Within my setting, there will be a race of spider people, and they will have the ability to create "metal silk", which is basically taking any type of metal, realistic and fantastic, and dissolving it in silk. The result is a cloth that is soft, supple and flexible as silk, but as strong as the metal used to make the metal silk.
What kinds of armor or clothing could they then be able to create, and would they be very effective?
To explain more about how the metal cloth would be like, if you were to take a piece of the steel cloth and stretch it taunt over a target, then proceeded to slash or thrust at it with a iron sword, the sword would be unable to cut through the cloth. Although, if you upgrade the sword to steel, it will still be unable to cut through the cloth, but a thrust may pierce through.
One obvious problem I can see with this metal cloth would be that even if weapons would fail to cut you, you would still receive a whole bunch of bruises. As such, any armor would then need to try and be hammer-resistant to be effective, altough unlike in Feaurie's setting, these people, who are not giant, and are in fact of a slightly smaller frame than humans, will be more worried about much simpler maces, hammers and swords rather than war golems
My go to solution at the moment is the Gambeson, made of the metal silk, and possibly padded with more metal silk. I am also toying with the idea of how well a metal silk Hijab and face veil would work.
Notes on the setting
- Late Medieval-ish tech levels.
- There will be reasonable amounts of magic
- Armor and clothing for both wartime and peacetime scenarios
- They will be fighting each other, other humans, and possibly other races of varying sizes
- They will also be allied with some humans and those other races.
- This metal silk is fairly common among the spider people, but much rarer among the humans and other races, although rich humans can afford to get this metal silk as well
EDIT 1: The armor need not be COMPLETELY made from the metal silk, they could wear plate, and have extra cloth over it