I mean dermal implants are of course going to be a huge market for them, which will push the research for bigger and more powerful versions of the same benefit. Maybe even some day we'll see the subdermal phone implants like from the mediocre recreation of Total Recall!
I should start some tech projects of my own for my own company... I wonder which I should start from? Power armor? Hunter-killer drone? Butler-robot? Please note that it is impossibly impractical to build a power armor that can reliably resist rifle rounds from multiple directions. Modern standard rifles even without AP rounds penetrate a thick layer of hardened steel and a ridiculous amount when equipped with AP rounds. To further make them redundant it's a trivial matter to issue a new 3000$ up-calibered rifle with 15 round magazine of heavy duty AP rounds to counter your 500,000$ suit. In other words - 'bullet magnet suits are impractical'. You don't want to stand there attracting fire. Power armor would be ideal for things such as making you run faster, run longer at full sprint, more agile - able to more easily and rapidly climb and jump, allowing better sensors and situational awareness and so on. So no space marines. Though according to lore in one moment the Mk IV is "like a walking tank and impervious to heavy machinegun fire" and the next moment "the sheer mass of primitive spears was too much". (which to me is really more a matter of inconsistency and occasionally very bad writing / being forced to try to write balanced game mechanics into lore)
Standard rifle rounds? Easy peasy. No, a standard rifle without AP will not penetrate a thick layer of hardened steel. This of course is dependent upon your definition of -thick- however. My definition of thick is at least 1/2". Of course, steel is not the best substance for bullet protection, it's just very tough by itself and makes a good marker for how powerful your rifle is. Kevlar backed by steel is far more resilient and can absorb a much higher velocity impact. Weave in some carbon fiber and you've got a plate of some really tough stuff. This is entirely passive, as well. We're talking 40k level tech, how do we know there's not some actual power in that armor, dedicated not just to boosting the trooper, but protecting them as well? With enough juice you could easily generate a low electromagnetic field that would dampen or deflect the impact of anything made of ferrous material, but have little to no impact on things not made of steel or iron. The 'mass of primitive spears' however lends me to believe they're using an arrestive defense rather than a hard defense like a steel plate. A bullet is rather easy to stop, if you can deflect, absorb or counter the energy from it's velocity it's mass is pitiful, a spear on the other hand with sufficient edge could still do harm even with just gravity behind it (though still unlikely to penetrate even the weakest of hardened plates with naught but gravity behind it. Odds are that -is- just bad writing). There have been experiments on modern armor vs. archaic weaponry, and things like a ballista do surprisingly well, our armor is built to withstand what we see in the battlefield on a day to day, if someone were to modernize a ballista, it'd be devastating, until we adapted to it, and then it would probably just go away. Bullets are efficient for most tasks. It is also true that a high powered rifle often defeats even the strongest armors, however one has to be able to resource, and use effectively. Just because you can penetrate the armor does not mean that the shot will be lethal. Particularly when you're talking about a machine with moving parts and multiple levels of material armament. The biggest problem with both of these things, is if you've got the resources to make a bigger gun, you could simply make a whole lot more smaller guns. Same goes for armor. Generally the reason why armor is so effective, is it's relatively uncommon, so consequently, the weapons to fight them are also uncommon, because you aren't going to invest the time in a weapon that you won't need very often. Make a few, bring them out when you need them.
I don't go that far myself. 40k is fun, you need to drive the story with the story and what would be cool and not what really would actually work or by considerations if something would be economically-logistically possible and so on. If you start worrying too much the inconsistencies will just ruin your experience. 7.62 x 39 Coating yourself with 6mm steel is going to make you weigh a shit ton - and regular steel cores will still penetrate you at 300 meters, which is in many terrains far above the average engagement distance. And that's just your regular steel cores without anyone even trying to actually counter your armor. You'd have to come up with something very, very expensive and exotic to be able to fend off up calibered AP rounds. Plasma screen that exists in a frame can be used to defend against kinetic attacks, plasma field on the other hand can be used to dissipate shockwave type attacks. Energy requirements far exceed the theoretical limits of backpacks; energy densities etc. I suppose some exotic non-extant nanomaterial might be tough and resilient enough to up the required caliber. As for the ballista argument, that's nonsense. 1930's autocannon such as Bofors 40mm gun is still today very effective against armor. Just keep pouring it on armored target and it tears shreds out of it until something breaks. Not bad for a 1930's gun. Ballistas on the other hand can't penetrate much anything and upgrading them with repeat fire capability and an engine won't help all that much. Modern tanks are all relatively easy to defeat but since they are already so expensive and so heavy it's relatively easier to upgrade things such as the frontal aspect of them with latest tech that can defeat the last tech that was built to defeat them. Then the AT weapon gets upgraded and rolled out en masse and again the tanks are vulnerable against the latest AT weapons, which are always quite abundant relative to the number of tanks. As of late the tank defense is moving increasingly from passively absorbing the hits to active measures to engage the incoming projectile itself. This is because it seems whatever the armor is like there's always a way to make a change to the warhead to defeat it. For instance the reactive Soviet armor was defeated by adding a narrow spike head to the anti-tank round, the spike would trigger the reactive armor and the spike itself would break but it was distanced so that the main warhead would not enter the reactive blast in time - due to the spike - and thus the main warhead would maintain it's course and not be deflected by the reactive armor. So now we're further on to having various munitions and sensors to fire at incoming AT rounds and this again introduces more and more decoys into the rounds that would seek to cause the defense to fire off ahead of the warhead.
I never suggested the materials/technology existed today. I also said using nothing but steel is a bad idea. You'd honestly be better off with a lighter gauge of steel and the same weight in paper. Also carbon nanotubes, but they're not practical currently. I didn't say there weren't guns capable of breaking tanks, and I think you're underestimating the capabilities of a ballista. Not that a medieval ballista would be practical in modern combat, but the energy capable of being presented is no joke. Combine that with a tungsten carbide or better shaft head and there are very few armors that are going to deflect that. There's a lot of different breeds of ballistae, making it somewhat difficult to get precise data, I found a few questionable citations such as this one https://historum.com/threads/ancient-artillery-and-siege-engines.41287/page-3 but really, I don't need to prove physics, if you push X mass Y speed you get Z energy. Ballistae ranged from 400 gram shafts to 80+kg stones and could (potentially) reach up to 90m/s. even half that at 80 kg is a pretty substantial amount of energy 64000 joules (the above website sites the 80k projectile clocking in at 200kjoules) Of course, a ball projectile would not be ideal for armor (unless you just wanted to crush it completely). I imagine were we to put our minds to it we could likely engineer a method more efficient with greater velocity today, take a 3kg shaft (not significantly heavier than the average spear or polearm) and bump it up to 140 m/s (current fastest crossbow on the market) and you've got about 30kjoules, which is about twice what you get out of a Barrett M82 firing standard 50 cal. Even at 90m/s the energy is pretty comparable to the modern sniper, and that's assuming we maintain the same firing design as the old fashioned ballista instead of just making it a spear chucking cannon. This is always the curse of armor, build a better shield and someone will build a way to break it. There's only one you they gotta kill, but there's an infinite number of assholes out there trying to do it. This doesn't make the shield any less valuable for protecting you, you just have to make sure you're not expecting it to protect you from something designed to break it. The best protection you can ever have is simply to not be on the battlefield in the first place. Barring that, you're gonna have to rely on whatever method available to keep you alive. I agree with you however that the primary focus of power armor should be physical enhancement. Carrying more weapons and moving about the battlefield faster will keep you alive better than anything short of not being there at all. Armor should consist of just enough to prevent the average bullet from breaking stuff internally and forcing the enemy to pull out bigger guns you can identify and avoid or destroy.
We have pictures of Sagittarius A*. https://eventhorizontelescope.org/blog/astronomers-reveal-first-image-black-hole-heart-our-galaxy
wouldn't it be fascinating if the only reason time exists is because we're existing on the edges of the event horizon of a giant black hole.
could be dual causality, but one doesn't really have much impact without the other anyway. Pun intended.
