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"I've got this beautiful panoramic three-dimensional painting of Mars based on Martian photos. It's 30 feet wide. You can pick out every pebble on the Martian landscape. And who'd have dreamed you could do that?"
- Arthur C. Clarke
 |
| Flexible Armor Suit | ||
| A pressure suit that, while flexible, becomes rigid like armor upon impact. |
| He [Nessus the puppeteer] went up a rise, moving slowly, though his feet wanted to dance. He was weaponless, but his suit was a kind of defense. No projectile short of a fast meteorite could harm him. Like a silicone plastic, the pressure suit was soft and malleable under gentle pressures, such as walking, but instantly became rigid all over when something struck it...
The top of the swell behind Nessus suddenly sparkled with harsh blue-white sunlight. ... He saw the light, he curled into a ball, and the ground swell came. It batted him like a beach ball. His rigid, form-fitting shell retained his shape. It could not prevent the ground swell from slamming him away, nor his brain from jarring under its thick skull and its extra padding. |
| From Neutron Star,
by Larry Niven. Published by Worls of If in 1966 Additional resources -
|
This is from "The Soft Weapon" (originally published in Worlds of If, February, 1967) from the Neutron Star story collection.
Niven makes use of this idea again in The Ringworld Engineers:
The soldiers were close, but Filistranorlry was standing back and firing his pistol. The roar was disconcerting, even terrifying. A slug slammed into Louis's ankle; the suit went rigid, and he rolled like a tumbled statue, picked himself up, and ran again. As two soldiers threw themselves at him, he swung over the fence and dropped.
Thanks to a helpful reader for providing the reference and text quote.
Compare to the karatand from Stand on Zanzibar (1968) by John Brunner.
Louis and Chmeee donned impact armor: leathery stuff, not unpleasantly stiff, which would go rigid as steel under impact from spear, arrow, or bullet...
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Additional
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More Ideas
and Technology from Neutron Star
More Ideas
and Technology by Larry Niven
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