HRogge Wrote:I never said it was easy... [grin]Ace Dreamer Wrote:If you are prepared for the suits to be made of really thin, but still sufficiently protective, ultra-materials, then they can fold-up to fit into something like a 'morphing disc'.Everyone in Fenspace has access to "better than should be" materials... thats what make thinks like lightweight power armor and Hardsuits possible.
This still doesn't easily allow the whole mechanics of such a system "to fold up". Even a passive armor with this scheme would have problems dealing with impacts because of the missing crush zone.
So please don't pretend something like this would be easy.
The real killer for armour like this is energy weapons - there just isn't enough material there to dissipate the energy, unless you are using programmable superconductivity. Maybe via something like wellstone, but that opens a whole can of worms, nearly as bad as nanotech.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programmable_matter
One trick is to use the dynamic nature of the armour to distribute the force of kinetic impact - "active" dissipation. This is without inertia damping fields, which would be tricky to get working on armour this thin, but might be worth researching.
I can see several ways of making this work, but, you run in to the meta problem of "hogging all the cool stuff", or letting things out into Fenspace that could be abused in... unfortunate ways.
Bit of a pity the armour isn't made of something like a programmable liquid...
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"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" - Hawkwind