What does /k/ think combat armor will realistically/plausibly

>>31941844
By the time warequired is taken to space, infantry warfare will be dead. There won't be body armor

>>31941844
Alot can happen in all that time so you can't really make an accurate prediction.

>>31943367
What makes you say that?
>>31941844
I honestly don't see us using giant metal tank space suits - they would be heavy to blast into space and that would cost us a lot of money and resources to get them off Earth. Probably space suits we have today mixed with modern body armor. This is just my 2 cents.

>>31941844

>infantry
>space

Realistically we just need a big ol space ship with nuclear weapons and just attack from space with overwhelming nuclear firepower

>>31943700
The entire point of us going to space is to go on other plants.

Unless you wanna just space ac130 them for luls

>>31943665
>What makes you say that?

not that guy, but robots.

>>31943864
Not the guy you're replying to but it can be
>fighting a long war
>resources low
>shall we make more robots or send meat as cannon folder when resources are low

>>31943700
you still need infantry if you want to invade the underground colonies of Mars, and you will need the best equipped soldiers to provide the best weight-performance

>>31943367
It will happen, but it will be terrifying like World War 1 in the same way because new technologies will be used that infantry will not be used to handling.

I think that in the early years of space colonization space infantry will play a vital role due to borading actions: most of the time space stations will be too valuable to be destroyed and conquering them will be a better option instead

Nanomachines.

>>31941844
I think once humanity truly becomes a space faring species that human beings as infantry will be obsolete. I mean the level of technology to sail the stars and sustain life on new planets is just so high that gun drone aks will fill that role (Elysium style). Or hopefully we will have reached a point where warfare and violence are no longer an acceptable or necessary means of operating/fixing our problems.

And on that note:

>BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD

>>31945963
You'd just rig every spacestation with a self destruct then wouldn't you.

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>>31941844

>>31941844
It will be a skin-tight suit made out of a material called buckypaper.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckypaper?wprov=sfla1

Buckypaper is 200 times stronger than steel, heatproof and electrically conductive so it can act as a faraday cage to protect electronics from EMP yet is light and as flexible as tissue paper. Normally buckypaper is made using carbon nanotubes mixed with a bunch of other chemicals however if boron nitride nanotubes are used instead then it can also protect against radiation.

Also, unlike traditional spacesuits a skin-tight uses mechanical pressure rather than atmospheric pressure to maintain pressure on the body so the wearer can survive in the vacuum of space. However the suit has to cling to every part of the body else your body part will expand to fill that space. For instance if there are spaces left for your armpits then your armpits will expand to become arm hills. That said it would probably be a good idea to line the suit with electroactive polymers so that will automatically contract and tighten the suit around the wearer's body to fit their exact shape much like the plug suits in Evangelion. Since the suit will be so form-fitting it might be a good idea to wear clothes over the suits to cover private parts.

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>>31949214

This is why 40k's art design is so damn good, it sticks to it's guns while everything else goes "wub wub hundreds of useless hexagons and metal bits everywhere over-designed as fuck mountain dew"

>>31941844
"space age" warfare will not involved large amounts of human troops because the facilities required to support and house human life on spaceships are EXTREMELY real estate intensive. Remote controlled or simple algorithm drones will be field-able in exponentially greater quantity than any human-bearing vessles; and be significantly more flexible.

Like say you can build one little space battlecruiser that has some planetary bombardment kinetic rods or whatever and carries a full 2000 man battalion of 'space marines'. And for the same material cost you could have 50,000 man sized unmanned drones run by some simple algorithm to not bump into each other or wander off, which all grab onto each other and get thrown in target direction by some kind of giant magnetic accelerator or form a solar sail or whatever; but say en route something happens; the "enemy" has space mines, or there's a solar flare, or use your imagination. That ONE ship gets damaged or destroyed en route and that's all folks. If half of the drones get taken out, the other still arrive and then can enter the atmosphere and function as "regular" (modern day) drones in an anti-infantry capacity. Or they can probably de-orbit at high speed and serve in a similar fashion as kinetic rod strikes.

The logistics of transporting human beings through space are simple tremendous, and although it could certainly be "done", it would be horribly inefficient.

>>31949379
A bullet will still kill you unless you make it ridged on impact.

>>31950688
You'd probably use small teams backed by orbital fire support. Drones would be useful but outside of lasercom range they'd be suceptable to jamming or simple spoofing.

Really, just one guy to spot targets would do it but you'd probably want a full platoon to storm buildings you can't or don't want to demolish.

Finally, keep in mind that if you don't have the infrastructure to deliver people to a location, you don't have much incentive to actually conquer it.

But mostly, this is nitpicking. I agree with the core idea of "No massive armies in space".

>>31949379
You'll probably want some padding to keep the impact from breaking bones, though.

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>>31949379
That might be one, or multiple layers in a space age suit of body armor but when you talk about radiation shielding and bullet protection, such a thin garment will basically be rendered useless alone. With radiation shielding bigger is better, the more you can pile on the more rads you can soak up for longer. As to bullet resistance a piece of steel as thin as tissue paper would pose basically zero resistance to pretty much any round, especially in a vacuum where a round will not have it's speed reduced by gravity or air resistance. It sounds like it would be smarter to make a body glove of multiple layers of BP combined with some kind of ballistic fabric and a self sealing layer which would keep wounded fighters from losing all of their pressure. The body glove would also (like modern spacesuits) have to contain some system for exchanging heat so your soldier doesn't get heat stroke while fighting or moving about in vacuum. The next portion would be their life support unit and all of it's connections to the body glove, over which would be another garment of ballistic weave and body armor, and some form of armored shell to protect their life support system, and finally boots, gloves, ammo packs/mags, helmet, and whatever other equipment they'd be taking with them. A space suit is never going to be some skimpy onesy wetsuit straight out of an anime, it takes a lot of complex shit to keep a human alive in space.

At the end of the day, a space suit is for all practical purposes a tiny spaceship which happens to have arms and legs sticking out of it.

>>31949112
Not who you are responding to, but that is less like tearing up railroad tracks, and more like burning down your own cities.

They're what you're fighting over - there'll be time where its justified like 1812 Moscow, but it can't be the go-to.

>>31941844
Not like that. It has a chain-driven pump on its back. Wtf 40k.

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>you were born too early to fight space communists in a mech suit

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>>31956016
outta my way, soviet and BETA fucking shits

>>31950080
Dude the entire point of the 40k is that the design and writing AREN'T GOOD

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>>31941844
Heres a pretty good example

http://pastebin.com/MbEZvFmu

>>31952132
>>31950688
So how are robots going to decide who's friend or foe? Kill/not kill? How to handle diplomacy or peacekeeping or civillians? Deal with newer tech ology or unexpected tactics that they weren't programed for. How about making improvised repairs that could never be done by even a dedicated repair bot? And that's still all excluding, god forbid, first contact

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SPESS MEHREN WHEN !?

>>31956741
That's one of the reasons I'd prefer controlling drones with mostly secure laser coms. Human control solves a lot of problems and even a token human presence solves much of the remainder.

The exact drone-human ratio for ground presence is a big question but depending on the complexity of the job, the degree of orbital support, the skills of the drone operators at managing multiple drones, and how difficult it is to operate each drone.

>>31943959
When it take so a lot of money to get your "meat fodder" to the fight, plus you have to feed them/ keep life support systems on it probably would be cheaper to put robots in ships with no amenities like that in them

>>31941844
By the time we actually get up there in any meaningful numbers, it's all going to be nano-machine swarms and semi-autonomous drones, baby.

>>31957438
Laser Com requires line of sight. The point I want to make is that robots will take a big part in the future, but they will augment rather than replace humans

First of all, it's gonna be skintight. In a vacuum, a breach in a pressurized suit is death. Skintight nonpressurized holds much less risk in the event of a puncture. Plus, pressurized suits restrict movement and make for a bigger target.

Jetpack or at least body-mounted thrusters will be necessary; without them you can't move and getting hit means spiralling infinitely into the void.

The suit will likely be more focused on heat regulation on the internal (direct sunlight in space will make your blood boil; absence of sunlight will make it freeze) with a white or mirrored exterior and electrically heated midlayer.

Kinetic weaponry won't be used past the first year or two of space combat. Recoil fucks flight paths, spent casings and missed rounds can trigger Kessler syndrome, and ammunition is bulky and expensive. When 1 kg costs $10,000 to lift to orbit it isn't worth physical ammo. The only thing stopping us from having laser weaponry is atmospheric dissipation, which isn't an issue without an atmosphere. So weapons will likely consist of laser rifles of some sort, leading me to:

Body armor. It wont be steel plates and kevlar, because those stop bullets, not lasers. Instead it will likely be heat dissipating material. The hard part about firing a laser gun is keeping it on a moving target, and it's got to consistently hit the same part in order to impart enough heat energy to do damage. Protection is movement, unpredictability, and heat dissipation, not physical armor.

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>>31959193