I spoke to some folks from Textron today about a new vehicle they’re unveiling down at the Army’s annual winter symposium underway in Florida. Called the Small Combat Tactical Vehicle Capsule (SCTVC), it’s a bolt-on armored capsule that fits onto the existing Humvee chassis, giving the vehicle Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) level protection from IED and mine blasts.

With the new vehicle (shown next to a Humvee), Textron hopes to get a piece of the Army’s $1 billion plus, 60,000 vehicle up-armored Humvee recap contract due out sometime this spring. The SCTVC also appears to be a good fit for the Marines who are trying to shed some weight from their battle fleet, said Mark Savarese, a spokesperson for Textron’s Marine and Land Systems.

The Marines have awarded Textron a contract for 3 upgraded Humvee test vehicles, after putting the SCTVC through a series of blast and ballistic tests; further testing will focus on mobility and durability.

One of the big problems with the Humvee when hit with IEDs is that its flat bottom acts as a gas trap, concentrating the blast energy upward into the vehicle. The original design also had lots of gaps and holes in the frame that allowed flames inside.

Textron’s bolt-on SCTVC capsule has a V-shaped bottom, so the interior is completely encapsulated in steel armor, including the fuel tank. The hull itself is lifted further off the ground than the up-armored Humvee, providing all important clearance between exploding ordinance and the crew compartment. More space is available inside, allowing troops to get in and out more quickly. Savarese said. While the SCTVC adds armor, it doesn’t tax the Humvee engine and drive train. “The brilliance is in the simplicity of the design,” he said.

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Imagine planes invisible — literally — to radar; a sub slipping beneath the waves hidden completely from any attempt at a sonar ping; a tank impervious to infrared sensors.

According to an article in Science Daily, this could be possible — but not in the way we’ve seen in recent attempts.

With planes it’s geometry and materials. With subs its materials, tactics and sound alleviators. With tanks — well, we haven’t gotten there yet. But scientists have successfully tested active cloaking from certain types of radiation, including microwaves.

“It’s a brand new method of cloaking,” Milton adds. “It is two-dimensional, but we believe it can be extended easily to three dimensions, meaning real objects could be cloaked. It’s called active cloaking, which means it uses devices that actively generate electromagnetic fields rather than being composed of ‘metamaterials’ [exotic metallic substances] that passively shield objects from passing electromagnetic waves.”

Milton says his previous research involved “just cloaking clusters of small particles, but now we are able to cloak larger objects.”

For example, radar microwaves have wavelengths of about four inches, so Milton says the study shows it is possible to use the method to cloak from radar something 10 times wider, or 40 inches. That raises hope for cloaking larger objects. So far, the largest object cloaked from microwaves in actual experiments was an inch-wide copper cylinder.

According to the report, this method could be more effective across a wider range of bandwidths. In other words, one active cloaking module could render the object invisible to many sources of emissions. Previous iterations involved materials that cloak against a single bandwidth or wavelength.

“The problem with metamaterials is that their behavior depends strongly on the frequency you are trying to cloak from,” he adds. “So it is difficult to obtain broadband cloaking. Maybe you’d be invisible to red light, but people would see you in blue light.”

Most previous research used interior cloaking, where the cloaking device envelops the cloaked object. Milton says the new method “is the first active, exterior cloaking” technique: cloaking devices emit signals and sit outside the cloaked object.

Be sure to read the scientists’ article in Optics Express journal HERE and watch the demonstration video. Can it cloak me from my boss, I wonder?

Broadband exterior cloaking from Fernando Guevara Vasquez on Vimeo.

(Gouge: MP)

– Christian

You’re driving down a rutted out wahdi in Helmand province. Your eyes are tired from the monotony, but you know you have to keep on your scan for those tell-tale spots of disturbed earth.

Rounding a small bend, you drive down a slight embankment and veer back to the right and BOOM! the IED goes off.

The proximity of your JLTV was close enough to the huge explosion (double stack 155 rounds) that your crew — if they had not been killed outright — would be left severely wounded, with possible brain injury from the cuncussive blast.

That is except for the innovative armor their high tech vehicle carried…

For more than a year, a good friend of mine has been developing with some key industry leaders in sensors, explosives and armor technology a new system designed to take the boom out of a bomb. I can’t get into the specific numbers for security and patent reasons, but the long and the short of it is that David Woroner of Survival Consultants International has designed a system that uses high-tech air bags to absorb the blast of a roadside bomb. The layers of ballistic material also help mitigate shrapnel, but the primary mission of the armor is to negate the overpressure that causes so many TBI casualties.

This project is still in the “paper” stages and has not been field tested yet, but a bevy of scientists and industry engineers are on the case running the numbers.

I have included here a video animation of the system to give you a better idea of how it works. While a lot has to be refined, the system offers the promise of a lightweight solution to a problem that the JLTV will likely face in the future.

And if the technology doesn’t work on the testing field, at least Dave’s idea could prompt some discussion of ballistic protection systems that don’t rely on heavy plates of armor or composits, but instead attack the problem from a very different angle.

– Christian

[From our friends at Breach-Bang-Clear on the Woroner armor debate.]

All right boys and girls, theres been a helluva lot of discussion here about Dave Woroner’s armor design and whether it would work or not work or whatever. Honestly I think part of the problem is that first off its over most (not all) of our heads. Second off, Woroner doesnt want to tell too much about the damned thing out of OPSEC or COMSEC concerns, which makes explanation difficult at best. Imagine trying to explain a lawnmower engine if you couldn’t talk about internal combustion, or if pistons were classifed.

Lemme see what I can do to make it make a little sense.

Have you heard about the Boomerang System made by BBN Technologies in Boston? Its an acoustical sensor system that uses “acoustical entrapment” to quickly and reliably identify the location of a sniper or other shooter thats putting rounds downrange towards our grunts. It’s been on Future Weapons and a couple other shows, has actually deployed to the AOR and apparently works.

Woroners system is kind of like that, but it uses light sensitivity to detect incoming projectiles. Sound wont work, its too slow for a system to detect an EFP or whatever and mitigate the blast. You might be able to detect the blast, depending upon the strength of the device and the range, but you damn sure wouldnt be able to detect it and then take steps to defeat it. Only light and electricity are fast enough to react to something moving at thousands of feet per second, which is why light and electricity are the basis of Woroners barrier system.

Its in the high nanosecond, low microsecond range of response, putting a countermeasure out to intercept the incoming weapon and either destroy it or mitigate it by shearing the blast wave off with its own blast moving at a reciprocal speed. This is effectively a countermeasure system intended to be used in addition to next-gen armor to reduce or nullify the incoming blast and projectile(s). Let me put it to you the way I had to explain it to Slim, which I think youll find is a little simpler than Daves explanation.

Some delinquent little bastard in your neighborhood uses a potato gun to launch a spud at your car. Youve got Woroners system mounted on the hood. It detects the incoming spud using light, not sound, and throws out some high tech shit you cant pronounce let alone explain to intercept it. That stuff is moving at about the same speed as the spud. It hits the potato and slows it down, possibly deflecting it some so that while it still hits your fender, it only hits with the impact of a nerf dart.

Potato-gun launched spud to nerf dart. Makes sense to me. Id rather get clocked in the head with an orange foam bullet than an Idaho baker any day.

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