What about real-time network-centric video games, how do they deal with time lag? Simple. The high-resolution graphics are generated locally at each site from a shared world-model. Only very limited operational data is sent between sites, so that latency effects are minimized. That’s fine playing video games in simulated worlds where all objects are prepared for in advance. It’s obviously not a solution for the real world.
A human in powered armor, that was immune to armaments up to 50 caliber machine guns and grenades, could totally dominate combat in a built up setting. It would still likely be vulnerable to hand-held weapons like rocket-propelled grenades, but any unarmored human firing one of these at close range would sign their own death warrant. Powered armor would also be vulnerable to booby traps, but these could likely be dealt with via advanced scanning technology, and disposable dumb robot scouts whose main function would be to draw fire.
There could potentially be many other advantages. For example, science fiction often comes up with the idea of a ‘chameleon suit,’ that provides, if not complete invisibility, at least makes it relatively hard to spot someone (especially as a chameleon suit doesn’t need to make someone truly invisible – just take so long to spot that the enemy is dead first). So far nobody has been able to come up with a lightweight nanotech fabric that can do this. But what if you could give someone chameleon-like adaptive camouflage for a weight cost of 10 kilograms? Not really practical for regular troops, but could be easily fielded by someone in powered armor.
Ah, but what if the enemy sends advanced AIs into combat with your armored suits, because unlike you it doesn’t care about the civilians in that particular area? Well, the traditional response to such asymmetries is to threaten to return the favor. It’s surprising how much of warfare – and conflict in general, in both human and animal settings – relies on set rules and boundaries. For example, today many nations likely have the capability to sink US aircraft carriers via massed missile attacks. But they don’t, because they know that the US would retaliate in kind and with interest. And US carriers still mostly get to operate with impunity.
The best environment for powered armor would therefore likely be in built up areas. Range is limited so that the enemy cannot bring any heavy weapons to bear on them. The enemy is limited to weapons that they can carry, few of which could penetrate a reasonable armored suit (especially without creating so much backwash that the enemy is killed by their own weapons). The armored troops would not have to travel from a support unit and thus would need less on board power and munitions.
The mere presence of a unit of troops in powered armor would likely cause every unarmored enemy in an urban area to surrender. Never underestimate the usefulness of intimidation.
It also bears mentioning that most of our urban interiors were optimized for the human form. Doors, stairways, ladders, equipment controls… These were designed for an approximately two-meter tall humanoid form. Power armor would naturally work well in such an environment, where tanks would not. Unless the armor bulked up a person so that they would have trouble walking down a hall, or through a door way.
Troops in powered armor would not just have the advantages of superior armor and weapons, but also sensors. Modern infantry have night-vision goggles and sophisticated radios and GPS locators. Troops in powered armor would be able to carry a greater weight of sensors, including better night vision, real thermal imagers (‘predator vision’), microwave sensing that can probe through walls, olfactory sensors (to potentially let them track better than a bloodhound), automatic shot detection and location of the shooting site, etc. As well as the software to integrate all this information in a rapidly useable form. Yes I know, ‘sensor fusion’ has turned out to be problematic in the current F35 US fighter project, but there is no intrinsic reason why it cannot eventually be done correctly.
Soldiers in powered armor would also be able to overcome a major issue that, for some reason, gets very little public attention (perhaps because the military doesn’t like to admit the long-term human cost to its veterans). Human senses are surprisingly acute for their size and power consumption, but are delicate and easily damaged. You are waiting and listening for the faint sounds of an enemy footstep – then a rifle shot overloads your hearing. Human senses were not built for this kind of abuse. In powered armor human senses could be protected: boosted to work at super-human levels of sensitivity, while at the same time protecting the humans from either the temporary disorientation or long-term damage of extremely loud noises or bright flashes etc. Flash bangs become meaningless to them. Meanwhile the unarmored troops in the area are deaf, blind, stunned…
The Problem of Joints
A big potential issue with powered armor is the problem of joints. How do you wrap a biological human in solid armor and still give them decent flexibility? If you examine medieval suits of plate armor, they are remarkably good at providing decent armor coverage… but how would you attach servomotors to these complex sliding plates? And how would you provide airtight/blast-proof/vacuum tight seals? Even if you are not fighting in a vacuum, you’d want good seals to block out blast overpressure, and also any toxic gases or nanobots etc. It’s not clear that this can be done satisfactorily.
Remember, most human joints are not simple hinges. The hip is a ball-and-socket joint, sure, but the knees and ankles etc. have combined rotational and sliding motions, which is why it’s taken so much longer to make replacements for these pieces. You could wear a suit of medieval armor, but it’s more like clothing - it rides on the body. Putting external motors on such a suit will be a lot harder.
In the early days of space exploration, the NASA tried to make space suits out of solid metal. The only way they could figure out how to do that was with extremely bulky and awkward spherical joints. They worked, technically, but were impractical (although similar joints are sometimes used on specialist hardshell deep sea diving suits). Still, their awkwardness, and the fact that these would jam with any sort of denting or damage, makes these types of joints impractical for powered armor designed for combat.
Hands and fingers could be a special problem. In science fiction one sometimes sees power armor where the hands have been replaced with weapons, but I don’t think that will be practical. It makes a good front cover for a science fiction novel, but soldiers don’t usually spend much time shooting their weapons. Mostly they carry and load and unload supplies, and open doors, and operate equipment… Hands will be essential I should think. It’s possible that the hands will be purely robotic, and the delicate human fingers safely tucked away inside an extended armored forearm.
One solution is to have an exoskeleton that stands apart from the human, and boosts his/her strength without having to actually wrap around them. Current research programs aimed at creating ‘powered armor’ suits mostly use this arrangement. A variant of this idea would be the powerloader exoskeleton that Warrant Officer Ripley used in the movie “Aliens.” It gets around the joint problem, and may eventually be very useful for giving mobility to people with physical weakness. But it doesn’t naturally provide much armor protection. The armor would have to be separate from the exoskeleton per so: very weight inefficient. So far this approach seems more aimed at letting an individual soldier haul heavier loads than to be a front-line combat system as such.
Although when you think about it, if you only want a soldier to be able to carry more equipment, why not just give him a four-wheeler all-terrain vehicle, or a truck? You don’t need an exoskeleton for an infantryman to transport heavy loads.
The Tom Cruise movie “Edge of Tomorrow” featured an example of such exoskeleton type suits. These exoskeletons could carry a lot of ammo – and had no armor and were easy meat for simple animals in close combat. Not a good solution I think.
Another approach is to have the human nice and safe in a small rigid armored box, and have mechanical arms and legs attached to the outside. This technique was used in the bipedal combat mechs in the movie “Avatar,” and l
ets you give the human full-around sealed armor, while the arms and legs can use simple optimized mechanical joints (but hint: don’t give the armored capsule glass windscreens that can be penetrated by bows and arrows!). This approach was also used in the “Ironmonger” suit in the first “Iron Man” movie. In some ways, the pods used in the book/movie “2001 A Space Odyssey” are also like this. This can work (as long as the human doesn’t get cramped curled up in that tiny shell!) but it will make the suit much bigger than a human being, and likely unable to use standard doors, corridors, stairways, etc., hence negating one of the big advantages of powered armor. I think we will see such systems, but I would expect them to be more useful in exploring hostile environments such as the deep ocean or outer space.
And if you are going to have a system like this that is large and can’t use normal doors etc., why not just give it wheels? Outside of human habitations, there aren’t many places that a human on foot can go that a robust all-terrain wheeled system can’t – and for some terrain the wheels are better! In the movie “Avatar,” don’t you think those human soldiers would have done a lot better in light tanks??
You could imagine humans that have their arms and legs removed and replaced with prosthetics – or even their entire bodies replaced and only the organic brains remaining – but then we are talking about cyborgs, not powered armor.
I am excluding systems like the skyscraper-sized Jaegers of the movie “Pacific Rim,” or the giant humanoid “Titans” of the fictional Warhammer 40,000 universe (or even – gulp “Robojox! Thought I forgot that one, didn’t you?), where a human crew wanders around a cockpit like the pilothouse of a ship. These are not I think properly considered as powered armor in the classical sense, and have their own set of problems.
Someday someone may develop a sophisticated metamaterial that can conform to the curves of a human body, and flex with it, yet still remain resistant to outside forces. Or perhaps something like sheets of armored scales connected to each other via powerful micro-actuators could achieve the same thing. So far materials science has not developed to that level, but you never know. For now, however, decent armor is going to require solid plates of material, and figuring out how to get a human to fit inside will be a major design challenge.
Control Systems
Once you have solved the joint problem you have to worry about control systems. At first it sounds simple. Have touch sensors inside the suit, when the soldier moves a limb it activates the sensor and makes the limb move along with it.
Only not that simple. First, what happens if our soldier trips and falls on his face? Does the impact of the soldier with the front of the suit cause the suit to spasm and try to punch into the floor? Or what if the soldier collides with a wall? You need to have external pressure sensors as well, and gyros and a fair bit of computation, and that’s just for starters…
When a biological system executes a movement, it pre-plans it for optimum efficiency. Sure it is always open to changing the plan if something unexpected happens mid-movement, but most of our motions are designed in advance. A suit of powered armor that only reacted to where your limbs were right now, and that had no idea of where the soldier ultimately intended the limb to end up, would have a very difficult task. It would have to be able to react much faster than the human, and with much greater accelerations, to avoid being left behind. It would also be potentially unstable, and might rip the soldier’s joints apart if it got out of tune.
Imagine a soccer goalie that only played the current position of the ball and didn’t try to lead the ball or anticipate where it might go… Such a simple-minded goalie would have to be an order of magnitude faster than the shooter to have any kind of a chance.
Or consider a dancer that is trying to follow the lead of a partner. If this dancer only reacted by moving in response to direct pressure, it would be a clunky fiasco. A dancer must be in sync with their partner, must be able to translate small changes in pressure into anticipated entire coordinated sequences of movements.
One possibility would be to implant an interface into the motor and pre-motor cortices of the soldier, so that the entire motor plan could be read out in advance and used to program the movements of the powered armor with the same coherence as natural limbs. That could be very effective, but interfacing electronics to brains has turned out to be a lot harder than we initially thought. To date no one has been able to crack the neuronal code – the language the human body uses to transmit instructions down the nerves. You cannot plug a camera, or speaker, or robotic arm or leg into the brain. They do not speak the same language, and while many smart people are working on this, there has not been any real breakthroughs. Someday, but not just yet…
The solution that I came up with in Old Guy and the Planet of Eternal Night was to have the powered armor use a neural network to adapt to the motions of the human soldier. In essence, the armor learns to become like a dance partner, anticipating and reacting in flawless synchrony with the motions of the human soldier. Could such mimicry eventually result in the suits transcending their original parameters? Well, for now I invoke poetic license.
Power Supplies
Biological systems are remarkable efficient at moving using limbs. Mechanical systems can be pretty efficient as well, as long as you use wheels, but they still have a ways to go to control limbs anywhere near as efficiently as biologicals.
Look at videos of those robots used to weld car body frames. Look at how fast and powerful and precise they are. And look at the size of the power cables connected to them! There’s a good reason most industrial robots are tethered to a power cord. They just suck up too much juice.
When a biological creature moves, it uses the natural elasticity of its tendons and muscles to store energy – in effect, when we walk, we are mostly bouncing along, only applying the minimum of muscle work to overcome frictional losses and maintain stability. Why do you think you have to run so far just to burn off one jelly donut?
Modern electromotive technology is based on the rotary electric motor. These are very efficient at what they do, but they are not naturally efficient at moving limbs. Those big industrial robots brute-force every move, and have enormous power drains. You may have noticed that most research robots that you see on video are tethered to an extension cord. The company “Boston Dynamics” has developed some quite advanced quadrupedal robots, and some of these do not have extension cords… they have big noisy gasoline generators, because their power demands are still greater than can be easily provided for with a battery.
The problem can be solved, I’m certain, but it’s going to take a lot of work. Coupling an electrical motor to synthetic tendons with the right degree of springiness is one approach. Systems of regenerative braking, as is currently employed by most electric and hybrid gas/electric cars, could probably also be developed. Some sort of synthetic muscle might ultimately be a better way to power artificial limbs: quieter and smoother than rotary electric motors and gear trains. Many are working on this but nobody has yet come up with a synthetic muscle that has the speed, power, durability, and reliability of a good old rotary electric motor. Someday, likely. Just not today.
I think that the power issue will co-evolve with the control systems issue. Letting the powered armor know in advance how it is supposed to move will be necessary to let it really optimize its energy usage.
And maybe someone will invent a nice compact fusion reactor (‘Mr. Fusion’ of Back to the Future fame) and the entire efficiency issue will become a moot point, to be replaced by the problem of heat dissipation.
In the meantime, look at energy management as one of the key design tasks for any would-be builder of powered armor.
Powered Armor Will Not Fly
The human body is not a naturally aerodynamic shape. Jetpacks for regular humans burn energy like crazy, are noisy and visible and any human soldier hovering around the battlefield is just going to be a nice fat juicy target. It will be even worse for powered armor. Forget abou
t it. Even the rocket-assisted jumping of Heinlein’s “Starship Troopers” makes no sense, either energetically or tactically.
I note that jet fighters that can take off and land vertically have had a very mixed operational record. In order for planes to fly efficiently, they need to have wings and be moving forward. Taking a heavy lump of metal and keeping it hovering in the air by raw thrust is very, very costly in energy.
Soldiers in powered armor are going to stick to the ground, where they will not burn up energy in pointless flying stunts and they are close to cover. If a soldier in powered armor needs vertical mobility, they can extrude claws from their hands and feet and scramble up any vertical surface as fast as a squirrel. Grappling hooks and cable guns might be useful in some situations as well.
If a soldier in powered armor encounters an airborne enemy, they should not try to fly up and engage it on its own terms. They should just shoot it down, or call for air support.
OK sure, someday someone may invent an anti-gravity device that has a low energy cost and also shields and cloaking fields, etc. and it will all be different. But until that happens, I say that soldiers in powered armor are not going to fly. Sorry about that, Iron Man.
The Need for Physical Strength
One thing I predict is that powered armor may require troops of exceptional physical strength. On the face of it, this sounds absurd. Isn’t the point of powered armor that a relatively weak human could have the strength of a bulldozer? Isn’t it true that a 70-ton armored tank with power steering can be driven by as well by a 98-pound weakling as by an NFL halfback? Well, yes, but….
Let’s take a detour to the fictional Warhammer 40,000 universe. The elite fighting troops of the human side are so-called “Space Marines,” biologically enhanced with super-human strength and wearing powered armor. Now, think about this for a while. There are many cases in this fictional universe where humans of normal strength wear powered armor that makes them more than a match for a Space Marine. So why do these Space Marines need to be physically superhuman, when surely the armor does all the work? I mean, how strong to you need to be to steer a 100,000 ton oil tanker?
Old Guy and the Planet of Eternal Night (An Old Guy/Cybertank Adventure Book 6) Page 28
