Comments by "DynamicWorlds" (@dynamicworlds1) on "[Imperial Roman Army] Armor \u0026 Shields" video.

  1. I think I remember something about the way they made them having a possible carbon gradient with some steel at one side, but only iron on the back, but I don't remember where I read that. Not that it was something with a controlled carbon content much less tempering, but rather just that they forged them with one side to the smoke and fire and it ended up harder. Roman-era metallurgy wasn't actually that good, so it's best to assume iron or low grade steels, generally for anything of that time period. As for thickness, if you can get the weight and thickness of one piece of torso armor, you should be able to estimate the thickness of the segmentata using just weight. You may also be able to work backwards if you can get a weight estimate of the rest of the gear the legionnaire carried, since heavy infantry tends to hit a max weight they carry.
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  2. EnhancedNightmare Sure mass loss would be a factor, but you could compensate for it within the margin of error of the other factors used in the rough estimate. You're of course, going to have to do some estimating about how much of the original armor is left, but it's not undo-able to get close, and the suggestion was a way to get around not having full access to an original piece (which may have thickness loss over time as well). As for Roman measuring units, we can do unit conversions, and I expect you could get reasonable estimates in imperial or metric for the weight of the Roman soldiers' marching kit and work backwards with the gear weight of heavy infantry to get a weight of the armor. Nothing's ever going to be perfect, and, of course, access to an original piece is better, but it doesn't mean the information you can access is useless (just that the precision of your estimate will be lower). Half of investigating history is making the best use possible of incomplete information, after-all (especially history of earlier eras).
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  3. Also on maintenance you can repair mail in the field, but you really need a forge to do proper repair work on plates. Don't forget that you'd be cleaning this yourself, after a march and after setting up a camp with a ditch and palisade while carrying all your supplies yourself. There's also the very overlooked area of coverage. Mail shirts would have sleeves and cover the arms far better than the segmentata could, even covering the armpits, so while it wasn't as strong to a direct strike, it was more protective overall against most things. It may not look like that big a difference, but attacking the arm can become really common if a formation is disrupted. Good mail is actually really hard to penetrate, even with a pointed weapon (especially if someone's trained with it, as they'll just make most blows roll right off), so while I might possibly reconsider if I knew I was going up against something like a falx (2-handed ones anyways), or a mace, I'd probably pick mail over segmentata. Keep in mind as well, that the area on the shoulders (where you'd likely take the strongest blows) were double-layered for Roman armors.
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