“ One thing you must realise is that there is no such thing as pure iron/steel these days. Iron/steel isn't nearly as strong now as it was in medieval times. However, with that said, iron in early medieval times was so soft you could hack right through a helm with a sword and leave a nice lil mark on the skull (depending on the grade of iron used on the sword and the helm, ofcaurse). After many hundreds of years of fine tuning, however, the only use the sword had was to puncture the plate. That was very difficult, however, since the grade of steel was so hard... only blunt instruments and weighted axes had any use against plate armor in later medieval times. Makes me wonder why rapiers were so popular then and why less people wore plate (Other than it's obsene costs... a nice suit of armor would cost as much as a nice lexus does now... and a kings suit would be as much as a rols royce).”
“ If it was a castle, it was the strangest one he had ever seen.
He of course saw the main tower - taller than anything he had seen outside of Stoneholt, the spire looked fragile and was topped by a glassed-in chamber.
The outer wall was so gently sloped that it would have only stopped a horde of hobbling old men, an able-bodied soldier could stride up to its crest with little effort. Within one saw a huge, nearly perfect bowl-shaped area with the base of the tower in the centre, covered in hundreds of mirrors.
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This structure is a massive solar collector designed by the Wizard-King Aardwal in centuries past. He used the concentrated light in his investigations into the magic of light, and in the fashioning of flash crystals.”
