Your country gets some new body armor (RAR!)

[Zor]

Let us say that you are a soldier in the army of your country. One day you hear the news that your government had adopted a new uniform for all combat operations from a new start up called Visari Industries...

Said new uniform includes fully enclosed environmental systems, HUD assisted targeting, built in night vision and IR systems, in helmet communications systems and armor which is 50% more durable per kilogram than the previous generation of body armor.

Are you happy with this development?

Zor

[Lord Revan]

Could you please tell more for us who don't enclyclopediac knowlage of game armors.

[Batman]

So much of my country's GDP did they waste on that?

[Zor]

Could you please tell more for us who don't enclyclopediac knowlage of game armors.

Helghast Infanty

Zor

[RogueIce]

On the one hand, since this armor is apparently fucking magic, sure why not?

But I still had to vote no because it's lacking crotch protection of any kind. The family jewels must be protected.

[Sea Skimmer]

It'd be nice, but in an environment in which the top militaries like the US take 50% of KIA from large explosive devices buried in the ground, and many of those of high enough yield to tear MRAPs in half, a 50% improvement in body armor, assuming this means something useful like a V50 increase against the SVD, and not pure bullshit specifications, would mean very little anyway. Mobility improvements for infantry are needed more then better armor.

Not sure what 'HUD assisted targeting' is supposed to damn well mean though. The problem is far more in locating and recognizing a target then hitting it once located. And unless the HUD is part of a full power armor system actually able to move the gun I have trouble seeing what it could even do on that respect.

[Simon_Jester]

I agree with RogueIce. This armor needs groin protection badly!

And Skimmer- hm. If your soldier had a HUD, you might be able to develop software that would be good at identifying human outlines or partial human outlines, and that would do stuff like mark the possibly combined with telescopic magnification, putting targeting carets on things for you. It would be at least vaguely helpful if you were wearing a visor that conveniently painted bullseyes on your enemies for you, I'd imagine.

That said, I think you're right that this armor is really not going to help very much in guerilla warfare where the guerillas' main tactic is huge bombs.

[Borgholio]

I think for armor to be truly revolutionary, it would need to involve either materials that are a quantum leap above current armors in terms of weight and / or protection, or be powered in some way to enhance the strength and durability of the soldier. Plus have groin protection.

[Sea Skimmer]

A large increase, not exactly a quantum leap is needed to get someone whom is armored against AK bullets the way a full clad knight could be against sword slashes.

Carbon nanotube armor may actually provide as much as 40-50% weight savings over the best current fiber based armors. It also very stiff, but in a velocity sensitive manner for a fiber. That would be enough to have limb armor that will stop some rifle bullets . Right now reasonable materials won't let you do this with even very large amounts of weight because the fabrics simply aren't locally stiff enough to resist blunt trauma from gunfire without being so thick they become so bulky they can't move anyway. That's why bomb squad suits are so clumsy; and they only get tested to stop low mass, low momentum, if very high velocity, fragmentation in the first place.

But because we can't produce enough long nanotubes to make actual vests for trials people are trying to estimate this using tiny glass beads as projectiles vs very thin pieces of armor, or else 'strike face' tests in which only a thin layer of the material (sometimes just one single mat of the tubes, one tube thick) is placed on top of another known armor material to indicate a performance improvement. So you end up with test results that indicate stuff like 1% ballistic limit improvement, which sounds useless, until one realizes the carbon nanotube was more like .06% of the total armor mass. But its hard to extrapolate such results to higher velocities and much more massive projectiles with any reliability. Such is still beyond the state of the art of current computational physics.

Side problem is we still don't know if carbon nanotubes cause cancer or not. Those monocrystalline whiskers everyone was raving about ~15 years ago before nanotubes were discovered as the strongest possible materials proved to be highly cancerous and most research evaporated. Also had other issues like impossible to produce them with acceptable quality. Let us hope the same won't doom the SWCNT forever.