One more piece of Roman Auxillary Trooper
Norman Knights maile coif study - they put on a quilted padded cotton arming cap before wearing the coif.
Subsequently with better metallurgy technology the medieval armourers were able to fashion bigger plates and the Great Helm was born. Full faced protection comes at a price - no peripheral vision.
I've been doing some reading on the Terracotta Warriors too - what intruiged me was really their armour. Instead of simply being overlapped in sequence like Lamellar armour, the Qin era plates were arranged in a way that would have less of a weakness if struck directly from the front.
What's also interesting was the plated helmet that was found in a separate site. That goes to show the Qin soldiers did not go to war bare headed. The Terracotta Warriors in the mausoleum were posed in parade dress rather than full battle dress.
If you compare the Qin bodyarmour to the modern infantryman....
...the design seems timeless.
Of course our anatomy hasn't changed at all since modern humans came about, but bodyarmour has gone through a great amount of changes via available technology and a compromise between mobility and protection. So its kinda interesting we've come full circle. If you look at the internal plate structures of today's bodyarmour - with front and back plates + optional side plates, its very close in layout to the Persian Chahar-Ainé. Ideas remain the same - technology and materials change....but war....war never changes. (October can't come soon enough)
