August 04, 2004

At 300# per lift, the damage these soldiers can make will be unimaginable... but who cares about all that! THESE SUITS ARE THE SHIZNIT!
posted by Warrior 20 years ago
  • From the link: "Soldiers will be able to chat online with each other while they are walking down a jungle trail." Post to MoFi in real time while blasting away fuzzy furriners! Excellent!11!!one!
  • That seems a little silly. Of course, in theory, a well-trained soldier would never walk through the jungle IMing and let the "fuzzy furriners" sneak up on them, but somehow I can see it happening.
  • Those suits are quite possibly the coolest thing ever. I can see a huge number of civilian applications for this technology too (if they'll let us have it).
  • Just imagine the possibilities for paintball and laser tag.
  • "Think about a good action movie that shows an average person walking down a street with a nice designer suit. All of a sudden, gunshots are heard and just before a bullet hits this person, his soft fabric suit transforms into an incredible display of alien armor that deflects bullets. If Natick engineers are successful, this movie will become a reality in the future U.S. Army. "What we hope to gain from this program is body armor that wears like a traditional textile impregnated with nanomachines connected to an onboard computer," DeGay explained. "So when you shoot a round into the uniform system, it's normally pliable until it senses the strike of a round -- it becomes rigid, defeats the strike of the round and becomes soft again." A shortcoming of traditional body armor is that it can only absorb so many strikes from machine-gun rounds. "When you have a uniform with this new nanotechnology, it can absorb unlimited numbers of machine-gun rounds," DeGay pointed out." Now that's fucking tough. Think we can beat Aliens and Predators with this thing?
  • meanwhile, a colleague of mine in the marine corps reserves recently left for iraq. we pitched in to give him money to BUY HIS OWN GEAR. seriously. soldiers have to buy a lot of this stuff on their own. sheesh.
  • Jean-Louis "Dutch" DeGay... *snigger*
  • you know, I think it's ludicrous that they're even investing money on these things, granted, you have to keep the country safe, but that, in combination with the Laser Guns (which are going thru testing rounds right now, see "directed-energy" on google)will only add wood to the fire! why not invest on something more useful like, oh I dunno, feeding the starved? These are NOT elements of peace man, and while the applications in everyday life will be cool, truth is, nothing but some amazing suit invented by the Japanese (or something) will come out of this...who knows what WW3 is gonna look like.
  • Gee, I'm amazed nobody has mentioned Heinlein's powered armor from the "real" Starship Troopers, arguably the coolest aspect of the whole book (forget everything you saw in the movie version). The uniform systems depicted in the article are almost identical to that worn by the Mobile Infantry, except they can't fly.
  • The concept of the powered armor suit also figures prominently in Haldeman's "The Forever War."
  • On the chat thing, I think the point of that was that they can talk to each other while on patrol or ambush without fear of being heard by the enemy. Their voices carry to each other's helmets, but don't project outward unless they want to be heard.
  • "Couldnt that same technology be used to shoot food into the mouths of hungry people?" --Bill Hicks
  • You critics will eat your words when Master-Chief saves our asses from the alien covenant invasion.
  • Speaking of the Master Chief's armor, if you've got a spare two grand US, you can get a set
  • BBF: You laugh, but you know he had to beat the holy hell out of everyone who sniggered at his name with his fists of cyber-fury. You *know* it.
  • ...And reflex armor (the stuff that goes rigid on impact) has been a component of some science fiction for a while too...
  • "The Future Force Warrior will be a responsive and formidable member of an invincible battle space team," DeGay explained. an Invincible. Battle. Space. Team. I wish I could have seen a picture of that interview. Did Dutch keep a straight face? Not mocking the potential usefulness of all this gear (should it come to fruition and the computers not constantly give error messages), just saying. as BBF & Boo say - "Jean-Louis" right? Clearly, French. He needed to take Reagan's nick to get any credibility at all.
  • Never mind all that -- hook me up with some RoboLegs!
  • Will those on-board retinal menus have Solitaire? How about networked Doom?
  • Gee, Mr. Ass-kicker! Wow that's so destructive! Golly!