Modern knowledge applied to low tech armour

My fantasy story is set in a world where a modern society (roughly WWIIish technology wise) has been set back by a huge cataclysm that has substantially (perhaps a factor of a thousand or more) reduced resources and population. The survivors have banded together into relatively small communities for survival. What I'm trying to figure out is what kind of aromur they'd develop given 20th century knowledge lacking most of the infrastructure, tools, and materials.

As resources go, the hardest to come across and make use of are metals. Few of these communities have access to natural sources of metals like iron or bronze, and instead have to rely on dangerous and costly salvage operations into the depths of the old world... and even then, what is salvaged is usually in poor shape. Leather and textiles are easier to come by.

The primary threats encountered are going to be rather vicious animal life (the apex land predator could be reasonably characterized as a vicious hybrid of mountain lion, horse, armadillo, and shark), sporadic attacks from primitive nomads, and internal peacekeeping. Firearms are used on occasion, but they are tightly controlled by the authorities and used as last resort tools to defend the settlement, given how rare guns and ammunition are.

Given the threats they're facing and the material and infrastructure constraints, what kind of armour would they develop? Would the additional knowledge gained from their previously tech-savvy society be of any use to them?

For any given item, they can likely salvage it to some extent, but whether or not it will be usable is an utter crapshoot. If they found an old military outpost that was sheltered from the elements and could somehow get it open, it would no doubt be full of valuable supplies. The main issue is that they'll never be able salvage the same kind of stuff reliably, especially since they're generally looking for more valuable stuff like pre-cataclysm fuel stores. So perhaps if they found a butcher's chainmail they'd be able to make one good piece of mail armour, but they'd be unlikely to find another.

As far as Kevlar... how well would that keep over the centuries? And how useful would it be when the primary threat are edged or blunt weapons? I understand that modern bullet-proof armour isn't much good against a knife unless it's been specially strengthened.

I could see plastics being salvageable since they don't really biodegrade, though I don't think they'd have the access to the petrochemicals and processes required to make it for themselves.

I'm interested in knowing what styles of armour might be employed. Would modern engineering, historical hindsight, the scientific method, or other such advances yield any improvements over more ancient design decisions, or would they just revert to the same armour that their distant ancestors would have kicked around in?

@ Smiling Ted:

Oh, I know, but my question is "would modern knowledge means the process would be improved?"

@WriteKnight:

The story itself is going to be set roughly six centuries after the cataclysm tore the hell out of everything, though in this case that's far more of a hinderance than help, because if anything the world has gotten worse in the meantime. I was already pretty much ruling out textiles and such as viable salvage... the nature of the cataclysm makes salvaging even durable metals a hit or miss proposition.

I was anticipating that on some level modern technology would be utilized... at the very least, they'd get very good at maintaining old machines and such. Ultimately, I'm expecting the constraints to be more bound to the lack of resources and infrastructure than to be a matter of scale, though I haven't quite worked out the specifics of what's possible and what isn't.

What I'm getting from your post and the posts of others is that plastic would be a decent candidate for armour materials, even with the means to make it long gone, but that the general design of armour isn't really going to change.

WriteKnight said:

My question is this. Six centuries is something like - eighteen generations. IF technology was lost - how was knowledge preserved untainted? Most stories that take place this late after the apocalypse - impose a 'dark ages' of lost technology AND knowledge. Think about the REAL dark ages, and how processes and knowledge were 'lost' or 'hidden' and how it was 'reborn' or 'rediscovered'. This will be an important element to your backstory.

And if you haven't already read "A Canticle for Leibowitz" - then stop what you're doing and read it - so you don't try and reinvent the wheel.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Canticle_for_Leibowitz

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Well, I meant the question in terms of the years immediately after the cataclysm, in which it might still be possible to find trained experts and such. Any techniques or decisions they made would then become tradition or trade knowledge even once the original rationale or scientific fundamentals were lost... for instance, the germ theory of disease would likely survive. The idea is that for the most part skills and knowledge that no longer apply to their lives WILL be lost... it is, in fact, a large part of the premise behind the story. There's only one or two of these isolated settlements that have appreciable libraries, and only one of them had the good fortune to have a pre-cataclysm university in it. However, they'll never be beaten back quite so far that they'll have to rebuild from the ground up.

The cataclysm in question wasn't quite like a nuclear war that shreds everything it touches, it's a creeping corruption, a blight, that appeared without warning and quickly rendered any unprotected area utterly lethal to humanity. The places that WERE protected suffered no ill effects, besides the massive refugee influx and suddenly being cut off from the outside world. So the factories were still standing (at least for the time being), they were just cut off from their supply chains, etc. God help you if you were in an urban safe haven... limited food supply and population density alone would mean that life would be short and brutal for a long time before things stabilized.

Thanks for pointing out the book, by the way. I'll be sure to read it when I have the opportunity! It sounds like it might be quite applicable to my backstory, as you said.

RichardB said:

There's another way around this -- against creatures like you describe, I'm not sure any armor they can make would be practical. Big land beasts cause a lot of crushing damage. Unless the armor is a rigid shell -- and I'm thinking that a rigid shell may not be possible under the circumstances -- a giant armadillo bite is going to just jellify the flesh between plates of metal / fiberglass / salvaged coffeemakers.

You have to look at how existing cultures protect themselves against animals. In general, it's with a good long spear and perhaps a simple shield. Body armor other than hides has not often been used, probably in favor of mobility. The exception is shark-divers, who wear chainmal.

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That's fair, I wasn't really intending these creatures to be easily defended against anyways. The predators in question (calling them "Plainstriders" for now) are rare, solitary hunters that are any traveller's worse nightmare... they're large, fast, durable, patient, vicious, and are pointy on pretty much any end of them you might end up dealing with. You'll probably hear their hunting call from miles off, which is usually a good sign that you should get the hell out of there and hope they're hunting something that isn't you. Generally, the only defense is to be moving in sufficient numbers that the Plainstriders don't commit to the attack or to be carrying enough heavy firepower to put the damned thing down before it can rip apart the entire caravan. The general rule is: if a Plainstrider has managed to get close to you, you are probably already dead or dying.

...so their defenses being inadequate to defend against that particular threat actually works pretty well. They can instead focus on more traditional humanoid opponents and weapons, then, without worrying about also protecting against 800 pound quadripedal killing machines.

WriteKnight said:

One can imagine that six hundred years after the last real Doctor has died - that there might be some knowledge of 'invisible creatures' that make us sick... but will they truly understand the difference between a bacterial and viral infection?

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...I was already expecting the knowledge to be a little on the vague side, but I really like that idea and I am going to steal it.

My expectation is that knowledge would be retained as you describe... the practical elements are retained as tradition, but the theory behind it gets lost to a large extent. It'll be interesting to think of ways that modern science would morph when passed down as folklore... electricity explained as a balance between two essences that wants to be equal? Fire explained as releasing the essence of the fuel? There's the "telephone" analogy, and loss of detail, but there's also the human tendency to anthropomorphise everything we find... and perhaps other ways for things to get garbled.

Hmm. Perhaps I need to get ahold of Canticle sooner rather than later.

GeorgeK said:

Machines break down. Without replacement parts an engine won't even last one generation, yet alone the 30 generations of use that you intend. They need metalsmithing if they are to use any of our leftovers. Rusted out metal will effectively become ore.

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Metalsmithing and maintainence will be two professions that will survive my apocalypse. I'm expecting them to be able to forge their own replacement parts, though I don't doubt some of the machinery won't be something they can fix themselves, and will break down very quickly.

However, I do get to cheat a little here... this is a fantasy story, and there is magic. Not a very whimsical or powerful kind of magic, mind you, but it's usable by basically everyone. My smiths will be able to forge harder metal with greater resistance to wear, tear, and degradation. Not invulnerability, but their metallurgy is artificially inflated.

It takes a lot of energy to move 800 pounds. It takes a lot of energy to make armor for an 800 pound carnivor. Such a creature would likely only be capable of short bursts of speed and would rely on ambush hunting, not a long trek. Alternately it might only be active at say dawn and dusk totalling about 4 hours a day, but then that would only work when prey is readily available on an ongoing basis. Maybe they are scavenger/omnivores most of the year but really only hunt right before the rut? If it's howling on a hunt I'd expect it to be communicating with other members of it's pack, not a solitary hunter. The rule of foraging is that if it takes more energy to nab a meal than you get from eating it, then it isn't worth the effort. Why would one announce its presense to the prey?

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800 pounds seems high, butI want them to be quadrupeds that stand about human height at the shoulder and can run at a gallop, and 800 pounds is smaller than a riding horse. Perhaps it would need to be bigger, even.

The hunting call wasn't an idea I thought through all that much. I got the idea when I was taking a walk along the bike trails at night, heard some bizarre city noise that sounded like some kind of mournful wail, and thought "damn, that would scare the piss out of someone if that was a hunting animal". Perhaps there are ways to play with that... if they hunted in mating pairs, then they could be each stalking their prey on separate sides and using the call to let the other know their location. Since they're likely to be highly territorial, it could be a nice big "get the hell off my land" call to others of its kind that might barge in on their kill. And there might be a psychological warfare angle as well... scare the herd they're chasing into moving too fast and leaving their weakest members behind for easy pickings.

I'm putting large herds of buffalo like animals roaming the wastelands, so that's going to be their primary food source and influence on their behaviour. Their attacks on caravans might just be them mistaking the comparitively small meal for an easy target, or it might be linked to territorial instinct.

I think I might need to go badger my biologist friends for help on this one, I obviously haven't thought this through.

Also, when you skin and gut a pig, you are usually doing well to get 50% carcass weight compared to live weight. Armor is sure to weigh more than skin. Assuming this creature is not magical then the 800 pounds gets scaled down to less than 400 pounds of bone, fat and muscle. That's still a one sided fight against a human, but physiology is physiology.

My choice of armor woul probably be made from the tanned hide of one of these things.

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That's a really good point I hadn't considered. It'd be an unlikely source of armour, since encounters with these things would rarely end favourably (and even if they did, you'd have to skin it on the spot and transport it from there, since you'd be in the middle of nowhere), but if, say, one got confused and attacked a settlement, then that WOULD make for a bitching set of armour.

@ RichardB:

That's a really neat thought. It'd be difficult to salvage the materials... after a few centuries out in the blight, most metal gets pretty degraded. Still, it might be cool to have folk running around in that kind of improvised armour here and there, especially if they were treasure hunters or such.

@ Writeknight:

The nature of the apocalypse is based on my magic system. To make a long story short, the environment has become extremely magically "unbalanced". Some flora and fauna can handle it, others (like humanity) can't, and need to hide in the few places in the world that retained a balanced character. There weren't nukes going off or anything... entire cities are still standing out there in the middle of the blight. I guess it's more comparable to the effects of a nuetron bomb... everything was left standing, but anyone caught it died.

Now, the blight is actually physically harsh as well. There's a lot of wind and water erosion, and it has a nasty effect on exposed materials. Many metals, plastics, and such would degrade heavily over decades of exposure, especially if they used the aforementioned "cheat" to magically increase strength and longevity. The magical techniques used to improve the materials would actually work against them.

I don't really think of the story as post-apocalyptic, actually, though it's obviously there for anyone to see. The main concept I'm actually working with is the societies that would form. I've been using humanity as an umbrella term in this particular article for four difference races, all of which are culturally distinct, and one of which the use of the term "humanity" is mainly for convenience (Looking like 8' bipedal lizards tends to make 'em stand out a bit.) The apocalypse they've survived is mainly an excuse to get these four peoples who would normally rather have nothing to do with one another into what are basically sociological sardine cans and see what kind of fireworks result. I thought it would be a fun setting to mess about with.

And I'll take your recommendations on Canticle to heart, the moment I actually get a free moment to drag myself down to the library!

Aye, that should all be perfectly within their capacity. I wouldn't put it past them to be able to assemble full plate (or perhaps complicated tools and devices like firearms) given the inclination and the means.

The assumption I'm working off of is that metal salvage is very difficult to come by and has to be carefully budgeted. Weapons, tools, and replacement parts for important devices and such would be first priority, which doesn't leave a whole lot for other uses, armour included.

How much metal would the kinds of armour you're describing eat up out of that limited supply? Which would remain practical under tight material constraints?

Mmm. Only one of the settlements has a usable vein of ore within its limits, and it's simply beyond the means for anyone to manage one far from the settlement. The protection required for survival outside of a haven is expensive, and keeping a mining operation going would be hugely expensive. For the same reason, armed conflict between havens is logistically impossible (which means that it's completely unexpected when someone figures a way out ). For the most part, travel is limited to the merchants who can afford it and salvage teams who are outfitted by the settlement to search for critical supplies.

Why wouldn't metal salvage be enough to justify metalsmithing? The market isn't going to have grown significantly over 6 centuries because the living space and resources haven't increased, and a steady trickle of metal salvage should be enough to cover the metal lost during recycling of old or broken gear, right?