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IBM Files Patent For Bullet-Dodging Bionic Armor
An anonymous reader writes with news that IBM has filed a patent for "Bionic body armor" that would protect a wearer from long-range gunfire by detecting the incoming bullets and administering small shocks to the appropriate muscles required for moving out of the way. Quoting the patent: "When a marksman (such as a sniper) is attempting to fire a projectile from a firearm, the marksman typically prefers to be as far away from the target as possible, thus giving him or her a head start for the escape after the firing. As an example, the longest reported sniper hit was from a distance of about 2500 meters, resulting in a time of flight of about 4 seconds for the projectile/bullet. Had the target been aware of the inbound projectile, avoiding it by simply walking away would have been possible." After detecting the projectile, the armor would calculate the trajectory and "stimulate the target to move in a predefined manner ... sufficient to avoid any contact with the approaching projectile."
I wonder how they want to detect an approaching projectile. By sound wouldn't give really much of a head start. Anyway, detecting a projectile, calculating an approximate flight path and stimulating including biomechanical lag would have to happen in a really short period of time.
I suppose the logic is this:
Without the suit, you WILL be hit by a bullet.
WITH the suit, you MIGHT accidentally fling yourself off a cliff or whatever.
I'll take the latter odds over the former odds any day of the week.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
If the wearer is about to pull the trigger on his M72 LAW when someone fires a rifle at him, do you think it's a Good Idea (TM) to jerk the person around?
Without the suit, you WILL be hit by a bullet.
WITH the suit, you MIGHT accidentally blow up your whole team.
Hmmm - to make the wearer escape the shot, the shocks would basically have to be admitted from one side only, to make the wearer move away from that side...
I wonder whether it could be used differently - e.g. make the wearer move in front of a moving car (ouch); or better, aid kidnappers by sending out a signal which actually makes the wearer jump / move towards the kidnappers getaway car - it would make kidnapping so much easier, if the victim would actually help you... ;-)
The question then would obviously be, can the armor be tricked into believing that WAS an incoming shot that would require this particular movement to evade 'the shot'...?
Actually, the plates generally in use by NATO nations are designed to stop up to 3 hits from 7.62 rounds. Now, granted "designed to" doesn't mean they will, but if you're suggesting that the plate is useless after only one hit from a 5.56 round, then you're just plain wrong.
Fortunately, I've never actually been hit with either a 5.56 or a 7.62 myself. But I've seen people get hit, and I'm not sure if there were multiple hits on the same plate or not. In Lebanon two years ago we couldn't even exchange our equipment for two weeks, and I wasn't keeping score of who was getting hit or where (front, back). But I can attest that no one was seriously injured by a bullet through the armour. I should probably mention that we were absorbing a nice mix of 5.56 (M16), 7.62 short (AK47) and 5.54 (AK74) rounds (and the occasional mortar or RPG!).
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
Bullshit, the Dragon Skin guys cooked their test data, they are being prosecuted; their armor is NOT better,
Read your own link, fucktard. No one is being "prosecuted", and the question of whether the DragonSkin product is better or not is still up in the air. I have seen about a 50:50 split on reports that one side or the other skewed the test procedure to make one or the other come out on top. I wore the current Army OTV off and on for 2 years and have seen it both fail and succeed first hand.
The live fire test guys who evaluate this stuff take their jobs very seriously, they didn't buy that crap armor for good reason (performance not price).
Yeah, no one would ever manipulate a test to make the product chosen look better. I've spent too many years using the end result of DoD procurement and testing procedure to have absolute faith in it. Sure, the guys conducting the test might be serious straight shooters, but what do you know about the pentagon political hacks who drew up the test procedure? Was it tailored to subtly exploit a particular weakness of the Pinnacle product? Pinnacle seems to think so.
Not everything is a conspiracy by the corrupt gubment.
No, but DoD procurement is rife with idiots who make poor decisions, and then go to the ends of the earth to back up those poor decisions, because to admit error is to admit incompetence, and promotions get harder when you've admitted incompetence. The Pentagon is a political rat's nest, full of infighting, backstabbing, and deal-cutting.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.