Power Armor in Science Fiction (Fallout, Warhammer 40k etc.)
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- Опубліковано 26 вер 2024
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Spacedock delves into powered armor in sci-fi in the wake of the recent #fallout show.
#warhammer
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In my mind, what differentiates power armor and mechs is where the pilot's limbs are. In power armor, the pilot's limbs are in the limbs of the power armor, while a mech pilot's limbs do not reach into the mech's limbs.
I use the same heuristic, and I think it holds pretty well. You can still get "petite mechs" this way where the squishy human is in a much smaller space, but ultimately their limbs do not leave the 'cockpit' portion.
In StarCraft's marine's limbs partially occupy the armor's limbs. So is it mech, or armour?=)
You wear power armor, you drive a mech.
Agreed
@@skipperg4436 Power Armor. The Starcraft Marine's limbs extend into all the suit's limbs and the wearer drives the suit with body motions. The only portion of the suit that the wearer does not occupy is the hands.
Samus Powersuit is hella underrated, highly adaptive,modular, and the scan feature is what everyone want when dropping on an unknown planet.
The Powersuit is crazy lore-wise. Its my favorite but one might argue thatt its not really Power Armor. Being more organic in nature and part of Samus body.
Also, you can crumple up into a ball about the size of a human torso. Edit: and more importantly, _uncrumple._
@@18Krieger I mean with Chozo Technology the border between Technology and Bio Technology are very blurry
It's honesty very much like the nanosuit from Crysis, but instead of alien nanotech it's out and out space magic
Nevermind that it can also store an absurd amount of missiles and power bombs and has infinite power beam and bomb ammo. And that's without upgrades like the wave beam or Gravity Suit. Samus' armor might just be the most overpowered power armor there is.
James Rhodes getting severly injured from an impact when the suit had no power makes me think that Tony also invented inertial dampening and it just hasn't been mentioned on screen.
He did incorporate an Inertial dampening field, for both reducing the impact of incoming bullets & cannon shells, as well as protecting the user normally when accelerating very rapidly, changing direction almost instantly, and when landing at a high speed/ crashing. He used it in the comics version of his suits of armor at least. In the movies, who knows..
Any tech that can produce repulsor fields and beams could be adapted to create an inertial damper field.
DARPA, get to work!
yeah but the real physics wouldn't be very happy about that lol
I am very curious how you figure that. We have tech akin to repulsors (rockets, em thrusters), they're just much less efficient or less powerful, but it doesn't work for a single instant of inertial dampening of the kind nerded to protect a squishy pilot from extreme g-forces
@@Hust91 Iron Man repulsors seem to only selectively follow the principals of equal and opposite reactions. There are many times when he blasts things wothout getting pushed back himself.
If you've got your arms in the armoured arms and your legs in the armoured legs, it's a suit.
If you're in a cockpit working with joysticks and pressing buttons, it's a mecha.
🤔Me, thinking of how they pilot Jaegers from Pacific Rim by using a full workout gym...
And in - between Avatar Mech Suits, you are in a cockpit, but the suit movingaccording to your legs and arm movement, not operated with joystick and Co.
i had the same though if its something you pilot its a mech if its trying to be an extension of you is a suit.
whats with cerebral interfaces for control input?
Well explained!!!😊
In emergency services, there's a saying: "in every collision there's three impacts. The car against the the other object. The person against the interior of the car. The person's organs against their insides." I've yet to see a media account for the third one. Rhodey's a great example, his organs should have been mush from that impact.
I feel like it would've been a great opportunity to bring up that time in Iron Man 3 where Tony fixed the problems with Extremis, thus creating an extremely powerful healing factor serum.
Wait a minute.... Extremis in its original form gives off a ton of heat... what if that's how they create Red Hulk in the MCU? Mixing Hulk Blood with Extremis?
It's especially strange if you remember how many late medieval weapons were made specifically under the assumption that they would not be able to do any first collision damage.
A hammer danging on your full plate armor might scratch it, but that is not the important point.
@@steemlenn8797 There's almost no evidence for the effectiveness of blunt weapons against armor. Almost all maces and warhammers are bladed for the explicit purpose of penetrating, not delivering concussive force. While the concussive force is great, hit placement is significantly more important (head), a hit against a cuirass is not going to break ribs, you have like 4 additional layers of cloth (gambeson), potentially mail and a jacket underneath.
Arrows and bolts would also not break your bones or rupture organs in armor, so why would a mace?
@@HarrDarr because that arrow was loosed from up to 300 m away, and is a) very unlikely to be optimally aligned b) much slowed down by air resistance already?
@@yjlom Arrows from 300m have to be shot in a parabolic trajectory. They might actually be at their max possible speed when speeding down on you from the sky. But they're obviously not as sturdy as a crossbow bolt, and you indeed have to be unlucky to be hurt by an arrow while wearing plate. Wearing anything less, however, you'd have to rely on a shield or on God's good temper.
Late crossbow bolts are known to penetrate even the best plate. Huge machinery with steel bow and steel bolt, maybe steel string. Lots of energy.
I know what its called but I cant unhear "Halo's miauw miauw suit"
And now we must all spread this
through me off with that one lol that shit is wild
Thor 2 reference I assume?
Edit after watching: yup
... Jonathan?
[Kat Dennings has entered the Chat]
The OG example of Power Armor comes from Starship Troopers (the novel, not the film), and is generally described as being a weapons platform first, vehicle second, and armor a distant third. Its main purpose was to give an infantry unit drastically increased mobility (hence the term "Mobile Infantry" used in the book) while also carrying an absolutely TERRIFYING amount of weaponry and ammunition, the idea being "get in, get out, and blow up as much stuff as you can in between".
Because in setting, weapons tech is leagues beyond armor below around the starship scale. Hence your 'armor' is not being hit.
So True
I was very disappointed this wasn't mentioned once in the video. Not only the first power armor but one of the coolest examples of power armor in all of science fiction.
The whole fitting the power armor to its wearer thing is addressed in the book _The Forever War_ by Joe Haldeman. In the book, each suit is specially fitted to its wearer, and their caloric intake and outtake is carefully monitored to ensure they stay within the tight tolerances of the suit’s fitting. The book even shows the results of what happens when someone is loaned a suit that’s not fitted to them, and it’s not pretty.
Or when they fall on their back…
This is what the MMC recon marine suits in The Expanse are too. I don't know if it was in the show too, but in the books Bobbie Draper is a nonstandard-enough size that she hadn't gotten one of the newest generation of suits yet.
That is also how it is irl for the closest thing to power armor we actually use, space suits. Some are modular but custom fitted, and others are entirely custom made for the associated astronaut.
Is that really power armor though, they are treated more like hardened exo suits. Either way great book.
@@Belligerent_Herald They’re not referred to as power armor in the book, but the suits are armored and provide the wearer with increased physical abilities, so I think that fits the definition.
I love how bruised and banged up Bobbie always was in The Expanse after combat in her armour. Sure it helped but it was no cheat code to falling of a multi-story building
I think her suit should have gotten a bit more love here.
@@Krahazik Agreed. Some of my favourite scenes in the Expanse involved Bobbie walking into a hail of bullets like it was a light rain shower.
Exactly, the Expanse's power armours were one of the best "gadgets" of the show, after the ships, naturally. Also if they didn't help so much, at least initially, against the bio-monsters.
Although I have mixed feelings about changes made to the outcome of her fight on Io, I do love how power armor is depicted in the show and books. S2/book2 also took into consideration on removing the occupant in an emergency ("popping the suit") and also the size of the occupant, since at least in the book it's remark a few times that Bobbie's is custom sized for her and that the standard size is uncomfortable for her to wear.
I'm rereading book 8 and I'm both dreading and excited about the last scene she's in power armor. iykyk
I'm surprised you didn't touch on WH40k's solution to "the armor getting hit would still severely injure or kill the person wearing it" bit via the bio-engineering and cybernetic reinforcement of the "pilot" wearing the armor.
Space Marines having reinforced bones, backup/redundant organs, denser musculature, etc. plays really well with wearing a giant bulky armored suit without turning them into a crash-test dummy when they take an HE round to the chest.
To expand on what op is saying. We see durign the Pariah Nexus a space marine has one of his lungs collapse and his heart stops. This is painful for him, but thankfully he has 2 hearts and 3 lungs so the redundant organs keep him from becoming combat ineffective.
If you want something to last a long time in the worst conditions, redundancy is a good method to employ. And what is armor, but adding extra redundancy to it's wearer.
Arguably this is further displayed in stat sheets of non-space marine power armors - Adepta Sororitas, while being equipped in power armor, do not have black carapace or other modifications, and end up with same strenght and toughness as normal human. (but with 3+ armor saving throw, identical to standard space marine armor)
@@MehrumesDagon Sororitas should theoretically have similar if not quite equal strength to Astartes since they are both in power armor, but the TT's strength stat isn't granular enough to show that difference and so sisters that should be between guardsmen and marines lean closer to the guard and get the same stats.
@@tau-5794 Sororitas power armour doesn't enhance strength because they don't have the black carapace that links their body with the suit.
@@tau-5794 No, Soroitas are normal humans whereas Astartes are significantly stronger. The armor of the Sister would have to be enhancing her strength way more than an Astartes' armor enhances his for her to come close.
Surprised that you didn't mention the H.E.V. suit, one of the most iconic power armors in a game franchise. Coolest thing is that unlike most power suits, which boost the wearer's power (strength, survivability) by a very large amount, the suit that Gordon wears keeps him just barely above a normal human's level of strength and protection, with some small power boosts to justify things such as the player swinging the crowbar 4 times per second.
Makes sense since the suit isn't designed for combat, it's basically really advanced PPE. Its job is not to protect against bullets but hazardous environments.
honestly it's great at its job. Gordon takes hits in it that would kill regular humans but the suit doesn't feel like a modern wonder, rather it feels like a... well hazardous environmental suit as opposed to combat oriented power armor.
😠 - Mjolnir (Me - yol - neer)
😊 - Mjolnir (meow - meow)
"theres meat under that armour and meat can be ground"-paladin kodiak
StarCraft music goes hard!
There are things to criticize in StarCraft, but the music is not one of them, they'd absolutely hit it out of the park.
Let’s not forget the powered armor / drop pod combo for that cinematic sci-fi coolness.
Yes!
Let's not forget Robert Heinlein! The guy that invented the power armor / drop pod in Starship Troopers
@@Scroolewse
Thanks for mentioning Heinlein.
Never expected both the Chieftain and Garand Thumb referenced in a Spacedock video, but a pleasant surprise nonetheless!
Power armor is always awesome.
i LOVE the Starcraft music in the background!
"...Halo's Meow-Meow armor.." LOL!
Kinetic impacts is why I vastly prefer my power armour on the chonky side. It's easy enough to picture Starcraft and Fallout armour having multiple layers of shock absorption between the outer shell and the meat. Hell, for the latter there's padded sections on the inside you can clearly see when it opens up, showing that someone clearly thought about it
I always imagined the fitting would be fairly simple. Taking FO4 power armor as an example (T-45 all the way), I figured an inflatable lining with sensors would both fit a wide variety of users and protect from impact. The only direct contact with the suit being the feet, which you can see from the game has adjustment and shock absorbing.
I like that. Too much fictional armor ignores the padding real life armor had beneath it.
I wonder if that's what the recon armor is as, canonically, it's intended to be worn under power armor, even if it isn't actually modeled.
Someone offers me a free Ferrari: I sleep.
Someone offers me a free suit of power armor: GIMME GIMME GIMME!
me: runs over the opponent who has power armor on with a ferrari
@@shinygoldenpotion1587 What that would achieve would depend on the suit and the type of Ferrari. If it's a Ferrari tractor vs. the mercenary suits from Dominion, you're talking; if it's more like a Testarossa vs. a Glitter Boy, you're going to look like the villain in that Munsters movie who tried to run over Hermann.
If you try and run over a Space Marine your car will be flattened.
@@shinygoldenpotion1587 Good way to wreck your Ferrari
You have to pay taxes to own and maintain Ferrari, but there's no regulation for taxes on power armor and the IRS wouldn't dare to fight you. The choice is obvious
In the MCU Iron Man 3 tie-in comic, he says the War Machine Mk 1 isn't properly calibrated, so it might hurt Rhodey. And IIRC, both Rhodey actors are the same height as RDJ. (See also: Paull Rudd and Michael Douglas.)
Also, in Iron Man 3, the Mark 42 is tight around the the ol' main thruster, because it's sized to fit Pepper too. And like most women, she lacks that equipment.
I assume Tony's suits after the Mk 1 all have some kind of inertial dampening. Vision hit War Machine's suit in the reactor, so the whole suit was "dead stick".
And finally, I assume they all have some sort of hairstyle protection tech from the Mk 2 on.
ALL women.
StarCraft music makes me smile from ear-to-ear
I hear the Starcraft 2 Terran music and kept expecting to hear "SCV here!" and "Fueled up and ready to go!"
Reject power armor embrace bipedal forklift technical.
cue Brigador ost
"Feels like you can take on the world in there, doesn't it?"
-- Paladin Danse, Fallout 4
I always drew the line between power armour and mech at whether you wear it and control its limbs with your limbs directly, or you sit inside it and operate it like a vehicle.
... no one brings up one of the grandaddy's of PAs: Traveller Battle Dress. Take one cup of Starship Trooper Marauder Armor, one cup of practicability, one cup of specialized variants, and you get the 3rd Imperium's three variants of battle dress (which can tank modern light autocannon in the face and come out fine).
Oh, and they can fly and act like SST Marauder armor if need be. It should be noted that after training in *_USING_* the battledress, the second biggest thing for training is getting their users to understand that they're not invincible.
Dress? Oh, Magical girls! Invincible plot armor build in without any metal or other strange stuff :D
@@steemlenn8797 ... it's not magical girls, it's just how Traveller terms their armor.
Combat Dress: armored combat uniform
Battle Dress: Power Armor
@@steemlenn8797 That's been my logic for magical girl durability a lot of the time. Force fields that aren't in the visible spectrum, maybe some kinetic dampening fields or the like.
The Chozo power suit from Metroid should also be noted. It's arguably more space fantasy than scifi, but it much like the Crysis nanosuit it becomes part of the wearer and seems to be able to materialize and dematerialize around them. It also seems to be capable of adapting to and incorporating more or less any foreign technology simply by contacting it. Really cool stuff
Don't forget that Samus wasn't even using the most advanced version of it (Raven Beak was)
Tau Battle suits sit on the border of mech/power armor.
That said, the Black Carapace creates a neural connection with the armor.
i'd say anything that doesn't fit your arms and legs into the arms and legs of the armor is a mech. so tau crisis suits would be mechs since the guy is scrunched up inside the torso but the xv 15/25 stealth suits would be power armor.
@@EvelynNdenial XV15, XV25, XV22, XV01 are powered armor suits full stop. XV8, XV9, XV88, are on the boarder. XV95, XV109, and KX139, are freaking mechs.
@@EvelynNdenial I say it's more a difference of moving in the armor (like Iron Man suits or Mjolnir from Halo) being power armor and piloting or driving mechs (like the Mantis, also from Halo, or Armored Cores from... Armored Core).
@@mikewaterfield3599 I don't think the 01 even counts as powered armor, it's closer to marine black carapace and just allows the wearer to more efficiently pilot a vehicle instead of giving any strength enhancement. 8 and up however are full mechs, just small, the Tau inside is basically scrunched up into a fetal position in the torso. The only borderline mech/power armors in 40k I can think of are centurion suits and paragon warsuits, where the legs are in part of the armor's legs but the arms are separate from the suit's, either crossed over the chest or in separate mini-arms for motion control.
@@tau-5794 there was a fluff story from the fifth ed codex, apparently it has as much protection as standard fire warrior carapace armor and contains life support systems along with the integrated multi tracker and target lock. Ergo in my head cannon which apparently matters most with modern GW, its power armor.
"Swooshing about" in the armor isn't the only reason why the force of an impact would kill you. Even in a perfectly tailored 0 tolerance, 100% fit, second skin armor, your internal organs and tissues are still squishy. It's not the velocity that kills you after all, but the change in it, that is, the acceleration, vis-a-vis the force. And this works both ways. Just like a sudden stop from moving fast (like in a terminal velocity fall) would burst your organs even if your skin/armor survived, so would a sudden impact that would cause you to move from stand still. No amount of armor protection would help here, except for sheer bulk, but that would break the limit between armor and mech.
The undersuit for some armours could also have a trickle power supply to charge up the energy levels, piezoelectric quartz crystals being the example of an extremely tiny electrical charge being generated from an impact.
I have to agree that the way the Fallout 4 power suits is presented, is a big improvement over F3 and FNV. The issue of getting in and out in F3/NV, is sidesteped entirely, and the suits in those 2 games, had no power source, not even a hand-waved one. Basically, magic. in so many words. So, this aspect, including both a greatly improved and visualized entry system AND a power source really redeems the concept. It also makes sense a Fallout 4 PA soldier would need to keep enemies to his front as best possible, as the rear would be the weakest part of the suit. Which, is true with tanks as well, that are also quite vulnerable from the rear.
I tend to be less sold on the notion of magic nano-suits where the entire suit just 'appears' out of thin air more or less, then magically conforms to the user.
I agree that NV/3 power armor kind of sucks, but there IS a confirmed power source. Up until 4 retconned the fusion cores into existence, cannon said that all power armor had an internal fusion reactor that gave all necessary power for the armor. How it lasted so long and what fuel it needs would almost definitely be covered by repairs/maintenance and lack of use (most, almost definitely all, power armor hasn't been used continuously over the 200 years since the nukes fell).
As for them just magically appearing on you, that's just how clothes work in the Fallout games, even 4. The difference there is that 4 doesn't consider PA to be another set of normal armor or clothes, which I agree with, unlike the fusion core retcon.
You missed one part about nanosuit, especially nanosuit 2, that also explains the transfer damage problem
with nanosuit the wearer still does take damage, the suit just creeps into the wounds to keep it's user alive, eventually making them completely dependent on the suit to live
Plus forced breathing and defibrillator. Prophet was basically a Walking corpse at the beginning of the second game.
Don't they wear some protective undersuit that you can see on Prophets dead body, that prevents this?
@@admiralbimback2062thats more to help them take the suit off. You see in 3 that after a while the nanosuit overwealm that undersuot and they had to skin it out of them
@@Daemon2k15 Yeah that's the main reason so it doens't fuse with their skin, but probaly also helps keep the suit from some small wounds where the suit isn't necessary.
@@admiralbimback2062 i mean you dont need the suit for a scrath
Regardless of any other factors. Power armor as a concept has been one of my favorite fantasy/sci-fi tools in all of the categories. There is pretty much setting where power armor doesn’t automatically make something cooler.
A concept that would be neat to apply to power suits is capes. With the right materials, they can be both wearable solar panels to help charge up power suits and provide some additional protection from bullets, fire, etc. Plus they just add style.
Addition: Weaving heat-conductive filaments through them to use as radiators.
@@RorikH Being able to tell someone has been pushing themselves because their cape is glowing white would be a great visual.
Needed to talk more about how the user interfaces and controls the suit. There are many different approaches depicted in sci-fi. Tony Stark seems to merely talk to the built-in AI and it intuitively knows what he wants like magic (I don't think that's ever really explained in the movies) . Astartes wear a cybernetic interface body glove that allows them to feel like their armor is part of them and is totally devoid of any AI management system.
On that note, in the comics, Iron Man's armor has a non-intrusive cybernetic interface that read his mental commands and activates the needed systems. It took years for Tony Stark to develop this interface, which may explain why the system doesn't appear in the MCU.
In Halo, the Mjolnir armor works in a similar manner to the Iron Man armor except that the user must be implanted with a device in the base of his or her skull so the interface can work properly.
@@TheVeritas1 also, said implant the Spartans get for their armor is actually standard gear for all members of the UNSC to have. Among many things, the soldiers have them to better interface with equipment like vehicles
@@granmastersword
Nice.
A Space Marine's Black Carapace is what allows them to interface with their Power Armor. And the Black Carapace is installed/grown under their skin and has ports that connect to the suit.
@@TheVeritas1He also has invasive types, such as the Extremis.
"TONY STARK WAS ABLE TO BUILD THIS IN A CAVE! WITH A BOX OF SCRAPS!"
"Well I'm sorry, I'm not Tony Stark."
I think my favorite example of 1-size fits all in armor. Is Stargate-Atlantis. The Asgard of the Pegasus galaxy have their environmental suits with a squishy foam / goo, that melds to the occupant. Probably designed with the hopes they would eventually return to their ancestral 'more human' form. But still adaptable to their current mini form. (Edit: Also has one of the coolest shoot-out scenes involving an arm-shield projector that isn't actually 'God like' in it's technology and does eventually fail. Which is oddly rarely seen for such an advanced race. But makes the whole encounter that much more memorable.)
I loved that suit developed by the Vanir (Pegasus Asgard). It was such a cool plot twist when the Vanir revealed their true form.
The thing with the MCU suits is that they could incorporate a tiny amount of vibranium and call it a day for impacts.
Hell, with sufficiently high technology, absorption and redirection of incoming "energy", or even the storage of that potential energy could be part of the design.
Like the Ironman suit being supercharged when Thor hit it with lightning, if you know the wavelength that your enemy uses then you can figure out ways to absorb or attenuate it to render it less harmful or even harmless.
the starcraft music POG
Reminder.
Power armor is something you wear.
A Mech is something you pilot.
in some of these cases the answer to kinetic damage is to reinforce and reengineer the person underneath, Space Marines, and Spartains both have extensive augmentations and in the case of SMs extensive genetic manipulations to withstand stuff that would normally kill a person. you can try and rip out a SM's heart, he's got another one as just an example
You wear armor. You pilot a mech.
The issue with powered armor is not that the man is sloshing around in the suit, any decently designed suit would safely secure the pilot, so that he would not slosh around in any way that was not helpful. The REAL problem is the pilot's brain and other organs sloshing around _inside the pilot._ bouncing off their skulls, for example. It's basically impossible to make a suit that could handle the g-forces and impact forces that powered suits often take in a way that would prevent the pilot getting a concussion or tearing connective tissues, at least without magitech like "inertial dampers."
and most power armor would get one shotted by an rpg 7
even if the armor survives the whole thing would atleast be knocked back a few meters
@@shinygoldenpotion1587 Put some Explosive Reactive Armor on that bad boy then.
Inertial dampers require gravity manipulation.
If you produce a gravitational field opposing acceleration, the acceleration field will be cancelled out.
@@scifirealism5943 Yeah, and IF you had the technology to do such a thing, then fine, but that's something we have no clue how to do, so it means those sorts of power armors wouldn't work well in a more hard sci-fi setting that tries to avoid "magitech."
@@timogul we know how to create gravitic fields, it's just gravity is a very weak force and only comes in positive charges.
I think it's pretty easy to distinguish between them in size. If you're wearing it like plate armor (that's powered), that's power armor. If you sit in like the suits in Apple Seed or the AMP suit in Avatar, that's more an "arm suit." Once you get bigger than that, like Titans in Titanfall, that's a mech.
Size does seam to be a major factor with most recognized mechs being at least about 2 stories tall for the smaller ones and whole skyscrapers in height for the larger things. Most power-armor is usually in the area of a single story in height and smaller that the wearer wears.
Another thing that I think also tends gets overlooked a lot regarding power armor designs is ammo storage for built-in weapons. Granted, guns having seemingly bottomless magazines is a common trope in fiction, but many fictional power armors will have several different weapons built into them without any consideration as to where all that ammunition would be stored inside the suit or how that would affect the person wearing it.
This isnt an issue so much for energy weapons, as you can handwave it by saying that they're linked directly to the armor's main power source, like how Ironman's repulsors are powered by his arc reactor. But for ballistic weaponry, it's a bit harder to jusity where all their ammunition is coming from.
I like starcrafts approach to the problem what happens when you get hit in power armor: you die. The power armor can only really protect against light arm fire, and the coil/powder hybrid rifles everyone uses go through them like a hot knife through butter. But because you need the power armor to fire the rifle (and because it's still somehow only like 5 times the price of the rifle) it still makes pretty much sense to use it
If you have a seat and joysticks etc. Its a mech. If you wear it, its power armour. If its ten metres tall and it mimics your limb movements. Its a Mech.
And if it mimics the movement of you and your friend together, it is a Jaeger!
The Frontline Series, by Marko Kloos, addressed the fact of armour sizing by literally having a fitting process of a week for the HEVA armour. It subsequently turned to one day after a few years. That, and the suit didn't save everyone.
one role that seems to be overlooked is power armour that is less about armour but for allowing squads to carry around heavier weapons that are normally crew served or otherwise infeasible to be used individually, and support for some kind of jetpack so the forces can make better use of terrain elevation and vantage points. throwing its defense in favor of mobility and firepower.
i guess it would fall under exoskeletons as mentioned but im saying more like the mobile infantry from the war thunder april fools event
Robert A. Heinlein's "Starship Troopers" came to my mind in an instant. He described the fighting forces power armor pretty detailed (f.e. the suit functions are controlled by eye / eyebrow movement) and in training the snazzy instructor could remotely disable the power source, making the soldier pratically a temporary statue. Not bad for a book that came out in 1959! 😎🤟
Stopped reading the comments when I got to yours. Hear, hear. Heinlein's cap troopers were the bomb! From orbit to ground-pounding and everything in between, their power-armour was tops!
I kinda can't believe a video about power armor failed to mention the first power armor. Not only was it the first but it's honestly one of the best because of how Heinlein thought of everything. He didn't just throw in power armor to write up some dope fight combat scenes, he knew exactly what power armor should be and how it would affect the soldier and the military.
Reposted from a different video but it's relevant here. A TA is a Tactical Armor, a small Mecha from the anime Gasaraki.
"Power armor generally implies the operator's limbs extending into at least one set of the extremities. For instance a Landmate from Appleseed while being only slightly smaller than the TA from Gasaraki is a power armor rather than the TA being a small mecha. With the Landmate the pilot's legs are within the upper legs and the thorax and pelvis of both pilot and armor are in the same location. Also there is the drastic difference in piloting systems, a TA is heavily automated with the mecha's system making most movements and the pilot just pointing it in the direction they want to go and what to shoot at. Whereas a Landmate relies on the pilots ability to judge every aspect of maneuvers from aiming carried weapons to the amount of force applied to leap from one platform to another. Now the line get's blurry with telemetrically operated mechs like the AMP suit from Avatar or the Giant Robots from Robot Jox, but they're still mecha."
OH, let not forget old school Metroidm Samus funky alien tech suit
Madox-01 is an anime from 1987 that has one of the best depictions of what a realistic powered armor could look like
Crysis is undeniably creative with the technology in the games. Another thing that interests me about Warhead specifically is the endgame weapon.
The PAC solves the problem of plasma weaponry needing a lot of fuel by making the very atmosphere of the earth itself as its fuel. It also works in a way that’s actually feasible for a Plasma weapon, by firing super fast blobs that dissipate if too far from its target.
Let’s have a shout out for 1959’s Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein, grand daddy of them all. Power armor was cool then, power armor is cool now.
My favourite power armour are the suits the Vanir wear in Stargate Atlantis
They're just so cool and have just the right amount of screentime
They're powerful, built to withstand extreme conditions, can house both the Asgard twigs and the _arms_ of late series Daniel, and look rad as hell
They're also clearly a Lantean design, even though they're built by Asgard. As is their spaceship, their FTL variant of a puddle jumper.
Such a cool faction, such a cool design, they're awesome
Problem is, the Asgard are much smaller than humans, so their joints don't line up with those of the human-sized suits.
at the moment, I can say about 3 types of the best power armor: the crysis 3 nanosuit, the armor of the black panther and the iron man of the Marvel universe. 4th place - Space Marine Warhammer power armor, 5th - Starcraft Marine armor.
The Black Panther suit isn't really power armor since it doesn't enhance the wearer's strength. This make sense because all Black Panthers are superhumanly strong.
I agree that the suit is a very cool design.
Getting out a power armor can be a challenge. And horrifying if not possible. In one comic story Tony Stark gets stuck in an unpowered Iron Man suit. He screamed for days before going silent.
You are under the wrong impression on how Mjolnir armor is powered in Halo. The back of the cuirass houses a micro fusion reactor that's good for 15 years of charge. Or at least usable charge to power the armor. The secondary nanocrystal layers don't provide any power to the suit but are part of what increases the reaction speeds of a Spartan in armor beyond "Brute force". Providing a lightspeed (As it is using optical signals) connection from brain to suit to muscle. Linking wearer and armor and allowing thought to more literally translated into movement.
Personally, for me the line between mech/suit is the operating style. If you’re using “conventional” controls and you’re seated/standing still, it’s a mech. If you’re physically operating it and it essentially multiplies the force of your own movements, it’s a suit. If you want to throw a punch: in a mech, you use a joystick or hit a button, in a suit you throw your arm. Also, in my mind a suit can be a mech… A “Mech Suit” in my mind are just suits where the body is no longer physically coupled to the movement and used only for control, like cars with electric steering… your physical movements aren’t mechanically coupled to the result, so if you lost power you’d have no control.
So on the Suit end of the spectrum you have a suit entirely moved by your own physical strength, a bit further down you have mechanical strength enhancement but you can theoretically still move the suit without power. In the middle you have mech suits that are typically much bigger than a person and they use physical movement for control and operation only. Further down you have humanoid or biomimicry me has where you use some physical movements mixed with classic controls and there might be enhancements like extra limbs or a different body plan. Lastly, full Mech would be something you pilot/drive like a vehicle in a stationary position and they may or may not be shaped like a humanoid or creature, and it’s essentially a vehicle with arms and legs and has lots of assists, computer aids… etc.
Very relevant interesting tech for power armor would be inertial dampening. Or, as _Schlock Mercenary_ did it with the mercenaries' suits, _deceleration distribution._ See, it's not the fall that kills you. But it isn't the landing either. It's one part of your body decelerating while another part (the opposite side, or your organs such as your brain)... doesn't. Yet. But if your entire body decelerates at the same time, all you have to deal with is the velocity being turned into heat. Go fast enough and it might become a problem, but otherwise you just feel a little toasty afterward.
Regarding the iron man suit, I had always imaged that since tony had perfected repulsor tech, the interior of the suit used some variant of this to act as an inertial dampener, to allow impact forces to sort of be smoshed away, absorbed or negated, allowing him to be battered and bruised, but not liquified.
Had to. Without inertial dampers, a human body wouldn't last five minutes.
Good point about the crumple zones in cars. Perhaps there is a layer that absorbs impacts sort of like mesh but after impact the areas fill with either air or fluid that pushes it back into shape. Ready for the next impact.
Halo's Mjolnir-powered armor handles impacts in just this manner in addition to containing the "artificial Mucessels" and other systems of the suit its underlayer contained a non-newtonian impact gel that would instantly harden to absorb impact forces and then relax back into a gel once the impact force had been spent keeping the wearer safe and relatively unharmed and it seemed to work pretty well since Chief survived a fall from orbit and was relatively unharmed and Jonson's comment suggests that he had done so before as well.
I love the power armor of the Hamilton's Fallen Dragon book. It starts as a synthetic muscle extra to the bearer, fed by the wearer's own circulatory system. And then as time and campaigns go by you add hardened synthetic skin, and sensors, and computer suite.
The result is something that multiply the wearer's abilities, instead replacing them.
There was a sublime comic in the 90s called the "Iron Manual" (the later version they released after the first Iron Man movie is not the same thing) and it was essentially a rumination on how the Iron Man armor worked and how it evolved. It actually borrowed a lot of ideas conceptually from materials science and some of the work in the real world to make power armor. One of the key things it mentions is that the "Iron Man" hasn't actually had much iron in it in years.
As far as durability, the implication is that the Iron Man armor (remember this is before concept of the Arc/Repulsor reactor) is sort of an energy sponge. It can absorb kinetic energy, energy conveyed from particle beam or directed energy weapons, etc. to power itself, and (borrowing in idea from the Star Trek the Next Generation Technical Manual) the gist is that there's something of a force field/Structural Integrity Field running throughout most of the underplating of the Iron Man armor. And like the SIF on the Enterprise, the big challenge that Stark talks about is the "lag" between the armor's ability to dampen the inertial force hitting him and compensate appropriately.
It was also one of the first times the comic acknowledged that the suit was highly automated; long gone were the days where Stark managed the suit's systems; just as fighter jets had to get more advanced to account for the operator's human response times, so too did the Iron Man armor.
The fun thing was that he was talking about doping a metallic lattice using custom-grown bacteria and a lot of other really nifty ideas, sandwiched layers of different materials fulfilling multiple purposes, etc. because real world materials specialists did. The Iron Manual had a LOT of influence on later writers' explanation of how different Iron Man enhancile suits worked later on. Good stuff worth reading if you can find it.
And I'd argue the nanosuits from Crysis are more along the lines of a technological equivalent of a Klyntarr/Symbiote a la Venom given the biofusion aspects.
@@adamzimmerman8345 I think there's room for a Klyntarr to take lessons from power armor in the setting to up it and it's partners durability. It'd be a fun explanation for such a thing. (plus, you can make getting a chance to examine said armor an entire plot into itself.)
power armor with cybernetic entanglements is next, but also 'shields' of some sort. I guess this would be the equivalent of 'The Borg'.
On the subject of energy density, Battletech covers that with their power armor. Elemental Suits have detachable battery packs that allow continuous operation for up to 24 hours. They also cover the size issues. While not described, there are adjustments to allow a normal person to fit into an Elemental suit usually designed for someone 7-8 feet tall.
@@captainkirk4271 GM owes us fusion power.
@@rifleman2c997Just 10 more years... for the last 60 years.
@@rifleman2c997 Where's my Marauder?
Kinetic impacts to the armor being transferred to the wearer was touched on in-universe in the Terran campaign of Starcraft 2.
One of the upgrades you could snag for your Marauder anti-armor heavy infantry between missions was installing a thick layer of "kinetic foam" inside the suits. The game described the upgrade as how the armored suits themselves were incredibly tough, but the soldier inside was... Less so, especially when it came to getting smacked around by artillery shells and space monsters. Being able to soften the blow by way of an impact-absorbing gel layer would help mitigate sharp impacts and keep the troops fighting fit much longer than the conventional armor design.
In the actual RTS gameplay side, the upgrade was a bit less impressive. Still helpful, sure - it gave your Marauders an extra dollop of hit points, which is always handy - but "being a bit tougher" feels like it kind of over-simplified things.
Meanwhile firebats just use soldiers so crazy that concussions are an improvement.
I'm surprised that, under "exoskeletons," yo didn't mention Ripley's freight-carrying suit for "Aliens," (a la "get away from her, you . . . ) perhaps because it's not a weapon(?) But it's an interesting design, with an open-framed, unarmored cockpit that seems designed to accommodate a wide range of body types, as standardized industrial equipment.
4:30 I think Octo Camo from MGS4 is a pretty interesting example of this. Its focused on stealth rather than strength but Snake is so physically old by that point that the suit has to do a lot of the work for him.
Power Armor is cooler than mechs, and I'm tired of pretending it's not.
Is this r/worldjerking leaking here?
Who doesn't want to be basically the sci-fi equivalent of a knight!?
@@Sorinoir I've got an entire workshop worth of parts just lying around waiting for the AI.
I got a Meta Quest 3 to use as a HUD in pass-through mode.
I got ultrasonic sensors and a haptic feedback belt for a poor mans "sonar".
360 3D cameras, in infrared, and UV, mounted to the helmet with head tracking. So it would be like using a flight sim with monitors and head tracking. So head motions can have more or even less acceleration. Look behind you by turning your head 45°, while happy to turn your head more to get less of an effect when in zoom mode.
Got to have an fpv drone for that sweet third person view.
The SpaceX life support system uses consumer oxygen concentrator technology. I'm going to add one of those. Like I said, I live on a volcano, sometimes I go to high altitude. Or just for a bio boost when riding my e-bike and out of breath.
If you stick to just the things that are possible to do, it's a very long list. Particularly if you have an e-bike battery to keep your suit charged.
Almost forgot thermal regulation. The amount of work a human body can do without getting tired is significantly impacted by heat or lack thereof. It doesn't even need to cover the full body, Russians did experiments with just a heat vest. If you keep the trunk heat regulated, the rest of the body more or less takes care of itself. I'm planning on just using some peltiers and PC liquid cooling parts.
All of those technologies have internal batteries that can run for two or more hours without being plugged in.
Oh and an Nvidia Jetson to run some of the AI local, and be a wireless router to my desktop running the full AI package. Maybe a couple of them.
I also have a "falling with style" backpack. Imagine one of those. DJI bicopters. The ones with only two arms. Now imagine wearing a big one like a backpack.
This isn't for flying, it's for thrust, jumping really high, and sort of acting like a parachute. By using small motors, you save a lot of weight, but they generate a ton of heat. That's okay if you only need them for a few seconds at a time.
You can find the backpack with powered rollerblades. The roller plates would be way more efficient at generating thrust, but keeping your balance is a real nightmare. And that's what the backpack is for, it can run all day in "stability mode". And even contribute to top speed if you let it cool down once in awhile.
Oh and carbon fiber armor plates, because I'm not expecting to take a bullet, I'm expecting to take a fall and slide.
Everything on my list can be done for less than $5,000 right now today.
Even the AI, because it's going to take at least a few weeks to get all that hardware together, and the software exists, if you compile it yourself. I'm just waiting on the one click installer.
The ergonomic issues are best addressed when you get into the scales that are found in VOTOMS / Heavy Gear / Appleseed. At that point, you can have an adjustable cockpit like are found in modern fighter planes and automobiles.
That size is really a nice sweet spot for various realism and real-world usability quibbles, which is probably why you see it in Cameron's Avatar stuff. Even in his Aliens power loader.
The power armor in Schlock Mercenary properly accounts for gross impact with what are essentially souped-up inertial dampeners made with gravitic tech: The wearer is made to "fall" with whatever acceleration vector is needed, and since injury comes from some parts of the body accelerating differently than others, they're left unharmed by even the most violent of impacts as long as their armor can keep up.
Possibly my favourite example of power armour has to be Shardplate in the Stormlight Archive. In that it is pure fantasy, ancient relics from thousands of years ago that the planet's preindustrial setting find so difficult to break through that whole nations are built around their ruler's individual suits. They fit themselves to the wearer and regrow with time, but need to be powered by the energy of the planet's continent spanning superstorms, which are unreliable, if possible to predict. Later this changes as we work out what the suits actually are, but that's thousands of pages in
Babe, wake up, Spacedock just uoaded
Edit: Leaving the original comment cause it's funnier. Thanks for pointing it out
*uploaded
So thought about impact suppression, woodpeckers. Hear me out, they can bang their head extremely hard into wood without injuring their brain. A lot of that is because of how their tongue wraps around their skull and provides cushion, but also their brain isn't allowed to slosh about in the cranium.
Consider similar conditions in the form of tech surrounding their wearer. Where your body isn't allowed a lot of wiggle room. There is still the problem of concussions cause your brain is still in a soup of fluid. But theoretically I think this is how power armor could protect the wearer.
So the problem is we need better impact protection in the pilot's skull? Workable.
If you want a plausible power source power armor, internal combustion engines are worth looking into. Gas has 20× the energy density of batteries, and that's even accounting for the inefficiencies of road-legal IC engines. Some more exotic engine types can achieve much greater efficiencies, mind you.
Given that these engines will obviously need to be very small, you should gravitate towards more mechanically simple designs than the piston engines of your car. Even if these designs have their issues, mechanical complexity is something you scarcely can afford at smaller scales.
One promising option is rotary engines. Especially the newer designs from Liquid Piston. They're reasonably quiet and efficient, very small in size, have few moving parts, and are quite powerful pound-per-pound. DARPA and the USAF are both funding it, so that should tell you something.
Regardless of which engine you choose, you hook it up to an electric generator and a micro-hydraulic system - Boston Dynamics can help you a lot with that - and then you'll be golden.
There is not much space between the efficiencies of a real engine (at least at its best workpoint) and the maximum efficiency a thermal engine can thoretically reach. Besides that, you have to add a lot of weight for the engine, the transmission (either hydraulic or electro-mechanically) and will get a huge problem with all the waste heat a powerfull engine will produce.
Road legal engines have efficiencies of about 20%. We've already built engines that can pull off 50% thermal efficiency.
Also, most of the waste heat is going out through the exhaust. You absolutely can deal with that.
As for the transmission: hydraulic pumps and electric generators both have much higher power-to-weight ratios than IC engines. They won't be much heavier than your powerplant.
@@augustovasconcellos7173 Waste heat is pretty much a non-issue to power armor design today, since it'd be for in atmosphere work. Even the worst heat conditions are nothing on having no atmosphere in terms of PITA for cooling.
Fun fact, the power pack on war40k space marine power armor was supposed to be the jet pack(the nozzles on the sides were exhausts for said jet pack) at the beginning, not sure when it was changed to the power pack it is now. I myself am not a fan of that particular piece of power armor(and primaris "upgrade" didn't address/change it in any meaningful way), so i designed my own instead(made it more compact while keeping the main function and rearraigning the exhaust vent size and placement. Now you could mount actual backpack modules(that hold your additional ammo, food, drink, o2 etc) on top and bottom of it, or swap top module for the jet/jump pack if needed).
The whole "how does the pilot eject from the suit?" immediately made me think of MADOX-01, where the protagonist defeats his enemy in the climactic battle by ejecting from his suit. So at least some powered suits are designed with actual ejection mechanisms...
And some like MJOLNIR are more like titanium jumpsuits than mini-mechs
You can make a modular suit that's held together by fittings that can basically explosively separate with springs. The whole suit can open normally or be turned completely modular for repairs or emergency exit. The issue then becomes preventing accidentally tripping it with damage, but that's more a secondary concern if the safety stuff is buried.
Not enough thought gets put into power capturing energy from the shock absorbers, our tendons (specifically Achilles) do that to conserve energy, and a lot of energy would get wasted as heat from the shock absorbers that could theoretically be used to power a hydrauluc turbine, potentially a tesla turbine to minimize parts and foot print.
To me it is a bit simpler:
If you are still standing once you enter it, you are in a suit.
If you are seated or lying down, you are in a mech.
so for you the Pacific Rim thingies are suits?
@@yjlom huh, I actually forgot Jaegers existed. I guess they fall outside that little of mine.
Not a bad general rule. Runs into the pacific rim gray area, but that's a rarity. (The only other mech I can think of is the Gundam fighters from G Gundam.)
If you can move all the robot limbs without moving the pilot's limbs, it's a mech. Otherwise it's a power suit.
I can't believe you just slid by the original powered armored combat suit as used by the Mobile Infantry in Heinlein's book "Starship Troopers"?
I'm kinda surprised there was no mention of Warframe in the "suit merging with the wearer" segment, since the Warframes are former humans that literally get infected with something that converts their entire body into metal-flesh that's not only more durable but also has the means to channel magic powers
Hello everybody and welcome back to spacedock!
Tony stark's nano suit can probably be distributing impact way more efficiently than an airbag and still be relatively invisible to the eye though imagine if they made the visuals for it by a bunch of its backside getting pushed away and from the force signifying that it was transferred around the body and then retract back to position... Gives me chills when I imagine it.
I think the idea of Fallout power armor is that someone can’t possibly be too tall or too short unless you are indeed a dwarf or a child. I imagine the part of the chassis the human fits in is not necessarily adjustable but influenced by the occupant stretching it. There is quite a bit of room between where you center your arms and legs and the armor itself.
The Posleen War novels dealt with the kinetic problem by having the suit full of nano goo so it would act as a kind of shock absorber.
I'm a simple man, I see a Crysis reference, I click "like".
Love the fact you had starcraft music playing in the background the entire time
YES! something I can talk about for hours. NICE!
Food for thought: The English word "suit" comes via French from a Latin word that means "to follow". As in 'to follow one another'. Because the parts that make up a suit follow each other as you put them on.
Heinlein influenced modern military scifi heavily with starship troopers. The Power Armor is a notable example, without this book the video we were just watching would not have been made in this form. I am a bit disappointed that the scope of the video is so narrow.
And he did it way back in 1959.
@@Belligerent_Herald "IN A CAVE!"
(Sorry, had some meme spillover there.)
There was actually a Starship Troopers anime in the 80s, so there's even a visual depiction of them that pre-dates those of Roughnecks: Starship Troopers.
Power armor would definitely need some kind of inertial damping system to survive most of the things they are shown doing. Like some kind of energy field that evenly distributes any kinetic force on one part of the suit across every single molecule within the suit. Without that, even using any sort of rocket boosters, like Iron Man flying around with his repulsors, would have to be super limited to avoid crushing the person inside. Though, that kind of thing might be getting dangerously close to magic, depending on the technology level of the universe your dealing with.
That is actually part of the reason the early Spartans in Halo were heavily augmented even without their armor. Without physically reinforcing the wearer, even the armor's muscles could easily crush them if they weren't calibrated exactly right. And it wasn't until the later Spartan types that they managed to make the armor safe enough for un-augmented humans.
And, of course, they have their magical shields to help explain why Chief can do things like falling from orbit without becoming a large can of very expensive soup.
For the longest time. I was racking my brain on how tf did the chinese manage to stall power armor troops. Well it turns out, its just gauss rilfes and emp.
or just anti mat rifles or 308 rounds because the t51 stated that the material used can survive up to 2500 joules and a 308 round packs 3200 joules of kinetic energy
My personal definition of what makes it power armour or a mech is... if your arms and legs fit the machines arms and legs then your wearing it like clothing so its a suit. If your sitting or standing inside of it then you driving in like vehicle its a mech
Power armor- operator's anatomy matches and fills the proper anatomical parts of the armor.
Power suit- wearer's anatomy forms the anatomical structure of the suit.
Mecha- vehicle that is designed to share anatomical similarities with its creator. Pilot is usually in a cockpit.
For me, the distinct look of the Knight Sabers from Bubblegum Crisis hold a special place in my heart. Seeing them dress up in the hard suits is a special treat.
Ever since the thought of a one-man tankette occurred to me, i haven't been able to think of a reason power armor would be better.
the tankette wins easily in combat or for maintenance purposes, but the power armour has much greater utility by default
for example imagine a tree or a large beam falls in front of your tankette: you're stuck
now same scenario but you're in power armor: you grab it in the middle, lift it up, put it down on the side of the street and go on your merry way
@@yjlom Put an articulated dozer blade on the tankette