Is an Iron-Man suit physically possible?

[WestAir]

Title is pretty straight forward. Is it possible to have a suit of armor that is capable of flying? What type of propulsion could such a suit even use? While we're here let's discuss that hand-canon that shoots kamehameha's: What the heck does it fire? Magic?

[Spaceception]

5 minutes ago, WestAir said:

Title is pretty straight forward. Is it possible to have a suit of armor that is capable of flying? What type of propulsion could such a suit even use? While we're here let's discuss that hand-canon that shoots kamehameha's: What the heck does it fire? Magic?

I'm pretty sure it's plasma.

[Evanitis]

As a layman who played a lot of KSP...

I see a payload that weights an armed and armored Tony Stark, but I see no fuel tanks. That looks fishy. I believe the plasma hand-cannon isn't the only magic in there. I think he uses alt+f12 when no one is looking.

Edited January 19, 2016 by Evanitis

[Jeanjvs]

Let's look at a few details:

1: It has no fuel tanks;

2: The only source of energy it has is the electricity coming from its ARC generator;

3: It produces thrust enough to fly and... incapacitate bad guys from a significant distance.

 

Considering those details, i believe it uses its electricity to turn air into plasma and accelerate it to generate thrust. I've never seen any intakes though.

 

I should also note that i have no idea if physics even works that way  

Edited January 19, 2016 by Jeanjvs

[Chewy62]

The arc reactor is basically a free energy device, so the whole thing is really impossible.

A gundam-sized suit would actually be easier to make.

[WestAir]

1 hour ago, Spaceception said:

I'm pretty sure it's plasma.

Isn't a plasma just ionized gas? The beam should look like a punctured steam vent - rapidly expanding and rising once out the nozzle.

[K^2]

19 minutes ago, WestAir said:

Isn't a plasma just ionized gas? The beam should look like a punctured steam vent - rapidly expanding and rising once out the nozzle.

At high enough energy, a plasma beam behaves more like, well, a beam. The quantity of matter in it is actually tiny, but it's traveling damn near the speed of light. About the only difference between that and a powerful laser is going to be how it interacts with magnetic fields.

So the most plausible explanation for suit's propulsion/weaponry is a VASIMR with an absurd I_SP range. If we push physics to the absurd, we can picture suit's reactor as a D-D fusion reactor that produces He + ~3MeV of useful power. (I don't know how it fudges the branch fractions, shut up.) If we use that energy to accelerate He to optimize I_SP without drawing external gas, we get I_SP of 3.9% c/g. The Iron Man suit is said to be about 200kg with armor. So we're looking at about 280kg with the pilot. (I'm estimating/rounding like mad here, get off my back.) Putting it all together, I'm getting 32 grams of D₂ for 1 hour of hover time.

So in terms of absolute limits of pure physics, can do. Actually engineering a reactor and propulsion system that can actually deliver these figures? That's where we hit fantasy land.

[Darnok]

There are many suits with different features https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Man's_armor

 

[nobodyhasthis2]

Short answer: It is a fantasy.

Long answer: The suit has repulsor technology which is the Marvel take on reactionless thrusters. There is no need to carry a fuel since the electrical power from the arc reactor can be turned directly into thrust. Although people will be quick to throw Newton's name around here and quote the laws of motion. Without super thrusters just about all sci fiction films are impossible.

Complex answer: Technically there is two ways to do this in real life but the actual results are totally pointless compared to all the alternatives. One is ion wind and the other is a quantum vacuum thruster. 

 

Edited January 19, 2016 by nobodyhasthis2

[mikegarrison]

According to the Marvel Wiki pages, the "repulsors" are muon particle beams. Since muons only exist for about two microseconds, I don't know how they imagine that would work. Anyway, if you have unlimited amounts of free energy you can probably do almost anything.

[cicatrix]

2 answers: yes and no

No: No, because there is no such energy source that has required output. And none seems possible.

Yes: If we suspend the realism and assume that we have an energy cell with that absurd power output - yes, flying with it will be possible. But then again - with the right amount of energy EVERYTHING is possible - stopping the starts in their orbits, undoing the big bang - that sort of stuff.

So the good question is: is it at least theoretically possible to have the power source of this capacity and size?

[Frozen_Heart]

The flying part and the hand plasma cannons. Nope you can't do that.

The powered and armoured exoskeleton. Yep that part would work and is actually being developed and tested right now.

[SomeGuy123]

Actually, everything you see the iron man suit do can be duplicated, at least in terms of effects...if the suit were 1000 meters high (and proportionally larger on the other dimensions).

The universe and physics do care how many atoms are in something.  The bigger some machines are, the less surface area they have compared to the volume inside.  

Fusion reactors care about scale.  The bigger, the more power:weight.  Fan rotors care about scale.  Ditto.  Laser weapons care about scale - the bigger, the more range.  Some kind of plasma emission weapon cares about scale - the bigger, the stronger the magnets that shape the plasma.  Radiation shielding cares about scale.

If the suit were 1000 meters high, it would have a gigantic fusion reactor inside and do to scaling laws, would produce enormously more power/weight than a small one.  The fusion power would drive fans so the "gigantic statue" can fly.  If not fans, it could in principle suck in air and ionize it through some kind of electric arc-jet thruster.  That would create that white plume you see.

Weaponry would best be laser weapons but if you really wanted a pathetically short range weapon (plasma balls, there's a way to make them hold themselves together by accelerating the ions so the moving electric charges make a magnetic field which in turn keeps the charged particles from escaping.  This will only work for a brief period, however) you could emit plasma instead which would visually resemble something similar to the "repulsor" cannon,  

Even the bits where iron man survives a fall that would crush him from the deceleration would be mitigated if the suit had gigantic amounts of internal space for crumple zones  (so if the suit were falling at terminal velocity of 200 m/s, Tony Stark would be inside a decelerator pod inside that would slow him to zero over a longer distance.  Suit would be damaged but it could in principle have damage control and self repair robotics inside)

 

Also, even if you could make iron man suits, they would in no way be a feasible weapon.  

Edited January 19, 2016 by SomeGuy123

[Scotius]

So, essentially you would have a Helicarrier

[nobodyhasthis2]

1 hour ago, SomeGuy123 said:

Actually, everything you see the iron man suit do can be duplicated, at least in terms of effects...if the suit were 1000 meters high (and proportionally larger on the other dimensions).

I can't say that your wrong here. The point your making has merit. However one must also remember that most machines obey the square/cube law which states bigger is not always better. 

Edited January 19, 2016 by nobodyhasthis2

[problemecium]

10 hours ago, mikegarrison said:

According to the Marvel Wiki pages, the "repulsors" are muon particle beams. Since muons only exist for about two microseconds, I don't know how they imagine that would work. Anyway, if you have unlimited amounts of free energy you can probably do almost anything.

That part's actually not so fantastical. Muons only need to live long enough to get blasted out the exhaust port. Once they've contributed to Newton's third law (or was it second? whatever), it doesn't really matter what they do as long as it doesn't involve chasing down Iron Man and slowing him down.

It's also a convenient explanation of the blue glow: decaying muons emit blue light.

[mikegarrison]

19 minutes ago, parameciumkid said:

That part's actually not so fantastical. Muons only need to live long enough to get blasted out the exhaust port. Once they've contributed to Newton's third law (or was it second? whatever), it doesn't really matter what they do as long as it doesn't involve chasing down Iron Man and slowing him down.

It's also a convenient explanation of the blue glow: decaying muons emit blue light.

He also uses them as weapons. To have any range at all, they would have to be moving at a pretty significant percentage of the speed of light instantly as they are created.

Eh, what am I saying? It's obviously just comic book magic anyway.

 

(It's the third law that says they would create a force. The second law says that the force would cause Iron Man to accelerate. And the first law is just a special case of the second law, where the net force and acceleration both equal zero.)

Edited January 19, 2016 by mikegarrison

[Kerbart]

I just enjoy the movie. It's not the kind of movie that entices me to get my notepad, fountain pen and slide ruler out to double-check on the physics.

For all intents and purposes, is there any difference between the technology required to make it work, and magic? (insert mandatory Arthur C. Clarke quote here)

[problemecium]

Well yes, of course they're going near light speed. A: Muons do that pretty often depending on circumstances. B: The arc reactor is a particle accelerator. C: Since the mass of a muon is tiny, you'd have to fling them pretty hard to get a practical amount of thrust.

[fredinno]

This is Marvel. Of course there's no scientific explanation for it- there was never supposed to be.

[magnemoe]

18 hours ago, K^2 said:

At high enough energy, a plasma beam behaves more like, well, a beam. The quantity of matter in it is actually tiny, but it's traveling damn near the speed of light. About the only difference between that and a powerful laser is going to be how it interacts with magnetic fields.

So the most plausible explanation for suit's propulsion/weaponry is a VASIMR with an absurd I_SP range. If we push physics to the absurd, we can picture suit's reactor as a D-D fusion reactor that produces He + ~3MeV of useful power. (I don't know how it fudges the branch fractions, shut up.) If we use that energy to accelerate He to optimize I_SP without drawing external gas, we get I_SP of 3.9% c/g. The Iron Man suit is said to be about 200kg with armor. So we're looking at about 280kg with the pilot. (I'm estimating/rounding like mad here, get off my back.) Putting it all together, I'm getting 32 grams of D₂ for 1 hour of hover time.

So in terms of absolute limits of pure physics, can do. Actually engineering a reactor and propulsion system that can actually deliver these figures? That's where we hit fantasy land.

First issue is generating that energy / velocity, second is to push trough the air. You also get spread because the ions repels each other but this is only an issue for longer ranges except that it will increase beam cross section and air resistance. 

[Razorstrike]

iron man's hand cannon use the magnetic field as a way to blast enemy because the magnetic field acts likes a magnet the suit sends out a negative or positive charge to propel itself so pretty much that is as much as i think of. 

[Razorstrike]

On 1/18/2016 at 5:59 PM, fredinno said:

This is Marvel. Of course there's no scientific explanation for it- there was never supposed to be.

actually there is cuz if the no way of telling the suit's power then y would marvel make the movie 

[sevenperforce]

I've thought about this before. Presuming that old Tony has figured out room-temperature superconductors, it's not terribly improbable to think that the "arc reactor" (which, I must point out, need not be a free energy device) can produce stupidly high voltage without significant thermal losses, voltage high enough to ionize air as a reaction mass and eject it using either magnetic fields (those silver pads could contain some sort of rotating magnetic field generator) or focused microwave sonic pulses.

I hadn't heard the muon explanation, but that's not entirely unrealistic either. You can control effective muon lifetime by varying their speed. If the arc reactor can send muons through some sort of fiber-optic cable or superconducting magnetic channel (do muons have a magnetic moment?), then it can control (on a particle statistics basis, not on an individual basis) where those muons decay. A sufficiently intense stream of decaying muons would add a great deal of energy to air or even ionize the air, apart from the Cherenkov radiation. This could explain how he can appear to violate conservation of momentum (e.g., hitting someone with a ton of force while not appearing to physically move himself); he can fire a highly energetic but low-impulse beam of muons which then decay and release their energy into a much larger mass of air just in front of their target. Alternately, the muons can be timed to decay just outside the repulsor, producing a wave of ionized air that pushes against the repulsor to produce thrust.

23 minutes ago, Razorstrike said:

actually there is cuz if the no way of telling the suit's power then y would marvel make the movie 

Because most people will go see a movie if it looks cool without caring about whether the science works?

Edited May 11, 2016 by sevenperforce

[p1t1o]

Since most main points have been covered, I'll go for whats left.

Lets say you do have a hyper-compact power source and reactionless, hyper-compact thrusters and the ultra-strong, ultra-light alloys and the sentient AI program running it all. And the impossibly compact and capable suite of sensors. And the pen-sized missiles that can take out main battle tanks. And something to make it comfortable without having to be naked inside.

I predict it would last about an hour before breaking down. Seriously, do you see how mechanically complex those things are? An entire suit will assemble itself around his body in seconds, from what looks like (and what must be) thousands of individual components from brute force servos to microelectronics to high-energy weapon systems.

Even with the best manufacturing techniques available, the mean time between failures is going to be severely problematic, as will the hours of maintenance per hour of flight time.

For example, the F-14 in its heyday, was so complex, and had so many components that it could be predicted to have at least one component failure *per hour*. Given that an ironman suit is significantly more capable than an F14 and can fold itself into a briefcase in about 2 seconds, I would wager that they are significantly more complex too.

Maybe thats why he has so many spares.

 

This can of course be explained away if you assume that Stark has permanent staff of about a hundred technicians, engineers and other labourers - along with their convoy of utility and transport vehicles and several tons of tools, spares and other hardware - constantly following him around covertly, which immediately jump out to retrieve just-used suits for maintenance and repair, and are ever-ready to spring into action to place a newly refurbished suit just where it is needed at just the right time. All without appearing on camera. Because those guys are Pros.