Armor
Armor (also spelled Armour) is a protective layer of material used to protect something from damage. Some types of armor includes armor for buildings, armor for vehicles and armor for personnel (generally referred to as body armor). This will focus mostly on body armor.
Types of Body Armor
Numerous forms of body armor have been developed over the millennia by civilizations with various levels of technology and resources on hand.
- Leather armor - not just any leather would do; soft leather offers no protection against blades. You need hard, boiled leather to be effective.
- Padded cloth armor - used mostly by the Egyptians, since Bronze age armors tended to be too expensive / too heavy to be widely used, and bronze weapons weren't all that great at cutting to begin with. Cloth continued to be used mostly as padding underneath metal armor, to help absorb blows.
- Paper armor - this one sounds crazy, but apparently it was actually a thing in ancient China. The Mythbusters tested it out and it might have been actually effective... at least, so long as it doesn't rain.
- Scale armor - an early form of mail, using overlapping metal plates rather than rings.
- Bamboo armor - basically wooden armor, but with the advantage in that you can shape bamboo more easily.
- Mirror armor - an early form of plate, this was a small round bronze plate attached to the torso. Besides physical protection, it was also believed to ward off the supernatural.
- Mail - the most common and effective type of armor from the ancient world to the middle ages. Flexible and easy (though time-consuming) to make, it was widely used by many cultures. While fairly effective against foot soldiers, the development of the lance charge required knights to wear extra armor over mail for additional protection.
- Laminar armor - armor made from bands of metal. The most famous example is the ancient Roman Lorica Segmentata.
- Lamellar armor - armor made from overlapping pieces of leather or metal. Sort of like scale armor, except scale armor is arranged like roofing tiles, whereas lamellar is laced together.
- Samurai armor - depending on the period, could be lamellar, laminar, or even plate.
- Brigandine - sort of like Lamellar, except the pieces of metal are riveted into a leather jacket rather than laced together.
- Plate armor - armor made from single, solid pieces of metal. Full suits of plate armor were not possible until improvements in smithing allowed for large bars of steel to be hammered out into single pieces.
- Ceramic armor - typically, ceramic plates are used as an energy-absorbing component in some ballistic vests.
- Ballistic vests - cloth vests able to stop bullets of varying sizes using high-strength cloth that wraps itself around the bullet, thereby bringing them to a halt. May contain metal or ceramic components to increase effectiveness.
- Blast suits - full-body armors capable of absorbing the heat and shrapnel of a bomb blast. May also include a closed air supply in the case of biological or chemical bombs. Commonly worn by EOD technicians.
Anatomy of armor
Basic terminology of the different parts of armor. Unless you were very wealthy, such as a knight, not everyone had every part of their body covered in armor.
- Helmet - protects the head, one of the most common pieces of armor.
- Cuirass - protects the torso. If its made from a single piece of metal, it is a breastplate. Most breastplate are associated with plate armor, but ancient Greeks had a bronze version called the "heroic Cuirass", often molded with fake muscles and various embellishments.
- Plackart - lower torso reinforcement that would overlap with a breastplate for extra protection, and connected to the faulds.
- Faulds - a metal skirt attached to the breastplate, allowing some leg protection while offering mobility.
- Gorget - protects the neck. With certain helmets, such as the Sallet, the gorget protected the lower head where the helmet did not.
- Pauldrons - protect the shoulders. The real life versions are nowhere near as big as those on space marines.
- Gauntlets - protect the arms.
- Greaves - protect the legs.
- Sabatons - protect the feet (you don't want some smartass spearman stabbing at your unarmored feet now, would you?)
- Codpiece - Yes, believe it or not, you could get dick armor too. Ordinarily this was just to armor the groin area like an athletic cup, but some people like King Henry VIII made massive codpieces to show off how well-endowed they were.
- Tabard - Technically not armor, but was the decorative sleeveless coat that would drape over the armor of knights. Besides being used as an identifier through the knight's heraldry, it also shielded armor from the desert sun so that the knight wouldn't boil in their own armor.