Got a Real World Weapons or Armour Question? Mk XII

[Brother Oni]

Interesting. That's quite a temperature raise in the metal compared to what it does to flesh (unsurprisingly), but the thick padding beneath combined with heat capacity of sweat is probably going to help. Also, the padding won't conduct heat anywhere near as quickly as the metal - so it will spread over a much wider area before it sinks through the cloth.

You're still talking about 100+ C metal only a couple of clothing layers from the skin. The padding isn't going to help that much.

The temperature rise isn't that much though - 35C (to get from 37 to 72) compared to 81 (25C to 106C).

What would be interesting would be to vary the contact area (currently 40.4kJ of propane would occupy ~3.6L so it's a fairly hefty ball of fire) as that would lower the energy requirement for harm and hence the plate may afford more protection (thermal conductivity of the armour would play a more important part).

I was thinking mostly about D&D, and I guess most computer game systems, where various sources of magical damage cause serious injury but are not guaranteed to be lethal. In those situations I would expect good armour to provide serious protection against many such threats. In systems where magic tends to be overkill (or would be if not for superhuman toughness, which I guess applies for high-level D&D too), armour can't be expected to do as much.

While damage to human tissue with cold isn't going to have too different an energy requirement to heat (going from 37C to 0C in comparison to up to 72C), the amount of protection afford by steel is going to be significantly less: while iron melts at 1538C, it goes brittle at only about -29C.

Comparison to D&D is going to be tricky - I believe spending a round (10 seconds) in a medium campfire only inflicts 1d6 damage or 2d6 if it's been burning for a couple hours.

1kg of moderately dry wood generates 4kW for an hour and I'd say a decent sized camp fire is about 5kg of wood.
This would give an energy output of 20kW or 200kJ to the idiot standing in the fire, which equates to 2d6 damage.

I was also thinking about Gothic-style plate (for complete specificity), but other types of armour could be equally interesting to investigate.

I assumed 2mm armour earlier, which is fairly comparable to gothic plate. Other armour materials can be worked out by looking at their respective specific heat capacity - for a solid piece of armour, just assume it's uniform (if you ask me to do mail, I will hurt you).