Clewin said:
With armor it comes down to protection vs mobility, which is why Roman and Greek soldiers didn't have armored mid-rifts (so they could bend at the middle), wore slatted leather or cloth skirts, and had little arm or leg armor (maybe bracers and/or greaves).
Really full body armor didn't appear until the mid-to-late Medieval period, and full heavy armor was generally too bulky for anything but tournaments (even knights preferred more mobile armor in combat). The only time you'd see full armor was a mix of plate and chain, and only rich knights would have that. Most soldiers fought with little or no armor at all, so in reality, a chainmail bikini would offer more protection than basically nothing and most warriors should be dressed in cloth with maybe a leather jacket.
Yeah, but you're mixing fantasy with reality in contradictory ways. A chainmail bikini only exists in a reality where
everyone has a full suit of improbably flexible plate mail. If you're comparing it to historical medieval times (where, as you said, quite a few soldiers didn't have armor at all), well, yeah: in the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
Clewin said:
Also having worn heavy plate (tournament plate), I'd bet on the girl in the chainmail bikini - you can't see out of those helmets, you're almost immobile encased in 300lbs of iron, and it is easy to be knocked off balance.
Maybe the plate armor I'm familiar with used some sort of revolutionary process to lighten its weight, but if not, you're exaggerating the weight of plate by around 250%. Plate armor weighed around 50lbs, tops. Smiths back then weren't retarded: they knew that if armor made you completely immobile,
it was shit-useless as armor.
Clewin said:
Once you're on the ground, you're as good as dead because it is pretty much impossible to stand without the help of a squire, so all they have to do is find a seam and stick a sword in.
I'm beginning to think that I've got a bit of a better idea of armor fighting than you do. I agree, yes, it's clumsier than being unarmored, but it's also ungodly useful. Most fights between men wearing full suits of plate become grappling matches, and really violent ones at that. Imagine a UFC match where both opponents are ridiculously difficult to harm. Both participants elbow, knee, punch, etc, and often just flip their swords upside-down and use them as quasi-hammers.
And even then, they're not doing that because their armor makes swordplay too 'clumsy.' They're doing it because a full suit of plate armor is really good at its job. Trying to 'kill' an opponent with traditional swordplay while they're decked in plate is an exercise in futility because they're all but immune to slashing attacks and most stabbing attacks, not to mention the fact that they're actively trying to make your job difficult by not standing still.
If you put a trained man in plate armor against a trained woman in a chainmail thong and bra, it's going to be a curbstomp. Because even if you somehow found a man and a woman with equal training in broadsword fighting, of equal height, and equal weight, the man has a nearly forty pound advantage on her, and he's the closest thing medieval times had to 'swordproof.'
And if they get into hand-to-hand, as most armor fights do? At that point, just pretend that plate armor is the equivalent of a full-body set of brass knuckles. I don't care how agile those chainmail undies make the chick. She's going to get beaten to a bloody pulp.
