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Q&A

Indestructible silk: good armor?

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I've been playing with different conceptualizations and types of armor for historical settings, especially armor with magic enchantments or made from weird materials. I was stuck thinking about lightweight protection and remembered that mithril shirt from the Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Rings.

To those who haven't seen or read it, the mithril shirt is described as being stronger than steel but as supple as linen. This latter property confused me when the wearer got stabbed with the force of a battering ram, since the shirt would be fine, but the person wearing it should be suffering massive blunt force trauma and internal bleeding. Heck, with that degree of flexibility, you could even justify the shirt being forced inside the person wearing it.

With that in mind, would a silk shirt or coat that is (for all intents and purposes) indestructible, be useful as martial protection, or would it just be over-designed pajamas? For the purposes of this thought experiment, imagine the wearer of this shirt being struck by an arrow, a knife, a spear, and an ax.

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This post was sourced from https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/122737. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

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