Many of you may have heard or seen the recent stories coming out of NBCs investigative unit on Dragon Skin body armor.
Soldiers for the Truth and other Dragon Skin advocates have already begun dancing in the end-zone on this. But as many DT readers already know, the field of ballistic protection is not a simple one. Theres a lot more to this story than meets the eye.
Fortunately, weve got it. But under ground rules, we have been embargoed from publishing information that would and in some cases already has force Dragon Skins vocal backers to scratch their heads and wonder whether the miracle armor is all its cracked up to be.
Were working hard to lift the embargo so DT can get the facts from all sides of this debate in front of our informed readers. As soon as we can, youll see it.
Stay tuned, folks. Theres more on the way.
{ 21 comments… read them below or add one }
I’ve been told from a friend that certain members of the Canadian forces also use dragon skin.
Meanwhile, the same friend told me that interceptor Armour is far inferior to the Canadian standard issue body armour.
That part in the story about a general wearing dragon skin is very interesting.
Whatever happened to that armour that was kevlar and silicon based? It looks very thin, but the silicon hardens when impacted. I saw soldiers wearing it in pictures… it looks nothing like interceptor body armour… looks more like a ‘jacket’ overtop their cloths.
I looked like the guys in ‘Full Spectrum Warrior’ were wearing it.
http://www.gamefactoryinteractive.com/images/Full%20Spectrum%20Warrior.jpg
My suspicion is:
OFF-ANGLE HITS.
I’ve said it before… Just like the scales of a snake, the potential vulnerability is if you get in between the scales….
Now, we’ve seen the Dragon Skin take many massive hits – ALL from dead on, straight ahead – and not be penetrated at all.. Very impressive.
BUT…. MY suspicion is that the vulnerability lies in hitting the vest from an obtuse angle – say, 45 degrees off-center or greater – allowing the projectile to ‘slip’ between the “scales” and penetrate.
Of course this is just an educated theory… not any inside info or anything… However, if you think about it, the ballistics have to be different when the projectile is hitting the disks from the side and not dead on…
My guess is it’s either THAT – or it’s a total bureaucratic SNAFU — where some high-ranking insider either A: Doesn’t want to buck up the cash to replace the entire inventory of Body Armour – or B: Doesn’t want the potentially HUGE contract to go to Pinnacle… probably because they have their own cash cow sitting behind the curtain….
Guess we’ll find out someday… but I will sure be pissed if it’s just some bureaucratic inside crony-job that is preventing our troops from having the best protection available…
Lord knows we’ve seen enough of that shit with these corrupt fools we have running our country right now. (oh, sorry if that offends the kool-aide drinkers)
JAFO, I think you have it right on the off angle shots. I wonder if shrapnel, fire and other issues are at work as well. Wish someone at NBC had asked those questions of the Govt or Pinnacle.
Y’know, I’ve seen story after story on this “scandal”, usually presented in terms of how BushCheneyHaliburton are preventing our troops from getting the armor they need to stay safe. Is Dragon Skin better than our current armor? Maybe, maybe not, but what’s more important to a soldier: His body armor, or his rifle?
So why haven’t we seen one story on TV or in print of the shortcomings of the M4 and the problems with the 5.56mm round? Where’s the stories on on the reasons behind SOCOM’s decision to go in a completely different direction than everyone else? Why is body armor (and armored Humvees before that) the scandal du jour, and not the stopping power and reliablity of our soldier’s weapons?
Maybe the idea of a military that fights back, (or worse still, kills their enemies before they have a chance to see if their armor is working or not) is anethma to a media that’s increaasingly out of touch with the realities of war and the people who fight it. Maybe the idea of doing a story about the effectiveness of those oh-so-scary “assault rifles” is troubling to them (“Our special report: the military’s dangerous new guns: Coming soon to a street corner near you?”). Maybe they just are more comfortable with the idea of soldiers as victims and not warriors. Either way, it’s enough to make me turn off the tv and tune into sites like DefenseTech, Blackfive and Michael Yon when I want the real story straight from the source.
It sounds like one reason soldiers like DS armor is that it affords them easier movement. That sounds like a benefit of DS, which may or may not offset whatever weakness ARL found when comparing it to Interceptor armor.
Does anyone know whether or not ARL took the easier movement, which I assume affects survivability, into account?
let me just say that even if it’s not all that it’s cracked up to be, DragonSkin opponents did themselves NO favors
1. having the army tests conducted by an employee of the competitor. hello conflict of interest! No matter the results of the test, they will automatically be tainted by the appearance of improriety. Beyond stupid.
2. banning private body armor
however well intentioned it may (or may not) have been, it gave all the appearance of an attempt to strong arm DragonSkin out of the picture (couldn’t have any reports of how well it worked in the field coming back could we?)
if they had concerns about it, a better approach would have been to clearly explain those concerns to the troops instead of the ‘shut up, don’t use it and no we’re not telling you why’ approach
Any idea’s on that body armour I mentioned below?
The M4 isn’t in the news is because people won’t draw the connection between a gun and saving lives. Also.. it’ll come out how much they pay for an M4 and I’m sure people will get pissed.
I looked into the off angle hits thing…
I could see that being an issue.. as if your laying down… it could hit in between the plates possibly. However.. the armour flexes with the wearer… and the videos I saw on their site which shows the plates being laid out on an adhesive surface. So I don’t see there being a gap created very easily. No more than a gap between the stiff ceramic plate between the body of the wearer and the gap between plates from an extreme upward angle.
Now.. 45 degress from off center? I swear I saw a video of shots being take low and to the right… in one of their videos.. but I can’t find the video to provide the time code.
The reference to “kevlar and silicon based” armor is probably about the use of shear thickening fluid: a mix of fluid (e.g., ethylene glycol) and ceramics (e.g., boron carbide particles) that gets denser when subject to shear stresses.
Defense Tech did a story on it awhile ago. Here’s a link:
http://www.defensetech.org/archives/000875.html
Here’s another:
http://www.military.com/soldiertech/0,14632,Soldiertech_Science,,00.html.
If shear thickening seems counterintuitive, think of Silly Putty: it stretches all you want, but roll it in a ball, and it bounces. Hit it with a hammer, it breaks.
Or, think of it this way. Dragon Skin works by covering the wearer with scores of little SAPI plates. This stuff tries to do the same job with millions of them.
irtusk -
Good points… I agree, they would have been better served with an open approach to the matter, rather than creating the impression of something being amiss… or fishy.
Foreign Boy -
The M4 topic has been addressed here – at Defense Tech – in a responsible manner… I’m not sure however that the decades-long issue with the .223, M-16/M-4 is going to be elevated to the same level of coverage right now… right or wrong. Your point is valid however…
I personally haven’t seen the DS thing covered as a Anti-Bush/Cheney/halliburton issue… Think they’ve been pretty good as far as staying on topic with this one…
I myself am no fan of this current Administration of Bozos, but am certainly not going to blame them for this one…
Response to an oblique shot:
In terms of kinetic energy, a shot normal or perpendicular to the surface of an individual disc is the worst case scenario. In this case all the energy of the shot which is a function of mass and velocity squared is concentrated along a single plane or a single axis. In a perpendicular shot there is theoretically no richochet. By conservation of energy all the energy is transformed into the force multiplied by the deflection. The smaller the deflection of displacement of the vest, the greater the force.
Now imagine for example a 45 degree shot. The projectile will definitely ricochet off of the vest. The ricochet is basically the projectile retaining some of the energy from when it first left the rifle, basically the more the projectile ricochets the more energy the projectile retains which ultimately means the less force the vest takes. Is it possible for a projectile to slip under one of the scales? maybe but the more oblique the shot the more the round will ricochet and the more energy it will need to penetrate between the scales.
Think of it like this: if you want to throw a rock throw a window, are you going to throw it at an oblique angle to break the glass? no. you would throw it at a trajectory that it would impact the glass perpendicular to its surface. Why would you do this? because by throwing the rock straight at the glass you will generate the most force and energy to break the glass.
Hopefully this will answer some questions about and oblique shot.
You guys need to check out the other threads on this forum.
http://www.defensetech.org/archives/002784.html
It appears that Dragon Skin has some major problems.
The only ‘major problems’ I can see in that thread is that someone is trying very, very hard to discredit DragonSkin.
Independent testing will get the facts. The rest is hot air.
irtusk, the men who tested Dragon Skin for the Army were employed by the Army, not a competitor. This is just another example of the mind-boggling amount of misinformation bouncing around the internet regarding Dragon Skin. But we certainly can’t trust the Army to test and procure reliable equipment for the Soldiers, now can we? No, of course not, if Big Army weren’t out to deliberately send Soldiers into harm’s way with inadequate equipment, SFTT wouldn’t have anything to scream about.
Is my frustration with the general ignorance surrounding DS starting to creep into my posting? My bad.
Dear Patriot,
That was a very nice explaination of force and impact. Here are a few additional points to consider:
1) All the tiles sit at an angle when flat or when wrapped around the body as they are overlapped by adjoining tiles. It’s called an imbricated pattern or better known as scalar armor. These tiles open a bit as they flex around the body by the tiles pivoting off each other to make the curve.
2) The tiles are true discuses, where the center is the thickest part, and they have a uniform downward slope of radius co-extensive with a radius or a segment. This is an Independant claim. All other claims are basic public domain concepts dependant upon the first claim. That is they have all entered the market well before the Dragon Skin patents.
3) The weakest point here is the point between successor tiles offset from the center, whereby you angle the test barrel receiver so that you get a perpendicular shot on the thinnest spot not supported by an overlapping disk. This is the definition of your perpendicular impact discussion.
4) Currently the armor is not tested this way in respect to the NIJ protocol or in the German lab that recently conducted side by side testing for the NBC Dateline news show. It is tested flat.
5) For scalar armor to be tested correctly it MUST be set around a fixed target around a test fixture designed to mimick the true wearing of the vest, and then impacted as set forth above so that the weakest point is attacked in a true 90 degree angle and also attacked at an angle to try and take advantage of the slight opening of the tiles as they make the bend around the body.
6) From what I gather the army did this, and the German laboratory didn’t, as well as any other testing entity that has reported results on Dragon Skin.
While interceptor plates certainly possess less repeat capability as shown at the German laboratory in what appeared to be true independant testing; remember the uniform thick plannular plates represented by the Interceptor system doesn’t change it’s poition at all while wearing, but the scalar armor does, and that’s why the NIJ has devised a different test for scalar armor. The military has simply taken it two step further; true wearing placement while testing, and extreme environmental conditioning testing. I remember very clearly giving armor to the military to train with, the boys play rough! The armor comes back looking like crap in a short period of time unless it’s built tough.
The envoronmental testing is designed to accelerate the aging process. In service life testing and maintenance has become quite common with military body armor world wide.
Regards,
Al
David, I think Pinnacle has discredited Dragon Skin better than anyone on a forum could.
Check out Pinnacle’s level 5 body armor!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKnfHhRl7U0
this is no joke, check it out
Yea and while everyone is at the Pinnacle Armor web site checking their testing side shows out, check out the one titled history channel test labs in the bottom left corner. They hired a movie stunt fabricator to make a fragmentation launching device supposedly to mimic IED’s in Iraq. They fashioned sharp pointed parts and launched then at about 900 Ft/Sec at a Dragon Skin vest from an home made air cannon, and actually stated that Pinnacle didn’t know what would happen. My God what a joke. Talk to Steven Cornelius at http://www.Tallcoat.com and get the real information on the IED’s that our troops are facing in Iraq. He’s an Retired Army Ranger; Anyone who doesn’t know what large fragments fired at a mere 900 Ft/SEc will do to a level 3 plate or flexible insert should probably not call themselves a ballistic expert. Unbelievable! Maybe he didn’t say that, but really what kind of a test is that.
Maybe it was another of Murray the Circus Tent Ringleader’s “entertainment value” videos. Velocities up to 5000 feet per second come off of artillery shells, the do slow very quickly with distance due to atmospheric drag, but most test velocities are double to triple what Pinnacle used in their “Entertainment video”. Just look up the M69 Training grenade vs the M67 Fragmentation grenade and you will see that their use of stunt coordinators and other Hollywood tricks, are just part of their smoke and mirrors marketing campaign.
Allan Bain is a closeted fagget.
For confirmation of this e-mail him at.
http://www.evolutionarmor.com/index.html
Allan Bain is a closeted fagget.
For confirmation of this e-mail him at.
http://www.evolutionarmor.com/index.html
Probably the best beating ever given on this forum Devil Dog. Allan Bain is a fag. Keep up the good work. KILL’EM ALL/ LET GOD SORT’EM OUT. SEMPER FI!!!!!!!!!!!!!