Excellent job on doging detail on the hands. Chainmail, thou art thy saviour!

Seriously though, that is a VERY good concept sketch...
Did you work for Blizzard? 8o
And the best way of layering armors is:
Cloth - Your usual clothes, or a robe
Padding - With several pounds of metal armor on, and when maces/morning stars/flails would hit that armor, this is required to avoid seriously deep cuts. 10 pounds of metal, being whacked with about 10 pounds of metal with 60 pounds of force. Broken bones ensue...
Leather/Scalemail - scale is just metal rings/plates attached to leather. Not much better at protecting then leather, but good none the less...
Ringmail/Chainmail - both are basically the same thing, except ring mail uses FAR larger, thicker, and heavier rings of a metal. Chainmail has about 10 times the rings that ringmail does, but they\'re smaller and thinner. still able to take a heavy cut, though bashing will still hurt a hell of a lot.
Plated armor - the heavy stuff, this is what\'s used to
deflect blows, not stop them. Armor is crafted in such a way that it would turn-aside a sharp blade, should it ever attempt to directly peirce the armor... which it usually couldn\'t, anyways, because it was half a inch thick, usually composed of multiple layers melted into eachother. Still, maces and flails would still dent it badly enough in acouple of fights so that the entire thing would have to be re-worked. War Axes would usually just stop and get stuck if the armor was thick enough and the swing didn\'t have much power behind it... but it usually wasn\'t thick enough to stop it all the way. usually got through the chainmail, too... 8o
A actual chest covering of chainmail costs about $400, IIRC. Plated armor costs thousands. THOUSANDS of dollars... If it\'s the real deal, that is. Movie armor is always cheap, and usually very thin, aluminum/plastic... painted with a steel color/texture

And with my rant in your mind, if i see a drawing with a sword
peircing a frontal chestplate, i will state that you are not drawing realistically...
And that you should\'ve drawn it slashing, cutting the plate in two.
