LogFAQs > #971913693

Compsognathus posted...

So any chest plate would needs a couple inches clearance from the chest because people need to breathe and thus chest need room to expand. Also having your plate touching any part of your chest makes it even more susceptible to hammers as now your plate is bent in to your likely broken ribs and your chest can no longer expand to breathe.

So the idea that women would have individual breast cups that their boobs would presumably fit in is completely silly. As a a large concaved plate like a men would have would be more than adequate. Boob would also effectively turn the cleavage into an wedge. One good whack with a weapon and that wedge is now an axehead lined up perfectly on your sternum.

Don't get me wrong there have been breast plates with breasts on them. But they were almost always decorative and put on top of a normal breast plate, not places for boobs to go in. Also they were on nobility who were not actually going to fight. Which is good since said breast would hinder articulation of the arms.

In history most nobility would've been fighting since that's how they legitimized themselves, gained honor and made wealth. The image of nobility sending the poor to fight is a poorly misguided image of older warfare, in fact if you look at history fighting was often a privileged and people wanted to fight. Classical Greek writers wrote that oligarchies were more stable because in a democracy the people often voted to go to war, there's times in Roman history that the citizen militia would force their commanders into battle or even force them to go to war. And the people leading them often fought from the front, the classical Greeks had high casualty rates among their officers because military authority was not valid unless you were willing to prove yourself.

Now there is some armors like the muscle cuirass used by the Greeks and Romans but these armors were used along big protective shields which were the main line of defense in battle, body armor was secondary to the shield in most cases until the advent of plate armor. Some scholars even theorize that when Herodotos describes the Persians as unarmored at Plataea he does so because they lack shields which in the Classical Era was the shield was the hallmark of heavy infantry.