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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.'"
Let the comments about how it looks just like an avatar from Quake/UT/Halo/etc begin.
WOW - if it pans out, this device is amazing. It only weighs 40lbs, and can withstand the impact from a car or elephant gun? If he can really mass produce it for $2,000 a piece, I would think the government would buy thousands (especially considering decent upper body armor can cost the same amount, and provides limited protection in comparison).
Crack - Free with every butt and set of boobs
This thing would probably easily deflect flying chairs...
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
- 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 videoTHe most trusted name in protection... *ducks*
Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what your country did to you
"I am robo-Troy! Fear me!"
Honestly if I wanted to place a clock in an efficient location "dangling between the legs" isn't one of the first places I would think.
9 out of 10 Bears polled say
"Crunchy on the outside gooey on the inside......."
Wow did I get this line from the article wrong
"Dangling between the legs, that would be a clock."
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
The inventor wore it (including helmet) in a four hour drive - and police officer stopped him and let him go after convincing himself that the inventor could see just fine with the helmet on.
This would be great for soldiers - if able to withstand assault rifle bullets, its weight (18kg) is pretty low for full body armor.
What makes me curious is this:
"In the helmet, there's a solar-powered fresh-air system"
How much fresh air could a solar powered air system produce?
Just 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.
Bush: He's Liberal in all the wrong ways.
Wouldn't want to be wearing one in the desert (jungle, etc), probably a reason why there is limited government interest. Unless this things has some sort of personal AC unit... but that would probably require portable energy beyound military logistical capabilies.
This isn't a matter of discomfort; dehydration and heat exhaustion would probably make this thing useless for large scale deployment. Maybe good for police forces, or soldiers operating in very hostile condtions, but probably too expensive and immature for mainstream deployment.
for example, here's one link:
y -inventor-crafts-real-world-halo-suit-for-militar/
http://www.engadget.com/2007/01/15/project-grizzl
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
... well it is ;)
--I thought I was wrong once, but I was mistaken.
I'll take three, please. A different paint job, and you've got the perfect disguise for your local super hero/villain.
'Loose' is when your pants are three sizes too big. 'Lose' is when you misuse 'loose'.
* $1000 - $2000 each to your normal market.
* $100,000 - $250,000 each to the government for the same outfit as above.
That sounds about right....
Here are some more pictures:
One
Two
Three
A picture can be found here of this revolutionary new technology.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
Finally, we get to see the real-life 'Red VS Blue.'
- Just my $0.02, take with a grain of salt, your mileage may vary.
So, it goes over your body and protects you from harmful things but "Trojan?" Was the name "Ultimate Mega Body Condom" already taken?
The enemy of my enemy is quite possibly also my enemy. I've made a lot of enemies.
For extended deployment, yeah, this would be a bear. But I would think for SWAT-style military deployments into occupied buildings, this would be brilliant. Send four "hardened" troops in ahead of the "soft" troops to clear the building, then let them return to base to cool off.
I would think it would also be handy for the guy who draws the short straw to man the Humvee turret -- in which case AC lines could easily be run up through his feet.
Think about it; our military has spent disgusting amounts of our tax money on a similar project that is now in serious trouble and a source of much scandal. Meanwhile, a private citizen of a neighboring country, with an out-of-pocket budget, succeeds (i'm mildly skeptical, but still, it looks good) at making something that would be a very good start towards our own projects. I want my tax-money back!
For those not in the know:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troy_Hurtubise
He's got his own documentary (via the National Film Board) and he won an ignoble prize...
BlackNova Traders
I can say it does seem to double as birth control. Even if you could find a willing woman, by the time you got that thing off well....the mind would be willing but the flesh soft.
Monstar L
Seems like you can push it in the water and drown the guy. And oh, it's 120Deg F in Iraq in the Summer.
It would also be interesting if one guy with a few thousand dollars could develop better balistic defence in his back yard than the entire US military machine (or indeed anyone else's military machine) has achieved ever. I'm guessing that if anyone takes him up on his challenge, and fires a sniper rifle at him of the kind being used in say Iraq, he's going to win a Darwin award. :-(
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Wasn't the first version of the bear suit, ripped apart by a grizzly in like 30 seconds? If so, then I would treat this new armor like a MS product: Don't buy version 1 or wait until there is a SP.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Being a crackpot is a prerequisite for involvement with our goverment.
...since it's already associated with protection...
Nah, bank robbers would love to have these. Run into a bank, take a few shots from the security guard before disarming him. You are "disguised" and if the police pull up, you have a good chance of again taking them out before they get you. A suit like this is a criminal's wet dream (if it works).
---
When you come to a fork in the road, take it! --Yogi Berra--
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).
"Hey baby, guess what time it is?"
stuff |
Or, more reasonably for the "prison take-down" teams they use to subdue unruly prisoners.
The first two guys are in these as they get a bit better use of limbs than holding the standard assault shield.
Then, the weight of them is a bonus because it'll help them pin the prisoner down.
Thing is, crackpots can still make brilliant discoveries. Newton was an alchemist; Tesla made all sorts of bizarre claims about death rays, "thought photography", and the like.
Hurtubise's bear suit work seems legitimate, so to the extent that the "Trojan" is an extension of that, extreme skepticism doesn't seem called for. OTOH, the "God Light"...well, maybe dude got hit in the head too many times while testing his bear suit or something.
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You cannot wash away blood with blood
Yea, my point didn't come across that clearly. This is an ideal piece of armor for very specialized applications. Don't know what direction the military is moving with mounted armaments, I'd think in the future we'll see joy-stick controlled metal-storm/.50 cals where the gunner is inside a vehicle with software aided remote targeting. Best defense is a good offense you know (especially with RPGs and IEDs).
SWAT-style applications are a good potential use. Especially for urban police forces. I am skeptical of how much military use this thing would see.
As someone with personal experience in the area of gov't contracts, there is no way on dog's green earth this guy is going to get anything but a "don't call us we'll call you" from the Fed's.
What most citizens fail to comprehend is the contracts for things already supplied in very large quantities to the Fed's don't change. They don't until enough moral/political outrage is generated from a given situation that "something must be done!" In the meantime, you get no straight answers from anyone anywhere on the Fed's side.
He may have a great product, but this is where business acumen is important. The guy has two practical options from a business perspective:
1. License the technology for pennies on the dollar to the guys already supplying armor to the DOD and then get screwed by them because they know they didn't pay the guy enough to lawyer-up for the battle to establish the obvious years later. This is a classic move in big-business. Buy innovaters then put their innovations on the shelf where they are "safe."
2. Find other markets. One I'm sure would have some interest is the stunts industry in the U.S. If I still rode mtn bikes, I'd look into this to protect my old bones on some of my favorite descents. (The ones that haven't been lawyered away that is) Meanwhile, find a federal contractor who is powerful enough to run at whoever is providing armor now. It'll take 10 years to get a single purchase order, but maybe by the time the guy's grandchildren are running the company they'll be protecting soldiers.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Just that, based on past incidents of clear crackpottery, his claims should be given a bit closer inspection than would similar claims from a less impeachable source.
Bush: He's Liberal in all the wrong ways.
Robocop
Cybermen
Goblin (he just needs the flying surf board.)
There is nothing so silly as other peoples traditions, and nothing so sacred as our own.
I'm all for the Army getting onboard this project. So when the bears attack, our Army will be ready!
Seriously, though, Colbert has GOT to have this guy on the show. It's just a natural fit. Yeah, I guess that would be TOO easy.
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.
B.
Every experiment which ends in a big bang is a good experiment.
darn...that didn't come out right at all...
A goal is a dream with a deadline
This guy originally began designing these suits, which he'd previously called MarkI through MarkVI, in order to allow himself to have close-up encounters with bears (driven by an experience from earlier in life). Last time I saw this suit being demonstrated, there was one major problem:
Troy spotted a bear out in the middle of an open field and began moving slowly towards it from his hiding place. So slowly, in fact, that the bear apparently got bored of sitting still and walked away. Troy's mobility was limited to about 1 step per second and a half.
Mind you, seeing a whole army of indestructible soldiers marching along at a snail's pace with cars, bombs, etc bouncing harmlessly away from them is darn cool, but I think that's not wuite what the army wants... Notice for example (assuming the posted links to the gang beating are the same that I've seen) that Troy remains unharmed by baseball bats, but is quite unable to right himself (or prevent others from ripping the suit off, I'll bet). Sure, he can take a log battering ram on the chest no problem, but the real question is whether or not he should have to. (if you've never see the log swinging video, find it--it's hilarious).
Those things were much more believable back in their time. Science has come a long way since then.
There are many tongues to talk, and but few heads to think. -Victor Hugo
This thing will go GREAT with my debilitating Batman complex! Now all I need is a fortune and an intense personal tragedy!
Add a catheter.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Unless I read the article wrong, the suit costs Troy about 2k to make. Mass production for the military would require several steps not counted such as sampling and testing to assure fitness for use. Some of this would be offset by efficiencies of scale but I suspect that the additional costs will be larger than any of the savings attained by moving to mass production.
Does it run Linux?
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Methinks you contradict yourself.
There are many tongues to talk, and but few heads to think. -Victor Hugo
From TFA:
Aren't the major joints kind of important? One baseball bat to the pelvis, and the bear-man would be pretty much fubared, no? Doesn't appear to be a real "invincible man" suit like this guy's other inventions.
Looks pimpy, though.
> I'd think in the future we'll see joy-stick controlled metal-storm/.50 cals
> where the gunner is inside a vehicle with software aided remote targeting
Actually, thats not the future, its been in use for a while.
CROWS nest: Safe, armed
My supervisor at work used one of these when he was deployed and supposedly (I may not be remembering correctly, so assume any error is mine) it can put a grenade in a window at a 1000 yards.
I say we take off, nuke the suit from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
Perhaps life really is full of possibilities.
I'd actually never heard anything good about Canadian beer until on Slashdot today (though admittedly twice in the same day), and my girlfriend's Canadian!! I didn't even try the beer when I was over there, I had a Corona. For some reason they put a lime in the top, it was disgusting :S Anyway, I think you can be proud: that you're as large as America - geographically at least - but generally renowned for being peace loving and more intelligent (though who isn't renowned for being more intelligent than America? sorry America).
which is totally what she said
Stick yer Halo up your arse. This was here first! :p
Just make sure to hit the right spot on the flamethrower suit.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
Type in your command code and detonate the suit in a low yield thermonuclear explosion.
Dirty Pirate Hooker
Wasn't this technology perfected ten years ago?
How hard is it to take off if you've got to drain the lizard?
This sig is false.
The whole suit comes in at 18 kilograms. It covers everything but the fingertips and the major joints, and could be mass-produced for about $2,000, Hurtubise says.
IIRC, aiming for the joints was a common tactic in days of yore, when knights wore similar protection systems..... once you have the guy crippled and on the floor, a stab to an artery in the groin area would see him off.
I thought some armour protected the joints too, so I suggest he look at 14th to 16th century solutions to a 21st century problem.
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Karma: Chameleon
These days, even the bears are packing.
Just because he has some _other_ strange ideas, doesn't exclude the possibility that he could have brilliant insights in this area. Issac Newton dabbled in Alchemy, the Occult, and fringe theology far more often than he did with physics or math. Perhaps the ability to think differently (and frequently wrongly) leads to the occasional brilliant insight that would never occur to others.
So the suit is a trojan? Then why is the thing between the legs called a clock if the suit is a trojan?
In general, stuff in video games is designed to look cool, rather than to be functional. I mean, look at MechWarrior for example. Why would you ever make a combat robot that walks? All you have to do is destroy one of its legs, or, hell, trip it up with a cable. (Of course, there's solid precedent for this.) I'm not saying that this is impossible, but when people announce technologies like this to the media before they undergo substantial testing, it usually means that they need venture capital. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and let's not even go into the Angel Light and God Light (which can "make blind men see and lame men walk").
Love the Third Amendment?
Only problem is, they'd have to rob a bank to afford one.
are you sure your american? those kinda statements can get you hanged as a traitor. yeah corona is weak. you need some of our molson canadian to do the trick. next time you up we'll pop a cold one on the house. just cause you such a smart guy!! serioulsy i'd mod you up if i wasn't commenting on this thread.
$action = empty(PHP) ? backToC() : unset(PHP) ; "when the concrete cases are understood, the abstractions are readily
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.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I have looked at all of the different news sites and they all have the same picture. I know that it is common for a single set of pictures to be released to the press so the fact that all the sites have a picture doesn't concern me, rather it's that the picture is so low quality.
Today a consumer can easily buy a 8 MP camera so there is no reason that this picture shouldn't be much better quality, also the pixelation, to me at least, screams photoshop.
After reading about all the crack pot ideas this guy has come up with in the past ("God Light", "Angel Light", "1313 paste") why does everybody immediately believe this guy is telling the truth? I personally don't. First the suit looks TOO much like Halo, second whats up with that huge clock or cock?, third whats up with all the different contours on the suit (if this thing was really body armor would it need to be contoured like it had a million gadget built into it, which according to the article it doesn't?).
So I personally think this whole thing is a fake (much to my chagrin). I would love to hear why you think different.
Depending on the mission a solider has a limited amount of weight he can carry. 40lbs for armor is alot for the guy humping it out in the mountains, but not so bad for the guy riding in a vehicle or standing at the gate who doesn't have to carry his own ammo, water, food, and pack.
Of course the military is already working on that too from making existing things lighter, to robotic pack-mules, and my personal favorite powered exoskeletons. The last have been getting steadily better every year. They're slow and noisy but they now can carry themselves plus another 150lbs (300lbs total) at a walking pace. Take that guy's idea add another 110 lbs of armor, weapon, ammo, and fuel and you'll have a good idea of what they are like.
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.
Comment of the year
Would that be the condom or the horse?
I WANT ONE!
Relocating to San Francisco / Palo Alto... Hire me?
Yet somehow no one seems to mention ElRon's cures in major media... and such trepidation on editors' parts leads to Beckham and his wife being recruited, as latest rumor seems to have it. If people actually knew about what ElRon actually claimed to have done, his "religion" would be classified with Nigerian royality scams.
Keep spreading the word of Xenu (xenu.net).
BACK on topic, sorry, this guy is doing what we SF and comics geeks always wanted to do as kids: build our superhero suit. I spent years redoing designs, and even today I perk up on hearing about a new impact or slash resistant fabric.
From what I can see, he's swiped (joke) my idea of plating the face, and running video to a screen in front of the eyes from a camera. I see only one camera. Bad idea. Use two, and two small hirez screens in front of the eyes -- this gives some stereoscopic perception. 2D viewing not good when you are fighting for your life or trying to target something. Alternatively, some sort of prism arangement could work, and be proof against risk of electronic breakdown that a camera system entails. A man with a plated face can take a shot from an Uzi to the nose. Yeah, they can shoot your camera, but the camera would be where your face is, so you're ahead by points by being alive. And you can always jack in a spare camera into a USB port, and then won't they be sorry for blasting you in the punum.
If you can make the armor light enough, you can move at a normal rate of speed, without power enhancement.
Sad part is, in ten years we won't have these suits. The Homeland Security Enforcement Elite will. So much for the second amendment and the theoretical right to revolt by handgun. Guns ain't worth much if they snicker when you shoot them.
Isn't this more of an Iron Man thing?...or does it need to fly first?
A goal is a dream with a deadline
The article mentions "high powered weapons", such as an elephant gun. Only problem is- an elephant gun isn't "high powered" in military terms. It's a damn big bullet, but big bullets have low velocities and are horrible at piercing armor because they spread their impact energy across a wide area.
An AK47 is a very high powered assault rifle (well over 2,000fps) and the favorite weapon of Iraqi guerrillas. Standard 7.62mm bullets (no idea if that's what the guerrillas are using) reportedly goes through more than a quarter inch of steel at close range. The armor piercing rounds will slice through a titanium+kevlar jacket like butter; it's doubtful this guy's suit could fare any better. I'm guessing Iraqi guerrillas don't have many AP bullets, but I bet they could find some if they needed to.
How about a 30-06? Small round, and extremely high velocity (over 2,500 fps.) AP rounds were used in WW2 against "lightly armored" targets (jeeps and such.)
BMG .50 cal? Aka the gun that marines use to punch holes in just about everything short of armored personnel carriers. And yes, there are a number of non-US rifles similar in purpose to the .50 BMG that Iraqi guerrillas could get their hands on. Getting hit by a .50 BMG in the head would probably give you a severe concussion or kill you just from the physical energy of the round alone. To stop said bullet, your helmet would probably have to weigh more than the entire suit...
Please help metamoderate.
or the weight could make it harder for the officer to get up when he's knocked over.
I'm not making a comment on this guy's stuff one way or the other, but having seen first hand exactly how government contractors/projects work, I'd say it's entirely possible and even probable that a private group or individual could beat them on specific types of projects.
Unless you've seen it, you wouldn't believe the level of miscommunication, ineptitude, petty politics, and flat out greed that can get in the way of actually getting a real product developed with the government.
Is this supposed to be exciting? I've had my endoskeleton since birth. Bah!
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Time for a stiffer mainspring
Time to "Spring Forward"...now "Fall Back" SPRING FORWARD! FALL BACK! SPRING FORWARD!...(you get the idea)
Time to switch to brass bells
Time to go from "analog" to "digital"
anyone else care to add?
A goal is a dream with a deadline
Well good for him. Sure looks a lot better and more practical that his last suit. However my only missgivings are in this paragraph: "In the helmet, there's a solar-powered fresh-air system and a drinking tube attached to a canteen in the small of the back." I am pretty sure the solar-powered fresh-air system is a fancy way of saying a solar powered fan in the helmet. More disturbing that that would be: "A laser pointer mounted in the middle of the forehead is ready to point to snipers, while LED lights frame the face." #1 I think I would prefer to point out snipers with something other than the middle of the forehead. Thats kinda like poking a bear with a stick in my books. #2 I love how included into that statment was how your face is lit up with LED lights, you know, just in case the sniper missed the stupid laser pointer in the forehead, he can aim at the lit up face. I actually laughed out loud when I read that paragraph, he may want to re-think some of those helmet elements. :)
"Its many features include compartments for emergency morphine and salt, a knife and emergency light."
Now just add one for slices of lemon and a canteen of tequilla...ole
Nothing witty
It's one thing to build a suit that can stand up to blunt force impact. It's quite another to build one which can, as he claims, stand up to high-calibur arms fire and any manner of other things that would be necessary for it to be a soldier suit, as he claims. Plus, what about other things like heat / sweat? How long can you wear the thing before passing out?
Etc etc etc.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. And I would put the idea of the creator of the "God Light" claiming to have made a combat suit superior to anything the world's military R&D departments could come up with... at a cost about 1/100th of what current models cost... as being pretty damn extraordinary.
AS I SAID IN THE SUBJECT LINE, it would rock if this were the real thing. But you're going to have to show me more than him getting hit with a baseball bat to convince me. Let's haul him out to Yuma and get some elephant guns and see how he does.
Or are you saying testing and skepticism is no longer a requirement?
Bush: He's Liberal in all the wrong ways.
Ok, WAY off topic, but...
Molson Canadian? Good beer? Please.
Personally, nothing by Molson or Labatt do it for me. There are a slew of micro (and no longer micro) breweries out there.
Molson Canadian?
By the way, neither Molson, Labatt nor Sleeman are even Canadian these days. But hey... semantics.
"You can surrender without a prayer, but never really pray without surrender" - NP
Militaries have to design armor that you can actually do useful stuff in. With his early suits at least, you couldn't really do much other than watch sleeping bears. The hard part isn't really making yourself nearly indestructable; it's making yourself nearly indestructable and still able to chase people, open doors, hear people sneaking up on you, grab things, etc. If this guy were on patrol in Iraq, insurgants would kidnap him by catching him in a net, dragging him off, and removing the suit. It's not any better than just staying in a bunker all the time.
This guy is kind of a known crackpot.
Yes, he is. But he also build a bear suit that protects him from being hit with a truck. It exists and works. That the man is insane doesn't mean it doesn't work. Many of his other ideas are nuts. But the suit exists and works. It was so bulky that others wouldn't use it, but that's what he's fixing, and with his obsessive and insane personality, I believe he will accomplish his goal (and no one will use it until after he's dead because of the stigma of buying from a nutjob).
Learn to love Alaska
(though who isn't renowned for being more intelligent than America? sorry America)
Well, I guess it's good for "America" then that intelligence isn't measured by popular opinion, but by actual results.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
While I can imagine a suit like this working, I also have questions about its effectiveness. A suit like this wouldn't protect a human from rapid acceleration/deceleration. Our brains are actually suspended in a fluid, so too much acceleration/deceleration would cause the brains to hit the inside of the skull, causing a concussion. If the force is big enough this could cause a knockout or even brain damage or death.
I wouldn't jump of a cliff with one of these!
Kind of off topic, but what's the reasoning behind leaving the HUMVEE Turret all open like that? Could they just install a covered turret with the material they use for the Pope mobile? Some protection is better than nothing.
Live forever, or die trying.
The only thing that comes to mind is Triumph the Insult Comic Dog:
"You are a huge nerd!"
Us Canuks make all the gadgets, and you Americans go out and "field test" them for us.
Blerg.
Right, but if someone gets trampled or hit with something heavy while NOT in this suit, their weight is going to be the least of their concerns.
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Robbers get away because they are able to quickly change their appearance out of view, not because they've out-gunned their opponent.
That suit doesn't look like it's very easy to get in and out of.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
HAH, with this we can finally retake Endor with impunity...no little furry dwarves with sticks and rocks shall block the progress of the new order...
How do you figure that this invention is deadly? It's building a device meant to protect people.
Live forever, or die trying.
If he already knows the /how/ of putting it together and has a defined bill of materials, then there is no reason to believe that his estimate of 2k per unit in mass quantities is inaccurate. But what I bet isn't considered in the cost is the price of testing and quality control. This isn't a simple widget where a mere visual inspection suffices for weeding out bad units. A large enough percentage of the production output will need to be taken to the lab and destroyed to ensure uniform output and fitness for use.
Who the hell would come at someone dressed like this with a knife?
But then again, if we learned nothing from Ewoks v. Empire...
Does that really apply when you've gone bankrupt? You gotta pay the bills somehow, and the government has the deepest pocket books. And I somehow think that if he DIDN'T sell it to the government they'd rip it from his hands in some legal battle anyway, that is if some other private contractor were actually interested enough to do something about his design, which I doubt. Otherwise he's simply thrown all his money away on a prototype suit for no reasonable use, and now he can't eat.
Yep, I don't expect something like that comming from anywhere else than the garage of some inventor. Now, I don't expect it to come by now either.
Rethinking email
Let the comments about how it looks just like an avatar from Quake/UT/Halo/etc begin.
I'm just now getting around to playing Half-Life 2 (the shame!), and I was thinking how if having completely armoured abusive police is fun on a tiny little screen, it must be way cooler in real life! Speaking of which:
I, for one, welcome our not so much new, rather more highly armoured overlords.
Please stop stalking me, bro.
> "... He calls it the Trojan and describes it as the 'first
> ballistic, full exoskeleton body suit of armour.'"
So what were all those medieval body-suits of metal armour?
Hell, the firepaste and 1313 paste all look like perfect shuttle heat tile replacements.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
come on I know it's offtopic, but ...
Oh yeah, geeks don't watch football
How much is your data worth? Back it up now.
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.
Learn to love Alaska
If the helmet is rigid, heavy and cushioned, the damage from a headshot would be minimal. The weight is the problematic part.
In this video, he claims that the built-in AC unit is powered by powerpacks on the back of the helmet with solar recharging capability. (I presume the headlights are powered by the same packs.) FWIW, there are battery packs with extremely long field-use durability. Nothing incredible, but enough to keep the guy suited for an 8 hour mission before he has to visit the charger to swap battery packs.
Getting back to the Yucca Mountain thread the other day, they *could* use some of that material for batteries that never die, or at least recharge themselves. Unfortunately, I doubt the military would want to take the chance of any radioisotopes getting into the hands of enemy combatants.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
I can see how this would be a problem. After all, it's not like they practice sit-ups in bootcamp.
+5, Truth
The government does not have enough money to buy standard body armor for the soliers in Iraq in 2007, they won't buy this. It is too heavy, the soldiers are already carrying too much on their backs. It is not "powered" so its not going to lighten their load, and it does not have climate control, protection against radiation, chemical, biological or telekenetic attacks. It would be better and cheaper to build a fleet of machines to go into battle than to pour money into something like this.
I think radio controlled airplanes with bombs and guns would blast this thing into oblivion and be much cheaper to build and deploy.
But don't forget folks, this is still oppression gear. Have your laughs, because they're not building this stuff to oppress towel heads overseas, they're building this stuff to kick in your door, when you're hacking at 2400 hours, after 3 jolts of coffee and downloading your happy warez. Remember, violent offenders get out on good behaviour after raping women, while you, as a "l33t haxor" and "warez d00dz" will likely never see the sun again.
Its you that'll be facing the robo troopers, not the "bad guys". The bad guys will already have the anti robo trooper guns.
Anyone remember Kevin Mitnick arrested as if he was Wesley Snipes, at the point of several dozen M16's? Yeah... the "lethal" "warrior" Kevin "pudge" Mitnick. You, could be the next Mitnick.
Just my ten cents. Hope you spend it well.
" What luck for rulers that men do not think" - Adolf Hitler
Inspecting a pair jeans to ensure that it meets fit for use standards means a visual inspection on an assembly line. A single worker can inspect a few pairs of jeans per minute. And if a unit passes inspection without being fit for use, the manufacturer, at most, has to refund the wholesale cost of a single pair of jeans /if/ the consumer complains about it.
Inspecting body armor to ensure that it meets fit for use standards means a pain-staking, time-consuming inspection which includes hitting it with several types of ordinance and exposing it to all sorts of chemicals. Further, statistical analysis must be done so to ensure that the the sample size takes the percentage of units that will be suitable for use in the field to at least three (if not four or five) nines. If a unit passes inspection without being fit for use, someone may die or be critically wounded and the manufacturer may be subject to recalling entire lots of thousands of units if not subjected to a huge product liability law suit.
Don't confuse fitness for use with the armor fitting a soldier. The two have very little to do with each other.
...For the ceramite-plated, servo-assisted power armor that requires to be wired directly to your nervous system to function. Cuz this thing just don't cut it.
Perl, n. A language spoken by Eskimos.
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.
Computers allow humans to make mistakes at the fastest speeds known, with the possible exception of tequila and handguns
I share your sentiment, but as long as it's legal for citizens to own body armor (Connecticut and New York :( ) then I see no problem with better armor, just make it available to the populace.
A libertarian shat on my carpet once. Claimed the free market would sort it out. -Ford Prefect(8777)
Yeah but the constitution does explicitly give you the right to use the sleeves from his first suit, so ya know... that's something, right?
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
But I would think for SWAT-style military deployments into occupied buildings, this would be brilliant.
Would probably be pretty useful in riots and other domestic crowd-control situations as well.
Samus would be proud.
If con is the opposite of pro. Then isn't congress the opposite of progress?
From the article..
there's a solar-powered fresh-air system and a drinking tube attached to a canteen in the small of the back
Not quite aircon but better than a hole in the head, as they say.
forget all that..
how you supposed to take a pee while wearing that thing?
MABASPLOOM!
Dude, where can I purchase one of these "AK47s" or "30-06s"? I can barely get 60 fps out of my current video card. And, what resolution are these babies pulling those kinds of frame rates on?
(I'm a jackass. I know.)
I feel sorry for this guy. He spent $15,000 on a suit that the military has no use for. The military currently working on liquid body armor. The liquid is used in addition to the Kevlar vests.
\
Looks weak against fire..
I'm sure Stephen Colbert is shopping around for bear proof armor. Especially since apparently someone has put in a constitutional amendment that arms all bears.
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
For one thing, the primary risk is not from above, but from below (IEDs) and the sides (IEDs, small arms, RPGs), so that's where you should concentrate any additional armor. For another, there are limits to how much further the HUMVEE can be modified: it's already slow and dangerously prone to rollovers because of all the added armor, and adding armor to the top of the turret is going to make those problems even worse.
...I sure hope he ain't a one minute man
He didn't design it to make someone invincible. He made it to protect people from as much as possible as still be practical for use in combat. His first design may have protected a lot better, but extreamly limited mobility.
Someone save me from this sanity.
No worries. I just checked my email and I have been approved for five mortgages and sixteen unsecured credit cards this week alone.
There is a critical sentence in the article that I don't think many people are grasping. The suit doesn't provide protection to major joints. I thought the suit was pretty cool till I realized he couldn't solve the problem of covering joints and still having flexibility. This means (just like the old suits of armor) that the suit has a vulnerability at every major joint (knees, hips, elbows and shoulders). If you look at the suit you will notice he only has black fabric over his hip bones and midsection and probably the same fabric on the front of the elbows, back of the knees and under the arms. This means the suit has as many vulnerabilities as it does protections, and it no doubt causes a reduction in mobility. Even if he did make it look like the chief in Halo.
It's a cool idea but more than worthless as a full suit in battle. This isn't to say that better vests and armor couldn't be developed using his ideas if his claims are real.
Here's what we know:
1. The suit exists
2. Cancer exists
3. Flashlights exist
4. He has one (suit and flashlight)
5. He doesn't have cancer
Therefore he has cured cancer because 5 comes after 1. I don't think anyone can argue with that (especially when put in bullet format). If anyone needs more convincing I can put this into a 35 page PowerPoint document for further truthiness.
Swi
Yes, the Humvee (HMMWV) is designed as a truck, but we're using them as wheeled APCs (Armored personel carriers). The suspension is pretty strained by the extra armor that has been added. Sticking a real turret on there puts us over the limit, or forces us into unacceptable tradeoffs, like decreasing underbody armor.
Keep in mind, "quickly" mounting the guns (or antitank missiles) means you don't have to ship it back to the states. It's not a 5-minute job; you usually spend a bit of time in a machine shop.
Hi, I'm Troy Hurtubise. You might remember me from such films as "Project Grizzly" and "Mommy, What's Wrong With That Man's Face?"
Well, he personally can't mass produce them. His 'research lab' is his garage out back where he and his buddies hang out.
If you have ever seen the documentary film Project Grizzly, this guy is a bit of an odd-duck who thinks he's doing serious research on bears and the like. Mostly, he spends his time building these big suits, having his friends wail away at him, and cultivating an image of an uber outdoorsman. In short, he seems to be a bit of a flake and most people don't take him that seriously.
The scenes of him hanging out in a municipal dump, hanging out with bears, and acting like he's advancing scientific research is enough to give you a bit of a sense of the fact that he's completely normal.
He's always had the goal of having a suit whereby he could get up front and personal with the bears, and learn a whole lot about them. I wouldn't look for much military interest in this thing. It's a device which more novelty than something which is very practical. Least wise, for any actual military applications IMO.
His intended purpopse of getting up close and personal with bears in the wild seem more like an obsession than anything of any real value.
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Because in the wrong hands, it would give people a significant advantage. It's happened before. http://www.cnn.com/US/9702/28/shootout.update/ 10 policemen where shot before they were able to take down 2 robbers with body armor. In this case, the officers had to go to a nearby gun store to get sufficent firepower to take the guys down and it took over 200 officers. Let me point out that the body armor these guys were using dosn't come close to what this guy has developed.
Someone save me from this sanity.
Cars, bats, bullets: these things have no effect on the newest in high-tech body armor.
The one thing it can't deflect? A good old-fashioned Slashdotting.
"By the time they had diminished from 50 to 8, the other dwarves began to suspect 'Hungry.'" -Gary Larson
the "God Light"...well, maybe dude got hit in the head too many times while testing his bear suit or something.
Never underestimate the powers of falling off your toilet while trying to hang up a clock. Sometimes getting hit in the head is good. ;)
I bet Daft Punk has already signed up to buy two
Another purpose for armor was to protect against arrows. Without armor a simple arrow can disable or kill any opponent. Why use swords if arrows work so much better? Armor (and shields) allowed armies to pass under waves of arrows to finally attack their opponents. Armor can actually get in the way when in hand to hand combat. The extra weight reduces your speed and stamina. And regardless of how good your armor is, there will always be holes. Should an opponent have a significant advantage in speed they will find those holes and win. If tired and weighted down, your opponent will have a significant advantage in speed.
So you are absolutely right about "1-2 disabling blows deflected by armour" but I would like to add that arrows make up a significant portion of those disabling blows. In fact, look into the history of warfare for different regions and you'll see that armor gets stronger along with bows getting more powerful. I would argue that increased armor is a result of more powerful bows + armor piercing arrowheads.
Willy
Looks like it could be pronounced 'hurt u biz'
There was a time when movies had plots. So you knew who's ass it was, and why it was farting.
-Not Sure
Suit or no suit, if he goes in alone he's going down. For every nut there's a nutcracker. Being taken by prisoners is every prison officer's worst nightmare.
Travelling forward in time at a rate of 1 second per second.
for SWAT-style military deployments into occupied buildings, this would be brilliant. Send four "hardened" troops in ahead of the "soft" troops to clear the building, then let them return to base to cool off.
It's called a robot and they are already sent in.
If the armor is good for anyone in a situation, it should be issued to all.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Hands up who has looked at armor from Ye Olde Days ? Not the flashy stuff the generals and Kings wore but the stuff your soldier/knight wore. Notice that it's nice and smooth ? That's because in those days they realised that if you had an edge or ridge a sword/axe/arrow could snag onto then that edge just helped the sword/axe/arrow get enough purchase to cut in ... not something you'd find comfortable. You want to deflect impacts not just absorb them.
.. when instead you want to maximise the chance of the bullet splashing off.
... so please let him do his personal test, I'll watch the blood and carnage on YouTube :-)
So this guy has designed a suit of "armor" that while it is probably made of the right materials the is pretty much all edges, joints, creases and other showy bits, all of which adds up to more places a bullet can lodge and drive in.
I bet he did his elephant gun test at a point blank angle and just proved that the materials could absorb the impact, want to lay a wager that if you did a test of firing the elephant gun at say a 30 degree angle across into the suit you'd get the fun viewing of a limb being torn off as the bullet lodges into his nice showy suit and then tries to take that part of the suit with it
This guy has watched too many scifi movies where the armor is all pretty looking to make it look good, real armor is quite boring in design, it;s all about function
Depends on the knife, a robust Swiss Army Knife has a can opener inlcuded.
Parent has a very funny and insightful post BTW.
500 dollar reward for tip(s) leading to the arrest of the person(s) who stole my sig.
The video seems to be having some trouble (it cuts out about the time he says "talked to the professionals in the field..."), and I'm not sure what the Yucca Mtn. discussion was about, but... knowing your interest in RTGs, I presume that's what you're referring to. It's possible that with an ultracapacitor/RTG combination, there would be enough cost/benefit for the military to use them. The question is, could you get something powered by an RTG into civilian (police) hands?
The Spoon
Updated 6/28/2011
metalstorm could put about 40 grenades per second (not per minute!!) into the same window
Live Action Halo anyone? With real bullets too.
Ginga no Rekshiya Mata Each page.
You can't use that arguement "Because in the wrong hands...", only because it could apply to just about everything! In the wrong hands, a kitchen knife... In the wrong hands, a baseball bat... The list goes on...
Look, take the grenade for instance. It's invented, it's out there, and yet, we have no grenade crimes. If they can control the distribution of grenades, they can do the same for this body armour.
Live forever, or die trying.
The guy kind of reminds me of Tony Stark.
Future Weapons - Tonight, 9 PM ET - Discovery
the big boys'll get their contacts in high places to stall him with nitpicking requirements changes while they get their own version approved, for twenty times the unit cost... $2000 a suit is far too cheap for the big boys to make a profit on...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
http://www.exn.ca/news/video/exn2003/09/03/exn2003 0903-firepaste.asx
Firepaste...Seems to work. Not all of his crack-pottedness is off-base.
The parent asked "How could this be dangerous?". I made the point that when used by criminals, it gives a SIGNIFICANT advantage to them over normal police forces. In combat, any sort of advantage is dangerous. The enemy holding higher terrain could prove dangerous to people who have to attack them there. A kitchen knife, baseball bat, and yes, even a gernade wouldn't give criminals nearly as much of an advantage over police as this armor would.
Someone save me from this sanity.
You send your video card flying at 60 feet per second? Darn, no wonder you're bitchin about how crappy it works...
-
So I know that racecar drivers have their seats custom molded to their bodies, both for comfort, and for safety. I would expect that these suits would have to be custom fit in order to absorb impacts in a way that was safe for the people wearing them. I would imagine that would get much more expensive than $2000 per suit.
Quick! Trademark the word iSuit before Apple, Cisco or Linksys beat you to it!
Unless they've changed pintle ring mounts since I was in the service, swapping guns is *less* than a 5-minute job. This isn't really a turret, it's a pintle on a rotating ring mount. You pretty much carry the gun to the vehicle, drop it on the pintle, and away you go. There are some specialized weapons that may require more complicated mounting, but I haven't seen one on that type of mount.
This ought to sooth the fears of the local people that we are there to invade their country and turn their women into robots. Nothing says 'I am your friend! You can trust me!' like a frowning mustachioed man dressed like robocop and batman's secret love child. When approached with this constructive criticism, the inventor attempted to eat the interviewer and process his constituent chemicals into another suit of armor.
-- "Oh. This guy again."
Someone who wants 72 nubile rewards in Paradise?
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
I have a friend who is a machine gun team leader in the United States Marine Core, and when station in vehicles his title is a vehicle commander. From my understanding from him mounting a gun on a Humvee is a 5 minute job. If I recall correctly it was common to switch the gun with artillery in less than 5 minutes. Now putting a turret in a Humvee not packaged with one... that takes some time, and I think would only be one in rare cases.
Computers allow humans to make mistakes at the fastest speeds known, with the possible exception of tequila and handguns
I saw a video demo of the suit yesterday actually. It has a built in fan in the front of the helmet too keep the area around your neck cool (and therefore, the rest of your body since there are so many arteries running through that area. To power it, the back of the helmet contains small power packs that are recharged by small solar cells on the back of the helmet.
n -11-2007_a.html
It's got a lot of other interesting features as well. I've never been in the military myself, but frankly it seems as if it's a lot more protective than anything I've seen a soldier in recently. And there's still that intimidation factor, because an invading force looks almost inhuman in suits like that.
The video btw is here: http://www.hamiltonspectator.com/media_archive/ja
May take a while to load since the site is still getting hammered.
What about a Kevlar apron of sorts? Although this has undoubtedly been thought of before, it still might help.
Har?
Star Wars fans! All he has to do is make them in white. No joke, I know a guy who paid $600 for a lightsabre that was nothing more than a fluorescent light with colouring on it and a handle. He'd definitely pay $2000 for something as cool looking as this.
I think you are refering to compressive vs. tensile strength. An example of this would be concrete has a high compressive strength rating (can absorb high compressive/crushing forces) but has quite poor tensile strength (twisting or bending) and will crack or spall. Conversely, steel has a high tensile strength (resistent to twisting/bending) but is comparitively easily deformed by crushing forces. This is why in construction you often use steel reinforce concrete - it has the benefits of both materials in resisting compressive and tensile forces.
During materials sciences classes we were shown the differences between 'bulletproof' and 'armoured' glass. Generally "bulletproof" glass can absorb the forces of a single bullet in a given area (can't remember the size off the top of my head), an "armoured" panel can absorb half a dozen or so bullets in close proximity. The way this is done is by layering glass with sheets of a flexible polymer, the kinetic energy from the bullet(s) is dispersed through the polymer layer, reducing the likelyhood that the panel will break/tear/shatter. The number of layers affects the amount of energy that can be dispersed, and therefore the number of bullets.
Sara
Designer, Gamer, Macgrrl in an XP World
It was Return of the Jedi of which you speak and also another part of why you can never trust media. In the movie they showed only the few lucky successes that the Ewoks had and didn't show the massive slaughtering that they actually took.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
http://www.hamiltonspectator.com/media_archive/jan -11-2007_a.html
While he showed no demonstrations of being hit with that suit, if it's like his bear suit, it'll hold up well.
This guy has just ripped off the 'Hudzen' android from Red Dwarf series 3 "The Last Day"!!!
k /3-7l.jpg7 62_1.jpg
Hudzen http://www.reddwarf.co.uk/deck06/images/image_ban
Trojan http://www.hamiltonspectator.com/images/hs/hs1558
He claims to have a miracle space ray that (alternately) provides Superman-style selectable X-Ray vision (that is to say, you only see a deeply as you want) OR else cures cancer in lab rats. Or both. Yet when pushed to demonstrate his miracle X-Ray gizmo, he suddenly claimed it was too dangerous to people and dismantled it.
The Angel Light and God Light are two different devices. Look at the Wikipedia entry you cited again.
The Angel Light was allegedly too inimical to life and he dismantled it. The God Light is the opposite: he's challenging people to prove that it doesn't work.
Soylens viridis homines es
There's still Mark Maughan's point that it's cheaper than a hospital bill.
I'll use US soldiers for an example because that's what I'm familiar with.
Injured soldier:
Hospital: approx $6k/day
Artificial limb: ~$3k
Flying home on medivac: $10k
Dead Soldier:
$250k insurance policy(he pays for it, but it's heavily subsidized)
$100k death gratuity for dying in a war zone/hostile action
In either case you have the loss of a trained soldier to worry about.
It quickly adds up. It pays off exceptionally well if you give it to the soldiers who are 1% or more likely to die in the line of duty of something this would prevent, and about 10% likely to suffer an injury requiring medivac to an out of theater hospital and extensive rehab or seperation from service.
As for mass production, he's obviously tested the suit, possibly multiple suits, though it's probable that he's simply repaired the one after shooting it. Heck, that'd be a benefit right there. Replacing a $500 breastplate after being shot is still cheaper than replacing an entire $1.5k intercepter vest. Well, at least $1250 of it, it's $250 each for the front and back plates, and one may still be usable. Once shot the vest itself is to be discarded.
Buy a few thousand of them and the fact you completely destroy ten suits in testing would still add less than $10 to the cost.
I don't read AC A human right
Or, more reasonably for the "prison take-down" teams they use to subdue unruly prisoners.
Yeah, now instead of getting sprains and broken bones from these "takedowns" they'll get crushed limbs. Yay! More prisoners in wheelchairs!
This may sound odd, but periods of true oppression usually come when a section of the population is able to effectivly protect itself from the attacks of another.
There's a reason why guns have been known as the 'great equalizer'. With it, it doesn't matter as much whether you're a fit 19 year old man or a 90 year old grandmother. Both have much more even chances against each other if they're armed with guns than bare handed.
With no real effective defense, tyrants tend to die too fast to go far. You still need a large force of bodyguards, who may always stage a ku.
Effective personal armor increases the effeciveness of professional forces(such as nobles) more than non-professional militia forces. Thus tyrants can push more without having to worry as much about the consequences.
I don't read AC A human right
I want a set for Dragoncon, size XXXXL please.
Can he still take on a bear? I mean, that's the original purpose of it right? Can you imagine how embarrassing it would be to fight through a platoon of lightly armed Iraqi soldiers only to have a bear at the Baghdad zoo screw off that helmet and take you out?
Fucking bears...
Except he's advertising that his suit can resist BULLETS now. There's a big difference between being bear-proof and bulletproof. I'll be extremely surprised if it can actually provide protection against standard high velocity FMJ rounds, let alone armor piercing rounds. As someone else has already noted, an elephant gun does NOT fire high-velocity rounds. Given that no one has yet mentioned or linked to hard evidence that the suit has actually been tested vs. modern military firearms, combined with the guy's crackpot "God/Angel light" claims, I'd say that extreme skepticism is indeed warranted when it comes to claims that the suit would be ideal for military use.
Potential riot control, animal control, and bomb squad applications is another matter entirely. There is videotaped proof that his suit can withstand blunt force trauma rather well--there is NOT proof (that I'm aware of) that it can withstand modern, high powered firearms.
Perhaps this is a silly question, but why not simply modify the Bradley so that the turret is enlarged to carry multiple coaxial weapons, in addition to the Bushmaster auto-cannons, with the ability for the gunner to fire any combination of the available guns simultaneously?
I had three guys who I had reason to believe knew what they were talking about (one did depot maintenance) who corrected me when I said it was a quick swap. They insisted this was not something where a truck pulled up and you did it in the field. Maybe they meant changing weapon types (MG to ATM) or installing a weapon mount on a bare truck rather than replacing the same weapon, or maybe the system has been fixed since they told me. I used to make AFV fire control systems at Astronautics; I'm not making this up. My info is probably out of date.
So if these suits do catch on, and if they are really bullet proof, maybe we'll have to go back to pick-axes and other medieval weapons that were used against the knights. The evening news would be much cooler to watch police taking out a suited up robber with a shield and a pick.=, instead of some lousy shoot out.
..........FULL STOP.
I've seen him on Discovery Channel several times, he is definitely a bit looney, but he has also produced some pretty cool inventions, like his fire paste.
2 004. It's the 6th link down, titled "Fighting fire with fact".
See the video here, http://www.exn.ca/dailyplanet/view.asp?date=8/31/
The only things you missed in what was otherwise an excellent breakdown of costs, is the cost of training a replacement squaddie for the duration of the injured soldiers convalescence, and the expense of the medical staff needed (in training and time spent).
Diet Coke. No, seriously. He's made two or three different crazy inventions by now, and claimed that the secret ingredient for them was Diet Coke.
OTOH, I do recall amusing stories of knights who became useless once they were knocked off of their horses. But they might have been wearing a lot more than 70 pounds of armor.
Good reason for police response teams to have .50 BMG sniper rifles with AP ammo. .50 AP would punch through that suit laughing all the way. The North Hollywood bank robbery already shows police need effective sniper rifles.
A
Plate armor? Meet longbow!
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
An example of this would be concrete has a high compressive strength rating (can absorb high compressive/crushing forces) but has quite poor tensile strength (twisting or bending) and will crack or spall. Conversely, steel has a high tensile strength (resistent to twisting/bending) but is comparitively easily deformed by crushing forces.
I am pretty sure the difference in tensile and compressive strength you studied for steel is because of how it is used compared to concrete. Thin walled tubes and surfaces fail do to buckling before compressive strength becomes an issue. Concrete would fail in tension on the opposite side before buckling would be apparent.
If you had RTFA, you may have known that it supposedly contains both air conditioning and water. Solar powered.
someone find John Connor!
try taking a look at the truth behind the hollywood shootout a little more
it took the cops so damn long to take those guys down because honestly, most of them had learned their shooting skills from the same school of thought that makes people think shooting with the gun sideways is effective..
I can take you on naked as the day I was born and walk away from it if you cant hit the side of a barn at ten feet.
in the end they just went for accuracy-though-volume. real professional.
If you believe Troy Hurtubis then I have a bridge to sell you on Mars.
"Dangling between the legs, that would be a clock."
People would have been gawking for an entirely different reason.
The argument I've heard for years against any kind of exoskeleton is in any type of modern warfare, mobilty is key. This seems like it would detract from your mobility pretty significantly(40 some lbs before anything else you need to carry) while not offering much significant in terms of protection - the joins are exposed, there's no way that faceplate has the armor levels of the actual armor plates in there, and the armor can only stop 'high powered' guns like an elephant gun, which as another poster already mentioned isnt very high powered compared to say, the common AK47 because it's a larger bullet traveling at a lower speed, something easier for armor to stop.
Just doesnt cover the problems they've been having with armored exoskeletons for combat use for quite some time now.
There already is a cooling unit being tested for body armor; it's less than 5 pounds, and can run for approximately 8 hours on a rechargeable battery.
"Make cyberlove, not cyberwar!" -Khaed(544779)
I don't know about this version, but previous versions of his suit actually DID have a personal AC unit. Since this is supposed to be an improved version, I would think that the AC unit is still in there somewhere.
coup, not ku.
"A goldfish was his muse, eternally amused"
I would think a slightly better measure would be to have an international IQ test then see where you end up.
The US has 5 times the population of the UK, but the UK has more than 2/3 of the number of Nobel Laureates (which I would assume is down to individuals rather than the entire population anyway..). That would suggest that the average intelligence per person is a lot higher in the UK, at least according to your measure? What's your point?
which is totally what she said
No, I'm pretty sure I'm Scottish (and not in that American 'I'm Scottish!' way, but in the way that I was born in Glasgow and currently live in Aberdeen) ;)
which is totally what she said
This is an urban myth. Armour designed for actually fighting in didn't weigh more than 20Kg, and even heavier jousting armour was light enough to walk around in.
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All you need is a rope/chain shooter; a gun that shoots ropes/chains and directed at the feet would make the person wearing the armor fall down and not easily stand up again.
If he thinks the DoD is gonna contract to someone that efficient, he's off his rocker.
He won't get a contract on suits who's initial models cost any less than $1M/ea
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It's a Red Herring unless you think you can quantify the value of human life. I don't.
"I would think it would also be handy for the guy who draws the short straw to man the Humvee turret -- in which case AC lines could easily be run up through his feet."
I think you're confusing him with the guy who draws the short straw at Guantanamo.
SIG: TAKE OFF EVERY 'CAPTAIN'!!
Sorry to see this modded to +5 funny, but hey, keep going. You probably already know that the deck is stacked against
people posting "unpopular" things but at least in my experience for every -1 TROLL I get there is someone to reverse
that with a +1 insightful/interesting.
What exactly is an "elephant gun?" I would hardly expect the suit to stand up to cartridges capable of stopping an elephant. I doubt it would stop a .416 Rigby, .416 Remington Magnum, .416 Weatherby Magnum, .450 Nitro Express, .458 Winchester Magnum, .458 Lott, .460 Weatherby Magnum, and .470 Nitro Express, .500 Nitro Express or .600 Nitro Express.
But I don't believe for a minute that the protective gear purchased by the Pentagon or any other military institution is purchased based on the odds of having to pay out life insurance, train replacements, etc. Rather what happens is that a budget is set by Congress and the President and the decisions makers in the Pentagon are given X amount of money for purpose Y and figure out the best way to spend it. I'd be very surprised if the sorts of analysis brought up in this thread past the actual cost of production and testing for fitness of use are considered at all.
Unless this things has some sort of personal AC unit... but that would probably require portable energy beyound military logistical capabilies.
Or you could just ride in an air conditioned vehicle. Or integrate a personal cooling suit. My biggest question is how quickly you can get in the prone and roll since the best armor is a big chunk of dirt between you and the bullets.
IIW the Pentagon, I'd give it to weapons squad. An M240B is supposed to have a crew of 3, gunner + assistant + ammo bearer. (I'm presently an assistant gunner.)
Now, a 240 really needs at least two men on the gun because the gunner has to keep his eyes downrange while the AG takes care of ammo and barrel changes and such. But I wonder if it wouldn't be possible have a chain gun that draws off the suit's power. A chain gun is a far simpler mechanism because it doesn't rely on recoil or gas to operate, and you can set your rate of fire to keep the barrel from overheating. (The Bradley FV uses a chain gun.) And if you built the gun into the suit, you'd get tons of anime nerds signing up for the Army...
What's your point?
My point was that it simply isn't relevant what intelligence level the US is "renowned" to have. We are probably not the per-capita smartest nation in the world by any measure, I will readily concede. But neither are we some barely-literate jerkwater like it's popular to portray us as, and we sure as hell stack up well against Canada of all places.
As a larger point, I guess I have just grown tired of the US-bashing that is just outright slanderous. I can accept, and I welcome, legitimate criticism. But I grow weary of having to constantly battle vicious lies and rank bigotry. We struggle and contribute mightily to the body of the world's knowledge, culture, and security, and it often seems that our only reward is to have scorn heaped upon us for our apparent lack of perfection.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
Those stories typically come from 18th and 19th century sources--hardly to be trusted (these are the same folks who talk about 30 or 40 pound swords!). They may have been caught up in the Enlightenment sense of superiority, or simply confused by looking at tournament armour, some of which is so heavy that getting up would be difficult. But tournaments were fought under high-safety rules, whereas battles were fought under rather different constraints (if you can't get up in a sport, you just lose the game--in a battle, you lose your life).
Many of the tools in the soldier's arsenals are from things the grunts started doing in the field (moreso in war zones) that caught the eye of the higher-ups.
My dad became the first* certified "chainsaw carpenter" in the army when an officer saw him using a chainsaw to cut timers for building constructed by his engineering battalion. Prior to that, all they were issued were hand saws (not even electric). Within a short time (a couple years), the chainsaw was standard equipment for field construction. (*others probably used chainsaws as well, but he was the one that was seen and asked to create an official class for certifying others in use of a chainsaw during building construction).
In the news more recently, soldiers have been using silly string to detect trip wires when entering buildings. I suspect that solicitations for development of a military version of silly string (i.e. more expensive and in a camo-colored container) has already begun.
I can easily see some maverick unit trying this stuff out after a few too many of their buddies get hurt. What is $15k out of pocket to an attorney, business owner, etc. who is a member of a National Guard unit that got activated? As it is, the guys in Iraq are paying out of their own pocket to "up-armor" their standard-issue Hummers.
On second thought, those Haliburton truckers on convoy duty in Iraq might beat them to the punch.
science is a religion
Now that you mention it, that does have a ring of familiarity to it. I seem to recall the author's amused condension at the hapless knights.
You shouldn't take it personally really. But have you ever been to somewhere like Houston? I've not, but I've spoken to a few people from there in person and over the phone. Maybe I'm just biased because a lot of workers in the oil industy aren't the brightest of people, and besides that I know that some of the people I've met from there are genuinely clever, but also just seem to me to be 'slow' in other ways. Of course I may be being hypocritical there, because I usually regard myself as semi-intelligent, but lacking in common sense and just generally being overfocused, so I sometimes don't notice things like changes in the office or at home.
Tourists also have a really large impact on our opinion of you. For example one of my friends used to work at Edinburgh castle. An american couple asked her if in all seriousness if an electricity pylon in the distance was the Eiffel Tower. I mean, come on...
We *know* that there are also some very smart people in America, and some of them are actually American themselves, but that doesn't mean that we don't have a lot of evidence of some really dumb Americans! You could say the same for any country, but it's just more noticeable since there are more of you. People from places like Houston have really slow accents too, which makes them *appear* slow thinkers, even though it's not always the case. It's the appearances that matter the most though - look at George Bush. You think people voting a President like that gives the appearance that you are smart as a nation? One of the things I think is the worst is just how the audience are on TV shows. They cheer at the most inane things. I can't remember the name of that show with the boxes full of money and all the bimbos holding them, but it just seems incredibly dumb to cheer and be so jolly at what is in essence a veeeery boring concept for a game show, at least in my opinion. It holds hardly any educational value, apart from maybe slightly increasing your knowledge of statistics, and as for entertainment value, it isn't something I feel I'd make a point of watching, though I've had to wait through it before with my family and girlfriend's family. The UK version is even more dull by the way (saw the american version while I was in Canada).
which is totally what she said
I don't deny anything in your post, but I hope you realize it was just a long-winded way of saying, "these people are different from me; therefore, they are stupid." I don't blame you at all, because know-nothing bigotry is common all over the world - even in the US - but it's a bit much to expect us to take it as informed criticism, especially when delivered with a heaping serving of smug superiority.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
I said I can be stupid too. Plenty of people are different from me but smart, I'm saying that the people I see cheering on Bush and wanting the middle east to be turned into a sea of glass are stupid. There are stupid people everywhere, but Americans tend to likes to loudly proclaim their stupidity to the world rather than just have it drift by un-noticed.
:p ). European and Japanese cars tend to be smaller, more efficient and generally handle well. I can't help but feeling smugly superior when I know the little 130HP diesel company car I'm going to get would probably run rings round a big dumb muscle car on a suitably winding (and therefore fun) back road.
/. and other forums I used to be part of, where the moderator started a whole forum on Counter-Terrorism after 9/11 and tended to ban or otherwise punish those who disagreed with him [was a CS Bots forum at Nuclearbox.com , probably still around, I was the author of TEAMbot but at the age of 18 or so I left in disgust and embarrassment at the way this guy was acting..]), probably more exceptions than I know, but I am only letting you know my opinion which is based on what I see, and is not intended to be racist or to insult every American. I guess I shouldn't criticize people if their differences to me aren't hurting anyone, so I should just try to think of those morons at gameshows, talk shows, and the ones on /. saying America needs to nuke everyone as 'different', rather than dumb..
Oh, oh!! Sorry, I forgot to say I am in a very big way bigoted when it comes to your cars, and I assign the types of car a country makes to the population that buys them. American cars are large, wasteful, and can't turn corners (well I think the Z06 or whatever it is is meant to be a good car, so maybe you're improving
I'm sorry if I appear to be a 'know nothing bigot', but you really should try and think from the point of view of the rest of the world sometimes, another problem I have with the attitude I perceive from a lot of Americans... 'America is bigger and better' 'we should be teaching those un-American countries a lesson', etc etc. I mean some people will genuinely mean well, and not everyone agrees with your foreign policy, but I do consider myself informed - I know that there are exceptions to my stereotyped view of america (a lot of which is even taken from
which is totally what she said