Power Armour - Practical or otherwise?

[Connor MacLeod]

A shield's going to do sod-all to protect you from the sides or rear, or from overpressure. How hard would it be for some ragged-arsed insurgent group to get hold of a few old 60mm mortars, or if that failed kludge some together out of scrap metal?

And it would be different without the shield, somehow? Its not like personal protection is a game where stuff comes free. You pay for the protection in some sort of tradeoff (like weight) so you really can't have everything.

I'd be great if we could make an artificial muscle that is breathable (one way, this can be done, so water vapor goes out, nerve gas cant come in) strong enough to be armor, rugged enough to resist abrasion from rocks and trees and webgear, offers little resistance to the users movements when unpowered other then the inertia of its own mass, and a few other things, but I doubt anything that awesome will ever happen. Its more or less how the suits in Crysis seemed to be imagined, only with added implausible gimmicks.

Funny you mention Crysis, but I often hear about how great that armour is supposed to be because of the carbon nanotubes (at least on SB). I've even heard some claim that CNT wil (supposedly) render modern infantry weapons useless against troops by some of the more enthusiastic claims.

I think though, 7.62mm rifles with discarding sabot ammunition are going to be a threat without dramatically more armor. The Sweds have now made this technology work in a 6.25mm submachine gun, and it pierced the side of an MT-LB (7mm angled steel) at 50m. From a freaking submachine gun. Accuracy of small caliber discarding sabot will always suck though at longer ranges, as they lack fin stabilization, but it'd be a problem close quarters.

I had to do a google for that and I came up with the CBJ-MS. How would that kind of round compare to 5.56 NATO as far as wounding goes (It could tumble I suppose but it wouldn't fragment much if any.) And what kind of 7.62mm were you thinking of? Assault Rifle? And if it scaled up from a SMJ wouldn't it be something like what the Steyr ACR was meant to be (minus the fins and a denser material that is) or what the IWS is (which is APFSDS and with tungsten)

[Lord of the Abyss]

A shield also means the guy with the shield does NOT have both hands free to use a rifle-type weapon. That limits the applications pretty drastically.

Do you really need two hands to use a rifle when you effectively have more than human strength thanks to the armor? If anything I'd think that you'd be more accurate with one hand than a normal soldier is with two since you can resist the recoil with the extra mass and strength from the armor.

[Simon_Jester]

A shield's going to do sod-all to protect you from the sides or rear, or from overpressure. How hard would it be for some ragged-arsed insurgent group to get hold of a few old 60mm mortars, or if that failed kludge some together out of scrap metal?

We were talking about room to room indoor fighting, where (contrary to Simmo's data-less claims) you would least expect to be attacked from behind due to the linear nature of most modern architecture.

You can expect to be attacked by hand-detonated bombs from any direction. You can expect to be attacked from the sides as you walk through a doorway- or attacked from both sides at once. You can potentially get shot through the interior walls of the damn building, although such bullets are likely to be slower and tumbling and not a big threat to a heavily armored man.

Real people who get into firefights think about this, and devise a lot of tactics to deal with the problem; it's not something they just ignore when working out their equipment lineup. You might want to consider that.

Maybe there are good reasons why the Army and Marines don't already equip their soldiers with ballistic shields when going into urban combat on a large scale. It's not like they aren't available or people don't already know about them, after all.

From what I have heard, basically military room clearing tactics and SWAT operate under similar methodologies, main difference being the level of force they face and use. Its easy to call what SWAT does "ideal" combat conditions when you have no experience to base it on. After all, they can't (officially) just burn a house down or frag grenade it if things get too difficult.

"Ideal" in the sense that they don't have to handle as much heavy weapon opposition, and a much larger proportion of the opposition they do face is armed with weapons that cannot cope with Class III or IV body armor, or comparable ballistic shields.

The thing is, the military does use ballistic shields (their own designs, even). Fucking Wikipedia has the pictures to prove it. There are even pictures of shields that are so heavy they are put on wheels and look like the front door of my house (so they can be used while disarming explosives). I'd post a link, but fuck it. I'm not doing basic Google searches for people who should know better than to ask me loaded questions.

Hey, Formless? Try doing one for yourself; that's a "USMC SRT." In other words, the picture you're talking about is of the Marine equivalent of a SWAT team. They are military policemen, designed to respond to crimes committed on military bases and so forth.

http://usmilitary.about.com/od/enlistedjo2/a/5816.htm

Their job description has very little to do with normal infantry combat, except insofar as "enemy guys with guns" are on it.

And it would be different without the shield, somehow? Its not like personal protection is a game where stuff comes free. You pay for the protection in some sort of tradeoff (like weight) so you really can't have everything.

Ballistic shields cost more in protection than they pay off for infantry, or so it would seem given that no infantry today use them.

For SWAT teams and similar missions, where you can realistically send a whole squad against one or two guys and having a dedicated shield-bearer to draw his fire and protect the team, it's different. Plus, SWAT teams usually don't have to walk long distances to get to their targets, so weighing them down with massive amounts of protection is less of an issue. The same logic applies to bomb disposal teams and so on.

Anything that reduces net casualties for a unit like that looks appealing, even if it has disadvantages like "makes the guy on our side about half as likely to shoot first as the unencumbered enemy" and "would cause him to trip and fall on his face six times if he had to walk a mile to get to the target." So they get excessive protection.

Guys wearing power armor are already being equipped with that excessive protection, but the shields are still bulky and awkward, and I strongly suspect that the consensus result will be "the armor can already stop most small arms fire and virtually all shrapnel, it's good enough that adding a forty-pound slab on the end of one of the guy's arms isn't going to pay off."

A shield also means the guy with the shield does NOT have both hands free to use a rifle-type weapon. That limits the applications pretty drastically.

Do you really need two hands to use a rifle when you effectively have more than human strength thanks to the armor? If anything I'd think that you'd be more accurate with one hand than a normal soldier is with two since you can resist the recoil with the extra mass and strength from the armor.

Gripping a weapon by a single attachment point makes it inherently unstable, unless that attachment point is somehow locked into position and stabilized by machinery. You could build a power-armor suit that effectively mounts its rifle on a hardpoint so that it can be accurately aimed with one of the user's hands, sure. But that adds an extra layer of stabilization software, and probably increases bulk of the overall weapon system, and if we follow that logic far enough we end up with the wearer in some kind of light "mecha" suit instead of something recognizable as personal body armor.

[Formless]

Oh shut the fuck up, you lying cunt. I'm calling you out on this one. You have no idea what you are talking about, and now you are ignoring evidence I've put up for you to review.

Maybe there are good reasons why the Army and Marines don't already equip their soldiers with ballistic shields when going into urban combat on a large scale. It's not like they aren't available or people don't already know about them, after all.

Hey, shithead. My link to wikipedia has a picture of two fucking marines standing behind a fucking ballistic shield. Its right fucking here. Two marines. Ballistic shield. Stop lying your ass off, right fucking now. Everybody can see you being an obtuse cunt. The source says that they use them, they happen to have a picture of SRT members using one, and pictures from the fighting are rather scarce because everybody is too busy hugging cover and shooting at each other to take pictures of all their goddamn equipment (especially that equipment that they are currently taking cover behind).

It doesn't fucking matter how many risks of urban combat you list, because a) you have no combat experience to speak from and b) there is always risk in combat and you just have to fucking deal with it. Like Connor said, would you be any [ed]less[/ed] more safe without a shield? No, because that's a piece of armor you can point at a door that isn't between you and the door, moron. Its that simple. Someone with powered armor obviously won't find it as heavy as a normal soldier, and somehow I don't think the guy who was using one as a gun rest for his AR-15 found it all that heavy to begin with.

Hey, Formless? Try doing one for yourself; that's a "USMC SRT." In other words, the picture you're talking about is of the Marine equivalent of a SWAT team. They are military policemen, designed to respond to crimes committed on military bases and so forth.

http://usmilitary.about.com/od/enlistedjo2/a/5816.htm

Their job description has very little to do with normal infantry combat, except insofar as "enemy guys with guns" are on it.

Job Description: A special reaction team is comprised of military police personnel trained to give an installation commander the ability to counter or contain a special threat situation surpassing normal law enforcement capabilities. All team members should be cross-trained in all team duties. As a minimum, the special reaction team must be capable of isolating a crisis scene, providing proficient marksmanship support, conducting tactical movement and building entry, and clearing of buildings in a variety of light and weather conditions.

Job Description: ... clearing of buildings in a variety of light and weather conditions.

You don't even read your own goddamn sources! Shut the fuck up. These people are still soldiers, they still preform in places like Falluja, they do exactly the job we are talking about. Nowhere in there did it say that they "respond to crimes committed on military bases and so forth." You just pulled that claim out of your ass because you read the word "police", and forgot that most of the Iraq War was considered "police action". Besides which, your fellow marines who have been caught committing crimes are armed with the same m-14 and m-16 rifles as everyone else. No True Scotsman would be the fallacy if it were any other person. At the rate you are going, its an outright lie.

Furthermore, its a distraction from the point that you have not demonstrated any evidence for your continued insistence that the military does NOT use these things, when wikipedia says they do. This is your opportunity to prove me wrong, and instead you ramble at Connor and LotA about how "bulky and awkward" shields are. When I have two videos demonstrating that you are a lying piece of shit, and they aren't that damn bulky or awkward.

Put up evidence, or get the fuck out before I request a moderator to remove you. Yes, I am invoking the rules: PR5, and at this rate PR4 ("No Broken Record Tactics") as well.

[Starglider]

I've even heard some claim that CNT wil (supposedly) render modern infantry weapons useless against troops by some of the more enthusiastic claims.

That is possible but not certain. There are numerous extremely strong materials that can only be made in tiny lab amounts, and some ridiculously strong theoretical ones that can only be made in molecular computer simulations. If we discover a cheap way of manufacturing them in (relative) bulk and the results scale up / match the simulations then yes, conventional chemically propelled slugs won't have enough energy to penetrate.

[Simon_Jester]

Oh shut the fuck up, you lying cunt. I'm calling you out on this one. You have no idea what you are talking about, and now you are ignoring evidence I've put up for you to review.

Maybe there are good reasons why the Army and Marines don't already equip their soldiers with ballistic shields when going into urban combat on a large scale. It's not like they aren't available or people don't already know about them, after all.

Hey, shithead. My link to wikipedia has a picture of two fucking marines standing behind a fucking ballistic shield. Its right fucking here. Two marines. Ballistic shield. Stop lying your ass off, right fucking now. Everybody can see you being an obtuse cunt. The source says that they use them, they happen to have a picture of SRT members using one, and pictures from the fighting are rather scarce because everybody is too busy hugging cover and shooting at each other to take pictures of all their goddamn equipment (especially that equipment that they are currently taking cover behind).

So, just to be sure I understand you, your claims here are:

1) Combat infantry already use ballistic shields in normal urban warfare conditions, or would be wise to do so.
2) It just happens that the only example you see fit to provide of this is a military police SWAT team training/posing/whatever with them.

If I understand you, my replies are, in reverse order:

2) How do you intend to prove that shields are a useful tool for combat infantry purely by proving that military SWAT teams have them? There's a problem with that, detailed below.

1) Combat infantry is not the same specialization as SWAT-type policing units. Normal infantry don't train in hostage rescues, for example. Nor do they train in cordoning off a crime scene. Their tactics are not suited to such things. At the same time, SWAT teams don't train to respond effectively to, say, the enemy having a tank parked around the corner. They are not primarily concerned with what happens if the enemy has hand grenades- they might have a backup plan for that, but their tactics are not designed around the assumption of it.

Combat infantry are trained and armed to fight their way through large areas occupied by large numbers of similarly (heavily) armed troops. The enemy's location, numbers, and intentions are all loosely defined; they may have heavy support weapons of types criminals almost never field. The enemy may be distributed so widely that they form a continuous 'line' or 'zone' that has to be gradually fought through one piece at a time- you cannot simply surround each individual enemy strongpoint and hit it with overwhelming force. Combat infantry may assault buildings, but that is only one of many things they do as part of their job.

SWAT teams are trained and armed to isolate and contain the threat of small groups of relatively well armed criminals, who typically occupy a well defined location that can be isolated, besieged, and assaulted. That word "assault" is important; while SWAT stands for "Special Weapons And Tactics," you could almost as well say something like "Special Weapons; Assault Team." Indeed, the first person to put together a SWAT team called them exactly that. Assaulting buildings full of criminals isn't the only thing SWAT units ever do, but it's sure the main focus of their training.

If you don't see the difference between those missions, and why one group might use different equipment than the other, then you have a problem in your mind, not mine.
__________________

Now, because of the difference between combat infantry and SWAT teams, it's foolish to say "Marine SRT units use it, therefore the Marines use it, therefore it's a healthy part of this complete infantry-equipment breakfast!"

SRT and combat infantry are different. Just because you'd describe both of them the same way to a four year old ("I take my gun and go kill the bad people, but not the good people") doesn't mean they're the same, or that they should do all the same things the same way.

It doesn't fucking matter how many risks of urban combat you list, because a) you have no combat experience to speak from and b) there is always risk in combat and you just have to fucking deal with it. Like Connor said, would you be any [ed]less[/ed] more safe without a shield? No, because that's a piece of armor you can point at a door that isn't between you and the door, moron. Its that simple. Someone with powered armor obviously won't find it as heavy as a normal soldier, and somehow I don't think the guy who was using one as a gun rest for his AR-15 found it all that heavy to begin with.

You might be less safe with a shield than without one under certain conditions- say, if you have to carry it for a few miles to get to the battle, so that you show up exhausted and can't fight effectively. SWAT teams get to pile out of a van a few hundred meters from their target; they don't have to carry their own equipment very far. Infantry do not have that luxury.

Powered armor reduces this problem but does not eliminate it. It just displaces it. Designing the suit to carry more weight means more powerful engines. The more bulk the suit is designed to carry, the bigger it gets, until it passes the threshold where it falls through floors or staircases. Where it's physically too large to go the places we want infantry to go. Where its engine makes too much noise and the enemy hears it coming and reacts by retreating and setting an ambush with heavy weapons. Where it has an increased target profile that makes it more likely to get hit in relatively open combat, with weapons too heavy to be stopped by anything a man can wear without turning into a walking tank.

If you reply "well, why NOT turn him into a walking tank?" I reply "fine, so buy an actual tank and be done with it."

So you have to limit overall suit weight, which means putting a 40-50 pound slab of metal designed to stop armor piercing bullets on the end of one of your arms is... it might be a good idea sometimes, but it is often counterproductive.

Hey, Formless? Try doing one for yourself; that's a "USMC SRT." In other words, the picture you're talking about is of the Marine equivalent of a SWAT team. They are military policemen, designed to respond to crimes committed on military bases and so forth.

http://usmilitary.about.com/od/enlistedjo2/a/5816.htm

Their job description has very little to do with normal infantry combat, except insofar as "enemy guys with guns" are on it.

Job Description: A special reaction team is comprised of military police personnel trained to give an installation commander the ability to counter or contain a special threat situation surpassing normal law enforcement capabilities. All team members should be cross-trained in all team duties. As a minimum, the special reaction team must be capable of isolating a crisis scene, providing proficient marksmanship support, conducting tactical movement and building entry, and clearing of buildings in a variety of light and weather conditions.

So translation: they need to be able to do hostage rescues, to do the job of police snipers. They need especially to break into buildings and deal with the criminals inside. They need to be able to do this when it is dark or light, raining or snowing or foggy.

That is just about all.

By the way, if you want better links:

http://www.americanspecialops.com/usmc- ... tion-team/
Some Marine Corps hagiography on the SRT units

Or, hell, just look up MOS 5816 for yourself; one of the convenient things about the Marines is that they have a four-digit serial number for every conceivable specialization one of their troops could possibly have.

You don't even read your own goddamn sources! Shut the fuck up. These people are still soldiers, they still preform in places like Falluja, they do exactly the job we are talking about.

Since you are going to scream and rail about my lack of examples, can I ask you for an example of SRT units using their specialist equipment as part of a larger military operation alongside normal combat infantry?

If other specializations in the Marine Corps are any guide, I'd expect that the specialist SRT unit would just pick up ordinary rifles and gear and go on patrol like everyone else, at times when they're not needed for their own unique mission. Sort of like the men with antitank rocket launchers... only to find that there are no tanks to blow up in Afghanistan. So they take the weapons suited to the job that needs doing, like anyone with common sense.

Do we have actual accounts of the SRT units taking their specialist equipment into combat in situations that would not normally demand a SWAT-style response?

Nowhere in there did it say that they "respond to crimes committed on military bases and so forth." You just pulled that claim out of your ass because you read the word "police", and forgot that most of the Iraq War was considered "police action".

You are now displaying great ignorance.

"Military police" have a well defined function: they police the military, typically with a side-order of missions like riot control. There are some exceptions where a unit of gendarmes or the like is simply a more heavily armed, paramilitary police organization aimed at the civilian populace. But when talking about the US, "military police" means first and foremost the people who police the military.

This has nothing to do with the use of the phrase "police action" as a euphemism for "war of occupation." Which you, not the US military's chain of command, are applying to the Iraq War. So no, they do not train all soldiers to fight like SWAT teams just because SWAT teams are police and "this is a police action." That would be laughable.

I will grant that the mission of normal infantry in a guerilla war starts looking more like that of police (and SWAT units) than it would in a conventional war fighting Soviet tanks in the Fulda Gap. But that doesn't mean infantry should be equipped and trained entirely the way SWAT units are.

Besides which, your fellow marines who have been caught committing crimes are armed with the same m-14 and m-16 rifles as everyone else. No True Scotsman would be the fallacy if it were any other person. At the rate you are going, its an outright lie.

I do not for a moment deny that SWAT units have to deal with enemies armed with automatic rifles. Especially SWAT units in the Army and Marine military police branches.

That's one of the reasons they were invented in the first place- normal cops are not equipped or trained to cope with that. SWAT units are.

Furthermore, its a distraction from the point that you have not demonstrated any evidence for your continued insistence that the military does NOT use these things, when wikipedia says they do. This is your opportunity to prove me wrong, and instead you ramble at Connor and LotA about how "bulky and awkward" shields are. When I have two videos demonstrating that you are a lying piece of shit, and they aren't that damn bulky or awkward.

I'm seeing ballistic shield weights of... what, 15 to 20 pounds for type IIIA protection? Which are not rated to stop full-sized rifle ammunition? Look them up, for crying out loud!

http://www.securityprousa.com/bashleiii.html
http://www.bulletproofvests.com/shields.html
and
http://www.thehighroad.org/archive/inde ... 40209.html

That last is a discussion thread on "why are ballistic shields not used more?" Short answer: Because they're for situations where you already know where the bullets will be coming from, where you had a chance to pick them up long before getting into the enemy's line of fire. When you aren't worried about limiting your visibility (say, to spot a tripwire on the floor that triggers explosives). And because they are fucking heavy.

It seems to me that this isn't a case of my failure to present evidence. It's a case of you getting a chemical imbalance again and demanding that I prove a negative.

Put up evidence, or get the fuck out before I request a moderator to remove you. Yes, I am invoking the rules: PR5, and at this rate PR4 ("No Broken Record Tactics") as well.

Go ahead; if you want to act on your fit of hysteria that's your problem.

[Admiral Valdemar]

I've even heard some claim that CNT wil (supposedly) render modern infantry weapons useless against troops by some of the more enthusiastic claims.

That is possible but not certain. There are numerous extremely strong materials that can only be made in tiny lab amounts, and some ridiculously strong theoretical ones that can only be made in molecular computer simulations. If we discover a cheap way of manufacturing them in (relative) bulk and the results scale up / match the simulations then yes, conventional chemically propelled slugs won't have enough energy to penetrate.

That's why I don't think power armour will be viable until synthetic muscles are improved enough to be like they are in *Crysis* or MGS. You could have a range of armours then, from skinsuits that are basically just strength and armour enhancements, to heavy systems that have added armour plates and weapons on for open combat. We don't expect one size fits all for infantry now with armour, so we shouldn't expect augmented soldiers of the future to have only some lumbering Heinlein system, or a fast Cyborg Ninja like one.

[Simon_Jester]

On the other hand, we do equip infantry with (more or less) only one basic armor system. There's the option of adding extra plates for more protection, yes. But you run into logistics complications when you have half a dozen different, non-interchangeable types of combat armor. Especially when it takes training to use the armor safely. You don't want a situation where the soldiers you'd send to clear out buildings inside a city cannot be used effectively in open countryside when you redeploy their unit, because they have the wrong kind of armor and it takes a month of training courses to learn to use the right stuff for the job.

[Sea Skimmer]

Hey, shithead. My link to wikipedia has a picture of two fucking marines standing behind a fucking ballistic shield. Its right fucking here. Two marines. Ballistic shield. Stop lying your ass off, right fucking now. Everybody can see you being an obtuse cunt. The source says that they use them, they happen to have a picture of SRT members using one, and pictures from the fighting are rather scarce because everybody is too busy hugging cover and shooting at each other to take pictures of all their goddamn equipment (especially that equipment that they are currently taking cover behind).

Ah yes, military police with a handgun and an MP5 and visible wavelength lights. That's totally what they use in conventional fighting, sure, totally. Look hey maybe when you get a clue and understand the difference between peacetime police tactics, and fighting a war you can stop being a hysterical looser who actually just claimed wikipedia is utter truth. Nobody fucking uses those riot shields in regular combat, its pointless when the biggest threat in an urban fight is a grenade and you can't carry a fucking rifle while you hold it.

[Sea Skimmer]

Funny you mention Crysis, but I often hear about how great that armour is supposed to be because of the carbon nanotubes (at least on SB). I've even heard some claim that CNT wil (supposedly) render modern infantry weapons useless against troops by some of the more enthusiastic claims.

In principle the specific energy absorption of carbon nanotubes is so much higher then kelvar that you might well get a vast degree of immunity to any existing small arms, in reality the realistic absorption will be much lower and people can design new ammunition much more quickly then you can make new armor. Armor designers seem to be expecting lighter armor out of CNT tech, rather then radically stronger armors. Though the need for radically stronger armor is also simply less pressing as a design goal.

Short of adapting sabot rounds, it'd also be possible to just design bullets with needle like points, the French came up with some weird police handgun ammo like this, which will help with armor penetration for much less trouble then a sabot, and still provide expansion on impact.

I had to do a google for that and I came up with the CBJ-MS. How would that kind of round compare to 5.56 NATO as far as wounding goes (It could tumble I suppose but it wouldn't fragment much if any.)

Fragmentation is variable with 5.56mm anyway, the CBJ rounds tumble fairly well in tests compared to cartridges of comparable power from comparable barrel lengths. Also the weapon can still fire conventional ball ammunition.

And what kind of 7.62mm were you thinking of? Assault Rifle? And if it scaled up from a SMJ wouldn't it be something like what the Steyr ACR was meant to be (minus the fins and a denser material that is) or what the IWS is (which is APFSDS and with tungsten)

Full size of 7.62mm, or ideally, a true intermediate rifle round like 6.25x45mm or several other identified 'optimal' calibers the world has been conspiring not to adapt for almost a century. It would be a bit like the ACR, but its preferable to have special ammo for a normal sort of gun, rather then all special everything because that makes it much cheaper to adapt, and gives more flexibility. As I recall, been a while since I read about it, the ACR could not fire a conventional ball round, it had to have a long projectile to cycle correctly. This is kinda annoying if you then want to say, use the rifle as a squad marksman rifle, or shoot up people who don't have armor, though like the G11 it was expected that high ROF 3 round bursts would provide the required lethality.

[AniThyng]

Hey, shithead. My link to wikipedia has a picture of two fucking marines standing behind a fucking ballistic shield. Its right fucking here. Two marines. Ballistic shield. Stop lying your ass off, right fucking now. Everybody can see you being an obtuse cunt. The source says that they use them, they happen to have a picture of SRT members using one, and pictures from the fighting are rather scarce because everybody is too busy hugging cover and shooting at each other to take pictures of all their goddamn equipment (especially that equipment that they are currently taking cover behind).

Ah yes, military police with a handgun and an MP5 and visible wavelength lights. That's totally what they use in conventional fighting, sure, totally. Look hey maybe when you get a clue and understand the difference between peacetime police tactics, and fighting a war you can stop being a hysterical looser who actually just claimed wikipedia is utter truth. Nobody fucking uses those riot shields in regular combat, its pointless when the biggest threat in an urban fight is a grenade and you can't carry a fucking rifle while you hold it.

To be fair to Wikipedia, nothing it said actually supports his interpretation

"US Navy (USN) Hospital Corpsman Third Class (HM3) Thomas J. Cupo (left), crouches behind the shield with a 9mm handgun, while US Marine Corps (USMC) Corporal (CPL) Stephen L. Clogston, provide cover with a Heckler and Koch 9mm MP5-N sub-machine gun. Both are members of the Marine Special Reaction Team (SRT), and are participating in a simulated bank robbery at the Marine Air Ground Combat Center in Twentynine Palms, California (CA). The annual training event, conducted by the Provost Marshals Office, is designed to train Military Police and Criminal Investigators proper procedures when dealing with a hostage situation."

[MrDakka]

Short of adapting sabot rounds, it'd also be possible to just design bullets with needle like points, the French came up with some weird police handgun ammo like this, which will help with armor penetration for much less trouble then a sabot, and still provide expansion on impact.

Do you have more details?

[Sea Skimmer]

Yeah, see this link, Tres Haute Vitesse bullets.
http://www.quarry.nildram.co.uk/THV.htm

Imagine designs like this, but with an added tungsten needle down the middle. That's what I was thinking.

http://www.ar15.com/ammo/project/ammo_c ... /index.htm
You can also see a lot of generalized ammo cross sections, including the US Army M959 7.62mm SLAP sabot round, and M855A1 semi AP ball ammo here. Suffice to say, a damn lot of different stuff is already done in small arms ammo design, and a whole lot more is possible if we ask for it. You can see with the SLAP round that the projectile is still most of the diameter of the cartridge, much different then say 120mm tank sabot which is only about a quarter of the diameter of the barrel. Adapting a smaller projectile would allow an even higher velocity for even more AP performance; though it would reduce effective range since the low mass projectile will suffer a lot from drag. The US Army was thinking IIRC 300m vs light Soviet armor when it designed it. On the other hand a full caliber round will have better long range ballistics and better accuracy for use via sniper. So to counter powered armor we should not expect any one type of ammo to be optimal. It depends on what you are doing. Since the power armor will cost so damn much, an enemy will be more willing to go to the trouble of designing and supply more diverse ammo to kill them with.

[MrDakka]

When I looked at the French THV bullets I couldn't help but think of rocket plug/spike nozzles and the sabot for the US Army M959 7.62mm SLAP is pretty damn thin, almost looks like a partial jacket.

Thanks a lot for the links. It looks like I have some new perusing material for the next couple days.

[loomer]

Wait wait wait, Formless seriously thinks the USMC go into battle with shields? Dude, you do know Call of Duty is not a documentary right? Please, provide a single documented incident where ballistic shields have been used in urban combat since WW1. And no - room-clearing operations carried out by Military Police regiments (except if it should happen to be, say, an all-out attack on a green-zone compound and they respond) don't count.

[Sea Skimmer]

When I looked at the French THV bullets I couldn't help but think of rocket plug/spike nozzles and the sabot for the US Army M959 7.62mm SLAP is pretty damn thin, almost looks like a partial jacket.

Thanks a lot for the links. It looks like I have some new perusing material for the next couple days.

It kind of is a jacket, and is supposed to just break apart at random and spray off firing, unlike the tank and autocannon sabots which are metal and fall off in discreet solid pieces. Also notice the big cavity in the base of the bullet which holds the tracer-incendiary material, it also comes without that. The break apart issue is actually one drawback of this sort of ammo, those plastic bits go flying and can potentially bounce off walls and the ground and hit people close to the shooter with enough force to wound.

Check out M993 ammo on the list for an example of a 7.62mm round which simply has a solid tungsten core inside a copper jacket. I don't see the Russian 7.62x54R tungsten ammo on the chart for comparison sadly, but the the 7.62x54r B32 API round is present as an example of a commie steel AP round, 30.06 M2 AP with steel core is also present. However all these rounds were aimed towards piercing actual metal armor, a round designed specifically to defeat body armor could be different as that French bullet design is. Body armor materials are generally more vulnerable to a very narrow point, while with metal armor a very pointy round is often a disadvantage because the point simply breaks on impact. Thus the needle concept, which in the case of Kelvar like materials can literally just poke between the fibers without needing to actually waste energy cutting them and get right at the ceramic plate.

[Admiral Valdemar]

There's already an alloy of metal and nanotubes being touted as capable of taking .50 and .30 AP ammo, along with practically unlimited numbers of small round hits from 9 mm with nary a scratch. How much more energy do typical sabot or flechette rifle rounds offer over standard ball rounds?

I'm just reading up on the Nanosuit 2's specs and the idea of kicking a car in someone's face is pretty awesome when you consider that just an 8 mm bundle of muscle fibre is about as strong as an entire adult bodybuilder's bicep.

[Sea Skimmer]

Such claims need more quantification to mean anything, we after all have a very different alloy of metal and carbon that can withstand 16 inch shells and two thousand pound bombs too, and its existed for a century. The question is what was the required density to do so. Stopping high caliber rounds with body armor isn't just about stopping them either, its about stopping them without so much deflection or spall that you suffer massive internal injury in the process, which makes me skeptical of any such claim of resisting .50cal gunfire at a reasonable density. We make vehicle armor out of the same boron carbide we used for body armor that can easily withstand a burst of 25mm sabot rounds; but it'd rather unusable for a person.

The hardness issue also comes into play, nanotubes are not very hard, so vast energy absorption vs lead bullets is unlikely to scale up well against a hardened projectile that the nanotubes are incapable of deforming. Until a company is willing to provide armor samples for testing by an independent lab, take all claims with an immense grain of salt.

The point of sabot rounds isn't more raw energy, that's limited by acceptable chamber pressure on the firearm. The point is more energy in a smaller area and at a higher velocity because for any total amount of energy higher velocity will produce superior penetration until you get very high up the scale and your own projectile begins to mechanically fail on impact. The best SLAP style 7.62mm round I know of is made by Norway, 52 grain projectile at 1340m/s and 4.81mm diameter, smaller then the standard US SLAP which is a 1980s design and kinda dated at this point. That means it has about 40% of the frontal area of a conventional full caliber bullet. In comparison the 7.62mm M61 AP round goes 838m/s with a 150 grain projectile of which some mass is the copper jacket.

Muzzle energy is 3036 joules for the SLAP round, and 3,423 joules for the M61. But the SLAP will have 168 joules per square mm of frontal cross section, while M61 has only 76 joules. That's a radical difference in performance which will be massively compounded by the actual impact velocity being nearly five hundred meters per second higher at close range. That is a massive difference to say the least. A late model blackpowder rifle might only have 450m/s muzzle velocity, and could still kill people a kilometer away.

[Sea Skimmer]

The Styer ACR fired 9.85 grain projectiles 1.5mm in diameter at 1,450m/s. Energy 673 joules which is approaching the power of a .357 magnum handgun round and more powerful then +P 9mm Luger rounds. Velocity was still 910m/s at 600m for 265 joules which is similar to +P 9mm at 100 feet.

Energy per square mm of frontal cross section at the muzzle would be 380 joules, so over double that of the Norwegian SLAP in turn. At 600m it's still 149 joules per square mm. Oh and of course, the ACR was firing three of these things in every cartridge and it was considerably more accurate then an M16 rifle in field trials out to 300m, but not enough to meet the massively high specs of the program. Wounding performance certainly gets questionable with such lightweight projectiles though, and such rounds are very sensitive to passing through intermediate barriers before striking the target.

The 15.2mm IWS using the same tech... yeah somehow I don't think even .50cal ball proof body armor is going to stop that thing. It defeated 40mm thick plates at 1000 meters in trials, and both sides of a BMP-1 which are 19mm thick, representing a very demanding spaced armor target. It also has a trajectory which is about as high as a human torso at that distance so you won't miss easily. The performance is several times that of .50cal SLAP. It also weighs fourty pounds unloaded, against 30 pounds for a .50cal semi auto rifle so you'd hope it was crazy effective.

[Admiral Valdemar]

I was thinking more the massed muscle layout that the Nanosuit 2 utilises, since it has the CNT as both its power source and armour. With the density of the fibre weave shown, and the fact that half a mm of single-walled CNT can stop repeated shots of over 300 J muzzle energy (http://www.nanoarchive.org/297/1/nano7_47_475701.pdf), it should prove sufficient for repeated hits from higher calibre saboted rounds even. Having the bulked muscle instead of just plates of alloy with CNT infused within, as mentioned above, then means you have something to catch the bullet and distribute the momentum, without adding useless weight to the suit, since the same material is used for mobility.

Still, they're improving the abilities of these technologies and how efficient we are at making them constantly. Even if they don't manage to make something shrug off .50 cal. SLAP rounds, you'd at least have a decent piece of protection from anything but the more exotic ammo and really big bomb blasts.

[Sea Skimmer]

Being able to stop repeated shots does not necessarily lead to any scale up in protection. That paper makes it pretty clear that its going to have excellent multi shot protection against anything it can stop, but also that you rapidly need bigger tubes to stop higher velocity rounds. It doesn't appear that it spreads load across anything like as wide an area as present day body armor systems do.

[Admiral Valdemar]

That's being looked into with the way the weave is produced (since you also need to make it without having it shear itself when impacted, or split apart when an AP round hits) and with the use of multi-walled CNTs. Multi-walled CNTs have several times the modulus rating of single-walled types, and that's just the ones we can make today, not the theoretical ones when better synthesis techniques are made.

That said, I need to see if I can find anything about the coatings I've heard about for such fabrics and how that can enhance their abilities for distributing impact energy. The Nanosuit itself is shown to have a reactive skin that covers the CryFibril muscles which gives it the ability to enable stealth features or increase durability. You could have the fibres on the outer layer tense and also be filled, or have interstices filled with, D3O or some other non-Newtonian fluid to dampen the impact. It's used all the time for extreme sports with only a centimetre or two being enough to totally nullify a hammer breaking fingers, for example.