Excuse me while I slip on a Trojan

Nothing has ever been awesomer...

Great!

Now we just need to add some strength-enhancing servo motors and a micro-fusion powerplant...

May...be...you'll think of me...when...you are all...alone... *hums*

This is apropos of nothing, but I just thought I'd note with pride that the Atheist Experience blog has arrived: we've been trolled by none other than DaveScot!

It was pointed out by a friend who wears body armor for a living that this suit is patently ridiculous. The weight of it alone makes it completely unworkable in real combat situations.

Imagine you are in Iraq (or appearing in Armed and Famous in Muncie IN) for example and you have to run 1 mile then fight and then run 1 mile all while wearing this huge amount of weight and your full combat kit, plus weapons.

He should be marketing to the Sci-Fi convention crowd. Halo fans would make is fortune.

What do you think the shipping would cost to get one of those to the other side of the planet? :P

What?! It doesn't include a camera or an MP3 player?! Pffft, just wait until iBodyArmor comes out, I guess, because this crap ain't gonna cut it.

I wouldn't want to fall in water over 6 feet deep in that bloody thing. Or have to run for my life.

This guy is completely nuts. I watched that documentary about his bear suit a few years ago. He started off with modified football equipment and had his friends bash logs into him. After several tries and a few broken ribs he worked his way up to a huge suit that he could barely stand up in and convinced a grizzly to knock him around. Completely insane!

Well, that's not quite true. The zoo or animal sanctuary that actually had a grizzly bear in captivity let him put the suit in the cage with the bear, but they didn't let him stay in the suit. The suit apparently did pretty well, but it did take a pounding.

He could move around in the Ursus suits - he just couldn't move much. Or get up if he fell down. Still, it did take a couple of tons of swinging log from 20 feet up to the chest with no damage to the occupant, along with hunting arrows, solid slugs, and sledgehammer blows, so not too bad. The tests he put the big white suit through are a joy to watch. Good work for a junkyard man.

This suit would maybe be useful for soldiers that don't move around too much or don't have to carry a full kit. Checkpoint guards? Gunners on Hummers? Heck, they should at least look at the materials.

Troy Hurtubise is AWESOME. Crazy, but fantastic. The big white suit even had a bite plate on one arm to "directly measure the pressure of a grizzly bear's bite." How crazy is that? And a blackbox recorder in the helmet, so he could tell his kid "Don't be stupid like your old man, gettin' into this B**LS**T!" as the bear claws through to him...

CS

Ah, the joys of YouTube.

Here's a clip from Project:Grizzly, in which you can see how Troy developed his early suits of armor. The first ones are pretty bad - you can see the shredding potential, all loose plates and hockey padding and stuff - but he takes some serious hits and keeps getting up. Not too shabby.

Here.

The original music is better. And in the original, as I recall, he gets up from the tumbles down the cliff and the truck hits.

CS

He started off with modified football equipment and had his friends bash logs into him.

I beg to differ.

He was turned to steel - in the great magnetic field - when he traveled time, for the future of mankind.

Give it glowing red night-vision eyes, and we'll talk.

Hey, are any of the guards at the creationist museum going to be wearing those things? We could go guard-tipping. Hehehehe.

Joshua -

Go here and look under Portfolio. You can buy that suit. It's a few thousand dollars, but hey! Ultimate badass!

CS

Troy Hurtubise is AWESOME. Crazy, but fantastic. The big white suit even had a bite plate on one arm to "directly measure the pressure of a grizzly bear's bite." How crazy is that? And a blackbox recorder in the helmet, so he could tell his kid "Don't be stupid like your old man, gettin' into this B**LS**T!" as the bear claws through to him...

And the best thing about it is that he'll almost certainly never encounter a bear in it. So far as I could tell from the documentary, Troy is (understandably) consumed with terror any time he sees an unrestrained bear within a mile of him. Including black bears munching on garbage.

His entire life is a cycle of: spend three more years updating suit, helicopter into the wilderness with a platoon of anti-bear combat specialists, put on suit, notice a bear grazing three hilltops away, take off suit, leave hastily and say, "Hmm...I'd better add in the inertial damping field and adrenaline IV drip, and test it by jumping off a skyscraper. Then I'll be ready."

If he learned to play nicely, the other kids wouldn't hit him.

"Klaatu barada nikto"

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Covers everything but the fingertips and major joints? Well then, shoot, it's still useless as goalie protection for women's lacrosse.

What? Those little balls really pack a punch.

Troy Hurtubise also has a crackpot side to him. Wikipedia goes into his 'Angel Light' and 'God Light' inventions here.

Another video can be found here.
Doesn't seem to healthy after he gets shot in the chest.

*too, obviously.
I like Skatje's take on it.

At least he's not trying to bond with the bears, a la Grizzly Man.

Troy is (understandably) consumed with terror any time he sees an unrestrained bear within a mile of him. Including black bears munching on garbage.

I don't really agree with that view of the documentary. Whenever one of the black bears in the garbage pile comes within 10 or 15 feet of him, he stops and puts his head down - but they leave him alone. He doesn't go running from them (which is more likely to get him killed). He stays right there. Brave, or crazy? (Probably both - proportions unknown!)

And he wasn't in the white suit when it was shot in the documentary. The top half falls off after it's shot. The balloon inside the suit wasn't touched. No penetration.

CS

Oh, good. More "Grizzly Man" bashing. Yet another deep thinker convinced he learned all he needed to know from Werner Herzog's generous and understanding documentary.

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Okay, that was uncalled for. Apologies to George.

But still, I get so irritated that people see "Grizzly Man" and just automatically buy into the director's premise, which is that Tim Treadwell was insane and/or an idiot, grizzlies are deadly killing machines, and Tim was just asking for it (and ended up hurting the animals he supposedly loved).

The technique director Herzog used was the visual equivalent of quote mining, and he had an agenda in the making of the documentary. In the end, his work was not just unfriendly to Treadwell, it was unfriendly to grizzlies, to nature itself, to the people interviewed in the film ... and to the viewer.

If you look at the editing of the film, you can see an obvious attempt throughout to make everybody involved, except the bush pilot who ferried Treadwell to his site every summer, to look mentally unbalanced. The whole thing pandered to the prejudices and fears of the audience - and reinforced them.

Herzog made money, though (the film grossed $3.5 million in theaters worldwide, and this was before video sales), so it was very friendly to HIM.

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Hank, that's not quite the image i got out of Grizzly Man, although i can see how you might've.

the film certainly wasn't any compliment to Treadwell, although on the other hand, i think the director's own prejudices came through quite clearly. it seemed to me quite unabashedly partisan and subjective; the fact that the movie was Herzog's opinion of Treadwell, as opposed to anything like an unbiased evaluation of Treadwell's life and works, seemed fairly clear to me. the fact that he was grinding an axe was clearly communicated, i think, even if his reasons for doing so were noticeably left unmentioned.

nor did i sense any anti-nature or anti-grizzly sentiment in it. perhaps i'm just cinematically tone-deaf, but the movie seemed to me to represent grizzlies (and the nature they live in) as largely unconcerned with humans and dismissive of us --- as things to respect for their power to kill us deader'n dead and not afraid to do so, yet certainly not actively malicious either.

and, to be perfectly honest --- whether cinematically quote-mined or not, i must confess i have a hard time seeing anyone who would deliberately approach a wild grizzly as closely as Treadwell did as entirely mentally stable. he was perhaps not an idiot, but surely less than wise.

Troy Hurtubise also has a crackpot side to him.

Side? Isn't his crackpottery the whole reason why he's interesting?

Hank:
In the end, his work was not just unfriendly to Treadwell, it was unfriendly to grizzlies, to nature itself, to the people interviewed in the film ... and to the viewer.
No, I didn't get that at all. Herzog, if anything, tends to be far gentler than most directors, & he gets deeply involved in the subject matter.
& let's face it: anyone who goes into deep isolation in the wilderness to run w/a pack of animals that are so powerful & so dangerous, well, that's a little out there. & the only friends to talk to were the bears & his camcorder. I'd go a little nuts myself.
I learned a great deal from the film. But I'm still going to keep some distance between myself & a grizzly. As much as possible.

Body armor has a time and place in combat, but the way they got us so overencumbered in Iraq with IBA, SAPI plates, side plates, blast belts, blah blah blah, it sure makes it hard to chase down that guy who setoff an IED then jumped a fence.

Now we just need to add some strength-enhancing servo motors and a micro-fusion powerplant...

Have you been playing Fallout Tactics? "Advanced Power Armor"? LOL! (I haven't played it, but I've watched my brother play it for hours.)

Heh. Power armor isn't that insane anymore. Now, non-powered... But seriously, they have stuff now that fractures when struck, instead of allowing penetration, layered you might do pretty well for quite a few shots. There is also shock gel, which nearly instantly hardens around a projectile as it enters, slowing it to a stop, which could be used in the the material that allowed the joints to remain flexible (not to mention probably being useful as a gel layer inside, so that the shock wave from a bomb blast didn't kill you, which is *usually* what does). There are classes of transparent metals that might be useful for face protection, or at least minimize the needed thickness of the poly stuff, etc. Now... This isn't to say that they have a practical prototype, just that it might be possible to make one. However, it might not be good for anything other than SWAT, since it would probably be useless against military level weapons. Then again, most of that class of stuff the *existing* armor is useless against, if you take a direct hit.

I suspect it won't be too long before some class of powered armor actually makes it on the scene, though its probably going to be the big hulking stuff, not form fitting, initially. Its not like they don't have the walking systems down for them in robots, with speed inprovements going on year by year, so motion may not be a problem. What is a problem is that every "new" tech being developed is always "just short" of usable when you *need* it.

I can finally stop worrying about armed elephants!

This has nothing to do with the nifty new Robocop suit, but everything to do with "Grizzly Man":

http://www.travisandjonathan.com/GrizzlyBearMan.html

Troy is (understandably) consumed with terror any time he sees an unrestrained bear within a mile of him. Including black bears munching on garbage.

I don't really agree with that view of the documentary. Whenever one of the black bears in the garbage pile comes within 10 or 15 feet of him, he stops and puts his head down - but they leave him alone. He doesn't go running from them (which is more likely to get him killed). He stays right there. Brave, or crazy? (Probably both - proportions unknown!)

Sure, he's brave. But he's also clearly terrified, which is why the bravery is notable. The original grizzly attack left him with, er, arctophobia, and he deals with it by forcing himself to get near bears, while building a super-suit so he'll never, ever, be in that situation again.

This suit weighs, what, 40 lbs? Isn't that equivalent to a medieval suit of plate, with all the mail and padding? Seems to me that it's possible to fight in this, if it was possible to fight in plate. Probably going need those IFVs for transport to the battlefield though.

PZ - Catchy post title! I'm always amazed with the titles you create.

If you look at the editing of the film, you can see an obvious attempt throughout to make everybody involved, except the bush pilot who ferried Treadwell to his site every summer, to look mentally unbalanced.

Ultimately, all great directors project themselves into their films!

Seems like a reasonable idea, but given the mobile nature of the Iraqi conflict armour that heavy isnt going to be much use. If it is used, it would be best for defensive positions (checkpoints etc) and perhaps some form of heavy mechanised infantry with vehicles to assult heavy targets when airstrikes are too risky.
In any case, I thought DARPA was working on a similar thing with carbon nanotube armour, which would make it much lighter protection, but also far more expensive

40 pounds? That's nothing, my turnout gear weighs more than that even when I'm not dragging a hundred feet of hose. If soldiers can't fight effectively with an extra 40 pounds (less than that, because they wouldn't need their current armor) they need to do a few more pushups in the mornings.

Now we just need to add some strength-enhancing servo motors and a micro-fusion powerplant...

Have you been playing Fallout Tactics? "Advanced Power Armor"? LOL! (I haven't played it, but I've watched my brother play it for hours.)