Re: Warhammer Quest: Silver Tower cover art
Posted: Wed May 11, 2016 4:57 am
Saintofm wrote:Agreed. Actualy female armor would be something more akin to what we've seen on Game of thrones or Dragon Age: Looks like what the males have, but slightly modded to better fit the female frame.
I should clarify that the pic I linked to was only to show what I was thinking for the breastplate, not the rest of her armour (which is not very stormcast-y), nor her build/physique (which is fine for a normal human, but not what I think a female stormcast would look like).
Yes the boob bumps ruin the armor's main job of deflecting blows but as long as it looks like actual armor and not this next picture,
Fair warning, I'm going to digress a lot here.
The negative effect of breast cups on armour protectiveness tends to get overstated, actually. The Romans gave their officers breastplates with sculpted pectorals (similar to the male stormcast minis), and if anyone understood how armour worked it was the Romans. It's only with the advent of gunpowder weapons that having concave curves (i.e. 'cleavage') on your armour really hurts. And even then it would only matter in very specific circumstances (i.e. the musket ball is right at the edge of the range at which it might penetrate your armour). If you have the technical skill to make a breastplate with 'boobs' that doesn't have a point in the cleavage area where the metal is actually thinner or weaker, then the curve alone is unlikely to compromise its protectiveness.
The reason real-world historical armour for women didn't have breast cups is nothing to do with them screwing up the protective aspects of the armour and everything to do with the fact that the few women warriors that have existed in the real world all came from cultures that didn't use rigid breastplates at all. Scythians and Sarmatians wore lamellar (and their women warriors seem to have been mostly horse-archers, who rarely wore armour at all). The Chinese (they had a couple of female generals historically) wore either lamellar or mail. The ancient Britons and Irish and the early mediaeval Picts wore mail or nothing at all. The Dahomey 'Amazons' didn't wear body armour (partly culture, partly climate, but it wouldn't have helped against European guns anyway). The Byzantine Varangian Guard (at least one contemporary account claims that after one battle, several dead Varangians turned out to be women) wore mail.
If the Romans had been feminists, their female officers probably would have had sculpted breasts on their armour, just like their male officers had sculpted pecs and six-packs. And none of them would have been killed by their cleavage "deflecting a weapon into their heart" or whatever nonsense gets spouted about boob-plate.
The real issue with realistic armour is coverage vs. flexibility/heat/fatigue, and the sweet spot is determined largely by what weapons you're facing (and the climate - although that didn't stop mid-east cultures from developing cataphracts and clibanarii). And a lot of the fantasy armour tropes people take for granted are wrong, but probably not the ones or for the reasons you're thinking of. Wearing just a helmet and carrying a shield was pretty common throughout history. Heck, going entirely naked wasn't unknown (usually from a combination of culture and climate). Leather armour is heavy, hot and noisy - fantasy thieves and assassins really should stop wearing it. Full plate is much lighter, more comfortable and more flexible - except you are probably wearing a load of heavy, hot and cumbersome leather and padding under it.
Probably the best (overall) armour anyone has ever invented (pre-gunpowder weapons) is mail. It's very flexible, relatively cool in hot weather (you don't actually need leather or padding - you can wear it over normal clothes), and much better at protecting you than anything else bar heavy plate (well-made mail actually resists penetration better than some early plate). It's also much quieter than pretty much any other sort of armour (except perhaps several layers of silk). It doesn't clink and jangle much unless you let it flap around loose. Fantasy assassins and thieves should probably wear oil-blackened mail shirts as standard.
The only problem is it's very time-consuming to make. You need a higher technology base for proper plate, but once you have that you can knock out dozens of sets of cuirasses in the time it takes you to make one mail hauberk. Outfitting an entire army in mail is so expensive in time and resources that only the Romans ever really tried. But everyone from the English Civil War on could give their armies buff coats, helmets and cuirasses (though once pike blocks gave way to skirmishers and gun-lines, armour went only to cavalry, of course, as infantry were no longer primarily melee troops).
OK, historical digression over.
I'm generally OK with breast cups on 28mm minis, because any loss in 'realism' (snort!) is more than made up for by you being able to tell the mini is actually female, absent any other features. To put it bluntly, it's hard to get across that a 28mm mini is meant to be a woman without giving it visible boobs. A curved breastplate that looks female without cups is better, IMO, but that's much harder to sculpt.
Take the current DE plastic warriors. They all look male to me, because GW have done away with the 'boob-plate' torso that the previous models had. Until I read some of the more recent BL novels, I wrongly assumed GW had changed the fluff to get rid of DEs having women fighting alongside the men (as it turned out, they'd actually changed HE fluff so that they too have female soldiers now - but you wouldn't think so from the models).
