Xie Baoshu didn't have armor, but someone brought him armor.

The person who came was Liu Guanshan, who was carrying a set of black armor in his hand, which looked very old. He threw this armor to Xie Baoshu and said, "This armor is for you, I used it before, and it is called Black Dragon Armor." ”

Xie Baoshu took the black dragon armor, which was somewhat like the Mingguang armor.

The origin of the word "Meiguang armor" is said to be related to the round protection of the chest and back. Because most of this round protection is made of metals such as copper and iron, and the polished aurora resembles a mirror. Wearing bright light armor on the battlefield, due to the sun's irradiation, will emit a dazzling "bright light", hence the name.

There are many styles of this kind of armor, and they are different in complexity: some only add two round guards on the front and back on the basis of the crotch, while others are equipped with shoulder pads, knee pads, and complex several shoulder pads. Most of the body armor reaches to the hips, and the waist is tied with a belt.

The most common armor used in the Sui Dynasty was the Liangcrotch and Mingguang. The structure of the two crotch mounds has improved compared with the previous generation, and there have been some small changes in the shape. Generally, the body armor is made of small armor pieces in the shape of fish scales and other shapes, and the length has been extended to the abdomen, replacing the original leather armor skirt. The hem of the body armor is a meniscus-shaped, lotus-shaped nail plate to protect the lower abdomen. These improvements greatly enhance the defense from the waist down. The shape of the Ming Guang Kai is basically the same as that of the Northern and Southern Dynasties, except that the leg skirt has become longer and more ornate.

In the "Tang Liudian Arsenal Order", "there are three out of ten systems of armor: Ming light armor, light armor, fine scale armor, black hammer armor, white cloth armor, soap silk armor, mountain armor, cloth back armor, infantry armor, leather armor, wooden armor, chain armor, and horse armor".

Due to the great imagination and artistic exaggeration of the sculptures of gods and Buddhas in many temples, some people think that "Shanwen Jia" is a pure sculpture art, a fictitious armor configuration, which is of course wrong.

So, what is the real name of the "mountain armor"? is it really an armor made of metal sheets pressed into a special three-dimensional shape and then intricately assembled like these speculations?

It is recorded in a book that Tang Yikai first used five catties of bone-penetrating grass and three catties of grape seeds for the chew, put one hundred catties of water into it, boiled two hundred boils, and went to check (slag) into Sichuan (wearing) five pieces of mountain armor, three catties of Datong salt, three catties of leather nitrate, five taels of saltpeter, half a catty of sand, sealed the pot tightly, and boiled for a day and night. Take it open, use a ladle with a "spoon") to cast such as cowhide thick, its appearance is different, such as spoon head, willow leaves, fish scales, square leaves, square length, etc., wear to make nails. Light and profitable, multi-purpose in the south.

According to this theory, the real name of the "Shanwen armor" is "Tang Yi armor", and his method of making it is to boil the skin of the pangolin for a long time, and after boiling, the molten pangolin scales are solidified into various shapes in a container, and then worn into armor. Therefore, the peculiar armor pieces actually change with the shape of the container when casting, and in addition to the so-called "mountain script", there can also be various strange shapes.

In addition to the competition of martial arts and physical strength, armor is also the most important equipment, which can effectively protect the bodies of the soldiers. With the development of the times, armor is increasingly used in important ceremonial events, such as military parades and other occasions. Dressed in delicate and beautiful armor and military uniforms, the majestic posture of the soldiers is also a reflection of a country's military strength

In the following dynasties, the armor did not change much. The armor and military uniforms of the early Tang Dynasty basically maintained the style and system formed from the Northern and Southern Dynasties to the Sui Dynasty. It was not until the Zhenguan period of Taizong of the Tang Dynasty that some reforms of the clothing system were carried out with the strength of the country, and the unique military clothing style of the Tang Dynasty was gradually formed.

In the period of Tang Gaozong and Wu Zetian, the national power was at its peak, the rulers were increasingly extravagant, and some of the army's uniforms and armor began to detach from the practical function, and many beautiful and generous, decoration-based ceremonial costumes appeared.

Another important factor in the appearance of ceremonial armor is the frequency of border wars. On the one hand, the war prompted the Tang Dynasty to produce a high level of armor-making technology. On the other hand, because of the frequent wars, military etiquette also flourished, and eventually gave birth to systematic and mature military etiquette.

In addition to being used on the battlefield, these exquisitely made armors also play an important role in peacetime: one can be used as the military uniform of military generals in peacetime, and the other can be used for the uniforms of honor guards and ceremonial etiquette, showing the majesty of the emperor.

One is the armor of actual combat, and the other is the dress of the honor guard. In actual combat armor, those made of iron are called iron helmets, iron armor, and iron armor, and those made of leather are called leather hats and leather armor. Ouyang Xiu has a poem: "You must pity the iron armor and cold bones, more than 400,000 border soldiers." ”

On the battlefield, blunt weapons actually have a very important position. On battlefields around the world, blunt objects appear very frequently.

Although most of the blunt instruments are bladeless and pointless, their huge impact force is enough to smash the solid armor out of the depression, causing internal injuries and fractures, and in severe cases, death on the spot due to internal hemorrhage. Therefore, blunt weapons were also considered to be the sworn enemies of heavy armored samurai.

Liu Xiu had a famous saying when he was still a civilian: "To be an official should be the ruling Jinwu, and to marry a wife should be Yin Lihua." This Jin Wu is a blunt instrument of the stick type. The exact shape of the Kingo is no longer verifiable, but according to the limited information, the Kingo was made of copper with gilt decorations on both sides, similar to today's baseball bats. This gorgeous weapon was used exclusively by the garrison of the capital at that time, and its popularity was not high, and it was gradually eliminated after the Han Dynasty.

Also known as the flail, it is a weapon with a very long history, which is both a blunt weapon and a soft weapon. It is composed of two sticks, long and short, and is linked by an iron chain in the middle. The long stick is used for the handle, and the short stick is used for attacking. The main use is to attack infantry armed with shields, and to slap siege soldiers. There is also a deformation of the iron chain clamp rod, called "Lianzhu Double Iron Whip", with two short sticks in series at the front end, which is the prototype of the three-section stick.

The Chebulus Stick is a variant of the stick, with an iron sheet wrapped around the front end for reinforcement and a wooden rear for the handle. Because the front is heavy and the rear is light, there is a wrist strap at the back of the handle to prevent it from taking off.

The mace, also known as the mace, is also a blunt instrument, although it is pointed, but the way of use is mainly blunt. Many people understand that the mace is a weapon with a wooden handle and an iron head, but in fact, as long as the iron head is installed, it is a "hammer", not a stick.

The mace is a very powerful blunt weapon, more powerful than the blunt weapons introduced above, and a single stick is enough to knock a person's heavenly spirit cover (skull) flying.

The gourd hammer is named because the hammer head resembles a gourd, and is sometimes called a garlic hammer. In many, operas and film and television dramas, the size of the gourd hammer has been greatly exaggerated.

In fact, the weight of such a large solid hammer is so much more than the limit of the human body, and it is difficult to use it on the battlefield. The ancient gourd hammer was the size of a child's fist, and the hammer had a handle about two feet long behind the hammer.

Although it may look small, this head is usually forged or cast in iron or copper, and the weight is considerable. Even the square bricks of clay can shoot dead people, let alone such an iron lump?

The gourd hammer is also a sharp weapon to deal with armor on the battlefield, against opponents wearing chain mail and ordinary scale armor, and if you hit, basically the opponent will have internal organ bleeding and fractures.

The structure of the leaf hammer is similar to that of the gourd hammer, both of which are hammer heads and handles. The hammer head of the leaf hammer is one piece at a time, separated around a central axis, like a book page, hence the name.

Compared with the gourd hammer, the advantages of the page hammer are still more obvious, which is more in line with the principles of physics. The smaller the force area, the greater the attack power, although the gourd hammer also has a "melon edge", but after hitting the target, it is still an arc hammer strike. The page hammer, on the other hand, concentrates the power of the attack on a vertical edge, and the power is more concentrated.

Many people think that hammers and bones are a thing, and even Baidu Encyclopedia says "bones...... Also known as gourd". However, the gourd here refers only to the shape of the gourd, not that the bone duo is also called the gourd hammer, but that the general bone duo can be called "golden gourd" alone.

In fact, although these two things look similar and have similar structures, they are both linked to a hammer with a handle, but there are still slight differences.

There are two ways to connect the hammer head and the handle, one is directly integrated casting or welding, the hammer head is connected to an iron rod as a handle, and a casing is added behind the hammer head to cover the hardwood handle. All in all, the head of the hammer is all solid metal.

Both the whip and the mace have a characteristic, that is, the front is thin and the back is thick, which maintains the center of gravity well, and also makes the center of gravity forward when ensuring the weight, which improves the flexibility to the greatest extent.

The shape of the whip resembles a bamboo slub, so it is also said to be a "bamboo whip". The most powerful whip is the Ming Dynasty two-handed long whip, this kind of long whip has a total of four feet nine inches long, about one hundred and fifty-seven centimeters today, a total of twenty-eight sections, and the weight is converted into about 12 catties to 24 catties today. When used, this whip is held with both hands, but it can only be played by the best wrestlers.

The mace is a pyramid, generally four-edged, and there are grooves on all sides to reduce weight. Therefore, the weight of the hammer is much lighter than that of the whip, and the flexibility is better. Therefore, in ancient times, those who used maces like Qin Qiong and the Eight Sages King had a more delicate image, and those who used whips such as Hu Yanzhuo and Wei Chigong had a much rougher image.

Although lightweight, it still weighs more than a sword of the same length, and because of its agility and length, it can not only blunt opponents in armor, but also deal with some light targets.

Generally speaking, when it comes to ancient armor, cavalry armor has attracted more attention in the past, because cavalry is basically the elite of various countries, so it is natural to be equipped with the best armor. And the infantry is the most numerous branch of the war. Even in the era when cavalry was popular on the battlefield, it was still inseparable from the contribution of infantry on the battlefield. However, the cheapness of the infantry makes them much different from the cavalry, both in terms of armor rate and armor quality. Therefore, what really reflects a country's military strength is often the armor rate and condition of the infantry.

Of course, the high armor rate of the Qin Dynasty was largely due to the accumulation of the entire Warring States period, as well as the seizures in the war with the Six Kingdoms. In the Han Dynasty, the equipment rate of armor declined relatively, at least in the central jurisdiction of the Western Han Dynasty, there was still a considerable base for the number of armor reserves, such as 142,320 pairs of leather armor and 63,340 pairs of armor.

For a local arsenal subordinate to the central government, this amount of armor reserves can be described as quite staggering. But at the same time, the armor rate of the infantry of the Han Dynasty feudal states is also the local troops, judging from the unearthed terracotta figurines, which is much worse than the armor rate of the central army. In the late Han Dynasty and the Three Kingdoms period, it can be said that it was "drought death and waterlogging death". For example, Yuan Shao and Cao Cao's "Yuan Benchu armor 10,000 collars, my big armor 20 collars, 300 primordial horse armor, I can't have ten." ”

In the subsequent development, along with the changes in the military system, the equipment of infantry armor often varies greatly depending on the different positions of the infantry and the situation facing the enemy.

For example, according to the "Taibai Yin Sutra", the armor rate of the troops in the Tang Dynasty could reach sixty percent. In the Song Dynasty, due to the relatively weak cavalry, the importance of infantry armor was very high, such as the famous "infantry armor". As a result, some elite infantry armies have a high armor rate, but there are also many units that are not armoured at all. And depending on the place, for example, in some frontlines of confrontation with the enemy, as well as the army garrisoning Gyeonggi, the armor ratio is quite considerable.

But at the same time, the armor rate of the garrison troops in the interior is extremely low. "Today, Zhang Jun has 30,000 troops, 10,000 pairs of fully armored, and all knives, guns, bows and arrows. Han Shizhong's army was 40,000, Yue Fei's army was 23,000, and Wang Xie's army was 13,000. Liu Guangshi had 40,000 troops, many of whom were old and weak; if he chose them, he could also get half of them. ”

Removing the armor of the elite heavy infantry, under limited conditions, the armor of the ordinary infantry will often give preference to the protection of the soldier's head and torso. Because in actual combat, the torso is actually a relatively more vulnerable part than the limbs. Especially in spearmen fighting each other, the torso is the easiest part to attack, and the human neck is often limited in protecting this area because of the small target. Therefore, with the exception of heavy infantry, infantry armor mostly does not protect the neck.

In addition, the parts of the infantry that are vulnerable to attack are the thighs and upper arms, especially the thighs, although they will not die quickly, but they are enough to deprive soldiers of their mobility, so the thighs are also the parts that need to be protected. As for the protection of the arms, in addition to avoiding the injury of the arms and incapacitating the soldier, it is also very important to protect the armpits, because this area is densely vascular, and once attacked, it will be as dangerous as the torso is attacked. For example, at the end of the Sui Dynasty, it was customary to attack the face and ribs of the Ming army with bows and arrows at close range, and the defense of the head was largely to prevent the soldiers from dying from the projection of enemy bows and arrows.

In general, although the infantry is often considered a fairly cheap branch of the army in the context of war, this does not mean that the infantry is not completely protected from the most basic protection.

Before the advent of firearms, the side with more armored infantry often meant that the infantry on that side had more combat effectiveness. Of course, in terms of the productivity of ancient times, it was a bit difficult to make all metal armor, so textile armor, leather armor, and even paper armor and wooden armor in East Asia were important lines of defense for soldiers to protect their bodies

During the Northern and Southern Dynasties, with a large number of nomads entering the Central Plains, the armor type of mirror armor was also introduced to China.

Of course, that's not to say that the goggles themselves aren't defenseless. But at the beginning of the Tang Dynasty, the assembly method of inlaying two or three pieces of heart goggles on the armor like Daqin gradually disappeared in the actual combat armor, and instead wore a round heart guard on the front and back of the torso. However, although it is a "heart goggle", in many cases, the heart goggles are often fitted to the abdomen and other positions.

Therefore, the defensive role of heart goggles in actual combat on the battlefield is even more uncertain.

There is a man in the state of Chu who sells spears and shields on the streets, and he first claimed that his spear was very sharp and could pierce anything, and when he introduced his shield, he said that his shield was very hard and nothing could pierce it. Then a weak voice came from the corner: What will happen if you pierce your shield with your spear?

Later this allusion became an idiom paradox. In fact, not only spears and shields, but also bows and arrows and armor are also a pair of enemies on the battlefield, one side always hopes that their strong bow can shoot through the opponent's armor, while the other party hopes that their heavy armor can withstand the opponent's bow and arrows.

So is it the bow and arrow that can shoot through the armor or the armor that can defend against the bow and arrow?

First of all, this question is not rigorous, because ancient bows and arrows are divided into straight, recurved, compound and so on, and the "stone" is used as the unit of calculation, and the effect of arrows shot by people with different arm strength will be very different.

Similarly, armor is also divided into various types according to the material, such as wood armor, leather armor, iron armor, etc., and different bows correspond to different armor, and the natural results will be different.

Although the bow and arrow were produced earlier than armor, in general, the development of bow and arrow lagged behind armor. Because no matter how much the bow and arrow are improved, it is still affected by the strength and distance of the arm, while the armor can be constantly improved or thickened. Crossbows and cannons were invented because bows and arrows were already difficult to penetrate armor.

For example, the Hun cavalry in history is often known for its strong bow cavalry, but in the face of the Han cavalry equipped with fish scales and iron armor, it is still powerless.

In the "Chronicles of the Three Kingdoms", there are also many cases of heavy armor soldiers crushing archers: Dian Wei wore heavy clothes and two armors, and the thief's bow and crossbow were messily fired, but Wei ignored them; Sun Quan begged Huang Zu, flying arrows rained, Ling Tong was the front, people were armored by two, and the soldiers advanced. Gao Shun's 700 subordinates are all well-trained and neat, and each attack is invincible, so it is named the trap camp.

So the question is, since bows and arrows can no longer penetrate armor, why did archers still fight to fire volleys in ancient wars?

As the most effective ranged weapon in the Cold Weapon Age, bows and arrows need to be tilted upwards at an angle when firing, relying on the falling dive force and the coverage of the salvo to kill and damage enemy troops. In addition to the psychological deterrence, the main thing is to restrict the enemy's armor.

Because the bow and arrow are fired into the enemy's body, the final death of the opponent may not be the bow and arrow, but the viral infection caused by the wound. Therefore, if you want to completely defend against bow and arrow damage, you need to wear heavy armor.

It is precisely because of the existence of bows and arrows that the heavy armor soldiers who charge into battle, if there is no bow and arrow deterrence, the cost of the enemy's attack will be greatly reduced, after all, even the light infantry can charge.

Another function of the arrow is to shoot the horses of the opponent's cavalry, since the soldiers are wearing heavy armor, then I shoot down the horses, which can also delay the opponent's charge. So why can't horses wear heavy armor? Yes, but most of the time it's light armor. Because the heavy armor of the man has already consumed the physical strength of the horse, if the horse is covered with heavy armor, the war horse will not be able to charge for a long time.

Xie Baoshu put on the black dragon armor and climbed to the top of the city.