What's stopping armor developers from using super-light overlapping ceramic plates in a brigandine configuration like Korean and Manchu armor from the medieval era?
Imagine pic related with ceramic plates connected with super light fiber instead of, like in real life, heavy-ass steel and hemp rope. If it's too heavy for infantry, soldiers in stationary positions or operating a mounted weapon could have their lives saved by it.
Shit for stopping bullets mostly.
IIRC dragon skin not working wasn't because the concept is bad, but because the original manufacturers manufactured it in a moronic way with perfectly round discs of more primitive ceramic glued to the interior pocket, which melted in the heat.
>All those studs over cloth
Is this effectively a full-body equivalent of Western coat-of-plates or brigandine armor?
Yes, and it's not studs over cloth, but the studs are the protruding piece holding in a larger piece of overlapping armor underneath the fabric or leather surface.
Because dragon skin manufactirers lied and a single large ceramic plate is better.
Most plates aren't monolithic. They are actually made out of smaller tiles. Its much cheaper that way and you can get higher yields and QC too. But they are much thicker than the tiles used in dragon skin and they are bound together pretty strongly to form one solid unit.
>If it's too heavy for infantry, soldiers in stationary positions or operating a mounted weapon could have their lives saved by it.
Already been done.
This is pretty good, turret gunner is exactly what I was imagining, but is this multiple plates all over the body or soft armor protecting from shrapnel?
I know, I'm saying dragon skin was poorly executed and created with technology from 30 years ago.
Bunch of hard to replace silly plates < Big, cheap, easily swappable plate with proven and predicatable performance. If it was a good idea, big money would be doing it, anon, even on a small scale. I don't know of anyone trying the concept again because, whatever the issues were 30 years ago, it still isn't appreciably better than what we have now. It was a neat idea that went nowhere against competitive designs, like Metal Storm, or XM8, or funky "Future Soldier" gadgetry.
Why didn't they try and make it as laminated insert? Manufacturer the ceramic overlapped discs in panels and encase them in some sort of lightweight resin to prevent slippage. Was this supposed to be vastly superior to traditional ballistic vests or what?
What's the point of wasting time and money cutting a bunch of little disks if you're just going to glue them into a monolith? Just make the single plate.
Because it has the possibility of being vastly superior, which goes back to the last sentence of my comment. Was Dragonskin supposed to be vastly superior to standard plates or just a gay taxpayer money suck with no discernable advantage?
It doesn't if you have to melt the resin off of all the scales and waste time trying to repair a bunch of them in the field.
>is this multiple plates all over the body or soft armor protecting from shrapnel
Sort of both. Hard front, back, and side plates with hard shoulder plates available on the market, soft armor under all of that and covering the places that are impractical to plate. There are newer and foreign implementations of the concept but here's the armor system from the photo:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interceptor_Multi-Threat_Body_Armor_System
That was already tried. It was called dragon skin. Concept mostly flopped because it wasn't ultimately better than other designs, and a lot of its promises were vaporware. Also the company had issues where the adhesives holding the plates together melted under heat, causing plate shift, leaving holes in the armor. Also also it was frickall expensive for the trouble.
Didn't the adhesive also fail when exposed to motor oil, or am I mixing that up with something else
Bunch of little plates that break are worse than one large plate.
ok, go clear a trench in it
>ability for infantry to move long distances quickly without exhausting>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
protection
That's why.
The most realistic near future depiction of body armor ironically (since the community hates it for not being operator tacticool) are the CSAT uniforms in Arma 3. Why add on 20 plus pounds of armor when you can give your soldiers full body lvl IIIa protection while being lightweight and still have the option to wear rifle armor if they feel like they need it. All while providing climate control and even medical information if an injury is detected.