RandomPhantom700
Master of Arts
Sheesh, tough crowd here. Yeah, the blunt force of the shot will still do damage, but c'mon.....IT'S A BULLETPROOF T-SHIRT! How cool is that?
Wearable Technology Scientists Discover How to Turn Ordinary T-Shirts Into Body Armor
- Thread starter Bob Hubbard
- Start date
I knew you'd caught that... But it seemed the humor had escaped him.
As to bullet proof t-shirts... Neat idea, once again, but as Archangel said, not much good to have no holes, but significant internal bleeding and bruising...
I knew you'd caught that... But it seemed the humor had escaped him.
As to bullet proof t-shirts... Neat idea, once again, but as Archangel said, not much good to have no holes, but significant internal bleeding and bruising...
I was visualizing a person wearing one of these with an entry wound, and the shirt pulled clear through the hole and out the back. Part of the reason a Kevlar vest works is not that it is impenetrable, but also that it spreads the impact over area (the t-shirt does this too) and time (Kevlar is relatively thick and absorbs the impact over time). The t-shirt does not do that last bit, unless I'm missing something.
The bulletproof t shirt's not really the point though. That'd be impractical, but a denser weave and some reinforcement etc would still mean lighter body armor.
That makes sense. What would be even cooler would be cloth that predicted or reacted to impact by becoming stiffer.
http://www.newscientist.com/blog/invention/2007/06/liquid-body-armour.html
Not sure if anything ever came of this though.
Anyway, I'm for anything that increases protection and decreases weight, heat, and cost for the user.
I don't know if anything has come of it, but, Dale Brown put that technique into use in his book The Tin Man. Which, is what this discussion popped into my mind.
I've seen variants in a few books.
Including using a fabric that stiffened to deflect kinetic energy to trap someone by causing it stiffen, and not letting it relax...
zDom
Senior Master
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Very cool. Wish I could have some.
Call me a prude, but I prefer blunt trauma over penetration.
A little Astroglide will change your mind.
I had exactly the same mental picture! It kind or reminded me of that battle scene in the mines of Moria in The Lord of the Rings movie where Frodo takes a full-on chest shot with a huge spear thrown by a giant cave troll only to be saved by his silky-soft mithril mail shirt. Even if there was something that strong, it wouldn't work if it was silky-soft. The spear would just drive the impenetrable fabric through you. Yeah I know, I should be willing to suspend my logical faculties and just watch the movie, right? Then again, what about internal consistency.Tolkien was very good at that. Hollywood--a bit less so...but I digress.
This sounds to me to be good secondary protection. If it feels and acts like a normal T-Shirt, wear it under your normal protection.
Larry Niven I believe?
Possibly. It's been a while... and it's been a while since I read Niven, too.
Those suits pop up a lot in Ringworld.
cdunn
2nd Black Belt
This just makes me wonder how long it will be before ultracapacitors make hypervelocity weapons trivial, and make all our current armor moot.
dancingalone
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I've read a few and enjoyed the first couple that had Sauscony and Kelric as the protagonists. The others seemed to drag. They're too formulaic for me ultimately.
If you like fantasy, Guy Gavriel Kay's Under Heaven is about to be published in May. He's probably somewhere in my top five authors for speculative fiction.
Archangel M
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I like David Drake's "Commander Leary" series. And "Enders Game".
I think its out already, i seen it at the book store last week!!
Great author. Though I have to rank Charles DeLint right up there too!
See this? This is where I hijacked the thread into comparative fiction.
