Also, a ton of money that is ostensibly earmarked “for the military” finds its way to pretty ridiculous places. At my old university there was a project that made a cute, cuddly video game that learned natural language by playing with children. It was funded by DARPA. It’s really not uncommon to get funding from “the military” on the thinnest veneer of how your project could, in 50 years and significant tangential work, benefit a soldier or intelligence agency.
You realize that the “movies and video games” examples you gave were evidently US Army demonstration or prototype setups, and your example of what we’d need from reality is the outfit from the video game Halo, right? Just making sure you were aware of the irony here.
Exactly. If we knew of them they would not be secret.
The Manhattan project set the bar unreasonably high as to how astounding would secret weapons be and how quickly we could get them online.
I’m not sure what you are trying to say.I think a lot public things future armor will look like that.
But plastic does not stop a bullet.
Basic research, which is part of DOD R&D programs, is never directed to a certain application, military or otherwise. The definition of basic research is: “Systematic study directed toward greater knowledge or understanding of the fundamental aspects of phenomena and/or observable facts without specific applications toward processes or products in mind.”
What you describe seems a natural fit for that type of research.
Actually, the ballistic vests they issue soldiers is made out of a type of nylon, but as we stated before, those aren’t really designed to stop most bullets a soldier expects to be sent his way, just shrapnel, splinters, spalls, chunks of rock, etc. That’s why they insert ceramic armor plates into them.
They don’t the whole thing out of the ceramic plates because they’re actually kind of fragile. I suspect the ballistic nylons is meant to protect the armor plates as much as it’s meant to protect the guy strapped to them.
I’m talking about the public that thing future armor soldiers will wear will be like in the movies and video games like Halo
Like the Halo http://khongthe.com/wallpapers/videogames/ghost-recon-future-soldier-218293.jpg
But plastic does not stop bullets.
That is why we don’t use them are never will.
They wouldn’t be secret weapons if we knew where they were.
LOL good man, I thought Lemur was being tongue in cheek. Heavy isotopes indeed. 
Lots of Hollywood writers and gamers come up with stuff like that - even the guy responsible for the second worst film ever.
Common heavy isotopes for directed kinetic energy weapons usually have 82 protons, 92 proton weapons are pretty uncommon.
I have no more access to classified info than anyone else, but I suspect that if everyone could actually know the top-secret stuff, they’d probably find it disappointingly boring and mundane. No sharks with lasers or aliens in freezers in Nevada.
But they apparently do use dolphins for mine-clearing, diver assassinations, and kamikaze attacks:
That follows a long history of weaponized animals. Wouldn’t be surprised if we were working on firebreathing emus right now.
The thing too, is DARPA does basic research to come up with tech that would be useful longer term. The internet was based on the concept that unlike earlier mainframe networks, there was no center point - the internet routing design was “self-healing” so that if an area of transmission were taken out, the resulting network would quickly learn any alternate route.
Similarly, a program that learns languages would have obvious intelligence applications; if it can learn English, it can learn Arabic or Russian or Chinese, or even regional accents and dialects; thus making transcriptions of communications intercepts (and then translation) far more efficient.
I bet it was really the bagpipes!
Or the kilts.
Google “DARPA”. Some of the actual projects being researched and developed are things like anti-aircraft/missile defense lasers, electromagnetic rail guns, power armor (although closer to Ripley’s power loader than Iron Man…but still pretty cool), smart munitions (like Gene Simmon’s gun in the old Tom Selleck film “Runaway”) and robots.
As others have pointed out, most of the “secret” weapons that are in current use have been designed to combat terrorists rather than another nation’s tanks and aircraft. We don’t need a lot of F22 Raptor superplanes to kill religious fanatics driving makeshift “technicals”. Most recent weapon advances seemed to have gone towards detecting, communications and making the battlefield safer for our soldiers. Drones, mine-resistant vehicles, stealthy helicopters and other systems for secretly deploying SOCOM operatives and of course, more robots.
I don’t know about ridiculous, but back when I was in college(Texas A&M 1991-1996), it was freely admitted that a huge chunk of the computer science department’s grant funding came from the Navy, because they were interested in “autonomous underwater vehicles”. We never did figure out if they were making some sort of underwater drones, or whether that was a euphemism for some sort of torpedo guidance system.
I have a good friend who used to work as a technical writer on the HARM missile and Paveway LGB programs when TI/Raytheon Defense was still in the DFW area. He said that the funny thing was that the unclassified stuff was the most spectacular and interesting stuff, and that the “Top Secret” documents were usually the driest, most boring things he ever had the displeasure of having to read. Really mundane tech specs, procedures, etc… not whiz-bang stuff at all.
That actually makes a lot of sense. The real intelligence threat to the USA isn’t nerdy geeks who want sci-fi entertainment - the easily bored Hacker Joe - but rather, Chinese, Iranian and Russian governmental agencies, etc. - the few experts in the world who would actually understand the significance of those seemingly “boring” blueprints, diagrams and numbers.