Wed May 14, 2008 12:03PM3 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 (3)
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Comments (3)
Anonymous (11:09 AM on Thu May 15, 2008)
Popular Science had a cover story recently about the real Iron Man armor from defense contractor SARCOS.
ian (4:42 PM on Mon May 19, 2008)
cool i wont one
R. Maheras (9:30 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.