i just got done watching" Langenschwert's Favourite clips from ARMA" wow that stuff is so cool...... itmakes me want to do some wma....unfortunatly i have a job, kids and am an mma fighter.....so the time constrant would prevent me anyways i noticed that the guys in the aurmor moved way slower.....i played football (american...) so i know that even plastic armor will slow you down. but here is how i feel armor is like. i dont know as much about historical warfare as i do modern ...so i will try to use an anology. take a tank......lately in iraq...there has been quite a few tanks being taken out by ied and rpgs...it has been sugggested that the m1 tank is flawed. and that a weakness has been found. i say of coarse.....but its not the tank thats flawed, its the use of the tank. a tanks main advantage is it is fast and carries a HUGE amout of fire power. the armor is designed to protect the firepower long enough to bring the awesome firepower to bear. that is why the ww2 germans were so successful...they massed there tanks together and used them as a quick hitting force. now put a tank in a city and you eliminate the mobility sooner or later you can probe for a weak point. now back to the knights in armor.....im asuming that ist the same thing. that the armor is there to protect the rider of a horse from arrows and such...long enough to allow for lance driven by 1500lbs of trappling hoofs.....for a vissual image think battle of stirling in brave heart...the heavy calvary charge.......before the pikes....imagin all that energy coming at you on a side note...the battle of stirling without the bridge?????it happened much more like this...athough i thought the bridge colapsed?not sure [ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-X3YaOOCGn0&feature=related"]YouTube[/ame] anyways back to topic.....when i knight is dismounted and in armor who is in better shape. plate guy or unarmored.......or some combo of sheild, chain, breast plate or leather. my gut would saythat he would be a armored guy would be a sitting duck for unarmored spear guy.
I'll go for the last part of your post, as I agree more or less with all you say in your post: Speardude vs dismounted knight in full plate armor(?)* *because the armor used by knights was in continuous change, one can usually pinpoint a certain armor down to +-10 years. Well, if the knight is proper trained in the arts you just saw demonstrated in the ARMA videos, he would be able to rush the speardude and kill him with a dagger or a sword wielded in halfswording before the speardude is able to penentrate any weakspots in the knights' armor. At the battle of Agincourt, the french knights did dismount, and according to different discussions by more or less knowledgeble people on different forums, they were killed in close combat by lightly armoured peassants wielding daggers that overwhelmed them/made them fall to the ground, than stab them through the vizer, etc. So IMHO, you are perfectly right in the theory that the knight was meant to stride around the battlefield on a horse, protected from arrows, but he wouldn't be a sitting duck on the ground either, remember that they started training from they were 8 years old, and that they were far better fed than the averidge medieval bloke. I imagine a fight on the ground would be like a random person from Darfur in a t-shirt and a spear vs. a fully trained martial athlete wearing full riot gear and a twohandsword...
True, the knight was generally an armoured lancer. However, it was very common for knights to fight on foot, both for tactical reasons and to stiffen the resolve of the commoners, who fought better knowing that their social betters were willing to fight and die beside them. The knight truly was the main battle tank of the middle ages. Best regards, -Mark
first a bit off topic...i saw a history channel specialon agincourt....now i know that the history channel is not perfect....but it ussally gives a pretty good thumb nail sketch..... they had about 4 factors that lead to the rout of alin court. 1. the numbers were not really as much of a missmatch as the legend suggest. common folk lore has it at 3-1.....but estamated may be closer to 12000 to 9000. 2. the ground was real wet and the advancing french were slowed...something about the lack of cloth on there boots made for a suction...but i cant remeber exactly 3. there was a large bottle neck.....and the french units advanced more tward the nobles (so they could capture and ransom them)....further increasing the bottle neck 4. the big killer ...croud dynamics.....with the guys up front stalled and blocked up the larger force advanced and tramped each other.... personally i have been in a brawl in the stands at a hockey game and can really understand this....it might seem strange but the force of a frantic dynamic crowd is overwelming......lost of times in fires in croowded buildings....more ppeople are trampled than die in the fire, or thye could have easly exited if they had remained sane and orderly
a siting duck was not really the right choice of words. im aware that knights were hard guys and most footman wanted to get back to the crops.....serious discrepancy in, training, size, nutrition, experence and moral. but my question is more of tactics.. i would take a army ranger with a pistol over a gang banger with an ak any day......but that dont make the pistol better. but if you personally were to fight a fullly armored knight like the one in the clip.....how would you do it and what would be your choice of gear. skip the ballista, trebuchet, catapult ,crossbow and musket route.
its also not uncommon to boster weakness and improve moral with an infusion of armor....in modern warfair. i use the term modern warfair very loosely since gulf war I was probalby the last of the big army v army wars.
Armored troops are superior in every aspect of combat except one, battlefield perception. Popular misconception paints armored Knights as cumbersome and only being able to fight from horseback. The truth however was that armor was designed to be very flexible which meant that heavy Knights had a lot of agility. They could run, roll around and even get up off their backs very quickly when knocked down. So armor wasn't as restrictive as portrayed in popular culture. Now the only thing holding armored Knights back was perception. The helmet, usually fully enclosed gave the user limited visibility and much less peripheral vision. Hearing was also impaired due to the enclosed helmet lessening a Knights perception even more. They could always take the helmet off or wear a less restrictive helmet but that lessened the protection. Another important sense that was stunted in armor was feeling through touch. A Knight couldn't "feel" their way through a battlefield of broken bodies and fallen weapons because the armor just couldn't transfer that sensitivity to the user. Now like a tank a Knight had support "infantry" or support facilities. Whether it be a entourage of less well equipped followers or an entire unit of foot soldiers. Even in larger formations mounted Knights still had a large number of support units so they could concentrate on breaking up formations while the support units cleaned up behind them. An armored Knight will always be superior one on one because he has protection but in the bigger scheme of things a Knight always needed unarmored troops as their eyes and ears. (You could always have the best of both worlds as well. Only wear armor on the important bits )
It depends on the situation and circomstances. The Monty Python scene in Life of Brian, where two gladators are to fight, one totally unarmoured, and the other one in some armor, where the unarmoured starts running untill the armordude dies of heartattack pops to mind. If I were going up against a knight in full armor in a boxing arena, I would have a longsword and a dagger, and I would have some armor, at least. I think this would be my best option, to enter into halfswording, pretty much like we see in the movie, as I have trained quite a bit on it, have some experience with wresteling, arm locks and fighting with those weapons I like your and Shadow Ronin's comparison with a tank; a plated knight standing in a market watching for troubblemakers is far more vulnerable to 5-10 peassants with cudgels and rondelldaggers, overwhelming him, then pinning him to the ground and stab him through the vizer, than one unarmored peassant in a boxing arena; he could have picked pretty much any weapon abailable, and would still be at a loss. Perhaps a cocked heavy crossbow (or an early handgun) would give him a one-shot-chanse, but even those weapons didn't allways put a fully plated knight out of a match. *Actually medieval manuals talks about duels on foot in boxing-ring-sized arenas, where knights/men-at-arms would go at eachother with heavier armor than was usual on the battlefield, and with different weapons. The fiore manuals shows examples of techniques to use in this "sport": http://www.thehaca.com/pdf/Dl27.jpg
earlyer i used taked about football padding...while not the same as steel armor...there are certain similarites....... 1. yes it slows you down.....but not increadibly so 2. what you are doing dictates how much you where...at least at the pro level......running backs where everything cause they take a pounding, whe d backs where the least just helmet and solder pads,,,cause with out speed ther toaste. and they do the hitting and rarely get hit. QB small soulder pads...cause they dont hit and need arm flexability and huge rib gaurds,,,cause they take shots there. but the main thing is.....sure they slow you down but if you played one side with pads the other without.......the non pad side would be carried out on strechers by the end of the game 3.
