There are dragon skin combat trousers which are armoured.

Personally, having just come back from Afghanistan, I would have sacrificed it for the mobility every time. In fact seeing as wearing it is little more than an arse covering exercise by the MOD, if there was a waiver you could sign so you didn't have to wear it I'd have probably signed it. That extra 12.5kg saved is very, very noticeable.

Has anyone done any research into the effectiveness of body armour in Afghanistan? Like, how many people were actually saved by it etc? I bet there are a fair few people whose lives where saved after it caught a few 7.62 rounds. Yes, IEDs are the main threat, but people still get shot and that's what the armour is there for.

Originally Posted by Yeah_Innit_Blud

Has anyone done any research into the effectiveness of body armour in Afghanistan? Like, how many people were actually saved by it etc? I bet there are a fair few people whose lives where saved after it caught a few 7.62 rounds. Yes, IEDs are the main threat, but people still get shot and that's what the armour is there for.

The counter-argument is how many of them would have been shot if they'd been 12.5kg lighter - and thus faster moving and more agile?

Originally Posted by therealbigdizzle

The counter-argument is how many of them would have been shot if they'd been 12.5kg lighter - and thus faster moving and more agile?

Yes, I understand that and see the point, but you can count the rounds stuck in your body armour, but you'll never know how many rounds you dodged being that little bit quicker on your feet.

Well the new plate's for the new body armour are lighter. When BAE get there act together and get this new body armour they talk about (the custard body armour) and that would save some weight.

Originally Posted by mattyw

Well the new plate's for the new body armour are lighter. When BAE get there act together and get this new body armour they talk about (the custard body armour) and that would save some weight.

I think you'll find BAE have had their act together for some time and are technologically ahead of pretty much anybody else in the defence industry - hence almost all British defence contracts lie in BAEs hands.

Osprey is the safe bet for the moment, when making a plate out of something solid, it doesn't require any treatment or maintenance.

Osprey is a passive armour and the new prospect of a 'custard-like' armour is active armour. What this means is that when the projectile strikes passive armour, the armour doesn't actually 'do' anything, no action is taken by the armour - it's simply that the armour prevents the projectile from passing through it. An active armour, on the other hand, has to perform an action when struck by a projectile. This means that the way in which it performs in the Afghan operational environment will no doubt differ from how it performs in the lab, making it a much more complex product to develop than Osprey (where passive armour had been in use since NI), and subsequently it will take much longer to develop and bring into service than Osprey did.

Originally Posted by Yeah_Innit_Blud

Has anyone done any research into the effectiveness of body armour in Afghanistan? Like, how many people were actually saved by it etc? I bet there are a fair few people whose lives where saved after it caught a few 7.62 rounds. Yes, IEDs are the main threat, but people still get shot and that's what the armour is there for.

During my masters degree, one of the neurologists once told us that body armour has increased survival rates in modern conflicts, but as a result of that, but as a result of that, brain injuries have risen (because people are surviving incidents that would have killed them normally).

Not sure if he was speculating, but he used to work at a Veterans hospital in the US and is a consultant neurologist in the UK so I'd be surprised if he just made that up.

therealbigdizzle - thanks for the info and who said you dont learn things on the internet.

amazing__lobster - body armour can save loads of bullets but it can still kill there person. The shock waves that the bullet makes can kill by giving the person internal bleeding. so it well done that body amrour can stand up to being hit by 1000000's of 7.62 but it does not matter as the person who would wear it would be dead from the shock waves passing thought them.

There is a big debate in the body armour world whether or not blunt trauma padding should be included in body armour to defeat the issue of shock wave propagation (is that really the right spelling?), which I think is what you are talking about Mattyw?

It goes a bit like "our armour is super duper hard impenetrable and no bullet will pass through it" followed by " oh really, well where does the shock wave from the bullet impact go then?" ad nauseum.

I am not sure really, as I have never worn body armour except for on one occasion on the firing range near Loch Ness, (buggered if I know its name, maybe some of the shooty types will know?), when I wore a spiffy DPM flak vest thingy while doing section attack type stuff. Only to be told it wasn't much use as there were no ceramic plates inserted in it, and if I had had the misfortune of being shot either by my mates or by my own mongness, all it would have done is kept my bits in one bag to bury.

Tam