This is how Ardashir would have dressed

[eric_hinkle]

Or something like that anyway. Though he is more of a savaran instead.

Just look at the great photo of a re-creator as a cataphract astride his horse. I can only wonder how much time and money went into that armor

Comments

Re: I wonder how a suit of full-body mail like that would go over someone with a furry pelt...

[eric_hinkle]

You never wear mail next to the skin; it has NO impact protection. You always wear mail over some sort of padded garment to provide the impact protection, and that under-armor garment would prevent any catching in the pelt. (And with the fur providing some padding, you might be able to get away with a thinner undergarment.)

Again, thanks for reminding me of something I should've remembered myself.

The thing I'd worry about is how to armor a Varkanna's long muzzle; the human-style helmet doesn't provide any protection to that vulnerable area. I'd expect broken muzzles to be common among veterans.

Probably so about the broken or scarred muzzles; they don't have insta-heal magic, at least not commonly, but they do have small-scale magics that can make sure that wounds heal without infection or crippling.

And the helmet is something I've long wondered about as well. My ideas have thus far been:

a) Something like a extended/enlarged 'nasal' combined with 'goggles' that extends out over the muzzle, protecting the top while hopefully allowing the wearer to see, possibly with some mail along the sides of the nasal (muzzle-piece?) to help protect the snout, or;

b) Something like an adapted horse's chamfron, or however it's spelled (the armored headpieces real-world cataphracts used to cover their horse's heads with.

If anyone has any other ideas please share them!

And overheating. Humans have some of the widest temperature range of any mammal; with a Varkanna, the pelt would increase the heat buildup from the armor, and the only way to dump that heat without sweating would be by panting. I'd expect to see a lot of heatstroke casualties in heavily-armored battles.

Well, they do have those rank-collars/gorgets I mentioned once with the minor cooling spells on them; and I'm assuming that their creators would have figured out ways around some of these problems -- they had several millennia of genetic engineering under their belts when they made the Varkanna and other beast-lord races of this world, and when youa dd in their being a mostly post-technological society, they knew some things that we wouldn't even be able to guess at.

But I still imagine that most armies would keep back some troops, not just as a reserve, but so when the fighting is over they can take over and allow the guys who've been battling it out for a few hours to either start panting or maybe just have buckets of water dumped over them.

But even so I'm supposing that just about every warrior expects to get nailed at least once by heatstroke in their career. Which is another reason why war-packs bring along youngsters (wolves and humans) who follow close behind their pack when it fights -- when they see someone go down, they ride in and drag them back out (which is apparently something that real-life armored cavalry of the late Iron Age and early Medieval period did).

Thanks for the points.