Lets assume our power armor has the same volume as our average human (1000kg/m^3), and is made of titanium (4480kg/m^3), everyone's favorite metal of choice. Average ground pressure = 8 * (1 + 4.48) = 43.84 psi When walking = 43.84 * 2 = 87.68 psi What does this all mean? It means your silly power armor will sink like rocks in mud. Heaven forbid you try to walk on snow. Don't even try mechs. You'll wreck any city you walk into.
Nu uh, all mechs have solar powered air intake vents around their body, which blast high-pressurized air out of the feet to negate 97.56% of the psi. Mhm.
Alright...I don't mean to be rude but you're completely off your rocker. PSI is pounds per SQUARE INCH . Distribute the weight, and that goes down. I don't know you source, but I imagine it is using an average human foot or something. If weight meant anything, why is the tank exerting less PSI than a bloody bike? Let me know if I need to say more, but this was just too silly. Please be a sarcastic post T.T
Because the pressure = force / area. Increase the area, decrease the ground pressure. A bike has two small contact points that touch the ground (the contact surface area is smaller than feet). A tank has large treads, distributing its weight over a much larger surface area. The ground pressure of a tired vehicle is around the same PSI in the tires. Mountain bicycles are around ~40 PSI.
So distribute the weight of power armour feet over a larger area. Problem solved. I hate you on so many levels right now T.T
What, like snowshoes? Have you ever walked in a set of snowshoes? Try adding inflexible power armor to the mix, and you have my other point: power armor is not agile. (you'd also still sink in snow with snowshoes power armor)
Who say's power armour is inflexible? If you're assuming hydrolic controls or something else silly, then sure. We've already produced devices that can be manipulated by regular nervous activity, and a weave of conductive material hugging the skin to receive these inputs is not entirely out of the question. Snowshoes are awkward to walk in because the human gate is specifically designed to not do that. With the assistance of power armour essentially creating new muscle groups and thinking for the brain, it is entirely possible to walk normally. Also, I am going to laugh at the poor sod deciding to use straight titanium. One, alloys exist and are infinitely more useful then just letting nature decide the properties of metals. Now, if we really want to get "out there" it's also not out of the question (if we have already figured out how to change matter to energy and back, especially on the scale of ships or the complexity of an organic being) that a somewhat sophisticated suit would produce it's own magnetic field to reduce the forces it is exerting on the ground. A powerful enough dynamo might do enough, if the poles were set using a gyro so that it would adjust to the user's position on the planet. There's a lot more science there on actually manipulating it, but it's not outside the realm of possibility as far as theoretical physics is concerned.
Different "tiers" of power armor would most likely face different situations. For instance, just an exoskeletal servo suit, (i.e the CoD Advanced Warfare suits on the trailers), while power armor in a way, would not add much weight to the bearer. While he might not be able to traverse mud as easily, he would still be able to. But a full body hardcase suit, sealed and pressurized, with full gear on the suit would sink straight into the mud/snow/sand etc. Especially with all the servo motors and mechanzical gear inside of them. When I'm in any sort of PA suit, I do try and stay realistic with the circumstances.
By definition, powered armor is a powered exoskeleton that augments the user's movements. Unless we're talking about invasive brain surgery and rewiring the greater part of a user's nervous system, powered armor will not help you walk in snowshoes. Real world exoskeletons (which are nothing more than that, a skeleton) weigh in the range of 50kg. These are designed to only augment movements, and do not provide protection. Since in-game power armor users love to shrug off direct rocket hits, lets assume their armor is of a similar composition of that of explosive reactive armor. Hilariously impractical, but impervium is the tool of godmoders who want to win at everything forever. The average body surface area of a human male is 1.9 m^2. This company lists explosive reactive armor in the weight range of 400kg - 500kg per square meter. We're looking at an additional ~800kg in weight from armor. Yes, if your power armor generated a magnetic field the size of a planet. That's planet-killing territory right there.
Stick a port in your spine that wires it into your nervous system proper, intercepting signals too and from that central point and interpreting them as needed. Yes, if we're talking about an ass suit made of ass it is going to be...ass. What manual input are you suggesting influences the power armour's movements? Relying on force feedback, and what I mean is person moves arm up->arm hits sensors in suit->suit moves arm up, is hilariously clunky and impractical. You could move around in something fairly light, but if any actual weight of the suit were to be manipulated the torque from the suit's motors would do terrors to your limbs when you try to stop it. Not an expert on servomechanisms, but some research there could probably lead me to eating my hat. Rockets =/= tank rounds. Still, this is assuming no one configures a better way (we are manipulating matter and energy, is it possible to shift kinetic force into something else entirely?). Yes with modern tech armour on this scale isn't feasible, but with the assumed 400 years in the future...well think about us in the 1700's compared to now. You don't need it to be the size of a planet, you just need conflicting poles. So long as there is something besides your own field holding the suit together (which pretty much anything inside the Roche limit of a planet does) you could basically be a magnet that is being repelled by the planet. I'm not an expert, so a planet's field may be too weak to even achieve this. Still, it's not about proving a specific way it works (because if I could do that I'd be in a lab instead of here faffing about), but instead it's my way of saying that it isn't a far stretch for some bloke to come up with an effective concept. If you want this to be about godmodding (and bleh-impervium) then yes there are obvious limits to what a suit should and should not do in a realm of entertaining fiction. There's always a better bullet, and for as much as you improve the armour you also improve the means to exploit it's behavior. Swords were all the rage, so chain mail became a thing. Chain mail doesn't do shit against a mace though.
I wouldn't take the measurements with very much salt, considering the vast oversimplification. That measurement is assuming the armor is entirely made out of nothing but Titanium, which is about the worst way to make any armor. You'd need to factor in the different materials, the form of armoring (Think plating vs. full metal bodysuit), the planet in question's gravity, and any forms of counter-weight. Take the powered armor I'm designing for example, a bodysuit of which is essentially light leather made to hold electronics with a hydraulic exoskeleton, kevlar weaving everywhere but joints, and thin durasteel plating in vital areas. The heaviest part of the entire armor would most likely be the hydraulics and liquid nitrogen cooling system. Would that be a heavy suit of armor? Yes. But so is just about any other metal-based armor. Is it as heavy as a bodysuit of full-on titanium? No. Overall, if your power armor design is nothing but full-on metal, you probably deserve to sink into mud and snow even faster then everything else. If you want to place a blanket ban or effect on a topic where each design can be so vastly different, then you should take each thing into consideration. Throwing the weight of a human made of metal out into the public and saying 'This is why your stuff is dumb and shouldn't work", isn't a good way to handle it. At most you're denying other roleplayers the ability to creatively counteract problems and limiting the potential hours of R&D RP when it comes to powered armor.
I did the math and got the weight of my armor. Working on the measurement for the pressure it exerts on the landscape using an average human foot size. 189.42 pounds from Steel ((For Durasteel plating measurement, 3 square feet approximate.)) 40.1975 pounds from Kevlar 150 pounds from Exoskeleton 53 pounds from Battery 80 pounds from Cooling System 512.6175 pounds Overall Suit Weight 180 pounds Human Weight 692.6175 pounds Overall Weight
Vitreloy is an amorphic metal alloy that is still being perfected. Using numbers from Vitreloy1 (we're at 106a, with V1 as: Zr:41.2 Be:22.5 Ti:13.8 Cu:12.5 Ni:10 and V106a as: Zr:58.5 Cu: 15.6 Ni:12.8 Al:10.3 Nb:2.8) which are going to be much less impressive, as finding information on liquidmetals that haven't the lab is past my patience and resources. Vit has a density (g/cm^3)of 6.1, with top Ti alloys coming in at 4.3-5.1. It has a positive elastic strain limit of 2%, while other alloys (Al, Ti, and steel) are at -0.5%. It also scales over Ti's specific strength, making it tougher as well. It presently has issues with extreme heat and have reliability issues. Is it so far of a stretch that Impervium is a naturally occurring amorphic alloy (it would take some freaky nature shit for it to happen, but then again nature is freaky)? Also yes, I have been taking guesses at what could be because it is "what could be". As I mentioned before, if any of us actually had the solution to working power armour why are we sitting here pretending it can't happen? Since it is also elastic, it could see use in smaller machine parts to provide quite the boost to function (Again, yes I'm just conjecturing. Still don't have the future goggles to see how this gets done, but I'd wager it could fictionally happen). I haven't had any luck finding the information on the weight of Vitreloy, and it is likely to change in the 400 years of advancement to come. So if you're trying to prove that an Impervium power suit is impossible with modern day knowledge and technology, then I'll gladly concede. If you're capable of using reasonable suspension of disbelief, a tool all fiction uses to some varying degree, then it isn't hard to see the possibility of us getting better at making armour. The Vitreloy example is showing what we have now, and then discussing what I believe to be possible with it. If you don't believe we could possibly advance our creation of alloys to find a lighter solution than titanium in four centuries, go ahead and argue it. And as a side note, you're arguing that tech we already are scratching the surface of wouldn't be feasible in the future. This very same future is beaming people up and down from ships. If you can't give me the numbers on beaming than it shouldn't exist, we should just walk to our ships instead.
This is a great argument. Also, I was looking at your math in the original post, and your math would fit a Glitch better then a suit of powered armor, and it would be more appropriate for a thread talking about why Glitch should sink into the landscape then a man in power armor. A more accurate measurement would be the surface area of the human body, rather then the total volume.
If you don't even read your own posts, why should I? It's also heavier than titanium, which is at 4.43 g/cm^3.
Because the rest of it makes sense. Also stronger=less is more, do the ratios if it bothers you so much. The point isn't that Vitreloy is the answer, but rather to explain how modern advancements are going. The numbers are only there because you're being asinine about it, instead of actually saying why you don't believe this could apply to feasible power-armour. Secondly, I'd like to call your presumptions that the weight would be equivalant to a suit made entirely of titanium, anti-explosive armour for that matter. I've read over the OP, care to explain why you are filling a human volume in titanium rather than thinking about the actual increased surface area of the suit? Or the fact that straight titanium would be absolute shite? Or the concept of armour not being the same as stuffing a donut with jam?
