Pure Speculation about the future

Historically any technological advance to armor gives at best a short term advantage, as that advance usually also has the seeds of a technique to defeat it.

--wally.

Laser weapons, sonic weapons, molecular disruptors... take your pick.

Any of that kind of technology will hit the market about the same time as t-shirt thin ballistic fabric does.

I think we'll all be dead by then

I don't see the paintball thing happening mostly due to cost. At least not for a hundred years. Yeah it may be possible in the coming decades to design a thin lightweight garment that is impervious to current bullet technology, but it would cost a fortune. And I doubt it would take many hits before being useless. Even if it can take 100 hits before being dead, that's still not much to a paintballer. Imagine spending $2000 on a new suit of armor for every single match.

I think bullet technology, as well as energy weapons will advance along with armor. There will never be a suit of armor that can keep one safe from everything. Maybe exploding bullets, or even mini shaped charges.

ZeSpectre said:

the basic idea is that your everyday clothes are now completely bulletproof.
what happens with currently existing firearms.

Click to expand...

They get aimed at the face.

Burqa up.

Trust me, the gun grabbers won't give up. Gun control has never been about stopping crime.

What happens then? Aim for the head.

If such bulletproof clothing suddenly came into existence, the antis would simply invent new scenarios implying the damage a person might do with a bulletproof shirt and a gun - and they would try to ban both.

By the time the shirts become commonplace, so will the counter. History repeats itself endlessly. Remember plate armor? Remember maille?

As an interesting aside, I once did quite a bit of research and rumination on body armor; in my spare time, I'm a chronically unsuccessful inventor. I toyed with an idea for an unconventional form of body armor (it involved ferrofluid), but abandoned it some time ago, as it was getting expensive. It would have been fairly impractical in the real world.

Remember, bullet resistant does not negate the laws of physics.

Even if the material can prevent the round penetrating the kinetic energy is still there and shock via blunt force trauma can still kill you.

It is a continual arms race (pardon the pun) between weapons and protection.

Padded material Sticks and clubs
Boiled formed leather Bronze and low carbon iron swords
Chain mail English longbow and high carbon steel
Plate armour Gunpowder
Early silk bullet vests Cordite and higher velocity pistol rounds
Kevlar Shrapnel, grenades, JHP
Ceramic plates High velocity rifle rounds, IED's, flechettes

Electromagnetic Rail gun, sabot rounds, laser/maser....?

Next big change in weapons technology will probably have to wait on much higher energy capacity storage.

Hopefully good old fashioned fully A weapions will then become C+R and "quaint".....

No vest or armor will change the fact that we are bags of mostly water. The tee-shirt-armor might not get scratched---but if I'm behind the tee-shirt I still get all that kinetic energy imparted to me.

I get your point--I think that the anti's are betting that they will stand a better chance of disarming us before the tech reaches the point. Oddly, defense against laser weapons might be ultra-light if chromo reactive; it will probably be on the market right on the heals of handheld lasers.

It's all a relative tango--remember that the HCI folks used to get hot and bothered about 'saturday night specials'.

I am going to go with the old adage of "the armor is going to be one step behind" as is typical throughout history, there will be a brief time when armor succeeds, but then it will fail as the projectiles get more advanced, etc. Besides, all of that nifty stuff has to have a frame to fall back on. That frame is the human body which, if nothing else could get bludgeoned to death while wearing this fancy new armor.

head shots!

As soon as a weapon is no longer effective it is a useless contraption. When the time comes that everyone is wearing impurvious to bullet clothing, my lead chuckers become paper weights.

At that time I would say

"Say hello to my little frind!!!" as I pull out my new and improved Keltec
pt890 Microwave particle accelerator pistol to turn the bg into overcooked KFC.

The "Brady Camp" cannot go away until such a time as we quit trying to legislate against stupidity. Babies are still killed in automobile accidents even though child seats are the law. People still drink and drive. People still own machine guns without license. (why do we need a license?) People still own unregistered handguns in New York, New York.

We can neither legislate against stupidity nor for safety.

Well, I'd subject for appraisal that your premise is simply wrong. Common-wear clothing can simply not be bullet proof. The energy required to make common-wear clothing impervious to such things is substantial. The technology to make things so is a long, long way off, and before that day comes, we will see ray guns replace common combat small arms.

The more likely thing to happen is to have technology out there that would completely replace the soldier: robots to fight, whether in a humanoid shape or with treads. The armor might be good, but it's never going to be -that- good. Heck we're more likely to see personal energy shields before that.

lol! And I thought paintballs smarted!

I remember reading about a man in the old west, he was shot in the chest where he happened to have silk handkerchief in his breast pocket. The bullet failed to penetrate to handkerchief but it didn't save him. He ended up with a silk lined hole in his heart and when they pulled out the intact hankie, the bullet came with it.

I think it's going to be a long time before we see a material that's truly as comfortable as a cotton t-shirt but able to become rigid enough to not demonstrate the silk handkerchief effect.

Such a development would likely happen in steps. We would probably first have to move from handguns to rifles to penetrate this kind of material.

There would probably then be development of Thompson/Center type hand cannons and we would probably see a .308 1911.

There would probably then be development of new cartridges and bullet designs to penetrate this material.

In the spirit of the original poster's question - If a material WERE invented that stopped all bullets without harming the wearer...

The politicians would:
-Attempt to outlaw "civilian" use of the material and keep it to police (even though police are civilians) and military use.
-Attempt to outlaw "cop killing" rifles, high powered handguns and new cartridge development.
-Pour tons of OUR money into research to make the material even more impervious to standard "arms".
-All suddenly agree that the Second Amendment does indeed provide an individual right to keep and bear arms - while at the same time attempt to define "arms" as gun-powder-based weapons in whatever guns and calibers are available today in an attempt to make the Second Amendment moot.

We would all, hopefully, fight all these attempts. Otherwise we would have a USA where us "citizens" would truly become subjects of our body-armoured government.

I think a lot of people are misunderstanding what the armor would do. The t-shirt armor would harden, essentially becoming a lightweight rigid piece of steel, that would spread out the force of the impact over your entire torso. You may not even get a bruise, any more than you get a bruise from shooting the gun.

The way to do that is with what's called "shear thickening fluid." I think some place already makes armor with hi-tech STF. It's a liquid, and when you apply stress to it, it becomes a solid. Did you ever make goo as a kid, from corn starch and water? It looked liquid, but if you poked it with your finger, it became solid and actually cracked... then when you removed the pressure, it was liquid again? Same thing. Your t-shirt would be impregnated with a liquid that flows easily, moving with your body - but when impacted by a bullet, the liquid suddenly becomes a very strong solid, and the whole shirt "freezes" and effectively turns to steel for as long as it takes to stop the bullet. The "solid" phase of the liquid would have to be significantly stronger than steel, but you get the point.

It would not only have to be practical, it would have to be cheap enough that everyone could have it at the same price as regular clothes. Maybe a liquid made from commonly available materials, which would wick into the cloth yet not get washed out, or rub onto the couch, etc. In real life, not practical. You'd need three layers - one layer in the middle to absorb the liquid, sandwiched between layers of waterproof material to keep it from "leaking" out. It couldn't be normal clothes, but it could be a fairly inexpensive armor, even being thin enough to conceal under a t-shirt, but it would be hot and would not breathe. The first shot would cause at least a slow leak, as the bullet tore the outer layer.

I imagine that most people still wouldn't bother to wear it. Criminals may, especially if they're planning to rob someone. CCWers may wear it. It could possibly be defeated by slower, heavier bullets, or maybe lighter faster bullets - depending on both the strength of the solidified fluid and the shear at which it solidifies.

So either folks would go back to 230 grain .45 or switch over to 5.7 - who knows?

See below.

~G. Fink