How could Rome mass produce her weapons, armors and supplies?

[visser300]

In order to supply her vast amount of legions, she really needs some kind of mass produce mechanic in order to supply weapons, armors, necessaries to her professional army.

But how could she actually do that? A real mass producing mechanic would not appear in next 1000 years. How could she do that in this barbaric time?

[xccam]

Lots of armour was passed down and consistently reused, its not like a soldier died and all his equipment was automatically lost (sometimes it was of course, or irreparably damaged).

Plus get lots of people making it.

[Condottiere 40K]

Roman culture was highly organized, so there probably was a military industrial complex, because you're forgetting that besides equipping an army, you have to feed it.

[Jester]

the romans caused terrible CO2 emissions actually.

no really, they found out by ice core examinations

[Aule_the_creator]

The most common armour for a roman legionary was the lorica hamata, a mail armour type (and most effective, despite what we think today with plate being better than mail, mail was better than the segmentata, the segmentata was just cheaper and faster to produce). Half of the rings in the coat are punched whole from sheet-metal, and the other half are made by drawing wire around a tune, cutting them up, and flattening them, then riveting them together with the whole rings. The card-punching was a technique perfected by the Romans. In a city of a million people, you could have quite a large number of smiths going, and in the beginning, the militia soldiers had to provide their own gear, so the republic didn't worry about this at all. After the Marian Reforms the generals provided the troops with armour, and would most likely commission them from a large number of smiths, and perhaps they had some sort of publicani system. During the Empire, when the state provided the armour for all of the soldiers, about 300,000 all in all, IIRC, in an empire extending from Britain to Egypt... commissioning armourers from all over the empire would not be extremely difficult.

[Coleus]

The late Roman Empire had state armouries near Milan to mass produce weapons and armour.

[daelin4]

The Romans likely hired numerous home-or-local smiths to maintain their equipment. Creating Roman weapons may have been a hurdle for those not familiar with the design, but maintenance isn't as complex as crafting the entire weapon from scratch.

The term "mass-prodice" implies a uniform and standardized arsenal; the Romans were not as uniform as they are portrayed in popular media, as the only way to really ensure that would be to distribute accurate blue-prints for everything a legionary would be equipped to every smith hired to do work for the legions. That would NOT be a good idea. It would be far more efficient to have hired locals or otherwise closer Roman sources than a single, centralized source. The logistics and requisition and redtape would have made a centralized system far less efficient than it needed to be- imagine the headache of trying to obtain new armour from Rome and it would take months to reach Britain. You'd rather the local smith just work on your existing armour and weapons. Blacksmiths that followed the legionary baggage train would have likely gained experience in working on Roman equipment, but the guy lived forever or had fifty arms a handful of Roman smiths will likely apprentice hired local smiths. Armies foraged locally a well, they didn't make tons of hard tack in Rome and hope to last solely on those.

I think that newer technologies like the Lorica Segmentata likely failed to gain widespread adoption due to the fact that the technology to produce them is known only to specific (re non local) sources. A Briton smith hired on to work the legion's equipment would not have had the expertise to build LS pattern armour from the start. Compared with chainmaille, something which pretty much every blacksmith by that time period would have known, would have become far more convenient despite any apparent obsolescence.

[Alkaline Earth]

There's a reason why most Americans have the last name Smith

All the Europeans who where good craftsmen came here and invented stuffs and made the US rich.

[Omegazxi]

They went from region to region and told the inhabitants thats the had work line up for them and they refused to take no for answer.

But the Romans like many other civilizations at the time had a good grasp on logistics and supplies, also blacksmiths traveled with Army camps to repair armor and weapons as well as make new ones (would be a nice agent or unit idea actually). And after you destroy another army there were lots of weapons to be reused or melted down into new weapons and armor.

So pretty much with Blacksmiths and Foundaries, which made weapons with metals gathered from mining or pillaging.