Nanotube Body Armor Coming Soon

s31523 writes "Military and law enforcement agencies are constantly seeking better protection in the line of fire, but current armor is heavy and bulky. The University of Cambridge has developed a new type of carbon fiber made up of nanotubes that is some cases exceeds the performance of Kevlar. The new material has other potential uses as well, from bomb disposal bins to flexible solar panels."

Looks Familiar

[DumbSwede]

I know it's inevitable and I want our troops protected, but its ironic how much this looks like the garb worn by the enforcer types in dozens of dystopia movies. One key to waging war is to dehumanize the enemy in the eyes or your citizens and fighting force. It will be far easier for our adversaries to paint our troops as inhuman.

Pointless

[Kamrom]

Why develop new body armor, when our soldiers still can't get the stuff made several years ago?

Re:Looks Familiar

[rastilin]

It doesn't look any different from the armour already worn by SWAT teams. The only real difference between this and the normal soldier's armour, to me at least, is the face plate. You could remove that if you were ok with shrapnel in the eyes.

Re:Looks Familiar

[ozmanjusri]

It doesn't look any different from the armour already worn by SWAT teams.

Exactly.

Enforcer types from dystopias, just like the GPP said.

Re:Looks Familiar

[Loke the Dog]

True, and there's more to it. Inhuman beings are more frightening than humans, and if you feel inhuman, you will not feel a need to act like one.

Re:Looks Familiar

[Anomolous Cowturd]

Your troops are enforcer types in a dystopian reality. While I'm always thrilled to see advances in materials science, and happy to see people that little bit safer, if your troops just stayed home we could use their armor for solar panels and I'd be even happier.

I Call Bullshit

[TheThirdRider]

Or at least partial BS. I work at a nanotube R&D lab and one of the things we're working on (which I am personally involved with) is making carbon nanotube thread. I've read over and discussed the very paper that is mentioned in the article; also I've looked at what the University of Texas at Dallas is doing. Pulling SWCNTs (single walled carbon nanotubes) from a furnace does not create the same level strength due to the tight wrapping of CNTs as using van der Waals forces present in aligned MWCNTs (multi walled carbon nanotubes) when pulling thread from an aligned forest of nanotubes. While the individual tubes are stringer than almost anything, they do not adhere well to each other and tend to slide apart when in a rope. C They may have some fibers that are stronger than Kevlar, I've made some myself infact. But it was only that strong in comparison when measuring Young's modulus because it was so small as to be neutrally buoyant in air and nearly invisible to the human eye. And, unfortunately, so far that strength doesn't scale. So, yes they probably have made super fibers, but I highly doubt they are usable for the applications they are claiming.

Re:Pointless

[jefu]

It boils down to the fact that the number of lives saved isn't worth it to the US taxpayer, or at least the ones that vote.

Most taxpayers are already paying for the war and associated expenses. I suspect many would be not displeased to put money into actually saving troops rather than (to pick a couple of examples) paying mercenary armies who don't pay their own taxes, or paying corrupt contractors building the US embassy with (semi-)slave labor, or paying the CIA to run secret prisons where they can torture with impunity, or paying Haliburton so Cheney can make a profit.

Re:multiple uses?

[Entropius]

Think the army is actually going to make 200k suits of this stuff?

A better way to stop people from getting shot in wartime is to not be in stupid wars.

Re:multiple uses?

[cumin]

You distinguish "stupid wars," but somehow I'm not convinced that everyone will agree with you about which ones are stupid. If I'm going to get shot at, yeah, I want one of these and I don't care who thinks the war is stupid or whether it is technically a war or not. I care about not dying.

Re:but

[Nullav]

Actually, according to TFA, networks can indeed be made using a series of tubes.

But the new material could also find applications in the area of hi-tech "smart" clothing, bomb-proof refuse bins, flexible solar panels, and, eventually, as a replacement for copper wire in transmitting electrical power and signals.

I could really see a use for such a resilient material in the more earthquake-prone areas, as opposed to fiber which would probably snap in a lot of situations.

Re:multiple uses?

[bhiestand]

Carbon nanotubes are *expensive* to manufacture. If the resources spent outfitting the entire infantry with these were instead spent on preventing unnecessary wars, the military would have a better way of delaying dying.

1) Boy armor isn't just for "the entire infantry"
2) War is inevitable. It is the military's job to survive the war, defeat the enemy, and come home to their families/jobs/communities
3) It's nice to have stuff that will save your life when war happens

Hell, a better way to save the lives of infantrymen would be to take the money spent on nanotube armor and instead spend it on twice as many troops.

Sure, that sounds like a great idea. While we're at it, let's just sell their current body armor so we can quadruple the number of troops. And maybe if we take away the rest of their equipment, we can have tens of millions of troops! That worked well for other countries in the past, right?

The only people who really benefit from this sort of thing are the contractors who fiddle with it.

Not the people who survive getting shot or having an IED explode outside of their armored vehicle.

If this stuff does become widespread the main impact on the world scene will be an upswing in business for Kalashnikov, as everyone replaces their aging AK's with the new higher-caliber models capable of penetrating American armor.

Congratulations, you appear to have learned something about the history of military weapons and countermeasures.

And to respond to your entire post, you are exactly the kind of person I was talking about. You have no idea what you're talking about, and want to turn a technical discussion into a political one. The whole point of America's military system is that increased communication, technology, equipment, and training reduce the number of soldiers you need to accomplish an objective. This lowers the financial and political costs in the long run. Nearly every service member deployed to a combat zone SHOULD have body armor regardless of whether or not you think they should be in the combat zone. Every service member who COULD deploy to a combat zone should have a full set of body armor and IPE sitting somewhere with his name on it. Otherwise you end up with the situation where only soldiers who can afford to buy their own get to take body armor to war.

So if you want to drop the political garbage, appeals to emotion, and nonsense, let's talk about the merit of nanotube armor. Surely if this armor was only slightly more expensive than the current materials, it would be worth it. If it cost $20m a set, it wouldn't be. Of course, we don't have any of that information because this article is really a "hey, cool new tech coming eventually" article. In other words, it's not worth getting your panties ruffled over, and certainly not worth making a fool of yourself over.