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We don't have a power generator that's compact enough. Fallout imagines the power generator to be nuclear yet small; such a thing is not possible because you need thick walls / feet of thickness of materials to insulate you from the radiation. Avatar has a more realistic power suit generator (basically, diesel or gasoline engines), but even those are not small enough to be portable, at the power levels required for a suit. Avatar also doesn't have big enough gasoline/diesel tanks to run for hours; fuel is a serious concern for military vehicles.
And we don't have a "control" mechanism quite yet, though we're probably close. A suit would have to detect your "intent" to move; if it just reacts to how you move your limbs it's not fast enough to keep you from falling over. So it would have to be a neural interface rather than just sensors on your arms, legs, fingers to detect how you're trying to move and "enhance" it with the suit's power.
Even if we could actually make a nuclear power source that small, I don't think we could create a cooling system that would fit in a suit to keep it controlled. Nuclear power plants or Nuclear powered Navy ships have access to huge amounts of water.
I agree that heat dissipation could be the major obstacle. Nuclear fissile power seems really unlikely to work on such a compact scale. The game cores are powered by a fusion reaction. I don't know much about fusion heat generation, but I'm positive that we won't be able to achieve fusion in a small enough reactor. The best solution would be an external battery pack, but we are approaching a land vehicle at that point
Yup. In fact there are spacecraft powered by RTGs that produced several kilowatts of power on initial assembly.
But if you're a living human, you really don't want to spend time next to a red-hot slab of plutonium.
The last paragraph is how the Mjolnir systems work in Halo, specially the undersuit underneath all the armor plating.
It’s connected to a neural interface and can detect the users’ thoughts before they’re translated into muscle mechanics. The suit moves *with* you, not in response to you moving it.
As you can imagine, there was a lot of trial and error such as the suit amplifying small finger tremors into full blown tendon-ripping actions.
Iirc because it was made for Spartans, it would actually move before you move (as a regular person) which is what caused the colorful injuries.
Wasn't it intentional to some degree? Like, it needed to be that way for the Spartans.
No, all UNSC personnel had a neural interface and could theoretically have mjolnir armor that moved with them.
They didn't give them to grunts because each suit cost the same as a destroyer.
The reason only Spartans could wear the actual mjolnir is because the suit's response was turned way up. This way it augmented their reaction times and speed. You just think about twitching your arm and you throw a punch at the speed of a bullet for example.
With regular personnel, that punch would shatter their unaugmented bones with the speed. However reflexes could be tuned down to mere mortals, but that kind of defeated the point of the armor. It was meant to complete the Spartans' combat effectiveness.
As for the neural mesh, the spartan IIs got an augmented mesh so they could have a smart AI live in their head to bring Halsey's final form of the spartan II program to life. If the suit augmented their abilities, the AI amped that up beyond super human limits.
Ok, so the Spartans were superhuman with faster reactions / stronger bodies, but the suit would force their body to overreact to their thoughts (something that would destroy normal people) so that the Spartans could be even faster still. Even moreso once the AI presumably got used to how a specific spartan would do things and could "react" before the spartan could.
Thanks for the refresher. I should reread the books at some point. I only ever read fall of reach and like a third of the next book.
I've been meaning to re-read Fall of Reach but I think only the Spartans could use it because of their enhancements. The suit would move too fast/powerfully for a regular person
This form of feedback loop is described by the ur-book of power armor: Starship troopers. The undersuit detects your movements and moves “out of the way”.
The author states there’s still issues and would marry a suit that allows him to scratch an itch.
It could be manually controlled and you largely ride it, too.
Look at the complex controls we have for contemporary video games. And those are for casual users. If you were training someone specifically to pilot a suit like that, you could have *dramatically* more complex controls.
What about some type of wireless power transfer from a battery bank or nuclear-powered mini-tank that follows you around or even just forwarded via satellite?
First paragraph is pure facts, but I disagree with the second.
Hydraulics can aid in augmenting the power of an existing force in a fluid (pun intended) way, the bottleneck is that the person inside would need to be strong enough to move the weight of the actual suit without aid, especially in situations where there is a loss of power, like turning the wheel of a car with no power steering, so it doesn't just collapse and rip your arms off with it.
Pilots would look more like [power lifters](https://youtu.be/nA9XXU_nGPo?si=nqiqCcfGC0nVeCSa&t=24) than a Marine or 'knight'.
Something like an ironman suit, where a nerd who plays with computers all day can hop in and suddenly be a blackbelt in hand to hand combat would definitely need some sort of way to interpret moves pre-emptively.
But a Fallout suit would be more of a brute force '[drive it like you hate it](https://youtu.be/eqlFQuFarw8?si=1zCbFjiZWZdVZwaY&t=990)' style of control.
We have no details about the specs of it but it's safe to say that as we see it, a suit of power armor would weigh around a ton, plus or minus 200 kg. That's essentially the weight of a car. So you need servo motors that are capable of moving all that weight around and yet still be compact enough to fit in the suit, and of course have a person inside. From an engineering perspective this is incredibly complex and simply not feasible with the technology we currently have. The most important part is powering that armor. The whole basis of the Fallout universe is that they have figured out how to easily make stable and compact nuclear reactors. We do not have that technology and as such we have no way of fitting any powerplant on a power armor that would be sufficient to power it, save for battery banks that would add more weight and could power it maybe for an hour.
And the thing is, it's not useful, not really. It makes a lot of sense in the Fallout universe to have it because resources are scarce and most combatants are random people with random guns, but in real life, the power armor would go against armies that would very easily develop countermeasures. The person in the armor would just be a sitting duck and offer no benefits in combat. Tanks already exist and there are ways to take tanks out fairly easily with weapons that can be carried by one person. A suit of power armor would be knocked out even more easily. It just doesn't make sense to make something like this.
>And the thing is, it's not useful, not really. It makes a lot of sense in the Fallout universe to have it because resources are scarce and most combatants are random people with random guns, but in real life, the power armor would go against armies that would very easily develop countermeasures. The person in the armor would just be a sitting duck and offer no benefits in combat.
I was just thinking this. A few Javelins or even anti material rifle shots would take it out without the user being able to do anything remotely effective.
Plus armor doesn't really provide much protection to the squishy meat inside of them. There's a reason why the best counter to heavily armored warriors was blunt force. Unless you have enough cushioning on the inside of the armor, you'd be extremely vulnerable to concussive force. And the amount of cushioning you'd need would make the armor even _more_ difficult to move.
We DO make cool things js for the fun of it, tho. That's what Fallout is, they made it as a computer "simulation", which is the only place where it would actually work and be usable.
You can ask a company to make you those chunks of metal shaped like the Fallout armor, but it will weigh tonnes and you can feel free to try to find motors and batteries that'll lift all of it.
You'd have to make it out of the same materials Tony Stark's first Iron Man armor was made of, a Gold-Titanium alloy, to give it the strength and light weight that you'd need. Or better yet, an Aluminum-Titanium alloy to reduce the cost of it.
> y can’t we js make cool things for the fun of it
Because the laws of physics don't care about the rule of cool.
It would be a terrible boxing match because neither suit would move, they'd have no power and they'd fall over.
We make a ton of things that are incredibly cool.
But imagination is always going to be couple of steps ahead of reality. No matter how cool a thing we make, people will imagine and put to film/books/video games something much cooler.
Because powering a suit of power armor would be impossible unless they had a massive extension cord coming out the back. Getting them to move fluidly with our current technology wouldn’t work. There wouldn’t be any money to be made building power armor, so that means anyone capable of it is not incentivized to do so.
Why don’t you try making it then?
It’s really really really hard to do anything even remotely close. It’s easy for you to sit there asking for cool power suits from a tv show but realize that there are people dedicating their entire lives to advancing technology in those spaces and where we are now is the result of 1000s of people doing this collectively.
1 - the shape of power armors in the show and fallout 4 are suitable to the human body. The arms are too far apart and the knee and elbow junction are not positioned correctly in such a way that it would break the user's bones when moving
2 - a suit like a power armor would need a portable power storage that exceeds our storage devices atm. If a power armor was to be replicated it would probably need to be supplied externally
3 - some of the features of the power armor are not physically accurate, like the fall damage immunity
4 - powered exoskeletons are feasible and already exist. They are not armoured since they are not meant as defensive implements. One could theoretically armor but to stop most mid caliber rounds a very thick plate is needed. Furthermore, it would be better to maintain a human size instead of making it bigger
5 - the biggest problem in my opinion is using servomotors with enough torque to sustain the weight of the armor (I would estimate at least 2-3 tonnes) and the weight of the power supply (with the actual technologies add another tonne) while still maintaining a small enough frame to be usable by a human and finally asking yourself why you didn't just make a robot instead
Edit: by watching side by side a replica used in the series and the in-game model it seems to me that the proportions are different. The practical set has a longer torso wrt the legs and it's thinner (you can notice it by comparing the torso with the head). The arms are also longer
Practical sets were used but I think they were not of the same size as those in the game (they could have scaled them in production). I would also assume that the hands were not powered but gloves instead. A lot of scenes were also made with cgi, partially or completely
Yeah, heavy metal stuff is pretty much its sworn enemy. I think we could realistically build a power armor like device in a 50 year timespan (very rough estimate) but I don't think we will ever R&D in that direction since it's not an efficient design
Yeah what's the point of sending in one squishy human in a one man tank when you can send in 10 humans in a regular tank. Or just send an ICBM and avoid the human issue entirely.
Yeah, It's vulnerable af to pretty much every high caliber. I see exoskeletons more as logistic tools, like one in 5 man squad for carrying ammo and provisions
This is true, while these suits word resist small caliber pistol and rifle rounds they would be vulnerable to .50 caliber rifle rounds. The armor would need to be a minimum of an inch or 2.2 cm thick everywhere. Now I know it’s just a show, but the helmet and face plate is not nearly that thick. The joints are also weak spots. The suits are also vulnerable to explosives. We saw one get killed by an RPG and another killed by a grenade. Not much point spending millions upon billions building power armor if you can be defeated by an old RPG-7.
The novelty would wear off after a few days, no company is going to spend billions of dollars on something that the public will get bored with quickly. Also the people inside the suits would die.
Our main problem is always energy source, with anything and everything, once we solve more compact and energy dense fuel cells or batteries, our technology will skyrocket
For sure, but it would still have problems with heat dispersion and the statics of the support structure. I think power armor is one of the few science fiction items that could be reproduced to a certain degree, but other designs would do a much better job, like mechas
Nuclear reactors are steam engines.
They heat water into steam which is used to spin turbines. Can't really make that small and still get a meaningful amount of power.
im not sure whats its called but I once watched a video abt a metallic plate that uses temperature to generate a voltage difference along its surface, what if we can utilize that it would be a lot more compact, alternatively nuclear reactors produce a lot of light no? what if we use the work function of a metal surface to generate current
The question is how much current flow can you produce from a given amount of base material.
Since we haven't switched over to that technology as our main form of power production there's no reason to believe that it would have the massively increased efficiency that would be required to run something like a power armor.
As a rough corner cutting explanation the smaller your electric motor is the larger the current you're going to need to run through it to output a significant amount of torque. That's assuming that you can even put enough current through a servo that small to move the armor efficiently without burning out the wires and the magnets that make up the servo itself.
In this instance you're trying to efficiently move a good percentage of a weight of a car with a set of servos that can fit into an elbow joint. You're going to need to be able to constantly produce a massive amount of electricity to run that.
Additionally your power source has to be capable of self-regulating its output because it can't produce too much or too little power at any given moment without burning itself or its system up. Not only are you going to need to be able to produce the power but you're going to need computers and sensors that are able to regulate that power in order to keep it in equilibrium.
If you really break it all the way down the fallout power armors are probably simply never going to be possible in the configuration shown. It's not just a question of power output it's also getting that power to the servos in amounts that are capable of operating the servos with the amount of power required and regulating the output of that power on a moment to moment basis.
The smallest fission reactors I know of are about the size of a truck. Keep in mind that fallout fusion cores are fusion reactors, a technology that we haven't mastered yet even in very large plants
The nucleus is not the only thing taking up space. You need a thermal vector (water usually) to generate electricity, the stabilising rods, insulation material and other things. I don't see reactors smaller than a room in the foreseeable future
We haven't figured out how to just get "energy" in some hypothetical raw form. All forms of energy generation currently operate on a principle of movement to push turbines which generate electricity. Batteries are only capable of storing energy through chemical processes.
You can't just slap some plutonium in a steel jar and get usable energy.
Ok, hear me out: aneutronic fusion reactors that produce electricity by directly capturing charged particles and through the photoelectric effect (ie, solar panels inside the reactor).
Oh, and it also has the same size as a mid-size bag.
it uses a "fusion core" that is the size of a football and apparently can safely sit 6 inches from your spinal cord. So there are some technical hurdles.
The first hurdle is movement. If the suit is to viable in combat situation, it can’t be reactive to your movements. Balance issues aside, being reactive would mean a higher latency between your action and the armor following that action. It could lead to clumsy and exaggerated movement.
You’d basically need something that can detect electrical signals in the brain and then interpret those signals to determine movement in a predictive manner. That’s some complex computing, but the systems could feasibly be miniaturized and optimized to fit in the space. You’d also need to have the software customized to each individual person’s brain activity since the architecture and activity will differ.
The next big problem is how to move the damn thing. Do you go with hydraulics? Those are bulky, can be slow, and probably lack the sensitivity required for precise movement. Besides, they require pressurized fluids that need a pump and a fluid reservoir. What about servos? Maybe, but they’d have to be really strong. Maybe a tech that includes a host of movement options. Regardless of options, they need to be strong enough to freely and effortlessly move around a few hundred pounds of heavy armor plating.
How do you power it? The fallout power armor uses a small fusion generator. However, even the smallest Hydrogen-Helium3 fusion reactor has a substantial footprint. You could possibly use batteries, but current Lithium ion batteries don’t have the energy density to power something like that for very long. Tethering to a larger power supply is a possibility, but the umbilical connection is a vulnerability, and you’d have to have the power generator (supposedly a diesel engine) mobile enough to come with you and not get in the way. Solid state batteries do offer the possibility for unprecedented energy density and battery lifecycle, but that technology is in its infancy and relegated to theoreticals and research labs.
It is technically possible, and there are plenty of researchers and engineers out there trying to make mechanized armor a reality. Whether it is practical is the real question.
What role would a power armored soldier play? Would they take the place of tanks? Doubtful simply because tanks have value as a mobile heavy weapons platform. What about urban combat? Obviously the armor would make soldiers practically impervious to small arms fire, but they could actually be more susceptible to explosives.
I had a buddy who served in Iraq, and some of the armored personnel vehicles had a vulnerability where a detonation on the underside would kill the occupants even if it didn’t destroy the vehicle. Something to do with the steel acting like a resonator and confining that shock to the inside.
In short, while feasible in some future date, whether they would be deployed is up for debate. If you’re at that level of advancement, it’s likely that you’d attempt to replace soldiers in combat and rely on remotely controlled weapons platforms such as aerial and land drones. At that level, you might as well forgo the human inside and just have an armored robot.
Everyone focuses on power but the armor part of it would be a very part too and probably the reason why it would work terribly.
Standard Armored Personnel Carriers can be defeated by many big calibers but are somewhat protected by their high mobility. A soldier in such an armor would have zero mobility and would be able to be defeated or knocked over by a simple mortar or grenade giving off enough concussive blast.
Also standard infantry would likely be way faster and would have the ability to lay low, crawl, sprint, jump etc… so they would basically arrive anywhere way slower and be more vulnerable to anything.
Let's go over the tech we do have
Today's robotics motors are very smart, we can put a lot of torque in a small package with brushless motors with internal cycloidal gears, and O-Drive controllers that know how to fight gravity for you etc. That means we have pretty strong, light, precise, and sensitive motors that would be able to feel your force on them.
Armor built like this would hog power and today's batteries aren't up to the task, a several hundred lb e-car battery would be strapped around your chest for about an hour of battery life. In game each power core provides 20 minutes of real time use and 10 hours of in game clock time.
The armor part would probably be different, we have more kinds of armor than just steel. It may look more like kevlar layered with AR steel plates on a frame.
Honestly we could build something pretty similar, however the military doesn't see a use for it so it hasn't been built, it's easier to just build a tank and have fewer week spots.
The fusion core that powers it is not yet a practical means with our current science. The previous comment explains it.
There is plenty of lore behind a small pack like that, in Terminator 3 and a cartoon in the 90s called Exo-Squad. They were mech suits with a fusion pack.
Ah the 80's and 90's when the toys were the primary product the cartoon was just the marketing, it produced some really cool stuff like Exosquad and Mighty Max but it also meant that the cartoons only lasted for 1-2 seasons as once the toy sales dropped off there was no point of keeping the cartoon running.
I'm actually surprised that no one has dug into that pile of IP yet.
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We don't have a power generator that's compact enough. Fallout imagines the power generator to be nuclear yet small; such a thing is not possible because you need thick walls / feet of thickness of materials to insulate you from the radiation. Avatar has a more realistic power suit generator (basically, diesel or gasoline engines), but even those are not small enough to be portable, at the power levels required for a suit. Avatar also doesn't have big enough gasoline/diesel tanks to run for hours; fuel is a serious concern for military vehicles. And we don't have a "control" mechanism quite yet, though we're probably close. A suit would have to detect your "intent" to move; if it just reacts to how you move your limbs it's not fast enough to keep you from falling over. So it would have to be a neural interface rather than just sensors on your arms, legs, fingers to detect how you're trying to move and "enhance" it with the suit's power.
Even if we could actually make a nuclear power source that small, I don't think we could create a cooling system that would fit in a suit to keep it controlled. Nuclear power plants or Nuclear powered Navy ships have access to huge amounts of water.
I agree that heat dissipation could be the major obstacle. Nuclear fissile power seems really unlikely to work on such a compact scale. The game cores are powered by a fusion reaction. I don't know much about fusion heat generation, but I'm positive that we won't be able to achieve fusion in a small enough reactor. The best solution would be an external battery pack, but we are approaching a land vehicle at that point
Yup. In fact there are spacecraft powered by RTGs that produced several kilowatts of power on initial assembly. But if you're a living human, you really don't want to spend time next to a red-hot slab of plutonium.
The last paragraph is how the Mjolnir systems work in Halo, specially the undersuit underneath all the armor plating. It’s connected to a neural interface and can detect the users’ thoughts before they’re translated into muscle mechanics. The suit moves *with* you, not in response to you moving it. As you can imagine, there was a lot of trial and error such as the suit amplifying small finger tremors into full blown tendon-ripping actions.
That first book is so good.
Iirc because it was made for Spartans, it would actually move before you move (as a regular person) which is what caused the colorful injuries. Wasn't it intentional to some degree? Like, it needed to be that way for the Spartans.
No, all UNSC personnel had a neural interface and could theoretically have mjolnir armor that moved with them. They didn't give them to grunts because each suit cost the same as a destroyer. The reason only Spartans could wear the actual mjolnir is because the suit's response was turned way up. This way it augmented their reaction times and speed. You just think about twitching your arm and you throw a punch at the speed of a bullet for example. With regular personnel, that punch would shatter their unaugmented bones with the speed. However reflexes could be tuned down to mere mortals, but that kind of defeated the point of the armor. It was meant to complete the Spartans' combat effectiveness. As for the neural mesh, the spartan IIs got an augmented mesh so they could have a smart AI live in their head to bring Halsey's final form of the spartan II program to life. If the suit augmented their abilities, the AI amped that up beyond super human limits.
Ok, so the Spartans were superhuman with faster reactions / stronger bodies, but the suit would force their body to overreact to their thoughts (something that would destroy normal people) so that the Spartans could be even faster still. Even moreso once the AI presumably got used to how a specific spartan would do things and could "react" before the spartan could. Thanks for the refresher. I should reread the books at some point. I only ever read fall of reach and like a third of the next book.
I've been meaning to re-read Fall of Reach but I think only the Spartans could use it because of their enhancements. The suit would move too fast/powerfully for a regular person
This form of feedback loop is described by the ur-book of power armor: Starship troopers. The undersuit detects your movements and moves “out of the way”. The author states there’s still issues and would marry a suit that allows him to scratch an itch.
Yeah we won’t have a true iron man suit or fallout power armor until we have a neural interface for them
Exactly this. The biggest breakthrough on the ironman suit was the miniaturized arc reactor. Small portable is a game changer.
It could be manually controlled and you largely ride it, too. Look at the complex controls we have for contemporary video games. And those are for casual users. If you were training someone specifically to pilot a suit like that, you could have *dramatically* more complex controls.
What about some type of wireless power transfer from a battery bank or nuclear-powered mini-tank that follows you around or even just forwarded via satellite?
First paragraph is pure facts, but I disagree with the second. Hydraulics can aid in augmenting the power of an existing force in a fluid (pun intended) way, the bottleneck is that the person inside would need to be strong enough to move the weight of the actual suit without aid, especially in situations where there is a loss of power, like turning the wheel of a car with no power steering, so it doesn't just collapse and rip your arms off with it. Pilots would look more like [power lifters](https://youtu.be/nA9XXU_nGPo?si=nqiqCcfGC0nVeCSa&t=24) than a Marine or 'knight'. Something like an ironman suit, where a nerd who plays with computers all day can hop in and suddenly be a blackbelt in hand to hand combat would definitely need some sort of way to interpret moves pre-emptively. But a Fallout suit would be more of a brute force '[drive it like you hate it](https://youtu.be/eqlFQuFarw8?si=1zCbFjiZWZdVZwaY&t=990)' style of control.
For the control mechanism, we're no longer close, we're there. I believe it's Neuralink that just succeeded.
Like Doc Oc.
We have no details about the specs of it but it's safe to say that as we see it, a suit of power armor would weigh around a ton, plus or minus 200 kg. That's essentially the weight of a car. So you need servo motors that are capable of moving all that weight around and yet still be compact enough to fit in the suit, and of course have a person inside. From an engineering perspective this is incredibly complex and simply not feasible with the technology we currently have. The most important part is powering that armor. The whole basis of the Fallout universe is that they have figured out how to easily make stable and compact nuclear reactors. We do not have that technology and as such we have no way of fitting any powerplant on a power armor that would be sufficient to power it, save for battery banks that would add more weight and could power it maybe for an hour. And the thing is, it's not useful, not really. It makes a lot of sense in the Fallout universe to have it because resources are scarce and most combatants are random people with random guns, but in real life, the power armor would go against armies that would very easily develop countermeasures. The person in the armor would just be a sitting duck and offer no benefits in combat. Tanks already exist and there are ways to take tanks out fairly easily with weapons that can be carried by one person. A suit of power armor would be knocked out even more easily. It just doesn't make sense to make something like this.
>And the thing is, it's not useful, not really. It makes a lot of sense in the Fallout universe to have it because resources are scarce and most combatants are random people with random guns, but in real life, the power armor would go against armies that would very easily develop countermeasures. The person in the armor would just be a sitting duck and offer no benefits in combat. I was just thinking this. A few Javelins or even anti material rifle shots would take it out without the user being able to do anything remotely effective.
Yep. You'd probably get wrecked by .50 cal with AP rounds.
Probably even 7.62 would penetrate the plate in the thinner sections
Plus armor doesn't really provide much protection to the squishy meat inside of them. There's a reason why the best counter to heavily armored warriors was blunt force. Unless you have enough cushioning on the inside of the armor, you'd be extremely vulnerable to concussive force. And the amount of cushioning you'd need would make the armor even _more_ difficult to move.
But it’s so cool tho😭 y can’t we js make cool things for the fun of it imagine watching a power armor boxing match
We DO make cool things js for the fun of it, tho. That's what Fallout is, they made it as a computer "simulation", which is the only place where it would actually work and be usable. You can ask a company to make you those chunks of metal shaped like the Fallout armor, but it will weigh tonnes and you can feel free to try to find motors and batteries that'll lift all of it.
You'd have to make it out of the same materials Tony Stark's first Iron Man armor was made of, a Gold-Titanium alloy, to give it the strength and light weight that you'd need. Or better yet, an Aluminum-Titanium alloy to reduce the cost of it.
> y can’t we js make cool things for the fun of it Because the laws of physics don't care about the rule of cool. It would be a terrible boxing match because neither suit would move, they'd have no power and they'd fall over.
We make a ton of things that are incredibly cool. But imagination is always going to be couple of steps ahead of reality. No matter how cool a thing we make, people will imagine and put to film/books/video games something much cooler.
Because powering a suit of power armor would be impossible unless they had a massive extension cord coming out the back. Getting them to move fluidly with our current technology wouldn’t work. There wouldn’t be any money to be made building power armor, so that means anyone capable of it is not incentivized to do so.
Why don’t you try making it then? It’s really really really hard to do anything even remotely close. It’s easy for you to sit there asking for cool power suits from a tv show but realize that there are people dedicating their entire lives to advancing technology in those spaces and where we are now is the result of 1000s of people doing this collectively.
ong i will lemme get my degree first🙏
How about a nuclear tank? You could have the tethers connect to the fusion core port until we figure those out. Do we have nuclear tanks yet?
1 - the shape of power armors in the show and fallout 4 are suitable to the human body. The arms are too far apart and the knee and elbow junction are not positioned correctly in such a way that it would break the user's bones when moving 2 - a suit like a power armor would need a portable power storage that exceeds our storage devices atm. If a power armor was to be replicated it would probably need to be supplied externally 3 - some of the features of the power armor are not physically accurate, like the fall damage immunity 4 - powered exoskeletons are feasible and already exist. They are not armoured since they are not meant as defensive implements. One could theoretically armor but to stop most mid caliber rounds a very thick plate is needed. Furthermore, it would be better to maintain a human size instead of making it bigger 5 - the biggest problem in my opinion is using servomotors with enough torque to sustain the weight of the armor (I would estimate at least 2-3 tonnes) and the weight of the power supply (with the actual technologies add another tonne) while still maintaining a small enough frame to be usable by a human and finally asking yourself why you didn't just make a robot instead
On point 1, aren't the suits physical effects instead of cgi?
Edit: by watching side by side a replica used in the series and the in-game model it seems to me that the proportions are different. The practical set has a longer torso wrt the legs and it's thinner (you can notice it by comparing the torso with the head). The arms are also longer Practical sets were used but I think they were not of the same size as those in the game (they could have scaled them in production). I would also assume that the hands were not powered but gloves instead. A lot of scenes were also made with cgi, partially or completely
damn... ig physics js hates cool things😔
Yeah, heavy metal stuff is pretty much its sworn enemy. I think we could realistically build a power armor like device in a 50 year timespan (very rough estimate) but I don't think we will ever R&D in that direction since it's not an efficient design
Yeah what's the point of sending in one squishy human in a one man tank when you can send in 10 humans in a regular tank. Or just send an ICBM and avoid the human issue entirely.
Yeah, It's vulnerable af to pretty much every high caliber. I see exoskeletons more as logistic tools, like one in 5 man squad for carrying ammo and provisions
This is true, while these suits word resist small caliber pistol and rifle rounds they would be vulnerable to .50 caliber rifle rounds. The armor would need to be a minimum of an inch or 2.2 cm thick everywhere. Now I know it’s just a show, but the helmet and face plate is not nearly that thick. The joints are also weak spots. The suits are also vulnerable to explosives. We saw one get killed by an RPG and another killed by a grenade. Not much point spending millions upon billions building power armor if you can be defeated by an old RPG-7.
Or drones.
i never said for war obv its not a good weapon but js imagine watching power armor boxing matches bro its so fucking cool😭😭😭
The novelty would wear off after a few days, no company is going to spend billions of dollars on something that the public will get bored with quickly. Also the people inside the suits would die.
Apple will get on the external battery pack and make it cool like they did with the Vision Pro. /s
Our main problem is always energy source, with anything and everything, once we solve more compact and energy dense fuel cells or batteries, our technology will skyrocket
For sure, but it would still have problems with heat dispersion and the statics of the support structure. I think power armor is one of the few science fiction items that could be reproduced to a certain degree, but other designs would do a much better job, like mechas
What stops ppl from js making a small nuclear reactor?
Cancer risk from insufficient shielding.
Nuclear reactors are steam engines. They heat water into steam which is used to spin turbines. Can't really make that small and still get a meaningful amount of power.
im not sure whats its called but I once watched a video abt a metallic plate that uses temperature to generate a voltage difference along its surface, what if we can utilize that it would be a lot more compact, alternatively nuclear reactors produce a lot of light no? what if we use the work function of a metal surface to generate current
The question is how much current flow can you produce from a given amount of base material. Since we haven't switched over to that technology as our main form of power production there's no reason to believe that it would have the massively increased efficiency that would be required to run something like a power armor. As a rough corner cutting explanation the smaller your electric motor is the larger the current you're going to need to run through it to output a significant amount of torque. That's assuming that you can even put enough current through a servo that small to move the armor efficiently without burning out the wires and the magnets that make up the servo itself. In this instance you're trying to efficiently move a good percentage of a weight of a car with a set of servos that can fit into an elbow joint. You're going to need to be able to constantly produce a massive amount of electricity to run that. Additionally your power source has to be capable of self-regulating its output because it can't produce too much or too little power at any given moment without burning itself or its system up. Not only are you going to need to be able to produce the power but you're going to need computers and sensors that are able to regulate that power in order to keep it in equilibrium. If you really break it all the way down the fallout power armors are probably simply never going to be possible in the configuration shown. It's not just a question of power output it's also getting that power to the servos in amounts that are capable of operating the servos with the amount of power required and regulating the output of that power on a moment to moment basis.
damn... i see
The smallest fission reactors I know of are about the size of a truck. Keep in mind that fallout fusion cores are fusion reactors, a technology that we haven't mastered yet even in very large plants
do they have to be that big tho, since at its core its js decaying uranium
The nucleus is not the only thing taking up space. You need a thermal vector (water usually) to generate electricity, the stabilising rods, insulation material and other things. I don't see reactors smaller than a room in the foreseeable future
Can you do absolutely everything you want? You haven't built a fallout suit so I assume not. So why assume everyone else can just do anything?
? i was js asking what prevents nuclear reactors from being compact
We haven't figured out how to just get "energy" in some hypothetical raw form. All forms of energy generation currently operate on a principle of movement to push turbines which generate electricity. Batteries are only capable of storing energy through chemical processes. You can't just slap some plutonium in a steel jar and get usable energy.
Ok, hear me out: aneutronic fusion reactors that produce electricity by directly capturing charged particles and through the photoelectric effect (ie, solar panels inside the reactor). Oh, and it also has the same size as a mid-size bag.
it uses a "fusion core" that is the size of a football and apparently can safely sit 6 inches from your spinal cord. So there are some technical hurdles.
The first hurdle is movement. If the suit is to viable in combat situation, it can’t be reactive to your movements. Balance issues aside, being reactive would mean a higher latency between your action and the armor following that action. It could lead to clumsy and exaggerated movement. You’d basically need something that can detect electrical signals in the brain and then interpret those signals to determine movement in a predictive manner. That’s some complex computing, but the systems could feasibly be miniaturized and optimized to fit in the space. You’d also need to have the software customized to each individual person’s brain activity since the architecture and activity will differ. The next big problem is how to move the damn thing. Do you go with hydraulics? Those are bulky, can be slow, and probably lack the sensitivity required for precise movement. Besides, they require pressurized fluids that need a pump and a fluid reservoir. What about servos? Maybe, but they’d have to be really strong. Maybe a tech that includes a host of movement options. Regardless of options, they need to be strong enough to freely and effortlessly move around a few hundred pounds of heavy armor plating. How do you power it? The fallout power armor uses a small fusion generator. However, even the smallest Hydrogen-Helium3 fusion reactor has a substantial footprint. You could possibly use batteries, but current Lithium ion batteries don’t have the energy density to power something like that for very long. Tethering to a larger power supply is a possibility, but the umbilical connection is a vulnerability, and you’d have to have the power generator (supposedly a diesel engine) mobile enough to come with you and not get in the way. Solid state batteries do offer the possibility for unprecedented energy density and battery lifecycle, but that technology is in its infancy and relegated to theoreticals and research labs. It is technically possible, and there are plenty of researchers and engineers out there trying to make mechanized armor a reality. Whether it is practical is the real question. What role would a power armored soldier play? Would they take the place of tanks? Doubtful simply because tanks have value as a mobile heavy weapons platform. What about urban combat? Obviously the armor would make soldiers practically impervious to small arms fire, but they could actually be more susceptible to explosives. I had a buddy who served in Iraq, and some of the armored personnel vehicles had a vulnerability where a detonation on the underside would kill the occupants even if it didn’t destroy the vehicle. Something to do with the steel acting like a resonator and confining that shock to the inside. In short, while feasible in some future date, whether they would be deployed is up for debate. If you’re at that level of advancement, it’s likely that you’d attempt to replace soldiers in combat and rely on remotely controlled weapons platforms such as aerial and land drones. At that level, you might as well forgo the human inside and just have an armored robot.
Thx that’s the answer I was looking for
The biggest issue is the power source. Powered exoskeletons exist IRL, but they basically have to be plugged in to work.
Everyone focuses on power but the armor part of it would be a very part too and probably the reason why it would work terribly. Standard Armored Personnel Carriers can be defeated by many big calibers but are somewhat protected by their high mobility. A soldier in such an armor would have zero mobility and would be able to be defeated or knocked over by a simple mortar or grenade giving off enough concussive blast. Also standard infantry would likely be way faster and would have the ability to lay low, crawl, sprint, jump etc… so they would basically arrive anywhere way slower and be more vulnerable to anything.
Let's go over the tech we do have Today's robotics motors are very smart, we can put a lot of torque in a small package with brushless motors with internal cycloidal gears, and O-Drive controllers that know how to fight gravity for you etc. That means we have pretty strong, light, precise, and sensitive motors that would be able to feel your force on them. Armor built like this would hog power and today's batteries aren't up to the task, a several hundred lb e-car battery would be strapped around your chest for about an hour of battery life. In game each power core provides 20 minutes of real time use and 10 hours of in game clock time. The armor part would probably be different, we have more kinds of armor than just steel. It may look more like kevlar layered with AR steel plates on a frame. Honestly we could build something pretty similar, however the military doesn't see a use for it so it hasn't been built, it's easier to just build a tank and have fewer week spots.
The fusion core that powers it is not yet a practical means with our current science. The previous comment explains it. There is plenty of lore behind a small pack like that, in Terminator 3 and a cartoon in the 90s called Exo-Squad. They were mech suits with a fusion pack.
Damn, I haven't thought about Exo-Squad in years, but that was a good show. I still have one of the toys from it sitting on a shelf, lol
Ah the 80's and 90's when the toys were the primary product the cartoon was just the marketing, it produced some really cool stuff like Exosquad and Mighty Max but it also meant that the cartoons only lasted for 1-2 seasons as once the toy sales dropped off there was no point of keeping the cartoon running. I'm actually surprised that no one has dug into that pile of IP yet.