• chaogomu@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    Hardness isn’t the best thing to have in armor. In fact, extreme hardness means extreme brittleness.

    Tensile strength is more desirable in armor. That’s the sort of strength that a string or rope, or Kevlar will have.

    Those can stretch a bit before breaking.

    Kevlar will stretch a bit when catching a bullet, this does a few things, but importantly it slows the bullet before stopping it.

    So this new material will likely show extreme tensile strength rather than hardness.

      • 0ops@lemm.ee
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        9 months ago

        Not to mention, really hard tires would have very poor grip. The rubber needs to be a bit softer to squish around all of the little imperfections in the road, technically increasing the contact area and providing a little lateral bracing (probably not the right term so I hope I’m making sense). This is why a lot of performance tires have shorter lifespans then other tire types, because in addition to a different tread pattern, they also often use a softer, “stickier” rubber, which wears out faster.