1) plasma colors varies between red-violet-blue, not white.
2) plasma jet has extremely high temperature – about 20000 degrees of Celsius, so it would melt/sublimate not only Tony’s lab but also everything he would touch with this flame.
3) since it generates so incredible amounts of heat, plasma jet magnets, and all surfaces close to it’s exhaust have to be cooled all the time, probably by some kind of liquefied gas, like nitrogen, or helium, but the Iron Man armor don’t have any tanks containing it!
4) there are no visible intakes of atmospheric gases, which should be transmitted through the armor to jet in insane quanities of it, especially when Iron Man goes supersonic!

oh, and by the way – the energy source. maybe it’s like in Gundam 00 – reactor which obtains energy through the topological defects of the matter? it could be the case, since miniaturization of such power source really should need the mind of genius…

I’m a bit of of a keen amateur when it comes to science, but as for your comments on the suit, it’s stated that the arc reactor produces 50 Gigajoules per second. If the first stage of the Saturn Five produced 190 Gigajoules per second, and attained the speed it did (fast), and weighing as much as it did (serious tonnage), then 50 GJ/s (they mean Gigawatts) converted to pushing a 200lb man in a 300-500lb suit through the air will send him beyond Mach 3. As for a previous poster’s comments, the Zeropoint energy idea is not necessary, and more difficult than a small antimatter reactor. it would require just micrograms of antimatter per second to generate Gigawatts of power; 1kg of antimatter yields 180 Petajoules of energy.

As for inertia and decceleration, racing drivers have survived forces of high G decceleration when crashing, and I think the suit would have compressed air bags to hold his head and torso in place. I’m sure he’d think of that.

This is Tony Stark, summa cum laude from MIT!

Still, how he’d prevent his ribcage from breaking or arterial tearing… Ask Stan Lee!

It was a good movie, and a good review.

I’m a bit of of a keen amateur when it comes to science, but as for your comments on the suit, it’s stated that the arc reactor produces 50 Gigajoules per second. If the first stage of the Saturn Five produced 190 Gigajoules per second, and attained the speed it did (20,000 kmph(?)), and weighing as much as it did (serious tonnage), then 50 GJ/s (they mean Gigawatts) converted to pushing a 200lb man in a 300-500lb suit through the air will send him beyond Mach 3.

As for inertia and decceleration, racing drivers have survived forces of high G decceleration when crashing, and I think the suit would have compressed air bags to hold his head and torso in place. I’m sure he’d think of that.

This is Tony Stark, summa cum laude from MIT!

Still, how he’d prevent his ribcage from breaking or arterial tearing… Ask Stan Lee!

It was a good movie, and a good review.

I’m suprised you like it, even with the nitpicks (which I agree with).

I also have one other one: his power source seems to be some kind of “Cold Fusion”, making a ridiculous output of energy from a small amount of material.

As far as I know, Cold Fusion has been disproven quite well. Also, if he has made this miraculous power source, why doesn’t he release it to the world to solve energy problems?

But then, as we all know, “Reed Richards [and Tony Stark] are Useless” ^_^: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ReedRichardsIsUseless

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.

The 10% part…I forgot about it because I was just LAUGHING TOO HARD!

Besides, Baldie is not Chinese AFAICS (although ‘Chinese’ takes in a wide range of ethnicity. I’m not an anthropologist, so please don’t swarm me).

I did not see Robocop 2 in a movie theater, so I don’t know how the
audiences reacted to it then.

As for places like Afghanistan being inferior due to a lack of
technology, those places may get messed up, but note how
centuries of conquerors still end up retreating from those
places with their tails between their legs (if they are lucky)
despite being “superior”. This definitely included the Soviets
and something tells me the Coalition forces won’t last against
a determined band of “primitives” who are used to adversity,
are quite willing to die for their beliefs, know their lands far
better than any enemy, and always outnumber the enemy.

I have no fondness for those places or their cultural beliefs,
but I do respect the fact that they are not helpless and not
afraid to defend themselves. I wonder if the latest round of
“conquerors” will learn anything from history?

(spoiler: stop reading this if you haven’t seen it yet)

The moment when Tony solves the “human sheild” problem during the villiage rescue made the audiance come unglued! For a moment, it seemed all was lost.. then a grid pops up like the “face recognition” systems you get on some digital cameras… only… just the bad guys faces are I.D.ed… and the bullets fired from the suits guns home in on the targets…

The idea that POSSIBLY we could build weapons systems that don’t harm innocent bystanders really hit a chord, it seems…

The other thing that struck me was the Jerico missile system. As I understand it, we used something similar to take out several of Saddam’s tank columns… one missile fired, and over a dozen tanks and their crews are killed.

Sure, Ironman is a total fantasy… but the line that Jeff Bridges character says about “the lack of technology has always been an Achellies heel in this part of the world” definitely rings true…

Imagine if Tony Stark had been forced to study creationisim, instead of science. Or what what technological weapons our grandkids could be facing, if we shrink away form science and technology, just so some religious nuts can push their BS in a science classroom, allowing others to get ahead of us.

Noting the above, ask me how much he cares if the physics is
correct or not? I know I sure wouldn’t.

It’s about being happy, not scientifically accurate, in this world.

I had no trouble with him smashing into the wall, since it was made of Stark SoftCrete(c).

The only issue I had a problem with was:

The paralyzation device. To me, it seemed a little too deus ex machina for my taste. It was too convenient. Secondly, it was an extremely useful, non-lethal weapon, that Tony should have probably incorporated into his suit. He would have been able to subdue the terrorists without resorting to killing them.

Other than that, I had no real issues with the story. The end fight was a classic Marvel scene. Hokey? Well, it’s a movie based on a comic book…so it worked for me.

Finally, there was one editing mistake my friend caught, but extremely minor. There’s one scene where the Audi doesn’t have a front license plate, but it does in all the other scenes it’s showed. I noticed it on a subsequent viewing (my 3rd…sigh).

Koro