Grenades vs. Knight Armor

[evanator66]

In my current diesel/arcanepunk (different levels & types of tech for each nation), a MC is attacked by a bunch of people in knight-style armor, and lacking skill in most combat areas he throws a frag grenade into a group of them. What I am wondering is, what effect would that have on them? I imagine the armor would deflect most of the shrapnel.

 

[Penpilot]

I'm in no way an expert, but just thinking about it, it would depend on the thickness of the armor. Some armor is designed to go up against longbows, while others you might as well be wearing tinfoil when facing arrows. This might be a good ball park estimate of how well armor would do against shrapnel.

Another thing to factor in is the noise and concussion of the explosion. The shrapnel may not get the knights, but the concussion reverberating off the armor may still turn their organs into spam.

 

[evanator66]

The enemies in question do not have organs, so the concussion would do little. As for the armor, it is of the heavier variety, so the shrapnel would not affect them. Thanks for telling me. I'll just have it be an incendiary grenade.

 

[CupofJoe]

Having just watched a programme where they made one of these... Plate Armour is worn over a gambeson/coat of fleece wool tightly stitched between multiple layers of cloth or leather. This seems that it acts a lot like kevlar does today in giving and moving to absorb the energy of an impact and spread it over a wider area.
The plate would deform I would guess and may be torn or broken [so mobility would be affected...] but there might not too much internal damage from the first grenade.
I'd be tempted to say that if one side can make effective/modern frag grenades, then they can probably make projectile weapons for use against plate wearing opponents [or super-tasers!]

 

[BronzeOracle]

Pardon the dumb question but if the knights don't have organs or other soft tissues that could be affected by concussion then why do they need armour? Are they undead? I would have thought they'd ditch armour as it would slow them down.

 

[wordwalker]

Creatures without organs, and still wearing heavy armor... sounds like a good way to build some very tough fighters that could only be ground down the hard way.

But my first thought was that explosions (like falls and falling rocks) should be one of the things armor does not work well against. Armor's best if you can angle a blow off it to deflect it, or else it spreads the impact out so that you get a broad bruise across your abdomen instead of a little slit through your spleen. An explosion or other large area of force is an impact that's already spread out, so all you can do is take it. A purely explosive grenade might work pretty well-- or, like you said, an incendiary. (When things don't have organs, burning them to ash is usually a good bet.)

But the attacker would have outsmarted himself with fragmentation grenades. The shrapnel they're packed with gives them more area but have less explosive power than a simple bomb, and the armor might stop most of the fragments. How well it would stop them I'm not sure (heavier variety armor, you say--heavy chainmail was the most common knightly armor, or you might mean full plate), but if the creatures have no organs, having two or three holes in them from where the armor was weak wouldn't hurt them much.

The right tool for the right job.

 

[SeverinR]

I don't think padding under armor was that good. But maybe someone that actually has fought in armor could answer that.
The padding was mostly to make the armor tolerable to wear.

War hammers and non-bladed weapons killed many an armored opponent. So the grenade concussion would cause damage.

If the grenade was close enough to throw them back, the body is slammed by the armor then the body slams against the armor when it lands. The head and brain would also slam into the inside of the helmet and brain into the skull, when the grenade exploded. I would say even if the armor isn't penetrated, there would be massive concussion/head injuries. (Closed head injury)
Modern padding in helmets to protect the brain only recently became efficient at this. The 80's saw the best leap for protection to the brain, and improved every since.
Even 70's era helmets weren't great.

I can only describe what happens to a human or human-like being. So you will have to adapt that damage into your creatures.

Frag grenades aren't good for penetration. So the armor would probably survive. One exception is if a large section of grenade hit just right or maybe a rock projected into the armor, they might penetrate. The typical fragmentation doesn't have the mass to penetrate.

Makes me think of an interesting question, armor and modern firearms.
But I don't want to hijack this thread so I will start a thread.

 

[evanator66]

To answer your question, they used to be human, but were devoured from the inside out by a parasitic entity (it is sort of fungal, and sort of plantlike) which removed the need for organs. They are wearing armor for ceremonial reasons (a cult worships the parasite and sacrifices hosts to it, in exchange fighters are provided by the entity, who the cult armor.)