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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.'"
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).
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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 videoHonestly 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......."
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.
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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.
A picture can be found here of this revolutionary new technology.
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Be yourself no matter what they say
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!
This would be great for soldiers - if able to withstand assault rifle bullets, its weight (18kg) is pretty low for full body armor.
The suit definitely seems to go along with the current war strategy... make no quick movements, take a huge beating, and then pull off the helmet for some publicity photos in the papers.
"Quoting famous computer scientists out of context is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming." - K
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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
The guy looks a bit short for a stormtrooper...
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
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
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.
Jon Acheson
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
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.
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.
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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These days, even the bears are packing.
Only problem is, they'd have to rob a bank to afford one.
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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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.
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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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...
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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.
Who the hell would come at someone dressed like this with a knife?
But then again, if we learned nothing from Ewoks v. Empire...
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
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.
Not laser proof?!?! IIRC they weren't proof against an Ewok with a stick...
This has been a test. If this had been an actual Sig, you would have been amused.