Wed May 14, 2008 1:03PM5 comments ›
Wed May 14, 2008 — by Rick Marshall
Can You Build Your Own 'Iron Man' Suit?
Newsflash: It's more than a bank account a dream, folks...
So what would it take to build your own Iron Man suit? Given enough money and access to scientific equipment, could you become a superhero?
The good people over at The Chicago Tribune posed exactly those questions to James Kakalios, a University of Minnesota physics professor. Kakalios weighed in on the likelihood of building various elements of Iron Man's armor, including jet boots, cybernetic helmet and, of course, repulsor rays:
It's that power thing again. If you want to send lightning bolts -- or laser beams, more likely -- shooting out of your palms, you have to carry along a power source big enough to generate them. To make a beam "powerful enough to melt a fist-size hole through a half-inch steel plate," Kakalios says, "would require an energy pulse of over 2 gigawatts of power, greater than the output of a nuclear power plant."
The verdict? Well, let's just say that you might want to hold off on making any superpowered arch-enemies for a while.
Read the full article over at The Chicago Tribune website.
Jump to comments (5) 
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Comments (5)
Anonymous (12:09 PM on Thu May 15, 2008)
Popular Science had a cover story recently about the real Iron Man armor from defense contractor SARCOS.
ian (5:42 PM on Mon May 19, 2008)
cool i wont one
R. Maheras (10:30 PM on Mon May 19, 2008)
What superhero comics fan didn't sit around designing some sort of special suit to fend off the bad guys with? I know I did! And a couple of us neighborhood kids even went so far as trying to design a glider suit which we could launch ourselves off of the roof of a nearby three-story Catholic Church.
We honestly thought we could do it, and it's a good thing we had a short attention span (a week or so), because if we had followed through with the project, no doubt one of us would have died during the test flight phase.
tre (10:10 PM on Sun Sep 28, 2008)
that mit be truw but wat if you put sadelits huced to the energy and it conex to the power soers of the iron sutes wich conex to the blasters
Nathan Boyd (6:32 PM on Thu Oct 22, 2009)
The energy source in the movie is good matter mixed with bad matter could u store it on the side of the suite instead of in your body where it can kill u so u can have boots that make u fly also if u could mail this to my myspace that would be great im on myspace everyday i want to know if its possible