Savage Builds: S1E1:Building Iron Man: Discovery channel Fridays 10pm PT

 The opening episode does something really amazing. The create an Iron Man Suit for real out of titanium using a 3d printer that is bulletproof in Colorado at the School of Mines on their 3d Printer. They assemble it in the San Francisco area where they make this series for TV and they shoot a .22 pistol at it from 25 feet, then a 9mm pistol at 25 feet and then shoot a .45 caliber pistol at it from 25 feet. The 9mm round and the .45 caliber round slightly dent the titanium but only very very slightly. However, I believe the 9 mm round if you were not wearing something to protect your neck it might have fragmented into your neck from where it hit around the heart area of the suit. So, in wearing this suit being hit by gunfire you would definitely need the neck and helmet armor to protect from bullets fragmenting off the surface of the suit. So, it is very different than a Kevlar vest that sort of absorbs the bullet. So, you would need the helmet and neck part of the helmet to protect from when bullets break apart on the surface of the suit into multiple pieces of shrapnel (like in a ricochet). Then a man who wears 5 mini-jet engines to fly around at 5 to 15 feet off the ground wears the suit at the end of the program and actually flies around with the suit on which is pretty amazing it can do all these things.

However, titanium is very very expensive so I wouldn't expect soldiers to be wearing these suits anytime soon. However, he did say it only weight 25 pounds I believe which isn't that heavy relatively speaking. However, how much do the jet engines weigh? the 5 of them. And they only run for 5 to 9 minutes depending upon weather conditions. So, likely it would be more useful as literally armor against bullets than flying around.

So, I could see soldiers wearing this armor coming down with parachutes to avoid getting shot maybe eventually into a battle or scouting somewhere on earth. It will stop a .45 caliber bullet but what would a 30 odd 6 do which can penetrate a car engine block and stop most vehicles from running with one round? Likely a world war I 30 odd 6 would go right through this like it goes through an engine block since a 30 odd 6 bullet was designed to go through 10 men before stopping.

Note: if you have cable like through Comcast or something I found I could just push the little blue microphone button on my controller and say "Savage Builds" and it gave me all the episodes that are out. So, if you have cable you might be able to see this episode for free like I just did.