And please understand that the LAG TIME is the only reason there was a last post. I hadn't even seen your attempt to tone it down until AFTER I hit "send."
Please, if you feel it necessary or helpful, delete it.
Apparently some of the misunderstanding comes from a lag time between posts from far sides of the world--I write a post, I send it, it posts AFTER your reply to the last post, you think I'm not responding to your questions, etc etc etc. So here, without hyperbole: You responded to Cartier with vocif...
As this discussion becomes heated, I should add one thing. Understand that what I'm about to say, in and of itself, doesn't prove anything; the pluraal of anecdote, as I've been told many times, is not "data." Also understand that I guess some of you at ARMA might have similar experience--...
The assumption that the ringen practitioner has the same amount of training under his belt as the MMA practicioner does change matters. But not completely. We're still speculating, on a situation that has not been put to the test. In that case, assuming the superiority of the MMA fighter may indeed ...
With all due respect, I have to come to Cartier's defense; it is inflated to think that ringen is somehow superior because it' supposed to involve "killing" for a number of reasons--but chief among them is that it is MUCH harder to kill with unarmed techniques than the vast majority of peo...
This is just a hypothesis, but maybe the Russians et al simply were closer in proximity to areas where larger-scale herding was the economy. The more leather is available, and the less it has to travel, perhaps the cheaper it was. (Anyone actually know the relatively price of leather, cloth and stee...
Ha! I'm an idiot! (And possibly insane, for responding to my own post. <img src="/forum/images/icons/crazy.gif" alt="" /> ) Anyway, as a historian friend who's better at minituae pointed out to me--leather was expensive in most places in the Middle Ages and Renaissance! (My jaw d...
No surprise--it's heavily dependent of the thickness of leather you start with. (I had the opportunity to be a science teacher at charter high schools that either were for American Indians or had a heavy population of them for a number of years. Guess what we made and tested a lot? ;-)) But yeah, if...
Say, what evidence (if any) is there for hardened leather being used, especially in round shields?
Hardened leather certainly was common in European armor at times; and round, hardened leather bison-hide shields used by Plains Indians were often very, very good protection--and quite light.
Just an aside, but I've found it extremely easy to make what Oakeshott described as a "pennyplate coat" with large washers, equally available from Home Depot, etc.
But let's also not forget a fact that's one of my pet peeves when it comes to firearms ballistics: Kinetic Energy is not what we should be concerning ourselves over with inelastic collisions. (I know, I know, the ammo makers still insist on putting it in all their tables ... ) A big problem--which s...
