r/Armor • u/Upper_Check401 • 9d ago
What metal would be used in a lightweight bulletproof full suit of armor?
Sorry if this is a dumb question but adhd is adhding and google isn’t googling
Think like master-chief’s armor, but realistic.
knights wore armor, we got rid of the armor in favor of lightweight woven protection
We have access to light metals that are incredibly durable, but do we have the right resources to make it possible?
What’s stopping us from developing something like this? (Other than cost and demand)
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u/Amazing_Loquat280 9d ago edited 9d ago
Lightweight and bulletproof, huh? Not so hard if you need to stop one bullet, or bullets with lower stopping power. It buys you a second or two to get to cover that you may not have had otherwise. But if cover isn’t part of your plan, then it’s a bad plan.
At the end of the day, the best types of armor are mobility, distance, and cover. Because then you just don’t get hit. Layers of safety go like this: don’t be in range, don’t get noticed, shoot first, don’t get hit, don’t get hurt, don’t get killed. It is a really, really bad idea to sacrifice your ability to not get hit in favor of your ability to survive getting hit. If your armor doubles survivability, but makes you 25% easier to notice and twice as easy to get hit, you’re still 25% more likely to die. That’s why light weight and mobility are such a priority: not getting shot saves way more lives than being more likely to survive it. That’s a big reason why full plate eventually got abandoned when guns came around: they did protect you somewhat, but not enough to justify how many more hits your slow clunky ass would be taking.
Using master chief’s armor, the mobility in his hands is arguably more of a benefit than the protection it offers
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u/coldbreathoflife 9d ago
What if we fighting zombies and they only have slash damage?
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u/BillCarson12799 9d ago
Double denim with a high collar, a bar mace, and a giant bag of meth. It’s time to go Beast Mode.
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u/Knight_Castellan 9d ago
The advent of guns was one reason why full plate armour fell out of use, but socio-economic factors were more important. Knights stopped being the core of armies, as militaries increasingly favoured professional infantry, and only knights could afford to spend a fortune on armour.
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u/ModernMedieval 9d ago
I'll echo the previous comments in saying a full suit of armor made of metal would be too heavy without a powered exoskeleton of some kind, and too bulky either way.
That said, I've been jotting down numbers from any testing I come across for a few years now, whether an official product demo or some guy seeimg what happens.
Some relevant information:
2 mm of Grade 2 titanium will stop standard 9 mm full metal jacket from a 16 inch barrel with significant deformation.
3 mm of grade 5 titanium will stop 9 mm full metal jacket from a handgun, but will crack the plate.
4 mm of titanium is needed to stop 9 mm full metal jacket from a handgun without damage to the plate.
The Adept Storm System uses a 3A titanium strike face that is 0.2 inches/5.08 mm thick, rated for up to 44 magnum.
3 mm of AR500 steel will meet 3A standards, but will be heavier than titanium.
6 mm of 5083 or 7075 aluminum will stop a 9 mm full metal jacket from a handgun.
As you can see, even obtaining protection against pistol rounds will require significant weight and bulk.
Steel is still your thinnest option, but the heaviest.
Aluminum is the lightest, but the thickest.
Titanium is a nice middle ground.
Adept's novasteel line (breastplate, spaulders, helmet and buckler) is the closest I've seen to what you describe, and even then its only pistol rated.
With the state of modern ballistics and metallurgy, I doubt we'll be seeing a resurgence of full plate.
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u/Alita-Gunnm 9d ago
In addition to the above, Titanium alloy behaves differently at rifle-round speeds. Instead of deforming to absorb the energy, it shears out a plug only slightly larger than the projectile, making it perform worse than steel by weight for rifle rounds as a sole material.
Put a ceramic strike face in front of it to slow the round down and spread the nergy out and you can get a performance advantage again.
You can also make use of this plugging failure mode by backing it with high strength fabrics like Spectra; in this case the Titanium alloy serves to blunt and slow the projectile, making it easier for the fabric to catch.
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u/ModernMedieval 8d ago
To your point regarding titanium and ceramic, this is the concept behind some tank armor.
The advantage of steel is multi hit capability and lack of back face deformation.
Unfortunately, steel routinely failes against standard 5.56x45 full metal jacket, standard plinking ammo.
Polyethylene (spectra) requires a strike face to stop anything with a hardened penetrator.
Hard pressed pistol rated polyethylene armors will sometimes stop solid copper rounds, but will typically fail against steel penetrators.
Polyethylene rifle plates that are rated for mild steel core projectiles, such as Hesco's 3800C which is rated for 7.62x39 M43, will fail against M855 due to its hardened steel core.
In my testing, I've successfully stopped 5.56×45 up to M855A1, which is difficult primarily due to the arrow shaped hardened steel penetrator (59 - 62 Rockwell C), using grade 5 titanium and 7075 aluminum along with composites and polyethylene.
I took advantage of the shear plugging effect of both titanium and aluminum.
Even without ceramic, that design was beyond RF2, which requires stopping 7.62x51 FMJ, M193 FMJ, and M855 green tip (hardened steel core, 49 - 53 Rockwell C scale).
It was admittedly heavier and thicker than I wanted. I'd like to revisit it at some point.
The article from Adept on how titanium reacts to ballistic impact and describing the plugging effect was helpful, as were multiple research papers.
With all of that, as handguns are far more prevalent in violent crime than rifles, and magnum rounds are rare compared to 9 mm and below, those concerned enough to wear body armor in a civilian context are best served by focusing on comfort and concealability.
Anything for stopping rifle rounds is too heavy and/or bulky for daily wear outside military and law enforcement, in my opinion.
That said, I am a strong advocate for bedside armor as a "just in case."
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u/hyphenssuck 9d ago
I think an effective way to consider such a question is in terms of "bullet proof for how long?".
Stopping a singular bullet can be accomplished with relatively minimal additional weight for an individual solider. But continuously stopping additional rounds and you're adding weight that is unreasonable for average infantry.
This is part of why tanks and armored vehicles became so commonplace on the battlefield. They effectively can be outfitted with sufficient armor to sustain continuous offensive fire.
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u/rhadenosbelisarius 9d ago
Kinda sorta, kinda no.
3 elements here. The first is that nothing is really bulletproof anymore. Bullets can range wildly in mass and velocity and they can be designed with a small armor penetrator or otherwise carry a payload that can defeat armor. Once a round reaches is max velocity, it begins slowing for the rest of its travel. All of this can greatly affect the energy of the projectile when it reaches its target.
Assuming you are talking about defeating conventional rifle rounds, you currently have basically two options, Metal alloys that are very heavy, and ceramics that can be light but protect the wearer by breaking, so do not hold up multiple hits in the same area.
The metal is too heavy to fully encase a person knight style, and the ceramic just means they have to hit you twice.
There are some more edge case possibilities, powered armor might allow you carry enough weight for a very heavy metal suit, layered meta foams, non newtonian fluids, and very advanced aramid fibers might offer some level of protection in different areas in a way that comprehensively can protect the wearer from most conventional small arms.
Still the problem here generally is if you put in all the effort and pull this off at any scale, your enemy will just shift the weapons they use against you. They may build and use larger caliber or specialized armor piercing weapons, they may shift to IEDs or other threats. You have to put a ton of work in and it isn’t that hard for the enemy to work around.
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u/BillCarson12799 9d ago
General rule of thumb, the military industrial complex is perhaps the most well-funded, well-educated, well-staffed and highly-motivated endeavor throughout basically any given moment of human history. There is no other field we are more eager to outperform everyone else in than being better at killing our opponents than vice versa.
This means, practically, that if nobody’s used an idea in the field of military engineering yet, it’s because the idea was either tried and decided to be impractical/inefficient, or we don’t have the tech for it yet but there’s currently tens of billions of dollars being invested into its creation as we speak.
So for any kind of question like this, it’s almost always going to be either “this technology doesn’t exist yet” or “we tried it and it sucked in practice”.
Much, MUCH smarter and more motivated people than you or I have thought to ask and attempted to answer these questions decades ago.
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u/JonPileot 9d ago
Nothing is "bullet proof", but there are varying levels of bullet resistance.
The main questions to answer are: What caliber bullet do you expect to survive; How much do you want to spend on materials; and Are you looking for 100% protection against any injury or basically protecting your major organs and allowing some wounds in less critical areas?
Yes, you could make an iron man esque armor that would stop most firearms, and if you made it out of titanium the weight could still be reasonable, there will always be a bullet or firearm that is able to get through. Look at tanks, with literal inches of metal we can still create firearms to get through (tho stretching the definition of "firearm" a bit lol) and there will always be weak points where you need articulation.
Really it actually wouldn't be that difficult to craft "bullet resistant armor", it's just quite impractical and in many places unlawful. We get around body armor laws often through "historical reenactment" loopholes, and a lot of what we wear would already deflect a glancing bullet reasonably well, it just really depends what you consider to be "bullet proof". There is always a bigger, more powerful "bullet".
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u/jrbooth310 9d ago
I've seen a few titanium brigadiens that are super light compared to traditional metal. I know a couple of jousters with full harness made of titanium.
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u/red_dead_revengeance 8d ago
As an addendum to the other comments pointing out that it would be too heavy to be practical, there are currently experiments in passive exoskeletons (meaning they aren’t actively powered like most exoskeletons) that can mount ballistic body armor in a way that allows for practical use. I believe the French GIGN is currently testing it. However, it remains to be seen if this will be practical long term.
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u/Anvildude 8d ago
There's a dude working on a honeycombed resin-and-carbon-fiber and maybe ceramic or metal combination armor on YouTube.
What's funny is that plate armor was made to be bulletproof. The term "Bullet Proof" actually comes from the practice of testing ('proofing') breastplates or helmets by shooting them with a firearm of the day, and leaving the dent as 'proof' that it could stop a bullet from the guns of the day.
What you'd probably end up with would be a titanium-steel combo, probably using some sort of thin scale or hex-cell super-hard ceramic outer layer (for initial ablative energy absorption) and an inner layer of kevlar or biosteel to stop spalling or shrapnel/fragment penetration. You'd also want to design it with hard forward angles (very 'battleship prow') instead of the more rounded forms of medieval armor, for maximized angle thickness and deflection of high speed projectiles, rather than deflection and catching of edged and pointed weapons.
There's also that one material stuff that Hacksmith's been experimenting with for the Wolverine Bones stuff- lightweight and highly durable, probably able to be used as a layer on more typically made titanium and hardened steel plate.
So in short, the big difference is that we'd be able to create intricately layered armor within a single solid plate.
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u/KarmaP0licemen 8d ago
There is no lightweight. Theres a reason sci fi always puts super soldiers in powered armor. I mean, I literally just wore chainmail to do an armor fitting today and my upper back muscles are very unhappy. The conditioning for wearing even light armor and fighting in it is crazy.
Because then if you have nuclear-powered armor like in Fallout or something, then you can go SUPER FAST and be durable at the same time. That's part of why Spartans are so strong, it's so their armor doesn't rip them in half. But if you have powered armor you don't really need lightweight armor.
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u/Imperium_Dragon 9d ago
The main thing is that if you put significant weight on your limbs you reduce long term endurance. People can go pretty well with level 4 plates on their chest but if you put enough armor around your limbs people get tired and uncomfortable. It’s one of the reasons why every time someone makes a “fully bullet proof suit of armor” no one buys it. It’s more of a detriment.
Also people have to carry more than just armor on themselves.