Boob Plate: Another perspective.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBtvS5yhTA8&t=2s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6KHz0qWQA9IMany automatically call the fantasy "Boob Plate" dangerous, impractical, unrealistic and ridiculous but here's an alternate perspective I hadn't considered and that caught me by surprise.
Shad is a medieval enthusiast and makes many videos about medieval times, from armor and weapons, to castles, as well as commenting on various fantasy tropes.
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Still probably not something that would ever happen (it would require extra metal to curve around the breasts, which would add weight and cost), but at least this means it can be less cringey and immersion-breaking in fantasy, as long as it's still full armor.
I enjoy watching Shad's videos, though I don't always agree with him I think he's pretty bright and knows his stuff. I should watch this video at some point. Regarding boob plate, the huge glaring problem is that having the center of the breastplate not stick out is very bad armour design, as you really want plate armour because its so good at deflecting force, and distributing the force that can't be deflected away. This is why maces for example used flanges or even spikes apparently, so they wouldn't skid off metal but catch and deliver their full force.
It would be easy to design a breastplate to accommodate an average woman's bust line back in the middle ages, in part because women were on average quite skinny, and thus would likely not have prominent breasts. So, the standard male breastplate with it's protruding/domed center would likely fit just fine on a woman. Note there are/were men with very large chests that would be harder to fit into armour, especially if the wearer is very muscular, as their effective size varies quite a few inches when their muscles are flexed, requiring a looser fit which would be very uncomfortable when not flexing.
Memo to myself: start a petition for Baldur's Gate 3 to include codpieces.
Now that should be enough to redeem this gentle fella.
Also it doesn't have to be mini.
The Scythians had plenty of women warriors, and may have been the source of the Greek myth of the Amazons, or absorbed the Amazons. One of their leaders, Tomyris, a woman, led the army that killed the Persian emperor Cyrus The Great. They pretty much wore the same leather and scale mail as the men of the time. There's no evidence they cut off a breast to be better archers.
Most armor requires wearing a lot of padding underneath it, like a gambeson for heavier metal armors. All that padding would pretty much remove most of the differences between sexes. Not only would the padding protect from impacts, it was needed to keep the armor from chafing.
But I am very willing to tolerate it, as long as it is not bikini plate like some of the above anime stuff. Not saying I did not see worse examples in Western fantasy. Even Ultima Online had skimpy female plate.
I would argue that biological imperative is responsible for thin waists being fashionable, as a small waist is in most cases a sign of health and youthfulness, as most people get chunkier with age, meaning a smaller waist might actually be more intimidating, especially with bigger shoulders/hips in contrast. If you really wanted a good place to 'carry' the weight of the armour from, I'd favour the hips, and hopefully avoid a sore back that carrying it at the waist could produce. This could be wrong though, as some cultures don't think small waisted men are intimidating.
I think the tech of the later greeks was probably about good enough to make plate mail, the Romans definitely knew how to make basic plate, though iirc metal's staggering cost and the limited benefit in pitched battle with a large shield meant nobody bothered. Look at some gladiator armour, it has similar aspects to 16th century armour (particularly the protection for arms, which was regularly made of overlapping plates, and I don't mean scales!). I think a strong argument can be made that on a battlefield, with disciplined troops, platemail is an unnecessary cost, and use of a good shield is good enough really.
The hardened steel thing is an odd point, as iirc, most armour was cold forged from very low carbon steel, which is quite soft, and cannot be hardened by heat treatment. The cold forging adds lots of stiffness, and some hardness, but you need to stress relieve with heat or you'll get cracking. I've done a bit of cold forging, and it can produce very strong finished products without bothering to harden. Apparently some armour was casehardened, which adds carbon in a thin layer on the outside of the metal, but even with this, heat treating armour would be a literal nightmare, for a number of reasons. 1st, at the hardening temperature steel is pretty soft, and your breastplate will likely be distorted, if not 2 dimensional due to lack of structural integrity. 2nd, if you are heat treating something thin, you need even heating to minimize distortion after quenching, and without a 'modern' heat treating oven this would be terribly difficult. Hotter the metal = more shrinkage in metal working, and as full plate needs to be fitted pretty well, this could be a big problem. 3rd, you couldn't use hardened but untempered steel as armour, since it'd just shatter, so you'd need to temper it, and tempered steel is springy in nature, its a big reason its used! Now, while a stiff enough spring might not bend/deflect very easily, it still will, so I wouldn't assume armour that has somehow been heat treated wouldn't bend under a blow. For example, most chainmail was not only not especially hard, it was necessary to soften it with height to make it effective.
I strongly agree deflection is much gentler than absorption. I once got in a scuffle with a smaller, weaker guy, and while I could flloor him with one punch, my face had to absorb all the force of each blow, and I looked worse despite knocking him on his ass +5 times, since most of the force of my punch was wasted moving his whole body. I think he might have taken more brain damage though, but if we're talking about blow to the body and not head, deflection is 100% better than absorption. I've heard that's why flat topped crusader helms fell out of fashion, as your neck had to absorb the full force of an undeflected downwards blow, while a connical top avoided this problem. Absorbed blows are also why maces have flanges, and perhaps why some bludgeons were spiked, so they would bit into the armour and not slide right off, thus transmitting more force, not to puncture people.
I've always been deeply suspicious of the view that much historical armour was actually heat treated (nor was I alone on this, other metallurgists agree it seems pretty impractical with the tech of the era), and I found out eventually that even low carbon steels can be forced into austentite and martensite by excessive cold working, and armour makers worked armour pretty heavily with little to no heat. Armour making remember was done by a specialist who did nothing else (usually in a large shop with various apprentices and journeymen), not a blacksmith or even weaponsmith, and they might not even be well versed in heat treatment, a tough thing to learn to do low tech. I mention martensite btw because thats the state of hardened steel post quench, and some have claimed to find it in armour. If you actually look up what a lot of the armour was made of, it wasn't very hardenable anyways, and cold forging would probably be just as hard.
Also an issue, if you heated armour, you'd lose a lot of your metal to oxidation unless you are in a sealed environs, ie case hardening, and it might not be even. Watch an online video of a blacksmith in action, the stuff on the outside of the hot metal that crumbles off is iron oxide, and is not an insignificant loss of metal per heating, and as plate mail would need heaps of forging, it'd almost all have to be done cold or you'd waste most of the metal, especially once you got under 1/4 inch and you have some much surface area vs volume.
I am in my spare time working on a very sciency fantasy setting, and have studied metallurgy a good bit academically, so I'm not pulling this all out of my ass.