Why did the Romans had no long-swords despite their advanced metallurgy?
I was reading up on the history of long-swords and came across the factoid that the Chinese during the Han-Dynasty (around 200BC to 200AD) already had not only long-swords, but actual ~140cm large twohanders to cleave through cavalry and stuff.
All the while, Rome literally relied on spears and small little pokey Gladii in the dimensons of around 30 to 40 centimeters blade length.
Other urls found in this thread:
Spears were the king of warfare until the advent of firearms.
A post died for this question.
the romans fought as heavy infantry. meaning they had gigantic fucking shields. A longsword is impractical to use with a shield. Longswords are useless for heavy infantry.
Romans didnt have any Xiongnu/Proto-Huns as their worst enemies to fight against.
Romans usually fought either each other in civil wars or badly equipped light infantry like the barbarians. Heavy infantry with shields and spears were ideal to deal with those.
Han-China, on the other hand, had to fight against a well-organized quasi-empire of semi-nomadic horseback warriors, who used both light and heavy cavalry. These forces would have run circles around shield-walls and fucked them up with constant arrow fire.
A less rigid formation of heavily armored footsoldiers using long blades was ideal against such threats when adequately supported.
Have you seriously never heard of the Spatha? Oh, that's right, you're a fucking retard.
They had long swords.
CTRL-F Spatha
>zero results
You kids need to learn your Roman history.
its just a single handed long-sword and not an actual two-handed sword.
It wasnt any longer than the later medieval arming swords.
Yes, there are also things called shields.
Pic related shows a Han-era two-handed "horse-cleaver" above the other blades. Its blade was 146cm long.
The roman senate banned advanced assault swords with extended capacities.
As has been pointed out, such a weapon might not have fit Roman doctrine very well.
On the other hand, I'm also not so sure about the Roman metallurgy being all that either. From what I've seen (mostly "The Sword and the Crucible" by Alan Williams) it seems that the core of Roman metallurgy was to have the Celts of Noricum do it, and while those did a good a job of it there doesn't seem to be a lot more to it than that.
As a small detail, the gladius is probably far more likely to have half a meter of blade than a foot of it.
Roman didn't have very good spears either while China had the naginata and other good 6 foot plus infantry spears used in close formations.
kek
long swords are fucking retarded and useless against a spear
That's a nice Gladius
Was this the proto birth of the Nippon samurai?
>Google Spatha
>They mostly used the shorter swords due to their chosen doctrine for how they implemented their armies.
Faggots thinking Jow Forums is only about guns
Well, the initially straight Zhanmadao curved and eventually became the Odachi, so yeah.
And the concept of a heavy swordsman was probably a thing around all asian empires.
They fought the Parthians, who were cav and cav archer heavy.
This is what I was going to say but this is based off celtic swords and was mostly only used by cavalry (basically the richest people that wanted to play at war and were never very notable in most of their history in terms of effectiveness)
The mongols mostly dealt with sieges in China. A lot of the mongols actual tactics against standing armies were in Russia and horse back lancers were the most instrumental part in their strategy.
They often lost against other archer heavy armies around the same time period.
Heavily armored soldiers tended to flee since if you could afford heavy armor then you could afford a horse. like this guy said horse archers massacred roman armies quite bad. They had to wait till they got a general going back to greek tactics of using light skirmishers like slingers in a combined arms approach before they ever started having any sort of military competency again.
>Romans usually fought either each other in civil wars or badly equipped light infantry like the barbarians
They took on any civilisation around the mediterrean.
>That blade
Neat. It's like a non-polearm version of the Ji.
>they had to wait till they got a general going back to greek tactics of using light skirmishers like slingers in a combined arms approach before they ever started having any sort of military competency again.
actually, watching how the Han fought against the Xiongnu back then, I wonder why the Romans didnt use chariots against light cavalry archers. It seems to work for the Han. Especially with their crossbows that outranges the horsebows of the Xiongnu. Similiarily, a foot-archer longbow employed on a chariot would also be able to outrange the short bows of riders.
>cant have enough hooks
>infantry spears used in close formations
Lets check back in with the Greeks to see how well that worked against Rome.
What? Where was that I didn't see that. It depends on the time frame. Badly equiped romans were used as shock troops, and equipment was based off of what an individual could afford. Then it was further divided off poor to rich in formation. Sort of like shock troops>1st line>2nd line>triarii>cavalry in terms of wealth.
The romans were really good at logistics and replacing armies they lost. Their tactics and strategy often almost always ended in complete disaster or heavy losses usually even when they won. Conscription and replacing dead people quickly along with logistics like traveling quickly and having supply lines is really the only thing that ever kept them afloat.
Romans didn't use chariots because they had fell out of use around the time of alexander the great. The Macedonian infantry was trained to combat chariots with very specific tactics. By the time they had fought the romans the death toll was so high and it was fragmented between a bunch of different experienced military rulers all over the place that the chariot had already fell out of use. Rome and Macedon had mass losses against one another in people fighting it was just a matter of which one could throw more people into the fight. Macedon also had been fragmented and fighting so many civil wars that they were all considered foriegn. It's kind of like the punic wars, the pheonocians were an outcrop of a Macedon ruler rather than completely foreign and different tactics the macedons faced. After the territory was divided up it was mostly among a militant general using similar tactics. Rome really stretched to defeat those places, and others using other tactics really made their entire empire fall apart.
Yeah, and this means that their fighting style was optimized for symmetric enemies using the same sort of organized infantry formations like them, supported by archers and light cavalry auxiliaries (since they had no stirrups back then).
I can see why the Romans had no big ass twohanders, since that wasnt something useful in lots of conventional fighting and actually quite suicidal if we see how the German Landsknecht-mercenaries employed them. They were called "double-pay mercs" (Doppelsöldner) for a reason - since the risk they were taking by charging into pike-formations wildly swinging with their Zweihänders was extraordinary.
The Ji was actually more a cavalry weapon than an infantry weapon historically.
>Why did the Romans had no long-swords despite their advanced metallurgy?
they didnt have advanced metallurgy.
the Romans pretty much had iron working and little more and were fortunate enough to be really good at logistics, which enabled them to take regions like iberia, and later on, with the tech from there, the central/west european areas of the germanic celts particularly passau/noricum region, who were producing technologically superior steels than the Romans were.
The Noric steels from modern-day Austria were able to make blades in the 1metre overall length range, first their own, then later on for the romans in the form of cavalry spathae, and that was pretty much the limitation of the technologies there until about the 1100s or so, at which point development of new waterwheel technologies allowed greater heat output enabling the development of more homogeneous steel construction methods.
So, the meme that most of their Gladii being made of Bronze is real?
What a bummer.
A lot of the logistics were private. Merchants would bring stuff and sell it to the soldiers themselves. Kinda like a Tim Hortons at a CF base.
I love this guy's historical art.
Really want him to draw an entire artbook about historical armor of western and eastern armies. Would throw money at it.
Roman optomization was historic land mark events like the Marian reforms. They couldn't handle slave revolts, and even just regular people were constantly fighting or throwing protests to lead to reforms. A typical army for them was usually one really rich guy playing in politics would try to raise an army of supporters, they'd buy what they could. They'd get organized for infantry, and cavalry was almost non-existent they were too busy with slave revolts or farming.
Romans were infantry heavy because they couldn't afford infantry to one specific standard, let alone anything better. I can reference a lot of this stuff a little bit more specifically but a broad sort of overview. The romans were basically just as big of a mob as anyone else, their socio-economic mobility decided how big of an army they could build (kind of like if a modern politician wanted to turn a regular person into infantry cannon fodder) and they'd organize it that way too. Meritocracy didn't exist there. It was heredity and money that decided most of it.
Exactly.
They did. The spatha was used by cavalry. The gladius was cheap and easy to make, and suited to the legions' style of combat, which was heavy shock infantry. Roman maniples would initiate battle by hurling pila, a type of javelin with a weighted, soft iron shaft, that was designed to pierce an enemy shield and then bend under its own weight, with the intent of making the shield clumsy and useless. Two pila were thrown, one in a high arc and one flat, in rapid succession, so that they impacted the enemy line at the same time, decreasing the likelihood of both being blocked as they came from different angles. This was done as the maniples jogged in close formation towards the enemy line, at a range of about 40 feet. As soon as the second pila was hurled, the legionnaires would draw their gladii and charge, impacting the line four or five seconds after the pila struck. The large scutum shield and short gladius were effective against spear and pike phalanx formations, as they allowed stabs to be fended off until the legionnaires were inside the effective range of the spears. A longer sword would not have been as handy in such tight quarters as the legions preferred to fight. Longer blades were used by cavalry, amd some auxiliary infantry, but not by the legions until late antiquity/Byzantine era.
You know what would be really interesting, if arrows in tapestries were javalins like the type of tactics you mentioned, that or actual arrows. Barrow mounds would have rich people with javalins. It's hard to believe hundreds of years later only the richest person was burried with those things unless it was symbolic of them funding people that used them as a regular tactic. It's very weird to look at a tomb and think this guy had javalins and one guy giving commands not in the battle was throwing those fucking things around and making any sort of difference as if they were a sniper with that stuff.
You fucking retard this is the best thread to hit the board in months.
The bigger fucking question would be why the Romans never knew anything of combined arms tactics.
Yeah, that turtle shell formation is cool and all, but a dedicated war-band of Han crossbow archers, supported by greatshield wielders, javelin skirmishers, pikemen and dagger-axe/halbert-warriors would totally rekt them.
Fuck off
Atlatl, maybe?
But they did. These roles were filled by the auxilia. Field artillery, slingers, skirmishers, light and heavy cavalry, horse archers, slavering war dogs, burning pigs, naked berserkers, hoplite phalanxes. The Roman empire fielded nearly every type of soldier and warrior imaginable, drafted from every corner of an empire that spanned three continents. The legions themselves were but a small, elite part of the army. It was very typical for each legion of 1,000 legionnaires to be supported by 4-6,000 auxilia tailored to the specific needs of the current campaign.
Historical art with cute girls is severely under-appreciated.
Because they had a giant ass shield on their other arm. Longswords aren’t really ideal with a giant shield as well.
Except they did, which is one of the reasons why they tended to do so well in combat. Have you never heard of the auxiliaries? They had just about every type of person you could have back then.
yeah, fellow wops and a heavily depleted Greek world. Up until the 1500's, maybe even 1600's, a contemporary Chinese unified army is going dwarf anything the Europeans can put together in terms of both manpower and capability.
The javelin had symbolic meaning and cult significance as well as being a weapon. In Celtic traditions, it is symbolic of Camilus, a war deity, and in Greco-Roman tradition it represents the lightning bolt of Zeus/Jupiter. The connotation of the javelin with power continued well into the Christian era.
of course, how can an europe that barely has 20 million people alltogether compete with an empire that wages wars with a few hundred thousand troops at the time.
CHINA STRONK wasn't a meme back in da dayz, boi.
Of course zues or jupiter casting it has a symbolic meaning, it's like Jacob taking responsibility for slaughtering people in a genocide that were circumcised.
It's still described in a generic term like putting them to the sword.It's not like they all got killed by swords literally.
The romans fought the Parthians who had loads of horsemen
Roman Pilum were excellent since they had good penetration power and the metal shaft would bend on impact making them useless for the enemy to use against them as was often the case with javelins
you know what happened the first time the Romans went in, right? It wasn't pretty.
That sounds like propaganda to get some dumb fuck to charge a shield line.
That's because Crassus was a massive idiot
Also Romans HATED scouting which is also really dumb
Or maybe they just couldn't afford to hire anyone on horse back to risk scouting. They never sent cavalry in before infantry. That would have been impossible for most people to get any of them to send well off people ahead of others. A person that spent a fortune on an infantry was lucky to get the cavalry to come along with them. They would have had to beg and plead for them to do anything at all.
kek
Probably a difference in tactics user. Romans would toss javelins with lead shafts to break an enemy shield wall, then close in behind their intact shield wall and use a gladius to stab, not slash.
Their cultural and military tactics rocked against the gauls in Europe and around the mediterranian. The tactics started to fall apart in the face of Steppe-people-esque light cavalry, but the Chinese have no place to talk here. All close-in infantry is pretty ineffective against mounted archers.
The biggest advantages of the Roman Legions were its engineering and logistics.
Don't know what the fuck you'd use long ass swords for in combat. Take fuckin forever to train with. Easterners are all about flashy, no practicality shit when it comes to their warefare. That's why established, technologically advanced dynasties in China continually get smash by barbaraians dressed in rotting rat-leather tunics.
A typical legion provided approximately 3 feet of space between soldiers in formation during combat, and that's at maximum. Apart from all the other correct answers about how bighuge swords being swung around wasn't how they fought, longer swords wouldn't have had room to swing without slapchopping each other.
It isn't that long swords weren't known to Romans, or couldn't be constructed by them, it's that they weren't useful as a tool for legions.
>but the Chinese have no place to talk here.
you're a dumbass.
The context in which their battles happened didn't necessitate them, in later centuries they started making them once they were needed.
>Easterners are all about flashy, no practicality shit
I think everyone is pretty guilty of that at some point in time. Look at the fucking Swiss Guard.
I think you only have seen memes so far.
Chinese warfare is incredibly pragmatic to the point of being ugly and utilitarian, stressing cheapness of equipment and ease of training over european flashy armor designs. Literally bamboo poles and rattan shields have proven to be most effective against other armies time after time again.
The fact that advanced chinese dynasties have fallen to barbarian invaders has more to do with internal decay through centuries of peace and not on actual military inferiority. And in lots of cases, barbarians won because internal traitor factions have allied with them. The Xiongnu, who will become the Huns and destroy the West Roman Empire singlehandedly, have been literally crushed and chased to Europe by the Han.
Bamboo poles are like 80% spears. You cut a point, heat it in the fire and you have something that can kill easily from a long reach.
>tfw you will never be a chinese warrior clad in an iron pagoda/metal tent.
And its funny how these lammellar armor style has survived the ages and eventually became modern body-armor and IED suits, while the rigid plate truly became obsolete.
>china
>naginata
yo nigga let me put it this way. Whatever the Nips had, the Chinks had before. You get me, nigga?
tactics they used
What the hell are you on about, most modern military armour is hard plate, one on the front one on the back.
it's probably already been said
they had groups of a certain number of people with a spear, a shield, and a gladius
the gladius at one point in time was somewhat curved towards the tip and has more weight in the tip
basically it's like an axe and a sword in one
so it's very good at chopping people apart
so it was throw the spears first if possible, shields up and spears then close in, then hack them apart with the gladius at the end
but look it up on wiki wtf I just remember having roman history classes ages ago
A shitty poor excuse for a prototype?
Swords are very much three dimensional objects. The thickness can and frequently does vary a lot both in a single blade and between different blades. As such the correlation between changes in width and mass distribution, or width and overall mass, is decidedly weak. A wide blade used for fighting can't be very thick since that'd make it awfully heavy, that's probably about as much as we can say with some degree of certainty.
Thus a more or less leaf-blade styled blade, like the early gladius or a lot of the bronze age swords, doesn't really point to a tip-heavy design. What the design does suggest is a cut-n-thrust approach as it combines decent width at the cutting part with a reasonably pointy tip. There's certainly no need to widen the blade either in order to shift the centre of mass forward as much as anyone would ever want on a sword either as "normal" sword balance demands that you significantly reduce the width and/or thickness from hilt to tip. The Chinese dao here is the most tip-heavy sword I've handled and has its centre of mass right about in the middle between tip and pommel.
Then there's the "axe like sword". This seems to be something people really think should exist, but it bounces around a lot as reality isn't to keen on delivering. We go from knightly swords being heavy clunkers to be wielded by strength alone, to the falchion being a marriage between axe and sword, and then on to others like the falcata when that didn't work out either. Somewhat refreshing to see it slapped onto the gladius I guess, instead of the usual opposite of naming it a more or less pure thrusting sword. The Conyers falchion can be a good illustration both here and regarding the three dimensional nature, as its great width near the tip fails to make it heavy, tip-heavy, or otherwise axe-like due to the widened portion also being very thin and thus not containing all that much mass all said and done.
>Why did the Romans had no long-swords despite their advanced metallurgy?
Contrary to popular belief, the Roman ferro-metalurgy was not that advanced and it only got a little better once the conquered the Celts, especially Norricum and their massive ore deposits.
Romans were simply not able to make blades longer than 70-90cm and that was at peak performance.
Short reminder, the Spatha is a celtic weapon used by the Romans only later in the empire, plus the blade length is 70-90cm max, thats a sword, it ain't exactly a long sword.
The Romans did not fight in a tight formation. They fought in open order.
>Chinese warfare is incredibly pragmatic to the point of being ugly and utilitarian, stressing cheapness of equipment and ease of training over european flashy armor designs. Literally bamboo poles and rattan shields have proven to be most effective against other armies time after time again.
That's Qi Jiguang's anti-piracy army.
Qi Jiguang's army is like that because most of the Ming Dynasty's actual army is up North hurling Mongols and assorted Nomads back.
Qi Jiguang was given the job of supporting Yu Dayou in a problem deemed secondary by the Ming Throne: 1560s pirate raids in coastal China. Qi was given a small budget and a goodluck pat.
What he did with that budget was impressive. He raised soldiers from the militias of nearby rural areas. Famously the Shaolin Monks and the Yiwu County miners who have fought off rival peasant groups who tried to poach in their mines. He took what peasants already had - mainly swords, spears, and the Langxian (a bamboo area denial weapon like a handheld barbed wire originally meant for predator control. Hence the name)- and went to work. He correctly surmised that a big roving army wasn't needed in a war spread out across Coastal China. So he focused on small unit tactics and spread his army out in order to counter pirate raids. But he focused on small unit tactics in a way that the formations could come together for large scale battles seamlessly.
Case in point: the Mandarin Duck Squads meant for small unit combat defending villages in groups of 11 would, in field battles, organize under their overall regiment of 900, of roughly 88 Mandarin Duck Squads.
Yeah, a small plate insert, but the carrier and the vest is more like chink brigantine or scale coat, as in being flexible.
The Huns did not destroy Western Rome. The Romans survived the invasion and actually managed to inflict some big defeats, such as the battle of the Catalaunian plains, upon Attila.
Also by the very same standard you lay upon China, the only reason the Huns were so successful was due to the internal decay in Rome.
Chinese specifically? Why not any other lamellar, scale or brigandine armor? Oh right, you don't know about them, because you basically don't know shit about armor. You just happened to see a pic of some Chinese lamellar somewhere and that's it.
It takes more than flexibility to be like a suit of armor. Actually being armor is a good start, the t-shirt I'm wearing is pretty flexible, bu it isn't much like brigandine for that. The plate carrier likewise isn't armor any more than the straps and points used to hold old armor in place is armor, because that's all it does. It holds the plate that protects you in place. If you want modern stuff similar to brigandine then Dragon Scale is your thing, and a bullet proof kevlar vest is pretty much just straight up a short, sleeveless gambesson.
Does this thing look like a 14th century full plate armor to you? No.
It is fair to say that the brigantine or scale coat of armor design has survived the time while the rigid plate cuirass hasnt.
compared to lamellar coats.
why do you say 'fortunate enough to be good at logistics' as if to discount the romans' achievements a la guns germs and steel?
>plus the blade length is 70-90cm max, thats a sword, it ain't exactly a long sword.
Longer than a typical Japanese two handed sword ...
>All the while, Rome literally relied on spears and small little pokey Gladii in the dimensons of around 30 to 40 centimeters blade length.
You're missing the most important part of what's held in the hands of roman infantry.
... Doesn't work well with a two-handed sword.
14th century full plate... Well then.
It seems you're going off of very basic visual things. You see fabric, so you think soft, and so it has to be like the flexible stuff right? That the construction underneath that fabric is utterly different isn't considered or even really known. Now there's certainly plenty of differences between 15th-16th century full plate and modern plate armor, but without anyone having claimed they were the same that remains a straw man. The mdoern stuff is plate armor because that's what it is, large and rigid plates. Apart from Dragonskin it isn't scale/lamellar, because that's bunch of small plates that together make up larger and somewhat flexible sheets.
Funny how that goes, the iron-fisted control freak guy in charge bans swords with blades longer than 71cm, and suddenly swords with blades longer than 71cm are quite rare.
Actually both groups had quite sophisticated technology relative to the time. Arms and armor equipment was quite high quality it was just not always widely distributed.
They simply didn't follow that route.
Their formations and methods of combat proved adaptable enough, so they never felt much need to introduce new stuff. Of course, later legions were smaller and equipment changed a bit, but nothing major.
Qi Jiguang is pretty badass. I have watched that one movie that portrayed his and his japanese adversary's exploits pretty well. I wonder if during the later Korean War against Hideyoshi the Mandarin Duck has been modified and made to work against regular Japanese Samurai and Ashigaru troops... I can imagine that they really needed more of those large shields to defend against their muskets.
>like this guy said horse archers massacred roman armies quite bad. They had to wait till they got a general going back to greek tactics of using light skirmishers like slingers in a combined arms approach before they ever started having any sort of military competency again.
They only really lost one battle and that was due to a failure in strategy, the Romans often did beat horse archers and cataphracts. Trajan conquered as far as the Persian gulf.
Romans also created their own heavy cavalry corps, the Equite Cataphractarii Clibinari('oven bearers' due to the weight and heat of the armor under the sun) and the Auxiliary Alae units that often fought as local horse archers did, like the Sarmatians.
Gladius had several iterations historically and the construction method and quality was pretty diverse.
The earliest models were the Hispaniensis which were also the longest, they were adopted from the celtic tribes of Iberia that fought along with Hannibal during his invasion of Italy, replacing the Greek-style Xiphos and other Etruscan sword patterns.
Afterwards the Gladius got shorter and thinner, with the Meinz, Fulham and finally the Pompeii being found at later periods. We can estimate that the Romans found that they really didn't need longer or broader swords, and the chopping capability became less relevant because they began facing more heavily armored enemies. The Pompeii with it's thin blade evolved into the Spatha by getting longer and longer though.
>Romans usually fought either each other in civil wars or badly equipped light infantry like the barbarians. Heavy infantry with shields and spears were ideal to deal with those.
No you idiot, the Romans fought enemies with excellent and even superior gear all the time, especially the "barbarians". Celts and Germans were literally the inventors of Mail armor, they always had longer swords and helmets just like the Romans, and by the time of the migrations the Goth, Vandals, Suebi, Marcommani, etc all had gear that could be arguably superior to a Roman legionary. On the other hand Parthians and later Sassanids were ridiculously well armored with Cataphracts being covered head to toe in sheets of articulated armor.
With time, Swords became less relevant for the Romans because they were fighting against so much quality armor.
Sounds like you know fuck all about history. The Pilum was designed to be able to pierce shields and cuirass as well as travel through a shield far enough that it would hurt the wearer. It would also become impossible to easily or quickly remove this type of thrown spear and so now your opponent has no shield and may be gravely injured as well. There also was modifications made to cause the thinner shaft to bend on impact so it would be unlikely to be used again by the enemy.
>hat? Where was that I didn't see that. It depends on the time frame. Badly equiped romans were used as shock troops, and equipment was based off of what an individual could afford. Then it was further divided off poor to rich in formation. Sort of like shock troops>1st line>2nd line>triarii>cavalry in terms of wealth.
This was only up until the Marian reforms, afterwards the legion was uniform in composition, with equal training, gear and organization, only supported by a variety of Auxilia, Foederati and Alae. The Roman legion as pop culture knows it comes from the professional army seen during the first and second centuries AD and that was the Marian legion, which was the first volunteer, professional army in the world.
the fuck are you talking about? the Roman military early on was the epitome of meritocracy because military ranks were also political ranks, and anyone with ambition and the guts to do it could get far simply by being good at war.
The reasons for the Marian reform are very specific, after the disaster of Arausio there was a shortage of fighting men that hadn't been committed to the front already, and General Gaius Marius decided to do away with the property and wealth requirements to allow any of the Capite Censi(the poor, landless masses of Rome) to be recruited, equipped at his own expense and ordered to serve for 16 years with the promise of free land and retirement money at the end.
The reason why there were so few land-owning Romans at that point was because after the Punic war and the insanely high death toll and deployment abroad, a lot of the soldiers either came back to their farms ruined and infertile or didn't come back at all. Wealthy Romans began buying up land from the destitute soldiers who had no other choice and formed large states staffed by an influx of slaves instead of employing Romans, leaving the impoverished ex-middle class to be paupers in the city streets. This brought upon the first civil war.
not really that different from a 16th century half-suit of armor either
well, one is a rigid plate and the other is a flexible armor.
The difference is how it looks like when not worn: The plate armor stands by itself, while those scale/brigantine suits are as modular as modern IOTV and plate carriers, with each individual part being strapped to the body individually.
During the Imjin War, the Ming Dynasty had a sizable musket force and an even larger artillery park (Nips had a microscopic amount of artillery). But the first troops who got a crack at the Japs were the Northern Garrison. Who were primarily cavalrymen due to decades of fighting Mongs. They shat on Japanese cavalry but not much else and were shit infantrymen. Good infantrymen only started to show up when some of the Southern forces showed up in Korea.
Also by that point Qi Jiguang's playbook has been adopted with musketry in mind.
>The difference is how it looks like when not worn: The plate armor stands by itself,
but that's wrong, the plate armor is fitted to the wearers' body at each part. They only look like one piece because they've been fastened to a dolly for display purposes. Do you think the arms are just hanging off the top like that?
>while those scale/brigantine suits are as modular as modern IOTV and plate carriers, with each individual part being strapped to the body individually.
yes, like actual plate armor. After the 14th century it wasn't all that common for everyone to have a full suit of armor either, many, i'd wager most soldiers got around with a breast plate only. The full sets needed to be custom made .
in gif format
You kid need to learn your ctrl f