Well, well, now look who's interested in developing power suits...

Anybody been seeing strange lights in the sky lately?

PS - There's great material there for people writing fan fics

Let's face it, power suits are a good idea. The only real problem is co-ordination, if you fall over, you might well be in trouble standing up again.

Holy moly and a crockpot of macaroni Hobbes, that's insane. I actually read that whole thing. That was awesome. DARPA... I thought they were just made up in Metal Gear Solid! I guess I need to start paying attention to my real life, and, you know, Earth, and the other humans that inhabit it.

Give them a few years and we'll be stepping out of our Avenger's onto Mars.

Just remember, kiddies. UFO is the game of steriotypes. The aliens out in space probably think we've rumbled their secret, and that any attempt at contact will result in bloodshed, due to this one game.

...

What if UFO is the reason why the aliens haven't made contact yet?

Check out the date of the request for proposals: June 2000....the Sectoid I have locked inside my closet keeps telling me it's a coincidence but I'm a little suspicious...

PS - On a more serious note, they are actually conducting research on the technology. Maybe we'll see power suits one day.

I think the aliens are scared to come here because were a militaristic race which has nukes. (and we nuked our own planet )

Back to the suit of power topic

Power armor is logicly the best way to protect troops and allow them to engage on foot and in buildings. Sence normal full body armor thick gets kinda heavy, the only way to have better armor and allow people to move is to of course boost there carrying weight with a mechanical system. But i think what the DARPA people plan on doing is create a "frame" system which won't provide better protection but allow for faster movement with heavier loads. This is a step in the right direction. Next we'll be seeing heavy power armor which is deployed in urban settings. With current fuel cell/battery technology this is as effective power armor can be. (Till E-115 is "found" )

-Psy Guy-

I actually read all that stuff before....there was a link at a "Starship Troopers"
Website.I read about an Experiment some Proffesor did with a weak (Coal?)
Engine......he went very fast,untill he fell down!


_

Probably both of us saw the same Starship Troopers website.....I got that link also from there

Still, I think the whole issue about wearing power suits isn't about protection but maneuverability and power consumption. If the thing is too cumbersome for the soldier to react quicky to a threat then it is useless, the same if he runs out of batteries in the middle of a fight.

The principle issue behind designing power armor is not the fact of being armored with plating and resistences, but like you've all noticed, moving around in it. I believe that with todays sensory technologies, we could have a system built that could read the slight movement of a muscle, and amplify it. But, in the same accordance, feel when it would strain, or stop, and have the servos stop applying whatever mechanical force they are creating.

Another problem would be the servos themselves. Obviously, you can't have them exposed, because that just turns the Power Armor into a Heavy construction suit. For those purposes, it's fine. But as power armor, it needs to not only have the servos, it needs to be self contained.

Balance is not an issue, someone here I believe, earlier linked to the Japanese having ninja robots. There is a lot that we can do, it's all a matter of compiling this knowledge and using it to the utmost extent.

For instance, we could have the basic plating be a depleted uranium/titaium alloy, with hydraulic servos. The only thing is designing it to be general, or specific to each human body. If generalized, it needs to have compensating factors, but could be much easier mass produced. If customized, it could have that much more usefulness in say, a squad of infantrypeople who are paratrooper'd into a base camp, and have an exact control over their motions.

I really think that around 5 people could develope this armor. It would take a Mechanical Engineer, an Electrical Engineer, a Computer Engineer, a Computer Programmer, and a Physics specialist or something.

Who knows anything about the USA's laws on creating weapons? I'll work on the Electrical Engineering if someone starts the Laser Weapons research... lol

Interested parties may also want to see a topic I prepared earlier.

As much as I like the idea, power armor has to fill a niche, and answer a few questions:

Why not just buy another tank? They carry more than a person, they go faster than a person, they are more heavily armored, AND you already have the factory set up.

Also, if your suit isn't RPG-proof, I'd rather have five guys in battlevests with rifles and RPGs for a fifth of the cost of a single battlesuited guy. If one guy gets hit - I've still got four.

A similar argument against mecha - if current best defense for tanks is to bury yourself up to your turret, leading to models that can raise their gun about 2 feet off their body on hydraulics for a minimum profile exposure, nobody in their right mind is going to stroll onto that battlefield in a three-story-tall mech unless we have seriously seen a new set of arms technology in which 2lb high-velocity tank shells do not matter.

JFG

RPGs are limited on the battle field compared to rifles, nades, and other small arms. They can't make helicopters that can take RPGs and keep going so i don't think armor should protect aginst them. Also 5 guys in one place and a RPG goes off (RPG means rocket propelled gernade just in case you didn't know) and you got mashed human.

Also tanks cost millions to make and take about 6 months to build plus its hard to quickly transport them. Something like a Bradley (the marine troop transport/combat vehicle) is more practical. The good thing about power armor is you can fit inside areas like urban settings and dense forest without bumping into everything.

No body ever said mechs where practical. Unless your fighting on one hilly ass planet with low grav a mech is pointless. You could have effective mechs used in urban enviornments but make sure there equiped with "skates" (the roller things seen on the mechs in Blue Gender and Heavy Gear). Basiclly mechs are "better" than tanks in that they are suppose to be more mobile and better suited in vertical and small area combat.

Also tanks aren't that great. Basiclly there big ass cannons with machineguns and armor effective aginst small and medium arms. There armor isn't too effective aginst tank shells, and a few portable TOW or LAW rockets can cripple a tank. Also in cityscapes a tank is a crawling target as they can't hide and can only effectively fire at something in front or behind it. Plus a tank is very blind compared to a trooper which hurts it even more as a city fighter. Also the idea about the burried tanks is good but it didn't work in desert storm as the M1A1s easly took out burried russian tanks with a single shot.

Which brings me back to my point (which i sorta lost track of) which is tanks are designed to kill other tanks and be immune to most troop carried weapons. The idea of power armor is to allow a guy to have the small arm resistance of a vehicle and the mobility and size of a foot soldier. And a mech..... well thats something gamers (like me) enjoy using in games
If you want firepower, mobility, and good defence just use a squad of helicopter gunships

Also you wouldn't need a physics expert if you have a mechanical engineer (statics and dynamics ,which is the backbone of mechanical engineering, are just applied physics acting on stuff)

-Psy Guy-

The aim of Power Armor is to give a soldier more power, speed, armor and control. A tank has plenty of armor and power, but you LOOSE manuverability, speed, and control.

Plus they're too big.

Power Armor doesn't have to be the big chunky stuff that our X-Com soldiers wear. A much more practical version would look a lot more like the Personal Armor, with either small hydrolics aiding the joints, or some of that fibre stuff that expands and contracts in response to electricity (can't give you any names to what that is, though).

Power Armor does not have to grant massive amount of strength. That just isn't practical. What good is the ability to pick up a car in the battle field? Useful for rescue operations, maybe, but quite useless for combat.

Instead, speed would be a much better option. A soldier who can run faster, and longer, then normal will have a huge advantage.

Then again... the chunky version of the armor does have style...

But I suppose the Personal Armor really looks better.

So the niche for Power Armor looks like

- city or close-in fighting, where planes and tanks can't go (6-ft doorways?)
- impervious or resistant to "small arms" up to assault rifles & grenades (but probably not .50cal), which normal troopers aren't

SWAT would love to have these, and anyone else that does door-to-door searches. Right now they have those heavy shields for breaching. (just googled on SWAT bulletproof shield) The advantage of near-future power armor is that you would also have protection on back & sides (& over & under) but would still be able to move a little (or in short bursts, such as when searching a house). This seems achievable. Cooling off might be an issue.

Psyguy: five troopers can also spread out further than one can, and set up crossfires, but I take your point about the RPG

BB: That stuff is shape memory alloy, the most common one is Nitinol. I did my thesis on it and hope Science comes up with a polymer (plastic muscle) instead if we're going to see practical electric actuators.

I never liked the X-COM chunky armor style myself, maybe it was seeing my shapely female troopers with a Marshmallow Man profile and no ponytail...

JFG

Heheh... at least you can still see their faces in TFTD, every now and then...

I want to see an exo-skeliton like they did in the matrix revolutions. Now that would sure beat the traffic jams in the morning.

Kernel: Yeah but the power cords are only 100m long!

(And you're still vulnerable to a sniper - no body armor)

Watley Review: Powersuited Children Were Army Experiment (click for link)

I've read the article and done some checking....the mentioned Institute exists and is researching future armor suits but the rest of the story is bogus. Somehow I found it hard to believe that toddlers could bench press 4 tons

UC Berkeley Robotic Legs - as linked by Megatokyo. Alien alloy plates not included.

Wonder how long it can go before running out of juice?