Scale Armor & Accuracy

[Dan Howard]

The mail test would need to be replicated using something resembling Roman mail. There is a whole list of reasons why commercially available mail is unsuitable for weapons tests. Williams' experiments are the only ones published to date with useful data for mail. Did the squamata and segmentata use plates of similar thickness? If the segmentata was 1mm and the scale 0.3mm then the results wouldn't be much of a surprise. I would love to test reconstructions of the three armour types using variants that all have a similar weight. It is easy to make scale and mail armour completely arrow-proof but they would be heavier than most variants worn on the battlefield.