Dragon Skin Testing and the Truth

[Team Sergeant]

Originally Posted by txzen

Dear Txen,

At the time I sold my rights out to Pinnacle Armo we had not progressed to the point where we would be making a serious bid for Artlicle One testing. The systems worked, the next generations was already planned, and the only conditioning tests that we had to pass at the time was a water immersion test. That was fairly straight forward. We used light weight Nylon fabric with the same amount of urethane coating as a boyancy comepensator and then ultrasonically welded the system inside this water proof cover.

We had sold some to SOCOM as well and again the issue of heat was never presented.

As far as placing the tiles into an individual envelop of fabric rather than using glue and fabric, it is possible, but a sewing nightmare, and of course placing all the tile in place is another time thief to high production manufacturing. I guess that might be a viable way to go, but I would think that the adhesive method will be tried again until it doesn't or does prove out. It's faster, cheaper, and easier.

We are experimenting with an adhesive for niche applications that seems to have this problem solved, we'll see.

As for the discs, why did they only fall in one area, I can't confirm this as a fact, one possible explaination is one section was light on adhesive and the fabric sandwich separated and allowed some tiles to fall and stack up on area where the glue didn't fail, but this is conjecture because I don't know exactly how the tiles looked after the heat exposure. I don't trust what Pinnacle states as an explaination because I spent the majority part of the 1990's using adhesive coated fabrics to affix everything from squares to hexagons in various matricies, and one thing was certain, if the glue wasn't right we knew it, it wasn't some difficult thing to see. We knew it. If what Pinnacle Armor is saying is true, which I doubt anyway, take responsibility for not having your staff up to specs in training. I mean look, if I were Mr. Neal, the 30 units that I sent to the military for evaluation would have been personally inspected and double checked. This was his first and supposedly best foot forward.

I say "Manup", take responsibility instead of crying foul all the time, if your stuff is good you will get another chance, especially if you aren't accusing the Army and it's evaluators of being crooked all the time. It's about diplomacy as well, Mr. Neal reminds me of the boy who cried wolf too many times.

If you look at another of my posting you will also see the difference between the testing at the German laboratory and the NIJ Vs. What the Military considers important in testing scalar armor. It was a post in response to Mr. Patriot.

Best Regards

Posted by: Allan Bain at May 22, 2007 04:07 PM

You should invite Mr. Bain to our forums.....

[Pete]

Originally Posted by txzen

.... The DS should get to designate where it is protecting against level IV threats also and not be expected to protect against rifle threats even at the edges where there are no overlapping discs.....

You don't get to pick where the enemy shoots you. The test is "none" and a number of rounds did.

The X-rays show the before and after views of the vests. The before shot on most of them show the scale overlap. Mightly small overlap area to be wishing the enemy hits only them. Remeber the enemy are bad shots, they just might "miss" and kill you.

Pete

[txzen]

All that is true, but IBA's level IV protection doesn't cover the whole vest and the tests hit it's level IV protected areas.

[Pete]

Originally Posted by txzen

All that is true, but IBA's level IV protection doesn't cover the whole vest and the tests hit it's level IV protected areas.

Look at the before X-ray - you can see the overlap of the scales. You have single layer and then double and triple overlaps. The single layer appears to cover only about 1/2 of the area.

Heck man, if thats your defense, you have to hit the overlap areas for a test; the soldiers might as well wear a T shirt.

I'm kinda' pokin' ya a bit but the standard is a shot in the, I'll call it torso, area must be stopped. All 6 suppliers of Intercepter meet those standards. DS failed, with what 13 of 48 shots?

So the real question is how much money has the company poured into DS and what do they stand to lose if their product is a bust and people start asking for their money back? I think a ton and I think, to them, it's all about money and not about the soldier.

Has DS had a recall of any vests for glue problems or were the only problems with the vests submitted for government testing? I find that odd.

Pete
No answers, but a lot of uneasy questions on my mind.

[Karl.Masters]

Originally Posted by LibraryLady

Why would there be places on the armor that doesn't protect against rifle fire? Isn't that the point of the stuff?

It seems to me, as the president, admitting there are places on the armor that don't stop the bullets is akin to admitting this equipment isn't designed to do it's job, regardless of whether it passes a test or not.

LL

LL,

I agree completely with your anlaysis.

Shots on the SOV 3000 were only taken on areas of ceramic coverage, or on areas where there was ceramic coverage at the start of temperature conditioning.

We call this the fair hit area.

Just because the ceramic discs went AWOL from their appointed place of duty dosen't mean the fair hit area is modified.

This environmentally induced disc migration, were it were to occur in the field, would create a vulnerability that would place Soldiers at risk of lethal injury, since the failure occurred in areas that are critical to providing rifle protection to the upper torso and vital organs.

I think you said it best - that's the point of the stuff.

To use the terms in the embedded quote in your post, it would be much more precise to say that there were "rifle defeating areas" that transitioned to "non-rifle defeating areas" after the adhesive failed in temperature conditioning testing and the ceramic discs migrated into random disorder at the bottom of the vest.

The Army body armor testing protocol is intended to support a Soldier safety release for use in a combat enviroment, which often involves operations at extreme temperatures.

It is very important to discover these types of equipment failures on the range instead of on a Soldier in harm's way. This is why we test.

In the spirit of continuous process improvement and corporate responsibility, I submit that it would be much more productive for this manufactuer to analyze the cause(s) of this failure mode, and take proactive steps to address this critical design deficiency.

Karl

[txzen]

Does the sapi plate cover more than the overlapping discs? About the glue I still want to know if all 30 of the vests's glue melted, or if there just wasn't enough glue on that one vest on that one strip of discs and if is a wide spread issue or what. Neal did say that it was one vest that had the disc slippage and that like the IBA not all of the vest is level IV protected.

[The Reaper]

Originally Posted by LibraryLady

I'm confused. I admit I haven't read all the links, and I'm definitely NOT up to speed on this subject.

Why would there be places on the armor that doesn't protect against rifle fire? Isn't that the point of the stuff?

It seems to me, as the president, admitting there are places on the armor that don't stop the bullets is akin to admitting this equipment isn't designed to do it's job, regardless of whether it passes a test or not.

LL

To futher muddy the waters, there is a layer of soft body armor which is pistol and fragmentation resistant. Rifle armor, especially Level 4 rated armor, is generally thick, hard, and inflexible.

The soft armor is located in the carrier, next to the body with the rifle plate towards the outside.

To make the entire vest rifle grade would make strapping on differnent coverage areas of plates like a medieval knight.

The entire concept is a tradeoff between unarmored, which is light, mobile, and reliant on speed and mobility for protection, versus armored, which make us slower, heavier, less mobile, but better protected. The same dilemma has existed with tanks. Some designers like heavy armor and slow, some prefer lighter armor and faster.

It is much easier if just the vital areas are hard armored. The shoulders, arms, legs, etc. are not as vulnerable as the torso, and in 130 degree heat and 100 pounds of mission related gear, there has to be some compromise.

At the same time, as I explained to the eggheads from Rand, we have reached a physical limiting factor, where we just can't carry any more weight without leaving something vital behind. It is a zero sum game, something people who have never humped a ruck have trouble understanding. Even after stripping down the MREs and only carrying one per day, after deciding to change socks just every other day, one t-shirt for the whole month, no underwear, cuttting off half the toothbrush handle, etc., there is only so much you can leave behind and still function, and just so much that you can carry. An extra 20 pounds? That is equivalent to 16 30 round mags of 5.56 ammo, and four frag grenades. I don't think so.

TR

[The Reaper]

Originally Posted by txzen

Does the sapi plate cover more than the overlapping discs? About the glue I still want to know if all 30 of the vests's glue melted, or if there just wasn't enough glue on that one vest on that one strip of discs and if is a wide spread issue or what. Neal did say that it was one vest that had the disc slippage and that like the IBA not all of the vest is level IV protected.

txzen:

Good input from Mr. Bain.

After an auspicious beginning, you are beginning to piss me off.

The methodology and disposition of all of the vests tested by the Army is in the PM's slide presentation at the other DS thread. The "what did..." and "how many..." questions are already answered, and we are not going to waste time answering them again. You don't seem to understand the mechanics or construction of the vests. If you can't keep up, you are going to be left behind.

Look at the pretty pictures and read it all before posting again.

TR

[Karl.Masters]

Originally Posted by txzen

I guess the question people would like answered is if another body armor is chosen does Mr Masters stay on as the head of the army's body armor project....

I plan to die in this job. My most important credential is what the Army terms "sole surviving family member". RIP SP4 JE Masters, CSC 1-508 PIR 82nd ABN DIV.

Originally Posted by txzen

...or would a different person, a flexible armor specialist if that is the case, take over?

Since 2003, I have evaluated three flexible body armor systems for the Army, and will soon receive a fourth for ballistic evaluation.

The Army is interested in lightweight flexible armor to provide Soldiers more lethality and survivability through improvements in agility, mobility, and comfort.

However:

BG Brown, PEO Soldier, stated in a press conference yesterday that the Army is unwilling to take any steps backwards in personal armor mass efficiency, nor is the Army willing to sacrifice ballistic performance, operational suitability, durability, modularity, or safety in order to field flexible armor.

I am confident that this nation's industrial base will overcome the technical challenges which currently limit the military utility of flexible body armor.

Karl

[x SF med]

TR-
you are restating the first law of economics "Everything has a cost" or "Every negotiation has a tradeoff"

It seems the eggheads from Rand would recognize what we ugly, dirty, intellectually challenged mud monkeys see right off the bat, but they don't.

[txzen]

Thanks for responding, this is a very common criticism that I think you have cleared up here. People really do either think you work for the manufacturers of Interceptor or that you job is dependent on Interceptor staying the armor of choice for the military. It being up to the army who runs the program and that they have chosen you to test flexible systems in the past I think those concerns are now unfounded.

And to The Reaper I am sorrow that my response to Pete came off as flippant. I have reviewed all of the PEO's pdf and see exactly what you are talking about. The shots that penetrated didn't seem to be on any edge or on a single disc. They also didn't seem to be at angles that would sneak bullets between discs. Thanks for directing me to the .pdf, I am embarrassed I hadn't seen it before I did have to turn UAC controls back on Windows Vista and restart my computer just to get adobe acrobat to install, but it was worth it. Sorry and thanks again.

[txzen]

I have an easy question I think and a simple observation about the .pdf.
1. I assume the initial xray is taken before any "testing" so that means that there aren't x-rays of after the temperature or chemical conditioning and before the ballistic test? So there are two x rays one of an untested and unconditioned armor and 1 after it has been fired on, right?
2. The observation is that when I looked at the x rays there looked like a lot of destruction. I mean the circled in, red spots I assume are the penetrations, but the amount of destruction done to those areas looks often as bad or at least very similar to the destruction done to other parts of the vest that I assume were hit with bullets and did not have penetrations because of a missing disc but no red circle.

[The Reaper]

Originally Posted by txzen

I have an easy question I think and a simple observation about the .pdf.
1. I assume the initial xray is taken before any "testing" so that means that there aren't x-rays of after the temperature or chemical conditioning and before the ballistic test? So there are two x rays one of an untested and unconditioned armor and 1 after it has been fired on, right?
2. The observation is that when I looked at the x rays there looked like a lot of destruction. I mean the circled in, red spots I assume are the penetrations, but the amount of destruction done to those areas looks often as bad or at least very similar to the destruction done to other parts of the vest that I assume were hit with bullets and did not have penetrations because of a missing disc but no red circle.

1. Yes.

2. I think you have missed the point. The disks delaminated from the temperature and either were not there when the bullets hit, or they were not well retained at that point, and the bullet blew out large numbers of disks.

TR

[LibraryLady]

KM and TR,

I appreciate your explanations; it furthered my clarity of the test results in the .pdf.

Thank you KM, sir, for the kind words.

LL

[txzen]

I see what you mean. On the low temp, the high, and the low to high temp there are large numbers of discs missing or displaced. On the first 5 tests it appears that there 1 disc decimated and the surrounding discs chipped/broken. The extreme temperature tests really do show lots of destruction.