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October 29, 2010 - 6:43pm
We're all "that guy"!! Thanks Danielle Barnett for the strip :)
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Comments
Butbutbut... he had to shine the dangerous, bright pratical lazor at the shinay triangle to make a NEW ELEMENT! A new element, for crickeys sake! With an atomic weight of .. um .. some number they haven't even INVENTED yet!
And it makes the magical arc welder even more powerful and not kill you with robot-itus any more.
How much more totally serious can you get? :3
i always wondered what people who knew mechanics would think when seeing iron man.....
Honestly, a group of budies and I (all of us being mechanical engineers) thought that the suit was the coolest thing ever and that we should abandon all of our current projects and start making the iron man suit. Granted, the physics is all wrong in the movie and such but that doesn't mean the concept itself isn't plausible. That's what developement is for (^_^).
of course! what ism't impossible MUST be plausible!!!!
Bingo.
Yes, powered armor can be built(with off the shelf tech no less, if you don't mind intramuscular electrodes to pick up motion for the suit). The problem that renders powered armor wholly impractical(to the point of nigh uselessness) is the same as the problem that plagued later era plate armor. And it can be summed up in either one or two words.
"Agincourt" is the one word summary. The French got their asses handed to them due to the limited mobility armor results in. The French at Agincourt had trouble moving in their armor over the soft, damp ground. They couldn't move rapidly, it took a lot of energy for them to move at all(they were exhausted just getting to where they could engage). What brought them down most leads us to our "two words".
"Ground pressure". Meaningful levels of armor are heavy. Even if, due to weight distribution, it doesn't *feel* heavy o the wearer, that weight still exists. Feet are small. Have you ever tried walking in really deep mud and your feet sink in up to your calves? Powered armor strong enough/durable enough to be practical would be heavy enough to do that to you on dirt.
In addition, the Englishmen on the other side of things found that if they knocked a French knight down, he wasn't going to be able to get back up. whereupon they could kill them with impunity, in grisly ways such as hammering a spike into the guy's helmet. The same applies to powered armor. You're going to have trouble getting back up off your back.
Powered armor is strictly in the field of sci-fi, and not very realistic sci-fi at that.
While you bring up some very valid points about the shortcomings of a power armor system in modern times, you also seem to forget that technology has the capacity to overcome those shortcomings if it is progressed far enough. Powered armor should not be writen off simply because it isn't plausible in the next 5 or 10 years, but should be researched and the technology pushed to make it a reality.
@miasaki666:
I'm an engineer. My engineer friends and I watched the movie. We are all aerospace engineers or astronautics engineers and we drooled over the really awesome flight control surfaces (many if not all of which you would need on such an unaerodynamic profile). We drooled over the hud interface and (of course) the 3d table Tony had. We enjoyed the movie for what it was, which is GMPP (gratuitous moving parts porn). However, when one of my human factors friends asked me if the thrusters could work we all burst out laughing. Arc reactor technology is such a load of bollocks that we just waved it off and to produce that kind of thrust with electricity...well, let's just say no and leave it at that. None the less, as an engineer, we tend to do our best to turn off the part of our brain that actually handles stuff like this and just enjoy all the flashy lights and explosions.
I had that exact thought (with different wording) when watching that movie. An excellent action film, but everything technical is a joke.
To be fair, almost no Hollywood action film has real-life physics. Have you seen that one GI Joe movie? They destroy the ice shelf above them to make the chunks of ice fall down and crush a giant underwater building, ignoring the facts that ice is lighter than water, and that things falling through water do not accelerate fast enough to crush a giant underwater building built to be strong enough to withstand several atmospheres of pressure.
Not to get a little PG-13, but if you consider it, it's a fairly obvious sexual metaphor. Stark is drained and weakened, so he takes his shirt off, builds a giant curving metal tube, and using his own bare hands, fires it directly into a triangle until it glows and creates something new.
Physics, no. Sexy--apparently?
Making me an entirely different kind of nerd...Watching that scene I laughed because it's obvious that the element he's working so hard to manufacture and needs the shield to complete is Vibranium...which is what the shield is made of in the first place. Yay for postmodern nerdist deconstuction. :-p
Sorry to burst your bubble, but what he made wasn't Vibranium, because Vibranium isn't an element. It's an alloy. They through that scene in as a tease to all the comic geeks, making them think he was going to use vibranium for the reactor, but he just needed it to level the particle accelerator. He did in fact create a whole new element.
Vibranium isn't an alloy, although it can be alloyed (Captain America's shield is a Vibranium/Adamantium alloy, for example). Wikipedia tells me that in the Iron Man 2 novelization, the new element is specifically called Vibranium.
Don't get me started on computers and programming in movies, it is just wrong.
I'm not an engineer, so maybe that's why I noticed this. I love the exaggeration on the movie price.
Is it an exaggeration? I thought prices were approaching that level here in the USA, and had maybe reached it in Canada.
OTOH, not having seen Iron Man, the only thing I saw in the comic that required suspension of disbelief was that the price of two tickets, $38.95, isn't even divided by two.
That is cause the tax is added onto the sum of 2 tickets. The price seems high but likely to me.
The total need not be divisible by two.
The fact that it seems likely to be a correct price makes me happy to live in a little hick town where movie prices are still $7/person.
Glad I wasn't the only one who found the idea of him building a particle accelerator IN HIS FUCKING BASEMENT to be improbable.
You know, with all his money going to making armour and in-chest generators, one would think he'd just pay to have all the shrapnel removed.
And then just build something more practical, like say a really cool tank.
As a general note, and not to completely geek out here (too late), according to Marvel Super Heroes the RPG, Tony stark has the powers of Probability Manipulation, Hyper-Invention, Hyper-Intelligence, and Hyper-Creation. In short, He has the 'power' to create anything, out of anything, in a short amount of time, and anything that requires "calibration" of any kind is ignored because after it is built, it is always perfectly calibrated.
Basically Stark always builds it right the first time.
so he's Mike Holmes?
I'm just surprised no one has brought up the fact that the tickets at the theater are almost $20 a person