Ok guys, I am going to mix a bit of fantasy with reality here, so please try to indulge me.


My question is, could a dude at what I'm going to call WL 1 (Weight Level 1) would be the slimmest, most flimsy character you can create on Skyrim wear a full set of armor? Now the developers have answered this question with a simple, "Yes, they can." This is obviously proven by putting a WL 1 character in a set of Dragonbone Armor with a Dragonbone Greatsword and call it a day. (He looks a little silly, though!)


Average weight would be WL 5 and a super buff dude would be WL 10, just to be clear.


Ok, now if you watch live action movies or TV shows, a couple I can think of is A Knight's Tale and Merlin (2012). If you look at the plate armor in those films and compare it to say, the steel armor, or arguably ANY armor in Skyrim, you can definitely see there's a difference in thickness of the metal.


All I'm really looking for is a ball-park figure of how much it would weigh me down to sneak into a castle and try and put on a full set of the decorative armor, Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure style.


Thank you!


EDITED DUE TO DERPNESS.

Well, each armor as you can visibly see is a variety of weights. Most heavy armor (plate mail) will be around 100-120lbs. That means a full set from the helmet to the boots. If there is chainmail on underneath the armor that will also add more weight to the base amount (give or take anywhere between 25-30lbs more for a full set underneath whichever armor you're wearing). This weight does not include the leather and steel clasps, so you'd in total be looking at anywhere around 150lbs...and that's on the lighter side. So in all frankness your character no matter how small should be able to sneak around in heavy armor, though in all honesty the friction of metal and the weight of that armor clanking around on the floor wouldn't be practical...especially since some of the heavier armors don't allow for much movement.

Reality

An entire suit of field armor (that is, armor for battle) usually weighs between 45 and 55 lbs. (15 to 25 kg), with the helmet weighing between 4 and 8 lbs. (2 to 4 kg)—less than the full equipment of a fireman with oxygen gear, or what most modern soldiers have carried into battle since the nineteenth century........https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plate_armour

so taking the above into consideration a fit woman could easy do the later two (be a fire man or a field soldier) ............so this ones opinion is YES

the underlining and most probably the most important aspect of an armor is YES how much dose it protect the one who wears it .......BUT is it justifiable as a all round product....if you have to use all your energy just to walk up to the battle field what will you do when the actual battle starts?

the wight of 25Kg spread all over the body will not be so much felt compared to other accessories ............. the most heaviest things becomes the weapon & shield that you have to lift with each limb.

the most realistic movies that you can watch of combat (and are very few around) are the ones where the combatants cant stand up any more from exhaustion, forget about raising the sword to do a full power hit ....your lucky if you can manage a jab

what won battles in the past & today is not the armor but the warrior who wears it .................so if the Spirit is there .......YES the most flimsy character can be a heavy armored bad asss dude

This agree with research I did a long while back in college. The King Arthur/Lancelot style plate is around 50lbs.....because its spread over the whole body its weight is not too difficult to bear for a practiced and fit warrior.


For example.......Lets just say for arguments sake that today Rick comes in at just over 300lbs

But my ideal fighting weight is more like 150lbs (that was a long time ago)

That means I am carrying a payload of 150lbs....yet I can still run upstairs. Get up after falling over. Carry an addition overburden of 50lbs for a short time.


So if I was a buff 150lbs in my mid thirties.......and took daily armour wearing practice......then yes....you can see that lugging just 50lbs of armour is a cinch!


Chain mail underwear plus a sword and board can be accommodated in my spare 100 lbs capacity.


But as Sah points out....actually fighting in that stuff would drain your strength in just a few minutes of full on combat even for a fit person.

That would be like me running up and down stairs twenty times without stopping......Coronry time


Checkout you tube......knights fighting.....loads of re-enactments are done......its a popular theme in historical fighting clubs.

There's a suit of plate armor in a museum in Germany. The armor was made for a prince, who did wear it into battle - on horseback. From the size of the suit of armor, the prince was about 5 feet 6 inches tall, and probably weighed around 160 pounds. There was a drawing of him being helped onto his horse by a couple of strapping footmen - the horse was about 18 hands at the withers, taller than the prince. His sword was over 6 feet long - and there was a journal report of him being dismounted in battle, and swinging the sword against his attacker.

No, no photos - this was in the mid-1700s IIRC. So drawings and handwritten notes or journals is all there were to explain the armor, sword, etc. But he wasn't very big, and while he was no doubt "buff", he couldn't have carried a lot of weight and still managed to swing the sword.

IIRC, the suit of armor was listed at appx 60 pounds, because of a padded leather gambeson and other "unders". The sword - I don't really remember - but 6+ feet of steel.... It took two men to get him on the horse, and once unhorsed he couldn't get back on. I found it pretty interesting - a lot moreso than the lives of his wife and mother!

I'd suspect joint stiffness would be more of a fatigue factor than weight. Especially when the game allows you to carry several spare outfits in your invisible backpack.

True story...lol.. when my cousin came back from Boot camp ( 4 months before I went in) she told me to start wearing weights around my ankles when I ran my 2 miles every day... plus do some in place ( or treadmill ) running with a rifle held at arm's length. My neighbor's might have thought it really odd for me to carry a rifle at arm's length running down the road...

The first couple of days... my arm's felt like wet noodles... but I got used to it... what I'm saying is... what you are used to, you can do.

One of the things that our company commander used to do as a "company punishment" is have us hold a pencil at arm's length between two fingers... try it and see how heavy a pencil is. Weight can be relative to what one us used to.

Good video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9IAyKBdo-lkabout stamina in combat. He tends to ramble a bit, but he knows his stuff.

And in combat stamina favours the lightweight. Big heavy guys with tree trunk limbs tire fast....if they hit you....your history....but give them time and they simply run out of juice.


I'm a chunky stocky build, but I was fitter once, and did Taekwondo for a few years (nothing spectacular). Despite being physically strong rapid sparring would reduce me to a panting wreck in a few minutes. The skinny wirey kids seemed to just keep bouncing around forever. So all my effectiveness had to be concentrated into like two minutes of being a power house before the lactic acid build up and stamina drain kicked in knocking me out of effective combat.


Ha! Bobbin an weavin duckin an divin.....not for me I found. I needed to politely ask my opponent to stand still for a few moments while I clobbered them

lol.... let them jump around like a jack rabbit and just turn and keep your eye on them.. defend... don't attack.....

Ha exactly so Areial....they can't hurt you bobbing about out of reach....I used to wait for them to bring it to me. It different in Skyrim fights of course because you don't tire by jumping about.

Plate armor was mostly used on horseback. Full plate that is.


Heavy chain was what was mostly used on the ground, and its fairly easy to move around in.


Keep meaning to get around to making that dragonscale tunic but need to get a load of money because I need a *crap load* of rings.

the problem with armors ....and especially the ones in the game is that they do not fit into the environment they are used .

throughout history there have been some very Important warriors that have walked the earth .........the Spartans, Vikings, Romans, Goths, Huns, Aztecs, Samurai, Knights ext .

the armors these warriors used depended on the environment & landscape of where they lived and the type of combat they specialized in, also taking into account what weapons where used against them.

in the game you can walk in a swamp wearing a heavy armor with no difficulty at all ..........in real conditions........you would have to adapt your armor build to accommodate these conditions, If you are going ti sink 20cm into the mud with each step you take because of the heavy armor your wearing you have lost the upper hand especially if fighting light armored opponents ......The Art of War goes into great detail about this.

there was a show once that used to try to see how warriors of different eras would measure up against each other.....yes this may be unrealistic, to compare a Spartan with a samurai ....Different geographical locations .....different tactics ....different weapons & armors ......different fighting styles ......in the show they would test weapons & the armors of each warrior (damage vs defense) in the show successes always was who had the better weapons that could bypass the armor .......and it was the armor that was always inferior to the weapons used.

Here is a somewhat https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/aams/hd_aams.htm discussing the myth that plate armor was overly cumbersome or heavy, requiring hoists and such to get a knight on the horse. From what I recall, this myth seems to have started when scholars examined suits of armor that were designed for jousting tournaments and assumed incorrectly those very heavy jousting armors were what people wore into battle.

Obviously, when jousting for sport and not wanting to incur injuries that the limited medicines of the time could not easily treat, it may have made sense to wear heavier specialized armor that would provide as much protection as possible from being impaled by a frontal collision with a lance at high speeds by mounted participants. Such jousting armor would seem to be more a liability than a benefit when on a field of battle where opponents don't always line up in an orderly fashion for a stylized frontal assault between two mounted riders. Hence the use of "field armor" in battle weighing no more than 45-55 pounds and not restricting movement to any significant degree.

Sah... you know one of those funny thing's that always hit my mind... I'm from Central Florida, swamps abound. Any who, the Spanish came and explored with their https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hernando_de_Soto#/media/File:DeSoto-Hernando-1791.jpeg ( Hernando DeSoto...* my favorite beach/ park/ Fort* ) Now any one who has been in Florida in the summer know's three things

1. it's HOT

2. it's HUMID

3. the NO-see'um's * a very small biting bugt*... will get under your clothing and bite the living tar out of you...

The picture in my mind is the Spanish beating themselves to death because the bug's got under the armor....and the lightly clad Native's laughing their loin-cloths off. Which is not what happened of course, but it's still a funny mental picture.

something interesting ............in the game you wear the armor 24/7 and preform all types of duty wearing it like cooking, chop wood, catch fish, mining ext

in real life ...you take the damnn thing off if you were not in battle or on duty ....just every day normal bodily functions like going to the toilet or sitting down to eat or going to sleep would have been a big task ....a field armor did not have all these Luxury’s & comforts

it boggles your mind that we also have a inventory ..........just think of the things you have in it & try to add that to the above posts

My armour has a trap door at the back and front....so I don't ever take it off. A hinged visor lets me eat and drink with a straw. My Dr Scholl armoured boots insoles are very comfy.


Sleeping is easy....I just fall backwards into a big box of polystyrene packing beads and lay there until morning!


Keeping my lady happy is somewhat difficult because she wears permanent plate mail too....but where theres a will......

Some really great points here. Like you, RedFox707, I find it difficult to wrap my "modern day head" around the physics of most video game armor workings. This seems to be the key here

In Skyrim, we rarely tire, and if we do, we recover superfast. So running from Winterhold to Riften in full Dragonbone, wielding a Dragonbone greatsword is commonplace here. Also, without mods, every character is the same size. There is no short, fat, tall, muscular, or average.

I guess, like string bikini chain, the answer is, "It's MAGIC!"

and use a good oil for all the squeaky parts ...........squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak

I recall ahttp://www.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Hallgerd mentioning such a feat....or at least, with one half of the pair armoured anyways

Medieval Armor is a subject filled with so much myths mixed into what should be history at this point that it's truly mind boggling. Ashdown's European Arms and Armor is a good starting point for anyone wanting to read up on the subject. A few points:

1) "Plate" armor was only worn by very rich dudes (not counting "sport" armor used in jousting tournaments). It was also self supporting (hence why you see it displayed as such). Once you got it on, wearing it is easier than its weight would lead you to believe, provided the wearer is actually trained in its use. The way you killed someone wearing it was to knock them on their ass and stick a dagger through the eye slot of their helmet. Either that or drive a military pick through their chest.

2) No one wore just "chain", and forget that crap you see larpers wear. You need to wear heavy leather clothing (not leather armor) underneath it or the chain links would be driven right into your skin, doing a lot more harm than good. Plate mail was fish scale style plates overlaid over the top of chain mail. Very good protection, but very heavy - made with arrows and quarrels in mind.

3) Leather armor was not nearly as common as some people would have you believe. It's a pain to make and fit for one thing, and getting that much quality leather isn't easy. That said, a good set of boiled (hardened) leather will protect you against a lot of damage. Remember armor isn't an 'all or nothing' affair - it's a matter of degree.

One of the things I like about Requiem is how it makes stamina a very important stat to manage and how it makes wearing heavy armor and swinging heavy weapons drain a lot of stamina. You move very slowly and tire very easily in heavy armor in Requirm until your character has the skill and perks to use them properly.

No one that has ever taken armorcraft seriously has thought of such a thing.

LARPers aren't the only ones that deal with chainmail. Buddy of mine used to participate in SCA events. His chain getup included the leather underside.

The Japanese used silk for much the same purpose.

What the [censored] are you talking about...it's closer 50-80lbs actually...for a full suit with padding and mail.Did you do any research?150lbs ON THE LIGHTER SIDE???Have you ever seen a real armor?Not even the heaviest tournament armors would weigh that much.

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Yeah I was gonna say...150+ lbs. of anything to hump around, even for a big dude that's in shape for it, is a helluva lot. You'd tire way before you got to the battle, if not then you'd be worn down far too quickly to be of much use.

Then consider that in an actual battle with many freaks approaching wanting to do you serious ill, your adrenaline will be running and at some point you hit a backlash when it runs out, and exhaustion would set in. Fear and nerves being keyed up to 110% can be maintained just so long, it can soon wear you out.

I've done speed marches in the Army, carrying a weapon and ammo, steel pot on my head, full backpack & various gear. I was only 18 then, full of piss n' vinegar and in decent shape, but 20 miles of that and you're not looking to take on any Roman centurions for awhile, believe me.