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US Army to Try Out New, Anime-based Uniforms
PenguinRadio writes "This is being reported in a few places, most notably USA Today which has an article about the US Army teaming up with MIT to develop a new nanotechnology-based outfit for our soldiers that can detect bio hazards, injury, and other funky things. The 5 year, $50 million grant also wants to look at bending light around the uniform to create some sort of invisibility." CNET has another story. The Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies has its own web page, of course.
You see this sort of thing (powered and/or cloaking exosuits) in anime, but you also see it in every other walk of science fiction too. ex: Starship Troopers, every other comic book ever published, etc, etc.
Neither of the articles mentions anime either. I'm just wondering where the "anime" reference in the article title came from. Left field, apparently, unless I missed something! (which is entirely likely)
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How do they plan to power these things???
;-)
Army trained hamster powered generators carried in backpacks perhaps?
Hate to say it, but most new technologies don't seem to get very far until the pentagon decides they're useful. Hopefully this will prime the pump of a nanotech industrial revolution.
"If you're thinking what I'm thinking, you're right." -
I didn't realize that Starship Troopers (1960) or Predator (1987) were anime.
Because so many people seem to be having trouble with this...
One would assume that they said "anime-based" because these sorts of battle suits crop up a lot in anime (although generally without invisibility) -- take Bubblegum Crisis, for example. The suit pictured in the article--along with the drawing style and the fact that the wearer is apprently female--looks suspiciously anime-like.
Compare to this.
Also, a little note to the humor impaired: The phrase "anime-based" in the title of the story isn't there to imply that the Pentagon is actually trying to be anime-like. It's a joke.
Look closely at the Army's own webpage with their little picture of what the armor suit might look like...
He's holding a Pulse Rifle from Aliens!
I think it's really weird that a filmmaker decides to make a film that's a metaphor for Vietnam in which superior technology is beaten by an organic enemy; an obvious moral. But now the Army wants those Pulse Rifles.
Have any of you seen pictures of the OICW? It's the Army's latest attempt at a replacement infantry rifle for the aging M16 (A rifle which when first made, had a plastic stock stamped with Mattel's logo because they were manufacturing the plastic parts). I swear, the people in charge of defining the equipment a future soldier will be wearing must sit around all day and watch Aliens over and over and over...
I saw some recent footage of a new integrated networking system for mobile soldiers. All these soldiers are checking their PDAs and typing into their wristpad. In some way I can understand the advantage of having access to all that information, but time and again history has proven that soldier's overreliant on technology get their asses bit.
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I was watching the Discovery channel the other day and I saw a peice on asteroids and how little the government gives them ($1 million from the NASA budget) to help track the many floating around space. Alot that, if they hit earth, would cause a global catastrophy, even the end of mankind. Sure, military forces is a good cause for funding, but I, for one, would like to see more money spent in causes like that, as opposed to bending light and creating armor.
The original poster was seriously confused. Don't people pay attention in physics classes anymore?
Simple considerations tell us that geometrical optics is an excellent approximation for any large object. The size of the object is much, much greater than a wavelength of light, so optics reduces to tracing rays from your eyeball to the source, and thence reflected or absorbed as the case may be. There is no such thing as "bending" visible light around a macroscopic object. You can make a suit which is nearly fully reflective (not a good stealth tactic -- you would appear like a nice shiny mirror), or nearly absorptive (in which case you would appear black), but there are plenty of ordinary materials that already work quite well for either purpose.
Since I presume that the nanotech folks at MIT are well aware of this fact, I doubt they proposed to "bend light" in their suits. Rather, they are probably going to implement something which Nature has long realized in chameleons and various other creatures : "invisibility" through blending in. Various miniaturized digital cameras could sense the background that a suit was in, and change the colorations on the suit (perhaps using a variation on the "digital ink" concept) accordingly. Hence, a suit could appear sandy-yellow when in the desert, white when in the desert, and camoflouge when in the jungle.
Since we all already doing essentially that when outfitting soldiers (no one wears the bright red of old British regulars anymore), it is unclear whether there is any real advantage to this concept, especially given the cost. Particularly since, to anyone equipped with infrared night vision goggles, every body temperature objects glow like a beacon.
Bob
Science, like Nature, must also be tamed, with a view turned towards its preservation.
The 5 year, $50 million grant also wants to look at bending light around the uniform to create some sort of invisibility.
IANAS (I Am Not A Scientist), so correct me if I'm wrong... But if you're bending light around a person, that means THEY can't see the light either. Right?
If so, this approach would be limited to situations where vision is not necessary, perhaps holding a hidden position until it is time to move out. Or maybe they would use some sort of devices to allow a soldier to "see" things outside the normal human visual spectrum, thus allowing them to see something despite not being able to see the normally visible light.
Just my 2 :)
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1) If the nanotech is any good, it can absorb energy from a landing (by cascading stiffness up the armor, and allowing the armor to take the pressure without crushing the guy inside) after a fall of much more than 20 ft. Also, I have jumped off of second stories of buildings higher than that often, and 20 ft. isn't THAT much to land from (especially if you know how to land decently.)
2) Ummm, is it just me or is connecting the suit's pressure control just the kind of feature you store in ROM, so it can't be hacked? Also, don't connect this segment of the suit to the (heavily encrypted) wireless network that you would have (but could turn off to sneak past sensors.)
If you were in a combat situation such as the ones that the USA is likely to face in the near (50 years or so) future, the enemy will not have tech. to be able do much damage in a combat zone, and as long as you have good hackers building the systems for the US, it should be ok (randomize frequency used, use encryption, and be able to switch both in combat in case of problem)
3) With mostly tech availible off the shelf, you could build a system that pinpointed who was using your armor and who wasn't, and display this inside of the helmet that the guys are wearing. The suit could also have night vision that would find hot bodies and check if they were wearing suits (which might be able to mask heat using insulation, by the way)
These ideas are all within the range of technology availible by the time we have nanotech to build the suits. (the real assumption here is the nanotech good enough to make the suits)
I'm a concientious