I used to belong to a medieval recreation society and made an articulated vambrace (covers forearm, elbow, and connects to the gauntlet). We had modern steel, modern tools (scissors, modern ball peen hammer) but still pounded out all the shapes and cut holes for rivets and pounded the rivets it.
It was tremendously satisfying (I'm a Maker, although I don't think I realized it at the time). Actually much more interesting than swordmaking to me, or even running around hitting people on the (simulated) field of battle or attending the festival meals and talking like a viking.
It also helped me appreciate that blacksmiths and shoe cobblers were absolutely critical in a growing town.
As a game developer I'm curious to know if there are any games with crafting you've played that you enjoyed? (For example, blacksmithing in Ultima Online is pretty simple but was fun because of the MMO/community aspect. I wonder if there are any games with more involved steps you appreciate?)
No, I don't get any satisfaction crafting things in games (and that goes back to Ultima III which I was playing around the same time I started making armor).
For example right now I'm playing Diablo IV wandering around finding stuff to make more powerful weapons, and it does nothing for me. It's entirely about the physical details of making a thing with my hands.
Which is funny because I hated to play D&D with people "by hand" while I loved when the computer was the DM.
Chiming in to say that "crafting" in games is really just a game mechanic for me, and gives me zero satisfaction. I also dabble in game dev on the side, and whilst some of my favourite games do include crafting aspects, I see it for what it is, which is a way to artificially extend the length of the gameplay experience as necessary.
The older I get, the more substance I want from my games. If it's short and sweet, just a few hours long? Great. Better than padding it for sixty hours rinse-and-repeating busywork. I can take the hours I would have spent on the busywork and instead put it into something productive, or other games.
I love making things, always have done, and it's not something that you can really capture in a game.
Not OP, but as a person who likes to make stuff with my hands and also enjoys video games, these are a few games with crafting mechanics I think are pretty decent:
For mobile: Stardew Valley crafting is very good. It’s simple and satisfying but still complicated enough not to be boring. Ocean is Home is a less popular game, but also has pretty good crafting although the amount of resources needed can sometimes make it a bit grind-y. But you can build a lot of stuff through crafting including walls, roof sections, etc to build a house, as well as make weapons, backpacks, and a huge myriad of other items. It’s almost like a more realistic Minecraft.
For VR: Song in the smoke has a physically realistic crafting mechanism that is both simple and satisfying. It’s very immersive without it being too labor intensive. Township Tale is also a game with realistic physical crafting mechanisms but can be a bit tedious at times (although I’ve only tried out the game a few times, so my impression could be off).
For console games: While not the typical type of crafting, I think Elder Scrolls Oblivion has a very cool method for crafting potions, enchanted items and spells. It is very customizable, and the way it is designed makes you want to play around with coming up with the best potions and spells, etc. It’s on the more complicated side of things and there is a bit of a learning curve, but the amount of possible new spells, potions and enchanted items you can craft is basically endless.
These are just examples I could think off the top of my head, but hope this gives you a bit of insight.
If you were rich it was made to measure. If you were a poor foot soldier, then much less so.
In the Royal Navy they used to joke that the ratings' uniforms only came in 2 sizes, too big and too small.
See also:
"Before he crunched his numbers, the consensus among his fellow air force researchers was that the vast majority of pilots would be within the average range on most dimensions. After all, these pilots had already been pre-selected because they appeared to be average sized. (If you were, say, six foot seven, you would never have been recruited in the first place.) The scientists also expected that a sizable number of pilots would be within the average range on all 10 dimensions. But even Daniels was stunned when he tabulated the actual number.
yes, I measured my arm (we also did clothesmaking so we had all the ingredients) although when I left the SCA I gave it to somebody similar sized. Note that the vambrace is lined with fur and leather, which allows for some adjustment for forearm thickness. It has adjustable leather straps (like a belt). You can also disassemble the piece by removing rivets, and making new rivet holes if you need to change the length/size of pieces. The rivets actually act as bearing rods to allow the elbow to articulate, it's really an impressive piece of work.
I find it interesting to ponder about crafting something that can withstand 7 centuries, given what we currently craft (as a software engineer) not even lasting 10 years.
Even NASA was unable to establish contact with the IMAGE satellite after 18 years. I do see the false equivalence here, yet it is nonetheless thought provoking, alongside 100+ year old tea shops in Japan.
One thought that we should not neglect to provoke is that we manufacture things “badly” by choice, in order to reduce cost, in order to make products accessible to more people. Sometimes that sucks and costs more in the long run, but sometimes it’s a rational choice not to overbuild something.
We absolutely could still make a fancy gauntlet that stood a good chance of lasting 700 years, but it would cost enough that only today’s wealthy knights would want to buy it.
Planned Obsolescence is an urban myth - there may be some examples, and if there are that's a tiny slice of the market. The reality is what OP said, price and quality are tradeoffs. Manufacturing things that can last 100+ years of wear and tear means those things would be costly, with very limited use cases.
Isn't this article interesting because it is an outlier (an old preserved gauntlet)? If we want to compare outliers like this to what we build today, it seems impossible to do, since we would need to wait another 700 years to see if any of the things we currently craft last that long.
I do agree with you on principles, but given those gauntlets being a pinnacle of human achievement for that time, our current pinnacles doesn't seem to last that long and the means are lost as well. Probably for the better, but quite can't tell also.
Maybe it is a creeping anxiety about losing knowledge as we stride forward and forgetting the means of recreating the things we end up with. Kind of like the Dark age of technology in WH40K.
Satellites will be up in space, able to be found by "space archeologists" for literally tens of thousands of years. Sure we maybe won't be able to communicate with them anymore, but that's basically the same as how this gauntlet was dug up out of the ground - the knights who might've used it likely weren't able to "communicate" (find) the gauntlet because it was buried underground.
How many gauntlets were not preserved? You are comparing a failure of NASA to the what you are calling the pinnacle of human achievement of the 14th century. Would it then not be fair to compare it to the pinnacle of human achieve of this century, rather than its failures? Also, what have we lost by not being able to recreate multi-century lasting gauntlets? Why is something lasting hundreds of years longer than necessary a quality worth preserving, rather than, something fit for purpose?
You know what's funny? Those tungsten cubes that were a fad recently will be among the most enduring relics of our time, because tungsten is extremely hard and corrosion-resistant. I imagine some archaeologist digging one of those up in a thousand years' time, thinking, "What the hell did they make this thing for?"
In the same vein, I find it funny to think about the future archaeologists pondering the relation of the Eiffel towers around the world the same way we do about pyramids.
NASA part was for an exaggerated example, and it was not a failing of them also. It was the nature of the business, decommissioning the C&C of their old satellites, presuming it to be dead after its planned obsolescence. Enthusiasts were there to re-establish contact luckily, but that is beside the point.
But for more mundane stuff, even phasing out media storage technology periodically causes a giant loss of knowledge and means even with the help of archiving groups.
I also stated that I'm ambivalent about the worth of such knowledge preservation, whether it is a form of stamp collecting or something more foundational. All I have to compare is the fact that we have an estimated %1 of Ancient Roman literature surviving and I'd prefer to have at least a bit more of it.
I do admit I didn't have a point to make really, or to assign worth to an ancient gauntlet. Rather it was a reflection on losing stuff while finding stuff and the permanence of marks we leave on this world.
The pinnacle of human achievement in our time is harnessing fossil fuels to replace biomass and whale oil as primary energy sources, enabling massive fertilizer synthesis (cheaper and more plentiful food), cheap concrete and steel production, and plastics. I'm pretty sure those plastics, and maybe even a PowerGlove, will still be around in landfills to be dug up in centuries to come.
I hate that I have to put the disclaimer here that there are obviously costs to the planet and us for this achievement, but it is undoubtedly what characterizes the age we live in (late-19th century forward) in a way that is arguably (if not self-evidently) heretofore unseen in all of human history.
Part of the reason for the long lasting aspect is the over engineering of the products back then. See also Roman aqueducts. Slave labor or nearly free peons also probably contributed to this.
Today we have much tighter engineering tolerances for cost reasons.
This may be survivorship bias. If you look back say to 1970. Pick any car of that era would you drive it today? Not much. It is not nearly as good or even that well built. But some of the cars of that era are very well preserved and taken care of and maybe even in better shape than when they left the factory floor.
Sometimes things are built well or kept around for whatever reason. But most of the time people slap it together and call it good enough. Then when they are done with that item it is discarded.
You can say 'look at all the stuff from the roman era that survived'. You can also say what about all the stuff that didnt? Probably most of it. But you do not see it because it is no longer there.
> See also Roman aqueducts. Slave labor or nearly free peons also probably contributed to this.
Surviving Roman infrastructure didn't just sit around for two thousand years, it has actively been maintained in that time.
You'll find that you can keep a lot of grandfather's axes around for as long as you want, as long as you keep them clean, and replace the handle and the blade regularly.
Well I for one, bet my ass that, if we are still using mainframes in 700 years, those will still be running legacy COBOL, they will still publish the mandatory, by-annual "COBOL developer shortage" article iteration on HN.
We have been "making" nuclear waste that will "last" for eons, though.
Hopefully the constructions (both technical and social) where we store it, in the hope of a future generation that can rid of it, will last centuries too.
I'm convinced everything surrounding nuclear waste is where humans are putting the most effort in thinking and planning for ages. Or, I hope it is.
That said, someone once told me that e.g. castles "back then" where built for centuries, not decades. People thought much more in family-lines, generations and long lasting tribes, than individual, or families' lives.
And there too, nuclear waste is where current society had to think of the grandchildren of the grandchildren, rather than 'before I die'.
Posssible, but unlikely. It is rather likely, that AI will become a increasing useful tool for human engineering. But replacing would require something fundamentally better.
Software is like plants in a garden. Maybe the garden lasts, but the plants are born, live and die, and have to be tended to regularly to survive. It won’t be the same garden eventually.
> The intact gauntlet is a four-fold finger glove worn on the right hand, which has individual iron plates stacked like scales and linked together through side rivets.
I have not been able to find the original publication with details on the preservation. My guess is that it would have been somehow stored in a place that was completely lacking moisture and oxygen, like maybe a tightly sealed box buried deep in teh ground?
Its always amazing to me to think that we used to just dress up in metal armor (if we were lucky) and then just charge into each other and hack someone to pieces in the mud. All because some dude born to another dude with a crown told us to. With zero anti biotics. Some dirt poor guy just trying to grow carrots to feed his family gets forced conscripted and sent off to die for something he has nothing to do with.
Incredible that today besides having antibiotics we are essentially still doing the same thing.
If you are interested in medieval armour, then I strongly recommend a visit to Leeds Armoury (in Leeds) or The Wallace Collection (in London) in the UK. They both have amazing collections.
What are "bullet points" as named in this article? It's difficult to find anything on Google not referring to the typographical symbol of the same name.
Context: "Archaeologists also found a hammer, tweezers, pliers, keys, knives, bullet points, and a completely preserved 14th century gauntlet, in addition to fragments of its counterpart worn on the other hand."
It could very well be referring to bullets in the "pew! pew! pew!" sense.
I'd recommend The Military Revolution by Geoffrey Parker[1] if you're curious to know more about the transition from knights to guns and all the strategic ramifications.
Ah, I'd been thinking it must be a device somehow related to manufacturing bullets (but how? was the question) -- it hadn't occurred to me that it could mean the pointy tips of bullets themselves. And thank you for the book recommendation.
Something's off here - bullet shaped bullets didn't appear until 1820 or so, musket balls preceeded .. but this is an excavation of a 14th century workspace with pre ballistic armor.
I'm tempted to think "bullet points" is either something lost in translation OR (it happens) a transcribed into text NOTE that indicated the list should have been made as bullet points.
It was tremendously satisfying (I'm a Maker, although I don't think I realized it at the time). Actually much more interesting than swordmaking to me, or even running around hitting people on the (simulated) field of battle or attending the festival meals and talking like a viking.
It also helped me appreciate that blacksmiths and shoe cobblers were absolutely critical in a growing town.