(I’m still partial to Troy’s suit, if not for the spot-on marketing techniques [joking])…
(Gouge: CL)
– Christian
Another Good Look at the Sarcos Exoskeleton
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{ 23 comments… read them below or add one }
With the armor cover, it could Save lots of lives and make it easier fighting house to house.
Key Performance Indicator: Dancing and Prancing
haha
Imagine the next generation of this thing, with an armored cover, more complexity and freedom of movement, more autonomy and with attachable weapon kits: 20 mm autocannons, grenade launchers, machine guns, MANPADS, antitank missiles… all modular.
You could have the basic exo and then specialize it with kits: combat engineering, assault, antiarmor, antiair, regular infantry, medic and medevac, logistics… Kits and modules are the way to go with this
the problem with the technology is the power supply. the technology for all the rest is already off-the-shelf, this company just put the pieces together. There is nothing new about mechanical limbs.
getting the power supply small enough, and potent enough, to give heavily armored soldiers the ability to fight for at least 20-30 min at a time between refueling, and this will give new meaning to the term mechanized infantry.
An APC can transport a group of suits near a specific target that needs to be defeated, the squad moves in and clears the target, then leaves and lets non-powered soldiers take over. It is basically the job we use tanks for now, only soldiers in powered armor will be able to go places tanks can’t, like inside buildings, bunkers, and through difficult terrain.
The only power supply for an exoskeleton with real firepower (20mm autocannons etc) that makes sense is a compact plutonium reactor. It could be done, but…
The Exoskeleton ain’t nothing….
Fear teh “Monster Arm Suit” 8O)
http://youtube.com/watch?v=cTXuklVV3AM
It’s just one of those days…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSz72Bn4tFk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qm1gQUPPGCA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOyj4ciJk34
http://www.apple.com/trailers/disney/walle/trailer_large.html
While I’m hoping that someone while buy troy’s prototype; you have to remember that this is a exoskeleton prototype. Its big and clunky now.. but prototypes still just fleshes out the concept. Once they figure out what they need and what they don’t.. and how to make the bigger parts smaller etc.. they’ll be getting somewhere.
You’ll probably see the end product under some kind of hard modular body armour. The benefits of the power suit will get negated by the heavy armour.
I could see a utility being used back on the ‘bases’ or even carriers. Imagine a single dude pulling a plane to the catapult… or 2 men hoisting weapons onto bomb pylons.
Even if exoskeletons turn out to be completely useless in real combat situations and mostly unnecessary for logistics, think about how useful they can be as recruiting tools.
Especially if civilian organizations never bite and the only place you’ll ever find these are the military, putting guys in these suits, adding a macho soundtrack and then airing the footage during sporting events might encourage the forces to spring for the suits out of their recruitment budget, even if no other arm would touch them.
I can drive my car dry in about four hours and it is supremely useful. This thing doesn’t need to have a two week endurance; it just has to get around the block or ten.
And it doesn’t need to have superman strength; that prototype is possibly way overpowered.
Give it just twice the strength of a typical adult male in a package that can defeat small arms and the infantry have an insurmountable advantage over unenhanced enemies, equivalent to mailed and mounted knights over peasants.
–Even if exoskeletons turn out to be completely useless in real combat situations and mostly unnecessary for logistics, think about how useful they can be as recruiting tools.–
hehehe.. god bless japanese and their gundam animes.
Everybody go read “Starship Troopers” by Heinlein. If you had an armored suit with infrared, microwave radar, a potfull of ordnance and trained troops…
Heinlein was an aeronautical engineer and laid out a good plan for the system, including insertion. What we are looking at is the first prototype. Sort of like looking at the Wright Brothers and whining about what it would take to produce the F-22.
If you think horses and mules are so great, don’t forget what they eat. It is not so compact as gasoline, diesel or methanol. The emissions aren’t so great, either.
Johnny,
I have read several posts from you and I must admit a few things. You never seem to know what you are talking about.
You are always pessimistic.
You don’t have a good grasp on higher level thinking.
To the poster “Old Sailor”:
You wrote: “The only power supply for an exoskeleton with real firepower (20mm autocannons etc) that makes sense is a compact plutonium reactor. It could be done, but…”
I totally agree: That idea was long overdue! Compact plutonium reactors for exoskeletons could easily be miniaturized by simply doing away with all the totally unnecessary safety measures, for example steely containment structures (pure civilian paranoia – they didn’t work in Chernobyl either…) . Radiation shielding needs only to be added between the mini-reactor and the exoskeleton’s / soldier’s back, too, to reduce weight. (In case of persistent high radiation levels, use of the exoskeleton is limited to a safe 20 minutes per combat). The overall weight can further be reduced by making the reactor cores of such light-weight materials as styrofoam etc. (which don’t rust either!). In case of doubts: A friend of mine knows a brilliant young Ukrainian nuclear scientist who is GREAT at simplifying nuclear reactors! Should the remaining technical glitches of the feather-weight plutonium reactors still diminish their service lives excessively then just declare them as single-use, throw-away objects (always think of the 4.000 new jobs this factory will create – no French parts incorporated this time!).
Cooling could be a problem… in exchange, this back-pack plutonium reactor has a lesser-advertised dual role as a nuclear demolition mine, too: Just drop it close to a target and shoot once at it, from a safe distance!
Only operational drawback: Being nuclear-powered, these exoskeleton suits can’t be shut off after each 5-minutes-use. Even when not in use, someone needs to walk on inside these exoskeleton suits.
Johnny:
You talk about intensive urban combat and then you propose giving good artillery support to standard soldiers of 2008. My god!! Does it help to reduce buildings to rubble? Or killing tons of civilians?
In urban combat the only way to save the day is door to door, house to house, face to face, in two words: close combat. Maybe this thing couldn’t get through many doors at this stage but it could patrol streets that an armored vehicle couldn’t, while foot soldiers go inside houses and clear the mess. Maybe an even more advanced version of the exo could be more human size than this one and then your exo-soldier could do the work all alone.
Remember that many first versions of a brand new military hardware are not perfect. As a clear example, tanks in 1916 were poorly mobile, mechanically unreliable, dangerous for their crews and didn’t even caused such an impact on trench warfare at the moment, but they achieved further improvements across the years and you know the rest. I am not even going to remember what were the French thinking about armored warfare and what were the Germans. Maybe we got a paralelism here? Maybe you are a Frenchy and I am a German for believing in the potential battlefield transformation of this thing?
—You talk about intensive urban combat and then you propose giving good artillery support to standard soldiers of 2008. My god!! Does it help to reduce buildings to rubble? Or killing tons of civilians? —
hey, son of the biatch!! how do you think is urban warfare works today?!! do you realy think that to drop hand-granates by infantry into every room is better and saver then to rave whole house with artillery? fu_ucking hell, how naive and retar_ted are you? or do you realy think that this “arest-terorist-job” what we see in american tv is a real urban fight? its a fu_cking SWAT-police job and not an urban fight between millitaries. go and suck your mothers tita, kido!!
Ooooh, someone sounds like they need to grow up a little. Untwist your panties Jonny, and get a spell checker. No need to get so bloody infantile over a freaking blog.
There is potential in this technology. Whether it is useful the way they think it will be remains to be seen. Thats part of the whole R&D dance. Can’t wait to see whats next.
In all honesty, its going to be a while before we have Heinlen’s “Mobile Infantry” suits with nuclear powered jump jets and sub tactical nuclear bazookas. I agree that the best short term use (once they get all the kinks worked out and armored up) would be in the same range as Tanks and IFVs are being used now, and letting more limber/smaller softies support the hard suits for building and urban ops.
Besides, its cool!
Ha ha johnny you totally discredited yourself with such childish and paranoid behavior, thank you very much for making things so easy my dear friend Gamelin.
Mondieu is that a Stuka? Run run!
As the best thing someone can do with trolls is to ignore them, that’s what I’ll do with johnny.
Back on topic, I think exoskeleton armor with infantry support in APCs could make a difference in urban combat. I am going to theorize a little and contribute to this post. Feel free to discuss whatever I say, politely please
An exo armor could be less probably hit by RPGs, could be impervious to small arms fire and most important, it could have much greater visibility and awareness than a crew enclosed in a big tracked vehicle.
APCs could be still fired upon, of course, but you reduce target risks from tanks and APCs to only APCs and you also add better protection to your convoy now, as exo units would be more ‘battlefield aware’ than vehicle crews.
If enemy units are found or soldiers know where to search, we get back to old close combat and door busting. As I said before, if exos are that large there would be few places where they could enter themselves unless smaller versions are developed and the terrorist busting job wouldn’t change much. (See another parallelism here: tanks didn’t immediately end trench warfare, exos wouldn’t immediately solve the indoor fighting)
So the point is that at this stage, unless miniaturized to human size (no larger than a BDU), exo armor could be used only as a support role, like many of you said.
In any case, exos could maneuver and help infantry more efficiently than an armored fighting vehicle in the street does. It could move around with speed, it could dodge, it could operate in narrow corridors, it could switch targets faster, it could kill faster (moving up your arm is faster than rotating the gun turret of the AFV). It would be like if you had a terminator there, or squad of terminators, they shoot, they kill, they get shot, they are unharmed. I don’t like making sci-fi comparisons but this one was necessary. Also, about room clearing, not all doors are 2 m tall, exos could operate inside warehouses, hangars, mosques and buildings big enough where tanks couldn’t. That’s a point.
Definitely, artillery strikes in a neighborhood wouldn’t be good. The Wehrmacht in Stalingrad, with indiscriminate artillery and air strikes created literally fortress of rubble where enemies could hide/fortify/ambush/snipe with ease, you don’t want that to happen. Not even counting the thousands of civilians dead or displaced, unacceptable today.
But what if we encounter a hard target, like a building full of bad guys and a tank round or artillery or some heavy firepower would be needed? well, an exo’s autocannon wouldn’t be a great help if we want to demolish the building without risking our soldiers. But the exo could be modified with a kit, it could be fitted with a missile launcher or some recoilless but powerful thing to blast the entire apartment. The kit could be deployable in another APC-like vehicle dedicated to exo support. This exo tender could be an armored truck, like a large MRAP, the exo goes inside and gets fuel, ammo, field repairs or changes to another kit, the crew never goes out and never exposes to enemy fire. This exo tender could also serve as a control center for exo units or it could even be made fully automatic and autonomous, without any crew.
Let’s see a couple of possible scenarios about potential use of exo suits:
Team 1: infantry in APCs with tank/MGS/whatever support.
Team 2: infantry in APCs, exo tender armored vehicle and a squad of exo armors dancing around.
Scenario 1: Our convoys run into a street where bad guys in windows and opposite sides start shooting at our guys in the open. What is better, a tank that can engage with its full potential one or two points at a time? or our squad of exos firing at everything at the same time and eliminating the threat much faster?
Scenario 2: Bad guys are met inside a warehouse or a large mosque and made it a strong point but this place can’t be destroyed. Team 1 can’t use the tank and needs to commit the infantry, there could be casualties. Team 2 sends the exos, they go inside and leave the place white clean without a scratch.
Away from puerile sci-fi fantasy, I see a lot of potential in this.
–Away from puerile sci-fi fantasy, I see a lot of potential in this
another playstation game dream. seriously dude. you are so out of real life.
It could move around with speed, it could dodge, it could operate in narrow corridors, it could switch targets faster, it could kill faster (moving up your arm is faster than rotating the gun turret of the AFV).
what a speed exsactly? people do not move faster inside of those batle suits. dodge? you think this suit can dodge bulets and RPGS? operate in narrow corridors? seriously? you belive that buildings are only corridors? some idea why tunel rats in Vietnam war were sll small guys? switch target faster? how at the heck? and why do you need that in a building?
a fu.ck.. your post is not worth to be answered.
–As the best thing someone can do with trolls is to ignore them, that’s what I’ll do with johnny.
–a fu.ck.. your post is not worth to be answered.
Now grow some neurones and mix them together my dear Gamelin, as in the first place, my post was not pointed to you, neither I care you read or comment it. Talks the one that drops grenades to level buildings and artillery barrages to obliterate neighborhoods. C’est la dr
New poster here. Never replied before, but i had to just for this one reason.
Jonny you’re a complete tool.
That is all.
He is not an idiot. you are the one idiot.
thats all