Got a Real-World Weapon, Armour or Tactics Question? Mk. XXVIII

[halfeye]

Related to armour vs guns, albeit from a much later era: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armour_of_the_Kelly_gang

Yes, that almost worked.

The gang's armour was made of iron a quarter of an inch thick ...

Ned Kelly's armour weighed 44 kilograms (97 lb). His suit was the only one to have an apron at the back, but all four had front aprons.

That's a lot of weight.

[fusilier]

That's one of the reasons I want to find the video, so I can nail down exactly what they were using and at what distance.

It was longer barreled, and vaguely 50' away, but probably not a 1700s musket. They were definitely using a lead ball, not steel or iron. The ball struck lower right IIRC, and glanced off, leaving a shallow round indentation.

It was within the last year and it had zero sensationalism so it couldn't have been most of the "science" or "documentary" channels at this point (it's amazing how far down hill the iterations of Discovery Science have gone in the hunt for cheap programming and higher ratings).

E: Finally found it, not Smithsonian... PBS Nova. All instances of the video I can find are behind regional blocks or paywalls. But the preview/intro does briefly show the firearm used and the distance. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9cWlsbX894 They also discussed the big difference between cheap untempered plate and high-quality tempered steel plate in resisting the heaviest hits.

The problem I have with this program is that the focus was completely on recreating the armor as accurately as possible, not the firearm. If I remember correctly, they used a .75 caliber "caliver." Which is "one" of the firearms such armor may have encountered. There's no indication that they attempted to charge it to historical standards, which would be overcharging by modern standards, although the powder may have been a poorer quality. Also it wasn't a .90 caliber heavy musket, specifically designed for punching through heavy armor.

So after a long and very thorough investigation and detailed reconstruction of the armor, they seem to have said "a gun is a gun" when it came to the other side of the equation. In my opinion the claim to the superiority of the armor is much weaker than it could have been.

[fusilier]

The entire point of copper jacketed bullets is being harder than lead, to avoid the projectile getting abraded by a rifled steel barrel (because lead is indeed soft enough to leave residue clogging up the rifling grooves). A simultaneous, if probably unrelated, development are "pointy" bullets, which may not get a significant increase in penetration against flesh or body armor from their form alone, but are fired at higher velocities and have less airfriction at the same time, leading to substantially higher impact velocities and therefore better penetration.

Not sure where hunting soft points fit into this... they might be supposed to penetrate better than a mushrooming hollowpoint, but less well than (and thereby transmit more energy into the target creature than) an FMJ by at least flattening the tip.

I thought jacketed bullets had to do with the introduction of smokeless powders -- which burned at higher temperatures, causing the lead to partially melt. Which made a big mess. So jackets were used. If it was simply a matter of lead against a steel or iron barrel, it would have been a problem during the blackpowder era. According to wikipedia, it was supposed to prevent the soft lead bullets from being deformed in the magazine. So . . . lots of reasons are given. (Note: I don't doubt that a jacketed bullet would have better penetration, but I don't believe that was the original intention)

[Gnoman]

The higher velocity of nitro propellants would potentially result in a much worse lead fpilong problem than you would expect from a rifle-musket or black-powder carfridge gun, but the bullets wouldn't melt. Pure lead bullets are still standard for .22LR, and the only cases of tose melting are in supercharged "how fast can we push this bullet" loads.

[Pauly]

Yes, that almost worked.



That's a lot of weight.

Well the armor did work. Not one round penetrated the armor. The Kelly gang were killed/disabled by shots that missed the armor. Ned Kelly, who wore the complete armor with backplate, walked in full view and close range of the police for an estimated 15 minutes, before being taken down by hits to his legs and arms. The police did not believe the reports about the armor and so weren’t thinking about aiming for the arms or legs.

As for the weight, the armor was made in a bush forge, not a proper furnace and it wasn’t heat treated. Recent analysis shows some parts were cold hammered into shape. If it was made by an armorer with a proper furnace to do heat treating I’m sure the weight could come down quite significantly.

[fusilier]

The higher velocity of nitro propellants would potentially result in a much worse lead fpilong problem than you would expect from a rifle-musket or black-powder carfridge gun, but the bullets wouldn't melt. Pure lead bullets are still standard for .22LR, and the only cases of tose melting are in supercharged "how fast can we push this bullet" loads.

So the rifling was stripping the lead from the bullets? That makes sense.

[Gnoman]

So the rifling was stripping the lead from the bullets? That makes sense.

It was a big enough problem that the Union issued special bullets that had zinc disks in place of the normal expanding base. In theory, the shot would expand the disks, forcing the zinc into the rifling grooves and scouring out the lead residue that was accumulating in there. Initially, this was 1 out of every 10 issued rounds, later increased to 3 in 10. It was later determined that these bullets didn't actually work.

[Clistenes]

They were intended to keep out muskets at long range, but not short. This, of course, refers to the heavy musket of an earlier era, not necessarily the later and lighter. "brown bess" style in use after armor declined furthere.

I dunno... I haven't read about cuirasses stopping musket balls in any contemporary text.

Early musket balls were very heavy and slow, so they lost height way faster than horizontal velocity (and hence, killing power).

By the time they were flying at the height of your knees, they still had enough punch to blow your leg off...

So, if they hit your cuirass, they were almost assured to keep enough power to punch through...

[Thiel]

Anyone want to know what people in 1889 thought of the bicycle as a military vehicle? Yes?
Well I have just the book for you. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1D8x6OiVDux3AVdsSrgP1eOK0Hx1mkBbk/view?usp=sharing]PDF Link

I found it at my local library a while back and decided to translate it

[fusilier]

It was a big enough problem that the Union issued special bullets that had zinc disks in place of the normal expanding base. In theory, the shot would expand the disks, forcing the zinc into the rifling grooves and scouring out the lead residue that was accumulating in there. Initially, this was 1 out of every 10 issued rounds, later increased to 3 in 10. It was later determined that these bullets didn't actually work.

I've been studying these bullets lately. The bullet was not intended as a cleaner bullet, but a more accurate bullet, however it was discovered that it did help clean out the barrel compared to the modified Burton Bullet. It's a very long and complicated story, but you can find a lot of detail about it in this video here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAdf...ature=emb_logo

[Raunchel]

Anyone want to know what people in 1889 thought of the bicycle as a military vehicle? Yes?
Well I have just the book for you. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1D8x6OiVDux3AVdsSrgP1eOK0Hx1mkBbk/view?usp=sharing]PDF Link

I found it at my local library a while back and decided to translate it

Thanks! I never even thought about it, but it makes for a very interesting read.

[Max_Killjoy]

The problem I have with this program is that the focus was completely on recreating the armor as accurately as possible, not the firearm. If I remember correctly, they used a .75 caliber "caliver." Which is "one" of the firearms such armor may have encountered. There's no indication that they attempted to charge it to historical standards, which would be overcharging by modern standards, although the powder may have been a poorer quality. Also it wasn't a .90 caliber heavy musket, specifically designed for punching through heavy armor.

So after a long and very thorough investigation and detailed reconstruction of the armor, they seem to have said "a gun is a gun" when it came to the other side of the equation. In my opinion the claim to the superiority of the armor is much weaker than it could have been.

The musket is also a later weapon, isn't it?

One notable difference between the armor in the arrow test video, and the armor in the PBS documentary, is that the former is not tempered, while the latter armor is.

[Max_Killjoy]

Also, latest "reloading bow" video -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sy_bJQaD3Uc -- just for fun.

[fusilier]

The musket is also a later weapon, isn't it?

One notable difference between the armor in the arrow test video, and the armor in the PBS documentary, is that the former is not tempered, while the latter armor is.

For the PBS documentary, a heavy musket would have been a contemporary to the armor (late 16th century, around the time of the Spanish Armada?) As armor use declined in the 17th century muskets actually became lighter and would have had lower penetration. However, there was a great variety of firearms available in the late 16th century.

That's my complaint: they matched the best armor against a contemporary middle weight firearm, and didn't even demonstrate that they were using historical standards with it.

[Saint-Just]

The musket is also a later weapon, isn't it?

Not...quite? Early firearms terminology is confusing, but in relevant time period both musket and caliver did exist, musket being heavier and more powerful. 18-th century musket has a bore comparable to the earlier caliver but somewhat higher powder charge. It still was not as powerful as earlier muskets.

[rrgg]

I dunno... I haven't read about cuirasses stopping musket balls in any contemporary text.

Early musket balls were very heavy and slow, so they lost height way faster than horizontal velocity (and hence, killing power).

By the time they were flying at the height of your knees, they still had enough punch to blow your leg off...

So, if they hit your cuirass, they were almost assured to keep enough power to punch through...

It's sort of more other way around. All bullets lose height at roughly the same rate (well sometimes a musket ball might come out of the barrel with a bit of backspin or frontspin but i'm ignoring that for now), and given two projectiles with the same density, shape, and velocity the larger one will be slowed less quickly by air resistance due to the cube-squared law meaning it has a smaller cross section and surface area relative to its mass. If you take two round balls with the same size and density but different velocities, the force of drag is going to be greater the higher the velocity is meaning that the faster bullet will lose speed at a higher rate than the slower one. Especially at speeds around and above the speed of sound, the effect of air resistance increases dramatically, around three times as much as at much lower velocities.

Basically, given the same muzzle velocity a heavier bullet will typically travel much farther and with a much flatter trajectory than a smaller one. The hard part of course being that it's trickier to accellerate a heavy bullet to very high velocities than a smaller one. If you look at very early hand cannons a lot of them do have fairly wide, short barrels and seem to have been built more for lobbing large, heavy bullets at relatively low velocities (at least compared to later firearms). Towards the end of the 15th century, with weapons like the arquebus, you tend to see a trend towards smaller calibers and much longer barrels relative to their diameter. This provides a number of advantages, in particular a much higher muzzle velocity/point blank range was generally associated with much higher accuracy and made aiming much simpler. It could also help a lot with recoil both because a longer barrel means that the bullet can accelerate more gradually over a longer period and since Kinetic energy is calculated (1/2)mv^2 while momentum is calculated with m*v, you can have a lighter bullet reach the same kinetic energy as a heavier bullet but with much less momentum (though the lighter bullet will also lose that kinetic energy more quickly over distance due to air resistance). Lower recoil also improves accuracy and helps quite a bit if you want to fire the weapon on the move braced against your cheek, chest or shoulder rather than sticking it into the ground or hooking it onto a castle wall first.

For the actual heavy musket which appears in the 16th century, there was no way for contemporaries to really measure a bullet's velocity and know for sure for another two centuries, but it most likely was a pretty high velocity weapon as well. Though it was made to fire a larger bullet than most arquebuses and calivers, the musket's barrel was typically much longer and heavier still, to the point where a forked rest was required to support the front end of the weapon when firing. The extra long barrel again would give the bullet more time to accelerate, muskets generally continued to use roughly the same powder:lead ratio as smaller firearms at the time, with a 20+ lb musket the barrel is going to be pretty strongly reinforced to help contain the explosive internal pressures and if nothing else the sheer mass of the weapon would have helped reduce the recoil felt even further. Plus according to primary sources it seems that recoil from a heavy musket was pretty severe anyways and could be quite painful without a very sturdy grip and good technique.

[Lvl 2 Expert]

Anyone want to know what people in 1889 thought of the bicycle as a military vehicle? Yes?
Well I have just the book for you. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1D8x6OiVDux3AVdsSrgP1eOK0Hx1mkBbk/view?usp=sharing]PDF Link

I found it at my local library a while back and decided to translate it

Nice, thanks. Bicycles have been used for some brilliant military feats since. They allow for semi-rapid transport of semi-many infanterists over semi-rough terrain for semi-cheap. Unfortunately all the semi's in there make them pretty niche, at the very least in a modern context. Need to move 1000km? By bike you can be there in 10 days, maybe 5 with very well trained troops and minimal equipment. (Or 40 with no roads and a few dissassembled artillery pieces loaded up.) But in many situations that will still be too late, so there's essentially no difference with the time it would take to walk.

Although around ww2 armies still uses plenty of horses and such because they simply didn't have enough motor vehicles, in that setting bicycles were certainly useful. That might explain why we still have a half (okay, three quarters) joking national trauma about the Germans stealing all our bicycles. They worked great for patrolling and such.

[Clistenes]

It's sort of more other way around. All bullets lose height at roughly the same rate (well sometimes a musket ball might come out of the barrel with a bit of backspin or frontspin but i'm ignoring that for now), and given two projectiles with the same density, shape, and velocity the larger one will be slowed less quickly by air resistance due to the cube-squared law meaning it has a smaller cross section and surface area relative to its mass. If you take two round balls with the same size and density but different velocities, the force of drag is going to be greater the higher the velocity is meaning that the faster bullet will lose speed at a higher rate than the slower one. Especially at speeds around and above the speed of sound, the effect of air resistance increases dramatically, around three times as much as at much lower velocities.

Basically, given the same muzzle velocity a heavier bullet will typically travel much farther and with a much flatter trajectory than a smaller one. The hard part of course being that it's trickier to accellerate a heavy bullet to very high velocities than a smaller one. If you look at very early hand cannons a lot of them do have fairly wide, short barrels and seem to have been built more for lobbing large, heavy bullets at relatively low velocities (at least compared to later firearms). Towards the end of the 15th century, with weapons like the arquebus, you tend to see a trend towards smaller calibers and much longer barrels relative to their diameter. This provides a number of advantages, in particular a much higher muzzle velocity/point blank range was generally associated with much higher accuracy and made aiming much simpler. It could also help a lot with recoil both because a longer barrel means that the bullet can accelerate more gradually over a longer period and since Kinetic energy is calculated (1/2)mv^2 while momentum is calculated with m*v, you can have a lighter bullet reach the same kinetic energy as a heavier bullet but with much less momentum (though the lighter bullet will also lose that kinetic energy more quickly over distance due to air resistance). Lower recoil also improves accuracy and helps quite a bit if you want to fire the weapon on the move braced against your cheek, chest or shoulder rather than sticking it into the ground or hooking it onto a castle wall first.

For the actual heavy musket which appears in the 16th century, there was no way for contemporaries to really measure a bullet's velocity and know for sure for another two centuries, but it most likely was a pretty high velocity weapon as well. Though it was made to fire a larger bullet than most arquebuses and calivers, the musket's barrel was typically much longer and heavier still, to the point where a forked rest was required to support the front end of the weapon when firing. The extra long barrel again would give the bullet more time to accelerate, muskets generally continued to use roughly the same powder:lead ratio as smaller firearms at the time, with a 20+ lb musket the barrel is going to be pretty strongly reinforced to help contain the explosive internal pressures and if nothing else the sheer mass of the weapon would have helped reduce the recoil felt even further. Plus according to primary sources it seems that recoil from a heavy musket was pretty severe anyways and could be quite painful without a very sturdy grip and good technique.

You have missed what I said about musket bullets being very slow, compared to modern ones. Their technology wasn't good enough to safely produce high pressures without the barrel blowing up, despite the long, reinforce barrels you mentioned, so they compensated by having big heavy guns that shot big bullets.

As you have said, a heavier bullet loses horizontal velocity as a slower rate than a light one, and muskets had an effective range way greater than arquebusses and pistols, but still way shorter than modern rifles.

As you have said, all bullets lose height at roughly the same rate, but since musket bullets were so much slower than modern firearms (around 450 m/s against an AK-47's muzzle velocity of 730 m/s), even if a heavy musket bullet and a modern rifle bullet hit the ground at the same time after being shot, the musket bullet will have reached a far shorter distance from the shooter.

Plus muskets were smoothbores, so the trajectories of the bullets were less straight than rifles...

But, since the musket bullets were so heavy, they still caused considerable damage when they hit, despite being so slow. We are speaking of 3.8 to 8.5 times the weight of an AK-47 bullet (3000-4000 joules of energy vs an AK-47's 7.62×39mm cartridge's 2100 joules or so...).

Going back to the original question, cuirasses... if you shot a musket, the heavy bullet kept its horizontal velocity quite well, because it was heavy (you said it yourself), but it was still very slow, so, if the guy you were shooting against was too far away, the bullet would miss his chest and hit his legs or fly between them or pass next to them... But it kept its horizontal velocity quite well, so it was still fast enough to hurt you seriously it hit the leg.

On the other hand, it you aimed at the chest and got a hit, that means the guy was quite close, and at that distance the bullet would keep enough energy to punch through the cuirass...

Hence, it should be quite rare for a cuirass to stop a musket ball in battle, because at the distance a cuirass could stop a musket ball you would rarely be hit at all...

[Gnoman]

Almost nothing could stop a heavy anti-armor musket at close range, but you could keep it out long enough to ensure that you're going to face no more than one or two effective volleys as you charge home (because you go from "this is the range that they can hurt us" to "this is the range at which we're trampling and stabbing them" too quickly for them to reload more than once). You also have to be able to contend with long-range harassing fire.

At such ranges, muskets wouldn't be fired at individual soldiers. They'd be fired en masse at large bodies of troops in the same manner that bows were used before them and bolt-action rifles would be used after them (this is why so many WWI-era small arms have sights that go out to a kilometer or more). Such volleys would be of limited use against infantry (because you're not going to inflict a lot of casualties) but could help disrupt a forming cavalry charge (take out a few riders or injure a few horses, and you get a lot of confusion, which breaks up cohesion). These are the ranges where a cuirass had to be able to withstand a musket ball.

[Clistenes]

These are the ranges where a cuirass had to be able to withstand a musket ball.

Yes, but at such distances the ball was more likely to hit your legs than your cuirass, or not at all...

Look the chart on page 46: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&sour...mFY0Xr6uS14bhx

At 100 metres, the musket bullets penetrated a 4 mm thick steel plate or a 5 inches thick wooden shield (Benjamin Robins, New Principles of Gunnery: Containing the Determination of the Force of Gun-Powder), but it had already dropped around 20-25 cm.

I guess a breastplate could stop the bullet somewhere between the 200-400 m range, but at that point the bullet has already dropped at least 1.25 m.

They could increase the effective range by aiming high (the bullet would follow a parabolic trajectory), but that would decrease horizontal velocity.

Other sources claim that a heavy musket ball could punch though a 3-4 mm breastplate at 30 m; I guess those were slower balls from earlier muskets... The probably dropped faster too... (https://books.google.es/books?id=Ovh...ckness&f=false).

[Max_Killjoy]

Yes, but at such distances the ball was more likely to hit your legs than your cuirass, or not at all...

Look the chart on page 46: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&sour...mFY0Xr6uS14bhx

At 100 metres, the musket bullets penetrated a 4 mm thick steel plate or a 5 inches thick wooden shield (Benjamin Robins, New Principles of Gunnery: Containing the Determination of the Force of Gun-Powder), but it had already dropped around 20-25 cm.

I guess a breastplate could stop the bullet somewhere between the 200-400 m range, but at that point the bullet has already dropped at least 1.25 m.

They could increase the effective range by aiming high (the bullet would follow a parabolic trajectory), but that would decrease horizontal velocity.

Other sources claim that a heavy musket ball could punch though a 3-4 mm breastplate at 30 m; I guess those were slower balls from earlier muskets... The probably dropped faster too... (https://books.google.es/books?id=Ovh...page&q=tercios breastplate thickness&f=false).

Did they just slap a sheet of mild steel up to a rigid mount, or did they use curved tempered steel, mounted over mail and cloth, over a soft body analogue, and on a stand with give?

[Clistenes]

Did they just slap a sheet of mild steel up to a rigid mount, or did they use curved tempered steel, mounted over mail and cloth, over a soft body analogue, and on a stand with give?

I don't know. I have been trying to find the book, but I still haven't been able.

For the references I have read, I think they shot the musket against a sheet of steel, rather than a breastplate mounted on a mannequin, but I don't know what kind of steel it was...

[rrgg]

You have missed what I said about musket bullets being very slow, compared to modern ones. Their technology wasn't good enough to safely produce high pressures without the barrel blowing up, despite the long, reinforce barrels you mentioned, so they compensated by having big heavy guns that shot big bullets.

As you have said, a heavier bullet loses horizontal velocity as a slower rate than a light one, and muskets had an effective range way greater than arquebusses and pistols, but still way shorter than modern rifles.

As you have said, all bullets lose height at roughly the same rate, but since musket bullets were so much slower than modern firearms (around 450 m/s against an AK-47's muzzle velocity of 730 m/s), even if a heavy musket bullet and a modern rifle bullet hit the ground at the same time after being shot, the musket bullet will have reached a far shorter distance from the shooter.

Plus muskets were smoothbores, so the trajectories of the bullets were less straight than rifles...

But, since the musket bullets were so heavy, they still caused considerable damage when they hit, despite being so slow. We are speaking of 3.8 to 8.5 times the weight of an AK-47 bullet (3000-4000 joules of energy vs an AK-47's 7.62×39mm cartridge's 2100 joules or so...).

Going back to the original question, cuirasses... if you shot a musket, the heavy bullet kept its horizontal velocity quite well, because it was heavy (you said it yourself), but it was still very slow, so, if the guy you were shooting against was too far away, the bullet would miss his chest and hit his legs or fly between them or pass next to them... But it kept its horizontal velocity quite well, so it was still fast enough to hurt you seriously it hit the leg.

On the other hand, it you aimed at the chest and got a hit, that means the guy was quite close, and at that distance the bullet would keep enough energy to punch through the cuirass...

Hence, it should be quite rare for a cuirass to stop a musket ball in battle, because at the distance a cuirass could stop a musket ball you would rarely be hit at all...

Yeah, sorry. I was focusing more on comparing period firearms, where the short of it is that since muskets were already shooting at likely around 500 m/s or so, even if you did take a smaller caliber muzzle loader and tried to accelerate the smaller round bullet to even higher muzzle velocities than that, you are already so far past the speed of sound and the point of diminishing returns where the lighter bullet loses speed so quickly that the heavy musket is still typically going to shoot much farther and have a much flatter trajectory overall that the smaller caliber weapons.

When it comes to modern military rifles though they generally do still beat out muskets handily when it comes to penetration at least due to bullets being much better shaped for both aerodynamics and penetration and usually including harder materials such as jacketed bullets or being made with a harder lead alloy. The 1980s experiments in Graz Austria did include two modern assault rifles for comparison and both performed way better than it came to penetration, though at shorter ranges larger muskets could produce much larger wound cavities in a simulated soft target, and the muskets were still able to well outperform a modern glock pistol.

https://journals.lib.unb.ca/index.ph...ew/17669/22312

A somewhat more interesting point of comparison is the early minie style rifles used during the us civil war. During Mordecai's testing at Washington Washington arsenal in the late 1840s he recommended aiming for a muzzle velocity of around 1500 fps with smoothbore musket charges and measured an "old rifle" (ie a rifle firing a tightly patched round ball rather than a minie bullet) as having a muzzle velocity of 2000-2100 fps. The new rifles however had to settle for much smaller charges and a much lower velocity of closer to 900-1000 fps. This means that up to a certain distance the old smoothbores would have been capable of a flatter trajectory and has led to some speculation that part of the reason rifles had a fairly minimal effect on combat accuracy during the civil war is that they were more reliant on soldiers having to accurately judge ranges and adjust their sights at around 50-100 yards than they would have had to before. At range though the minie ball still performed dramatically better. Whereas with round balls even the 16th century heavy muskets were considered unlikely to kill or cause serious wounds to even unarmored targets past 600 yards if they hit, and were unlikely to shoot much farther past 1000 yards even if pointed way up in the air, civil war era Springfields and Enfields were apparently still able to pierce several inches into wood and sandbags at 1000 distance and could reach that far with just a few degrees of elevation. How exactly their penetration compared at very short ranges I'm not entirely certain. I think I did come across a passing British reference at one point complaining that the new Enfield rifles' penetration was unsatisfactory so maybe that was the for a very well charged brown bess, but I don't think that was the case with the smaller 69. Caliber US smoothbores at the time. Its tricky to compare directly since even if a cylindriconical bullet has less energy, it has a much denser cross-section and will need much less energy overall to penetrate say a steel plate since it only has to make a smaller hole. If I recall Earl J Hess's book did have a short section discussing all the anecdotal evidence regarding privately purchased "bulletproof" armors used during the civil war, which were typically made of 18th century steel and were of a huge variety of different designs, but concluded that they only seemed to have worked about half the time, in addition to coming across lots of complaints about how they were too heavy most of the time and would only protect you if you got shot square in the center of the chest.

Getting back to the subj

[S@tanicoaldo]

I've been working on a setting that is between it's Bronze and Iron Ages.

There is a NPC blacksmith who complained to the PCs that laments the newfound popularity of iron over bronze, since iron is more brittle. Bronze, he argues, is superior since it merely bends and can be hammered back into shape.

Which is something I always thought it was true, unlike steel iron is not that much better to make weapons than Bronze it's just easier to make you can mass produce.

One of my players called me out and I said I was wrong and Iron is a lot superior but was unable to provide any evidence.

Anyway I was reading online and I was unable to find any text that goes deeply in the subject.

So can anyone help me out?

[Lvl 2 Expert]

I've been working on a setting that is between it's Bronze and Iron Ages.

There is a NPC blacksmith who complained to the PCs that laments the newfound popularity of iron over bronze, since iron is more brittle. Bronze, he argues, is superior since it merely bends and can be hammered back into shape.

Which is something I always thought it was true, unlike steel iron is not that much better to make weapons than Bronze it's just easier to make you can mass produce.

One of my players called me out and I said I was wrong and Iron is a lot superior but was unable to provide any evidence.

Anyway I was reading online and I was unable to find any text that goes deeply in the subject.

So can anyone help me out?

Staying faithful to the era your NPC could exist. Not only do many people just love to grumble about things that are new and find anything wrong with them to complain about, bronze does have some legitimate advantages like the hammering it back into shape thing. But this is a transitional era as well of course, the smiths of this time have more experience working bronze and the bronze available will be an alloy whose composition has been tweaked over time, while the iron just contains some random impurities. If you were talking about medieval quality steel I would agree with your player that it is generally the better material for weapons, but in a transitional setting it is going to depend on a bunch of factors.

Game wise it would be nice to do something interesting with it though. Either give bronze and iron weapons slightly different properties to create an interesting in game decision or introduce another smith later on who has been happily experimenting with iron and has a different perspective on things.

(Side note: iron is not really easier to make, it requires a hotter furnace and therefore wasn't figured out until much later. Iron ore is much more plentyfull though, so the raw materials are easier to get. Random ground contains several percents of iron. This was a big advantage in the real world middle eastern early iron age, because their entire trade networks and other complex societal structures had just collapsed.)

[Xuc Xac]

I've been working on a setting that is between it's Bronze and Iron Ages.

There is a NPC blacksmith who complained to the PCs that laments the newfound popularity of iron over bronze, since iron is more brittle. Bronze, he argues, is superior since it merely bends and can be hammered back into shape.

Which is something I always thought it was true, unlike steel iron is not that much better to make weapons than Bronze it's just easier to make you can mass produce.

Iron is worse than bronze, but steel is better if you can figure out how to make it consistently.

In the early Bronze Age, iron is rare and can only be found as meteorites because nobody can smelt it from ore yet. An iron weapon is a super expensive but functionally inferior status symbol, like a sword with a silver blade. King Tut was buried with an iron dagger, for example.

In the early Iron Age, iron is cheap crap. It only has one ingredient that can be found almost anywhere and it's harder to work with than bronze so it can't be made with a lot of fancy details. Depending on the smith's mood, the weather, and whether or not a butterfly in China flapped its wings that morning, an iron weapon will either be too hard and brittle or too soft and bendy. At this point, rank and file soldiers are mainly equipped with iron but the officers have bronze.

In the later Iron Age, bronze is mostly used for decorative bits or nautical equipment (for its corrosion resistance). Smiths have figured out how to make steel on purpose. It's not always high quality, but even the low quality stuff can be used to make weapons that are good enough.

If you wanted to rate the suitability of a metal for making weapons like swords, axes, and spears on a scale of 1 to 10 (with 1 being a Nerf toy and 10 being the theoretical platonic ideal sword material):
Iron is an 8, bronze (properly alloyed and treated by a weaponsmith) is a 9, and steel is a 9.5. You need about a 2 or 3 to kill someone and killing becomes easy around 4 or 5.

[Lvl 2 Expert]

If you wanted to rate the suitability of a metal for making weapons like swords, axes, and spears on a scale of 1 to 10 (with 1 being a Nerf toy and 10 being the theoretical platonic ideal sword material):
Iron is an 8, bronze (properly alloyed and treated by a weaponsmith) is a 9, and steel is a 9.5. You need about a 2 or 3 to kill someone and killing becomes easy around 4 or 5.

That would make pillows a low (and liberally applied) 2, wood somewhere around a 4, depending on whether we're allowing helmets, and flint maybe a 6 if not judging the whole "hard to shape into a sword specifically" too hard. Not a bad system.

[Max_Killjoy]

I've been working on a setting that is between it's Bronze and Iron Ages.

There is a NPC blacksmith who complained to the PCs that laments the newfound popularity of iron over bronze, since iron is more brittle. Bronze, he argues, is superior since it merely bends and can be hammered back into shape.

Which is something I always thought it was true, unlike steel iron is not that much better to make weapons than Bronze it's just easier to make you can mass produce.

One of my players called me out and I said I was wrong and Iron is a lot superior but was unable to provide any evidence.

Anyway I was reading online and I was unable to find any text that goes deeply in the subject.

So can anyone help me out?

You are correct.

• Iron takes one metal, not two.
• That one metal is far more common than copper or tin.
• Copper and tin ores are rarely near to each other.
• This all made iron far cheaper than bronze on the material side.
• Iron takes a much hotter furnace to smelt, etc -- it's trickier and less obvious what it takes to make a good iron alloy.

Something that's no commonly known about bronze is that it can be work-hardened to hold an edge and retain its shape more resiliently -- eliminating the "can't hold an edge" problem. Additionally, there are differences between high-tin bronze and low-tin bronze, just as there are differences in steels depending on how much carbon, etc, is in the alloy. High-tin bronze is crazy good for making edged weapons.

The belief that early iron was immediately better than bronze is a notion of "inevitable progress" was dominant in historical circles and popular "knowledge" for hundreds of years, in no small part because of a disdain in academia for "experimental archaeology". It's still one of those things that "everybody knows" even though it's just not true.


http://myarmoury.com/talk/viewtopic.31591.html
https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistoria..._in_every_way/
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistoria...o_the_iron_age

[Lemmy]

TBF, Steel is more brittle than bronze... Because that characteristic is pretty much tied to hardness. If something is super-hard, it's also super-brittle. Steel, for example, is both stronger and more brittle than iron.

The main advantages of steel over bronze are:

- availability.
- strength.
- hardness
- weight/density.

For the purpose of armor and weapons, I'd say availability and weight/density are the most important factors. Bronze, however does have some significant advantages too:

- more plastic (can suffer more deformation without fracturing - i.e.: it's less brittle).
- resistant to corrosion (specially that caused by salt water).

These factors are probably not enough to compensate for its disadvantages (compared to steel) when it comes to armor and weapons, but they could still be used as valid arguments by a blacksmith trained in the bronze age.

[Max_Killjoy]

Hard = brittle is a tendency, not a universal formula. One of the tricks of making a good sword is to make the steel hard enough to hold an edge, but impart the "spring" quality of returning to shape when bent, rather than snapping off or staying bent; this is in part where quenching and tempering come into play.