Synthetic spider-silk reenforced skin

http://io9.com/5830664/this-is-bullet+proo...milk-yes-really

Very cool, although I wish someone had captioned the video (it's in German, and being used for reference in an English article).

I agree. It's one of the better articles linked on here, in my opinion, though. Or at least, more useful to some people.

So, the goal is to increase the amount of propellant in your typical bullet, then? :3

And increase the barrel length of the gun. More propellant doesn't make for faster bullets unless that extra gas is in a confined space.

So, raising pressure in a cylinder of a fixed length does not affect the force the piston is experiencing? That surely is nice to know!

That would effect the piston, the problem is the burn time to achieve that pressure.

Too much powder and all you get for your effort is a muzzle flash, as the unburnt propellent is expelled and combusted.

Hurray physics!

But yeah, orthoskin would be good. All FFDO's should have it.

Non-issue with modern propellants, far as I know.
Actually, was a non-issue even with WWI-era rifles; on the contrary, the amount of propellant in a standard round had to be reduced since the bullets went well past the range where effective aiming was possible.

The video is in Dutch, actually.
We see enough German-slinging in these forums to not let that pass by.

It also doesn't really add anything but some backstory and abundant admiration to the article. If you're interested, I'll gladly provide a translation for you.
The only thing the text doesn't really mention is the different petri dishes the man holds up, holding respectively 1) grown epidermis 2) grown 'dermis', its matrix infused with silk, including normal human fibroblasts, with the same epidermis grown over it 3) epidermis grown directly over two layers of spidersilk, and 4) the same as 2), with spidersilk woven into the matrix instead of normal silk.

I was about to correct that, but Dutch and German are so close together. I took a couple years of German in High School - enough so I can understand about 1/2 of what's said, but I can still understand about 1/4 to 1/3 of Dutch because of the similarities.

Wow MSNBC tech also picked up on this one.