On a pseudo-armor tip:
I've been fashioning some SP goggles with combat in mind as of late.
I'm not much of a mad-scientist type, I'm more of a fighter, so I'm always thinking about how to make SP armor and combat-related SP stuff.
So I used the iron goggles that the Heidelburg Mensur fencers used as loose inspiration, and took a pair of German WWII safety googles as a base, adding heavy-gauge brass-rod protective eye-grills on hinges to flip down over the high-impact safety glass. The bars on the grills are angled such to provide protection primarily from downward vertical and diagonal cuts. Got rid of the elastic strap and replaced it with a buckled leather strap, of course, fairly standard SP stuff.
I'm not done, I still have to develop a locking mechanism for the grills when they're down, brass plate some of the steel parts still showing, and add a little more leather just for aesthetics.
My soldering skills are a little rough, so they might not be the prettiest things you've ever seen, but when they're done I'll post a pic up here for y'all to check out.
Hopefully I'll also put up some Steamy Gangs-of-New-York style streetfighter bracers, my winter gorget, brass-pauldron-having military longcoat, and brass-shin-plate-having 'battle spats' at the same time, but maybe I'm getting ahead of myself. I just kinda dig the idea of presenting it all as 'an ensemble', ya know? Maybe even with my brass codpiece to boot.