Everyone here is correct about power being the biggest limiting factor.
The number 2 factor though is concussions.
Concussions don’t usually happen from something slamming into your head, most concussions happen from your head moving quickly and then coming to a sudden stop, and your sloshy brain inside still has momentum and slams against the inside of your skull.
It’s why you can get badly concussed in something like a car accident even if your head never hits anything. Or in football / hockey, even just a big full speed hit to the chest can give you a concussion.
The way Tony Stark moves in that suit would give him constant concussions. You cannot move that quickly and suddenly come to a stop. Until we have a way of transferring consciousness to a computer or something solid state, theres no chance of ever directly piloting an iron man suit.
The tech behind the power source, thrust, and primary weapons doesn’t exist, and there are no real-life counterparts to them even at large scale that would just need to be miniaturized. With that much fiction in even the mark 1 suit, it’s impossible to estimate cost.
The biggest problem IMO is the fact that all our power generation technology comes down to “boil water to turn turbine”. How we generate the heat changes, but not how we turn it into electricity.
The biggest problem IMO is the fact that all our power generation technology comes down to “boil water to turn turbine”. How we generate the heat changes, but not how we turn it into electricity.
Technically the ones that use steam to spin turbines are:
- Coal plants
- Gas plant
- Thermal Solar Plants
- Nuclear Fission Plants
- Nuclear Fusion Plants
Then you have ones that spin turbines, but using other methods:
- Hydro dams and tidal power - use water
- Engines / Generators - use controlled explosions
- Wind Turbines - use wind
Then you have the few that truly don’t use spinning turbines:
-
Solar Panels - they use semi-conductors specially designed so that light causes the electrons in the material to start flowing, directly creating usable electricity.
-
Piezo Electrics - similar semiconductors that react to material stress (bending etc) and cause electrons to flow
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Batteries & Fuel Cells - store power in chemical form, and the reactions cause the electrons to flow directly
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(Proposed) Direct Energy Converters - experimental devices long proposed for nuclear fusion reactors that can directly produce flowing electrons. There’s been recent research investigating doing this with fission reactors as well.
Good expansion on other things that turn turbines, but all of which would also never work in a mobile suit. Solar and PZ are truly different than “spin turbine“ but neither would work great to power the suit. Batteries and fuel cells might someday be energy dense enough to run an iron man for a short time, but still a long ways off. I think the direct energy converters are a super long way off. Good for low power situations, but I doubt they’ll ever be powerfully enough to propel even cars.
Oh yeah, I was just expanding on the non turbine power types cause I think they’re neat.
Though I missed some of the most interesting ones: Nuclear Batteries.
Edit: just realized that ngram already mentioned these.
They’re different from chemical batteries in that they can’t be charged or discharged, and their energy comes not from chemical reactions, but from radioactive decay.
Thermal-nuclear batteries convert heat into electricity, including completely solid state ones like radioisotope generators, that use an array of thermo-couples to convert heat into electricity, not turbines.
Then there are Beta-Voltaic nuclear batteries that use specialized semi-conductor circuits to convert the electrons and positrons emitted from a radioactive material into usable electricity.
Neither of these produce anywhere near enough power output for a flying suit, nor can their power output vary, but still interesting to think about in the context of Tony Stark’s arc reactor.
(Proposed) Direct Energy Converters
There’s also another heat -> electricity conversion method used by nuclear fission reactors, though it could presumably be used for anything in place of a steam turbine: thermocouples. Usually people think of them as electrical sensors for heat, but they can also scale up to produce a lot of electricity from a lot of heat. It’s not very new technology either; Voyager spacecrafts use it in their RTGs. No idea about how that scales though.
Biggest bottleneck to the development is the power source. Which is the biggest plot armor of the series. Without unlimited power the suit would constantly die and power down or it would have to be hooked up to the mains.
And also the part where he doesn’t even get a concussion from enormous impacts. Until we invent and miniaturize inertial dampeners, we still can’t ignore physics.
You’d also need very small, very powerful servomotors since it also augments his speed and strength, and I don’t believe sufficiently small and powerful ones exist.
Those pesky laws of physics! They get in the way every time.
But Tony Stark made it in a cave with scrap parts.
Something like that IRL would be totally impossible (and impractical) for lots of reasons but two big ones would be the power source and the inertial dampening: Even if you could power the suit, it would kill you if you tried to pilot it.
Limit 1: Power - nowhere to store fuel, no way small fuel lines could supply enough thrust to lift a human.
Limit 2: Flight Stability - humans would lose balance very easily and limb mounted thrusters would fail to correct before said human breaks their neck on a brick wall or the road or something.
Limit 3: Controls wouldn’t work well. Voice activation would be slow. Hand controls would be complicated and clumsy.
Ignoring all research and devopment costs, Northrupp Grumman could probably build a rudimentary very flawed version for about $183,262,894.63 if I had to guess. The bulk of the cost is sensitive and complicated electronic components, ultra lightweight frame materials, and a million dollar paint job.
There also is no where to put all the computational power needed to control the thing. To be able to control the suit properly, the targeting computer for the weapons, the communications, etc.
There’s literally no room in the suit for anything more than a couple single board computers.
And we’d need to dissipate all the waste heat from the thrusters and the fuel source, too. Without causing injury to the wearer.
People mention the power source and they are right, but even if you had that sort of power source, iron man would melt himself.
99% thermal efficiency is basically impossible and even just 1% of the 3GW of power output would cook you near instantaneously.
There’s a guy building one in his garage
