The family and I watched the Avengers last night. Decent enough movie, but I liked the individual movies much better. The whole Thor teaming up with Iron Man thing even made fantasy unbelievable for me, but YMMV.
Of course our two boys (9 and 10) were pumped up after the movie. One of them asked me if the military will have Iron Man type soldiers in the future. I told him that they will probably have something similar as I know they are working on suits or exoskeleton machines that increase the strength andendurance of a soldier, however I just don’t ever see any kind of suit that would give a man all the powers of the Iron Man character. This of course elicited a negative response from the “dreamer” of the boys. (Yeah he tends to live in his own world, sigh).
I told him that most everything that Iron Man could do is probably feasible IF we could come up with a power supply. However I said that the part that wouldn’t be feasible would be the ability of the suit wearer to survive the massive impacts that Iron Man survives in the movies. He walks away from falls of thousands of feet, is hit or thrown by the other characters with incredible force. My thinking is that even with this incredible suit there is still a squishy human inside. Sudden stops from massive falls or shattering impacts would still kill our super soldier regardless of the fact he is wearing a protective suit. His brain and internal organs would still be slamming around inside of his body turning his insides into a smoothie.
Now this isn’t a big deal, but I just wanted to confirm that my thinking if correct. No matter how well protected you might be, that protection can’t save you from a bouncing brain in your head. (example, Dale Earnhardt getting killed despite no damage to his body via puncture wounds etc.) That is correct isn’t it?
Yes. You are correct. Great speeds followed by sudden stops tend to, you know, kill people.
People who survive this sort of situation have managed to make the stop less fast via padding, obstacles such as tree limbs or snow, or ‘soft’ impact zones like water, air bags, or boxes.
Unless the suit has air bags or manages to decelerate at a survivable rate, Mr. Stark would be dead inside his suit. In the real world, physics always trumps cool visuals.
I’ll also add that other features of his suit are kinda ridiculous. Where does he store his missiles/bullets? Controlling his flight would be incredibly difficult if he controls it as much as he seems to. He’d need computers to aid him much more in real life.
Also, militaries are moving more and more toward drones and robots. I don’t foresee a time in the future when large numbers of human soldiers are fighting each other. War will become more and more automated. Who cares if you lose a bunch of drones or robots?
When miniature fusion batteries are available something similar would be doable. But the energy requirements of anything that is more than a suit of armor are very high. Several attempts were made to test the feasibility of super power suits, and so far they’ve come up wanting. A rocket pack on a soldiers back could help him run much faster, but only for a short time, and it could also set his butt on fire. The famed jet-pack was designed to give soldiers flight ability, but again only a short term effect, and little practical value. Augmented exo-skeletons have been proto-typed and found to have the common problem of short term operation, and little help beyond carrying the extra weight of the system. Perhaps with modern lightweight batteries, motors, and armor materials we could make a heavily armored suit with some power augmentation to allow a soldier to cross a field at high speed or use a Batman like powered tether to climb a wall. But that has limited practical value in modern warfare. Our concentration is currently on drones, requiring no soldier, and existing technology to keep them on the move. I think if we could make the Ironman suits, we could make them without the Man inside, and we will end up with drone tanks instead of men in suits for ground forces.
The hidden assumption in the Iron Man suit is that it is reinforced with force fields. Not a huge stretch given the repulsor fields he uses to fly. But that stuff is Star Trek tech. (Keeping in mind that scientists are actually looking at creating a warp field today.)
The problem with drone suits is that they’re reliant on communications which are easily disrupted, or software which can be hacked.
We’ll have power suits, but more akin to the exoskeleton forklift Ripley operates in Aliens.
Right. I just heard on NPR last week a piece about the NFL and helmet safety/concussions. Helmets are great for preventing skull fractures. They do very little about preventing concussions (which the speaker said were caused in great part by rotational forces acting on the brain tissue). So Stark might not have broken bones in some situations, but, yeah, he’d have some major brain damage.
Yeah, spinning around inside the Helicarrier’s rotor until he could only be see by the twinkle of his boot jets kinda pushed it… But this is the Marvel Universe. IIRC, the latest version of his armor was about 25 pounds of nanotech stored in his bones until he needed it. It looks like even the movie versions of his armor have had some means of damping inertia for awhile, considering some of the flying he does. The Iron Man armor has always been “indistinguishable from magic.” Until, of course, you watch him nut Thor and just knock Thor’s head back a bit, then Thor returns the favor and nuts Iron Man about 25 feet back with a dent in his faceplate. Oh, THAT’S magic!
My understanding is that a suit that enabled one to leap tall buildings would produce unacceptable stresses on the human occupant. Powered exoskeleton research tends to be about endurance and carrying capacity more than feats of agility. Powered exoskeleton - Wikipedia
Tony Stark’s superpower in the movies is the ability to survive any blunt force trauma as long as it’s funny. Which, given the nature of blunt force trauma, is always funny as long as it’s survivable without major injury. Ergo, all blunt force trauma is harmless for Tony Stark.
Regarding the football players and concussions, the same problem exists for the military. Helmets have seen some major redesigns due to this (hence why newer helmets eschew the old leather harness rig in favor of foam pads, which soften the force of impacts a bit better). They’ve also put a lot of thought into things like short-term recovery (your brain will shrug off some substantial knocks if you let the person just spend a day laying around doing nothing) and diagnosis (before I deployed, I had to take a test that involve solving puzzles and completing various random tasks. After this deployment, I’ll take the test again, and they’ll determine if my brain is still firing on the same cylinders).
And yeah, the military is working on powered armor, but I doubt we will ever get Iron Man’s armor, or even Heinlen’s Marauder armor. As someone mentioned in Schlock Mercenary, there’s a nickname for jetpack troops flying around on the battlefield: “Skeet”. There’s no cover to be found in the sky, and I doubt that anything man-shaped will be able to use speed and altitude to the same defensive advantage that a regular plane would be able to use far better.
I CAN easily see them using powered armor for augmenting regular infantry using infantry tactics (carry heavier loads easily, which would translate to packing on more armor and carrying bigger guns and more supplies). Similarly, as pointed out above, you could also use it for the mundane but vital task of moving stuff around or loading and unloading cargo.