The Making of the Medieval-Inspired 3D Printed Women’s Sovereign Armor | Hacker News Reader

The Making of the Medieval-Inspired 3D Printed Women’s Sovereign Armor

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49 pointsmuse90029 comments

I remember a couple who once gave sword fighting demos at Gen-Con (cannot remember the name). They made an interesting remark that the male of the couple couldn't find historic armor that fit since he was 6'+, but the female could since she was about the same size as most of the old armor wearers. Shows you how nutrition has really upped the size of humans.

The average male height in middle ages Europe was about 175 CM, which isn't that far off what what it is today.

The average height actually went down since the middle ages, and plummeted to below 170cm in the 17th and 18th centuries, making people like Napoleon which was 168-169CM tall about average for the day.

Being over 6" (182cm) in most caucasian / european descendants nations is considered tall even today.

I'm also not sure what he means by finding "historic armor", modern replicas are made to size, even production runs will have a height range that fits the average modern male (or female, there are replica makers that make armor tailored for women).

Whilst being tall he would also have no much problem finding chain mail or plate to fit a 6" tall person, what he would have is a problem finding one in wearable condition which isn't a museum exhibit ;).

Going further back to say the Roman empire we know based on the documents from the period of Gaius Marius (Marian Reforms) that the required height of a roman legionnaire translated to feet was 5"10-6"0 tall.

but here there are some citation with much shorter legionnaires

http://history.stackexchange.com/questions/17072/average-hei...

" Imperial regulations, though not entirely unambiguous, suggest that the minimum height for new recruits was five Roman feet, seven inches (165 cm., 5'5") ... for the army as a whole a reasonable estimate of a soldier's average height is around 170 cm (5'7").

- Roth, Jonathan, and Jonathan P. Roth. The Logistics of the Roman Army at War: 264 BC-AD 235. Columbia studies in the classical tradition, Vol. 23. Brill, 1999.

"Roman records directly attest such measuring of recruits, although determining the exact height requirement is problematic. Vegetius gives the minimum standard, or incomma, as “6 [Roman] feet [178 cm.] or 5 feet 10 inches [ca. 173 cm.] among the auxiliary cavalry or the [soldiers] of the legionary first cohort.”15 Although both Fritz Wille and N.P. Milner see Vegetius’s figures as an optimum and a minimum figure respectively, the expression incommam . . . exactam strongly suggests a regulation height.16 Vegetius may mean that cavalrymen must be 6 feet and soldiers of the first cohort five foot ten. In any case, these are clearly height requirements for elite sol- diers and not for the entire military. Praetorian Guardsmen probably had a higher minimum height than rank and file legionaries until the Septimius Severus started recruiting the latter into the imperial guard at the end of the second century.17"

Page 9 of that same book.

During the later Marian Reforms the height requirements were extended to the rest of the legions including the auxiliaries. That book however doesn't cover that period.

I thought Gaius Marius was pre-Caesar, so Republican Rome? And Septimius Severus / Vegetius were post-Augustus Imperial Rome.

Not sure about minimum heights, but the timeline seems a bit off here...

and ancient roman foot is shorter

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Roman_units_of_measure...

Roman unit| English name | Equal to | Metric equivalent | Imperial equivalent

pes | (Roman) foot | 1 pes | 296 mm | 0.971 ft

our world in data has some historic data: https://ourworldindata.org/human-height/

> The average male height

What if the difference is not the average male height, but that extremes are more likely?

That's highly likely, but then average knight or man-at-arms would tower the average malfed peasant.

Henry the Eighth was 6"1', his field armor is more or less complete and at the met[0], so if anyone has a tall friend in need of a good plate armor you know where to stop ;)

http://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/23936

Funnily enough, my wife has a different problem - she has trouble finding sparring jackets that fit her. She's above average height for a woman, so the biggest available jacket was still too tight for her.

I'd like to see the Hypermill people take this on. Each year, Hypermill, which sells high-end CAM software for machining, takes on an insanely complex project as a demo. They've machined a crown from a solid block of titanium.[1] Their system has really good solid geometry, allowing them to use long tools in a 5-axis CNC mill to get at hard to reach places inside a complex object.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bqv5SjC4s6w&feature=youtu.be...

This whole world is new to me, and I am as impressed as any layman.

Particularly interesting to me is how off I would be if I were to guess the amount of time it takes to do anything.

Making the armor: 6 hours

Adding the LED and electronics: 115 hours

That's not literally what those categories are -- I am being hyperbolic -- but it felt like that reading the time investment.

Might be an interesting heuristic to figure out how well someone knows a domain.

Interview of the future: "How long would it take you to write a CRUD app in Rails with persistent storage?" and just see if the time is realistic.

Just to note, the modeling was close to 115 hours and the manufacturing and finishing for the armor was 172 hours. Then the electronics.

(I think your numbers are your estimates, so I'm not trying to argue, just stating the totals from the article)

Even though I just had fillers in my example, I did misinterpret the numbers in real life, so thanks for correcting that.

I was just thinking. Humans seem to frickin' love armour!! In reality it was only used in certain circumstances by certain people and only for a very short window in human technological development. But ever since it has been a part of out art.

The word 'practical' is used quite a few times. This looks like it would do about as much good as bikini armour, all the intricately filigreed cutout parts over your vitals and guts would be remarkably weak.

The "real life" archetypes of these are actually exactly that: renaissance parade armor. They were never meant to be used in battle, and they're not medieval. Medieval armor, if at all like that, would be way more pragmatic and light weight. There was a short period at the end of the middle ages (15th century) where knights would really wear very heavy armor, and that was the end of that age. See: battles of Crecy and Agincourt.

Wasn't the longbow the end of that age?

Longbows were pretty ineffective against late period armour like that. And not even plate - mail with gambesons (lots of layers of cloth) was pretty effective at stopping arrows, and full plate harness (2mm thick on average) was for the most part impenetrable even at point blank range.

What longbows were effective at was taking down horses and forcing your enemies to slog a long way on foot with their visors down (restricting vision and breathing). Making the fight a lot easier for your guys.

The end of armour really only came along with gunpowder weapons. Incidentally, gunpowder weapons also made longbows obsolete- largely due to the difference in training needed to shoot a gun (a few weeks on how to load) vs shooting a 100-pound warbow (years to develop muscles).

A combination of longbows and lots of foot soldiers with halberds, which would basically crack the knights like bugs, once they crashed down their horse and couldn't get up anymore.

It is fantasy armour, but imagine that the filigreed parts are all solid with the filigree applied on the outside. The armour in the article is "practical" in the sense that the overall design of it (its component parts, its silhouette) is basically [Gothic plate armour][0], rather than a completely fantastical invention.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gothic_plate_armour

Also made of plastic. And not Kevlar, either.

I remember host gator from my childhood. Crazy that they're still around.

It's possible that I missed something, but what does this post have to do with host gator?

We've hugged the site to death. It is currently displaying a 500 error, and the site was made using Host Gator.

Youtube hosts the making of video.[1] Though I would like to read some context for this thing.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pc41jrMpH_o

Found this article [2] explaining the project:

[2] https://www.shapeways.com/blog/archives/26537-custom-medieva...

There's always Google's cache if you want to read the original article:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%...

Ahh yeah that makes sense, thanks for that!

This link is behind a .htpasswd, inaccessible

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