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Originally Posted by Fred Brackin
We probably crossed over into TL9 levels of DR for the vest and trauma plates styles of armor some time ago. See Kenneth Peters' update on the subject in Pyramid 3/57 (itself 8 years old).
There are some limited production guns that exceed UT's numbers for conventional firearms even without electrothermal technology. They just use higher pressures without electrothermal.
Actually the not-so-rare S&W .500 Magnum pistol exceeds Gurps TL9 numbers and is more than a decade old. I know of a 7.5mm pistol that does about 4d P which is a little more than a UT TL electrothermal in that caliber (without goign from P- to P too).
The thrust-to-weight ratios for Spacex's current rocket engines exceed any given for any TL in Ve2.
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Regarding ceramics and body armor, there was advancement in how they're made:
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The price of ceramic armor dropped dramatically starting about 10-12 years ago in the US, though it's taken time for that to proliferate around the world. The reason for this is instead of hot pressing the ceramic powder into the plate we can now do it cold and just use mechanical pressure to create the binding effect. The prior high temperature precision process was very expensive in energy, and required rather expensive equipment to do the heating correctly with more potential for error in general.
This is also why you now see dramatically more use of ceramic armor on all kinds of light armor vehicles as applique as well as ships, aircraft and lol, Turkey built a new armored train with ceramic armor recently.
The other aspects of body armor have also come down in cost but in a more progressive fashion. In practice though the US didn't use this technology to make the armor cheaper, it held the cost about equal and used it to make the armor better, as improvements in the microstructure of the armor went hand in hand with gaining the ability to cold press it. Other people have gone for the cheap option and you can now get Level III ceramic plates for under 300 dollars US while in the not so long ago past they cost a thousand or more.
In general though ceramic armor of all sorts gets more expensive per weight the thicker the actual plates. Which is itself a disincentive to reducing weapons calibers and thinking that will somehow defeat armor. You don't just let the enemy use lighter armor at that point, they'll also inherently spend less money on the material.
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