The chest plate never came off as the batteries? inside kept his heart beating and was, therefore, surgically attached. He had to charge it from a big cable at times so I assume it was some sort of big, bullet-proof, chest-shaped battery. I also assume he wore the red ’shorts’ part under his clothes also, but that it could come off if desired as he was an very available millionaire bachelor…

The cuffs of the gloves and boots had the yellow ‘chain mail’ inside them, which he pulled up and locked to the rest (red) part of the suit. The alloy was incredibly light, the suitcase fairly large, Tony pretty strong… got it? Hey, for the 50’s and 60’s it was pretty cool…

As to the movie, well, I think they tried very hard to make it believable given the current background technology available in both real life and popular fiction. First thing in that list was to dump the suitcase bit… even though it would have been cool for us old-timers it still would have made Mr. Bad Astronomy choke on his popcorn… The ‘Transformers’ method of putting it on looked to me a lot like some of the Starcraft cutscenes I’ve seen on the web. The 3D design bit was very cool, and the HUD display inside the suit was so sweet I want one for my car… so for Iron Man embracing modern technology is so fitting it’d be a crime not to.

‘Quite a few people have mentioned ‘inertial dampers’, obviously a staple in sci-fi nowadays but not even thought of when Iron Man was introduced. At some point in the Marvel Comics Universe they introduced Vibranium™ (another post explained that well), which means the organic part of Iron Man is pretty much impact-free. Remember, this is the Universe that contains Adamantium™, the unbreakable metal so popular with mutants, and the mystic Uru™ metal a certain Thunder God had made into a hammer… (hmmm, wonder where I could get a suit made of a Vibranium/Adamantium/Uru alloy?)

Now for propulsion… it’s amazing what can happen when you have unlimited energy, take inertia out of the equation, and can leave propellant behind in the same Time Capsule as the suitcase. Modernize! Update! Excelsior!

Long long ago we envisioned using ion engines that use charged particles for propulsion, to allow a nuclear-powered spaceship to move without carrying propellant. That was the first thing I thought of when I saw the blue ‘repulsor beam’ in the movie. It wasn’t a ‘repulsor field’, just pushing things away, it was more of a ‘force beam’ that literally hits something. I also like how it has to slowly dawn on Tony that it’s got a future as a weapon, given how he made weapons for a living and all… I also think that if you have a ‘repulsor force’ you’d end up with both repulsors and tractors, reinforcing my idea that it’s more like an ion engine in nature.

I’m told there’s a military sub-orbital transport that uses a pulse engine that can be anywhere in the world in under four hours. WHO told me this I can’t say, but given unlimited energy, something that accelerates or emits lots of particles at close to the speed of light, total insulation from inertia, and a decent life-support system I don’t find it odd that Tony could have made a trans-continental trip in a decent amount of time. I’m pretty sure the suit has auto-pilot (and waste handling) and that he’s used to sleeping on long flights.

Kudos to whoever brought up Cyborg, and how they dumbed it down for the $6million man… a true cyborg would be more like those shown so well in Ghost in the Shell or something more like a Terminator, not just some guy with a mechanical arm.

One thing they didn’t have when Iron Man was thought up was shown very subtly in the movie, when in fact it would be the key to making the whole thing work. It’s something that’s around us all the time, so much so that we can’t even see it anymore. Back then it would be considered almost magic, and even now that we’re totally dependent on it there are only a few ‘wizards’ that understand, create, fix, or corrupt it.

What am I talking about? Software, of course. The world runs on it. It’s in virtually every device you use from your Microwave Oven to your car. Modern jets can’t fly without it (controlled instability, anyone?) and your car won’t run either. For Iron Man’s suit it’s obviously watching things, controlling the limbs when impacts occur, keeping ‘rag doll physics’ from becoming an issue. It was software that let him design the suit, make the suit, and run the suit. Software is obviously Tony’s true genius…

Finally, there’s no getting around the “Arc Reactor”. Sure, he managed to do in a cave in Afghanistan what he presumably couldn’t do with all of his father’s labs and resources at his disposal, but thats’ why he’s special… and people can often achieve great things with the proper application of the right kind of stress. Maybe all he lacked was motivation… Anyway, I assume this is one of those things that they did, then couldn’t figure out how they did it to mass produce it. His making another one was a 1 in a million chance, regardless of how large. Of course, he did it yet one more time, so maybe it was a 2 in a million chance… anyway, it’s not something they could mass produce as there’s some element of chance in it’s creation. (evil thought, maybe each time you start one up there’s a good chance it’ll vaporize a few city blocks. Shows you how much he risked to make them.)

I also doubt it’s a fusion process as there’s no heat produced. I think we’ll have to borrow from the latest craze in unlimited energy used in modern fiction, ‘zero point energy’. From Stargate’s ZPM’s to the Incredible’s Syndrome, ‘Zero Point Energy’ is energy drawn from the fabric of space itself. To me this is the only kind of ‘reactor’ I can see working inside someone’s chest.

As to why it’s in his chest, I’ll also add that the ‘barbs near the heart’ bit would work in sunny Afghanistan but once a billionaire got back to modern medical facilities I’m pretty sure they’d find a way to remove them. I much prefer the idea that he has a mechanical heart that needs electricity to work, but that’s such a minor point in an otherwise incredibly enjoyable movie that I can live with it.

Last but not least, Gwennyth is an angel, and can run across even water in high heels and not trip…

In the comics, and a few novels, Iron Man often uses suborbital ballistic flights for intercontinental travel. A few of the IM novels also mention that he sometimes uses additional throwaway tanks of fuel and/or oxygen to boost him for longer hauls.

And in free-fall, holding his hands like that takes very little effort.

(…I don’t think the propellant is anything that would exist in the real world. File it with adamantium, vibranium and all the other ‘ums that defy physics in comics.)

OTOH, in comic books, he isn’t dead until we see the body, have it autopsied, cremated, mixed into a slab of concrete, and sunken to the bottom of the Marianas Deep. And then you got to worry about clones.

Or he could be a Skrull.

Y’know, with the energy that Obie was exposed to in his last scene, he could be mutated or Somewhere Else…

I love comicbooks!

Sure, he becomes an enlightened good guy after spending a
few months in an Afghani cave, but you don’t see him selling
all his posessions and wearing sack cloth, do you?

All this film does is make everyone want more material things
than ever, plus use women as play toys.

I feel dirty now.