This week we’re covering the winning topic from the latest ACOUP Senate poll, which is a look at some of the odd designs and mechanics for futuristic science fiction body armor, particularly rigid ‘hardsuits.’ Naturally, this post isn’t going to cover every variety of armor that appears in science fiction, so I want to be clear that I am generally limiting my scope here to rigid non-powered armor. Power (or powered) armor – that is, armor that moves with built-in servos and motors, rather than purely under muscle power – is its own topic that we’ll leave for another day.
(I’m running a bit behind on this one on account of the Thanksgiving Holiday, but I’m going to go ahead and post it, a bit rougher-cut than usual, and hopefully fix any typos or mistakes when I get back home)
Instead, I want to focus on rigid science fiction armors because they offer an interesting lens to consider their design: how to armor a human body in a rigid substance is an exceedingly solved problem: quite a few cultures have tackled this particular problem with a lot of energy and ingenuity, attempting to balance protection, mobility and weight. And the “problem with sci-fi body armor” begins with the fact that most of these futuristic ‘hardsuits’ utilize little of any of the design language of those efforts. Instead, where real armors evolve against threats, fictional armors evolve as a visual language, borrowing the design elements of other fictional armors far more often than they dip into their own historical exemplars, with the result that the whole thing sort of devours itself.
All of which provides a fascinating window to talk about how actual armor is designed and the concerns that can motivate its structure, in contrast to the often very flawed visual designs we see in media.
So what we’re going to do is first look at some quite obviously (to me, at least) flawed science fiction armor designs. Then we’ll look at how threats shape coverage and other concerns for body armor and from there look at some historical exemplars that might point to potential solutions (and also a bit why I suspect designers don’t use them).
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Getting Armor Wrong
What actually spurred this topic in my mind the first time was a single promotional still for Dune (2021) showing Dave Bautista (as Glossu Rabban) along with some Harkonnen soldiers in their battle armor, because I thought both the design of the armor and also specifically the modifications made to Bautista’s ‘main character’ version of it were really telling:
In particular, you can see that the Harkonnen soldiers (officers, presumably) have armor that consists of heavy pauldrons and a high collar, along with a breastplate that runs all the way to the hips (the ‘belt line’ as distinct from the natural waist) and then extends a bit further in the front. But one also instantly notices that Bautista’s armor is a lot less protective: the rigid component covers only the upper-torso, with only fabric over the belly and much less shoulder protection. And it isn’t particularly hard to guess why: with such large rigid elements, one imagines those extras in the shot can’t move or bend very much (I think you can actually somewhat see, in the shot above, how confined their posture is, in fact), but Bautista needs to do a lot of physical acting and emoting which is going to demand that he can raise his arms over his head and bend at the waist.
Except, of course, if these fellows were expecting to be in an actual fight they might also want to, you know, be able to raise their arms over their heads or bend at the waist!
That problem restricted to these Harkennonen uniforms, although the contrast between Rabban’s armor and everyone else makes it quite clear. But you can see the same issue and how it was resolved – from a film perspective – on the Atreides and Sardaukar armor. The Atreides armor is worn for the arrival scene, so it can be quite rigid because no one needs to actually fight in it.1 Consequently, the rigid shaping of the breastplate, which extends all the way over the pelvis seems, in the scene, to require the actors to stay quite rigidly stiff and stand up very straight, while its not clear the pauldrons allow a full range of motions to the arms.
Meanwhile the Sardaukar do need to take their armor into actual fight scenes. And the film’s solution was to cheat: the Sardaukar armor looks rigid, with the same heavily structured pauldrons as the other too and the long front ‘plate’ running down to the waist, but in fact if you look closely (especially as they move and fight) you realize these ‘armors’ aren’t rigid at all, but appear to be made of flexible textile, allowing the actors to bend and move. What I think is interesting is that the Sardaukar armor, to my eyes, shares so much of the shaping and design language of the Atreides and Harkonnen armor, I think we are supposed to assume they’re all made of the same rigid elements in only modestly different styles.2
One of the quirks we’ll return to in fictional armor design is that its developmental trends respond not to technological development or threat environment (as real armor does) but to other fictional armor designs. And so this problem – rigid science fiction armor that one couldn’t possibly move effectively in is one hardly confined to just the recent Dune films. Take, for instance, the iconic N7 armor, worn by Commander Shepherd (who can be male or female) from the Mass Effect franchise:
Now someone whose player the Mass Effect games may argue, of course, that Shepherd (and other armored characters) bend and move just fine. To which I might suggest they look closely next time at the character models and how they move when those characters are running around and fighting, because I suspect you’ll see, as I did that a lot of those movements require having very clearly rigid plates on the character model bend in order to facilitate motion.
In particular, characters often move their necks in ways that require those high collars to bend in dialogue and cutscenes, while in combat characters do a lot of both turning at the waist (that his, horizontal rotation of the upper body) and bending at the waist (that is, bending forward or backwards). And visually, these armors have a set of belly-plates that seem meant to perhaps vaguely imply that they can bend and articulate, but they pretty clearly can’t. Those plates can’t slide on each other horizontally because of the way they’re sculpted (they’re not flat!), while height difference of the plates seems too little (especially on the male Shepherd) to allow these plates to easily slide over each other vertically (and also the uppermost plate is flush with the breastplate, so it’s going to push that into the chest (ow). Meanwhile, the ‘V’ shape of the belly-plates also means the sides of the body and a portion of the front lower torso are unprotected (more obviously on the male Shepherd than the female Shepherd, as she has a big ‘ol extra belt and a narrower frame).
Meanwhile, in order to get something there it looks like these Shepherds can get their arms over their heads leads to a really odd pauldron design I’m seeing appear increasingly frequently in both science fiction and fantasy settings: the breastplate is suspended by mere straps from the shoulder (rather than rigidly covering it as a historical breastplate would) and the pauldrons (the shoulder guards) are mounted not on the shoulders, hanging down, but on the upper arms, projecting upwards. That creates ‘poke yourself in the neck every time you raise your arms’ problems if the pauldrons are actually high enough and tight enough to protect the shoulders. In the case of the N7 armor, that’s resolved by just leaving a huge gap between the armored collar and the shoulder, which as we’ll see is a pretty big problem for armor that is at least in part designed to resist contact weapons.
And before we move on to talking about armor design concerns in the real world, I want to note that I picked these two sets of armor designs deliberately for one reason: in both settings, armor is significantly about dealing with contact weapons, like swords, spears or clubs. One of these days, I want to revisit the Dune combat model more broadly, but it is a conceit of the fiction that energy shields in Dune largely obsolete the battlefield use of most projectile weapons, leading armies back to fighting with swords and knives in close combat: your energy shield stops bullets, so your armor is really concerned with blades (the long-knife kindjal being the standard personal weapon of the Imperium).
Mass Effect is a bit more mixed, but players of the series (especially the first game) will know that one of the tactical considerations is that melee strikes are not impeded by the ‘kinetic barriers’ (read: shields) of the setting, which are designed only to intercept small objects (like bullets) moving very fast. A Krogan swinging the butt of his rifle at your head is too big and too slow and so passes right through to one-hit-KO Shepherd if you are careless. As a result, contact weapons remain a thing in setting: Asari commandos wield swords, Krogans will engage, cheerfully, in melee and Shepherd him/herself takes up wielding a sharp ‘hardlight’ omni-tool bayonet in later games. That said, Mass Effect‘s shields aren’t as absolute a defense as Dune‘s shields – they fail much quicker – meaning that armor is also in theory supposed to protect from bullets (and especially from energy weapons, environmental conditions and heat all of which ignore kinetic barriers).
So let’s talk about how to think about what armor covers, how it covers it and why. And we need to start with the place that all armor development starts, which is:
Threat Profile and the Human Body
Whereas fictional armors are often shaped through a kind of evolution whereby costume designers, artists and animators see each other’s costume ideas and iterate on them, armor development responds (within the limits of the physical materials available) not to other armor design, but to the demands of the human body (you need to be able to bend and move and armor needs to be of a weight a human can wear) and to the threats the armor is meant to defeat.
We can think about this by contrasting two very different threat environments: an ancient or medieval battlefield dominated by contact weapons as the principle threat, and a modern battlefield where shrapnel and direct-fire munitions are the primary threat.
Let’s start with the ancient or medieval battlefield. Now, I don’t want to over-generalize about the balance of ‘threat’ between missile weapons (arrows, javelins, etc.) and contact weapons (swords, spears, maces, etc.) on pre-modern, pre-gunpowder battlefields – that balance would have varied, from contexts where nearly all threat was contact weapons (colliding hoplite phalanxes, for instance) to conditions where the dominant threat was missiles (for instance, warfare on the Steppe). But for the sake of this thought experiment, we’re going to a contact-weapon focused threat environment, mostly because that most closely fits the threat environment in Dune (where shields remove nearly all missile threats).
Now contact weapons can deliver energy (nearly all weapons are about delivering energy to a target)3 in quite a few ways: as a penetrating blow with all of the force directed at a small point (spears, sword-thrusts) or a cutting blow with the force concentrated along a narrow edge (swords, axes)4 or blunt trauma, delivering potentially somewhat more energy somewhat less concentrated.
Those threat profiles influence materials and design. Armor works largely by converting various kinds of piercing or slashing attacks into blunt trauma distributed over the widest possible part of the body. And that in turn is part of the advantage of using rigid materials in armor construction. Of course the materials themselves also play a role: rigid materials (like steel) are often a lot stronger for their weight or thickness than non-rigid alternatives (like fabric). But also in a lot of cases rigidity is the point (or more correctly, how you defeat a point). If an armor material perfectly holds together but bends such that it is simply driven into the wound, that isn’t necessarily an ideal outcome (the classic example of this are silk Steppe garments which might not be pierced by an arrow, because silk fibers can be very strong, but also wouldn’t really impede the arrow, being instead just driven in around the arrowhead).5
A rigid material can spread out the energy of a weapon impact over a large surface; because assuming it remains rigid the entire armor component moves from the impact, contacting the body across a much larger area. The power of distributing impact energy in this way is pretty stark. A 50J impact concentrated into a very small, sharp impact zone (like the tip of a spear or an arrowhead) can easily produce lethal wounds. By contrast 200J applied across your entire chest is something you’ll certainly notice, but probably won’t cause any permanent injury. Indeed, as modern body armors show, impacts upwards of two-thousand joules (the energy delivery of many modern rifle rounds) is quite survivable if spread over enough of the body. So rigid elements (be that a breastplate or, as in modern armor, something like rigid plate inserts) can be of tremendous value precisely because they’re rigid and thus spread out the energy of impact.
That said, you will not armor all parts of the body evenly. We’ve actually discussed this before, back in some of the earliest days of ACOUP: armor is always a balance between weight and protection, with the result that armor is rarely uniform in structure or thickness. Thicker armor means more weight, which adds up fairly rapidly, while more complete protection around joints means reductions in mobility. So an armorer has to think pretty hard about the tradeoffs between mobility, weight and protection. And one of the key questions here is, quite simply, “where is an opposing blow most likely to land or be most dangerous?”
The answer to this question depends on an intersection of two factors. On the one hand, there is the attacker’s factor: biomechanically, all weapon-strikes originate from the shoulders and so as they travel away from the shoulders, they sacrifice reach and power to do so. If I have, say, a sword and want to strike at your legs, I have to advance further into measure to be able to do so, because my arms and weapon are angled downward from my shoulders, whereas you can respond by making a ‘straight line’ strike at my upper-body. Consequently, with contact weapons, there’s a lot of threat on the upper body, less on the legs. In particular a lot of weapons can deliver very strong downward strikes onto the shoulders themselves, so the top of the shoulders is a pretty important threat zone. The upper-arms, by contrast, demand a horizontal strike, rather than a falling vertical strike: that’s a vulnerability, but less so.
The other factor derives from the defender’s body: different parts of the body are differently lethal if struck. Strikes to the shoulders, neck or head are obviously potentially very rapidly lethal, though the head both requires a lot more mobility and also is harder to strike effectively because heads tend to move around a lot in contact fighting. Likewise, the torso is full of vital organs and arteries that make wounds there really dangerous; the upper-torso is perhaps easier for an enemy to strike, but the presence of the rib-cage (nature’s natural armor) can both limit the damage a weapon strike there causes and also, in the case of a stab, make it hard to recover the weapon (that is, get it back out). Consequently, a lot of fighting systems emphasize penetrating strikes to the gut. By contrast, arms and legs move around a lot and are generally less lethal if struck.
That leads to the rough ‘order in armor’ I discussed all those years ago, with the chest and head (specifically the cranium, the top of the head) coming first, followed by the shoulders, followed by the waist/hips and upper thigh, followed by limb and face protection.
By contrast, the threat profile of gunpowder warfare is slightly but importantly different. On the one hand it is a lot harder to armor against bullets because they arrive with much more energy. And I want to stress: much more energy. For a sword or spear swung by human arms, the upper limits6 are around 130J, though most blows will be much weaker than this. Arrows, as we’ve noted, top out around the same energy at launch but fall off somewhat in flight. By contrast, musket bullets can arrive with many hundreds of joules of energy and modern rifle rounds can deliver in the neighborhood of 2,000J of energy on impact. So armor that is trying to stop such a round has to be able to absorb a lot more energy and successfully spread it out over more of the defender’s surface.
The other factor is that, whereas melee strikes originate at the shoulders but can be rising strikes (‘uppercuts’) or falling strikes or horizontal strikes, bullets and other direct-fire weapons (this would be, for instance, equally true of directed energy weapons) fly very fast on relatively flat trajectories, which means the threat is mostly to the front of the body. Meanwhile, whereas a melee combatant can tailor his strikes to your armor – striking at the unarmored portions of your armor – soldiers with guns are generally trained to aim for the center of mass and generally cannot, in battlefield conditions, target specific parts of the body of an enemy (due to limits of accuracy and range). Consequently, whereas armor against contact weapons tends to want fairly complete coverage of the torso (including the sides and the tops of the shoulders), armor against bullets (and other missile weapons) is much more concerned with covering the vertical surfaces of the torso and is willing to compromise armor on the shoulders and even leave gaps in protection, if that means achieving a favorable balance of coverage and weight.
If you glance back up to the Mass Effect armors, I think you will see where they take some of their design language here with the shoulders covered only by the straps holding up the breastplate (with the pauldrons moved over to the upper armors; we’ll get to that), which you see in modern body armor designed for bullets. One also sees that pattern – a breastplate essentially suspended over the chest by straps over the shoulders, rather than extending some protective coverage over the shoulders – in some Japanese armors (particularly those associated with non-elite soldiers, the ashigaru), which I suspect has a lot to do with the prevalence of arrows in Japanese warfare in the pre-Tokugawa period. More elaborate armor for the samurai warrior-class frequently features sode, protections for the shoulders and upper-arms.
Structuring Rigid Armors
Once we’ve decided on what needs to be armored and that the how is a rigid material, be that steel, ceramic ballistic plates, or some future material, we then have to think about how the armor is going to articulate, that is, how it will allow movement. After all, the human body is not rigid and has to bend in certain ways to enable us to move and fight.
And indeed, here the demands of fighting with contact weapons impose some pretty sharp limits on armor, because effectively fighting with swords or spears or other contact weapons generally requires using the whole body: you need to be able to twist and bend at the waist, move the arms freely (including getting them over your head), manage footwork and so on. As a result, armorers needed to be pretty careful in how they constructed armor protection so as not to limit mobility (which is, I must note, a separate question from weight and its impact on fatigue and endurance).
“Also let me tell you that the student immediately before me who struck his opponent in the face with the pommel of his sword, could also have done what I do, that is, step with his right foot behind his opponent’s left leg, and then hook his opponent’s neck with his sword handle, in order to throw him to the ground as I do.” (trans. Colin Hatcher)
The first solution to the problem of how to use a rigid material to armor the body is of course to simply armor the parts of the body that don’t bend and then use some other material to protect the parts that do. Archaic Greek ‘bell’ cuirasses and later Greek and Roman muscle cuirasses take this approach, with the cuirass terminating at the hips7 and hanging leather strips, called pteryges, hanging down to cover the rest of the hips, groin and upper legs. But this is not exactly an ideal solution, as it sacrifices a lot of coverage.
Instead, of course, the solution is to construct the armor out of a series of rigid plates which are able to move relative to each other. There is another solution, which is to create what is essentially a fabric composed of rigid rings – mail – but we’re going to leave that aside for today. The earliest of these articulation solutions is scale armor, by which we mean an armor composed of a lot of small rigid scales (metal or hardened leather, typically) which are fixed to backing material (textile or leather), so that they hang down. The scales overlap, which presents a solid metal face to the enemy, but since they move independently, little mobility is lost, allowing a scale coat to extend down past the waist and even cover the legs. The weakness of the approach, however, is that the scales are only anchored to the backing material at the top; there’s not much to stop a blade or spear-tip from sliding up one scale and beneath another, thus penetrating the armor. That’s less of a concern for something like an arrow-strike (which is going to be descending at least somewhat when it arrives) but against an opponent with a sword or dagger in close combat, that is a very real weakness.
A way to solve that weakness is to connect the scales to each other rather than to the backing, so that an opponent cannot slide a weapon underneath them or flip up a scale to render the opponent vulnerable. That solution – small metal plates connected to each other, rather than a backing – we call lamellar armor and it was very common in a wide range of cultures, but it has very little purchase in modern fantasy or science fiction armor designs, I think primarily because it was not included in the Dungeons and Dragons armor system. Nevertheless, lamellar armor was quite common in a wide range of cultures: we see it in the Near East, in Europe, in China and in Japan. The rigidity of the overall armor for lamellar varies based on how the plates are connected together (which you can see quite clearly in Japanese armor, in which a single set of armor often includes both rigid surfaces and articulation both using lamellar, connected more or less rigidly). In Europe, we see a variation on this concept, the brigandine (also underused in fantasy settings) where the metal plates are riveted through each other and a textile or leather backing.
But of course the solution we’re most interested in is plate armor, where a set of armor (a ‘harness’) is composed of a set of articulating plates which both provide a rigid protection to the wearer but also articulate where the wearer needs them to bend. Now going through all of the different methods late medieval plate armor uses to allow the armor to articulate would run beyond the scope of this post, but the relevant part here is the way that plate armor articulates over the torso, broadly speaking. The key components here are the cuirass, composed of a breastplate and a backplate, which covers the upper-half of the torso; this component is generally entirely rigid over that surface because the human body doesn’t bend there much either (on account of the rib-cage).
Below the cuirass, often directly attached to it, is a component called faulds. This consists of a set of articulating ‘lames’ (horizontal strips of armor) connected via leather straps or sometimes sliding rivets so that the lames can telescope into each other to enable the user to bend at the waist or raise their legs or even sit down. Faulds usually extend over the hips (sometimes only on the front) and a bit of the upper legs but occasionally run down as far as the knees. Then in many armors, an additional pair of metal plates hang down from the faulds to cover the upper legs called tassets.
Above the cuirass, we have pauldrons or spaulders (we needn’t here get into the differences), which protect the shoulders and upper arms. These are structured with a shoulder ‘cop’ – a dome-shaped metal piece – covering the shoulders, to which were attached a series of descending lames (articulated the same way the faulds would be) to apply coverage to the upper arms. Crucially, these pieces generally attach to the cuirass (though spaulders often also attach to the upper-arm armor called the rerebrace) rather than just to the upper arms, because as you will recall protecting the top of the shoulder is really quite important. Indeed, even a casual look through ancient and medieval armor will quickly reveal that this armor tends to be the thickest on the shoulder: Early mail armor often featured a second later of mail to cover the shoulders, for instance; for some medieval armor, a mail coif or aventail also provided a layer of protection over the mail covering the shoulder.
The key advantage of this setup is that by terminating the solid form of the cuirass at the ‘natural waist’ (where the body is thinnest) the cuirass allows the wearer to bend and rotate at the waist, while the faulds, with their telescoping design, allow the wearer to bend down at the waist, raise their legs or sit. Likewise, the segmented, articulated construction of the pauldron both protects the shoulder, but also allows the arms to be raised.
Returning to Speculative Armors
Coming back then to our science fiction armors, we can diagnose some of the problems here. Both the Mass Effect and Dune armors extend too far down the body in a single, rigid structure which would cost the wearer some ability to bend. In the case of the Mass Effect armor, there’s some hint of articulation, but in the games’ actual animation the armor doesn’t articulate, but rather merely bends, despite being apparently rigid in structure (like the breastplate to which it attaches). In addition, the Dune armor features big pauldrons which look like they offer a lot of protection, but it’s not clear how well they can fold upwards to allow the arms to be raised; in the case of the Sardaukar armor, it certainly looks like they can only because the material they’re made out of isn’t, in fact, rigid.
The alternate form of these problems one increasingly sees, particularly in fantasy armor, is to simply not cover some of these troublesome areas. Thus for instance, Baldur’s Gate III‘s armors have this problem where there will be a breastplate, but no faulds or tassets, leading to a question of how to fill all of that space below the waist. I had intended to include a screenshot from the very recent Dragonage: Veilguard, which has this problem bad in some armors as well, but I’m away from home right now and haven’t the images to hand. In that case, several armors end up looking more like a padded jumpsuit with just a small armored plate over the upper-chest.
Likewise, I’ve seen a tendency for pauldrons to end up, rather than a dome over the shoulder with some articulation, as a vertical plate connected to the upper-arm, which both compromises protection on the top of the shoulder. That’s not a huge problem, as we’ve seen, if the armor is designed to deal primarily with direct-fire missile weapons (like guns), but a significant problem if it is designed to protect against swords (also a tall or spikey plate affixed to the upper-arm could potentially dig into the neck when you raised your arms, which would be more than a little uncomfortable).
Now, we might ask why do these costumes keep reproducing these sorts of ‘bad’ designs? I think the first thing to note on that score is that costume armors are often more in conversation with other costumes than with historical or modern armor. As a result, these designs often don’t ‘reference back’ to the real thing in a way that would ground them in the realities of combat or even just physical mobility.
Another factor is materials. Real armor is generally made of expensive, durable, rigid materials that are designed to take a beating. For much of the iron age, that was, of course, iron (or steel), along with padded textiles and hardened leathers. For modern armor, the basic structure is made of kevlar or other similarly strong synthetic fabrics, backed up by steel or ceramic insert plates. With those sorts of materials, joints, rivets and other attachment points can be really robust while still being small. It just doesn’t take a very large rivet or buckle to hold up to the forces of a moving human body when the rivet or buckle is made of steel.
By contrast, my understanding is that a lot of costume armors for TV and film are made of weaker, lighter and cheaper materials, like plastics, unhardened leather or EVA foam. Those materials often have to be thicker than the equivalent in something like iron or steel simply to hold together (though they are often much lighter), but also they can’t handle small, high-stress connection points, like the sliding rivets or buckles of articulated lames or the holes in scale or especially lamellar.8 As a result, its often quite hard to make these articulated structures with those materials. Not impossible, of course – you will see talented cosplay folks work miracles with leather and EVA foam – but harder.
As an aside, I’ve often suspected this is why good ol’ fashion mail – ubiquitous on the medieval battlefield across Eurasia – is so rare in fantasy films and TV. In older movies, it was common to use silver spray-paint on kitting to create ‘knitted mail’ and that works well enough for extras in the background, but for major characters, there’s often no real substitute for actual mail which is going to need to actually be made of thousands (tens of thousands if they’re correctly sized) metal rings. And you can’t really make those out of plastic or foam if you want the costumes to hold up during shooting. Consequently, while one can certainly get mail made a lot cheaper today than even two decades ago, there is no truly ‘cheap’ way to get lots of mail, especially if one insists on realistically small rings.9
Now the funny thing is this material problem shouldn’t apply to video games at all. After all, video game armors – any armor that exists only in CGI – doesn’t have to bother itself with the rules for this or that material. Thus there’s nothing stopping CGI artists from making armor with articulation, scales and so on. And sometimes they do. But often, I think, there is the feedback effect where video game artists aren’t imitating real world armors, they’re imitating film armors, and so inheriting their problems even when they don’t share their limitations. That, I think, explains quite a lot of the silliness one sees in games like Baldur’s Gate III and DragonAge: Veilguard.
The final factor, I think, for science fiction armors is an aesthetic one: artists and designers working on science fiction properties don’t want an armor structure that feels medieval in its design. The telescoping design of faulds and the free-hanging plates of tassets, in particular, seem to scream ‘medieval’ in their visual content, which might be seen as undesirable for a production – be it a video game or a film – that wants armor to look and feel futuristic. The problem is that while materials may change, the human body doesn’t.
Coming back to Dune and Mass Effect, the quirk of both settings is that because shields can substantially limit the vulnreability to ranged weapons, but aren’t effective against melee weapons, the armor worn is mostly about dealing with those melee weapons. This is explicit in the Dune universe, where it is, by the time the novels take place, no longer common for soldiers to even regularly carry firearms and other ranged weapons. Again, we should get into, some other time, if the Dune combat model works, but I would say under these conditions we ought to expect armor to look quite a lot like medieval plate armor in terms of coverage and shape. But of course that might well cut against what the director or the artist wants to communicate in terms of futuristic shaping.
All of that said, one of the things that has changed is that for designers who want to consider their armor designs a bit more deeply is that there is a lot more information available. Museum catalogs these days are generally online with pictures and it is a lot easier to engage with the robust community of recreators and reenactors who are often fairly knowledgeable not only about how armor was made but also how it was worn. So the opportunity for designs that engage meaningfully with past armors in a way that produces something that both looks good but is actually broadly function is much greater now than it was even just twenty or thirty years ago.
- The Atreides get caught by surprise, after all, at the end of the film and so no one has time to get their armor on.
- Which would make sense in the broader world of the fiction. While the Sardaukar are the best fighters in the Imperium, part of the point of society under the faufrelcuhes is that they are stagnant and all of the Great Houses have militaries based on the same methods and technologies (to the point that their sword masters all go to the same schools (Ginaz swordsmasters).
- Chemical and biological weapons being the exception.
- There is some meaningful difference between how a curved sword cuts, drawing along a surface to slice it, as opposed to how an axe cuts, concentrating a lot of impact energy on a narrow edge at the moment of impact to ‘hew’ through something. In practice, many slashing weapons do a bit of both naturally through the biomechanics of the swing and the curvature of impact edge.
- That might still have some advantages in making it easier to get the arrow out again or limiting the damage of the wound, but it certainly doesn’t prevent a wound.
- As estimated by Alan Williams The Knight and the Blast Furnace (2003)
- Later muscle cuirasses often extend down to the navel in the front, but terminate higher on the sides over the legs, which is ‘splitting the difference’ in terms of coverage and mobility. It probably mattered, for this purpose, that Greek hoplite and Hellenistic phalangite warfare, where you’d see this armor, doesn’t seem to have required as much personal mobility as some other kinds of contact fighting.
- The lamella of lamellar armor, because they’re connected to each other, rather than a backing, can – I am to understand – experience rather greater forces than the small scales of scale armor.
- I noticed that while the recent Gladiator II has a fair bit of mail in it, a lot of the rings are quite large. I don’t think that’s much of a problem though, and is certainly better than just not using mail.
I think you messed something up with the formatting? It seems like a lot of the post got put inside footnote 3 by accident.
Annotated note 3 has cannibalized a large part of the main body of the text, i believe. Something is off, at any rate.
The closing tag on the footnote is malformed (probably supposed to be [/end_notes]) so the footnote grabs everything up to the closing tag of the next footnote.
FYI footnote 3 is messed up, instead containing an entire section down to footnote 2.
And footnote 2 itself seems to be completely blank as far as I can tell.
What happened is that one of the footnotes is missing its end tag. Thus, it cannibalized the end tag of the next footnote, which therefore ends up empty.
There’s no tag for it in the text either.
Think I’ll wait to read until the formatting is fixed. I was reading what I was footnote only to realize it was the main text.
Typo hunt:
That problem restricted to these Harkennonen uniforms
-> isn’t restricted?
Sardaukar armor (right) and Atreides armor and Combat Bagpipes (left)
-> The Sardaukar are on the left, the Atreides on the right
pauldrons as the other too
-> other two
silver spray-paint on kitting to create ‘knitted mail’
-> knitting
substantially limit the vulnreability to ranged weapons
-> vulnerability
“I have to advance further into measure to be able to do so,”
I don’t understand “measure” here, is it a typo, or a usage I am unfamiliar with?
“which both compromises protection on the top of the shoulder.”
What is the second problem the “both” suggests?
I believe “measure” here is about distance, it’s a fighting term used at least in HEMA, not sure how universally. Basically in order to hit you have to be at a certain distance (measure). But typically if you can hit your opponent, so can your opponent hit you, so it goes both ways. And obviously if you go closer, you’re at a bigger risk to be hit.
So it’s saying you have to advance further into the distance where hits can be made, putting yourself into more risk.
This is simplifying things quite a bit, there’s more various slightly varied meanings and uses for “measure”, but I think is sufficient for this context.
Hope that clarifies, although I’m pretty sure there’s bound to be someone much more knowledgeable than me, who might comment later. 🙂
Measure is a Fencing term (seen it used elsewhere) something like “step into where the opponent can hit” or “towards the opponent” or similar.
Right, though we mostly say “distance” now. “Measure” is a bit old-fashioned, but there seems to be quite a few old-fashioned people in fencing salles.
It’s the literal translation of the Italian “misura”; “distance” is a concept a bit too simple for XV to XVIIth century Italian fencing.
Bioware minor edits: the Mass Effect commander is “Shepard” (like astronaut Alan) not “Shepherd”. The new game’s title is “Dragon Age: the Veilguard”.
im reminded of a bit of a joke that the set design guys that had to make the armor for Lord of the Rings went a wee bit insane making it considering they had to make so many of the dang things.
Probably, though in exchange they did get one of the better armours in fiction. (IIRC the main problem is the Gondorian armour extends the breastplate too far rather than use faulds)
Although it’s notable that in Tolkien’s world chain armor was used instead of plate armor, with some accessory pieces like greaves and vambraces.
Of course the movies are an adaptation so this is mostly preference, it’s not that plate couldn’t exist, but historically mail is slightly more consistent with Tolkien’s world. Plate armor mostly tends to be prevalent when powerful bows, crossbows, and guns are involved. This is partially because mail can be brute-force defeated with those projectiles in ideal conditions, whereas anything short of a musket isn’t going to pierce plate armor, and partially because producing complex engineered weapons goes hand in hand with producing complex engineered armors.
Notably, one exception is if you’re using Bronze, which is worked differently than steel in ways that make it easier to form plates. This is why older hoplite armors are plate and later Roman and Medieval armors are mostly mail-the metal changed and that influenced the ideal form of the armor. Although you can and they did make bronze mail and iron plate, it’s just harder or less intuitive.
This historical evolution has led to some curious situations like Augustus, a roman emperor who lived at a time when the typical armor was mail or scale, being famously depicted wearing a breastplate in a period-authentic statue. This was traditional for Roman legates and emperors in particular, likely as a way to harken back to mythological roots rather than because the typical infantry armor wasn’t effective enough.
Anyway, my personal vision is that the men of Gondor and Rohan look like a mix of Bayeux Tapestry knights and the artwork from the Crusade Cycle and a bit of fancy helmet stuff going on, with the various orcs looking somewhat like Roman legionnaires, likely wearing mass produced armor like the Lorica Hamata.
Remember that you went in a chariot if you had a triumph, even though cavalry had driven chariotry from the field by that point.
I can’t remember when Tolkien mentions anyone wearing greaves? Imrahil has a vambrace, but I don’t recall the greaves. Always willing to improve my Tolkien knowledge!
Not in The Lord of the Rings. But in the earliest prose version of “The Fall of Gondolin”, Tolkien says the Elves there made “all manner of swords and axes, spears and bills, and the fashioning of coats of mail, byrnies and hauberks, greaves and vambraces, helms and shields.”
Body armor is still all mail, not plate, even in the strongest and longest held Elven fastness of the First Age built by the kindred most associated with smithcraft.
” partially because mail can be brute-force defeated with those projectiles in ideal conditions”
Probably less of an issue for much Tolkien mail, made by dwarves, Noldor, or Dunedain, and thus exceeding realistic performance expectations due to ‘craft magic’ or whatever. Frodo’s mithril mail shirt being the most obvious (and uncommon) example.
I seem to recall from the DVD commentary that they made some mail for LotR by cutting PVC pipe into rings, and linking it like actual mail.
I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the size of the rings in mail armour tended to roughly correlate with how expensive the armour was- as presumably for smaller rings, you’d both need a more skilled smith (to be able to get the rings smaller in the first place) and it would take longer to make the armour (As there’s more rings to make)
not me pressing “refresh” all night until Bret finally posts!
Happy Thanksgiving, Bret! Been waiting for this one since you first mentioned Mass Effect on the blog years ago and it was a blast to read through. Since we went over steppe silks, though: are you by any chance familiar with Jackmeister on YouTube? He’s a historian of the Mongols who made a video a while back on the popular myth of the “anti-arrow” silk shirt (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKCqyooOzbw). I’d really recommend his videos on steppe blacksmithing and the use of the “tribal” framework to describe steppe polities as well.
I think the conceit with the N7 mass effect armor is that it is “smart”. It does stretch and bend and is more of a fabric than armor until it gets impacted by enough force to make it go rigid, and then it relaxes again to allow movement. Which of course still makes you wonder how it distributes that rigidity and what happens if you get hit while moving, and why they don’t use that wonder material where mail would be in a medieval armor and then use already rigid plates overlaying that. Or all the vulnerability of using some kind of smart armor in a battlefield rife with electronic warfare, though I suppose it could be a property of the material itself somehow. So the answer is: magic nanotechnology solves all design issues, especially if you don’t want to actually think about about ramifications of your technology and combat design.
At least i think that’s the n7 armor, but it’s definitely a sci-fi armor idea I’ve seen/read before.
Officially it’s ballistic cloth (which ablates to carry away energy weapon hits) where it bends and ceramic plates where it doesn’t, overlain by the kinetic shields and underlain by a self-repair and medigel injection system to do automatic first aid.
(Per the in-game codex which IGN helpfully put online. https://www.ign.com/wikis/mass-effect-legendary-edition/Body_Armor )
One trick in a lot of these properties is probably that the artists and writers aren’t necessarily fully coordinated. Odds are that since things are being done concurrently and revised through increasing crunch, they couldn’t do it perfectly even if they wanted to. But they also have multiple goals, and being eyecatching is probably way above worldbuilding in the developer’s priority stack.
“Human bodies,” the narrator intones. “Human bodies never change.”
I know that you said you might cover power armour in a future post. I hope that if you do, you cover just how hilariously bad the marine armour in Starcraft is. Poor Jim Raynor would have to dislocate both of his shoulders to wear his CMC-300 suit.
Blizzard basically just handwaves it as “don’t think too hard about it”.
There’s an amusing glitch in Fallout where power armour vanishes, showing the body underneath it. And that body always looks warped and twisted, like something out of a horror movie. Because the armour isn’t actually shaped like a human body.
I will give credit to one thing about SC equipment: everyone is always shown in covered helmets, at least. Given that our Terrans are regularly chilling out on floating platforms, asteroids, right next to lava, etc., that is probably a wise idea.
The CMC-300 suit at least has the justification of being designed by people who view marines as basically expendable resources. Which, given that the only units have less protection are unarmed workers or literal suicide bombs, is probably correct of them.
That’s not much of a justification, given how A) We can see in the Starcraft 2 teaser trailer just how high-tech the thing is and how much effort it is to put a human into it (Yes, I know there’s caveats concerning *this* particular suit, but it’s still representative of the suits in general). It’s basically the opposite of what you’d expect for an expendable soldier and B) the complaint you’re trying to justify having nothing to do with costs, but about anatomy. It’s just physically impossible to fit a normal human into the outline of the suit. The shoulders are too wide and the waist too narrow.
If anything, the CMC-300 (and frankly all other Starcraft armor designs) is a good example of this “inspired by previous fiction” thing in that they’re pretty directly taken from the Warhammer 40k designs for their space marines (Just like the Zerg were designed not to imitate any real creature, but the otherworldly biotech of H.R. Giger in general and the alien from Alien specifically). And the Warhammer figurines have that shape because they’re not designed as something a human is inside, they’re designed as having the proportions of a human on the outside, to be easily readable as such. But if you take the “shell” off a human-shaped armor, the space underneath ends up not human-shaped.
If you want goofy Blizzard armor, there’s always the orcs:
http://worldofwarcraft.blizzard.com/en-us/game/races/orc
Basically unarmored except for four-inch-thick spiked pauldrons hovering over the shoulders.
It’s an interesting point about recreating a chain mail costume that it should be possible to 3D print (out of plastics) far easier than easier than it is to ‘weave’ metal rings together — there are some technical limitations, but printed articulated joints are one of the common novelties of 3D printing…
In terms of Sci Fi armor, this production process would probably be fairly easily adapted to far more durable plastics (and sintered metals) than the hobbyist’s PLA or PETG. (Of course, the decomputerization of the Dune universe would significantly limit this production method).
It’s hard to overstate what a technical marvel 3D printing is. Either the commonly known extrusion variety, or the even more impressive laser-welded powder deposition metal 3D printing. I have no doubt that a suit of titanium chainmail could be 3D printed to whatever dimension you please in an hour or two (though there may be challenges getting the rings small enough).
I’ve already seen plastic-extrusion 3D printed mail. The limiting factor there would probably be bed size, but you could print it in sections and link it together later. There’s some pretty impressive plastics that can be 3D printed now, though there’s still the issue of delamination between the layers which might be tricky with thin-profile rings. Still, if it’s cheap enough it doesn’t need to last long on set as you can have one per day if you really need to.
I’m not sure if I’m repeating myself but it’s worth noting that 3D printing allows for very different methods to produce chainmail: all of the interlocking rings can be printed in place in one run… and, increasingly, the materials can be very durable plastics.
Isn’t one of Bret’s points that plastics don’t look right for mail though? You could do it for the extras, but then you still ahve the same problem for your main characters as with spray-painted mail.
I’m curious about the reference there about how mail is cheaper (to produce? to buy?) now than “two decades” or so ago. Why is this? Is iron cheaper (and aluminum is now used as well, which is a lot lighter)? Or can machines stamp out rings faster? Or is sweatshop labor in India and Pakistan just cheaper than medieval European smiths?
All of the above are true. Steel is cheap as sin compared to how expensive it was in medieval times, rings can be produced extremely quickly, and all the hidden costs of industrial labor have been cut to shreds so more man hours can be put on any task for far cheaper.
It is also possible to design machines to rivet the mail itself if you really, really want to, and know the dimensions of what you’re fitting it to. There’s just not anything like enough demand to produce a bunch of mail; the few uses are pretty niche, limited to shark watching and protection for chefs or slaughterhouse workers.
Thanks! That is all very informative. I did not know anything about contemporary mail production apart from reenactors and costumers. (I did own a few mail shirts once that came from the subcontinent — interesting experiences!)
There is actually a large demand for mail in the reenacting and HEMA world, and there are places that sell reasonably good recreations (of various degrees of quality) for affordable prices. The main problem is that they are industrially made in sheets and assembled by workers in standard patterns that aren’t always good – if you want good fitting mail you have to be willing to do some cutting and a bit of riveting yourself. But that’s totally doable.
For example: https://www.allbeststuff.com/chain-mail-armour/6-mm-dense-chainmail-mild-steel-round-riveted-shirts/medieval-chain-mail-shirt-6-mm-full-round-dome-riveted-chest-38
Yes, a typical fast-food restaurant has a chain-mail glove in the kitchen somewhere, even if they only bring it out for inspections.
If anyone is curious as to why mail is still used for kitchen protection, it’s effective and can be cleaned by dunking it in almost any cleaning solution, which rusts non stainless steel but sanitizes it in minutes. Other hand protection would disintegrate or needs special treatment to get clean. This practicality is why it’s still kicking around as a technology, although it’s also perfectly functional.
Yes, to China and India. But it is also a demand thing. The LARP, cosplay and reenactment scenes are growing, creating demand that did not existed 25 years ago.
An older colleague of mine, told me that back in the day, when he went LARPing, it was usual to either custom make mail, starting with bending rings from wire. Or they adapting those mail-vests butchers are wearing. Today I can get an decent riveted steel mail shirt for 250€, 350€ if I want to go for aluminium.
Why is the aluminum more expensive?
@Bullseye
Hell if I know. Only can tell you that they are.
Maybe because aluminium reacts less well to plastic deformation. You have quite a lot of that when bending open rings to make the weave. Creating more loss for the producers?
Or there is just less demand, so you have less economy of scale.
Aluminum is actually a bit harder to smith than Iron. It’s a finicky metal in some ways, so it’s only preferred when material costs are high per weight, or it’s resistance or lighter weight are important. The reason we use aluminum for cans and such is because our food is acidic and would eat regular steel, and stainless steel *is* more expensive. Pure steel cans would actually be quite a bit cheaper, they’d just rust rapidly, so we either use aluminum or line steel with tin. And soda is acidic enough that aluminum is preferred for it. Hence the impression it’s cheaper when we actually use it in cheap goods for it’s properties, not really it’s price.
With mail the fact that most the cost is in manufacturing and it’s a specialized niche good combine to make Aluminum more expensive. Also there’s a small chainmail glove industry for animal and kitchen protection, but it obviously uses steel and not aluminum. Economy of scale effects are small here, but relevant.
Just to chime in on aluminium being more expensive than steel for mail shirts. I absolutely could see this as a material properties thing. Aluminium is significantly less ductile than steel, and fatigues much easier. You can get a lot more bend out of steel (or bend it a lot more times) than aluminium.
There are aluminium alloys that have improved ductility, but the further you go from alloys that are in regular use in multiple industries, the more expensive you get. If you’re engineering something that’s springy, you would go through a lot of different materials before you plumped for aluminium*. Steels (including stainless) are much better, as is titanium if you want light weight. Lots of very ductile plastics too. Aluminium has an additional issue with ductility in that it has a finite number of cycles it can resist deflection for, even under the material’s elastic limit (e.g. if you wiggle a strip of steel below its elastic limit, it can keep doing this indefinitely until the end of time. If you do the same with aluminium, it will fatigue and snap at a semi-predictable number of cycles).
Upshot of that is that ductile aluminium alloys are probably fairly niche. Doubly so if you’re looking for something like an off the shelf aluminium drawn wire that you could easily turn into rings. Meanwhile, drawn steel wire is used practically everywhere for spring making.
The reason that Aluminum has this problem is actually really fascinating too. Aluminum has to be alloyed and the chemistry of those alloys, particularly common ones, produces a lot of cracks at phase boundaries of the crystal lattice, mostly because the crystal lattice is rough and crappy
To explain, when you flex some metal you are sliding the bonds in the metal to a new shape without breaking them, possible because of its electronic orbitals. This is what gives metal the ability to flex without breaking. If a bond is over stretched it breaks, which is much more likely at a defect.
In a metal there are areas where the normal bonds are interrupted, forming less stable and longer, less secure, chemical bonds, or even gaps. These are defects in the lattice. Alloyed elements specifically help fit in these gaps or bridge them, but it’s imperfect.
When you combine enough gaps in a place you can form a concrete region without bonds, which then becomes a persistent weakness that is visible as a crack. This is how all high cyclic stress accumulates in metals, or at least it is likely to be caused by something similar. Once the cracks appear you start widening them every cycle until the material fails. This typically takes less than a tenth the time compared to forming an initial crack.
We can mitigate this by work hardening the metal, which means we nearly break the metallic bonds repeatedly before forming the final shape, often while still slightly hot. This pushes these defects to Crystal boundaries, which in steel are typically planes that then safely store the defect, often because carbon fits in between the iron crystals. When you reheat the steel you can cause this carbon to chemically bridge the gaps in the planar structure.
The cyclic forging of Carbon is basically a process of moving defects to Crystal edges then locking the defects beneath a lattice of new bonds, primarily with carbon. This means the final structure of spring steel is basically an iron lattice which can deform with solid carbon “rods” running between them keeping them stable. This is only possible because iron crystals have big gaps, iron can bond stably with carbon, while carbon is small enough to fit between iron molecules and can form strong bonds with itself.
This is why overstraining or reheating steel can ruin it but as long as you don’t introduce more defects it more or less works forever. This generally works great, although Sulphur, a ubiquitous contaminant, forms large enough nonmetallic bond regions that after millions of cycles the steel still cracks. But it takes a long, long time.
But as we said Aluminum likes have rough planar transitions with crappy bonds. This means work hardening Aluminum causes cracks to form at these transitions that can’t be annealed or bridged by typical alloys. Most Aluminum *starts* cracked as such, on a microscopic level, so all commercial alloys are fundamentally vulnerable to cyclic failure.
Soft plastics imitating rigid materials don’t look right. Hard plastic mail, spray painted or even nickel plated should hang more or less like iron mail does. It would weigh less and I’m sure you could densify it somewhat by adding copper particles to the plastic but then you start exhausting your actors.
If you’re in an actual sci-fi cold weapons conflict you could always get mail or some kind of chain/lamellar/scale hybrid sintered from titanium or maraging steel in a DMLS machine. There’s a lot of interest in this technology for combat armour and other personal protective equipment.
Hard plastic mail, spray painted or even nickel plated should hang more or less like iron mail does.
Wouldn’t there be a problem with paint (or possibly even plating) getting scratched/chipped/worn off during rehearsals and multiple takes? As Bret notes, you can get away with some things for extras, but major characters need to look “authentic”, especially in close-ups, and chipped paint (or shiny sections that have been re-spray-painted more recently) would maybe interfere with that.
3D printing plans for chainmail are easily available in the internet, so this is probably a solved problem nowadays. The extras get plastic 3D printed mail and the same print plans will be used to produce metal 3D sintered mail for the main characters. Probably aluminum to make it lighter.
Interestingly, where I’ve got engineering quotes for car parts through metal 3D printing I’ve found titanium more affordable than aluminium. For my parts at least.
My understanding is that titanium is more amenable to the 3D printing process than aluminium, though it could be that more people are using 3D printing for titanium than aluminium (ally being easier to get machined), meaning it’s easier to sneak another small part into an existing titanium run on the same machine.
What is the piper doing in that one shot? The bagpiper! What are Scottish Highland Bagpipes, the piob mhor, doing on an alien world? I am a piper but I’ve never seen any of these Dune movies or whatever they are. Someone please enlighten me!
I keep a trivia list of all the movies that have featured a Highland bagpipe or bagpipe music or a piper and apparently I need to add at least one more.
Dune is set in the distant future, where humanity has long since left Earth and colonised the stars. So there’s all sorts of cultural mishmashes hanging around.
In the books the Fremen are actually descendants of a Buddhist-Islamic syncretic group called Zensunnis, there’s another background religion that follows the Orange Catholic Bible, the Atreides consciously took their family name from Greek mythology, etc, etc.
Ah! That explains a lot, thanks for cluing me in!
I personally see Orcs protected mainly in leather/cloth and looted bits of armor that have been cut down for them. And perhaps some very crude and ugly shields and helmets and weaponry, since they wouldn’t put much store on aesthetics and are too unmotivated to put in a lot of work, altho’ I suppose all Sauron and Saruman’s slaves could be making cheap armors for the armies, to some degree. Tolkien does make some mention of sweat laborers in fields, factories, fortresses.
I don’t see it that way myself – Tolkien’s orcs may be lazy enough to not bother making armor look good, but they’re smart and talented enough to make it highly effective. Or at least check if it’s effective and harshly punish anyone who makes substandard armor. They’re lazy and crass, but not stupid.
Tolkiens evil is also industrial; the witch king setting up the siege is evocative of the dread felt by world war soldiers seeing and hearing their enemies entrenching and preparing, knowing that every inch of wire and meter of trench is a dead friend.
Purely thematically the orcs should have armor, for the same reason, and they do. It’s why I personally favor munition armor for my head canon, ill fitting and standardized but perfectly functional. There are lots of trade offs that can be made to comfort and aesthetics that let you make more armor faster, and they don’t make the armor crude or ineffectual, just truly miserable if you’re not of a similar size to the model orc.
“see Orcs protected mainly in leather/cloth and looted bits of armor that have been cut down for them. ”
Canonically, orcs, like almost everyone else in Tolkien, wear mail if they’re armored at all. The only clear exception is Sam’s dead Southron, wearing “overlapping brazen plates”, maybe scale? Unclear exceptions are Eol’s galvorn armor, and maybe Morgoth.
I could buy a headcanon shifting to lamellar or scale armors, which I think take less labor than riveting rings.
“they wouldn’t put much store on aesthetics”
Pippin and Merry actually see an orc-knife with a carven hilt. It’s ugly in the sense of offending their aesthetics, but it’s not described as unskilled.
And also thanks for this!
Thank you! Those pipes sound very weird on the soundtrack, not a true Highland pipe at all, but fake bagpipes in movie scores is not unusual. They look like a contemporary pipe but sound nothing like it.
They are probably Uilleann pipes which have a bigger range of sounds that can be done. I think almost and media production that has pipes in the music use irish pipes.
Actually I should have googled it first. Here Hans Zimmer says it was his guitarist. https://youtu.be/93A1ryc-WW0?t=511
Have a look into some of the videos of Zimmer talking about his approach to the music of Dune. One of the main themes was to make the music sound like it was from the future. Not some modern idea of what the future sound like, but to make it sound like an alien evolution of contemporary music. Sort of like the concept of the uncanny valley, but applied to music. Oddly familiar, yet jarringly different.
Got him an Oscar for it (which I think is richly deserved, the music is fantastic). Though it should be noted that the Oscars for music is more about the emotion music evokes than anything to do with accuracy (the number of films using the Armenian duduk to denote something middle-eastern/egyptian/arabic should clue people into that).
And the Atreides formerly ruled a planet called Caladan, which sounds kind of like Caledonia to me.
They also have a cultural touchstone of bullfighting (the Duke’s father having been killed by a bull), which to my mind is very Spanish, though I’m sure it’s been done in many other cultures too.
I feel like after 20,000 years of cultural drift, over numerous worlds, whether something was originally Spanish or Scottish is likely to not prove a barrier to its incorporation into a given future culture.
20,000 years is a really long time to absorb different cultural practices, or invent new ones wholly and completely. Hell, 20,000 years before now we were still 9000 years off domesticating cattle, so necessarily we’d have needed to invent bullfighting in the intervening time.
Well, the Atreides are shown to be literally descended from Atreus, through Agamemnon.
The piper is a striking part (not a background detail) of the critical scene of the Atreides family arriving on Dune, so definitely belongs on your list. I think he’s there both to create a sense of contrast and strangeness, something the director likes anyway, but also to emphasise that the Atreides are a royal family with ancient, distinctive traditions.
https://youtu.be/Oi3na4qTW1o?si=cFkfiqnb4cm83mxt
The bag piper came from the legendary composer Hans Zimmer rather than Herbert IIRC. He was trying to make the film sound futuristic by avoiding classical western orchestras and prioritising music that he considered “universal” in history. For this reason he settled primarily on the human voice. Bag pipes make their way in because it’s an instrument which has cropped up repeatedly in history. In the words of Hans “The goat better watch out, it’s probably going to end up being a bag pipe”
youtu.be/watch?v=93A1ryc-WW0&t=477s
Protection against projectiles on modern battlefields is mostly horizontal, a notable exception were WW1 British helmets, which seemed to be concerned almost entirely with protecting against downward moving artillery fragments (and flechettes?). I wonder if the advance from airbursts triggered by barometric pressure estimates of height to proximity fuse made shell fragments more horizontal and thus hastened the move towards more protection for the sides of the head.
I doubt it. After all, many of the helmets designed during the same time period were more of a “bowl” despite everyone using more or less the same kind of artillery fuze technology. Artillery was still mostly using time fuzes for airburst shrapnel during World War Two.
Truthfully, I’m not sure barometric pressure triggers for airbursts really are all that prominent? I can’t easily find reference to them. I may be overlooking something.
I seem to remember most of the original helmets of WWI were designed to protect to impacts from above, not just the British, and I vaguely remember that the main thing was not to protect against direct bullet strikes, or direct short-range fragment strikes from an airburst (they weren’t strong enough for that, although they could help), but more indirect fragment and other strikes.
If you look at film of a WW1 you can see the sheer volumes of shell strikes in a heavy bombardment, and (this the key bit) the gouts of stuff of being flung in the air. And gravity being what it is, all those steel and stone fragments that went up, came down, often at a fair speed, creating a hail of fragments which were painful and, if they hit the soldiers standing to in their trenches on their fragile heads, disabling.
So the first helmets were more like construction hard hats, primarily designed against this problem. The 1915 French helmet looks almost exactly like a modern builder’s hard hat, and the shallow bowl shape of the first British helmet is also explained this way. The German Stahlhelm came out a bit later and to my eyes looks better designed to also protect someone peering over the top of a trench from a bullet, but I’m not sure if that was the case
The German helmet is also basically a medieval sallet.
IIRC WWI and WWII helmets were more concerned with protection from environmental hazards and indirect effects then from the bullets and shrapnel themselves. A stray bit of brick or wood to the head could easily kill a soldier or render them helpless and vulnerable. It’s far easier to protect against that danger then to protect against bullets or artillery.
They weren’t rated for bullets, yes. There’s significant scholarship on how helms like the Stalhelm were influenced by studies on head injuries and shrapnel tests. The consensus is that they were reasonably good at preventing or mitigating head injuries from shrapnel, particularly from distant or otherwise mitigated explosions, but almost completely ineffectual against bullets, and that the designers knew and intended that.
the ww1 british helmet (brodie helmet) was also designed to be cheap. it was stamped out of a single piece of metal. the german stalhelm, being german, was much more complicated and had to be formed out of multiple pieces of metal to get the shape it had. It did protect better, though, which is why modern helmets look a lot like it.
The stalhelm wasn’t made of multiple pieces, but it did require about dozen different stages of stamping. Here’s a picture of the stages.
https://imgur.com/azy6zns
Here’s a quote from someone describing the ridiculousness.
“I can only speak about this from a manufacturing engineering perspective, but: that’s a ton of different pressing steps for no benefit over hot-stamping it in one shot. The material also had to be annealed after every single one of those press operations (probably not the trims, at least.) Think about how that affects production efficiency: suddenly you’ve got an enormous amount of work-in-progess between every step just devoted to heating up and cooling down. Then add in the fact that they’re producing these in a bunch of different sizes, and the operation becomes absolutely enormous.
It’s interesting in there how there are two seperate trim operations: one at step 6 (back row, helmet on the left) and one at step 8 (back row, helmet third from the left.) Looks like it’s just the outside getting too messed up by all the draws that causes the first trim op. Then they form the rim, trim that, and roll it over. They could probably have saved a couple steps just by simplifying the rim design (IIRC, that was actually done late in the war.)
Overly complicated production processes are symptoms of bad engineering. It’s not like this effort was being put in to produce a better helmet to help soldiers survive: it had worse impact resistance than the Russian WWII helmet. Hitler like the way this one looked, it looked pretty when they shot propaganda videos of victorious German soldiers, and it conjured up images of the perceived WWI glory that Hitler sought. The helmet was an aesthetic item, not just a practical one.
And in the same way that the helmet design was compromised by aesthetic concerns, so too was its production process. Viewed through that lens, the process becomes an opportunity to showcase superior Aryan craftsmanship and talent. So when you see people marveling over the amazing German production process that could produce the Stahlhelm? They’re reacting just like the Nazis wanted them to.”
I think the “soft factors” of design for things like helmets are fairly important. A neat looking helmet might help with recruitment, or just getting your soldiers to wear the damned things.
An example of a design failure in this space is the WWII US Army’s chin strap problem. A rumor said that having the chin strap of your helmet buckled around your chin made you more likely to break you neck if you got hit in the head. It’s not clear this was ever based on any real statistics, but the rumor spread regardless. And so hardly any GIs wore the straps as intended. The fact that having your helmet fall off was far worse of an issue than having it crank on your neck a bit didn’t sink in.
Great post as always, though I’m a bit sad to miss out on power armour.
Going for the no-prize though, maybe in Dune the armour is made out of a futuristic material that is both flexible and resistant to attack? It especially makes sense since only slow movements penetrate the body-shield. The armour doesn’t need to resist bullets or arrows or a heavy whack. Mail might work, but a rondel dagger would slide through that easily. A thick flexible plastic might be a good additional protection against slow and weak knife strikes.
One thing I’ve always wondered though is if early modern plate harness is meant primarily to defend against edged weapons, or against black powder pistols and muskets? It only appeared after the development of firearms. Greeks, Romans and people in parts of the world where firearms came later could presumably have made full suits of plate armour if they wanted, they had skilled blacksmiths, but never did. (Yes they had cuirasses, but not full body coverage). Plate harness was often sold with a “proof mark” showing that it could resist a musket ball. I suspect the weight, the mobility trade-off, and the difficulty of donning it only made full plate harness worthwhile if you thought someone might aim a pistol somewhere other than your cuirass-covered torso.
Thing to note are: The Greeks did try to make a full suit of plate armor in the 15th century BC, the Dendra Panoply. It didn’t catch on, likely because it was too heavy (bronze has worse protection-by-weight than iron after all), wasn’t needed in their hoplite fighting style (the shield protects much better) and, I suspect, was really uncomfortable to wear. As silly as it sounds, but the boring technologies of sliding rivets and the lamellar lacing technologies are crucial to making flexible-yet-stiff armors and weren’t around back then, which means the fauld in the Dendra Panoply is just not working right. The Romans had their mail, which covered the entire body, and their attempts at articulated laminar, the (in)famous lorica segmentata, fizzled out, disappearing from the record a century before Roman Empire lost the west.
Also, plate armor was a luxury good that, just like billionaire’s yachts today, were over-engineered and stuffed with features that might not actually be needed, because the man commissioning it had the money and wanted the prestige of being fully covered. Rank-and-file soldiers at the time wore simpler munitions armor like the Almain Rivet.
The problem with “flexible yet resistant to blows” imaginary materials is that physics, just like the human body, doesn’t change. A material that deforms from the *tiny* forces of a human body bending inside it but somehow stiffens to absorb a high-energy blow has to be non-linear in response, which means the stiffening is localized to where the force is in the high-energy regime, which means it doesn’t diffuse the strike to a non-lethal pressure.
Good comment! I hadn’t considered sliding rivets.
I agree about flexible materials that deform but resist high-energy blows in science fiction in general. But I don’t think it applies to the Dune universe because high-energy blows (from fast-moving objects) are blocked by your energy shield, your personal force-field. Physical armour in Dune doesn’t need to resist high energy blows, it needs to resist slow cuts and presses. Plate armour is vulnerable at the joints, so it might be worth using flexible but less strong materials to have fewer joints.
If anything, the slowness of attacks in Dune makes the problem worse. The non-linear response of the armor would have to switch to “stiffen” at lower energies, which means it’s also more likely to react to a body’s natural movements. Imagine trying to twist away from a blow and suddenly your armor gets stiff because you bent your waist to quickly too fast.
I don’t think you necessarily need high-tech selective stiffening. Even thick clothing or a gambeson gives you some protection against blade attacks.
If you’re in grappling range it’s not too hard for an opponent to aim at a gap in your armour. Gaps have to exist in plate for you to move at the joints. So in a Dune world of shields, I think your main priority for physical armour would be to minimize gaps, either with mail, scale armour or even something like motorcycle leathers.
To try a different approach: a sheet with a minimum fold radius. (Or fabric made from threads with a minimum fold radius.) For the sake of illustration, imagine a string of beads that are not quite cylindrical but have conical ends instead. Every individual joint can move freely (with almost zero force, only bending the thread holding the beads together) up to the angle where the conical parts meet, which stops further movement even in the face of much higher bending forces (until either the thread fails in tension, or the beads fail in compression).
Movements of the body are distributed over a large area, thus the range of motion of the clothing being inadvertently exhausted in a ~5 cm (2 in) patch is not too big of a problem. However, the weapons rely on having extremely small radii (that’s what edge sharpness means), so a limited-bending material forming into a coffee cup around the weapon would be substantially adequate.
A “flexible but resistant” armor has to deal with distrubited, relative smooth deformations to be able to move, while resisting stabs and cuts that effect a small area. So, easy to fold but resistant to cutting or piercing. Arguably things like leather or thick cloth do this somewhat, (I’m aware of the leather armor post on this blog, yes, but flexible leather does still have some of the properties described.). So tougher versions of these things are arguably plausible enough to work in a story.
Given the boundaries of what is commonly accepted as plausible in science fiction, it is at least somewhat reasonable to imagine solid plates of flexible material that stiffen when struck forcefully. It’s not entirely consistent with material science as we know it, but it’s something that can at least sustain suspension of disbelief if presented properly.
Dune in particular isn’t the best setting for this, though, because of the “slow blade passes” dynamic. Everyone’s already fighting with bladed weapons in a strange style that deliberately slows down to slip past personal shields, so those same slow blade attacks will also tend to avoid triggering the “stiffens to resist a high energy blow” feature of some hypothetical nonlinear armor material.
Funnily enough, I seem to remember that the ‘flexible material which stiffens very briefly and locally when struck by something fast’ dynamic is key part of the in-universe explanation for how armour works in Mass Effect, with the plates being additional optional reinforcement. Which would be a nice way to explain what we actually see on screen.
A material which flexes under slow pressure but stiffens when struck by something at high velocity is a “shear thickening fluid”. First suggested as a research direction for armour back in 2004. (Obviously you can’t wear a fluid, but you can wear a composite material with a internal layer or of something else soaked in the stuff.)
So we don’t have such armour yet, but plausible if not actually demonstrated as practical.
Polydiborosiloxane and other shear thickening gels are active topics of research amongst military materials scientists, to the point where I strongly suspect some of my distant contacts are doing grey research on them. They let you create a solid that behaves like a gel during movement and like brick when shot.
There’s no particular physics rule that forbids a material that stiffens in response to e.g. an electrical current coursing through it, coupled with a chip that detects incoming damage and responds on the nanosecond scale. It’s science fiction but justifiable. Agree it probably can’t be just a passive material, though fabric imbued with non-Newtonian fluid isn’t the worst body armor you can get either.
Directly non-Newtonian solids are a staple in Marvel; being the current explanation for Captain America’s shield, for why the (lamellated!) prosthetic arm on the Winter Soldier is so versatile, for Wakanda, for a bunch of the Thor stuff and possibly (I can’t remember if it’s ever been official anywhere) for the Hulk’s bones.
“The problem with “flexible yet resistant to blows” imaginary materials is that physics, just like the human body, doesn’t change. A material that deforms from the *tiny* forces of a human body bending inside it but somehow stiffens to absorb a high-energy blow has to be non-linear in response, which means the stiffening is localized to where the force is in the high-energy regime, which means it doesn’t diffuse the strike to a non-lethal pressure.”
Well there’s an obvious solution to that, just cover the soldier in explosive reactive bricks. Flexible to the contortions of the human, will counteract incoming force without needing to diffuse it. Surely there are no possible downsides to this idea.
Considering one of Shepard’s possible combat styles incorporates a biotic explosion centered on him or her with no ill effects (Nova), military contractors in Mass Effect could certainly explore this option. The krogan would love it.
On reflection, explosive reactive personal armor *outside* the kinetic shield might even work in Mass Effect, at least as much as anything does. (Incant “element zero” and “dark energy” as needed.)
> A material that deforms from the *tiny* forces of a human body bending inside it but somehow stiffens to absorb a high-energy blow has to be non-linear in response, which means the stiffening is localized to where the force is in the high-energy regime, which means it doesn’t diffuse the strike to a non-lethal pressure.
What about a material that stiffens when given an electrical impulse. And enough electronics to detect blows and make the whole armor stiff for a split second.
Also, it seems reasonable for the stiffening to happen in the moderate energy regime. Ie high enough energy that it doesn’t happen when you are walking. Low enough that the strike is fairly well diffused. There should probably be some sweet spot here.
> A material that deforms from the *tiny* forces of a human body bending inside it but somehow stiffens to absorb a high-energy blow has to be non-linear in response
What I learned from this post is that the ideal armor is two layers of silk with a layer of oobleck (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-Newtonian_fluid#Oobleck) between them.
Hello fellow Dan.
Oobleck armor is unironically a topic of current research, I know there was a university of Michigan study and several army armory projects that have since gone slightly opaque. The biggest problem is keeping a liquid in the correct place.
There are also gels that work, with the ideal to create a bunch of different viscosity components that all shear differently, letting you layer them in a composite depending on how you want to compromise mobility and protection. Polydiborosiloxane is a promising gel, but other materials are also being researched. Ideally you’d want a full range between gel and plastic bricks, as there’s always going to be a compromise between thickness, heavyness, shear threshold, and mobility.
There’s recently been some experimental archaeology with the Dendra Panoply, with people completing an 11 hour simulated Bronze Age battle exercise in a replica of the armour.
Their conclusion was that it was surprisingly fine both in terms of mobility and fatigue. It looks clunky and awkward, but in practice doesn’t seem to have been at all.
Here’s the paper: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0301494
Were the weight, the mobility trade-off, and the difficulty of donning of plate armors worse than mail armors?
Heavy plates like Maximilian armors were designed to resist early firearms but I thought earlier full plates were created before firearms became common.
Have a look at people putting on a mail shirt and plate armour. It’s all very well having physical coverage but I think there’s also chronological coverage. If your camp gets attacked you don’t want to spend forever getting your armour on.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dyNcfZ7pQfM
Larry Niven describes armor (in Ringworld I think, but don’t quote me) that is flexible normally but goes completely rigid when hit with force. (Like oobleck but a solid rather than a liquid). That was my head cannon for Mass Effect armor.
That doesn’t work at all for Dune, obviously.
Is the use of silk as armor historically attested? Jackmeister has argued its not, instead being born out of tropes about barbarians https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKCqyooOzbw
Doc Holliday (as in the OK Corral) had medical journal article published about silk pocket handkerchiefs being pushed into the wounds of gunslingers instead of being cut by bullets.
An article I read about Doc’s article claimed that some steppe warriors wore loose silk undershirts that wrapped around an arrow as it entered the body instead of being cut. Arrows rotate in flight, so a broadhead point screws itself into the flesh rather than leaving a straight entry path.
Pulling on the fabric surrounding the arrow helped it unscrew itself back out of the wound following the original track instead of cutting out a core sample.
The fabric pulled into the wound may have also slowed bleeding a bit.
Sorry I don’t have a reference: I read the article a long time ago in a hard-copy journal.
IIRC the armor in Dune is purely a movie thing, and I think you are spot on that it’s in dialog with other scifi movies. Going from first principles, and assuming that the Great Houses think mostly in terms of shielded combat, I’d think something like leather would be the order of the day. I’ve never handled leather made for armor, but based on my experience with leather jackets, it seems like it would be very difficult to push a slow kindjal through such armor against an opponent who was free to move.
You’re right. In the original novel, water management had priority with the still suits, followed by camouflage. My take is that most of the novel’s tech is stupid, but it is fun to read about. I actually was hoping this post would be a functional critique of the novel, rather than the movie, but alas.
The novel easily resists criticism of the stupidity of its tech, because the novel is about (the failure of) a political system that constructs and enforces cultural and technological stagnation, generally in stupid patterns.
I read the first five novels, and they almost never wear armor of any sort. Why don’t they wear armor under their shields? Why do they fight with knives instead of swords? Why do they hardly ever take advantage of the fact that shooting a shield with a laser produces a huge explosion? It appears that the Bene Gesserit breeding program doesn’t select for intelligence.
They don’t wear armour under their shields because armour is hot, heavy, limits your movement, helmets reduce your vision and hearing, gauntlets stop you using keyboards or touch screens. A shield is by itself fantastic protection, better than medieval full plate. It’s a trade off: physical armour would give you slightly better protection but makes you worse at all the other things that soldiers have to do.
People here on Earth fight with swords because they are longer and thus more effective levers: you can hit someone harder and faster with a sword than with a knife. In Dune this doesn’t work, the sword will bounce off the shield. In Dune people have to be slow and precise rather than fast, and a knife gives you better fine control than a sword and is easier to use when people are grabbing and shoving each other at very close distance.
They hardly ever shoot a shield with a laser BECAUSE it produces a huge explosion. And just how huge an explosion can’t be predicted: might be a 155mm shell equivalent, might be a kiloton nuclear blast equivalent.
If you’re trying to conquer someone else’s planet, blowing the shit out of everything will make it worthless to conquer. If you’re defending your own planet, you’d prefer to have more than just piles of rubble left when you’ve beaten the invaders off. If a shielded assassin is trying to kill Baron Harkonnen, you shooting the assassin with a laser might save the Baron’s life but if this also kills everyone in the palace who isn’t shielded and converts the palace itself into a slightly glowing crater, you’re not going to enjoy what happens to you next.
This.
It’s also worth noting that conflict in Dune appears to happen a political system, rather than between competing states. Or at least, that’s my interpretation of it.
Warfare between rival houses is closer in my mind to conflict between rival businesses within a state. Yes, one business could just use explosives to blow up all of the rival business’ real estate assets and cripple them, but that would be against the customs of the state they operate within and would bring down punishment from that state’s leaders (in Dune, that being House Corrino and the Padishah Emperors).
It’s not ‘real’ war as we would understand it. It’s political posturing using means that we generally do not resort to outside of a ‘real warfare’ context.
That’s how I square it anyway.
It’s not that unreasonable that, in the absence of a militaristic culture, violence that isn’t optimized but is widespread would occur. It reminds me of Prohibition era US more than a true industrial war, or knife-fighting between Italian and Spanish noblemen in the streets of Lombardy over prestige.
Yes, more effective ways of war exist, and yes, the people involved actually know that, but they specifically don’t invoke them because it’s not in their interests to actually wage a total war. Hence atomics-no one really bothers with personal shield bombs because nuclear weapons exists. If you’re going to go nuts just go nuts, basically.
This stasis is preserved by the specific and intentional efforts of the Powers That Be, who largely benefit from such a timid state of conflict. Dune has so many institutions that seek to preserve the status quo that something like four events all had to occur at the same time to create the conflux of events needed for the story to occur-A noble house had to nearly achieve rivalry to the Emperor, the Spice needed to be threatened, the Bene Gesserit needed to be just close enough to their final task to take risks, and tentative spice truce with the Freemen needed to fail at a time that presented both opportunity and danger to their green dream.
The inciting incident of Paul’s Birth hit four different major factions in just the right way to collapse the status quo, like a knife aimed at the heart of the universe. Which it was. Dune is a world of precognition and prophesy, imperfect but powerful. Herbert did a pretty good job of showcasing how many off-ramps led back to status quo and yet how they all failed, one after the other, because of the circumstances and actions of the spice users.
The one thing that does strain belief is that terrorists don’t use laser weapons to attack shielded rulers-that would be such as obvious way to upend the political status quo that any number of idealogues would undertake it. Dune, for all that it helps us explore ideologies through the text, is a book with a surprising lack of active political ideologies for a world set in our future. People are too accepting of the status quo presented in a way that strains belief, although this is an incredibly common failing of stories.
@Dan Excellent analysis, and aligns really well with how I interpret the conflict environment of Dune. It’s a within-systems conflict, not a between-systems conflict, and that produces different incentives and disincentives. You could liken it to gang warfare as well if you like. All manner of small-arms fighting…but you don’t see gangs buying military surplus tanks and driving down their rival’s streets blowing up their known safehouses. Despite how effective that would be, it would quite quickly result in severe reprisal from the State.
Very good point on the lack of laser-guided terrorism/violent activism (take your pick as to which of those you want to apply). You’d need to add more checks on the access to laser weaponry to explain that. Or cultural ones I suppose. I haven’t yet decided if the frequency of American presidents being shot is more due to the availability of guns, or the precedents being set that it’s on some level acceptable to shoot presidents.
Though, considering the relatively few snapshots we get of the universe of Dune, perhaps it does occur. Just infrequently enough that it doesn’t play a part in the stories we have access to (essentially snapshots in time on 3-4 worlds out of however many are in the Imperium. It’s hardly a representative sample).
Very good observation about the number of offramps presented that weren’t taken, and the confluence of coincidences that led to the unimaginable violence at the end of Dune. I hadn’t picked that up on my readings, but I can see it now you’ve mentioned it. It’s interesting to me just how much influence Herbert’s experiences of WW2 have coloured the world he created in Dune.
Both keyboards and touchscreens are irrelevant since they don’t use electronics. This is one of the cultural taboos upholding status quo.
On the other hand soldiers would need to be able to handle paper with printed information. I think the word “filmbook” refers to books on microfilm. This requires some sort of enlarging equipment to be readable. Analogue radio would be useful on a planetary and possibly interplanetary scale. Weather satellites requires analogue TV to be of any use. So they certainly use non-electronic technology based on radio waves.
“They don’t wear armour under their shields because armour is hot, heavy, limits your movement, helmets reduce your vision and hearing, gauntlets stop you using keyboards or touch screens. A shield is by itself fantastic protection, better than medieval full plate. ”
But the energy shield is protecting you from energy weapons, bringing combat down to knife-fighting. Physical armor would complement that, protecting you from the knives. A mail shirt or brigandine jacket, and skullcap helmet, seem reasonable, at least if one is expecting combat. Yeah the armor is hot and heavy, but so was real world armor and people used it anyway, and those forms of torso armor won’t limit your movement much. Skull helmet won’t reduce your vision and hearing, though perhaps it also doesn’t do much good against knives (or rather, perhaps typical knife strikes wouldn’t engage such a helmet.)
Hey, for what it’s worth on the videogame front, there’s some strong technical incentives to avoid any extra articulation on a character model. Every extra object that needs separate movement physics and a separate visual representation is going to create a bunch of computational overhead, and any system like that would also need to be tested extensively to avoid the also-not-historical clipping that would tend to happen if the animations for the character didn’t match up with the animations for the armor pieces. Even something like hair is hard to model properly, after all, and that’s after being a thorn in the side of almost all character artists for decades.
Thanks for getting this out today, even with the typos and the footnote error! It was a lovely way to relax post-thanksgiving 🙂
I’m a great fan of Dune, and I think the shields are a great bit of invention. Frank
Herbert is often quite clever and consistent about using them (for example they obviously overload in a sandstorm due to the sheer number of particles flying about). However he does leave two headscratchers.
The first being why the Fremen, despite abandoning shields because of the sand problem, are still primarily presented as knife fighters and not gun fighters.
The second is as you note, why the more senior folks don’t wear 15th century plate harness which, plus shield, would make them extremely difficult to kill (late medieval battle scenes are full of tales of fully armoured men getting facing ridiculous odds on the battlefield and surviving – often the real danger was exhaustion or not being able to keep your footing).
Rule of Cool, I guess!
Dune has really great worldbuilding overall.
I agree, precisely because it doesn’t overly care about practicality, realism, or even internal consistency. Instead, it focuses on creating a space to explore the philosophy of the society that exists and the characters that live within it. For example, making everyone fight hand to hand is a good way to show the different moral imperatives of different cultures, as well as the importance of having excellent control over your own body. Even if, in “reality”, using anti-grav technology to drop very large boulders on people and crushing them under their shields would probably be far more effective.
Dune, like almost all excellent sci-fi, is about the human condition. Technological change is merely a way of thrusting protagonists into situations that lets us explore philosophical and psychological ideas. Realism is rarely what makes great art great.
“The first being why the Fremen, despite abandoning shields because of the sand problem, are still primarily presented as knife fighters and not gun fighters.”
The Fremen do carry guns. When Paul and Jessica meet Stilgar’s troops in the desert, Paul nabs a pistol off one of them. They dont use the guns against the Harkonnen very much because the Harkonnen have shields. But pistols guns are lightweight and occasionally useful against enemies or wildlife so they carry them.
“The second is as you note, why the more senior folks don’t wear 15th century plate harness which, plus shield”
I suspect that we aren’t imagining their combat styles correctly. A shield would make it extremely viable to grapple an armed opponent, something more akin to jui jitsu or freestyle wrestling then fencing. Except instead of “ground and pound” you have “ground and saw.”
As to the Fremen, that’s why I said *primarily*. They carry maula pistols and the like, but the narrative implies that they consider the crysknife their primary weapon, and not just metaphorically.
I think your second is not wrong (although you underrate how much the people who wore and used plate armour were 100% aware and allowing for grappling as part of combat – you’ll notice one of the medieval illustrations today is a grappling throw used on a heavily armoured opponent), on further reflection something like a bodysuit made of a kevlar fibre would work better. It’s certainly odd that physical body armour of any kind is rarely mentioned in Dune.
The blades are their primary weapon because the Harkonnen have shields. Shoot someone with a blade and it does nothing. But the guns are useful situationally.
Yeah full plate warriors grappled but they still had big long blades. If an unarmored warrior with a knife tries to grapple a warrior in full plate with a two hander they are going to end up extremely dead from sword trauma. With the power shields, that’s off the table. I certainly wouldn’t want to go into a wrestling match wearing full plate.
Trying to wrestle someone wearing full plate when you’re not wearing it _sucks_. Grab them wrong and they move? Say goodbye to your fingers. Try to punch them to soften them up a bit? The only thing you’ll be tenderising is your knuckles. They punch you in the ribs to make some space? Hope you enjoy having two or three of those snapped in one shot. A number of common wrestling finishing actions, like chokes and arm-bars, are super difficult to pull off against armour.
Um… have you ever seen actual freestyle wrestling, Tea Kew? There is no punching and the clothes dont give you any purchase if you grab them.
I have wrestled both in and out of armour. If you said “you’re going into a wrestling match, one of you is wearing full plate armour and one of you is not”, I want to be the guy in full plate armour every day of the week.
One possibility that occurs to me is that the technology of Dune may allow for knife blades that are sharp enough to reliably cut through any reasonably light or soft body armor they know how to make, so if you can move it slow enough to penetrate a shield and then stab or saw at the armor, you’ll be very likely to cut through it like it wasn’t there.
As I recall it, the Fremen avoid shields not because of sandstorms but because shields attract enraged sandworms. A later book even has a “pseudoshield” which is designed specifically for this effect.
Which has me wondering if the Harkonnens know about this problem.
Edit: Yes the Harkonnens do know about this, see my explosions comment below.
With videogames while the material problem itself doesn’t exist I think you’re ignoring the resident technical limitations instead. Modelling is still a complex and lengthy process, and then models need to be rigged. I can imagine how if you tried using realistic faulds in pauldrons and such you would then need to carefully simulate their motion at every step lest you end up with a clipping mess. The problem is even worse for ring mail. You would need to run full physics simulations for each player movement, then prebake the results into the animation system, all just for one piece of armour. Gluing rigid plates to the player body and occasionally cheating by allowing them to bend with it is a lot easier.
okay, but ring mail moves like fabric (or at least is close enough for computer modeling purposes if you say it’s very heavy and very thin/flexible) and there are a whole bunch of ways to model clothing in video games. I think it’d probably be *easier* than modeling faulds correctly
Right. Consider armors in a game like The Witcher (TW2 shows soldiers most prominently so let’s go with that): there’s lots of soldiers with lots of different types of kit so there’s also a lot of opportunities to go wrong, but it’s not uncommon to see faulds and voiders and such (example: https://i.imgur.com/ibJIkgS.jpeg). But then, it’s not that the armor articulates: it simply smoothly deforms smoothly with the animations.
But then, the alternative is looking silly in action AND silly in stills, so what about it? And as for difficulty of implementing mail, the problems you mention apply to all clothing, and lots of contemporary games have cloth physics, certainly for player character, if not all of the NPCs. Hardly a problem unique to mail.
It’s very noticeable in the Shadow of Mordor games that the cloth animation for any cloak worn by the player character is taken directly from Arkham Asylum.
This is also the reason for the amusing fashion choices in the Dishonored video games. Outside of clothing and hair the aestetic is very much Edwardian or late Victorian. But there are no dresses in the game or even loose coats and there are a lot of period inappropriate short haircuts because that stuff would have added a lot of work. One of those things that once you see it it’s hard to stop noticing it.
Yes, came looking for this (and Brennen Goslin’s reply below). If an armour design (like Mass Effect’s) looks like it’s probably supposed to articulate, but when you watch the animations closely it merely flexes, that’s probably worth treating as a limitation of the animation that we’re supposed to see as “really” articulating like the design.
To oversimplify quite a bit, video game characters don’t actually wear clothes (or armour). Instead, the rubber/plastic doll that represents them gets reshaped to the silhouette of the outfit they’re assigned, and that is then painted with the colours and textures of the material it’s supposed to be made out of – but its actual movement is still mostly just a single (rigid or soft) object bending at the smallest number of joints they can get away with.
With Dune, you’d expect them to wear armor that can cover as much of their body as possible while resisting low-pressure lacerations and puncture wounds (since a slow-moving knife with only potentially a few seconds to stab can’t really put too much power into it quickly).
As for the combat in general, it doesn’t make sense. Even if shields block bullets/etc, you’d still be able to kill them through the shields with enough momentum transfer – IE if you set off a powerful enough bomb next to them, it’s going to accelerate them so violently it kills them (or you put a shield on the front of a steamroller and/or bulldozer and drive over them).
I think there’s a bit of handwaving possible on some of that because the shields implicitly work on a kind of technology that we on Earth are not aware of – they’re not just invisible body armour or reverse magnetism or whatever, and it’s not clear what happens to the resisted energy – I don’t think any is transfered to the shield wearer. And yes, some sort of kevlar fabric all body suit plus armoured goggles plus shield would make you invulnerable.
I get the impression from the battles that we do see (and the recent Dune films emphasise this) that very large explosions and/or bulldozing people is still viable. The handwave Watsonian explanation for why this doesn’t preclude lots of hand to hand combat as well is that the armies have lots of different weapons systems available (lasers, bolt guns, missiles) and so the more modern weapons often cancel each other out. The Doylist actual explanation is that Herbert thinks close-combat is cool and bends his world to require it.
In the first book, The Harkonnens use archaic explosive shell artillery because it is useful on Arrakis because shields are rarely used. And it is clearly indicated that such artillery is not commonly used anywhere else.
On the crushing aspect others have mentioned, at a larger scale there is a class of spaceship specifically designed to destroy targets by landing on top of them to crush them.
IIRC the artillery isn’t used because it’s effective against shields. It’s effective against the cliff faces and caverns that the Atreides are fighting them, by trapping them inside collapsing tunnels. We sort of see that in the film part 2, but targeted against Sietch Tabr.
There’s definitely got to be something going on like that. If it can transfer away momentum as well, then two people fighting with shields shouldn’t be able to even push each other around – they’d come to a dead stop upon impact.
In any case, the close-combat is cool, so it is what it is.
Against Dune shields, flamethrowers and napalm bombs seem like one answer. The slow, viscous burning liquid penetrates the shield.
Or put a bomb on the end of a spear – beyond your shield, but within the enemy’s.
Or if shields really negate all high-tech weapons, they still might use pike or polearm formations, not just knives.
The recent Dune part 1 had a nice scene with an impromptu spear wall which worked well, and raised some questions on why they used more often, although the fact that it was defeated by troops airdropped behind them offer one clue. (Frank Herbert was *really* vague on how fighting worked at a large scale in his world. Denis Villeneuve made a brave attempt to fill in the gaps. For example the Fremen don’t use formations – they never do in the books – because they’re almost attacking from close ambush or at high speed from concealment.)
My interpretation was that the impromptu spear wall was indicative of the actual battlefield fighting tactics of the Atreides. It was clear from the co-ordination involved that it was heavily drilled, and crucially it was at a point where the Atreides in question were expecting an assault and had time to plan their defence (which only fell apart because they were flanked, which presumably wouldn’t have happened if the Harkonnens hadn’t rapidly achieved air superiority).
It could well be that this is the only example of Great House organised battlefield combat we see in all of the films, and all other instances of combat are either small-scale actions (favouring more individual combat), or armies fighting in utter disarray.
For instance, the shot of Gurney and the Atreides running pell-mell towards a mass of Harkonnens could be construed as a last desperate charge from men who already know they’re all dead against a group of Harkonnen troops who weren’t expecting to be charged as they thought all the Atreides would be dead (and thus weren’t formed up either). Either that, or having been ambushed they hadn’t the time to form up properly (or were already aware that formations would be vulnerable as the Harkonnens had already achieved air superiority, so were thinking it was safer to get stuck into the mass of Harkonnen troops in the hope they didn’t decide to just drop a ship onto everyone and blow everyone to smithereens).
As you say, Fremen don’t seem to play the formation game at all, attacking mainly from ambush at speed.
For videogames I’d add that it seems like animators are damned to accept either clipping or flexing in their costumes, you can’t get rid of both so you accept one as the lesser evil and design your costumes to accommodate that. KCD and its upcoming sequel are where I really noticed this. Both games have at worst reenactor level armor, with 2 looking to get things even better than the first, but I noticed that they introduced flexing into rigid plates where previously there was none. I very much suspect this was done to avoid clipping given how big a problem that was in the first game. I suspect that’s why tassets and faulds aren’t more common, and why lower torsos are somewhat barren in general. Anything you put in that general region will inevitably become a hotspot of stretching, clipping, or both, so at best you get the Mass Effect armor where the impression of flexibility is given despite the animations clearly cheating, or Halo armor where it’s just left devoid of rigid protection altogether.
Sadly I don’t expect this to be solved anytime soon. Maybe in the future when labor saving animation tools, likely AI based, are available to polish every last animation to a proverbial shine, but I do t expect to see that come about for decades, if ever.
This is brilliant, I was looking forward to this post and not disappointed. Would love to see more deep dives on power armour as you mentioned, but also on power weapons (as in Warhammer 40k, for example). I recently wrote a piece on laser weapons in science fiction (link below) and now you’ve got me thinking about how SF armour would and should interact with directed energy weapons rather than projectiles, would love your thoughts.
https://militaryrealism.blog/2024/10/03/science-fiction-weapons-lasers-part-1/
The extensive presence of “small” attack animal (something like 2-6 leg, high less then 1m, various type of natural weapon) does change the “order in amour”?
This is brilliant, I was looking forward to this post and not disappointed. Would love to see more deep dives on power armour as you mentioned, but also on power weapons (as in Warhammer 40k, for example). I recently wrote a piece on laser weapons in science fiction (link below) and now you’ve got me thinking about how SF armour would and should interact with directed energy weapons rather than projectiles, would love your thoughts.
https://militaryrealism.blog/2024/10/03/science-fiction-weapons-lasers-part-1/
Not strictly relevant: your home page welcome says “pendantic” not “pedantic”.
Footnote 9: solved problem, applies identically to scopes. I wonder if filmmakers simply got confused about how red dot sights work.
Issues which I suspect have been discussed to death in fandom:
Alderaan: I thought you were going to calculate gravitational binding energy.
More to the point: if the Falcon is to encounter a “cold” field of asteroids, rather than a lavaball (most of Alderaan’s mass still there in mostly the same orbit) or a cloud of ejecta that immediately cooks the Falcon (if you use more time to deal with the “the target is made of ablative armor” issue), you need to shove pieces of the planet apart more efficiently than dumping energy at the plasma “blanket” its surface turns into. Probably partly explains how Obi-Wan notices the event through the Force, rather than Han (and everyone else) through the cosmic-event-bright flash (including plenty of ionizing radiation).
Starkiller: hm, the impact animation somewhat resembles a high-speed impactor? Perhaps the “laser bolt” is in some fashion related to its propulsion system?
We pedants hate being called pendants!!
Then stop hanging around.
Thanks Basil! A very silly error for a self-professed pedant.
Re. Starkiller Base, that’s a good point. This would make more sense as a projectile and visible red light is the exhaust. I would still wonder at how the laser/impactor manages to cross the galaxy (and be seen by Han Solo in the sky in a completely different part of the galaxy) and yet appears at the start and the end to be travelling at sub-light speed.
Projectile weapons and lightsabers in Star Wars are the same technology. An invisible envelope of sci-fi magic magnetism contains and shapes a volume of special sci-fi magic plasma. Planet killing projectile weapons fire an asteroid-sized piece of lightsaber blade into the inside of the planet, where the solid iron core breaks the magnetic bubble and the plasma boils the center of the planet into gas in an instant, popping the planet; scale up for stars. At least, that’s what I was able it infer from watching the movies, I doubt anyone writing the things put much thought into it.
Likewise I assume Starkiller was designed to skip it’s projectile in and out of hyperspace in a dozen places on the way to it’s target for propaganda purposes, because the weapon was not well explained but the film did show from start to finish that the First Order were the kind of people who would do that.
I’m afraid the explanation for what Solo sees is entirely outside his universe – namely that JJ Abrams, despite his good qualities (a better caster of actors there is not) hates space, has no idea how space works and would happily sacrifice any amount of spatial realism for a pretty picture. In both The Force Awakens and his Star Trek he has people watching planets being destroyed *from another star system*
Having no idea of what distances in space means is a far too common error:
https://blog.ifraagasaetterskan.se/Distances-in-space#wbb1
>>So the opportunity for designs that engage meaningfully with past armors in a way that produces something that both looks good but is actually broadly function is much greater now than it was even just twenty or thirty years ago.
I think armour in games and films *does* engage with armour far more meaningfully than in the past. It’s just that there are more facets to engagement than “make as realistic as possible”. Those are art forms, and communicating something about the character and the world is a higher priority than having the sliding rivets in the right places. Dr Tobias Capwell, who is not just an expert on Renaissance armour but a world-leading expert, does a lot of first-look type interviews where he discusses video game armour (easy to find on youtube). Even on something as outlandish as Warhammer 40k he has a lot of positives to say and could point out the exact source of inspiration for various armour elements, sometimes down to an exact manuscript.
Of course, I understand that this blog is really about history, and uses armour in media only as a segway to discuss real armour. But I don’t think that means one has to be quite so pessimistic, or to neglect armour-as-art in favour of armour-as-a-tool.
uses armour in media only as a segway to discuss real armour.
“This isn’t my hobbyhorse. This is the Segway I’m using to get to my hobbyhorse.”
Re: why modern creators might aesthetically resist medieval-looking designs, I think there’s also a “gendered component” to it. Armors that have an hourglass figure or resemble dresses or skirts may not look badass or manly enough for modern tastes given some of our cultural hangups.
Give the player the option to include an armored codpiece under the fauld? This was a fad during a part of the period where the European full plate armor was used.
medieval armors do not resemble dresses or skirts more than Roman or samurai armors do though. Especially when the “armor skirts” always have an opening at the front (whose skirts do not). And I don’t think medieval armors have a more hourglass figure than a modern form-fitting suit or trench coat does.
I think the sci fi armors without the skirts are actually more feminine due to they being more form-fitting.
One comment on the armour in Dune: no character in the books ever wears armour. The Fremen don’t. The Harkonnens don’t. The Atreides don’t. Not even helmets or police-style stab vests under clothing, not even physical shields, not even when they’re the Duke’s personal sword master fighting to defend the Duke’s wife and only child.
They have shields over normal clothing or over stillsuits, and sometimes not even shields.
In a universe where contact weapons are so important, you’d think they would – but they don’t. The armour is entirely an invention of the Villeneuve films.
“no character in the books ever wears armour”
Well since this is on the website of pedantry, I’ll point out that the gladiators do wear body armor.
@Ajay, everybody IS wearing armour. Shields are fantastic armour.
The purpose of armour is not to make you invulnerable (although that’s nice if you can manage it). It’s to reduce your chance of being wounded or killed without being too expensive or too restrictive on all the other things a soldier needs to do.
A shield in Dune appears to be about the size and weight of my portable phone, and likewise a soldier “puts on” his armour by pushing a button. And instantly becomes immune to arrows, bullets, artillery fragments, and most swings or thrusts by melee weapons. Offer this to a medieval knight instead of full plate harness and they’d switch in a heartbeat.
Dune soldiers with shields but not physical body armour will be better at seeing what’s going around them, better at hearing what is going on and responding to orders, can carry more equipment / rations / water, can be carried in greater numbers by ornithopters and other vehicles, can do things like operate keyboards or other fine dexterity. This is nicely depicted in Dune 2, where the Harkonnens in the desert have to have built in air conditioning in their armour, their situational awareness sucks, and they get overwhelmed and stabbed anyway.
Without body armour they’re more vulnerable to close quarters grappling type combat, but *everyone* has to train for that anyway, and I would bet on a more skilled knife fighter with just a shield than a less skilled knife fighter with shield and body armour.
I prefer my explanation, which is that the culture is so stagnant and un-innovative that no one has thought of armour as a good idea yet. Remake please in which the Atreides have actually come up with the concept of “the helmet” and this is such a terrifying leap forward in warfare that they must be destroyed.
“House Atreides is developing a new form of warfare, based on… hats.”
PAUL (puts on improvised pot-helmet)
STILGAR: LISAN AL-GAIB!!!
Fantastic post. I’ve long been fascinated by this subject. Jill Bearup runs a delightful YouTube channel where she rates fictional armor. It’s kind of amazing how often TV and especially video game armor fails to cover vital organs, creates needless mobility issues and just looks … kinda ugly.
I always enjoy reading your posts!
Re: making chainmail for movies. For the Lord of the Rings movies, Weta Workshops armourers did indeed make dozens and dozens of real chainmail suits for characters to wear – some of the artisans actually wore the fingerprints off their fingers from the endless twisting of bits of metal! But that level of fanaticism – or devotion, if you will – is certainly vanishingly rare.
I would also very much enjoy reading your take on “boob breastplates” at some point, if you are so inclined. Female “armour” that seems to be useful only for redirecting melee weapon strikes directly towards the middle of the chest is one of my biggest pet peeves with SO MANY MEDIA!
I am under the impression they are designed to be sexy rather than practical. (This applies to a lot of women’s outfits in pop culture.) In reality I think something like the cuirasses used in Europe from the 16th into the 18th century would work. These were systematically made more curved than the wearer’s body. This to make them harder to hit at a reasonably strait angle by the handheld firearms of the time. As a by-effect they could be quite roomy. If I remember it correctly I have seen at least one woman actually wearing one on TV. At a ceremony involving the king of Sweden both male and female soldiers wore the same antique uniforms. These looked like they were designed at the time around 1700. As part of the uniforms they wore cuirasses so roomy it did not matter if the wearer had breasts or not.
A small correction on the wearing of pauldrons: rather than attaching to the cuirass, most armour for the arms and legs attaches to one or more load-bearing garments worn over the body, typically something like an arming doublet.
It’s fairly common for your arming clothes to have a set of anchor points at the shoulders to attach the pauldrons and then another set of anchor points on the upper arm to attach the vambraces. Both pieces of armour will also usually have straps and buckles to keep them tight to the arms.
It’s Bautista. Batista is the character he played in the WWE
Fixed
I think Mass Effect armor *is* power armor! Being able to generate kinetic barriers requires element zero and a mass effect field. There seems to be little reason why that couldn’t also have its telekinetic or mass-altering effect, and indeed many armors explicitly increase the wearer’s strength or speed. Furthermore, users can swap in mods or upgrades that increase strength, speed, etc., without in any way changing the appearance of the armor. Does that change the analysis any?
Devereaux tends to use “power armor” to refer to slightly-above-human-scale human-shaped tanks, not as an expansive term that includes all assistive clothing; and that seems to be his rationale for excluding “power armor” from this post, ultimately, that it is a tank instead of an outfit.
Good, most of the points I wanted to make are already made. Thanks!
Except for a couple of really, really big points.
One is that human artists really are less different from LLMs than we want to admit. If we keep reprocessing each others’ works without taking in reality, we all end up hallucinating bullshit. That goes for fantasy armor design, no? So pointing out the design BS in individual outputs seems to be focusing on the symptoms, not the problem.
A second problem, particularly with this post (for me) is that I’m one of the quaint oldsters who think that science fiction is a SUBSET of fantasy that deals with science and futurism. This is more than half fantasy, so this properly is a discussion of fantasy armors, not science fiction. That wasn’t the topic what we got polled about. I’d like to talk more about SF armor than Dune or FortNite, thank you.
A third problem is that SF armor isn’t grappling with current reality at all well. I’m going to elide the “well, as you know Johnny, human body armor simply can’t deal with artillery” problem (duh!) and point to the more general issue: war is now fought across many different realms, each of which has its own rules. The US is prepared to fight on the sea floor (abyssal warfare, mostly cutting cables and pipes at the moment) in midwater (submarines), on the surface (floating ships), beaches and coasts (marines and SEALs), on land (army), in the troposphere and lower stratosphere (jets, helicopters, missiles), upper stratosphere (balloons), mesosphere (missiles and lasers, not that anyone actually flies up in that great frontier) and thermosphere and exosphere (US Space force: missiles, beams, and satellites). Each realm has its own rules: you don’t have armored knights on horses galloping across the abyssal plain (they’d die before they got their) or on the surface of the moon (ditto). Submarine warfare isn’t like jets dogfighting, and Spawar is so freaking fast that flying an X-Wing and trusting the Force will get you killed by someone dropping a box of screws into your orbit at 10 km/sec. How much of that have you seen and/or read about in SF media? Yeah.
Humans can fight outside a vehicle from roughly -50 m underwater (semi-sane scuba depth) to +6,700 m (Siachen glacier battle in Kashmir in 1984). In SF we could posit troops marching across the abyssal plain or on the moon, but they’re wearing different kinds of armor (deep sea suits are not space suits and vice versa. Keeping pressure out and keeping pressure in are two different problems). They’re also facing different kinds of weapons. In the ocean, bullets slow down fast, but pressure waves can be deadly. In space, propagating pressure waves are irrelevant, but hypervelocity shrapnel is part of the environment. I’ll return to this, but the basic point is that if we’re talking about armored troops fighting, each environment they’re fighting in has different protective needs and different weapons. Fighting in generic armor 1.0 from Caladon on Arrakis is a good way to kill everyone from overheating, for example, and that didn’t get discussed above (AHEM!). This is why the old military supplies from Vietnam didn’t work very well in Iraq in the 1990s (AHEM!). Environment matters if keeping grunts alive is not a fantasy.
The second problem is weapon velocity. Kevlar alone sucks for keeping out sharp pointy things, but is a useful base for antiballistic armor (this is why there are anti-stab vests and kevlar vests, and they’re not the same thing). This is not a new lesson: the Chinese (why they frack haven’t they been mentioned yet?) used massively quilted cotton armor to stop musket balls centuries ago. Similarly, steel plate and kevlar both suck for keeping out micrometeoroids, although there’s a lot of kevlar in space suits to try to help. However, if you really want to stop small space junk, you use something like a Whipple shield, which is basically a bunch of layers of tin foil with gaps in between that you bolt on over the kevlar. What it does is to cause small objects moving really fast (ca. 10 km/sec, or 10 x bullet speed) to explode into a ball of plasma. They’ll do that when they hit anything, even a sheet of tinfoil, so the goal is to turn the solid penetrator into an expanding ball of hot plasma, then have armor beneath that to deal with the plasma. There’s now reportedly dozens of shielding systems based on this concept being deployed on spacecraft.
Where I’m going with this is that different armors work best in different velocity regimes: armors that work well against low velocity, human powered weapons suck against bullets or space projectiles. Armors that work well against bullets tend to be less good against human powered weapons or space war. Space armor is useless against human powered weapons and iffy on bullets. So space armor won’t work in a land war. Anti-ballistic armor won’t work well in space or against halberds, and plate armor will help a knight survive being whacked, but not being shot or irradiated in space. And none of these work very well underwater. Environment matters, and hopefully the SF you’re ruminating on is good enough to encompass this basic notion.
The LLM problem has a solution: widen the database. Trouble is, most armor is from the past and the past is inconsistent with the SF aesthetic.
“I’m one of the quaint oldsters who think that science fiction is a SUBSET of fantasy that deals with science and futurism.”
Blasphemy! The science in Science Fiction may just be an aesthetic, but it’s there, and maybe the key feature that defines the genre. It’s very different from the European medieval aesthetic that defines so much fantasy.
Widening the database can help in some situations with LLMs but I shudder at the thought of anyone considering it a solution. People thinking that all we need is more data collection is the bane of my professional existence at this point.
Every solution causes yet another problem!
There are kevlar gloves for use in the kitchen by people who easily cut themselves. Originally they were developed for use by surgeons working on patients with HIV. If the surgeon does not cut him- or herself the person does not risk getting infected blood into him or her.
I assume you haven’t played it because it’s not in your wheelhouse and got a very, shall we say, *divided* reception on release, but I wonder if you’re looked at any of the Starfield armour. Some of the pieces (UC Antixeno Spacesuit and all the new Va’ruun gear immediately come to mind) are firmly in the “game designs responding to movie designs” camp, but other pieces (e.g. Constellation Mk. I) clearly have a “how do we take a spacesuit and up-armour it” ethos that might provide interesting examples of either doing it right or at least doing it differently wrong.
Plastic lamellar is actually pretty solid. I strung together an ashigaru-style cuirass, in part based on your “Order of Armor” post for a larp out of picklebarrel plastic spray-painted silver, and it’s held up for years of rain, boffer hits and falls.
Something to remember when asking why the soldiers / warriors of the Dune Imperium don’t use flamethrowers / bombs / steamrollers etc is that the rich and powerful people who have absolute control over the societal structure and the technological development DO NOT WANT any weapons developed that might overthrow the privileges of their aristocratic world order.
Our pedantic host went through this in a podcast (the Boiled Leather Audio Hour IRRC). Shields are expensive. Sword and knife fighting skills require years of practice to develop, something a peasant does not have time for.
Beyond that argument, if one Great House decides it’s worth some social unrest to win more battles, the Imperium can retaliate with Spacing Guild sanctions or atomic weapons.
Frank Herbert himself was aware of this. In Heretics/Chapter House of Dune, thousands of years after the Imperium, shields are obsolete and armies fight with a lot of more high tech kinds of weapons and equipment.
One of the things I’d have loved to have seen in Dune is the Imperium face an Out of Context Problem. Some other, hitherto unknown, civilisation whose style of warfare differs markedly from that of the Imperium’s. Exposing the flaws of all of these ways of fighting under a step up in the degree of desperation of everyone involved would be an interesting exploration.
Not quite the story Herbert wanted to tell, but would have been interesting nonetheless.
There is a mention in one of the books that one of the reason they keep atomics around is in case they meet nasty aliens.
I mean… the story Herbert tells very much IS the story of the Imperium facing an Out of Context Problem: namely, the precognitive Paul Atreides leading an army of Fremen to overthrow the stable-stagnant-corrupt-decadent order that apparently has no ability to cope with the Fremen because they’re just so rugged and tough and pure and all that.
The Fremen’s style of warfare does differ markedly from the Imperium’s, in ways that do illustrate some of its flaws, and Imperium civilization meets that challenge in the same way that a log meets a bandsaw. The future of human civilization is largely determined by Paul’s heirs after that point…
Very true! Hadn’t considered that. Or rather, was thinking about Out of Context Problems too narrowly as coming from outside of a system rather than within.
What I was picturing is something like the storyline of Pandora’s Star and Judas Unchained by Peter F Hamilton mashed up with Dune. Though if I wanted those stories…I should probably just read those books (and I have, they’re really bloody good). Dune is Dune, and the Commonwealth Saga is the Commonwealth Saga.
One consideration for space marines like Shepard and Master Chief is that they’re fighting in environments that generally don’t have liveable atmospheres (or sometimes any), so being wounded anywhere is a potential death sentence if the space armor isn’t up to at least sealing breaches. Generally that’s going to be up to handwavium (especially since SF armor often doesn’t feature bulky air tanks for aesthetic reasons), but it seems as if it should influence the hierarchy of protection some.
One thing I would push back on a little bit is the idea that science fiction does not want to adopt the design language of medieval armors. For the right science fiction stories, that design language can sometimes be desirable. One notable example is Star Wars, where Darth Vader’s iconic helmet evokes the design language of the kabuto helmets worn by Japanese samurai in what is probably a nod to the Kurosawa films that helped inspire Star Wars. Similarly, the Mandolorian helmet worn by Jango Fett in Star Wars evokes the design language of the 15th century Italian barbute helmet, although that may just be convergent design for all I know.
It’s worth noting that NASA spacesuit designers in the 1960s did spend time in the UK studying plate armor joints when they were designing spacesuits. Armor is already in them.
The problem is that there are two senses of design. The engineering version starts with solving a problem, then makes the resulting solution look cool. The artistic design takes something that looks cool and reuses it, often without understanding whether it’s appropriate in context. I’d gently suggest that the first process produces genuine novelty, while the second process, cool as it looks, is increasingly being mechanized by LLMs and similar systems. This might be worth thinking about.
A minor nitpick: though wildy common among reenactors, “barbute” is the wrong name. It’s actually just another type of sallet, or “celata” in its Italian etymon.
I’m not sure if you know about him already, but robinswords on youtube shows a lot of stuff in action what you explain here and in other posts. He is more into medieval stuff and HEMA though.
https://www.youtube.com/@robinswords/shorts
Especially this one is relevant to todays topic: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/5oDrMOEkJaw?feature=share
I think if shields are standard equipment (as with hoplites or legionaries) then greaves shift from Tier 3 to Tier 2. The lower legs are hard to cover (more so with a hoplon than a Roman shield) without uncovering more vital spots – but a deep calf wound is still disabling (and if you fall over you get stabbed with a pointed spear-butt).
In Icelandic sagas the legs get targeted a lot in fights with sword/spear and shield.
Leg targeting is referenced in the sagas more because it is a notable departure from norms that the audience would know and either because it is a high-skill/high-strength maneuver that demonstrates the power of the character performing it or because it is a creative/deviant maneuver that demonstrates the villainy/cleverness of the character performing it.
Greaves are kinda a pain in the ass. They’re a really annoying place to have weight, making them fit well is surprisingly challenging and if they don’t fit well they’re super painful to wear for any length of time. So sure, your lower leg is the main obvious opening in a sword and shield fight without any armour – but armouring it well is still harder than it might otherwise seem. And if you have body and shoulder defenses you can always let your shield drift lower to help protect the legs.
Heh, it’s hard enough to get my daughter to keep track of/wear shinguards in Soccer.
Surely sex appeal remains an important consideration. The girls in bikini armour are familiar 🙂 Shoulder pads are essential to give men a more domineering appearance, while women should not hide the outline of their breasts or shorten their legs.
https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/dressed-for-success-gorilla-and-whore/
Armor aside (mostly because it’s in the movie, not the book), there’s a lot to have fun with in Dune. I posted some thoughts on the tech in the book seven years ago at
https://heteromeles.com/2017/07/28/silly-summer-thoughts-part-1-new-dune-movie/ and
https://heteromeles.com/2017/08/05/silly-summer-thoughts-3-dune-shields/
> In Europe, we see a variation on this concept, the brigandine (also underused in fantasy settings) where the metal plates are riveted through each other and a textile or leather backing.
Mild nitpick, but brigandine plates are never to my knowledge riveted to each other, only to the fabric layer – and that layer is even more pedantically better called a facing rather than a backing, since it’s always the outer layer of the armour.
It depends on the model: the Leeds-type brigandine, which was quite in the XVth century, has overlapping plates riveted both to each other and the fabric layer. Same goes for the XVIth century type with the very small plates.
III.1664?
Checking the RA’s excellent pictures of the interior, the construction appears to be exactly as for the other (original) brigandines I’ve had the privilege of being able to handle – with no riveting of plates to plates. The small plates are riveted through their centre in most parts of the garment, with some riveting along the edges at the hems/armpits/etc.
If you rivet plates together without sliding rivets, you simply achieve merging the two smaller plates into what is effectively a single larger one – which is fine, and might happen occasionally in brigs, but certainly isn’t standard.
You’re right, my mistake: I even own a reproduction, I should know that.
Although perhaps Frank Herbert, writing in the 1960s and 1970s, presumed that lasers would always be at least pistol or carbine-sized, an obvious counter to the shields he describes would be a bullet (fired from a safe distance) that carries a miniaturized laser that activates upon impact with the shield.
Doing so would create a tactical nuclear level explosion, at least – the size of the explosion is unpredictable. Impractical in the Dune Imperium.
Minor reason: setting off atomic level explosions in your own territory, for instance against rebels or an enemy raiding force, will destroy huge chunks of your own real estate and people.
Major reason: the Dune Imperium has the Great Convention by which anyone employing atomic weapons, or weapons that create similar levels of destruction, has their entire planet nuked in retaliation. So yeah you equip your forces with mini laser bullets, you win the battle (assuming you don’t care about the massive collateral damage), and then the losers appeal to the Emperor and the Landsraad and your entire Great House gets nuked out of existence.
Minor nitpick, I’m pretty sure a nuclear level explosion is the upper bound of shield-lasgun interactions in Dune, not the lower bound. But the point mostly stands that it’s unpredictable enough most people wouldn’t want to mess around with it.
Also, if you are firing entire vollies of massed laser gun fire against entire armies of shielded opponents, then the law of large numbers comes into play. Sooner or later, one of your laser gunners will metaphorically roll snake-eyes and get a nuclear-equivalent explosion, or at least something big enough to really make you regret being nearby.
It seems to me that Battle Armor from Dragon Ball/DBZ is surprisingly well-designed for fictional armor: it has prominent shoulder guards, along with additional guards for groin & thighs, and it combines relatively rigid and flexible sections. Of course, it helps that it’s made of futuristic materials that can bend/stretch and absorb impacts as needed, but the point stands. It’s also not invincible and can be broken, although it stands up very well to the rigors of melee combat and projectiles, which involve many more joules of energy than usual. Might be worth analyzing!
Yet more credit goes to the late, great Akira Toriyama.
I still disagree with the idea that movies abstain from mail because of the price. For an hours worth of a A-line movie star, you can put a few dozen extras in pretty good mail hauberks. No custom fitted stuff, but more then good enough for a couple of people running around in the background. And for the main character you can still add overgarments and accessories, to make them pop.
And as a garment, they are pretty easy to maintain and reuse. So if a studio has a few dozen, they can be used again and again.
But armor is used to tell the story and say things about the characters wearing it. And wearing a mail hauberk will just make characters look like they are wearing their big sisters dress.
This is why we get stuff like Peter Pevensie armor our host complained about in this “Armor in Order, Part II” post. In our society brought shoulders are considered a sign of manliness and strength. So heros need brought shoulders. So they get big plaudrons first. It is also why all those bad ass characters in the dune movie get those plaudrons with terible ergonomics.
I think it is much more about “price in time” rather than dollars or other currency. Once you’ve made the mold for say a vac-form plastic breastplate, you make the second, third, etc in minutes. So far there is no shortcut to making mail other than someone sitting down and linking tens of thousands of rings together.
You can 3D print mail. With good enough software to create the print plans and large enough metal printer it would probably be possible to create a fitted mail in single print run.
One day yes, we’ll see 3D printed maille with no hand assembly in a movie or TV series. Right now in late 2024, I don’t think so.
Suppose there’s a big medieval blockbuster movie announced, and you want to supply armour for the actors and maybe extras.
The stereotype director, a dreamy creative type, will say something like “3D printing sounds cool, OK with me”.
Then you meet the stereotype producer. Who will offer you a contract where you agree to 3D print say ten fitted and fifty loose maille shirts, in six months, for less than the price being offered by an Indian / Chinese museum replica maker. And be careful to read clause 7, the stupendous amount of money you will pay as the penalty fee if you don’t finish on time (since this is new tech) and thus screw up the entire shooting schedule.
Like I said, just buy a 100 hauberks. That would be like $20 – $30000. You’d probably would not even notice that in the budget of a mordern hollywood movie. And you do not even have to design the vac-form.
Mass Effect has the extra hilarity of the female armour designs having a giant shot trap right on the chest (and a point where any impact on the chest would have its force concentrated into the sternum) because the designers thought they needed visible breast forms for some baffling reason. Mind you, it’s still not quite as bad as the sequels deciding that none of the female characters aside from Shepard should be wearing any body armour at all and should instead be either in form-fitting (p)leather or almost entirely naked. Please Bioware, just let us wear regular armour like we would in real life.
I think one could read the Mass Effect armor as (relatively thin) plate armor with an additional bullet proof vest on top. It’s been forever but I don’t remember it being that melee-heavy. Mostly just shooting at them until the shields are drained.
(Also as other’s have said, I’m pretty sure we’re supposed to believe that the armor does articulate, it’s just that the animation is taking shortcuts.)
Could the design of armor change meaningfully if future materials were both very hard and very light? Does armor necessarily need to be heavy? Naturally, it wouldn’t solve the issue with range of motion.
Not particularly. The primary design constraint on the function of things like the cuirass or the shoulder defences is rigidity and how to compensate for that while allowing necessary movements (leading to articulated joints, sliding lames, flexible in-fill with mail, etc).
What weight determines is mostly how _much_ of your armour you can have. Magitech materials that give you the same strength for a fraction of the weight mean you can expand rigid armour back out from just the very core torso zone while still maintaining acceptable protection against your expected range of threats, without excessive overall weight.
You’d immediately see an increase in decorative personalization where not prohibited by uniform standards if you solved the weight problem, so in that sense yes.
But if you’re talking sci-fi magic lightness, the initial use of the material would be to fill in the dimensions and or mass of whatever armor is in use at the time. An infinitely thick steel plate can stop an infinitely large solid bullet, weight is the reason we don’t put those on humans.
Eventually there would be attempts at innovation that involved the specific values of the new material, but these will be exaggerations of elements that already exist; solid armors already include design features that try to guide impacts to slide along the surface rather than stop hard, I can easily imagine those enlarged to comical proportions.