Armor, muskets and French Army museum

takerma

Banned
I went on a vacation to France in last few weeks and obviously could not stop myself from spending full day wondering around French Army museum(did not get past Prussian war just too much awesome stuff to see)

People often think that armour just magically became useless as gunpowder handheld weapons appeared. Museum contains many examples showing otherwise. There are many suits of armour with multiple indents from musket balls. The highest I counted was 5, I don't know if these were inflicted in one engagement or in multiple battles. But whoever wore it definitely got his money worth. There is one helmet on display with a clean musket ball penetration through the visor

In general highly recommended place to visit, absurd amount of medieval (early, middle late) weapons(rapiers.. they have A LOT of rapiers, with every design imaginable), armour, arquebuses(revolver like muskets!), pistols, canons, whatever you want its there.
 
Read this on wikipedia that full armor suits or breast plates could stop bullets fired from the early low velocity firearms if there was a modest distance. So you only had to worry at close range. Generals and princely commanders actually wore full armor suits right up until the early 1700s.

The biggest problem for armoring infantry soldiers was weight. Soldiers on both sides of the Civil War would purchase iron and steel vests from peddlers (if they could afford them) but the effectiveness of the vests depended on the quality. Not to mention there was a stigma of being cowards towards those who wore them
 
Military changes due to gunpowder are still regularly misunderstood : for exemple, it's often said that gunpowder made castles and fortifications unsustainable because too vulnerable to cannons.

But it's quite wrong : not only early gunpowder was fantastically uneffective against walls (up to the XVth century, gunpowder was essentially a pshycological weapon), but when mettalurgy progressed you had an adaptation to gunpowder artillery. Larger walls, both to absorb impacts and to host cannons on them for exemple.

What happened is that these changes were really expensive, and that these plus the maintain of a large enough artillery required ressources that only great princes could afford at this point, either kings of great feudal princes (for the French exemple, it meant the king and dukes of Burgundy and Brittany, roughly speaking)

As for personal armours, it generally went both ways.
The first being a lighter armour for most uses : it became obsolete to try protecting all possible gaps and protective weaknesses as the Late Medieval armour attempted. Eventually it went for the essential with new models, more light and more flexible, up to being more of an (effective) deflecting breastplate up to the XVIIth century.

Heavy cavalry, however, kept older models longer, as it was stil going for the shock tactic and pursuing. Mostly the same tactics, while evoluting, that Late Medieval calavry (as in assisted by a growingly important light cavalry). Maximilian armour is a good exemple of the difference in protection. (While it often devolved in parade armour for what mattered great princes).
 
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TinyTartar

Banned
The simple answer is that armor did not become obsolete. It just became a matter of resource allocation.

Heavy armor was really expensive, and while it got really good by the time of gunpowder, and could protect from bullets, it became more efficient to come up with different styles of armor instead.

The 30 Years War still saw heavy armor being used to good effect. Shock cavalry went away for a while in favor of the Caracole, but made a reemergence with the Cuirassier, who used armor that specifically protected the chest and head but did not try to cover the entire body. Pikemen of the era also had something similar, with Spanish Tercios wearing a steel breastplate and steel morion that could protect them, but they would not do much for other parts of the body because it was cost effective to do it that way.

The truth of the matter is that heavily armored shock lance cavalry was not made obsolete by the Battle of Pavia, and was still a unit to fear for a long time, but its usage was not cost effective anymore, and while I'd say its battlefield use remained relevant probably up until the bayonet was developed, which coincided with flintlock muskets that COULD penetrate most kinds of armor (wheellock muskets were not as effective and shots would dent or bounce off frequently) as well as making it so more guns could be brought to bear as the pike was replaced, the larger scale of warfare at the time made it less efficient to use than to pay for and outfit a squad of Pikemen.
 
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