My wife and I were watching The International last night. After a combat scene, we got discussing... Assuming you're wearing a class II or III armored vest and you take several shots to the chest (but there are still bad guys around), at what point do you discard the vest? How many shots does a vest take before it becomes more of a penalty, I suppose in hindrance to movement, then an advantage?

Simple: You don't.

Granted i don't know that much about ballistic vests and such... but i would discard the old one exactly a minute before i begin to wear my new one. I think even an old vest which lost a bit of its elasticity and strength and even is riddled with impacts and rips would still be better than not wearing one. So specialists... untrue?

It depends on whether the vest has been working or not.

Working - Don't bother taking it off, there are still bad guys around.
Not working - Don't bother taking it off, there are still bad guys around and you've been shot in the chest.

Ever tried having a loose thread from your clothes snag on something, and it tears up your clothing? Now, if those threads are kevlar that can hold your forward momentum without breaking...

If you've been shot in the vest, use standard fire and movement, but check for loose threads before asking for covering fire.

Modern Armor can fall on a frag grenade and remain 90% effective.

Future armor should be better than that.

Although that is just the armor mind you.... The person inside would still suffer considerable damage. However, I believe that is irrelevant to the discussion.
If the armor is doing at least some good you leave it on, period. If you do get into a situation that you need to take it off and there are bad guys still around you are probably going to die anyway...

It depends. I have never seen the movie in question, but I do know some stuff about armor.

To explain the answer a bit better how ballistic vests work is by weaving a very tough fiber, like Kevlar, into sheets of fabric. One sheet of fabric will generally not stop a bullet, so the makers of ballistic vest will layer multiply sheets into a panel, generally 15 or more layers will go into a vest. The theory is a bullet may go though a couple of layers before it gets stopped. The panels are then placed in to a carrier, to help minimize the and tear or the protective panels. Depending on the threat level sometimes a trauma plate (generally made out of layering a combination or ceramics, plastics, and or metal) can also be inserted in to a carrier for additional protection.

Modern ballistic type vest that most police wear need to be replaced about every five years. Kevlar and other synthetic fibers breaks down in sunlight and sweat. There is some cutting edge real world genetech taking place now of taking genes of spiders that make spider silk and incorporating them into goats, so the goats can be "milked" for spider silk to make a natural fiber to be used in a variety of application including body armor. This would produce a lighter and more long lasting vest than what is currently around. Spider goats.

Older vests form the late 70's and early 80's were only good for one shot because the layers of Kevlar would get pulled out of place from the first hit, sense then the quilting technology has gotten better and can take more hits. Even though current vests can take a couple bullets and still be effective, vests will lose their effectiveness as more and more of the outer layers turn in to Swiss cheese.

Although not an ballistic vest issue, I would have to think walking around in a vest covered in bullet holes would draw some unwanted attention.

Edit Fixed broken link.

Mind your that such vests typically only cover the torso, not the extremities. A fragmentation grenade would still affect the extremities, but your torso would be mostly intact. The scenario he described was a frag grenade COVERED by a kevlar vest. In such instances this is sufficient to block most shrapnel. However, rarely is a kevlar vest lying around and capable of being thrown on a live frag grenade prior to it's going off.

Although there would be minimal damage to the skin... I doubt the kinetic energy of a grenade going off with someone in a vest laying on top of it would be dissipated any significant amount by the vest to not result in severe damage to internal organs or bones in the torso of said person. That was what I was getting at with my statement.

Your URL is not.

But.... but..... I saw a FutureWeapons episode where they placed this new really awesome Dragonskin armor on top of a frag grenade, and it held all the shrapnel, and that proved how awesome it was.

Now you're saying that any kevlar vest can do this?

You're saying that FutureWeapons is hype?

My world just shattered.

Yeah, a person in a vest would have their spine shattered at the least from jumping on a grenade. My point was, you could pick up that guy's vest, and still only have a small chance of bullet penetration.

Those pinnacle vests have been subject to all sorts of controversy, hence their lack of major use against kevlar. Theoretically, dragonskin is superior, but those SOV-3000 vests have proven to show a number of defects in the field, namely improperly manufactured ceramic disks and a low tolerance to prolonged exposure to heat (such as the 120ºF ambient temperatures often found in Iraq). Most of those field tests are still classified, but one of the supervising engineers overseeing the tests basically said, "I'm under a gag order until the test results make it up the chain. I will, however, offer an enlightened and informed recommendation to anyone considering purchasing an SOV-3000 Dragon Skin—don't."

For my money, I'll take the Kevlar.

I first heard of BioSteel back when I was in a college biology course, about six or seven years ago. Transgenic goats win the cool war for armor. Another substance I had read about was reactive memory cells developed at MIT that hardened upon being struck by a bullet, but turned back to gel after a few minutes -- I'd like to see where they take that technology.

You really should post the whole quote.



Interceptor Body Armor held the contracts they were looking to replace. Mercy me. That couldn't possibly be a conflict of interest...

Naw, that would just be unethical.

Ironically, the Interceptor vests performed just as crappily at Aberdeen if I remember correctly. Must be the fact that ammunition is just a helluva lot better than it used to be. Every time armor is improved one step, bullets are improved two.

I used to work in the same MOLB department as one of the world's leading spider silk researchers. We heard a lot about it in various conferences and thesis/dissertation defenses. The big hurdle with using spider silk in armored vests is its elastic properties. Yes, it has phenomenal tensile strength (a strand the diameter of a pencil would sheer in half a 747 in flight without breaking), but it also deforms something like 200%. What that means is that, while a bullet may not penetrate a vest, it will push the vest through your chest just like a wound cavity. Thats the current direction of research- how you utilize that tensile strength, but use a weave of other materials to compensate for the elasticity. Any vest that results will likely be a hybrid of different materials.

As for when you discard an armored vest, I think most of the above are dead right (no pun intended)- in the heat of combat you never take of a vest that could be providing any amount of protection (unless you have a new one on hand and sufficient cover/cover fire to change it safely). But it should be pointed out that your average vest will *never* encounter a bullet, and any vest that does is instantly less effective than a new vest of the same type/quality. In that regard they are essentially "one use only" items. If you take a hit in a vest, you should replace that vest as soon as any imminent danger has past. If we were to apply reality to SR, your runners would be replacing their armor shortly after every time they soak damage from a firearm (which could be as often as every run for some groups).

they're called Dilatant, a kind of non-newtonian fluid. they are nowhere near ready for field testing yet.

to sum it up for the OP, you replace used armor once the battle is over. kevlar is cheaper than lives.

After reading that, all I could think was: "The slow knife penetrates the shield."

Oh god, I actually know that reference.

Really, with the whole ceramic composite plate business going on today, you should be able to just slip in a new plate rather than scrap the whole vest.

As for the usefulness of high tensile/high elasticity fabrics, that sounds like it would be perfect for the pockets that said ceramic composites are fit into. So long as you can keep the ceramics from falling out, you're stopping small arms fire.

holtzmen fields are indeed non-Newtonian




right, but the reason the kevlar is there is to protect the rest of you from shrapnel and spalling from the back side of your plates. if you're still in a warzone, sure you can swap out plates, but I'd still replace the kevlar when I got a chance. not to mention the fact that it degrades under UV.

Don't the ceramic plates shatter when struck by a bullet? I thought that was how they absorbed the impact.

I suppose in SR you can repair stuff with nanopaste handwavium. SR4 turned a bit more into Diamond Age than suits my taste.

You replace body armor as soon as it takes damage (ie 1 bullet). SR4 being abstract I would let the player replace the main piece of armor. The only exception would be the full military suits which could be repaired.

Dragonskin armor failed the test due to the ceramic plates not being held in place due to the temperature extremes as part of the requirements. There was a reason the owner said he wanted the armor tested right out of the box (ie did not have to endure the heat and cold requirements before being brought to the ballastics tests). Each of the rounds penetrated the dragonskin vest. I don't know if they fixed the bonding between the fabric and the plates since the test, but the owner also mislead the airforce that his armor had been certified Class III I believe. Dragonskin was also much heavier than the interceptor armor. Great armor under ideal conditions, but not ready for field use.

There are people who haven't read/seen Dune?

Weird. I saw the FutureWeapons episode mentioned earlier, and they fired all kinds of rounds at it, starting with sidearms and working up to the 7.68 out of an AK47, and they were real proud of how it didn't penetrate. If every round was penetrating (as above), and they were swapping it out with a pre-scuffed duplicate between shots, that would have to be about the most mind-blowingly unethical half-hour of television I've ever sat through.

It seems reasonable to assume that if both tests performed as reported (i.e., in the trial mentioned above it failed, and on FW it worked) then there must be some condition under which is is awesome, and some condition where it's not. That suggests that some tweaking may be possible to make it more consistent protection, but based on what we know now it's hard to tell what's causing it. Until we know exactly what the difference between the tests was (or we get some trustworthy third party...maybe Mythbusters has time?) it's hard to draw a conclusion. If I were responsible for purchasing wonder-armor for my troops, you can bet I'd ask for a couple suits to try and wreck myself before I risked lives on it.

What I do like about the Dragonskin team is that they're trying new approaches to armor. Even if an experiment doesn't pan out, you might learn something from trying. If they can eventually get armor with good stopping power that doesn't impede mobility, I call it a win. If they're already there, even better.

Nah- they got rid of Dikote.

Policy for the military and most agencies is to ship the affected armor back to the manufacturer to see how well it performed.

Here are the test requirements and failures of the dragon skin armor
http://www.professionalsoldiers.com/files/...000121may07.pdf

On FutureWeapons they tested the armor fresh out of the box.

On military certification they have soldiers wear it for one week then test.

The vests fell apart internally due to wear and tear causing them to fail the ballistic test.

That's why it's always better to test your gear to failure than to test to success.

Funny how Generals and persons of interest in Iraq and Afghanistan all wear Dragon Skin armors. I guess it must be the combination of weeks of constant heat and flexing under that heat stress which causes the plates to dislodge. I mean, if it was just heat, then...



And if it's only adhesive problems, then it's just a matter of suspending them in some kind of net mesh. But I guess that assumes that said mesh wouldn't interfere with the yaw of the plates since they rely on that to spread the impact over a larger area and to cause bullet deflection through partial angle changes.

Regardless of the specifics, there's some pretty stupid bureaucratic business going on in the background. It's worth checking out just for all the drama. For instance, there's the previously mentioned fact that one of the people evaluating the armor on behalf of the military was a higher up in the company competing for the contract. As for the other guy in head of testing...
And, as to the claim that they didn't pass Level III testing, Pinnacle claims they were given verbal confirmation that the vests passed all ballistic tests. Later they were told that they didn't have a written certification because the vests hadn't been tested against the extent of their warranty. So basically, Pinnacle was told that Dragon Skin armor couldn't be Level III certified until 6 years after their application since they were apparently so stupid as to offer a long warranty.

To be fair, those types of people don't do as much moving around in high-temperature areas as your standard grunt. However, and I might be mistaken on this, I believe Xe (formerly Blackwater) uses Dragon Skin. I think the only legitimate means of knowing if there's any bureaucratic shenanigans going on is through good old trial by fire. See how many PMCs using the armor complain about their vests falling apart, and go from there. We all know the military has a somewhat iffy track record when it comes to selecting the best available equipment (case and point: the M9 service pistol).

Dude, Mel Gibson likes that gun in Lethal Weapon. If it is good enough for him, it is good enough for anyone.

Seriously though, what is the issue with it?

Aside from the fact that the 9MM isn't as potent as a .45 (plus the 1911 is battlefield tested), there were early problems with the M9. I believe at least three of them came apart and the slide flew back from the gun and hit the operator in the face (all 3 were Navy SEALs, IIRC). Apparently the frames were made in the US and the slides in Italy, and there was some metal problem with the slide that caused it to crack and break. They also had 11 failures in the test lab. The M9 was redesigned so a fractured slide could not come visit the shooter. They also had lots of "cracked frames", as well. Also, the military switched from Mec-Gar magazines to Checkmate to save money, and the new ones do not stand up well to sand and dirt and water.

The military apparently believes the 9MM round is more accurate, had better range, and is more lethal (even vs. body armor) than the .45. I grant that you can shoot more accurately when firing fast, though, with a 9MM. On the plus side, it has a firing pin safety, on the down side they went with a heavy, long double action trigger pull (the last thing you need in a firefight, IMO). Despite being 9MM, the M9 is rather heavy and bulky, and has a wider grip than the 1911. The SIG P226 (the other contender for the military contract) has several of the same pitfalls.

The M9 also has stupid jamming and stove piping problems. That gun is just silly with field use issues.

Just a couple of comments from a guy who actually wears this kinda stuff:

-I've been to Iraq twice and have been visited by several gernerals and yet to see a set of Dragonscale. Not sure what the PMCs are wearing but all the military I have seen are wearing IOTVs by Point Blank and they work. Look for the video of the guy taking a shot to the chest then getting up and running to the other side of his HMMWV. One of the guys in my unit took 3 rounds from and AK to the plates and none penetrated. The softer portions provide some protection but rounds will still penetrate on occasion if it does not hit the plate.

-So far, everyone I have heard wearing a vest and jumping on a grenade has won their medals posthumously. There may be an exception but I am not aware of it.

-Once a vest takes a hit, assuming the plate was hit, you will replace the plate as soon as possible. The Kevlar portion could still be used, but it would be degraded and the military replaces the whole vest. The Kevlar in military vests is covered by a fabric shell and that will occasionally wear out, but the kevlar pads are extremely durable and not prone to fraying much even after taking hits.

-As for the 9mm, not a big fan. Don't like the round, don't like the weapon, don't like that we adopted it simply to be able to use the same caliber ammo as our allies. Let them use what they want and we will use what works. That would be why the SF guys have gone back to .45.

-Answering the original question, regardless of the condition of the vest you are wearing, some protection is better than no protection. You can change the vest after the bad guys are dead and/or gone. I wouldn't try it in a firefight.

The temperature tests were to simulate vests being on an aircraft without heat and then landing in an airfield in the desert and left in crate during the day. Not an unlikely scenario. I am not sure I would trust a vest that couldn't hold up in transport. The interceptor armor was 28.5lbs vs. the dragon skin 47.5lbs. This is a huge weight difference and would knock it out of consideration just due to weight (USAF and USN may differ on their needs). The owner knew the reason for failure, and I believe was at the tests when they were performed. Yet, he still pursued that the army should not fail his vests. It sounds more like an unethical bidder. I also heard they had quality control problems with their vests. I believe almost half failed out of the box due to quality issues.

Working for the government I can say we do give verbal assessments, but without written documentable facts we do not accept them for consideration. I have not accepted a bidder who was much cheaper because the contractor could not give resumes of his people with training dates even when notified them as such (your safety personnel do not meet section xx xx xx xx part y.y.y). The specifications are there for a reason. One is they have to match real world conditions or the extremes of what they can expect, and it is sometimes to weed out untested and unproven contractors.

I'll be honest, I don't know the specific reference, but all I can think about is Stargate SG-1 when SG-1 is facing Apophis and he has his energy shield deflecting/stopping all bullet. Then Jack throws a knife that passes through the shield and goes through Apophis's hand.

It is a Dune reference. They had shields that stopped anything* moving fast, like bullets or fast slashes, so you had to slowly push your knife through your opponents shield to force it into the squishy parts.

* Except for lasers, both the shield and the laser blew up if the laser hit the shield. Thermonuclear explosion blew up.

How about the fighter jet the pentagon has been trying to get congress to stop buying them for last, I don't know, ten years?

"But Boeing keeps giving us money!"



I saw the movie when I was like, 10.

Yeah, I honestly don't know why Glock doesn't enter the fray for U.S. armed forces use. It's lighter, cheaper, more reliable, and has a wide range of tasty calibers to choose from. I've had my 22c for almost four years and fired easily a thousand rounds through it without so much as a jam... Then again, I baby that thing, so I doubt it even has the chance to jam...

Backing up one second...

This is in SR only, I'm not advocating throwing a man down on a grenade, BUT, if you've already shot someone can you throw the body on top of the grenade? The troll bruiser type should have plenty of strength to toss a metahuman a meter or two as needed.

In a similar vein, can a metahuman body be used to tamp a breaching or cratering charge?

DWC--Great job at taking the idea one step further. Macabre but efficient.

We can even use hostages chained down to tamp the charge...I'm getting all sorts of dark ideas. Tamping just says it need to have an Armor Rating equal to half the Structure rating, so I we put all the hostages in armored vests with IEDs strapped to their chests, they can tamp the charge and serve as a dissuasion from attempting to disarm the device. Then you link the devices so that if the vest goes off, so does the breaching charge.

Espionage or terrorism, you tie people to the primary support beams of a building, broadcast the transmission and you get instant headlines. Code the transmission as coming from a known terrorist organization that would support the bombing anyways, and they'll take the credit because it furthers their own agenda.

IIRC there were rules in a previous edition (maybe DMZ?) for using metahumans for cover...

Applying that logic to BishopMcQ's question, couldn't you use the victims body as a Structure Rating?

Sounds like Dragon Skin is actually ideal for a civilian home defense scenario where you keep it in the box until the Hells Angels try to storm your house by the dozen.

Anybody want to weigh in on the story about the 9mm being designed to be a wounding round as opposed to a killing round? The way it was told to me is that a dead soldier deprives the enemy of a single soldier, while a critically wounded soldier will need to be pulled back to safety to receive medical attention, by other soldiers. A dead soldier is worth a soldier, while a wounded soldier is worth several.

It sounds apocryphal to me, but given the trending towards lighter caliber weapons I have to wonder if there might be some reality behind it.

The Original (from the 80's) or the SciFi Version... The SciFi Miniseries was by far the better of the two...
and they did Children of Dune as well... pretty good...

Keep the Faith

That's all well and good on a 20th century battlefield, but something tells me that fighting guerrillas on a modern battlefield calls for tactics that rely less on exploiting human compassion -- hence the trend to return to heavier calibers.