[from occupied ga]

While nanotube armor may stop bullets (or may not, as I mentioned above), the armor still will not protect from the deadliest effect of a firearm: hydrostatic shock. If you're wearing armor and it stops a 30-06 moving at 3000 feet per second, you will still have to have medical attention within a short period, or you'll still die.

What a load of nonsense. Conservation of energy and momentum guarantees that the same energy and momentum is applied to the shooter as the shootee. If your statement were true, then the recoil would cause as many problens as the bullet. I only know of one case of a person getting killed by recoil and that's when the recoil toppled a heavy automatic weapon on her. What causes in injury in a gun shoot wound is the tearing an puncturing of things that were not made to be torn and punctured.

When you think about how redundant a human body is

Another load of nonsense. Yes, you have two legs - try walking with just one of them. You have two eyes - try doing a task that requires depth perception with just one of them. You have two arms. Try picking up a large package with just one. Sheesh.

[JamesP81]

What a load of nonsense.

If it were a load of nonsense, then people who are shot while wearing kevlar vests wouldn't have things like broken ribs from the experience. Unless nanotube armor could stop a projectile and completely dissipate the energy away from the wearer, it would be no better than kevlar. Consider: when Kevlar stops a handgun round, it pretty much debilitates the wearer. He's not in the fight anymore. And we're talking about handgun rounds that probly don't exceed 1200 feet per second. Scale that up to 3000 feet per second for your average civilian hunting round (which kevlar is incapable of stopping anyway) and the wearer is still likely to die from the shot even if the armor stops the round. Might want to think about those things before you spout off.

Again, there is nothing in the article that suggests that carbon nanotubes have good ballistic properties. I don't see why we automatically assume that they would. It has high tensile strength, but that doesn't necessarily transfer to stopping a projectile. Hardened steel also has high tensile strength. It's also very brittle and prone to break.

The big advantage I see to this technology is the realistic possibility of aritificial limbs as good as the original.