Bringing Iron Man to life: Exoskeletons, armour and jet packs

If the object is to allow a soldier to cover large distances quickly, then those designs that take their inspiration from kangaroos is the way to go, much like the 'Blade-runner' amputee athletes. The kinetic energy is stored in the spring (as it is in the tendons of kangaroos), and released again, so is a very energy efficient way of travelling, though not suitable for all terrains and hardly stealthy.

I believe the Soviets experimented with a power-assisted version (with combustion-powered cylinders) that allowed soldiers to take strides ten yards long.

If you want to your soldier to carry heavy equipment/supplies into hostile territory, then why burden the soldier with it and a HULC system? It's better to have a robotic mule carry the gear independently. Or, as was done in Burma in WW2, a real mule can be parachuted in.

(A local farmer did this, and the next day Japan surrendered... nothing to do with an A-bomb at all, just the threat of Jasper on a donkey. Later on, when posted as a guard in the gardens of the Imperial Palace, the Emperor, under house arrest, politely approached him for a light... "You can fuck off" he responded)

Whilst accepting that (and previous AC's) point, if you've got a loader then you'd need some counterbalancing for loads, so the performance point stands, and even if you overcome that and don't need the counterweight, the performance of a small family saloon weighing a tonne is nothing to get Quaritch into a sweat is it?

"Gas turbine generators are small and pack a punch and would likely work well in such a device. "

Not very fuel efficient, on varying loads though, which is why they've never had much use in ground transport. For the hypothesised exoskeleton from Avatar we'd be talking about something of the order of two to four tonnes weight to start with, and that implies (for a bit of spring in its step) around 800kW. A turbine gen set of that scale weights in at around six or seven tonnes, although you could reduce that if there's no silencing, enclosure, sled, and perhaps use a smaller set and run it more agressively (offsetting the life and service implications). And it'd use around a quarter of a tonne of fuel per hour, so for three hours endurance you'd have 0.75 tonnes of fuel. Say you over-rate a smaller turbine, and optimistically get a 6-700kW generating set at four tonnes, 0.75 tonnes of fuel, and the exo skeleton itself at three tonnes, throw in some weapons or load, and we're talking about a ten tonne vehicle with a p/w ratio of around 50hp/tonne.

I do want one, I just can't see it happening anytime soon.

One could argue that the point of putting a human life in danger is the prevention of trivialisation of warfare.

When one side has literally nothing to lose, it has no reason not to wage warfare.

True. But it's already happening anyway. That's why militaries all over the world are spending billions on UAV/UCAVs. You could say that is trivializing war. Then again, a pilot flying thousands of feet above his target, with little chance of being shot down, while he drops bombs, could also be trivializing war. Or a medieval knight in inpenetrable armour riding around a battlefield stabbing poorly armed, untrained peasants willy-nilly is kind of trivializing war. I guess where I am going is the comical/tragic future of war could be humans sitting around in armchairs, letting drones and robots do the fighting for them. In which case, why have the war in meatspace at all? Put it in cyberspace, if that is possible. Of course one side would blame all their defeats on lag.

I've often thought it would be ironic if, in the future when our troops are running around in mech suits, the enemy launched a surprise attack on the mech suit factory, causing the troops to have to fight to defend the factory without wearing their protective mech suits. Surely one of the soldiers would see the futile irony of being slaughtered to defend the factory that makes the suits to prevent them from being slaughtered.

Or it could be that one mech suit is valued at much more than one human life, in which case giving one to a soldier would be pointless, or at least he should be the one to guard the suit. Anyway, just random thoughts.