If I want a suit of armor to mimic/fight Superman.....

Asking this after watching an episode of Batman: The Brave and the Bold, where Batman wears a suit of armor to fight Superman. Of course Superman crunched the armor like a tin can, and fanboys ranted, saying that even in power armor Batman cannot stand up to Superman.

So.....assuming we can use any materials from any universe to craft it, what would I use to mimic or counter his powers?

I assume one of the first answers would be to have the armor crafted out of either adamantium or vibranium. I thought about saying "the same alloy that Captain America's shield is", but no one knows exactly, since the scientist who created the shield fell asleep, and an unknown catalyst entered the compound. No one has been able to completely replicate the shield either.

I thought about various weapons and gadgets as well, as Superman once stated that he got tired of getting the crap kicked out of him by Batman's utility belt. There are many things in Batman's belt that mimic some super powers. I can't find the list anywhere anymore.....

Okay, let's construct this armor, eh?

EDIT: Yes, fictionally adamantium is insanely expensive, but let's assume that we have enough money to spend on enough adamantium for a full suit of armor. Also, let's refrain from magic and kryptonite. It'd make things too easy.

Um. It's been over a decade since I really looked at the source-book, but Rift's Cosmo-Knight perhaps? Since you said any universe anyway.

If I recall correctly they have FTL space-flight, they regenerate, their armor regenerates, they have absurdly powerful energy blasts, they don't take any damage from a list of damage types unless it's magic in nature and the things not on that list they only take something like 1% of the damage from. Oh, and on top of that I seem to recall that they had a somewhat absurdly powerful personal force field.

They've always been my personal definition of 'overpowered class'. Oh, they did fucntion like paladins I think. So if you were bad you lost a lot of your power.

Kryptonite armor, Kryptonite claws, and Kryptonite lasers are necessities. A power suit that can handle any character with Superman's level of power would be more difficult.

Yep, pretty much Kryptonite armour.

Actually, The Iron Man armour modified to be powered by Kryptonite(like Metallo) and emit Kryptonite raditation and integrated with a Mother Box should do it.

EDIT:

Or maybe a Dr Vasz style meatsuit made out of Kryptonian corpses?

Or possibly if you wore The Destroyer, since thats impervious and magic.

Kryptonite armor is useless as long as Supes keeps his distance and/or uses his head to wear something that protects him from the kryptonite radiation. Kryptonite is only effective if you can trick him into getting close enough to where it can be used on him and take him down immediately.

Better idea would be frangible Kryptonite bullets that have a lead coating. (or has lead been retconned out of blocking kryptonite radiation?) Supes won't think twice about letting a "poor dumb schmuck" empty the clip of his sub machine gun at him point blank. Of course when that happens the kryptonite bullets will perforate him, the frangible rounds will shatter upon entering his body, and shrapnel will scatter in every direction making it impossible to save his life in time.

Imperiex Probe Armor that Steel wore or (for Marvel side) the Destroyer armor (which is less armor and more of a mind piloted robot).

A suit of powered armor that essentially gives a being superman's reaction time, and has a Kryptonite Power Source? so something along the lines of Iron Man's armor or the X-O Manowar suit drawing on a combo of gold and green kryptonite power source. one kryptonite powered repulsor blast, there goes superman.

I'm sure if Tony Stark with a box of scraps in a cave could whip up a kryptonian buster suit heh. Stark does his best work in caves.... Just ask the ladies hehe.

Magic armor. Supes is vulnerable to magic, so I'm assuming something could be enchanted to resist his power as well.

He might be vulnerable to a suit of armor made out of comic book editors.

(I originally meant that simply to do a riff on the snark we regularly see for the comic industry around here, but then I got to thinking ... Picture this armor. Ew.)

Superman's powers...

Heat Vision
Ice Breath
Invulnerability
Super Strength
Flight
Super Speed
X-ray vision
Super Hearing
Regeneration

Let's start with a skin suit that if penetrated injects the user with a regen serum and uses synth skin that regrows over the tear. This serum could be held within the fabric itself. We can make this out of a nano-silk fiber synthetic flesh that we have the beginnings of already...

If I remember right silk breathes and you wouldn't have to worry about coolant on this level so at this level we have a nearly as good regeneration as Superman...

On this next layer of the suit we have a suit of synth muscle made of carbon nano-tubes with an exo-skeleton frame made of adamantium or a titanium alloy. This gives a level of invulnerability but more importantly would likely be able to equal some max strength levels of Superman. This layer would also need a coolant for the body and it would house a power source of some sort...both a back up and a primary and/or would feed off of energy generated from another source discussed in a few...

On this layer at various points you have several shield generators of various types providing superman style invulnerability.


So at this point we have...
Invulnerability, Super Strength, Regeneration

One assumes that if you're going to have the field generators on this level for shields you are probably going to want the others...

Flight would be accomplished through either hand and feet boosters OR magnetic or antigrav fields...

Super-Speed could be accomplished by a mini-warp field generator.

The next Layer you'd want a gold, carbon nano-tube, and if you had access to it vibranium exo suit layer. that has built in solar power capture... This would allow the suit to be ultra-hard, light weight, maneuverable, and with every attack that someone throws at you it powers the suit and if no one is around you have solar power.

For x-ray vision and super hearing...we have stuff in the world that mimics that type of stuff so you throw that in a helmet and you got super senses...of course it would also need to help with super speed and such cuz we wouldn't be able to keep up.

The heat vision, just attach laser that vcan handle heavy load and tie it into the power source...

Ice Breath... all you would need to replicate is to go back to the 1st layer and use a similar layer some where that contains a couple of chemicals that you ca control their combining and releasing and stream them into a pressurized air gun.

One of those chemicals would likely create or be oxygen in those mixtures so you could also replicate superman's not need for oxygen too with that...


It would be light weight, quite invulnerable, and provided nothing malfunctioned at it wasn't a heavily prolonged fight you could easily match superman in an armor suit a lot less cumbersome than the one you often see batman use to do it...

This armor would be more along the lines of a light armor over several layers of a latex suit... it'd probably weight a ton, but you would feel the weight due to the synth muscle and exo-suit... and the anti-grav field...The difference for the person inside the suit would be like having an inch or two bigger waist than normal.


If I was going to mod it to fight superman, depending on how I wanted to beat him I'd modify the power source with kryptonite, change the armaments to a kryptonite syringes, and changed the chemicals of the freeze breathe to having it so it laces with kryptonite... I'd also add in a layer of lead take keep from getting radiation poisoned...

Supes has a weakness to magic and kryptonite....so make armor consisting of that.....lol

I think you may have to get a little technical here. (I am talking mostly on incomplete information/'out of my ***', so anyone who really knows about what I mention here, please elaborate/correct me.)

Armor has a few purposes. One, to keep concussive and (cutting) damage from reaching the wearer.
I'll try to deal with (cutting) damage first - I believe chain mail was always pretty good at keeping cuts from reaching the wearer. So carbon nanotube super chainmail might be called for here.
Next, concussive damage. This requires 2 critical effects: resistance to deformation (see above reference to 'crushing like a tin can), and dissipation of energy. That incoming kinetic energy from Supes Superpunching has to go somewhere. So here's where it goes all wrong: he punches you, the armor doesn't deform (reference cars with 'crumple zones' - this dissipates the incoming car's kinetic energy and absorbs the impact harmlessly for the occupants). So if it doesn't deform, it MOVES you.

Ok, So instead of getting crushed, you GO FLYING. And here’s the danger: Inside your safe armored haven, your armor is aok – it resists deformation like a champ – but when you hit that wall that is coming at you at 50/100/150 mph, it’s not the hardness of the armor that matters, it’s HOW HARD YOUR HEAD HITS THE INSIDE OF THAT STRONG, STRONG HELMET. Depending on how fast you’re moving when you strike, you might end up as a perfectly intact suit of armor filled with a pasty pink goo formerly known as You. (nice cadence there, if I do say so myself!)

Martial artists familiar with Aikido may be familiar with the concept of ‘redirecting’ the energy. There was a fascinating material on a very old show in the 70s/80s (‘That’s Incredible’) called Sorbothane (you can still find it on the internet) that would absorb the mechanical energy when struck and transform it into heat energy, and there are more materials like this around today. Also, modern tanks have ‘reactive armor’ which is actually directed charges (aka bombs!) ringing the outside of the vehicle, and when they’re struck with a projectile, the bombs actually explode away from the occupants and destroy the projectile before it reaches the people inside. Ablative Armor is a similar concept, but it merely deforms under impact to absorb and redirect the energy (like crumple zones).

So what I’m suggesting here is, looking for a solution that prevents a strike from ‘hitting’ the wearer, is only a limited part of the solution. What you really want is something that will take the energy delivered by Superman’s kinetic-type strike, and transform it. [This is what the fictional energy shields on Star Trek do with most physical and energy weapons they are hit with – up to a certain point, they absorb the energy directed at them. In order to get through, you have to effectively ‘blow the fuse’ on the shields. (This may or may not be the exact fictional explanation; it is how I understood what I read at the time many years ago in the Star Trek Technical Manual.)]

So transform the energy. But 2 questions, how, and into what? How – it has to be some kind of energy shield. Dune had the ‘Holtzman shield’, which would resist more strongly the harder it was struck; hence, ‘the slow blade penetrates’. You could do it through materials that were designed to absorb the energy at the atomic level, like sorbothane and similar things, and turn it into heat, sound, or light. The tech is beyond current science, of course.

I’ll let someone else deal with LaserBeam Eyes.

And I hope this has further confused the discussion.

As to how to beat him... has anyone ever gotten supes **Drunk**?

(And if someone says he's immune to alcohol/poison, I'll just hate you now.)

Yeah, Supes has been very well established to have almost zero protection against magic.

Magic sword goes through him like butter, magic spells affect him completely, etc.



-np

There was a few ways that the shields being hit was dealt with... blow the fuse, make the shields stronger, or use them in their phaser...

The suit i'm talking about could do any of the three.

One of the fields could easily cushion any impact...

along with the fact that the technology to produce these fields could be turned inward and the problem with outside forces would be alleviated the fact is the suit i propose would have energy absorbing materials and padding that while it doesn't seem thick is actually very good as spreading out any force that would do damage...

Btw...if i know my marvel right vibranium has unlimited energy storage potential so the problem you are suggesting would never occur so >.> yeah...