Iron Man!

[Jedi Master Spock]

Got around to watching Iron Man. So... sorry, I couldn't help but notice a few technical details.

The original generator unit could put out up to 3 GJ per second, and had enough for fifteen minutes of full-power operation of the first suit, or fifty years of keeping his heart shrapnel free. If we assume fifteen minutes of maximum power draw, that meant the source had about 2.7 terajoules of usable energy on hand, and 1.7 kilowatts for the electromagnet.

I don't see the doctor changing car batteries more often than once every 8 hours, though. I don't recognize the make of car battery, but even as large as it is, it's really unlikely to have more than a tenth of that capacity. It was a pretty old car battery, and I can believe ~10% of peak power production of that generator being the average in high-intensity use of the prototype suit. 300 megawatts is a lot to play around with for moving around a couple hundred kg of metal.

Heck, it's a lot to move several tons of metal.

Baldy's big bad model appears to use great smoky chemical thrusters. Stark's second and third models, however, show little sign of onboard reaction mass or air intakes. I suggest that, in spite of the apparent small flames jetting from his boots and hands, that the repulsor technology showcased in the Jericho missile is involved. The whole "I point my hand and everything goes BOOM away from me" shtick is a giveaway.

Baldy's big bad is freaking big. I hesitate to scale from watching on the big screen, but I feel like it's maybe ... 4 meters tall? Throwing a three ton weight in the air is a remarkable display of strength, as is catching it, which seemed to strain Mr. Red and Gold. I think that may well turn out to be the best benchmark of actual strength in the movie, rather than sending people flying with a punch, punching down steel doors, et cetera.

The armor suit survives AK-47s firing 7.62mm/39 with essentially no dents. 20mm rounds fired by a Raptor cause bullet holes and dents, but no holes were made in the wearer. If I had to guess by just the movie, it seems like it's designed to resist .50 caliber fire with only a little denting.

Final note: Baldy does really well at not tripping over himself for the first-time pilot of what amounts to a small mech. Real talented pilot there.

[GStone]

Any details on what's involved in the repulsor tech? In the comics, it's been tiny pieces of material fired at high velocities. Subatomic particles or microscopic material, I can't remember which. Or even Jericho?

[l33telboi]

Great movie, wasn't it?

Baldy's big bad is freaking big. I hesitate to scale from watching on the big screen, but I feel like it's maybe ... 4 meters tall? Throwing a three ton weight in the air is a remarkable display of strength, as is catching it, which seemed to strain Mr. Red and Gold. I think that may well turn out to be the best benchmark of actual strength in the movie, rather than sending people flying with a punch, punching down steel doors, et cetera.

You never saw Superman Returns or Hulk, did you? :P

The armor suit survives AK-47s firing 7.62mm/39 with essentially no dents. 20mm rounds fired by a Raptor cause bullet holes and dents, but no holes were made in the wearer. If I had to guess by just the movie, it seems like it's designed to resist .50 caliber fire with only a little denting.

I think she might've been exaggerating a bit when she said there were bullet holes in the suit, because really, there's no way stark could survive rounds from the rotatory cannon on a F-22 and live, if they had actually penetrated. More likely she just saw huge dents and then resorted to a bit of hyperbole.

Oh, and we saw the first suit Stark made survive a prolonged barrage from a .50 cal.

Then there's also the tank shell he was knocked out of the air with.

And one more technical detail: Notice how at 1% thrust his suit is able to counteract gravity? So if 1% thrust equals an acceleration of 10m/s^2, then 100% thrust would mean 1,000m/s^2. Better hope he never fires those thrusters at maximum, I don't think a human could withstand it.

But then again he did fly straight into a ceiling at 10% thrust (or 100m/s^2) without the benefit of a suit...

[Jedi Master Spock]

You never saw Superman Returns or Hulk, did you? :P

Oh, I saw Superman Returns. Haven't seen the new Hulk movie. Different standards of "strong" come into play in the Superman movies. The Iron Man movie was clearly intended to be marginally realistic for a comic book movie.

But if you stop a 3 ton vehicle from a 6 meter drop in its center of gravity over a 1.5 meter distance, that's still a 120 kN force or so. If he can (barely) pull off that catch, he can lift maybe 13 tons off the ground.

I think she might've been exaggerating a bit when she said there were bullet holes in the suit, because really, there's no way stark could survive rounds from the rotatory cannon on a F-22 and live, if they had actually penetrated. More likely she just saw huge dents and then resorted to a bit of hyperbole.

IIRC, there were actual bullet holes, but thinking on it, I think they were in the aerodynamic control flaps. They clearly didn't penetrate inside the suit.

Oh, and we saw the first suit Stark made survive a prolonged barrage from a .50 cal.

I didn't remember if that actually hit him much, or if that was just a panicked spray into the exploding munitions dump. IIRC, we don't see the whole suit again close up and clear until after the crash, so I'm not sure whether or not the .50 cal dented up the first one or not.

Surviving a tank shell to the chest was a bit on the ridiculous side, even if that turned out to be not much of a tank shell and it hit his thickest armor. Blowing the tank up with a single tiny missile was a nice moment, too.

Then there's also the tank shell he was knocked out of the air with.

I think that's what dented his chestplate so badly. I remembered that after I logged off.

And one more technical detail: Notice how at 1% thrust his suit is able to counteract gravity? So if 1% thrust equals an acceleration of 10m/s^2, then 100% thrust would mean 1,000m/s^2. Better hope he never fires those thrusters at maximum, I don't think a human could withstand it.

But then again he did fly straight into a ceiling at 10% thrust (or 100m/s^2) without the benefit of a suit...

I want to say the Iron Man suit is something like 500 kg, frankly. If the Mk II suit is an average of 3 cm of solid steel surrounding Stark with a 2 m^2 surface area, that's about 480 kg of steel, and the gold-titanium alloy was supposed to be a density match. Stark himself is maybe 70-80 kg. If we go from, say, 90 kg for just Stark+repulsors (he was testing without the suit on) to 540 kg for Stark+suit, then peak acceleration (theoretical) is 18 g, which is twice the blackout limit for a trained pilot wearing a g-suit.

If the Iron Man suit is a full metric ton or so, then Stark barely hits his blackout limit at full thrust. I see that the Marvel website puts Iron Man at 235 pounds with a 200 pound suit (that represents six millimeters of steel with a 2 square meter surface area, a volume of steel that could be melted down to a cube 20 cm on a side), but the movie Tony Stark is substantially smaller than that, and the movie Iron Man suit does look like it has a good bit of metal on it, whether the steel model or the gold-titanium alloy model - certainly too much to move in without the mechanical augmentation. But I digress.

Given the peak power output of that power source (3 GW) that's not actually that much thrust. 1000 m/s^2 *100 kg is only 1e5 kgm/s^2 ... i.e., 100 kN, or about 23,000 pounds, which is not hard to develop with up to four million horsepower.

He's going to need serious thrust to overcome air resistance when he's accelerating at high speeds. The humanoid figure experiences much higher air resistance relative to its size than modern fighter jets, so he might need close to that much thrust to go up in the Mach range.

[Sideswipe]

Baldy's big bad is freaking big. I hesitate to scale from watching on the big screen, but I feel like it's maybe ... 4 meters tall? Throwing a three ton weight in the air is a remarkable display of strength, as is catching it, which seemed to strain Mr. Red and Gold. I think that may well turn out to be the best benchmark of actual strength in the movie, rather than sending people flying with a punch, punching down steel doors, et cetera.

Don't forget he was using the Mark 1 chestpeice at the time and if I remember correctly it was below 50% power.