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Military Develops Liquid Body Armor
kai5263499 writes "Military.com has an article about a new liquid body armor the U.S. Army Research Laboratory has developed. According to Dr. Eric Wetzel, the project coordinator: 'The key component of liquid armor is a shear thickening fluid. STF is composed of hard particles suspended in a liquid. The liquid, polyethylene glycol, is non-toxic, and can withstand a wide range of temperatures. Hard, nano-particles of silica are the other components of STF. This combination of flowable and hard components results in a material with unusual properties'."
Armor that is lighter and more flexible would be more comfortable to wear. This makes it more likely to be worn. I would expect to eventually see designer suits utilizing this stuff to be bought up by politicians, rap stars, etc. Bascially anyone who would be interested in an armor plated limo.
As a former member of the US armed forces I had to wear a kevlar vest from time to time. The vests I wore hindered movement considerably. They were not that heavy, but the inflexibility was the worst part. As I was finishing my term new vest were just making their way into use that incorporated ballistic plates (steel I think, maybe ceramic) to actually stop bullets. The vest I wore were only said to stop fragments not a direct bullet impact. The downside to the newer vests was heavier weight. If they can make the vest more flexible, lighter weight, and have better stopping great.
Our service members need every advantage they can get. Wether or not you agree with the politics that puts our troops in harms way a person must be very anti-American to not want them all to come home again.
That is all for my rant. Time to go home for the day. :)
the_crowbarHave you read the Moderator Guidelines
Does the "poly" really change it all that much?
Sodium explosively combusts in water! Chlorine gas is highly toxic! Can the combination really change their properties all that much?
Been there. Done that. It's called Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Look it up.
I think I can speak for nearly all of us when I say the last thing we want is to see American soldiers die. That's kind of the whole point.
>*sigh*
>
> that is exactly the parent's point. If its stab resistant how can it also be sewable. Since > sewing is essentially stabbing a piece of cloth with a needle that has some thread going > through it.
It's probably the same reason you can pour it slowly as a liquid. When you sew it you're using a small amount of energy on a small area, whereas a bullet has a lot more energy and mass and causes more of a chain reaction. Probably.
Nukes are not always desirable.
For example you may want something the country has *cough* oil *cough*. In that case you don't want to make the country uninhabitable. Not only do you want to make sure the occupying army is unharmed but you will need the labor of the civillians to make the gears of industry turn.
If we dropped nukes on iraq who would pump the oil and transport it to our ships? How could our soldiers stay in the country for a decade to make sure people do what we say?
Polyethylene glycol's pretty good on one hand: it's dirt cheap, comes in a variety of weights (we have on the shelf in lab average molecular weight PEGs from 200 to 20,000 daltons) and as has been mentioned above is nontoxic. What's bad about PEG is that it degrades fairly easily--it should be stored in the dark and kept cold, at least if you're going to use it as a reagent. This makes me wonder about the shelf life of the armor, although PEG degredation might not be the limiting factor; physical wear and tear might be.
Couple of issues here (avoiding the whole flame aspect):
1) While logistics would be a pain, if the US camped a couple of carrier battle groups off the coast of a given country, they would own the sky and sea in short order. It becomes much easier to keep supplied when you can do that.
2) Iraq had something like the 3rd largest army in the world back in 1991, which the US effectively neutralized in a month or so. Again, airpower is king. The country isn't large or exceptionally modern, but it was quite a military foe.
3) If Iraq is small, then there aren't many countries that are a big military threat. Germany, the UK, israel... the list is small and we're on good terms of most of the strongest countries (coincidence? I think not)
4) The fact that the US hasn't fought a "big" country in years doesn't mean jack with regards to the ability to. I've never mugged someone, that doesn't mean I'm too weak to.
Sure, there's some arrogance from the US on the military front, it makes sense. Like it or not, the US posesses the strongest military force in the world.
Hate us for our culture, politics, whatever, that's an subjective opinion and you are welcome to them. But military strength is an objective thing, and hatred of the States doesn't diminish that.
And yeah, if we fought a united (!) Europe, we could probably be beaten. There are a zillion better reasons not to attack, least of all being that France is a strong ally...
"Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel." - A.B.
But how does a footbal player turn soldier qualify as a hero, exacty?
I was a soldier, am I a hero? Are football players heroes?
What about Iraqi soldiers, are they heroes?
Sadly this invention was too late to save Pat Tillman.
How very disrespectful to single out this one man out as "a Hero" for the mere media value that he played in the NFL. His pre-war job was to play a silly game for millions of dollars; how is that significant? It is a sad commentary that that is the reason his death gets any more coverage than other soldiers killed in this political bloodbath. The NFL probably paused for all of 5 seconds before casting him aside and filling his position with someone else, and now they're latching on to mountains of press coverage because he's dead.
It's hard to say that without seeming to take away from Pat or without seeming to sound like a troll, but it had to be said in light of you being moderated up. So, yes, think about why Pat went to fight, but don't forget about all the others who sacrificed to fight and who died without all the fanfare. You should be far more thankful for their history of anonymous sacrifice.
Rubbish, it's not disrespectful to anyone. The guy turned down $ millions to volunteer to go fight for a cause he believed in after returning from his honeymoon. That demonstrates unusual and quite incredible selflessness, sacrifice and commitment to his country, he was also well known and liked by many fans whatever you think of that. He made the Army Rangers, an elite force and now he's joined the ranks of America's war dead. Telling his story takes nothing away from the others, I remember when this guy joined up with his brother, he was being interviewed (nobody could quite figure out why he was doing it and he was reticent about going into details) and I remember thinking, "that's one hell of a guy", now we've learned today that he's been killed. If anything it brings the loss of the thousands of family members into sharp focus through our fleeting familiarity with this hero. And no I ain't even an NFL fan.
You belittling his sacrifice and claiming his career was silly is ignorant and disrespectful.
How about using a piezoelectric effect? Deforming the outer surface (e.g. a bullet strike) creates a charge that propogates through the fluid beneath the outer sheath and causes it to stiffen.
All but one of the guys who dropped the nukes committed suicide.
And so did many victims of the Holocaust.
And yet, many of the Nazis who committed what were -- unlike Hiroshima and Nagasaki -- unarguably war crimes, did not commit suicide, and some continue to collect pensions from the German government to this day.
I'm not trying to say that no American ever committed war crimes; My Lai was also unarguably a war crime (and may Calley burn in Hell!), and some of the U.S. military's actions in Iraq -- as in throwing prisoners in a river to drown -- surely are atrocities.
I'm just pointing out that suicide isn't necessarily what the guilty do. Indeed, I'd be inclined to suggest that the really guilty, people like Josef Mengele ("Angel of Death" responsible for human experimentation at Auschwitz, died vacationing at a Brazilian beach), Rudolf Höß (first commandant of Auschwitz, executed), and Erich_Priebke (perpetrator of the Ardeatine caves massacre, still alive), tend to be so -- for lack of a better word -- evil that they feel they're not guilty and therefore feel no need for suicide or other punishment. (Indeed, Priebke so strongly felt that the killing 350 Italian civilians was not his responsibility but the responsibility of those who ordered him to do it, that he openly admitted his actions from fifty years later to a television news crew's cameras -- and it was only this admission that led to his trial).
For the record, I believe that the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were no more illegal than any bombing of cities in the war -- and all major combatants bombed cities in World War II. Dead by conventional bomb, dead by V1 rocket, dead by fire-bombing, dead by atomic bomb -- they're all dead. I'm unaware of any difference in ways of being dead, with the possible exception that atomic bombs mean a quicker death.
Also, for the record, I believe any crime involved in dropping the atomic bombs pales beside the atrocities committed by the Japanese in Korea, China (in "the Rape of Nanking" (warning: link includes a disturbing picture of mass decapitation) the word "rape" is used pretty literally -- but includes ripping babies from their mothers' arms and bashing the babies' heads against walls, prior to raping the mother), the Philippines, and the Bataan Death March, not to mention the Japanese forced labor camps in which tens of thousands died.
To those who contend that we "could have" beaten Japan without recourse to atomic bombs, I ask them how many more America boys would have had to have died to achieve an unconditional Japanese surrender using only conventional weapons -- and if those arguing against using atomic bombs had any of their family members on the line.
I wasn't in the Pacific fighting Japan, but Paul Fussell (later professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania) was -- after fighting Hitler's legions in Europe -- and I'll defer to his opinion and that of the other boots on the ground: "Thank God for the Atomic Bomb"
But let me ask you: how many American boys would you have sacrificed in further conventional war against Japan, so that you, safe at home, could claim the moral high ground of an atomic-bomb-free but protracted conventional war ?
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
By far most of the people who oppose the war are not American, and their primary reason to oppose it is the tens of thousands of Iraqis that were and are killed. Not that most people want the American soldiers dead, but those 700 are a much lesser concern, especially since they did do most of all that killing.
The tendency of Americans to completely forget/not care that there even were any Iraqis hurt is maybe the most disturbing thing about this country to me.
Excuse me? A quicker death my ass! If you were dying of radiation sickness right now, or were a child with one and a half arms, soon to die from cancer I don't think you'd be so keen to drop nuclear bombs.
I do not know whether it was "economical" (although using that word in references to human lives disgusts me) to drop the bombs, but doing something such as that was definitely an atrocity. Perhaps it was the lesser of two evils, but it was still damn evil - and everyone should recognise that.
When it comes to a falloutesque situation, I hope it was, at least, "economical."
im in ur