Modern Armour, Medieval War

Factual Questions
1

My question is this: assuming that a modern person had for some reason to participate in a medieval battle, where s/he could expect to be shot at with arrows, slashed with swords, or bashed with maces … and that person could have their pick of modern military body-armour and/or riot gear. How effectively would they be protected? Could they stride the medieval battle-field with relative impunity, or would they still be somewhat vulnerable?

I assume we can now make armour much more effectively than that enjoyed by a knight in plate mail - but also that there must be some limits, as our person has to move about.

What think you all?

2

Well Modern body armour is designed to protect from modern weaponsie; guns and shrappnel.

I’d imagine you could you could make some damn fine and manuverable anti-sword and arrow armour by simply making body part molds in strong lightweight polymers, and some kind of overlapping mechanism at the joints.

3

Chain mail is still used for some things (shark diving comes to mind first) which implies that it is unusually good at stopping certain kinds of attacks. I’d guess that standard issue military body armor wouldn’t be tremendously useful against swords, because modern armor is designed to cushion bullets and slow down their impact.

4

One of the main purposes of a mace was to bash the head of a combatant wearing armor to give him a concussion. I don’t know if you could completely eliminate that risk with modern body armor, though a modern helmet and rubber mouthpiece would greatly reduce it. I’m not sure how much protection riot gear would give you against a blunt weapon to the ribs or your limbs. Seems to me broken bones and concussions would still be an issue.

5

Good point … assume, for the purpose of the question, that you could have a hand in specifically designing the armour.

6

How would modern riot shields hold up against their medieval equivalents? They’ve got to be just as durable (against slashing and against individual chips being broken away, I’d thing – OTOH maybe after a certain amount of force they just totally crack? I dunno,) and protective at less weight.

7

It’s always trade-off. Using modern materials and technologies it’s possible to create body protection unpenetrable to arrows / sword slashes and quite effective in cushioning agains blunt trauma, but some weak points always will be present. You can better cover joints, but it will restrict your movements, and so on. Also, no armor can help much against being trampled by cavalry charge or from being thrown to the ground and being hacked with axes by bunch of guys that attacked you from all sides, so it would never be like total impunity.

But overall, when compared, we can make much, much better armors nowadays. Lighter, stronger and less restricting.

8

Yeah, armor is one place where we can really improve on the materials and methods used back then to a point where it would afford an advantage on the battle field (the same can’t be said of say, swords).

However, You’d still get your ass handed to you. There will always be weak points as well as types of attacks that cannot be defended against (large rocks dumped on you, trampling of calvary, being out numbered, etc). But more over, unless you are only facing peasants (and probably even then they’d be a danger to you in groups) any knight worth his salt, any mercenary, any one at all part of the warrior class of the time would have owned you.

These guys trained since they were tykes in close combat and the martial arts of Europe were as effective as any others.

It doesn’t matter if your shield and armor are technically superior, if your opponent can run circles around you and put the point of that sword in your visor or through an articulation, or had you on the ground before you knew what happened, what’s the point?

9

The best defense is a good offense. Stay in the trees with a bazooka or machine gun. Don’t let anyone get close.

Other than that, try to get along. If you’re from the future, why would an army want to attack you, particularly? If you’re prancing around a medieval battle in modern armor just to prove that neither side can hit you . . . did you ever hear of an unsinkable ship called the Titanic?

10

It might not help on an individual level, but if you distributed effective and mass-produced arrow-proof armor among the French kuh-nigg-etts, wouldn’t that change the outcome of many battles against the English?

11

What about an Ursus MK VIII or something. Just walk around invincible. Let cavalry trample you and then get back up…

12

Probably not good summer armor, but in cooler weather it might work.

13

Oof, yeah good luck inflicting any damage on your opponents with that thing on, but bit with the log should prove it’s worthiness against blunt objects.

14

I don’t agree with this. I suppose some average joe that has never done any fighting would probably get beat one-on-one. However, the idea that these folks were some sort of Bruce-Lee like masters of the martial arts is inaccurate. The samurai tradition was more often a guy hacking his way through a bunch of terrified peasants armed with a sharpened bamboo pole. The same applied to European knights. Most casualties in battles in ancient times were killed while fleeing, or by being gang-tackled and stabbed while down or from behind, etc.

I’d be willing to wager that a modern army, trained for a few months with, say, roman legion tactics, and armed with quality modern equipment would be able to handle any similarly sized army from ancient times. Discipline, teamwork, and physical fitness were much more important than the mythical fighting prowess of knights or samurai or whatever.

15

Off-the-shelf stuff would be better than nothing, but not all that great. Google knife-proof vests to see what the trade-offs are between ballistic vests and something that will stop a blade. Given access to modern materials and fabrication techniques…you’d end up with something that looks a lot like a modern-designed suit of medieval armor, with some limited use of materials they didn’t have to make it somewhat lighter for the same level of protection. They had weapons technology pretty well figured out.

Modern fabrication and materials science would improve the average quality, and of course we’d completely out-compete them on how fast we could turn it out if we had to mass-produce it (assuming modern factories doing the work) but really, steel armor is still pretty damn good for what you’d need it for: proof against most stabbing weapons and edged weapons, decent against many missile weapons, some protection against impact weapons.

As Kinthalis pointed out, you would be toast on a medieval battlefield. Even if they couldn’t get through your armor, and your joints were all well protected, no armor is proof against getting mobbed, knocked off your horse and run over, or just having your joints broken or dislocated by wrestling techniques. I’ve been doing martial arts, including weapons work, for half my life and I still would probably end up dead or incapacitated in just a few minutes.

You just can’t train as hard and don’t have access to the quality of opponents and instructors in modern life as those guys. They started training when they were kids. It would be like Joe Average going up against a professional gymnast in an acrobatics contest. With that kind of disparity in skill, gear doesn’t matter much.

On preview: ivn1188, the difference is that those guys would have been training in those tactics most of their lives. In a game of basketball, you wouldn’t need NBA players to beat the crap out of a group of medieval knights you threw in your time machine. Most pickup basketball players would do well against them. Your group of modern army guys would not have the same innate grasp of how to function in that kind of conflict. Even part-time levy troops would probably have accumulated years of formal practice and drill instruction that can’t be duplicated in just a few months. I would not expect a group of professional soldiers or knights to have much trouble with them, absent technological tricks that they wouldn’t have encountered by that time.

Give the modern mindset for logic and empirical problem solving a little time to work, a few years for training and drill, and yes, modern guys would have a much better chance, probably even a temporarily unbeatable one. But the question was whether modern equipment itself would give an insurmountable advantage. No, it wouldn’t. Skills matter more than gear. Modern materials wouldn’t be hugely superior in comparison to what they had anyway, so you’d be at rough parity with respect to equipment.

16

Absent an offensive edge in your armour, it wouldn’t really matter. You could get it lighter and have an offensive advantage that way, but as far as I know, melée combat in Dragoon armour is the same as melée combat in plate-mail. Preferably mob the target, find a weak spot in the armour and stick your knife in it.

That said, a prototype hydraulic-based exoskeleton armour holding a heavy ballistic shield should be able to stop - or at least deflect - even a cavalry charge. A tetsudo of those would be pretty hard to come to terms with.

I’ve seen some of those prototypes - my father dabbles in similiar things - and it’s pretty impressive, what they can do. One of the examples my dad put together in the tech yard was a pneumatic arm that could operate to within 30% of human flexibility, but lift up to 200 kilo straight up.

(And I think that’s pretty much the future of infantry armour - the design focus is on enchancing the soldier’s performance, not protecting his body.)

17

But beyond skills and gear, haven’t concepts advanced quite a bit in terms of organization, tactics and strategy? As I understand it, the French knights of the 14th century were perplexed and confounded by disciplined ranks of low-born but deadly Engish longbowmen. If they were stopped short by such a moderate innovation, what might a trained and disciplined group of modern soldiers accomplish?

18

Incidentally, wouldn’t the use of see-through face protection give a pretty massive advantage in field of vision? I would suspect that would be an extremely useful advantage.

19

This is just ignorance on the subject really. It isn’t about some mythical fighting prowess. I’m not talking about legendary tales from Japan Or Europe about single knights holding off an army. We know this didn’t happen, and the works of masters of martial arts of the time, at least in Europe, speak plainly and realistically about the arts of war.

And THAT is what I’m basing my conclusion on. The warrior classes of the time would know a PRACTICAL, effective martial art that dealt exclusively with hand to hand combat. And they would have practiced it used it extensively to defend life and property and country, and to kill routinely.

We haven’t done that as a matter of course for a very long time now, and certainly not with the weapons of the time.

So I’m sticking with getting your ass handed to you by some of these guys.

Even a group of modern soldiers would not have the DECADE or more of martial training in the weapons and tactics of the time to be anything more than a curiosity on the battle field before they were cut to pieces.

20

This isn’t really true. Tactics or lack thereof at the time depended heavily on the quality of those in charge of the battle. Some times these were inexperienced commanders dealing with troops either not completely loyal or not under complete control of those coordinating the battle.

There were brilliant commanders like Richard the Lion Heart and there were bumbling idiots. There were experienced, nearly unbeatable troops and there were undisciplined troops who would either break and flee or charge into their doom without orders. It doesn’t matter if French knights could own any English peasant and bowmen in single combat. If they blunder into a field of knee deep mud and get funneled into a small area they are going to be easy pickings for 12 year olds. :slight_smile: