Light armor from carbon allotropes

I want to make a powered light armor for my sci-fi setting.

The candidate material is carbon, as it's lightweight and has a whole rainbow of different allotropes with different properties.

I want to make an armor that:

• Has a literal exoskeleton, that also functions as your regular sci-fi exoskeleton and doesn't hinder movement.
• There would be also an exo-muscle, that can increase strength a bit.
• Has a good protection against blunt force trauma, tearing and heat in general and is capable of decelerating and distributing the force of an object.

How should I imagine that?

Imagine, that you're inside a disturbingly humanoid bug's carapace and muscle tissue, although the fancy paintings on it and the bulletproof face mask, that looks like something straight out of the Carnival of Venice, except less creepy and more sci-fi, can hide this fairly well.

We should use:

• Allotropes of carbon and air
• Nanolevel engineering

Alloys:

• The plates:
  • good thermal insulator, light, and has a mediocre hardness, tensile strength, and toughness.
• inside:
  • good thermal insulator, capable of decelerating the projectile, light
• exoskeleton:
  • harder, hard to compress, heavier, progressively deforms

Based on these criteria, what allotropes should I use and what formation should I place them in an alloy for these purposes?

posted about 7 years ago

Mephistopheles‭

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