After a decade of development, a new multi-material helmet design proves dramatically lighter and stronger than traditional armor. Layering different materials for each stage of impact delivers superior weight-to-performance ratios. A $2,000 shell can cut helmet weight by two pounds, critical when helmets now carry sensors, radios, and displays.
I, years and years ago, came up with a scheme for how you could make ballistic armor that was much lighter and much stronger than had been created in the past. And, uh, we've, over the last year, been doing some testing to try and actually prove out these ideas I've wanted to do for almost a decade. And, uh, the results are extraordinary. We're, we're seeing, we're seeing, we're seeing performance that, that we wouldn't have believed until we actually tried it. And, uh, I can't give away the specifics, but I can tell you this. Go ahead. Look, I can just give away this. Look, I'll tell you this, uh, building helmets out of homogeneous materials, meaning you take a material, make a helmet out of it. That is not the way to get the lightest, strongest thing. Uh, composite materials where you combine multiple different materials that kind of, uh, cover each other's strengths and weaknesses. Almost always make for a more optimal system in terms of weight to performance. And so imagine a multi-composite where you're using not just 2 or 3, but maybe even more materials, and you're actually designing them to do their part under the different stages of destruction that a helmet goes through as the helmet deforms and is penetrated. You, you can build some really interesting things that are far beyond what the United States has done so far on ballistic helmets. And I'd say one of the reasons that the US hasn't done these types of technologies in the past, it's not because I'm this genius who is smarter than everybody. It's because it didn't make sense when the helmet was this thing that was supposed to cost a few hundred dollars, when a helmet was supposed to be this cheap thing that, you know, you put on your head, it needs to work, but the whole system is pretty cheap. If you're instead building this kind of very expensive thing where you've got sensors, computers, radios, displays, optics, speakers, microphones, all this stuff integrated. You now need to look at it as an integrated product. And when you look at it as an integrated product, you always want it to be lighter, right? And so you start to ask, okay, where's the best savings per dollar, the best weight savings per dollar? So if I wanted to pull 100 grams out of this helmet, how can I do that the cheapest? Well, Well, I'll tell you what, it's not pulling 100 grams out of the electronics. It's not pulling 100 grams out of the optics. It's not pulling 100 grams out of the microphones. It turns out that the place to invest money to save weight is in the actual physical ballistic shell itself. So all of a sudden it actually makes sense in the context of an integrated system that, you know, costs quite a bit to, let's say, you know, you could say, you know what, my helmet skin is going to cost $2,000. And in doing so, it's going to weigh 2 pounds less than it would have weighed otherwise. It finally makes sense. So, um, yeah, we're doing some really exotic stuff to do better fragmentation protection, better rifle and small arms protection, better blast protection, concussion protection, hearing protection. A helmet does a lot aside from, you know, carry your night vision system.
