Alexander for the time being found the arrow-making facilities to be adequate, being able to at least meet his required demand for the coming year.
As such, he was next taken to the armor shop, where according to Faziz, two thousand (2,000) men were employed making chainmail.
This was a huge endeavor and the dimensions of the workshop where these men worked in surely represented as such, with the humongous wooden shed being the literal size of a football field, having multiple doors, numerous huge windows to let in sufficient light, and a large number of thick wooden pillars to hold the giant roof up.
Alexander observed that all the men inside were industriously laboring away, with some drawing out the steel wires, others turning them to rings, a few were engaged cutting these rings, many were busy linking them with each other while a large number were riveting them.
The small clinking and clattering noise that filled the football pitch-sized shed was surely something to be experienced as the men tried to fulfill Alexander’s order of so many chainmail.
Alexander had ordered his legionaries to be equipped with chainmail that covered up to the thighs, or traditionally by what was called a hauberk with additional head protection, which was also called a coif.
The general soldier’s calves and feet were left relatively unprotected, being only lightly armored by leather greaves made from boiled leather and thick leather shoes lined with thin steel plates.
Their hands were also relatively bare, sheathed with only leather gloves, thus making them vulnerable to enemy attacks.
And the reason behind such decisions had to do with weight, time, and cost concerns, due to all of which Alexander was forced to prioritize the protection of key and vital areas of the body and sacrifice armor over relatively safe ones.
Alexander’s first concern was the weight of the armor that would soldiers have to lug around.
Chainmail might appear light, being made of thin metal wires turned into rings.
But it was still heavy.
For example, a short-sleeved shirt of chainmail typically weighed around 8kg.
While the hauberk, which was a long-sleeved shirt that reached up to the thighs that Alexander planned to use weighed around 12 kg.
Then there was the headpiece, or as it was more commonly known, coif, which came at around 3 kg.
This was already 15kgs of steel.
And if Alexander wanted to add a pair of mail mittens or gloves to protect the hands and fingers, that would weigh an additional 1.5 kg.
The legs would need to be protected by a pair of chausses which would add another 5 kg of weight, thus bringing up the total ultimate weight to protect the whole body up to about nearly 22 kg.
This was a significant increase from the original 15kg.
Now, granted wearing mail would not feel as heavy as carrying a backpack that weighed the same amount.
Because the weight would be evenly distributed around the body.
And to help with that even more. belts at the hip and straps around the arms and legs could be used to bind the mail to the body so that the weight would rather feel like more of the own body weight and not like dragging a huge burden,
Additionally, chainmail weight could be heavily reduced by making the rings really thin, which could help shave off as much as 50% of the weight, though that would have the drawback of decreasing some of the armor protection.
But all in all, these solutions were possible, thus mitigating the problem with weight.
But in attempting to do so, the second and third problems, i.e- cost and time would start to rear their ugly heads.
Making just the hauberk and coif was already a very time-consuming process, taking somewhere between 180 to 200 hrs to make.
And so, if the mittens and legs were to be included, this would easily reach 300 hours.
The reason for this disproportionate increase was because the rings on these two mail armor would have to be much finer, so as to allow them to slide off the skin and not obstruct the body’s movement.
This huge amount of required time naturally translated to huge costs, and reasoning that the legs would be relatively safe shield the legionaries’ large shield, and the hands and fingers would be protected by the sword guard, Alexander decided that the cons outweighed the pros here.
But that was the case for only the general soldiers.
As for the armors of his officials and generals, Alexander intended to fully protect them to the best of his abilities, covering them head to toe with chainmail, underneath which would be a layer of thorax linen or gambeson.
The reason for this was because these men would be the brains of the army and would be the ones to lead the common soldiery into battle. 𝘦𝘯𝑜𝘷𝘦𝑙．𝑜𝑟𝘨
And as Alexander planned to make these men highly trained and educated, hence the cost of protecting them would dwarf the risk of losing such a high-value investment.
This type of equipment would be given to all officers above squad leader (10 men team leader), i.e sergeants (100 men leader) and above, which came to exactly 71 officials per legion.
(60 sergeants, 10 captains, and 1 legion leader).
And though Alexander could not afford 6,000 such chainmail, 71 was certainly feasible.
As these thoughts played inside Alexnader, he then asked Faziz, “How many chainmail can we make?”
About hundred to hundred and twenty (100 – 120) a day my lord,” Faziz proudly answered, having never seen large numbers of iron products made every day before in his life.
“Mmmm, that’s good,” Alexander give him a gentle nod of approval to this, appearing neither pleased nor displeased by the speed, for the number was around his own estimate of 180 to 200 hrs per armor mark.
Finished with this site inspection, Alexander then moved on to the melee weapons part of the district, where he observed the production of spears, pillums, caltrops, and swords were being made.
Alexander particularly paid attention to the sword-making process, as it would be the primary weapon of his soldiers.
He had given Faziz the design of the sword that he copied from the Roman gladius, with the addition of a sword guard.
This was added to protect the fingers, and particularly the thumbs of the wielders, which was a major source of injury for the Romans.
But those were only the outer changes.
As much bigger changes were happening internally.
Firstly, the swords were being made not quite the same way they were made before.
Alexander had attached a waterwheel to his shed, which replaced much of the initial manual hammering, allowing the steel ingots to be more easily turned into sword billets.
Hundreds of blacksmiths would then take these billets into finished swords, and the second difference in the production technique would beings.
Instead of simply beating the steel, Alexander had ordered the blacksmiths to deliberately dent the edge of the blades, creating spiraling patterns on the surface of the sword.
The reason for this was to turn the atoms that run through that ordinarily run straight like the grains in a wood into a swirling pattern very reminiscent of a fingerprint.
In this way, whereas previously any impact energy could travel straight through the steel from edge to edge and break it, now will have to travel all the way along these swirls, thus exhausting more of its energy in the process, before it can break the blade.
Only by doing this, by processing the steel a bit differently, the steel can be manipulated to be such that the cracks will now have to follow a longer path, and this would roughly double the overall breaking strength of a sword.
And not only that, these grooves would allow the swords to withstand hits from multiple angles equally well, rather than only from only one single direction as was the case with ordinary swords, which tended to be very strong when attacked against the grain, but very brittle when attacked along it.
But Alexander was not done yet, for there was still the heat treatment to be done, which in this case was called quenching.
This was very similar to annealing, as the blades would be put into a furnace at around a 1000 degrees Celcius, soaked in the furnace for a few hours, and then, instead of letting the steel cool slowly, they would be taken out of the furnace and immediately bought back to room temperature by placing them into ice-cold water, with the ice, being winter, being sourced from the nearby hills.
This technique would produce a very hard, but also quite brittle steel, making it very good at slicing others but not being able to withstand repeated enemy hits.
And to rectify this, they would again be heated at 300-400 degrees Celcius for a few hours. in a heat treatment process called stress relieving, which would help the steel literally relieve some of its internal molecular stress and finally turn into Alexander’s desired product- strong, tough, and malleable, able to hack, slash, thrust, and parry like no other blades.
A sword made from this would be magnitudes stronger than anything anyone could produce and was designed to be the primary tool for Alexander’s conquests.
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