Armour, armor... Aaaarrrrmmmoooorrr. As you can probably see (if you can't, theres not much I can do for you <you roll eyes, yes?>), this thread is dedicated for RL armors and the questions we have about them. If there's already another thread of which is the same like this one, well... You know what happens. Lockety lockety lock.

So,　I invite those who are familiar on the subject of armors and the like because I, for one(I guess), have questions about them.

So first one:

How exactly HARD is lamellar armor against steel weapons (like katanas)? Can it be... reliable in huge battles and such? Cavalry, yes but how about infantry? I'm asking because.. well, I need help on a project given to us by our oh-so nice History Teacher.

Always a good place to start:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamellar_armour

Checked that out earlier, though.

Presumably it depends on the material used. Thick leather is going to be ok, if you're lucky. Metal is more likely to survive. Depends on the weapon too, I wuld guess a katana is less likely to hurt the wearer than say a heavier european arming sword (or larger varieties of weapon) simply because even if a heavy weapon doesn't cut though it's going to break things.

Google produces quite a few hits here.

Not an exert on armour here, but I just opened the wiki-link on the lamellar armour 5 seconds ago. The picture of the reconstruction they've got up there looks kinda shoddy to me though. With the way the leather scales are arranged, any attack moving at a downward angle will encounter lots of nice edges to get stuck on and wrench itself underneath. On the other hand, going up provides a greater chance for the weapon to slide off.

Now attacks moving down are more common I expect than ones going up. Same reasoning I apply to attacks coming in from the side. the wearer's left side is better protected than his right. Again though, this is only for the reconstruction shown at the top of the page which uses excessively large scales with very thick protruding edges. the samurai-one and (though its hard to tell with the low resolution), the siberian one look much better in that regard with a far smoother surface.