Have to agree with Johnny Bravo, The Forever War is an excellent book.
For another take on combat armor, read Forever Peace, also by Haldeman. Not exactly a sequel to The Forever War, though.
Um… yes it is. 
Pretty much what I was going to say. For mobility you sacrifice armoring and increase the chance of becoming scrap metal.
Those armor suits in the last matrix movie had to be the most poorly designed pieces of military hardware i’ve ever seen in a movie. Huge, clumsy, complicated, and offering the pilot no protection, a limited firing arc. A jeep with a turret on the back would have done the same job much more efficiently- And been immune to emp, with a properly designed engine. That kind of thing is the problem with power armor. If you have the technology to build man-wearable power armor, imagine what that same technology packed into a more efficient shape-ie a tanklike chassis- could do.
Power Suit, pfff.
What the military needs is a Gravity Suit. The Navy SEALS aren’t going to have any use for a Chozu-made suit that’s as slow as molasses underwater!
On a more serious note, I can see how “combat” armor could be useful in situations like going underwater (the marines could don the suit, and use it to walk around underwater looking for survivors of a submarine wreck) or space exploration (walking around on the surface of Mars?).
They have a working prototype of the small, proximity-fused ammunition. I saw it on the Discovery Channel. It seems like an awful lot of weight and expensive, delicate technology to lug around for only a small combat advantage.
Personally, I am annoyed at just how much so-caled “science” fiction completely ignores real science and physics. Why would any military spring for armored suits that protect every part of a soldier, when its far cheaper and more efficient to simply treat flesh wounds to the arms and legs?
Well, from what I understand, hydrostatic shock from a lot of the new generation of weapons is such that its approaching the point where even a leg or arm wound can be fatal.
-XT
That’s rather rare though. And I’m not sure that you can make bullets much more lethal than they are. But even so, there are limited gains to be had from armoring legs and arms, because that really slows down your troops and makes their aim suck.
Forever Peace is not a sequel to The Forever War. Doesn’t even share the same history/universe, IIRC. However, Haldeman has also written Forever Free, which is a sequel to The Forever War.
:smack:
D’Oh!
Does no one here read Slashdot?
Yes, it is, and if/when the fancy-schmancy new OICW rifle gets into play, American elite forces will be able to smoke much larger infantry units. But trying to turn individual soldiers into tanks is kinda silly, since tanks already exist, and for the amount of money you’d spend developing and deploying personal armor, you could make a hell of a lot of really really cool tanks.
I don’t expect to see a Navy Seal team given the mission to destroy an enemy airfield. It’ll always be easier to send them out lightly armoured and stealthy to find the airfield, gather intel from a distance, and signal coordinates back to HQ so the field can be torched by cruise missiles and unmanned drones.
You’re absolutely right. Which is why, if we armored their arms and legs, the armor should be … power-assisted! So we’re back to Powered Combat Armor again. 
It seems that this will depend on material development more than any other factor. With current technology, the wearer would need strong armor to survive attach which means lots of weight which in turn means slow movement. While battle tanks were mentioned for comparison, they can only survive in the modern battlefield with infantry support. Those pesky enemy soldiers tend to hide in all sorts of places waiting to shoot the tanks full of holes when given the chance.
A few articles I read long ago dealt with the subject of giving soldiers this type of armor and all were negative. For one thing, soldiers are very effective at staying out of harms way. Be it a foxhole or shell crater, if there is some form of shelter, a soldier will find it to stay alive. A soldier encased in hundreds of pounds of armor isn’t going to be nimble and is probably going to be hit by most things shot at him. This goes back to the more armor adding more weight using more power cycle which means you end up with a battle tank. Said tank-like soldier isn’t going to be able to move fast, won’t be able to enter above the first floor of many buildings as he will fall through the floor and will cost a fortune.
Did anyone see the movie Steel besides me? I doubt it but I was wondering about the plausability of that movie. Cover yourself in steel and run around for a few minutes. Wouldn’t your heart explode if you could even move to begin with?
I’ll add my vote in favour of Forever War being an excellent book. Not just the combat armor; there are lots of other fascinating sci-fi concepts in it too, such as:
The gadget that creates an opaque sphere round itself inside which powered weapons don’t work.
and
All the stuff about relativity, with the protagonist’s life covering IIRC more than a thousand years of earth history.
You might also like John Steakley’s Armor.
I understand your line of thinking, but the problem with that is that it further increases the size of the “suit” and introduces new problems with building an engine, power source, etc, all of which massively increase the cost. You can’t just add an off-the shelf engine for this. It would have to be specially designed and built in huge quantities. And there would be limits to how fast you make such a machine: a soldier’s legs can only go so fast before they start being damaged, even if the legs aren’t really providing motive power.
I’m not saying the government would pass on, say, Fallout-style power armor. I am saying we’re unlikely to ever create such a suit, at least for the foreseeable future.
You can also posit awesome materials science increases, but I don’t see that happening in the foreseeable future either.
Yes, I mentioned it briefly in the OP as one of the novels that deals with powered armor. I enjoyed the first half of the book…the second half of the book I didn’t enjoy as much.
Anyway, I guess it comes down to utility on the battle field. If you could make such a suit that was reasonably light and fairly mobile then I can certainly see the benifits. Certainly it would make soldiers reasonably immune to small arms fire as well as shrapnel and indirect artillary fire (short of a direct hit). Again, the main stumbling block I see is power. Even if you went with a more modest power assist armor (i.e. the powered armor would simply negate the effects of weight and allow for generally natural movement by the soldier…he could run, jump, etc ‘normally’ even when wearing several hundred pounds of armor) the power requirements would be prohibitive. I’ve tried to think of different power sources that could work but haven’t come up with anything that is powerful enough or sustainable enough to make it work.
In a lot of the books they talk about using nuclear power sources but I have no idea how you’d shield something like that…or how much even a very small ‘reactor’ would weigh. Certainly it couldn’t be very safe. Anyone have any thoughts on how a personal reactor would work, what it might weigh, and what you could do to protect the occupant of the armor?
-XT
In Starship Troopers, the MI has very specific functions–usu., extremely quick, precision strikes that damage things exactly as much as the govt. wants, no more, no less. I believe Rico says something like, “If they wanted us to kill only left-handed redheads, we’d do it.” The Special Forces, basically. They don’t seem set up for the type of police/patrol work that would seem to be half/most of our military’s job at the present. Plus, the suits have the speed/agility of something between a tank and a helicopter (very high jumps possible), not to mention an arsenal that a nuclear sub commander would envy (our current military would never entrust nukes to privates).
And Heinlein seems to acknowledge the fact that human brains on the scene are always going to be more effective than remotes in critical situations–and that communications failures are bound to happen (my personal beef when it comes to UAVs, etc.). Remotes are great when the mission isn’t critical, or when our communications dominance is absolute–neither of which will be true for all cases.
Funny, I had read one of his commentaries in one of his short stories sets where he denies completely that he was writing an answer to Heinlien. He wasn’t aware of such a comparison until someone looked at his manuscript and said “Hey! Your writing a riposte to Heinlien!”.
His claim about the battlesuits was that they would obviously be needed on the planets they would be fighting on. Heinlein was less an inspiration than a lack of atmosphere.
I think there are about 3-4 variations on one section of “Forever War” that Haldeman has written. They all deal with the first “battle” and the return home:
The original has Haldemann returning to find the world very zombie-like and homosexuality being encouraged as a form of birth control. The variations have our hero returning to a very crime-ridden world. Another version has a scene that could have inspired Mad Max.
Purely FYI, a story on a DARPA powered exoskeleton; it’s used to increase the ability of soldiers/firefighters/etc. to carry loads on their backs. Pretty neat.