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Inventor Slims Down Exoskeletal Body Armor
The Hamilton Spectator is reporting that inventor Troy Hurtubise, creator of the "bear-protection suit" made famous by taking a hit from a moving vehicle, has slimmed down his design in hopes of landing a lucrative government contract. From the article: "He has spent two years and $15,000 in the lab out back of his house in North Bay, designing and building a practical, lightweight and affordable shell to stave off bullets, explosives, knives and clubs. He calls it the Trojan and describes it as the 'first ballistic, full exoskeleton body suit of armour.'"
- Beaten with baseball bats
- Slammed by a large log
- Pushed off a cliff
- Hit by a truck
- Beaten by a gang
Google Video has a different videoJust as a start, here's his Wikipedia entry.
So until his claims are proven, he's in the group of people whose claims should all be taken with a grain of salt.
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I want to say that the rifle (an elephant gun or not) was fired straight into the chest plate. The joints might not be so well armored (and in the 40 pounds version, they are not even be protected).
It's a play on the inventor's name, Troy. Trojan = "from Troy."
At the very least, maybe they'll use them in the Halo movie.
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Even then it would still work better than most stuff that humans ever used as body armour. If you look back into history, humans have been quite happy with a lot less before.
Humans settled for a chain byrnie (basically, inaccurately: t-shirt) for a long time, until basically everyone was already trained to slash at the legs. Then they basically just made it longer. When bodkin tips and primitive firearms made maille useless, people just came up with a thin plate armour, but even that wasn't as invulnerable as you'd think. Then eventually guns got more and more powerful and all the weight was concentrated in a super-thick breastplate and helmet... at the price of leaving the arms and legs completely unprotected again.
(As a side-note, that's one of the factors that confuses people about medieval armours. They see a late musket era breastplate that weighs a lot, and get ideas like, "man, the whole suit must have weighed 100 kilos." In fact, at that point the breastplate and the helmet were the whole suit.)
At no point was the armour supposed to make someone 100% invulnerable. Something like a lance during a cavalry charge was nigh impossible to reliably stop, because with an armoured man and a destrier horse behind it, that was a helluva lot of energy and momentum pushing that tip. So armour never really tried to be invulnerable to that. Estocs could do a pretty good job of penetrating a knight's armour, and so could warhammers (think a thin sharp spike perpendicular to the handle, much like a pickaxe, not the massive hammers portrayed in video games), and so could back-spikes on axes, spiked maces/morningstars and flails. Even if it didn't penetrate, a mace or flail hit could crush articulations.
And in the age of chain armour, it was even more funny. A good hard hit with a straight sword could easily crush tissue and break bones even if it didn't penetrate the mesh of iron loops. Padding helped a bit, but only so much.
Basically the purpose of armour in all ages wasn't to make you invulnerable, but to give you better odds. If on the average you could hope for 1-2 disabling blows deflected by armour before one finally got you, that was advantage enough. Anything more than that that would have been impractically heavy and ultra-expensive. The weight was especially a factor, as they actually had to be able to fight in those suits.
So basically what I'm saying is that if this suit's only vulnerability are the joints, well, then that's already head and shoulders over what has been considered good armour before.
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Ok, he's videotaped himself, IN THE SUIT, being hit by a truck, wailed on by baseball bats, etc. And you're arguing that the suit must not exist because he also believes in some other nutcase idea?
Look, the suit exists. There's documentary evidence. (Literally; a documentary was made about his efforts to use the suit to observe hibernating bears, which is what it was originally designed for.) Regardless of what else he believes, this is definitely a product that can be useful to the military.
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Tricky. Aramid polymers (such as Kevlar or Twaron) are a few times stronger per weight unit than steel. Thus a suit made of steel would be a few times heavier than its polymer counterpart. Thus I'd think there's little interest in such beasts.
One interesting snippet though is that bulletproof vests are not knife resistant and knife-resistant vests are not bulletproof. This has to do with the type of weave.
You are mixing "strength." Aramid polymers are not stronger than steel if your measure is bending it. They may be able to stop a bullet with a few times less material, but that's not a measure of "strength." If solid parts are so bad, why are the ballistic plates solid inserts into bullet proof armor? Solid is better than fabric sometimes. The benefit of this suit is not the suit as he makes it. He can't make it as it should be made. It should be lightweight but strong sandwiches of cermaics and steel, covered in a woven fabric (Kevlar, if you wish) bonded to it. Something with some form holding capabilities (the steel) added impact resistance (the cermaics), and penetration stopping (the fabric) all made into an armor patter like the one he laid out.
With the right materials, his would be bulletproof and knifeproof, just like you mention is difficult to do. It would also be lighter than people expect, though it would still probably be very bulky.
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I believe it is because the Humvee is designed to be an all purpose vehicle, and the guns can be quickly mounted or dismounted depending on what they need the vehicle for. The Humvee is a truck first, and an armed platform second - quite the opposite of a tank or howitzer.
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