time of wonders

#this post has everything. zombies. knights. bicycles. knights on bicycles. mark twain.

My unicorn lady, Brìghde

I have discovered the truth about chainmail bikinis, and it is imperative those wearing such armor do not think about it too hard or they may inadvertently cross the line between Sexy Hero and Homicidal Pervert.

Helmet practice by yangchao yu

chinese warrior in song dynasty by xhs id: 4955043269

Inspired by The Female Armor Bingo, I present to you my short guide to armor bust areas, to better help you decide what to wear :P

Any resemblance to particular armors, living or dead, is purely coincidental. Well… mostly.

Edit: Here’s a follow-up picture- the butt area

(Snorting HARD.) :)

(cc: @petermorwood) (FFS LOOK AT THE HANDS ONE)

(absolute helpless laughter)

This side by side comparison sure is something

on the one side we have GORGEOUSLY handcrafted armor. Looks like actual plate, the white tree of Gondor clear and easy to see and echoed on the pauldrons and even pressed into his belt! Which is folded in a LOVELY knot to hold it in place. The chainmail is REAL chainmail. And over all there’s some good wear on it, it looks like Boromir has owned and worked and lived in this armor

And on the other side we have stuff that looks like it was created for a shoe string budgeted made-for-TV Camelot production. It’s CLEARLY plastic. And wtf is that LENGTH that leaves a huge swath of his VITAL ORGANS unprotected???? The symbol is PRINTED on it, not even embossed, and so poorly you can’t even really tell what it’s supposed to be. It looks, as far as I can tell, like someone smooshed a bunch of pseudo celtic symbols together. Those shoulder things are NOT pauldrons. They seem to be some half arsed attempt at coin style chainmail? Maybe? I have NO idea what that shirt is. It looks like maybe the designers were going for a type of Gambeson, but it’s just way WAY too thin. It ALL looks like they hit the after halloween sale at party city for supplies.

cc: @petermorwood

*sees someone wearing a new piece of armor* whet fresh helm is this

Raidlord by Azora Visuals

Interesting to see male fantasy armour (of a sort - I can see oh-so-many unprotected targets) that looks as silly as far too much female fantasy armour.

This looks uncomfortably snug. Is it made to fit over inhalation or exhalation? If the armourer and wearer get that wrong, things are going to get a bit breathless.

As for wearing it in cold weather over bare skin, no thanks!

Finally, it extends below the natural waist without any break, so bending over to pick up something from the ground would be a bit of a problem - and that codpiece-thing looks too much like an ice-cream scoop for my liking. Ouch…

One of the odd things about fantasy armour is the way the artists spend so much time on getting the textures and sheen correct and so little time on the ergonomics of “can someone wear this and fight move or even breathe in it?”

Look at real historical armour, people. Pictures of that are mere clicks away. 

(…snicker)

Lady Lucerne's armed-up timeline

swordswoman by Two B

Good art, and artist Two B often uses The Real Thing as inspiration and reference; for instance, this portrait…

…reminds me of this one, Emperor Maximilian I by Peter Paul Rubens.

Several other paintings on ArtStation are also based on real armour, and look all the more effective for it.

Archaeologists: “Uhhhh, there’s still a lot of debate about how effective leather armor really could have been on a battlefield. Alas, we shall never know.”

Punks: “Hey, fresh cut, the boneheads carry knives sometimes so make sure and lift a good leather jacket. It’ll save your life.”

Layers layers layers! Slashes won’t do shit even to most t shirts but a stab will ignore the shit outa your leathers. Layers will keep the blade from getting as deep as it otherwise would and gives more for it to snag on if it serrated.

Armour has always been about layers.

Example 1200s minor noble: linen shirt, gambeson (layered and quilted linen with wool insulation), chain mail, surcoat, arming cap, helmet, coif, bigger helmet.

Another example Alexander era Macedonian hoplite: linen tunic, greaves, 1" of tightly pressed and laminated linen, helmet (probably with some sort of arming cap/padding inside), big ass shield.

Layers save lives.

Yes! Cloth is hard work to cut with a knife. When they were trying to ban (sword) duelling in Europe, they banned people from carrying around shields/bucklers, so your defensive tool was a cloak wrapped around your non-sword fist, with plenty of loose fabric to catch your opponent’s blade. You might get your cloak torn, but you’re less likely to get your skin sliced up, and that’s the important thing.

You know what is a surprisingly amazing material for armor?

Silk.

Silk.

The Mongolians used silk vests because silk isn’t broken by an arrow, and you can use the silk to gently pull the arrow back out, even if it’s barbed. They also often used silk as the backing for leather armor.

The first bulletproof vests were made in Japan and Korea. Out of, yup, silk. Silk could stop black powder bullets, but was rendered obsolete by higher powered modern firearms. A combination of silk and metal was experimented with, but dropped because of the expense of silk.

Franz Ferdinand was wearing one such vest when he was assassinated, but it didn’t help because of where he was hit.

The US military is now looking into something called Dragon Silk, which is spider silk made by GMO silkworms, to make body armor that might be more comfortable than the current kevlar vests.

Silk, people.

You want proof about silk being able to stop an arrow? Try sewing it with the wrong machine needle in place. I have shattered – literally shattered – needles that were too thick. They just will not pass between the tightly woven fibers, even when in a machine that can go through your actual fingers. And that was just a lightweight taffeta, not something woven to be intentionally impenatrable.

It is horrible at stopping slashes, though. Whether by the blade of scissors, roller cutter, or well honed dagger or sword, it just falls to pieces like it never meant to be whole in the first place. This is, again, where your layers come in – a nice heavy leather for slash damage, a dense silk for piercing. You probably want to put something under it though, silk against sweaty skin is unpleasantly sticky. It *clings*. Eww.

Useful things elementary school neglected to teach me, exhibit #5839

This is where linen, hemp or even nettle (no, it doesn’t sting) comes as the next-to-skin layer; comfortable, hard-wearing, easily washed and not even unusual: “linens” was period-speak for “underclothes” for centuries.

All three are made the same way, more or less, involving a technical vocabulary of retting, beetling, scutching, hackling etc.; look it up.

*****

* The wooden scutching-knife may be and IMO almost certainly is an ancestor of the “Dussack”, a German / Central European training weapon (the real thing would have been a Messer, a large fighting knife). Compare this illustration from a fight manual ca.1570…

…to a couple of modern repro dussacks…

…and finally to a couple of painted antique scutching-knives from Sweden, one marked 1918, so the shape hadn’t changed much in 300 years….

*****

Any fabric where the washing instructions are “boil until clean” will be OK as bottom-layer armour. That’s how its laundry labels say to treat top-quality Irish damask linens inherited from my Mum, so fabrics like hemp or nettle certainly won’t come to harm.

Your characters may interpret it this way: those who boil their under-tunics the night before combat seem to drive off a lot of infection demons and make wizard healing a bit easier.

Finally, a memorable side-note that has literally nothing to do with fabric armour or indeed fabric of any kind: in 1806 (or ‘08) MP and ex-military surgeon Humphrey Howarth was challenged to a duel.

That morning he washed thoroughly all over, then proceeded to the duelling ground in his coach - stark naked, knowing from his experiences as a military surgeon that cloth fragments forced into a wound were the primary cause of fatal infection.

Whether from embarrassment or because it was now A Silly Thing, his opponent Lord Barrymore called the duel off…

also to stick up for archaeologists: fabric and leather armor doesn’t keep well the same way metal and ceramic does! even metal flakes away. and until fairly recently, archaeologists didn’t have particularly sophisticated tools to check for traces of fibers. they basically had to just dig up an area and hope to guess what was there from the shape of the rust or the bones or the shards of ceramics. this was why finding tombs has always been so exciting: it’s a room full of stuff that hasn’t totally rotted away, ideally with paintings on it showing living people wearing perishable goods like fabric.

armorers and archaeologists and historians have been debating about leather armor not in terms of was it good at being armor– modern leather gloves, boots, and jackets do a great job!– but whether or not any given civilization would have found it cost effective to use leather for protective equipment. some civilizations don’t have very many cows to spare. some have plenty. some could never hope to afford enough silk to let mercenaries have it; some mercenaries made a point of wearing gaudy patchwork silks and fabrics as a point of pride, some have historically exported the massive amounts of silk they had.

leather rots, especially leather that is continuously exposed to rain and sun and blood and stabbing. it’s not so easy to patch. it needs to be tanned and cured and oiled and maintained carefully. does leather make good armor? sure! is it what any given fighter would have been equipped with as the most effective protective gear for the time, geographical and economic climate, and contemporary weapons technology?

archaelogists aren’t being overpaid dipshits when they tell you they can’t say for sure.

Also not just archaeologists, historians! One of the main arguments against leather armor is that VERY FEW HISTORICAL SOURCES TALK ABOUT LEATHER ARMOR, AND ONLY AS A NOVELTY. So the records(albeit fragmentary for all sorts of reasons) back up the lack of leather armor in archaeological finds.

What the records DO mention, however, is leather acting as connective material for composite metal armors(segmented, scales, bands, etc), or covering the joints(cuz leather is more mobile than metal, obvsl, and making mail is TIME CONSUMING), and this is ACTUALLY the source of one of the most common types of “leather armor” we see in games and media; “studded leather”. What this ACTUALLY was was a suit of metal plates about as long as your hand over laid and riveted together called a “brigantine” or “jack”, but to give it added protection and durability it is usually COVERED with a layer of cloth or leather, so what it LOOKS LIKE is a studded cloth or leather coat. When fantasy writers of the early 20th century looked at the (much more sparse and difficult to find, let alone translated)historical sources ON pre-modern societies they had at the time, they saw pictures of this and THOUGHT it was leather, and that misconception passed from fantasy fiction into wargaming and then D&D.

And while Im here and ranting I just want to address one pet peeve(related to this cuz vikings seem to always be given leather armor in tv and film): the Norse largely did not fight wearing “armor” as we think of it, aside from shields and helmets. Some did but, particularly early on in the medieval period, it was considered Cowardly and Dishonorable; like “oh, you’re fine with cutting someone ELSE up but you won’t give THEM the same opportunity???”, and this was hardly a way of thinking unique to their culture and time. It’s perfectly fine to present ppl going off into fantasy combat wearing a tunic and leggings(more so even, if you want to present enchanting as an important trade). Maybe they dont have the money for armor, maybe they find it tiring, maybe they object to it on moral, social, or religious grounds(’god will protect me’ etc etc); there are plenty of perfectly justifiably reasons to write your characters fighting in their culture and era’s equivalent of a tshirt and jeans(or naked even. Thus the French- and British-Gaels, and also archaic Greeks).

I am an unabashed fan of swords, but it is genuinely tragic how slept on warhammers are as symbolic weapons

Swords in a historical context were analogous to sidearms - built for flexibility of use and ease of transport, as well as taking on the role of a status symbol in a lot of feudal and early-modern societies. They are inextricably tied to notions of heroism in most cultures, yes, but also to concepts and institutions such the nobility, monarchy, and the existence of a wealthy warrior class. The role of a sword as a weapon of choice in fiction, then, serves as a subtextual elevation of the user’s importance; they have been marked out by destiny, the divine, social expectation, circumstance, or any other number of things, as special. Important. Powerful.

Warhammers in the European tradition were a response to advancements in plate armor technology: by the late Middle Ages, plate armor granted such significant protection to those lucky enough to lay their hands on a full suit that they posed an almost insurmountable threat to an unarmored fighter with armed with only a sword, club, or rudimentary spear. Late-medieval full plate is one of the purest symbols of power projection and power preservation in military history— in fiction, they armor the status and power of the sword, stripped of the romantic and heroic ideals granted to the sword by its storied history.

As a weapon specifically designed to respond to and defeat plate armor, the warhammer can be viewed as its symbolic antithesis: where plate armor embodies the idea of unassailable strength and martial dominance, the warhammer as a weapon evokes the destruction and dismantling of said strength— a weapon designed to pierce, tear apart and sunder the idea that being powerful and being untouchable are synonymous. Where the sword symbolizes elevating a person to power, and plate armor symbolizes power seeking to perpetuate itself, the warhammer symbolizes the leveling of tools and structures that would convince us that power cannot be challenged.

also big hammer go smashy smashy