Slinky Spacesuit

[torainfor]

web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2007/biosuit-0716.html

Even the Star Trek guys quickly admitted space suits need to not be skin tight!

[Spokane Flyboy]

These are interesting suits in the long run as they hold pressure at all times. I've actually played with the concept of suits like these in my setting I'm building, having ferrous material woven or impregnated into the suit fabric and magnetic flooring and shielded ceilings. It would give a sort of artificial gravity.

[torainfor]

Functionally, I understand that there shouldn't be any difference between the mechanical pressure of the prototype and the air pressure of the current suit, but I just can't wrap my head around it. Air pressure is so self-evening, you know? And it's the pressure on your skin that keeps your internal bits pressurized so your blood doesn't boil. It just weirds me out, for some reason, to think that can be done with what amounts to a bunch of string. Still, the configuration of the reinforcement to align with physiological movement is so cool.

What if we just developed some kind of paint-on neoprene that shrinks as it dries, providing literal skin-tight pressurization? Eventually, skin could be genetically modified to take care of it naturally.

In other news, my dog is dreaming and sounds like a quail.

[Spokane Flyboy]

Yeah, if you think that's a trip, you should see what they're trying to achieve with memory materials in a similar fashion. Skin tight suits that enhance your physical strength by whole magnitudes. Can you imagine soldiers that could lift two or three times their own body weight with the ease they currently lift half? There are firms in the real-world currently working on that technology.

And you own Quail Dog? Quailman's loyal sidekick?!

[torainfor]

That suit would be phenomenal for rehab purposes! Other than that, I see mucho danger.

Never heard of "Quaildog" until now. Kinda interesting. No, we own Cinnamon, AKA: Cinnamonster, AKA: Princess PeePee, The World's Most Neurotic Dog. How neurotic, you ask? She's afraid of her own tail. It attacks her eyes when she's happy, so she's learned not to be happy. Except when she's given dried spaghetti, peanuts, or frozen vegetables. Then she's moderately happy.

[duchessashley]

torainfor - Not to toss this thread to the dogs, but your dog sounds awesome!! It's nice to know that someone else out there has a weird dog.

We have Gracie - "Gracie Ann Marie Shenequa LaToya Victoria Consuela Millicent..." and the list goes on. She has no sense of smell. You can put a treat in front of her and you have to point it out. She's spastic and either cannot or will not learn tricks. For that reason, I say that she's either the world's dumbest dog (cannot learn) ...or the smartest (will not - pretends to be dumb, thusly doesn't have to). Have you ever seen the episode of "Just Shoot Me" with the character Donnie?

[newburydave]

Hey Guys and Girls;

I hate to rescue the thread from the dogs but the "skinsuit" has already become a standard piece of hardware in mainstream secular Science fiction over at Baen books. None other than Dave Webber in the Honorverse has made it the standard Navy issue for deck personnel in the Manticoran Space Navy for some time now.

His chief heroine, Admiral Honor Harrington, has had qualms about how skin tight and revealing it is (much more so than the old standard issue ship suit) on the eve of more than one major space battle.

It seems that the new skinsuit is not just a pressure suit lest the ship lose pressurization (an unfortunately common occurrence) but it is also armor in that it will stop the hyper-kinetic fletchettes that their standard military sidearms fire.

It does other stuff too so that a Naval officer can live in one for an extended time. It is a real microenvironment and so flexible that Honor, who is a martial arts master-super-duper-doll, can do back flips and rip the hearts out of the baddies in hand to hand combat without any hindrance beyond what a traditional ghi would offer.

It doesn't have the mega armor that the ship's marines tactical combat armor sport (the description sounds like they are walking main battle tanks) but it provides mega protection for the ordinary ship-board squids (or whatever they call the Space Navy personnel, Vacuum suckers I guess).

The cover art on the books make the female Manticoran Navy officers wearing them look like real jail bait; sort of like that Borg female on Star Trek Voyager.

So the slinky vacuum suit is already imagineered by the Sf community to be very functional and much more ergonomic. It just remains for the techies at MIT to fill in the details. And I happen to know that most of them read Sf so they're already clued in.

[Spokane Flyboy]

Yeah, I've seen it before in science fiction, and it's becoming more prevalent as it does come off as more useful to sci-fi military personnel when compared to the bulky NASA-style pressure suits. I've imagined my space marines looking closer to storm troopers than walking tanks, however. Sort of a cross between the up-coming Future Warrior system and the Spartans from Halo, depending on how much body armor they feel is necessary.

[newburydave]

The Honorverse Space Marines combat armor is rather like a powered exo-shell with full life support, jet thrusters so they can "jump" obstacles on the ground or maeuver in space. It also has some built in armaments. The description makes it sound like a battle robot with a man inside.

If you want to see some scary armor check our John Ringo's Armor in his Posleen universe which the heroes developed in "A Hymn Before Battle". It is literally our of this world, built to our Marine's specs by galatic fabricators so we could be their mercenaries.

[Spokane Flyboy]

We had similar in the role-playing game I played. It was known as Marine Combat Armor (MCA). The caveat was that it lacked agility and speed.
The setting I'm working on is currently at the start of mankind's Great Expansion into space, which happens to occur within an age of wars fought to attrition following the further collapse of our current world economy — oddly, I started that idea for this setting in 2007 before it actually happened, but had read enough to see it coming although I saw it being 8 years down the road, not one. So, technology hasn't progressed as rapidly and much of the space faring is in ships built and designed by private firms for groups of people that want the heck off Earth before war sees their corner of it.

For the part I'm writing a story around, governments are starting to devote resources to space with the wars finally coming to an end, and are seeing dollar signs and resources outside of Earth, which has lead to the forming of the first space militaries to protect their interests. The ships are still rudimentary by sci-fi standards and swords (mostly fencing type swords), knives, bats, and the like are favored over guns since they won't trash the ship nearly as quickly as a fire-fight would.