It’s all about what your armor does with kinetic energy. As you may know if you’ve ever played croquet, kinetic energy can transfer through one solid object into another solid object.
In the case of a weapon hitting a breastplate, the red ball is your armor and the green ball is your body, and what you don’t want is a whole hammer worth of kinetic energy transferring through the armor into your body. A good way to prevent this is by making your breastplate convex instead of concave, so that the force can more easily glance off.
Take these two shapes for instance, and humor me in another metaphor. Say you left these two objects out in the rain for a day. What would you come back to? The concave one would have collected almost 100% of the rain that fell on it, while the convex one would still be a little wet but most of the rain would have slid off of its surface onto the ground. Now imagine that the rain is actually a battleaxe or something else heavy-ended. Do you want your armor to collect all the kinetic energy and transfer it to you, or do you want your armor to make sure that most of the kinetic energy slides off, like the rainwater sliding off onto the ground?
A good breastplate will cause blows to slide off to the sides because it is convex, as shown in this breastplate from Witcher 3 that I drew on to emphasize its shape.
Now, compare that to one of the boobplates from Skyrim, which I also drew on to emphasize its shape.
Now, each individual boob is a convex shape, which means that weapons will slide off them, but unlike the big rounded shape of the Witcher 3 breastplate I showed, which makes the weapons and the kinetic energy they bring with them slide off into empty space at Geralt’s sides, the individual boobs of the boobplate create a little valley in the middle of the chest where the weapons will end up. So the boobs on a boobplate deflect blows off the armor…right back into the armor.
Here’s another graphic to help further visualize the problem, wherein the blue arrows represent the incoming weapon and all the kinetic energy it brings with it:
– mod Sallet
tits armor is historical
What you’ve got there is a “heroic cuirass” or “muscle cuirass”, the kind worm by military commanders who wouldn’t normally see combat on the front line. It’s just for show, not meant to be a significant means of protection.
I’d like to add that not only is there no evidence of the heroic cuirass ever actually being used in battle – but they are an artifact from an era when the mightiest weapon one might by expect to be struck with was a heavy spear with a bronze tip, being wielded one handed. (That’s why it’s got that green discoloration, it’s literally from the Bronze Age, ie before they had iron or steel).
Once steel and stirrups were introduced, the impact that one could experience on the battlefield rose dramatically, because the amount of force a guy on a horse with a steel tipped lance could inflict was dramatically greater than a soldier with a spear in one hand and a shield in the other could ever even hope to inflict on their best day.
So steel armor, became the standard to protect against the guys on the horseback and so soldiers had to start carrying weapons that could hurt people in steel armor (maces, war picks, polearms, etc).
Hence the convex shape and design elements to prevent blows being deflected into bad places became a bigger and bigger focus.
It’s almost like weapons and armor have evolved over time because ancient civilizations didn’t have access to all the knowledge and science we do today…
