Dragon skin vest vs. kevlar vest

[TheZoneWizard]

Almost made me lol in a library…

Dude, tin foil?? No I’m talking about crap you cover your house with and put in between girders. Even cheap aluminum siding off a house is .4 inches thick and would stop a slash or scrap with no problem. Lamelar construct would work and adding kevlar would beef it up. You can check out videos on youtube where people stop medium caliber bullets and shells with stacks of magazines. Lots of reference material. Plus titanium. Yes titanium again. Ultra light and durable. 2 1/2 inches of the stuff(not meant as armor, but example) can stop a armor piercing .50 round at 20 feet! Seriously…youtube…an odd place but interesting.

[darktoes]

None of that’s going to be particularly wearable, and I’m fairly certain most aluminum siding isn’t .4 inches thick.

My point is that, as far as metal is concerned, anything thick enough to stop a bullet is going to be pretty heavy and hard to move in, whereas anything light and thin enough to wear isn’t going to stop a bullet. That’s why bulletproof vests use kevlar and ceramic plates.

[Aabbcc]

My point is that, as far as metal is concerned, anything thick enough to stop a bullet is going to be pretty heavy and hard to move in, whereas anything light and thin enough to wear isn’t going to stop a bullet. That’s why bulletproof vests use kevlar and ceramic plates.

Not entirely, there’s also the consideration of slowing down the bullet a bit to reduce the damage, which a block of metal just won’t do even if the bullet never penetrates it.

[darktoes]

I’m not sure a few layers of kevlar is going to do that much slowing down on a rifle bullet, but that might be a consideration as well.

[Mantar]

Heavy and hard to move it, sure, but not entirely infeasible. See:

Ned Kelly

[darktoes]

Yeah, and look at the coverage. He got shot in the knee.

Armor the joints with that and you’re a statue.

[TheZoneWizard]

Missing the point entirely. You aren’t suppose to sit like a lump of $h!t and get shot at point blank by a rifle and walk it off. My points are moving your @$$ and if you are light enough but take a graze you can survive. The only real armor that is light is t-shirts and lab coats and crap of this nature. I know for a fact you can make armor and take a slash pretty well and be light enough to move fast.

I can also show you items you can buy off the shelf and turn them into some decent armor.
look up on amazon MSR Titan pot. $150 and I know of several locations to find them locally. Plus forks, knives etc so other crap made out of titanium. I’m getting at, you can make some ultra light stuff and it can certainly slow a bullet. Deflect slashing and slow some bash.

I can do this in real life with all this random crap I can find. I think fudging it a little for the game isn’t really a stretch >=P

[darktoes]

I think bullets are a lot more powerful than you think, at least rifle rounds are. Sure a kevlar vest might stop a pistol round but you sure as hell won’t walk it off, you’re talking completely winded and probably a cracked rib at least. I know from experience that kevlar vests are surprisingly heavy and bulky, so don’t expect anything to stop a bullet that isn’t at least a bit encumbering. Banging a bunch of pots flat and duct taping them to yourself might stop a few rounds but it sure will slow you down.

If you just want something that can take a few bites and grazes then your best bet would probably be thin kevlar, and we have the light survivor set for that ingame. Just slowing a bullet isn’t going to save your life.

MY point is that the more armor you add, the more encumbering it is, regardless of whether you make it of titanium alloys or not. And anything that can stop a rifle round is going to be damn heavy.

[TheZoneWizard]

I’m pretty sure you are still missing my points here. Armor doesn’t have to imply stopping a .50cal.

I fall and scrape my head. But if I had a duck bill baseball cap I’d have avoided some of the impact.

Adding leather, kevlar and titanium or other metal would prevent certain damage. There are options that would diffuse and mitigate some damage rather than playing a tank which i hate with a passion >_<

Actually adding titanium wouldn’t encumber you at all. It is lighter than leather and you can make it overlapping based on lamelar styles. Add a few sheets of kevlar and nylon and you can most certainly run like the wind and slow a .22.

You can survive is what I am getting at. Light survivor gear is just a start in my opinion. It was probably added from my arguments about heavy/light leather. But I’d have to ask Kevin about that.

[darktoes]

I’m not missing your point at all. Yes, lighter armor has a place, but you can’t have light armor that can stop bullets, and titanium isn’t some magic substance that can stop bullets with a paper thin strip. If it was, I’m sure the military would be using it.

What you’re basically asking for is some magical unrealistic armor that somehow has full coverage, decent armor rating, AND low encumbrance.

[TheZoneWizard]

No. You miss the point that you assume it has to stop bullets. I’m pointing out that light armor can mitigate bullet damage and not be lethal.

I have no clue where you got the idea that light armor has to be paper thin. You can bend 1/8th of an inch of titanium and reduce a fair amount of damage of any kind. Bullet protection is not used in the military or police because of cost mate. No other reason. It does exist though. Google diamond tuxedo. You can absorb 9mm bullets and have a totally normal tuxedo in reality. Cost? 1million US. This is not even using titanium.

You can make braided titanium just like steel and it would be a fraction of the weight. Then use overlapping plates of titanium and kevlar woven together. Using Liquid Body Armor(by DuPont) treatment of the inter woven kevlar sheets. You can find similar method of ancient japanese armor. Braided titanium and plates with drilled holes in them to interweave everything.

Using all that I mentioned would create something like a jean jacket in regard to encumbrance if you layer the small plates into octagonal and half octagonal design. In short, you can be stab proof and bullet proof in reality…so why the heck not in a game? =P

PS- you will still be bruised.

[darktoes]

I don’t see how you can “mitigate bullet damage” without stopping it. If the bullet goes through the armor it goes into you, which means you’re probably dead or severely injured.

1/8th inch titanium is still going to be pretty heavy, and you won’t be able to easily move with a sheet of it over you. The military/police do use bullet protection, they have kevlar vests with ceramic plates. Anything more advanced is going to get ridiculously expensive fast for something that probably won’t even be needed.

That tuxedo is expensive because it’s diamond encrusted and has water cooling, not because of the kevlar vest underneath. 9mm rounds aren’t even that hard to stop, your skull can stop them dead if you hit it right.

Even if you do something creative with lamination or weaving, it will still get really thick really fast. A few smallish plates to protect your vitals might be okay for encumbrance, but we all know how well low coverage armor works in Cataclysm. Braided steel/titanium probably isn’t even going to protect you that well since it can’t compress like it’s intended to. As armor it would just act like a thin sheet of metal as far as stopping penetration is concerned.

Something with braided steel and kevlar plates isn’t going to be the encumbrance of a jean jacket, not thick enough that it can stop a bullet. And that’s not nearly something you could craft in Cataclysm.

The issue is that you’re arguing that you can make light, flexible, bulletproof or resistant armor and you really can’t. You can make vests that will stop a handgun round and we have those ingame, if you want something that protects more of you or protects against bullets, you have to make it bigger and heavier.

[TheZoneWizard]

Dude…I get you are thinking and rationalizing and all but seriously. You don’t grasp the concept of being shot dead and shot but not dead??

Go look up how bullets work. Short version = armor slows bullet and sometimes breaks a bone or bruises severe. But you live because the impact was mitigated. Other times the bullets passes through and was slowed to a point to which you live but now are bleeding.

You seem to not know that people can live while bullets are not completely stopped before the flesh.

Jeez dude, go look up titanium. It is NOT heavy. I mean seriously help me out here. Ya gotta just investigate stuff. Plus you ignore the design elements of practical armor. I was assuming you knew how much of these types of armor are actually made but I’m not going to reply now because you really don’t grasp what I am saying and you don’t need too unless you mod or code the game. Cheers mate!

[darktoes]

You seem to not grasp that having a bullet inside of you is going to be severely incapacitating if not life threatening regardless of whether it’s been slowed down a bit. Ignore speed for a moment, since you can easily have an extremely high velocity bullet pass straight through you and live if it hits nothing vital, and just realise that a bullet in your heart/brain/lung/stomach/whatever is going to kill you if you don’t get medical attention soon if not in seconds, and you don’t get medical attention in Cataclysm. You get zombie bites.

I know titanium isn’t as heavy as steel, but it’s not magical, so you need a fair amount of it to slow or stop a bullet. If you have a fair amount of it you can’t move as easily because it restricts your joints, not because it’s heavy. You know how tying someone up makes it so they can’t move even though the rope weighs next to nothing? Same principle.

I’m amazed at how completely out of touch with reality you are.

[Sanehatter]

I don’t know anything about titanium or its possible applications in body armor (although there is sense in saying if its not already used, then it’s probably not suitable for it). But there are bullet wounds and bullet wounds. A high speed bullet damages tissue in a really larger radius than the projectile itself, due shockwaves and such, and a lot of modern body armors increase survivability against rifle rounds by simply reducing impact speed.
However, the current damage for high caliber rifles looks quite low compared to the effect they have in a person’s body, so I’m not sure we should be trying to decrease it further.

[darktoes]

Perhaps, but that’s military body armour and it’s only slowing the rounds. Military body armor is pretty encumbering and anything stronger is going to weigh more and be even more encumbering, so it’s not like you’re going to be able to make something better AND light. Not unless you use some really damn fancy materials.

[mlangsdorf]

Body armor that is certified to National Institute of Justice Type III[1] standards is supposed to completely stop a 7.62x51mm NATO round at 850 m/s, without transmitting enough energy through to the wearer to seriously harm them[2]. And class III armor is worn by soldiers in the field and the individual plates only weigh around 3-5 lbs[3].

Though the ceramic plates that convert class II armor (stops pistol bullets) into class III armor (stops rifles) are only meant to stop 3-5 rounds, and then the armor plate and the carrier vest need to be replaced. So that doesn’t really match C:DDA’s model and I don’t know that players would enjoy having kevlar vests that were converted to … status after being hit 6 times.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_armor#Performance_standards
[2] Been a while since I read the standard, but a broken rib is borderline acceptable but a crushed chest is not.
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_Arms_Protective_Insert

[Sanehatter]

Pretty much. I’d really like more military body armor options, but there’s no need for sci-fi alloy stuff, we already have the Rivtech combat armor for that.