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[smjjames]

If it takes that much trouble to create power armor, you might as well just make a piloted mecha.

[Bumber]

If it takes that much trouble to create power armor, you might as well just make a piloted mecha.

Depends on the situation. Could be too big and dangerous to civilians depending on what you're planning to use it for.

[Magistrum]

But when they do shoot a bunch of civilians, who is considered responsible? What happens when they face a situation outside of their programming? How far can you trust robotic deduction to shoot the right people? At what point does dumping a bunch of machine-gun armed robots into a country to kill anyone they find suspicious become a warcrime?

re:responsibility:
We can appoint people to be responsible, anyone you want. I vote for the producing company or the general. We never gave the responsibility of bad-doing for the right people, now is not the time to start doing it either.
re:situation:
They stop. That's pretty much the standard, when there's an uncaught exception they simply stop there. We can order them to disengage and come back too, no worries.
re:deduction:
Very much, soldiers are very easily identifiable, that's why human soldiers don't usually shot civilians, their targets are very easy to distinguish.
re: warcrime:
When the soldier/civilian casualty ratio passes a certain threshold. That's actually pretty weird, because we even have a name for killing a bunch of random civilians, and people don't even raise an eyebrow to strategic bombing.

[Arx]

So any way to do the electricity stuff I mentioned in OP?

Wierd's suggestion is the safest - plate the entire thing with a ninconductive ceramic.

The best so far on the batteries thing seems to be to use some kind of extremely low resistance conductor to charge a capacitor bank and then partly charge the batteries from that. You could put a circuit over the ceramic coat, I guess.

But as Giglamesh says, it's kind of hard to be precise.

[smjjames]

re:deduction:
Very much, soldiers are very easily identifiable, that's why human soldiers don't usually shot civilians, their targets are very easy to distinguish.

The problem comes when you're fighting a group that don't wear the usual military garb, like say, terrorists, or a ragtag band of rebels.

Even when fighting typical soldiers in soldier garb, the robots would still need the capability to tell friend from foe.

[GiglameshDespair]

-snip-

Protecting against a taser is relatively simple You can do it yourself with little difficulty. I wonder if a taser would even function against hard armour, as the electrodes would have difficulty penetrating. They'd bounce off rather than stick.

However, Andres said a 'Lightning gun', which is probably different from a taser. The picture he gave reinforces this:

Found a cool picture of a lightning gun.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

No taser I've ever seen. Such a weapon like this does not exist, and neither does any powered armour in actual use. So we have nothing solid to base it on.

If it takes that much trouble to create power armor, you might as well just make a piloted mecha.

Mecha have their own problems, primarily their role. Armoured roles are filled better with armour: a walking mecha is a lot less practical than a tank.

-snip-

There's a lot more to it than saying "This bloke's responsible now" in the eyes of law, nationally and internationally, which is what I'm trying to get at.

Spoiler: One of these is the enemy. Which? (click to show/hide)

[H4zardZ1]

If there is no lighting gun, Tesla coils exists.
This makes a point, Andreas, no?

[Magistrum]

Even when fighting typical soldiers in soldier garb, the robots would still need the capability to tell friend from foe.

It's pretty easy, really. Soldiers come with a lot of flags, differently colored helmets... recogonizing colors wouldn't be too hard.

One of these is the enemy. Which?

The one that is shooting at you. A human would also be incapable of know until them.
But, "This bloke is responsible now" is our actual system.
Politicians never know anything, throw them in a room, wait some time, they come up with someone to blame. Not hard.

Really, I see no problem with death machines. If anything it should be way easier to control them.

If there is no lighting gun, Tesla coils exists.
This makes a point, Andreas, no?

Lighting guns exist, they are, as described earlier, aimed with lasers to create a low resistance path trough air.
Tesla coils are far from a gun and you would be pressed to hit something with it.

[GiglameshDespair]

-snip-

Spoiler: What nation? (click to show/hide)

Most soldiers will be wearing something reminiscent of camouflage, which tends to look reasonably similar. Because that's what works.

Hope your machine can tell well enough. Not even American soldiers go out to the field bedecked in the red, white and blue. Remember, we're talking about autonomous machines here. They have to be able recognise allies and enemies and communicate with them. So as long as the people didn't shoot at them they're golden? Does it have the ability to talk to them and figure out the difference between a lie and a honest mistake. Can it read body language? What if people surrender? Humans are superior in reading body language than machines,

There are no current electrolasers in service with any military, and certainly non-handheld. If you're being shot by a tank or ship weapon, however, laser or not powered armour wouldn't save you anyway.

[ChairmanPoo]

how about a lightning rod?

[GiglameshDespair]

Hand to them and ask them to climb a church in a thunderstorm?

[Greiger]

I don't know why I'm poking my head into this discussion, but I wanted to post to watch.

I had a big long post explaining a theoretical lightning gun strike against theoretical powered armor but decided that my 2 classes in electrical engineering in collage years ago probably pales in comparison to what others know, so I'll just summarize the high points of what I think I know.

1) Protecting the suit itself and the wearer strongly depends on the strength of the gun.  If you just took the charge from a modern tazer and just magically delivered it to the powered armor, just making sure the outer armor is conductive enough to send the charge to the boots would be plenty.  As the charge gets stronger, you would have to start considering things like insulating the outer armor plates or having thick grounding cables running on the outside to redirect the charge and keep the charge from bleeding into the inner parts of the suit.  But there's pretty much no way in hell I can imagine any kind of human sized bodysuit taking a hit from an actual lightning stroke and not being a hard melted outer layer with a cooked nougaty center.  At a point it dosn't matter how conductive the suit is, but how conductive the ground is.

2) Charging the armor's batteries is far more difficult than the armor just discharging the hit.  It takes specialized batteries to take a sudden jolt of high voltage and not just fail utterly (and explosively).  That's one of the reasons why there are so many different kinds of batteries.  Some have long life but are completely incapable of being recharged, some recharge very quickly but have little capacity, some have long shelf life without losing their charge, some can be recharged thousands of times, some can supply a lot of power quickly, and some are very lightweight.  And while I didn't look into it very deeply I would be very surprised if there is a reasonably sized battery that is capable of being light enough to put on a bodysuit, has enough charge for extended use, and is capable absorbing any amount of energy capable of jumping more than a few inches through air fast enough to not be damaging destructive to everything involved.

Anyway yall electrical engineers feel free to correct any of that, but that's where the problems are as I see them.  I think with near future technology it could be possible to make a suit protect the user and recharge it's batteries on a zap.   ...But that would be pretty much all it could do, wouldn't be any kind of a combat suit.  More like some kind of specialized emergency maintenance suit or something.

[sambojin]

Lightning guns. Impractical, but possible.

The taser idea is the easiest. Nice, simple, aimable and non-lossy for getting a heap of electricity to your target.

Your could also do a tesla coil in many different ways. The problem being that arcing through air requires a hell of a lot of voltage, and you'd really want to make sure it grounds to them and not you (or other random stuff).

You could also just do it as a multi-stage transformer run off a light engine, but size and weight comes into play. As well as the heat dispersal required to stop you from cooking the working bits. You can get a surprising amount of energy out of a small RC car nitrous engine though (2kW+ for a 500gram engine), even with lossy conversion and voltage transformation.

A piezoelectric approach could also be done. You'd need large piezos and you'd have to hit them pretty hard, but that's not really a problem. Cordite could do the "hitting" easily enough, converting explosive shock to high voltage electricity, but the piezos would degrade pretty quickly I think. You could also just run it off a small nitrous engine, set up like 5000 really big electric lighter starters all wired together, for a low tech approach. Again, it will arc to you or other stuff that you don't want it to.

There's also the pseudo-EMP style approach, just reversed, where instead of an explosion deforming a charged coil to produce an EMP effect, it deforms it to do a voltage step up. The initial electricity could be stored in capacitors inside the bullet shells, with an explosive impact-fuzed charge for coil deformation, or as a piezo-tipped bullet, with the shock of deceleration on the piezo providing high voltages. It'd be fiddly as hell to make, but it'd only arc to whatever it hits (in theory) and has the advantage of having kinetic impact and electricity doing "stuff" to the target. You could probably fit all that junk in a 20mm bullet.

There's a few other potential esoteric types available (electrolasers, directed microwave and pulsed plasma coming to mind), but they're way beyond my ken. Sort of.

With the levels of power you're looking at, why not just a rail gun or a plasma launcher? Or a laser? Even high temperature incendiaries are essentially explosive plasma if you use the right mix, so pulse an electric charge through that on impact as described above. Then you get pretty lighting effects, kinetic power, stickyness to grounded targets, heat, and a low level EMP pulse. Plus, they're doable with relatively available tech.

A mix of thermite, magnesium powder and high grade silicon powder all mixed and bonded in a shell, with a good electrical shock to get the thermite going and the silicon into plasma form on impact might work. It may be worthwhile just adding piezo crystals to the explosive or incendiary mix, hopefully explosive shock=>heat losses for sparkies. It probably does need a solid electrical boost though. Between that and an impact fuzed explosive (ala Raufoss rounds), you'd probably get something nicely charged and hot, with a bit of arcing on the target due to plasma coils ending up in weird configurations on explosive impact. Piezos in the round, or capacitor discharge, for more "lightningny" style effects (that would probably just move the plasma around into funny shapes for a brief instant) if you want. But there will be plasma, just doing stuff, and magnesium thermite (possibly alongside a penetrator as well)..... It might work. Maybe. Would look pretty anyway.

Like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y72nrlNnXAk

added to this:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XjTsRju6W-Y

with a bit of extra electricity on impact for dispersal and arcing.

[sambojin]

In any case, develop the weapon first. Then design defenses against it.

Lightning Gun is only "sort of" a thing. Which type of gun are you talking about?

Only then can we develop armour to resist it. Power Armour or not.

It's rare that armour is ever good enough to resist against well developed weapons immediately. It tends to happen the other way around.

[Bauglir]

If I had magical fantasy resources and needed to design a defense against a lightning gun, I'd rig up a system that detects rising voltages or something and fires off a bunch of copper wires in various directions such that one end of each is traveling toward the presumed lightning bolt and the other in some arbitrary direction perpendicular to that approach. I'm probably not gonna tank that shit so I'd probably have to try and divert it somehow, although that pretty much kills the idea of leeching current off it.