I'd first like to say this is all speculation from a modding perspective.

It's been confirmed that pauldrons, greaves and the cuirass are now merged and part of a single piece called "armour" (or 'armor' if you are that way inclined).

Yet we also have numerous screenshots of the iron armour with quite a bit of variety: cuirass with no pauldrons, huge metal pauldrons, one bone pauldron.
I think it's fair to say these will be different individual items in the game (as we know smithing cannot alter an items appearance), probably all simply called "Iron Armour".

My theory (which may be a bit wacky) is that armour is now 'modular' in the Creation Kit, the best example I can think for this is the creatures in Fallout, a case in point being the Super Mutants, in the Geck under their model tab you can pick and choose which bits to display, different helmets, armour etc. So for example Uncle Leo in Fallout 3 is only wearing a pair of pants and boots, while Super Mutant Masters are fully armoured - in the Geck they have certain bits enabled or disabled under the model tab.

My theory is that armour in Skyrim now works in the same way, in the Creation Kit we might be able to, say, select Iron armour and then under a similar "models" tab we could pick and choose which bits to display.

How this ties into modding is that it may make seperate pauldrons/greaves/cuirass possible in the Creation Kit with relative ease, by simply choosing to display a pauldron and deselecting the cuirass part, providing of course that Skyrim has unused "body slots" like Tail in Oblivion or the more numerous BAO1/BAO2/Nosering etc in Fallout.

Again this is just speculation on my part and we will know for sure when the game comes out, but it's the only theory I can come up with which explains all the variety in Iron armour (without have hundreds of different nif files, I think modular armour would save on disk space).

Does anyone think this is a possibilty? Or am I just mental?

Wait what? I thought they said only the cuirass and grieves had been merged?

I believe there are going to be different varieties of iron, y'know, like.. Iron Armour in different types of varieties.

It'll still be called Iron Armour, but it'll look different with each different type, y'know? But good read and idea.

Yes, and pauldrons were already merged with cuirass since Oblivion.

Yes exactly, that's what I think it'll be like in-game. I mean behind the scenes it might be modular - leading to the potential for seperate pauldrons to be modded in (still no luck for console people ).

The only thing I can say to you is that don't expect too much from the Creation Kit. The ES CS is famous for lacking practical and efficient tools. I swear I could have paid $100 more for Skyrim if the Creation Kit was a realtime editor.

smithing is simple each part is crafted/upgraded sepratley but player can only name armour as a single set piece !

No they haven't been, Pauldrons had been merged into a single set (no more left or right) but they had still been a single piece of separate armor from the rest.

Uh... Did you play Oblivion? http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Armor

You're mistaken about this.

Uh, no.

Hmm... Not bad

Ha that's true, I'm just looking at the progression of the construction sets. In Morrowind there was no modular aspect at all to any models. In Oblivion there was a little for the creatures, the Minotaurs for example - under their model tab you could select different shaped horns. This was again expanded in Fallout 3 with a lot more options and variety. I think in Skyrim this modular aspect may now be extended to armour as well as creatures.

I did/do...but i forgot what vanilla was like, i've been playing with the pauldron mod for so long. xD

Ii hope so, there is a lot of potential for this.