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There's a very obvious reason sci fi armors don't look like historical armor: so they look sci fi. If you make your plasteel armor look like a medieval suit th

There's a very obvious reason sci fi armors don't look like historical armor: so they look sci fi. If you make your plasteel armor look like a medieval suit then your movie will look like laser jousting. It's why tatooine looks like a western even though it's made of jet engine parts- everyone is just dressed like a western, except the guns shoot lasers. Also, weight is no longer an issue like it historically was. You used to march to a place and set up camp to fight; now you run patrols and missions. Soldiers need to carry packs and water and ammunition; every loadout will be heavy and cumbersome. Transport and communications make heavy loadouts possible. Realistic sci fi would not have two armies sprinting at each other or dramatic last stands or light loadouts. Unfortunately that makes for extremely boring movies. People carrying 100 lbs of gear and ambushing each other, then sitting in cover and waiting for heavy fire support is not dramatic. That said IMO there's a dearth of "heavies"- dress up some huge 7' guy with 4" thick plates of chunky armor and those leaf spring stilts and have him sprint around with a machine gun. That would be fun! If you have a massive population and elite soldiers then why does every single guy look incredibly normal? Alao shoutout to edge of tomorrow for shaving the coolest power armor of any movie, even if it looked pretty dumb when they were just gliding around on wires. Tom Cruise sprinting in that getup looked awesome.

JKCalhoun 2y ago
Too bad that "looking Sci-Fi" means more or less all looking the same. Art design in the movie "Alien" (was it Ron Cobb?) borrowed from samurai armor for the space suits. (And of course Darth Vader himself was inspired in large part from samurai armor.) Lazy films and video games since though seem to often just recycle a certain look. Perhaps an unpopular opinion but the "anime look" has been fatiguing to this person's taste for a couple of decades now as well.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- MichaelZuo 2y ago
  I think it’s safe to say the vast majority of sci-fi artists are mediocore, but it’s not obvious since most shows/movies/games nowadays are also very far from hard sci-fi, where things like armor plausability would actually matter.
- inejge 2y ago
  Art design in the movie "Alien" (was it Ron Cobb?) borrowed from samurai armor for the space suits. I thought it was Moebius (alias Jean Giraud) who designed the Alien spacesuits? E.g., see [1]. (Perhaps he did borrow bits of samurai armor styling, I'm not disputing that.) [1] https://filmsketchr.blogspot.com/2013/04/alien-concept-art-by-jean-henri-gaston.html https://filmsketchr.blogspot.com/2013/04/alien-concept-art-b...
  - JKCalhoun 2y ago
    Thanks for clarifying. I suppose I could have Googled before posting. ;-)
EGreg 2y ago
Sci-fi portrayals are as quaint as those pictures in 1900 of everyone flying around in 100 years, rather than being glued to their smartphones: https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/12b4wxd/this_is_what_people_in_the_1900s_thought_that_the/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/12b4w... Minority Report was meticulously researched, for example, but it had physical disks moved around (movement) and the guy's security credentials weren't rotated, and he was able to get into a lot of places, like his former place to steal the precog etc. Data from Star Trek, or "the Computer" are quaint. Data is just one Android while you can easily download AI models to unlimited machines and robots. And "the Computer" speaks like a ro-bot but the movie "Her" is much more like what AI is becoming. The Holodeck might be closer. Here is what a realistic movie of our future would look like: It would be super boring. Nothing would move. Every crime would be solved efficiently or not even allowed to occur. Effectively digital ID for everyone/thing. Security is tight, no advancing the plot Cameras everywhere, cheap and plentiful AI correlates all the sightings Mass surveillance (cheap) of online comms and quick extrapolation of every scheme. Any scheme is thwarted before it happens Robots everywhere, doing all work Robots spying on everyone in their home Humans produce less than 1% of content Humans earn less than 1% of money Humans become irrelevant to the economy Knowledge and algorithms easily replicated Robots can download new software over the air No sense of identity of self preservation Just commoditization of all skills (2030) Probably no interest in anything, since every bot knows everything, and has no self-preservation instinct or sense of self except just to simulate it, for humans, until humans become economically irrelevant. About the only threat, in this system (and it's a serious one) is that the cost for producing bot swarms with malicious intents, that anyone with few resources could release a bot swarm to work at scale across multiple platforms, amassing gameable metrics such as karma / clout / reputation, as sleeper cells, gradually shifting discussions. They would dominate 99% of the content everywhere, turning the Internet and the entire world into a Dark Forest. Anyone who shows up would be exploited over time, because it's cheap and easy: https://ystrickler.medium.com/the-dark-forest-theory-of-the-internet-7dc3e68a7cb1 https://ystrickler.medium.com/the-dark-forest-theory-of-the-... In the short term (i.e. by 2030) bots will have infiltrated every platform and social network, even those which might try to close themselves off, because their existing users would run bots in their accounts to gain an advantage, until being "just yourself" un-augmented would get you poor results. Since there is no way to tell if someone is human or not (just as if you'd use rybka chess program for one move every 10 or so), people would just default to "being enhanced" or "having assistants". Swarms of agents / bots / robots are the thing to look out for. They can coordinate at scale, execute long term plans relentlessly and imperceptibly and never forget what they're going after. (And when swarming can be perfected in the real world, you might get this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-2tpwW0kmU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-2tpwW0kmU) So yeah, sci-fi movies can be exciting, but in a "terminator" way where malicious destruction is the default, and only because the cost is so cheap to wreak havoc at scale. In any case, the idea that you'd need "armor" or even try to explore the universe yourself, is laughable. Bots and drones will be built to fight wars, explore space, etc. A lot of von neumann probes, etc. They can build an entire "civilization" of terraforming planets over thousands of years, but they wouldn't need oxygen etc etc. Out in space, they might have an actual purpose and plan that is very different from humans. But for humans to go travel there would probably be very unlikely, many people (like Rogan) don't even believe humans could have survived the trip to our own moon, due to space radiation.
unsupp0rted 2y ago
I liked the Sci Fi battles in The Culture book series- no armies, no heroics. Just one AI spending milliseconds blasting another AI at extreme distance in space. Victory or defeat comes down solely to tech-tree development and physics, nothing else.
- grues-dinner 2y ago
  We may not have gridfire or CAM dustings but I'm pretty sure that's how space combat will end up really going. No cinematic Expanse-style Gatling gun vs inexplicably slow missile dogfights, just getting vapourised by something going 50km/s that was fired from hundreds of thousands of km away by something you never even saw. The good news is at least those engines don't use physics we have access to - Inaros didn't need the whole rocks thing, he could have just fuelled up a freighter and brought it in at some fraction of c from outside the ecliptic. I don't care how good your railguns are, they won't hit something that has its own blueshift.
  - jltsiren 2y ago
    Space combat in The Expanse kind of makes sense, assuming that you have magic engines that can accelerate you to something like 5% or 10% of light speed before running out of propellant. The thing is that space is big. Hundreds of thousands of kilometers is a short range, and 50 km/s is a low speed. Missiles appear slow, because they use the same engine technology as ships, which limits the acceleration they can achieve. Reaching 50 km/s at 50g takes over 100 seconds and is obvious to everyone in the general area. Railgun speeds are inconsistent in the setting, but firing them is also obvious, and random course corrections are an effective defense against them. Your freighter trick would not have worked. The acceleration would have taken days or even weeks, depending on what kind of acceleration the ship can handle. And it would have been obvious to everyone in the solar system. That would have been plenty of time to send a fleet (that can accelerate faster) to intercept it.
    - grues-dinner 2y ago
      I dunno, surely you would coast out of the system for a year or two. Once out in the Oort cloud, you can drift and turn quietly with your engines away from the solar system and vanish. Then point your engines away (add a glare shield maybe) and nail it inwards. Even if you get so spotted coming from some angle out of the ecliptic no one is going to be able to catch up considering you're coming straight at them rather than a nice stern chase. Accelerating out to meet you head on only makes it worse (though at 50,000km per second, say, you won't be in range for long no matter how far they go). And even in the books the missiles that killed the Canterbury closed 200,000km in eight minutes. That's nearly 200g and the closing speed would have been 800km/s. They'd go 20 miles in a single frame of the 24fps video of the event. Even 50km/s is not a low speed if your defensive strategy is a machine gun. You have 1 second to go from a dinner plate sized cross section object at 50km to being dead, and if even if you did hit it with a bullet going say 2km/s the other way, which is a very fast bullet, if it was on target before, the bits will still hit you nearly as effectively. In fact, a better missile would disperse into a spray of fine metal pieces a few 10s of km away and be uninterceptible and cover a wider area in car you can try a dodge. Seems to me like combat in the universe would be a lot less close-in dogfights and a lot more long range stealth kills by tiny relativistic bullets. And a lot more plausibly deniable "disappearances" in deep space. And I get it, don't get me wrong, rule of cool and all that. And while we don't have those engines, the approximate same techniques probably apply to any spaceship combat we'll see in the next 100 years. Months of nothing slogging across nothingness then dead in a second out of nowhere. Unless radar really improves and stealth doesn't, I guess. And surface impacts from deep space will make current ICBM concerns seem quaintly sedate, even if we can't get to relativistic speeds.
ycombinatrix 2y ago
Edge of tomorrow power armor is cool? Wasn't it supposed to be poorly conceived & haphazardly designed in universe?
wkat4242 2y ago
I think the author also ignores the advances of material science. Why just decide between hard and soft materials? What about a material that's soft at normal movement speeds but turns hard at the speeds of a bullet? Would solve the problem of being so restricted in armour yet it would look different. For sci-fi this is not unthinkable. There's already materials that harden under electric charge.

JKCalhoun 2y ago

Too bad that "looking Sci-Fi" means more or less all looking the same. Art design in the movie "Alien" (was it Ron Cobb?) borrowed from samurai armor for the space suits. (And of course Darth Vader himself was inspired in large part from samurai armor.) Lazy films and video games since though seem to often just recycle a certain look. Perhaps an unpopular opinion but the "anime look" has been fatiguing to this person's taste for a couple of decades now as well.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
MichaelZuo 2y ago
I think it’s safe to say the vast majority of sci-fi artists are mediocore, but it’s not obvious since most shows/movies/games nowadays are also very far from hard sci-fi, where things like armor plausability would actually matter.
inejge 2y ago
Art design in the movie "Alien" (was it Ron Cobb?) borrowed from samurai armor for the space suits. I thought it was Moebius (alias Jean Giraud) who designed the Alien spacesuits? E.g., see [1]. (Perhaps he did borrow bits of samurai armor styling, I'm not disputing that.) [1] https://filmsketchr.blogspot.com/2013/04/alien-concept-art-by-jean-henri-gaston.html https://filmsketchr.blogspot.com/2013/04/alien-concept-art-b...
- JKCalhoun 2y ago
  Thanks for clarifying. I suppose I could have Googled before posting. ;-)

EGreg 2y ago

Sci-fi portrayals are as quaint as those pictures in 1900 of everyone flying around in 100 years, rather than being glued to their smartphones: https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/12b4wxd/this_is_what_people_in_the_1900s_thought_that_the/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/12b4w... Minority Report was meticulously researched, for example, but it had physical disks moved around (movement) and the guy's security credentials weren't rotated, and he was able to get into a lot of places, like his former place to steal the precog etc. Data from Star Trek, or "the Computer" are quaint. Data is just one Android while you can easily download AI models to unlimited machines and robots. And "the Computer" speaks like a ro-bot but the movie "Her" is much more like what AI is becoming. The Holodeck might be closer. Here is what a realistic movie of our future would look like: It would be super boring. Nothing would move. Every crime would be solved efficiently or not even allowed to occur. Effectively digital ID for everyone/thing. Security is tight, no advancing the plot Cameras everywhere, cheap and plentiful AI correlates all the sightings Mass surveillance (cheap) of online comms and quick extrapolation of every scheme. Any scheme is thwarted before it happens Robots everywhere, doing all work Robots spying on everyone in their home Humans produce less than 1% of content Humans earn less than 1% of money Humans become irrelevant to the economy Knowledge and algorithms easily replicated Robots can download new software over the air No sense of identity of self preservation Just commoditization of all skills (2030) Probably no interest in anything, since every bot knows everything, and has no self-preservation instinct or sense of self except just to simulate it, for humans, until humans become economically irrelevant. About the only threat, in this system (and it's a serious one) is that the cost for producing bot swarms with malicious intents, that anyone with few resources could release a bot swarm to work at scale across multiple platforms, amassing gameable metrics such as karma / clout / reputation, as sleeper cells, gradually shifting discussions. They would dominate 99% of the content everywhere, turning the Internet and the entire world into a Dark Forest. Anyone who shows up would be exploited over time, because it's cheap and easy: https://ystrickler.medium.com/the-dark-forest-theory-of-the-internet-7dc3e68a7cb1 https://ystrickler.medium.com/the-dark-forest-theory-of-the-... In the short term (i.e. by 2030) bots will have infiltrated every platform and social network, even those which might try to close themselves off, because their existing users would run bots in their accounts to gain an advantage, until being "just yourself" un-augmented would get you poor results. Since there is no way to tell if someone is human or not (just as if you'd use rybka chess program for one move every 10 or so), people would just default to "being enhanced" or "having assistants". Swarms of agents / bots / robots are the thing to look out for. They can coordinate at scale, execute long term plans relentlessly and imperceptibly and never forget what they're going after. (And when swarming can be perfected in the real world, you might get this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-2tpwW0kmU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-2tpwW0kmU) So yeah, sci-fi movies can be exciting, but in a "terminator" way where malicious destruction is the default, and only because the cost is so cheap to wreak havoc at scale. In any case, the idea that you'd need "armor" or even try to explore the universe yourself, is laughable. Bots and drones will be built to fight wars, explore space, etc. A lot of von neumann probes, etc. They can build an entire "civilization" of terraforming planets over thousands of years, but they wouldn't need oxygen etc etc. Out in space, they might have an actual purpose and plan that is very different from humans. But for humans to go travel there would probably be very unlikely, many people (like Rogan) don't even believe humans could have survived the trip to our own moon, due to space radiation.

unsupp0rted 2y ago

I liked the Sci Fi battles in The Culture book series- no armies, no heroics. Just one AI spending milliseconds blasting another AI at extreme distance in space. Victory or defeat comes down solely to tech-tree development and physics, nothing else.

grues-dinner 2y ago
We may not have gridfire or CAM dustings but I'm pretty sure that's how space combat will end up really going. No cinematic Expanse-style Gatling gun vs inexplicably slow missile dogfights, just getting vapourised by something going 50km/s that was fired from hundreds of thousands of km away by something you never even saw. The good news is at least those engines don't use physics we have access to - Inaros didn't need the whole rocks thing, he could have just fuelled up a freighter and brought it in at some fraction of c from outside the ecliptic. I don't care how good your railguns are, they won't hit something that has its own blueshift.
- jltsiren 2y ago
  Space combat in The Expanse kind of makes sense, assuming that you have magic engines that can accelerate you to something like 5% or 10% of light speed before running out of propellant. The thing is that space is big. Hundreds of thousands of kilometers is a short range, and 50 km/s is a low speed. Missiles appear slow, because they use the same engine technology as ships, which limits the acceleration they can achieve. Reaching 50 km/s at 50g takes over 100 seconds and is obvious to everyone in the general area. Railgun speeds are inconsistent in the setting, but firing them is also obvious, and random course corrections are an effective defense against them. Your freighter trick would not have worked. The acceleration would have taken days or even weeks, depending on what kind of acceleration the ship can handle. And it would have been obvious to everyone in the solar system. That would have been plenty of time to send a fleet (that can accelerate faster) to intercept it.
  - grues-dinner 2y ago
    I dunno, surely you would coast out of the system for a year or two. Once out in the Oort cloud, you can drift and turn quietly with your engines away from the solar system and vanish. Then point your engines away (add a glare shield maybe) and nail it inwards. Even if you get so spotted coming from some angle out of the ecliptic no one is going to be able to catch up considering you're coming straight at them rather than a nice stern chase. Accelerating out to meet you head on only makes it worse (though at 50,000km per second, say, you won't be in range for long no matter how far they go). And even in the books the missiles that killed the Canterbury closed 200,000km in eight minutes. That's nearly 200g and the closing speed would have been 800km/s. They'd go 20 miles in a single frame of the 24fps video of the event. Even 50km/s is not a low speed if your defensive strategy is a machine gun. You have 1 second to go from a dinner plate sized cross section object at 50km to being dead, and if even if you did hit it with a bullet going say 2km/s the other way, which is a very fast bullet, if it was on target before, the bits will still hit you nearly as effectively. In fact, a better missile would disperse into a spray of fine metal pieces a few 10s of km away and be uninterceptible and cover a wider area in car you can try a dodge. Seems to me like combat in the universe would be a lot less close-in dogfights and a lot more long range stealth kills by tiny relativistic bullets. And a lot more plausibly deniable "disappearances" in deep space. And I get it, don't get me wrong, rule of cool and all that. And while we don't have those engines, the approximate same techniques probably apply to any spaceship combat we'll see in the next 100 years. Months of nothing slogging across nothingness then dead in a second out of nowhere. Unless radar really improves and stealth doesn't, I guess. And surface impacts from deep space will make current ICBM concerns seem quaintly sedate, even if we can't get to relativistic speeds.

ycombinatrix 2y ago

Edge of tomorrow power armor is cool? Wasn't it supposed to be poorly conceived & haphazardly designed in universe?

wkat4242 2y ago

I think the author also ignores the advances of material science. Why just decide between hard and soft materials? What about a material that's soft at normal movement speeds but turns hard at the speeds of a bullet? Would solve the problem of being so restricted in armour yet it would look different. For sci-fi this is not unthinkable. There's already materials that harden under electric charge.