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[AceSV]

I'm a little confused by the armor system.  I'd like to produce an armor that is between plate armor and chain armor, called lamellar armor.  If you want to be super technical, armors like this can be defined as scale armor, laminar armor, splint armor, and so on, but I usually think of any armor made of multiple small plates as a variation of lamellar. 

Here are some pictures of lamellar armor:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Across time, armors like these were made of many ingenious materials, metal, leather, paper, wood, shell, bone, ivory, horn, seed husk, stone.  This is the main reason I'm interested in putting it into Dwarf Fortress. 

So, is it possible to make lamellar armor that is between chain and plate in its hardness/flexibility level?  I've seen a few examples that produce a specific material for different grades of chain, but that wouldn't be ideal for making it out of multiple materials.  If it is not possible, back-up idea is that "lamellar" is used exclusively for non-metal armors. 

Secondly, I'm open to any ideas on streamlining the reactions for making lamellar out of multiple materials.  I'm also curious about how to accomplish some of the more exotic materials.  Mythbusters tested paper armor and found it to be "as good as steel" in certain applications, but I doubt that is how it would work in DF without some fiddling.  Seed husk armor also strikes me as interesting, it would be fun to farm Rock Nuts to protect your militia from wild animals, but I don't know off-hand if DF has sufficient material set up for that. 

[Eric Blank]

I'd just use an armor level of 2 (if it's made of metal it will automatically be considered a 3 when you add the METAL_ARMOR_LEVELS token.) The armor system isn't very good for situations like this. I would suggest giving it less coverage, which would make it less protective overall than a breastplate when made of the same materials, but lamellar should really cover quite a bit.

Also note that the vanilla breastplate isn't like full plate armor you'd see on knights of the late renaissance/middle ages. It's actually just a breastplate, more like was produced centuries earlier, something akin to what's depicted in your second picture, but a solid metal sheet instead of plates. You can mod in full-coverage plate armor too though.

I think if you give it SOFT, HARD, METAL, BARRED, SCALED and LEATHER it can be made of cloth, bone, leather, or metal, so after that all you'd need special reactions for are things like wood (if you give the civ the wood armor token they'll spawn with all their armor made of wood, which doesnt sound like what you're looking for.) paper, ivory, plants/seeds and maybe stone.

[Grimlocke]

You may have to modify the materials you use for paper armor and such. That and probably the leather and bone ones as well are kind to be pretty close to useless with the standard material properties.

Alternately, you can make a separate item entry with more coverage for the organic armors.

[Halnoth]

You are welcome to check out the reactions and materials in my mod for inspiration.