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.
> the breastplate is suspended by mere straps from the shoulder (rather than rigidly covering it as a historical breastplate would)
Another nitpick, but this isn’t consistent either. There are quite a few historical breastplate designs which don’t come over the shoulder at all, in both surviving examples and historical art. The Kastenbrust in Glasgow (A.1981.40.a) is a really nice one, and a lot of Gothic cuirasses also just come up to the front of the shoulder and then use straps over the top. Maximilian styles typically have a square-fronted design that sits really quite low on the shoulder (although often paired with a plate collar), and Almain rivet uses a simplified form of the same pattern with the collar more often skipped. Indeed, I’d probably say it’s more common than not for medieval rigid cuirasses to not cover the top of the shoulder.
The reason is pretty simple: getting rigid armour over the top of the shoulder without unacceptably impinging on mobility is a challenge. Pulling the steel back and relying on mail to cover that upper shoulder area is much easier and mostly as good – it’s very hard to drive a stab fully downwards in a way that can completely bypass the plate components, while mail and underlayers will typically be enough to accomplish turning a cut into at worst a nasty bruise.
For an example of mail in a (sort of) SF movie, see Tina Turner’s character in Mad Max 3.
It’s also an example of why real mail isn’t often used. Reports of the weight of the costume vary from 80 to 120(!) pounds. Possibly they count different parts or something. It’s also somewhat impractical as IIRC it’s a full-length dress, including bits where the mail adds weight but no protection (mail panels below the knee in a slit dress).
In any case, this is why you don’t see her moving around a lot.
I would beliefe 60 pounds, maybe 70. But above 100 pounds? The Mrs. Turner herself can’t weight a lot more in that movie.
My friends mail hauberk weights 29 pounds, and his size is a lot bigger then Tina Turner’s. I don’t know anybody with mail legs, but shops selling stuff like that say 10 – 15 pounds per pair. Maybe the same again for the gloves and those ridiculous shoulder pieces.
Still hell a lot of weight to move around in in the desert. Especially with out a belt to shift the weight to the hip. And the stuff get’s hot as hell, in the sun. Can’t be fun to wear that with out under garments.
Another example are the Lord of the Rings movies which also used a lot of mail. Judging by behind the scenes footage, the “chain mail technicians” on that had quite the time putting it all together.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cyXeHccKTDs
Not surprising that most movies don’t go for that,
It seems like this would make Star Wars storm trooper armor one of the less stupid SF designs then. They seem to have a decent range of movement and a reasonable amount of hard material coverage.
Of course, the material doesn’t seem to protect them from direct fire very well. But it may reduce a lethal hit to temporarily incapacitating, or protect against other threats such as shrapnel, hard vacuum when fighting in spaceships, etc.
Probably stun settings as well. A lot of combat in the past wasn’t about killing the enemy, it was about defeating them, which isn’t the same. German longsword manuals have a variety of techniques to make the enemy simply not be there, for example–someone with a broken leg that you tossed behind you (into the waiting arms of someone who’s job is to deal with them) can safely be ignored. Similarly, someone stunned in a battle can be taken prisoner (and we have many scenes where the Empire took prisoners, so we know it was part of combat). We don’t see it often, and only with high-profile prisoners (Leia, really), but we also have a very limited view of battles in the Star Wars universe.
There’s also communications to consider. The Rebels have the force; the Empire has well-established and highly sophisticated command and control doctrines. Han and Luke utilize this at least twice in “A New Hope”. Thermal imaging, chemical inventory tailored to specific species, battle overlays, diagnostics–there’s a lot of data you could depict visually that could help various stormtroopers.
But ultimately I think the choice was psychological. (Okay, the in-universe choice; the real reason was “Prop guy said so”.) The Empire demonstrably did not care about life. It gave minimal consideration to human life and none at all to anyone else. Turning everyone into interchangeable, disposable non-entities is part of their doctrine. You see that with TIE fighters, which are cheap, abundant, and essentially disposable. And it fits. A brutally tyrannical dictatorship is as destructive to the humanity of those who think they’re part of the machine as it is to the victims, the destruction is simply less obvious.
If we take into account the prequels there’s also the fact that stormtroopers are building off the reputation of the much more competent and powerful clone troopers, who man-for-man were pretty clearly superior troops. We actually see some clone troopers use real tactics, successfully. The empire meanwhile had no peers, so it exaggerated the characteristics of the armor until it no longer worked as armor-it was a uniform, dressing for it’s enforcers, nothing more.
“If we take into account the prequels…”
For my part, I do not. By the time Lucas got around to making them there was a whole extended universe that had been built, and that’s what I go with.
Makes for some interesting discussions with my son, who’s a big Star Wars fan but who grew up in a post-Prequel world. My view is that these are two totally different timelines, which just happen to overlap for three movies.
But you are correct. You can see the same trend again and again–as military equipment moves away from combat it loses its combat effectiveness. Perhaps a good example is police uniforms. American police are thought of as wearing blue (“the thin blue line” and all that tripe) because after the Civil War the USA had to do SOMETHING with all those spare uniforms. Likewise, once the Empire secured its base those uniforms had to go somewhere. The equivalent of police is an attractive option, both because it makes surplus equipment useful and because it blurs the line between domestic policing and military action (the Empire is, after all, a totalitarian and fascist dictatorship). Toss in what we’ve seen of dictatorships since the Russian invasion of Ukraine (does anyone think for a second that those people in the meeting where Vader Force-choaked the guy weren’t skimming off the military procurement budget?), and yeah, that Stormtrooper armor may well have been painted stop signs (I have the plans somewhere).
As an aside, one of the little touches I find so endearing in the first trilogy is the propensity of the props department to repurpose gear. The helmet of a Death Star gunner becomes, with a fresh coat of paint, the helmet for a Rebel trooper, that sort of thing. Sure, this was done in reality because spray paint is cheaper than new props. But in-universe it really creates the sense of a rag-tag group scavenging whatever they could grab. And the progression from that to the fleet action at Endor feels earned. You’ve seen them go from stolen Imperial equipment to a fully-functioning military-industrial complex. The Prequels were that in reverse, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing (though I dislike it personally). The sequels…..well….They exist, and I’ll leave it at that.
“American police are thought of as wearing blue (“the thin blue line” and all that tripe) because after the Civil War the USA had to do SOMETHING with all those spare uniforms. ”
I don’t think this is right. The NY police adopted blue uniforms in 1853, before the Civil War. I suspect they were influenced by the Met, which also wore blue – in their case, specifically because blue wasn’t a military colour (soldiers wore red). The oldest police force in the world, the City of Glasgow Police, wore brown.
It’s possible that police forces elsewhere in the US wore blue because it’s what was available, rather than because they wanted to match the NY police?
Both are actually true Ajay. The NYPD wore blue because of the Met, and while I can’t find the exact procurement documents I suspect they could afford to order custom uniforms.
However there was immediate resistance to their adoption because, and here’s proof history is just a damn circle, people didn’t like militarized police. Uniforms made police lackies of the elite, and it was a disturbingly foreign innovation associated with the military of monarchies. The officers themselves didn’t like it, and there were several court cases and acts of defiance. However the media ended up primarily supporting the adoption of uniforms, which was a popular reform among the wealthy and shopowners because it let them identify officers to more easily petition them after property crimes. The idea was that collective identity would create accountability.
Several other rich cities like Boston followed suit, but outside of the sphere of the culturally elite cities there was skepticism and budgetary concerns.
The practice of uniformed police might have actually petered out there, but after the civil war the combination of uniforms being cheap and the triumphant union army having good press led to the adoption of surplus uniforms across the nation as a representation of association with the military and hence just authority…
Just as protesters feared back in the 1850’s, and just as the Met specifically sought to avoid when they made their uniforms distinct from the military. And lest we forget the decades that followed aren’t remembered fondly in us police relations. In fact the levels of corruption were so infamous that corporate police were seen as preferable at first, until that proved even worse. The uniforms fixed nothing, but proved a huge PR win for the departments.
Call to the modern day, when precisely the same thing happened with a different war, more surplus military equipment, and the modern equivalent of the class divides from a century ago. Time is a flat circle.
I hope you’ll forgive me mixing my prostilitizing in with the historical timeline there.
I think Stormtrooper armour is 90% psychology. As has been noted, the Empire had no peer rivals with whom it might go to war. Stormtroopers are not an army that expects to fight against peer militaries, they are the face of oppression of the Empire, to be turned on those who would rebel against them. The reason that they don’t have rank insignia (for the most part) or personal markings is because they aren’t presented as people, but as the unstoppable force of the Empire. You killed a stormtrooper? Great, there’s another hundred coming down the road to get you. You and your friends kill 100 stormtroopers, fine, that Star Destroyer just deployed another 10,000. They will never stop coming, there are always more of them than you can fight and you don’t get any benefit from killing them as another just takes there place. So why even bother? Resistance gets you nothing, the Empires forces cannot be defeated. That’s the rationale. Its even canonised in universe with the Tarkin principle, rule by fear of force, rather than force itself. The deathstar is the ultimate expression of this philosophy. It is vast and can destroy planets. You simply can’t fight it. You might as well just do as you are told.
That said, presumably the armour isn’t just cardboard. We do see blaster shots penetrate it easily enough so maybe its focus, aside from anonymity, is against sharpnel, glancing blows and poorly armed resistance groups. Enough to make the stormtroopers brave enough to charge a lightly armed mob, but not heavy enough to absorb fire from appropriately armed soldiers.
Fear is a much better tool than slaughter because it reduces damage to your tribute system.
My fanon for SW Storm Trooper armor is that it is primarily an armored vacuum suit, because they were originally designed as boarding parties for spaceship. They wear them in case of decompression, not for protection from weapons.
That they wear them on planets and other places decompression is not a danger I attribute to the Imperial military being a very top-down rigid organization that tells you to shut up and follow the regs regardless of practical considerations.
That armor looks pretty good against distance weapons. Not surprising as the coverage seems a lot like contemporary Army armor.
The problem with it is vision.
I’ve heard comments from members of the 501st Legion (organization of fans who make and wear the armor at conventions). Apparently you can’t see out of that helmet as the “eyes” are located too high. I guess if the eyes were correctly placed the trooper would look he had too large a head.
I’m not sure how they deal with that since the armor would also muffle sound; presumably many of them have previous work wearing mascot costumes.
The helmet in general is a bit too stylized for reasonable use, but this actually fits very well with the evolution of the armor. The original clone trooper armor was a bastardization of Mandalorian armor that was actually much more practical, mostly because it was less exaggerated, mostly because it manages to barely fit the breathing apparatus in and has a slightly different eye design.
Then we have the stormtrooper armor, which was designed by a fascist state ruled by an idiotic madman, so it takes the reputation of the clones and exaggerates all the features until you can’t actually see anything.
might be interesting to look at real armors in principle. they have very little coverage, but pose a high chance of preventing you from taking a deathblow. at minimum you get enough time bought to be medically evacuated out to a hospital or something…
maybe thats the idea with stormtrooper armor?
A note on your Commnet #3: If you look at OSHA risk assessment it’s all about preventing energy transfer. Chemicals that contact your body but do not transfer energy–such as nitrogen in the atmosphere or clean water–are by definition not a threat. The stuff has to DO SOMETHING to you in order to be a threat, and thus if you keep the stuff from doing that something to you you negate the threat. It’s a bit more complex with biologicals, but let’s be real, the average grunt doesn’t care and a simple framework “Keep energy from being transferred” is good enough.
In fact, the OSHA framework makes an interesting conceptual model for armor. Armor can be thought of as personal protective equipment (PPE). While sci-fi and fantasy tend to make that the first line of defense, the reality is that it’s the last and worst. Relying on PPE is basically saying “There’s nothing we can do to protect you, good luck.” Replacement (use stuff that isn’t a threat) isn’t realistic in a combat zone (which is defined by active threats), but engineering controls and administrative controls are better options than armor. Engineering controls are things like longer-range weapons–if I can hit you from six miles away, but you can only hit me from three miles away, I’m going to sit at six miles out and blow you up. Administrative controls are doctrine–think the Roman habit of rotating people in the front of the army. Combat is exhausting, and fatigue exacerbates pretty much everything bad in any situation, so rotating people reduces casualties.
If you MUST have PPE, it’s ALWAYS a question of trade-offs. I know a situation where drillers wore ice vests to keep cool, but ended up in a hospital due to dehydration. Folks forgot that those vests weigh 45 lbs, and lugging 45 lb vests around in 105 degree (F) heat is not fun, even if it’s a cold weight. At that point, the question becomes one of tactics. More maneuverability means that you don’t get hit as often, but if you do you die. More rigid plates take hits better, but they prevent you from moving. Humans have certain parts that are rigid anyway so can be protected, but there’s always a trade-off.
That said, weapons tech is going to advance at a rate that would make armor more or less ineffective pretty quickly. Rigid armor won’t protect against ablation, for example. And if you’re getting close enough to me to stab me in sci-fi combat my artillery and my buddies aren’t doing their jobs. (Dune is an exception, except that the vast majority of the action occurs in an environment that negates the justification for this exception.) My guess is that in most sci-fi settings armor is going to be AT LEAST as much for show as it is for any sort of protection.
Also, regarding maille, you are absolutely right as to why it’s rarely presented on screen. There’s simply no realistic way to mimic it onscreen. To make realistic looking maille you need to make maille. LOTR created a lot of buzz in the maille-making community because it actually did this, by cutting PVC into rings and linking the rings together. This creates an incredibly thick ring, but makes a huge weight reduction (something Tolkien actually comments on in the books, as the Fellowship leaves Imladres). Still, 30,000 links is 30,000 links and even if half are solid (as was the case in the Middle Ages) you’re still talking about a huge number of person-hours to make the armor. And games don’t really have it much easier. You can make the maille a fabric texture if you want, but it always looks weird. Animating the links in anything like a passible way requires tremendous computing power. And let’s be real, most people simply don’t care about hauberks and the like. “Armor” means “Plate armor” in the modern perception, with maille being considered an extremely primitive, ineffective option only used until folks could make something better, so it’s not worth the time to develop it. (I do not agree with this, as I hope is obvious.)
You should read the Dungeon Samurai Series by Kit Sun Cheah. You would particularly like his treatment of armor — and dehydration.
Observation: Modern body armor is winning the fight against modern small arms.
A combat helmet can now defeat rifle FMJ, all handgun rounds, and functionally any reasonable shrapnel threat. ECH. This protects the head very well.
A modern hard armor plate can now defeat armor piercing hardened steel penetrators from full power rifles. Ones likely rated for tungsten are also in existence, and entirely within viable weight range.
Observation: Modern body armor cannot act as ‘armor’.
It cannot be used as a first line. A soldier will not enter a room expecting their suit of plate to shield them from an enemy ambushing them from a blindspot. Instead, it prevents mortal injuries. Your observation about it being akin to PPE is fairly sharp.
Observation: Mass Effect’s main threat for armor is energy weapons and cold weapons.
A K-Barrier will not defeat lasers or contact fighting. This means that armor must be high coverage, and thinner. Lasers work by principle of ablation and sustained burn. They are also very accurate. In an ideal situation, you protect the whole soldier, but lightly, ensuring that incidental glances do not incapacitate them and sustained burns do not kill them.
Conceptualization: Scifi armor probably should be rethought overall to properly address the threat profile in-universe.
If your threat is lasers that can’t go through anything, a suit of futurized plate armor and some very good goggles (or better yet opaque faced zero-lag cameras) will be top selling. If your threat is high power electromag ballistics, your best bet might be something akin to today with concentrated protection.
Honestly given how Dune is, a suit of something like lamellar would be great purely because it moves. In addition to keeping your attack below the velocity threshold, it also needs to somehow force through that armor… all while the armor is shuffling around and potentially disrupting your attack.
Interesting, I didn’t get the impression contact weapons were supposed to be that big a part of the Mass Effect setting- the way I parse it, their presence in the games is more a mix of Rule of Cool and an effect of focusing on irregular small unit actions in fairly close quarters. Kind of the same way you might see a lot of knife and bayonet use in a modern commando movie even though that isn’t a big factor in large-scale combat.
The Mass Effect games are ran in a custom Unreal 3 Engine… Meaning that most likely, the materials intended to be rigid can NOT be made rigid, or the whole animation system doesn’t work and thus no movement at all, which is not animation. Ouh, and you need to run the thing in real time…. right.
The difference between movie and game is clear here; one needs real materials, while the other cannot have them, just emu/simu-lation of one at most.
It’s like the critic has never worked at the field. Which ever fireld this is.
Nore have I, but I know something about materials while he clearly doesn’t know anything(at least in comparison).
Making proper maille seems to be excessively difficult – I recall visiting a museum and wondering about the very different structure of maille links, when I noticed that all the exhibits with rings with a cut, unconnected edge were labeled “reproduction of find XYZ” and all the actual items, although in a much worse condition, had every single ring riveted – which obviously would have added a *lot* of labor to the reproduction, and thus wasn’t done for them.
Riveting doesn’t add as much to the process as people think. There were specialized tools for doing it. You have to be a special kind of stupid to do the same thing 30,000 times per shirt and NOT come up with a better way. You can buy them today for about $30, and the design hasn’t changed much in a long, long time (for exactly how long you’d need to ask a specialist; I know they go back to the Middle Ages at least, but never really dug into the details). Once the links are made–which would be done in batches of thousands–the squish/poke and rivet steps take a few tools, a hammer, and an anvil.
What I’ve found is that the limiting factor is, it takes the right person. I’ve not done rivetted maille, but I’ve made a few hauberks and coifs using butted maille (not a significantly less complex process, I literally skip two steps). My issue is that I can’t sit still–8 years of Roman Catholic schooling under nuns didn’t cure of that–and maille offers me a way to fidget in a socially acceptable manner. I’ll happily spend 8, 10, 12 hours linking links together while listening to music, or chatting with friends/family, or the like. It becomes a background thing, something you do more or less on autopilot. As an aunt once quipped, “It’s like knitting, but for men!” And remember, when we’re talking about the past we’re talking about societies where idleness was viewed as a sin, for the very good reason that it was dangerous. People couldn’t AFFORD to simply sit around telling stories. If I can sit around the tavern telling stories AND setting myself up to be able to put a few hundred rivets in tomorrow, I get to have fun and make tomorrow’s job easier! Literally a sack of pre-rivetted links, a sack of unriveted links, and two pairs of pliers and I can get a few hours of work in while also catching up on the local gossip (it has to do with how E4-1, the weave used since maille was developed in Europe, is put together). And since rivets can (usually should) be done cold, I can pound out the rivets outside, where I can watch folks in town or maybe chat with a good-looking girl or high-ranking nobleman. It is not, in other words, something which will appreciably impact my social life; it IS something productive, useful, and money-making.
The problem with making maille for modern movies and the like is, mostly, that we don’t have the production capacity. In the past this would have been something that was in fairly high demand, so if I wanted a few hauberks there would have been a system in place to produce them. The smiths probably had chunks of maille lying around that they could combine to make it fairly quickly (I’ve been told, but cannot confirm, that they’d make patches of maille to either act as patches or to combine to make new suits). Today, somewhat ironically (in that it’s the reverse of every other production method), you’re mostly looking at hiring artisans or training people specifically to do this process. While E4-1 is hardly the most complex weave out there (try Half Persian Sheet 6 or, if you’re REALLY brave, the sheet version of Captive Inverted Round!), this still is a fairly specialized skillset. I saw a necklace at Macy’s once that was butted E4-1 on the bias sell for $5,000, if that tells you anything about the rarity of this skillset. And the closures were horrible, nothing like what you’d see at M.A.I.L. Artisans. Making enough maille for an army in a movie–which tend to be orders of magnitude smaller than real armies–would be a significant portion of the cost of the movie in most cases.
I wonder how much a shirt of mail might go for if they’re selling necklaces of the stuff? Even just vambraces of mail…
Now I kind of wish I were a mechanical engineer so I could invent and automatic maille-knitting machine. It seems entirely doable with the right knowledge and cash.
It is, there are a couple examples you can view online, although they may be old or bad.
The main issue is actually really simple-what are you using as a model for the output dimensions? How are you fitting the mail? Like all garmants mass production is easy, but getting a good fit is hard. You’d likely want to create a variety of sizes, but there’s not *enough* demand to justify infininatly granular sizes and woe to the man or woman whom isn’t “general issue”, to borrow some slang from WW2.
The result is ill fitting armor, which works but is both ugly and a huge pain in every inch of your ass, just completely miserable. Unlike fully flexible clothing mail starts being really uncomfortable really quick. You can compensate a bit by making the armor larger to begin with, but there are limits before it looks comical and simply doesn’t work. And tailoring it to fit is labor intensive, though less so; that’s likely the best solution.
Can I ask if there’s a difference between “maille” and “mail”?
French vs. English?
No difference, but maybe it should be? Other people are using “maille” in the comments and I’m liking it. Great way to show, at least in writing, that you’re referring to the ancient/medieval armour rather than postal or electronic.
My rant on the Dune Combat Model:
1. Where are the spears? This website has discussed many times how the spear is the primary weapon of the infantry – it has reach and killing power. And there are many many variations of the spear that is often tuned to the armor of the opposing force or the needs of the spear carriers.
2. Where are the organized fighting groups? Instead of descending into a Pell-mell melee, where is the unit cohesion and organized formations?
3. Where are the fluid based weapons? The two big ones I am thinking of is firefighter truck fire hose, which is useful for crowd control and breaking up formations of people; and if the shield prevents a person from being hit with the water cannon, there is still a lot of force that can push the person (or crowd) around. And flame throwers – even if the shield “blocks” the fluid, the fluid will fall to the ground and burn on the ground and the enemy troops now have to contend with the fact the ground is on fire or slow moving burning fluid is splashing on the person.
4. Where are the light based disorientation weapons? Flashbangs are the primary choice here. Anytime an enemy group tries to form up into a cohesive group, flashbangs launched by grenade launcher, mortar or drone would break up the formations.
5. Where are the energy projection disorientation weapons? I’m thinking of (available right now to police departments) “pain projectors” which cause pain to exposed skin. That and audio disruption gear which causes difficulty in communication or being able to think.
6. Where is the artillery? The intent of the artillery (in this case) is multiple: it kills anyone who’s shield is not working (overloaded, turned off, broken). it has a physical knockdown effect due to the shrapnel; if you get hit with enough shrapnel you are still going to be knocked around by it – and disoriented. Artillery can also deliver napalm (fire) and concussion blasts (more disorientation).
7. Entangling weapons – likely niche – but pulling an enemy trooper out of formation and leaving them vulnerable to your teammates weapons is a serious consideration. Like I said – probably niche.
8. Where are the heavy vehicles? I expect a tank can still crush enemy formations through weight alone if nothing else.
9. Land mines. There is a host of options here: punji pits, up spikes into the bottom of the boot, bear traps (vice and jaw traps), explosives.
10. Low speed projectile weapons – paintball guns. Now before you discount them – the question is “what is in the paintball”. It just be paint that marks the target in a fluorescent color and blocks vision – paint on visors. Or it could have a variety of chemical agents – blinding agents, skin irritants, strong smells (skunks and durian come to mind). So even if the shield prevents the paint ball from hitting the target, they are now in an aerosolized cloud of “oh god what is that”. Or chemicals that catch fire when the paint ball breaks (yup, risky for the person carrying the paintball gun), or causes a (small) smoke cloud), or personalized flashbangs.
11. Specialized shield defeating weapons – best example I can think off: push activated shotgun at the end of a spear. The user “stabs” the target, gets through the shield and when they make contact with the target, the shotgun tip goes off. And since the spear has already penetrated the shield, the target gets the brunt of the weapon.
On the defensive side – right now IRL anyone can buy “cut proof clothing” that uses miracle modern fabrics (it’s a couple hundred to several hundred bucks depending on how much of the body you want to protect. Anyone who works in a warehouse buys cut proof gloves or elbow length sleeves due to prevent incidental cuts). So suddenly the wearer is highly resistant to cuts, but not crushing weapons or firearms. So if you are looking to armor up someone from scratch, starting with a base layer of “cut proof clothing” followed up with a layer of protection for blunt trauma (read clubs) would be needed to protect from broken bones. And some of these materials have a variety of resistance to firearms, fire or chemical damage (YMMV). So I expect it would be reasonable to put all troops in “modern material soft shell” that is cut resistant (and possibly resistant to the other problems I mentioned depending on the exact modern material used – I am saying resistant, not immune and there is a lot involved with armor construction using modern soft shell materials; before adding hard plates) and then add the hard shell layer to areas that are perceived to need the extra layer of protection. So the trooper would likely be in cut proof clothing up to the neck, including gloves and boots, and probably with and full cinch hood to protect the head from stabbing (but not clubs, you still need to wear your helmet).
I can tell you exactly what the Sardaukar in distant shots are wearing (in Dune 2 at least), because in the theatrical release, there was an extra in a long shot wearing a jacket that still had the logo on it. It’s a Dainese-brand motorcycle jacket. The Sardaukar will do poorly in a fight against bladed weapons, but if they hit asphalt falling out of an ornithopter, they should be okay.
In general, I think a lot of the inspiration for fantastic and sci-fi armor comes from the look of motorcycle gear – because motorcycle gear has the cultural associations that make it look both “tough” and “cool”. This leads to exactly the sorts of problems you point out in this article, because motorcycle gear does not armor the squishier parts of your body (like your belly). It also makes you ask questions like “why do these fantasy warriors need spine protectors? doesn’t the armor do that?”
As for flexible armor – I always assumed Commander Shepherd was wearing some kind of futuristic, extremely advanced D3O. In 2024 we have protective gear that flexes like foam during normal use but becomes rigid on impact; I have to assume that by 2180 it will be even better.
When you say that D&D never included lamellar, does that mean that what they call Splint and Banded Mail isn’t lamellar? Because they’re described as “Armor made of narrow vertical strips of metal riveted to a backing of leather that is worn over cloth padding. Flexible chainmail protects the joints.” and “Armor made of overlapping strips of metal sewn to a backing of leather and chainmail. The strips cover vulnerable areas, while the chain and leather protect the joints and provide freedom of movement. Straps and buckles distribute the weight evenly.” respectively, which matches both my perception of what lamellar is and how you describe it. Sure they’re for NPCs and characters with Heavy Armor Proficiency who can’t afford Full Plate, but they do exist.
Specific to Dune not only high-energy missile weapons, but also fast-moving high-energy melee weapons (swords, maces, polearms, etc.) are also blocked by shields such that the weapon of choice is generally knives and daggers. In that context, I would expect most armor to be some form of flexible material similar to modern soft armor that prioritizes foiling penetration as opposed to attempting to distribute force.