Real life Power Armor is going to be realized in the future. : Fallout Series Discussion

» Sat May 28, 2011 5:03 am

These things have been in development for years. The only thing holding them back is power- presumably, these will be run off of batteries, and good luck having one keep a charge for over 5 hours of usable energy under battlefield conditions.

Once we hit the 10, 12, or even 15-hour battery life will these things hit production. Until then, they're only learning how to walk.

It's not just a power supply, but dealing with the mechanisms and protecting those mechanisms. Guarantee you putting these out on the battle field would be a bad idea since people would be aiming at the power supply for them. Until we can get super efficient systems, enhanced systems for better loads, power supply issues, and miniaturization of the components this is just a pipe dream really.

Only thing we could "plausibly" make right now imho is a clunky version of a gundam unit or more than likely a power loader from Aliens. If you could miniaturize the components with the retaining the same amount of power then I would say we would see this within 5 years. However with the rate we are going it won't for another 25 to 40 years till we see something along the lines of FO Power Suits let along the stuff we see in Crysis.

» Fri May 27, 2011 8:49 pm

It's not just a power supply, but dealing with the mechanisms and protecting those mechanisms. Guarantee you putting these out on the battle field would be a bad idea since people would be aiming at the power supply for them. Until we can get super efficient systems, enhanced systems for better loads, power supply issues, and miniaturization of the components this is just a pipe dream really.

Only thing we could "plausibly" make right now imho is a clunky version of a gundam unit or more than likely a power loader from Aliens. If you could miniaturize the components with the retaining the same amount of power then I would say we would see this within 5 years. However with the rate we are going it won't for another 25 to 40 years till we see something along the lines of FO Power Suits let along the stuff we see in Crysis.

Said miniturization is possible- but why work on that if we can't get the damn things to run for more than a handful of hours without a recharge? The tech is there, but there's no real need to improve upon the technical aspects without an adequate power source now. It's like saying hypersonic jets are a pipe dream that won't be seen for half a century because nobody is working on the airframe while the engine that will run the thing is still in pre-developmental stages.

The US military aren't the only ones working on them, BTW; the Japanese are also building a medical exoskeleton for use by parapalegics and quadrapalegics.