There's a very obvious reason sci fi armors don't look like historical armor: so they look sci fi. If you make your plasteel armor look like a medieval suit then your movie will look like laser jousting. It's why tatooine looks like a western even though it's made of jet engine parts- everyone is just dressed like a western, except the guns shoot lasers.
Also, weight is no longer an issue like it historically was. You used to march to a place and set up camp to fight; now you run patrols and missions. Soldiers need to carry packs and water and ammunition; every loadout will be heavy and cumbersome.
Transport and communications make heavy loadouts possible. Realistic sci fi would not have two armies sprinting at each other or dramatic last stands or light loadouts. Unfortunately that makes for extremely boring movies. People carrying 100 lbs of gear and ambushing each other, then sitting in cover and waiting for heavy fire support is not dramatic.
That said IMO there's a dearth of "heavies"- dress up some huge 7' guy with 4" thick plates of chunky armor and those leaf spring stilts and have him sprint around with a machine gun. That would be fun! If you have a massive population and elite soldiers then why does every single guy look incredibly normal?
Alao shoutout to edge of tomorrow for shaving the coolest power armor of any movie, even if it looked pretty dumb when they were just gliding around on wires. Tom Cruise sprinting in that getup looked awesome.
unsupp0rted 1 days ago [-]
I liked the Sci Fi battles in The Culture book series- no armies, no heroics. Just one AI spending milliseconds blasting another AI at extreme distance in space. Victory or defeat comes down solely to tech-tree development and physics, nothing else.
shawn_w 24 hours ago [-]
Not all battles in Culture books are like that. Hydrogen Sonata has close range equiv-tech fights on a planetary surface, for example. Still AIs running the show while the (armored) human hopes they survive, of course.
grues-dinner 1 days ago [-]
We may not have gridfire or CAM dustings but I'm pretty sure that's how space combat will end up really going.
No cinematic Expanse-style Gatling gun vs inexplicably slow missile dogfights, just getting vapourised by something going 50km/s that was fired from hundreds of thousands of km away by something you never even saw.
The good news is at least those engines don't use physics we have access to - Inaros didn't need the whole rocks thing, he could have just fuelled up a freighter and brought it in at some fraction of c from outside the ecliptic. I don't care how good your railguns are, they won't hit something that has its own blueshift.
jltsiren 1 days ago [-]
Space combat in The Expanse kind of makes sense, assuming that you have magic engines that can accelerate you to something like 5% or 10% of light speed before running out of propellant.
The thing is that space is big. Hundreds of thousands of kilometers is a short range, and 50 km/s is a low speed. Missiles appear slow, because they use the same engine technology as ships, which limits the acceleration they can achieve. Reaching 50 km/s at 50g takes over 100 seconds and is obvious to everyone in the general area. Railgun speeds are inconsistent in the setting, but firing them is also obvious, and random course corrections are an effective defense against them.
Your freighter trick would not have worked. The acceleration would have taken days or even weeks, depending on what kind of acceleration the ship can handle. And it would have been obvious to everyone in the solar system. That would have been plenty of time to send a fleet (that can accelerate faster) to intercept it.
grues-dinner 1 days ago [-]
I dunno, surely you would coast out of the system for a year or two. Once out in the Oort cloud, you can drift and turn quietly with your engines away from the solar system and vanish. Then point your engines away (add a glare shield maybe) and nail it inwards. Even if you get so spotted coming from some angle out of the ecliptic no one is going to be able to catch up considering you're coming straight at them rather than a nice stern chase. Accelerating out to meet you head on only makes it worse (though at 50,000km per second, say, you won't be in range for long no matter how far they go).
And even in the books the missiles that killed the Canterbury closed 200,000km in eight minutes. That's nearly 200g and the closing speed would have been 800km/s. They'd go 20 miles in a single frame of the 24fps video of the event.
Even 50km/s is not a low speed if your defensive strategy is a machine gun. You have 1 second to go from a dinner plate sized cross section object at 50km to being dead, and if even if you did hit it with a bullet going say 2km/s the other way, which is a very fast bullet, if it was on target before, the bits will still hit you nearly as effectively. In fact, a better missile would disperse into a spray of fine metal pieces a few 10s of km away and be uninterceptible and cover a wider area in car you can try a dodge.
Seems to me like combat in the universe would be a lot less close-in dogfights and a lot more long range stealth kills by tiny relativistic bullets. And a lot more plausibly deniable "disappearances" in deep space. And I get it, don't get me wrong, rule of cool and all that.
And while we don't have those engines, the approximate same techniques probably apply to any spaceship combat we'll see in the next 100 years. Months of nothing slogging across nothingness then dead in a second out of nowhere. Unless radar really improves and stealth doesn't, I guess.
And surface impacts from deep space will make current ICBM concerns seem quaintly sedate, even if we can't get to relativistic speeds.
jltsiren 1 days ago [-]
The exact numbers in the books are often inconsistent. In Persepolis Rising, the forces that surround the Tempest form a bubble almost three light seconds across. And railgun rounds take less than a minute to reach the center.
My overall impression from the books was that the typical engagement distance is from seconds to tens of seconds at railgun speed (relative to the target), whatever that speed is. Anything beyond that, and random course corrections would make hitting anything with an unguided round effectively impossible, no matter how accurate your weapons are. And if you hit a missile at that distance, the random corrections will probably also get you out of harm's way.
grues-dinner 23 hours ago [-]
Yeah, and my point is, a guided missile capable of multi-G course correction coming in at tens of km per second is very unlikely to be stopped by a machine gun. And you do hit it with a bullet by a miracle, you'll only do so at a range that's means you're in the debris shower, which is all going multiples of times faster than a shaped charge detonation.
You certainly won't have time to pirouette about firing multiple guns photogenically while a bunch of missiles and the ship are all in one frame.
The missiles seem a lot scarier than the railguns which you actually might be able to dodge given the ranges, as long as you saw the firing happen. Not least because a solid rocket motor actually could do quite a lot of that today.
jltsiren 22 hours ago [-]
The debris will likely miss due to the evasive maneuvers both the missile and the target did, and due to the lack of thrust after the destruction of the missile. Plus the standard practice seems to be pointing the main engine (with exhaust velocity measured in percent of light speed) at the approaching missiles. To avoid being vaporized, the missiles must be intentionally trying to miss and then do aggressive last-moment maneuvers once they are close enough to the target.
unsupp0rted 1 days ago [-]
Agreed. And just to add, the limiting factor is what kind of acceleration the occupants can handle. Even with magic anti-g fluid injectors replacing your blood with marshmallows, it'll still take a long while to get up to 5% or 10% of light speed without turning into goo. Not minutes or hours anyway.
Individual space battles might be measured in years, even in the participant's timeframe.
"So who won that space battle out by Ceres?"
"Dunno, it's only been 3 years."
grues-dinner 22 hours ago [-]
Surely that just makes it even more lopsided to the guy who gets a missile off before you notice. Even if you can pull 20G before your brain explodes, if the missile does 100G (and even Sprint anti-ballistic-missile missiles in real life did that, in atmosphere, but admittedly not for long, they "only" reached 3.4km/s) then you may as well be standing still. Plus you only really have evasive capability in one axis, you can't leap to the side with any major acceleration in the last 100 milliseconds while the missile covers the last final 5km.
5-10% of light speed won't really change timeframes much (the Lorentz factor is like 0.5% at 0.1c).
If there were a major fight that weren't just a sneak attack and involved fleet on fleet, I imagine it would look like swarms of super fast autonomous missiles rushing in and trying to take each other out faster then you could blink. Any that got through the opposing swarm would proceed to absolutely shred the squishy, slow human containers due to their speed and agility.
We don't have those engines, so it would probably just be a bit like a modern naval engagement would be today: a long range missile fight between ships that have negligible speed relative to the missiles. Except there's no such thing as terminal velocity, the ships are made of tissue paper and your CIWS equivalent has orders of magnitude less time with the target in range.
unsupp0rted 20 hours ago [-]
An interesting missile would be one that catches up to you, latches, and accelerates you to only 20 G or whatever is the minimum to kill you.
Then when your crew is braindead it uses little maneuvering thrusters to spin you around and takes you back to the point of engagement, so your ship/secrets can be salvaged.
I suppose a simple neutron bomb missile would be more efficient for this, and wouldn’t involve a long elliptic trip, so long as it didn’t fry your systems and data storage media.
Edit: I asked ChatGPT and apparently there’s no sci-fi involving a missile that functions to latch and accelerate the target to enough Gs to kill the occupants. Did I invent this just now?
grues-dinner 12 hours ago [-]
Yes, I think you did! It's a brilliantly diabolical design!
It's not quite the same, but there's a short story by Alastair Reynolds (I think in Galactic North) where a missile forces a ship to run forever, chasing it out of the galaxy as the universe ages around them (I think).
JKCalhoun 1 days ago [-]
Too bad that "looking Sci-Fi" means more or less all looking the same.
Art design in the movie "Alien" (was it Ron Cobb?) borrowed from samurai armor for the space suits. (And of course Darth Vader himself was inspired in large part from samurai armor.)
Lazy films and video games since though seem to often just recycle a certain look. Perhaps an unpopular opinion but the "anime look" has been fatiguing to this person's taste for a couple of decades now as well.
inejge 1 days ago [-]
Art design in the movie "Alien" (was it Ron Cobb?) borrowed from samurai armor for the space suits.
I thought it was Moebius (alias Jean Giraud) who designed the Alien spacesuits? E.g., see [1]. (Perhaps he did borrow bits of samurai armor styling, I'm not disputing that.)
Thanks for clarifying. I suppose I could have Googled before posting. ;-)
1 days ago [-]
MichaelZuo 1 days ago [-]
I think it’s safe to say the vast majority of sci-fi artists are mediocore, but it’s not obvious since most shows/movies/games nowadays are also very far from hard sci-fi, where things like armor plausability would actually matter.
wkat4242 17 hours ago [-]
I think the author also ignores the advances of material science. Why just decide between hard and soft materials? What about a material that's soft at normal movement speeds but turns hard at the speeds of a bullet? Would solve the problem of being so restricted in armour yet it would look different. For sci-fi this is not unthinkable. There's already materials that harden under electric charge.
ycombinatrix 19 hours ago [-]
Edge of tomorrow power armor is cool? Wasn't it supposed to be poorly conceived & haphazardly designed in universe?
Minority Report was meticulously researched, for example, but it had physical disks moved around (movement) and the guy's security credentials weren't rotated, and he was able to get into a lot of places, like his former place to steal the precog etc.
Data from Star Trek, or "the Computer" are quaint. Data is just one Android while you can easily download AI models to unlimited machines and robots. And "the Computer" speaks like a ro-bot but the movie "Her" is much more like what AI is becoming. The Holodeck might be closer.
Here is what a realistic movie of our future would look like:
It would be super boring.
Nothing would move.
Every crime would be solved efficiently
or not even allowed to occur.
Effectively digital ID for everyone/thing.
Security is tight, no advancing the plot
Cameras everywhere, cheap and plentiful
AI correlates all the sightings
Mass surveillance (cheap) of online comms
and quick extrapolation of every scheme.
Any scheme is thwarted before it happens
Robots everywhere, doing all work
Robots spying on everyone in their home
Humans produce less than 1% of content
Humans earn less than 1% of money
Humans become irrelevant to the economy
Knowledge and algorithms easily replicated
Robots can download new software over the air
No sense of identity of self preservation
Just commoditization of all skills (2030)
Probably no interest in anything, since
every bot knows everything, and has no
self-preservation instinct or sense of self
except just to simulate it, for humans,
until humans become economically irrelevant.
About the only threat, in this system (and it's a serious one) is that the cost for producing bot swarms with malicious intents, that anyone with few resources could release a bot swarm to work at scale across multiple platforms, amassing gameable metrics such as karma / clout / reputation, as sleeper cells, gradually shifting discussions. They would dominate 99% of the content everywhere, turning the Internet and the entire world into a Dark Forest. Anyone who shows up would be exploited over time, because it's cheap and easy:
In the short term (i.e. by 2030) bots will have infiltrated every platform and social network, even those which might try to close themselves off, because their existing users would run bots in their accounts to gain an advantage, until being "just yourself" un-augmented would get you poor results. Since there is no way to tell if someone is human or not (just as if you'd use rybka chess program for one move every 10 or so), people would just default to "being enhanced" or "having assistants".
Swarms of agents / bots / robots are the thing to look out for. They can coordinate at scale, execute long term plans relentlessly and imperceptibly and never forget what they're going after. (And when swarming can be perfected in the real world, you might get this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-2tpwW0kmU)
So yeah, sci-fi movies can be exciting, but in a "terminator" way where malicious destruction is the default, and only because the cost is so cheap to wreak havoc at scale.
In any case, the idea that you'd need "armor" or even try to explore the universe yourself, is laughable. Bots and drones will be built to fight wars, explore space, etc. A lot of von neumann probes, etc. They can build an entire "civilization" of terraforming planets over thousands of years, but they wouldn't need oxygen etc etc. Out in space, they might have an actual purpose and plan that is very different from humans. But for humans to go travel there would probably be very unlikely, many people (like Rogan) don't even believe humans could have survived the trip to our own moon, due to space radiation.
arminiusreturns 1 days ago [-]
This accurate and depressing to know it is likely the future. It makes me think of "nets" in CyberPunk 2077, and how everyone is trying to run/control their own private one, and "the net" is super dangerous, as it's the way direct hacks of your on-person augments are done for example. Then there is the "blackwall", where the rogue AIs exist.
magicalhippo 8 days ago [-]
Tod over at Tod's Workshop[1] on YouTube has done a number of interesting practical tests of various medieval weapons against armor.
They really show why the armor technology was driven in the direction it was, and how weapons and fighting evolved to compensate.
Also Matt over at Schola Gladiatoria[2] recently had some videos on his reproduction plate armor, including one on the gaps[3] in the armor.
At least in the context of Dune, as highlighted in the article, the armor designers probably should have looked more towards medieval armor technology.
The same issues are faced by anyone who works in a bullet proof vest.
Try selecting one: Wrap around gives better protection, at the expense if movement, weight, and a lack if airflow.
Side panels give better protection, at the expense on movement, weight, and a lack if airflow.
Trauma plates give better protection at the expense of...
You can armor someone like the LA Bank Robbery, but they can not fight.
The trade-offs are not easy to replicate because we are all made differently. A military can sculpt their warriors until they are all the same shape, but they lose other things.
Overweight cops especially have issues with the trade-offs in their body armor.
jollyllama 1 days ago [-]
> You can armor someone like the LA Bank Robbery, but they can not fight.
Many police officers who responded to the incident in question sustained significant injuries.
ubermonkey 1 days ago [-]
I was amused at the time that, in one of the Nolan Batman films, Bruce and Fox have a discussion about some changes to the Batsuit that improved mobility but reduced protection around these same lines.
yellowapple 7 days ago [-]
This article would be a lot more compelling for me if it showed some examples of sci-fi armor done correctly (or at least better).
giantg2 1 days ago [-]
The armor from Halo is done reasonably well, depending on which variation of it you're looking at. I once wrote a paper about the feasibility of it. Most aspects of it are potentially feasible, or have stand-in technology that could perform similar functions (eg active intercept systems for tanks instead of energy shields). I think the main difference is, that armor comes with strength enhancing systems to overcome the weight issues (there are several poentially feasible options for this, but nitinol wire as synthetic muscle is particularly interesting to me).
softfalcon 1 days ago [-]
Unfortunately, the article ends by pointing out that the Halo armour also has many glaring mistakes.
giantg2 1 days ago [-]
Can you point me to that? The only mention I see is that of the lower torso plate issue. And of course there was no mention of the other parts of the system that might cover that area (soft armor and the inception system).
mrguyorama 1 days ago [-]
Only because the author is utterly rejecting the source material. The very first thing "invented" in any "sci-fi" war setting is a magic fabric that acts like a rigid structure when hit with a weapon. The black "fabric" that the article points to at Master Chief's waist IS armor. Not only that, but it HAS evolved against it's threat profile: The primary damage type it needs to resist is thermal, not kinetic. The black fabric has a layer of ~magic~ nano goo that better dissipates the heat, and the setting's shields are more effective at mitigating a ball of plasma than a physical plate of material is.
The large green portions of Master Chief's armor is primarily for housing equipment and systems. It has a nuclear reactor in it, computing facilities that rival starships, and enough motors or hydraulics or "space magic" actuators so that Mister chef can shot-put cars. It won't have mobility problems because it's power armor, the suit IS the mobility. The suit canonically survives reentry primarily by becoming entirely rigid and pretending the impact would not turn the occupant into goo. It's a suit of Iron Man armor.
Halo meanwhile has both UNSC Marine "armor", which is basically a plate of steel hung over your chest and nothing else, and ODST trooper armor which would have likely been better for this post, as they are actual standard equipment, while there are only a few hundred sets of Mjollnir-IV armor.
The Mass effect commentary suffers from the same problem: All the "flexible" stuff on an N7 suit are magic material that provide ample ballistic protection. They also massively overemphasize hand to hand combat for the Mass Effect universe. Sure you might take a rifle butt to the chest, but 99% of the threat in that universe is a microgram of metal fired at a significant fraction the speed of light.
For the Dune armors, the complaints about "rigid" stuff bending are accurate, but the swordplay in Dune isn't really comparable to how we protected against middle ages swordplay, because the shields completely change everything up. Shields ARE effective against a sword, if it travels fast enough. You don't armor against an actual sword blow delivering 100J because that will be stopped by the shield. You don't land a brutal slice on your enemies, you slip inside their shield and gently slide a knife between their ribs. A stab proof vest in this universe should be entirely effective armor, but instead, no armor in Dune is ever shown to do anything. Dune 2 had MUCH more rigid and all-encompassing armor for people who expected to get shot, not that it stopped them from getting domed and stabbed.
arethuza 1 days ago [-]
The descriptions of the "Serious FYT Suits" that the Culture has are pretty cool but as most Culture tech is basically magic they probably don't count.
aftbit 1 days ago [-]
Along the same vein, the armor from The Golden Transcendence series is incredibly cool, but basically magic. I remember there being a pretty cool mech suit in The Expanse too.
nickdothutton 1 days ago [-]
Surprised Dragon Skin[1] was not explicitly mentioned. I see it failed testing and was never adopted.
Myself and some "co-workers" bought our own and had it shipped to us when we were deployed. Stuff was light and moved better than our issued armor (people were constantly pulling the plates out of battle armor due to weight and heat). No idea of effectiveness, thank god, as things moved to IEDs and much heavier protection was necessary.
moomin 7 days ago [-]
This is a great article but I do think the Atreides armour _could_ look different from medieval armour. Any physical power has to be applied while you’re already inside the shield. This probably affects where is effective.
recursivecaveat 7 days ago [-]
Good point, "the slow blade penetrates the shield" would imply to me that the kind of big downward swing at the shoulders that you would want pauldrons to protect against is just not possible.
aspenmayer 7 days ago [-]
For readers, at time of posting, something went weird with the tags for the footnotes for footnote #2 not escaping correctly, so a lot of the article continues after footnote #3.
scotty79 7 days ago [-]
Any examples of good sci-fi armor?
jonathanlydall 1 days ago [-]
Something I like about the style of Stargate SG-1 was that for the most part (at least initially), the team was equipped with essentially standard military gear. It seemed practical and non-pretentious.
Even when the humans got starships, the crew were dressed and acted essentially like navy.
Made the show somehow more believable.
It probably also helped the budget.
1 days ago [-]
huntedsnark 1 days ago [-]
The Half-life 2 Combine Solider armor. It almost looks silly like they're wearing a pillow, but it lets you tack on a ton of protection for your center mass without affecting mobility as much.
maxglute 19 hours ago [-]
With body modifications that suggest they basically live in the armor, i.e. the neck and torso ports looks like its there to inject calories and expel waste without need for removal.
xg15 7 days ago [-]
> Instead, where real armors evolve against threats, fictional armors evolve as a visual language [...]
I wonder if that hints at a "root cause" of the problem, or rather an additional constraint that movie armor is subject to and real armor is not: Prop design is all about which associations to evoke in the audience and which to avoid.
If you want to show some futuristic soldiers in hi-tech armor, you probably want to deliberately avoid any association with medieval armor - even if from a purely technical standpoint, taking those designs and upgrading them with modern/future tech would be the best fit for your soldiers.
taeric 1 days ago [-]
Fun read. Silly, of course, but still fun.
Surprised it didn't mention Iron Man. That is almost certainly the most popular of sci-fi body armor at the moment.
I, personally, think the biggest conceit with the armor narrative is that it can work as well as it does, period. This is touched in the article about how they manage to keep melee weapons as focus points. Realistically, no armor is protecting you from modern gun fire. And many hits that are survived by the likes of iron man would kill the person inside, regardless of if the armor survived.
barrucadu 1 days ago [-]
In the first paragraph:
> I want to be clear that I am generally limiting my scope here to rigid non-powered armor. Power (or powered) armor – that is, armor that moves with built-in servos and motors, rather than purely under muscle power – is its own topic that we’ll leave for another day.
taeric 1 days ago [-]
Ah, fair, I think. I confess I assume that there is some sort of power source on all of the ones discussed, though? The Dune setups clearly have a power source for the shield stuff. Why wouldn't that power source also work to help move the armor?
ndsipa_pomu 1 days ago [-]
I love this blog in general for the picking apart of modern movie tropes and the writing is surprisingly engaging for discussing logistics etc. The "Game of Thrones" collection is probably my favourite for absolutely ripping apart the poorly thought out battles. (Though I am a fan of the GoT series up to a point)
This doesn't take into account newer materials that can become rigid when struck.
giantg2 1 days ago [-]
Can you share a particular source? I've actually had an idea in the past about changing rigidity in soft armor to reduce trauma. It's most likely unfeasible, but it would be interesting if someone already built something similar (as is the case with every reasonably patentable idea I've ever had).
just6979 1 days ago [-]
There are many examples used as limb & joint protection for motorcycling and mountain biking. D3O, xmatter, SAS-TEC: brand-names of various non-newtonian shear-thickening substances used to allow flexibility and conforming to body motion but firming up under hard/sudden impacts to spread the forces. Not quite as soft or flexible as a fancy sci-fi material would need to be for a full-body armor, but certainly much more comfortable than the hard plastic materials previously used for protecting extremities.
These are often demonstrated by protecting a hand from a hammer blow, and I know from experience they are very adequate for protecting knees and elbows from trees, hard ground, and moderately pointy rocks. However, it's unclear if the shear-thickening is significant enough to protect against an actual sword strike or knife stab, and very unlikely that they could withstand a modern projectile weapon.
The idea is proven, but would need some further materials breakthrough to approach the level of sci-fi armor.
LurkerAtTheGate 1 days ago [-]
Not combat-armor, but a lot of motorcycle protective gear is exactly this. D3O is soft/flexible normally, but goes rigid on impact. I have plates of it in my own riding gear. I believe there's also some progressive versions that harden more or less based on the impact force.
giantg2 1 days ago [-]
Yeah, that D3O stuff is basically just a non-neutonian putty. I was aware of the liquid/putty/gels. I was wondering if there's anything else.
Is it possible that in the future there exist materials that look solid like that, provide the protection of what our naive 21st century minds associate with such rigid plates, and yet are flexible?
justlikereddit 1 days ago [-]
A little detail that slipped mention is the fact that later plate armor were made to resist bullets and that fire arms and melee weapons co-existed for quite a long time on the battle field. With a dynamics between better firearms, worsening armor economics and ergonomics as an equation.
As seen on modern EOD technicians vs infantry there's clearly still ergo-economics at play on how to armor combatants.
I'm not sure I would say armor is fully solved yet
aspenmayer 7 days ago [-]
Onscreen and textual body armor is plot armor, metaphorically speaking. If the depiction of the armor doesn’t make sense, the audience’s suspension of disbelief will suffer to a degree due to the Dunning–Kruger effect among those with knowledge of the domain, or that same effect may be canceled out by the so-called rule of cool.
The best/worst example of this I can think of is the Christian Bale movie Equilibrium (2002), where Bale’s main character doesn’t even wear armor at all, instead favoring some kind of gi or frog uniform from what I can tell. The gunkata “firearm martial art” conceit hand waves some of that away as its practitioners supposedly being much less likely to be in the line of fire, but it ends up being a bit too much like literal plot armor to be believable.
> Angus Macfadyen's character, Vice-Counsel DuPont, describes the fictional fighting style gun kata in the film:
>> Through analysis of thousands of recorded gunfights, the Cleric has determined that the geometric distribution of antagonists in any gun battle is a statistically-predictable element. The gun kata treats the gun as a total weapon, each fluid position representing a maximum kill zone, inflicting maximum damage on the maximum number of opponents, while keeping the defender clear of the statistically-traditional trajectories of return fire. By the rote mastery of this art, your firing efficiency will rise by no less than 120 percent. The difference of a 63 percent increased lethal proficiency makes the master of the gun katas an adversary not to be taken lightly.
> Kata (型, かた) is a Japanese word for standard forms of movements and postures in karate, jujutsu, aikido, and many other traditional martial arts. The gun kata shown in Equilibrium is a hybrid of [writer/director Kurt] Wimmer's own style of gun kata (invented in his backyard).
Gun kata is essentially a MacGuffin that takes the form of a fictional fighting technique, likely inspired by survivorship bias, but with little to no apparent basis in reality or actually existing fighting techniques, but that's not what it's for; rather, it films extremely well and sets up some decently well-done worldbuilding alongside some decently believable fighting sequence set pieces.
> Anthony Leong wrote of the gunfights in A Better Tomorrow,
>> Before 1986, Hong Kong cinema was firmly rooted in two genres: the martial arts film and the comedy. Gunplay was not terribly popular because audiences had considered it boring, compared to fancy kung fu moves or graceful swordplay of wuxia epics. What moviegoers needed was a new way to present gunplay—to show it as a skill that could be honed, integrating the acrobatics and grace of the traditional martial arts. And that's exactly what John Woo did. Using all of the visual techniques available to him (tracking shots, dolly-ins, slo-mo), Woo created beautifully surrealistic action sequences that were a 'guilty pleasure' to watch. There is also intimacy found in the gunplay—typically, his protagonists and antagonists will have a profound understanding of one another and will meet face-to-face, in a tense Mexican standoff where they each point their weapons at one another and trade words.
Tangentially related:
> Why “Cool” Military Gear Never Actually Works [video]
Also, weight is no longer an issue like it historically was. You used to march to a place and set up camp to fight; now you run patrols and missions. Soldiers need to carry packs and water and ammunition; every loadout will be heavy and cumbersome.
Transport and communications make heavy loadouts possible. Realistic sci fi would not have two armies sprinting at each other or dramatic last stands or light loadouts. Unfortunately that makes for extremely boring movies. People carrying 100 lbs of gear and ambushing each other, then sitting in cover and waiting for heavy fire support is not dramatic.
That said IMO there's a dearth of "heavies"- dress up some huge 7' guy with 4" thick plates of chunky armor and those leaf spring stilts and have him sprint around with a machine gun. That would be fun! If you have a massive population and elite soldiers then why does every single guy look incredibly normal?
Alao shoutout to edge of tomorrow for shaving the coolest power armor of any movie, even if it looked pretty dumb when they were just gliding around on wires. Tom Cruise sprinting in that getup looked awesome.
No cinematic Expanse-style Gatling gun vs inexplicably slow missile dogfights, just getting vapourised by something going 50km/s that was fired from hundreds of thousands of km away by something you never even saw.
The good news is at least those engines don't use physics we have access to - Inaros didn't need the whole rocks thing, he could have just fuelled up a freighter and brought it in at some fraction of c from outside the ecliptic. I don't care how good your railguns are, they won't hit something that has its own blueshift.
The thing is that space is big. Hundreds of thousands of kilometers is a short range, and 50 km/s is a low speed. Missiles appear slow, because they use the same engine technology as ships, which limits the acceleration they can achieve. Reaching 50 km/s at 50g takes over 100 seconds and is obvious to everyone in the general area. Railgun speeds are inconsistent in the setting, but firing them is also obvious, and random course corrections are an effective defense against them.
Your freighter trick would not have worked. The acceleration would have taken days or even weeks, depending on what kind of acceleration the ship can handle. And it would have been obvious to everyone in the solar system. That would have been plenty of time to send a fleet (that can accelerate faster) to intercept it.
And even in the books the missiles that killed the Canterbury closed 200,000km in eight minutes. That's nearly 200g and the closing speed would have been 800km/s. They'd go 20 miles in a single frame of the 24fps video of the event.
Even 50km/s is not a low speed if your defensive strategy is a machine gun. You have 1 second to go from a dinner plate sized cross section object at 50km to being dead, and if even if you did hit it with a bullet going say 2km/s the other way, which is a very fast bullet, if it was on target before, the bits will still hit you nearly as effectively. In fact, a better missile would disperse into a spray of fine metal pieces a few 10s of km away and be uninterceptible and cover a wider area in car you can try a dodge.
Seems to me like combat in the universe would be a lot less close-in dogfights and a lot more long range stealth kills by tiny relativistic bullets. And a lot more plausibly deniable "disappearances" in deep space. And I get it, don't get me wrong, rule of cool and all that.
And while we don't have those engines, the approximate same techniques probably apply to any spaceship combat we'll see in the next 100 years. Months of nothing slogging across nothingness then dead in a second out of nowhere. Unless radar really improves and stealth doesn't, I guess.
And surface impacts from deep space will make current ICBM concerns seem quaintly sedate, even if we can't get to relativistic speeds.
My overall impression from the books was that the typical engagement distance is from seconds to tens of seconds at railgun speed (relative to the target), whatever that speed is. Anything beyond that, and random course corrections would make hitting anything with an unguided round effectively impossible, no matter how accurate your weapons are. And if you hit a missile at that distance, the random corrections will probably also get you out of harm's way.
You certainly won't have time to pirouette about firing multiple guns photogenically while a bunch of missiles and the ship are all in one frame.
The missiles seem a lot scarier than the railguns which you actually might be able to dodge given the ranges, as long as you saw the firing happen. Not least because a solid rocket motor actually could do quite a lot of that today.
Individual space battles might be measured in years, even in the participant's timeframe.
"So who won that space battle out by Ceres?"
"Dunno, it's only been 3 years."
5-10% of light speed won't really change timeframes much (the Lorentz factor is like 0.5% at 0.1c).
If there were a major fight that weren't just a sneak attack and involved fleet on fleet, I imagine it would look like swarms of super fast autonomous missiles rushing in and trying to take each other out faster then you could blink. Any that got through the opposing swarm would proceed to absolutely shred the squishy, slow human containers due to their speed and agility.
We don't have those engines, so it would probably just be a bit like a modern naval engagement would be today: a long range missile fight between ships that have negligible speed relative to the missiles. Except there's no such thing as terminal velocity, the ships are made of tissue paper and your CIWS equivalent has orders of magnitude less time with the target in range.
Then when your crew is braindead it uses little maneuvering thrusters to spin you around and takes you back to the point of engagement, so your ship/secrets can be salvaged.
I suppose a simple neutron bomb missile would be more efficient for this, and wouldn’t involve a long elliptic trip, so long as it didn’t fry your systems and data storage media.
Edit: I asked ChatGPT and apparently there’s no sci-fi involving a missile that functions to latch and accelerate the target to enough Gs to kill the occupants. Did I invent this just now?
It's not quite the same, but there's a short story by Alastair Reynolds (I think in Galactic North) where a missile forces a ship to run forever, chasing it out of the galaxy as the universe ages around them (I think).
Art design in the movie "Alien" (was it Ron Cobb?) borrowed from samurai armor for the space suits. (And of course Darth Vader himself was inspired in large part from samurai armor.)
Lazy films and video games since though seem to often just recycle a certain look. Perhaps an unpopular opinion but the "anime look" has been fatiguing to this person's taste for a couple of decades now as well.
I thought it was Moebius (alias Jean Giraud) who designed the Alien spacesuits? E.g., see [1]. (Perhaps he did borrow bits of samurai armor styling, I'm not disputing that.)
[1] https://filmsketchr.blogspot.com/2013/04/alien-concept-art-b...
Minority Report was meticulously researched, for example, but it had physical disks moved around (movement) and the guy's security credentials weren't rotated, and he was able to get into a lot of places, like his former place to steal the precog etc.
Data from Star Trek, or "the Computer" are quaint. Data is just one Android while you can easily download AI models to unlimited machines and robots. And "the Computer" speaks like a ro-bot but the movie "Her" is much more like what AI is becoming. The Holodeck might be closer.
Here is what a realistic movie of our future would look like:
About the only threat, in this system (and it's a serious one) is that the cost for producing bot swarms with malicious intents, that anyone with few resources could release a bot swarm to work at scale across multiple platforms, amassing gameable metrics such as karma / clout / reputation, as sleeper cells, gradually shifting discussions. They would dominate 99% of the content everywhere, turning the Internet and the entire world into a Dark Forest. Anyone who shows up would be exploited over time, because it's cheap and easy:https://ystrickler.medium.com/the-dark-forest-theory-of-the-...
In the short term (i.e. by 2030) bots will have infiltrated every platform and social network, even those which might try to close themselves off, because their existing users would run bots in their accounts to gain an advantage, until being "just yourself" un-augmented would get you poor results. Since there is no way to tell if someone is human or not (just as if you'd use rybka chess program for one move every 10 or so), people would just default to "being enhanced" or "having assistants".
Swarms of agents / bots / robots are the thing to look out for. They can coordinate at scale, execute long term plans relentlessly and imperceptibly and never forget what they're going after. (And when swarming can be perfected in the real world, you might get this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-2tpwW0kmU)
So yeah, sci-fi movies can be exciting, but in a "terminator" way where malicious destruction is the default, and only because the cost is so cheap to wreak havoc at scale.
In any case, the idea that you'd need "armor" or even try to explore the universe yourself, is laughable. Bots and drones will be built to fight wars, explore space, etc. A lot of von neumann probes, etc. They can build an entire "civilization" of terraforming planets over thousands of years, but they wouldn't need oxygen etc etc. Out in space, they might have an actual purpose and plan that is very different from humans. But for humans to go travel there would probably be very unlikely, many people (like Rogan) don't even believe humans could have survived the trip to our own moon, due to space radiation.
They really show why the armor technology was driven in the direction it was, and how weapons and fighting evolved to compensate.
Also Matt over at Schola Gladiatoria[2] recently had some videos on his reproduction plate armor, including one on the gaps[3] in the armor.
At least in the context of Dune, as highlighted in the article, the armor designers probably should have looked more towards medieval armor technology.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/@tods_workshop/
[2]: https://www.youtube.com/@scholagladiatoria
[3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51oN1Z0rzPM
Try selecting one: Wrap around gives better protection, at the expense if movement, weight, and a lack if airflow.
Side panels give better protection, at the expense on movement, weight, and a lack if airflow.
Trauma plates give better protection at the expense of...
You can armor someone like the LA Bank Robbery, but they can not fight.
The trade-offs are not easy to replicate because we are all made differently. A military can sculpt their warriors until they are all the same shape, but they lose other things.
Overweight cops especially have issues with the trade-offs in their body armor.
Many police officers who responded to the incident in question sustained significant injuries.
The large green portions of Master Chief's armor is primarily for housing equipment and systems. It has a nuclear reactor in it, computing facilities that rival starships, and enough motors or hydraulics or "space magic" actuators so that Mister chef can shot-put cars. It won't have mobility problems because it's power armor, the suit IS the mobility. The suit canonically survives reentry primarily by becoming entirely rigid and pretending the impact would not turn the occupant into goo. It's a suit of Iron Man armor.
Halo meanwhile has both UNSC Marine "armor", which is basically a plate of steel hung over your chest and nothing else, and ODST trooper armor which would have likely been better for this post, as they are actual standard equipment, while there are only a few hundred sets of Mjollnir-IV armor.
The Mass effect commentary suffers from the same problem: All the "flexible" stuff on an N7 suit are magic material that provide ample ballistic protection. They also massively overemphasize hand to hand combat for the Mass Effect universe. Sure you might take a rifle butt to the chest, but 99% of the threat in that universe is a microgram of metal fired at a significant fraction the speed of light.
For the Dune armors, the complaints about "rigid" stuff bending are accurate, but the swordplay in Dune isn't really comparable to how we protected against middle ages swordplay, because the shields completely change everything up. Shields ARE effective against a sword, if it travels fast enough. You don't armor against an actual sword blow delivering 100J because that will be stopped by the shield. You don't land a brutal slice on your enemies, you slip inside their shield and gently slide a knife between their ribs. A stab proof vest in this universe should be entirely effective armor, but instead, no armor in Dune is ever shown to do anything. Dune 2 had MUCH more rigid and all-encompassing armor for people who expected to get shot, not that it stopped them from getting domed and stabbed.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_Skin
Even when the humans got starships, the crew were dressed and acted essentially like navy.
Made the show somehow more believable.
It probably also helped the budget.
I wonder if that hints at a "root cause" of the problem, or rather an additional constraint that movie armor is subject to and real armor is not: Prop design is all about which associations to evoke in the audience and which to avoid.
If you want to show some futuristic soldiers in hi-tech armor, you probably want to deliberately avoid any association with medieval armor - even if from a purely technical standpoint, taking those designs and upgrading them with modern/future tech would be the best fit for your soldiers.
Surprised it didn't mention Iron Man. That is almost certainly the most popular of sci-fi body armor at the moment.
I, personally, think the biggest conceit with the armor narrative is that it can work as well as it does, period. This is touched in the article about how they manage to keep melee weapons as focus points. Realistically, no armor is protecting you from modern gun fire. And many hits that are survived by the likes of iron man would kill the person inside, regardless of if the armor survived.
> I want to be clear that I am generally limiting my scope here to rigid non-powered armor. Power (or powered) armor – that is, armor that moves with built-in servos and motors, rather than purely under muscle power – is its own topic that we’ll leave for another day.
https://acoup.blog/tag/game-of-thrones/
Does what it says on the tin.
These are often demonstrated by protecting a hand from a hammer blow, and I know from experience they are very adequate for protecting knees and elbows from trees, hard ground, and moderately pointy rocks. However, it's unclear if the shear-thickening is significant enough to protect against an actual sword strike or knife stab, and very unlikely that they could withstand a modern projectile weapon.
The idea is proven, but would need some further materials breakthrough to approach the level of sci-fi armor.
As seen on modern EOD technicians vs infantry there's clearly still ergo-economics at play on how to armor combatants.
I'm not sure I would say armor is fully solved yet
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plot_armor
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PlotArmor
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RuleOfCool
The best/worst example of this I can think of is the Christian Bale movie Equilibrium (2002), where Bale’s main character doesn’t even wear armor at all, instead favoring some kind of gi or frog uniform from what I can tell. The gunkata “firearm martial art” conceit hand waves some of that away as its practitioners supposedly being much less likely to be in the line of fire, but it ends up being a bit too much like literal plot armor to be believable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frog_(fastening)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandarin_collar
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Film/Equilibrium
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equilibrium_(film)
> Angus Macfadyen's character, Vice-Counsel DuPont, describes the fictional fighting style gun kata in the film:
>> Through analysis of thousands of recorded gunfights, the Cleric has determined that the geometric distribution of antagonists in any gun battle is a statistically-predictable element. The gun kata treats the gun as a total weapon, each fluid position representing a maximum kill zone, inflicting maximum damage on the maximum number of opponents, while keeping the defender clear of the statistically-traditional trajectories of return fire. By the rote mastery of this art, your firing efficiency will rise by no less than 120 percent. The difference of a 63 percent increased lethal proficiency makes the master of the gun katas an adversary not to be taken lightly.
> Kata (型, かた) is a Japanese word for standard forms of movements and postures in karate, jujutsu, aikido, and many other traditional martial arts. The gun kata shown in Equilibrium is a hybrid of [writer/director Kurt] Wimmer's own style of gun kata (invented in his backyard).
Gun kata is essentially a MacGuffin that takes the form of a fictional fighting technique, likely inspired by survivorship bias, but with little to no apparent basis in reality or actually existing fighting techniques, but that's not what it's for; rather, it films extremely well and sets up some decently well-done worldbuilding alongside some decently believable fighting sequence set pieces.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacGuffin
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MacGuffin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Set_piece
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_fu
> Anthony Leong wrote of the gunfights in A Better Tomorrow,
>> Before 1986, Hong Kong cinema was firmly rooted in two genres: the martial arts film and the comedy. Gunplay was not terribly popular because audiences had considered it boring, compared to fancy kung fu moves or graceful swordplay of wuxia epics. What moviegoers needed was a new way to present gunplay—to show it as a skill that could be honed, integrating the acrobatics and grace of the traditional martial arts. And that's exactly what John Woo did. Using all of the visual techniques available to him (tracking shots, dolly-ins, slo-mo), Woo created beautifully surrealistic action sequences that were a 'guilty pleasure' to watch. There is also intimacy found in the gunplay—typically, his protagonists and antagonists will have a profound understanding of one another and will meet face-to-face, in a tense Mexican standoff where they each point their weapons at one another and trade words.
Tangentially related:
> Why “Cool” Military Gear Never Actually Works [video]
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42285468