EOD 9 Suit Olive Drab (helmet not included)

For all your setting up us needs.

Olive drab? You got that right! And those boots - hideous!

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In all seriousness, why would you make something like this in olive drab? It serves no practical purpose that I am aware of to use that particular color.

Why not make it retroreflective orange or something, to ensure high visibility? If I were the person working on a bomb, I imagine I’d want my support staff to be able to see me clearly at all times - especially if the thing went off (but wasn’t powerful enough to just shred me to pieces) and I needed to be dug out of the resulting mess for medical treatment.

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I’m telling you, if I had to wear that outfit, I’d be tempted to cut the wrong wire on purpose.

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“Salt?” (boom)

The helmet is only an additional $15,000. How much for some gloves?

Pussy.

“Hey, it’s smoking now! Cool!”

you can get something a little cheaper. Even Ninja-Jump-able http://www.all-about-german-shepherd-dog-breed.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=661

Because the person shooting at you whilst you’re trying to dismantle the IED they just put there would find it much easier to target a high vis suit than even a vaguely camo one. This is my mental model for its usage: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfTzwm37XOY

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Anything short of high-molecular-weight unobtanium isn’t going to save your fingers from much; but it certainly will reduce your dexterity(the rest of the suit seems to be a good inch thick all around, multiple inches in the reinforced plates, so matching gloves would be pretty clumsy).

I’d imagine that using gloves is how you turn on Challenge Mode.

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Are you Amish? Just turn on your inertial field dampener…

This is just a hunch, but I think that’s because the vast majority of bomb-disposal operations take place in war zones. Bright colors make for marvelous targets.

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Color me confused, but I was under the impression that in most war-zones, you don’t bother dismantling explosives, you simply clear the area and detonate them.

Also, do we have any sort of hard numbers regarding how often bomb disposal personnel are actually shot at? I’d imagine that any time you’re bothering to dismantle a bomb instead of just destroying it, the area is already under lockdown. You don’t try to defuse explosives in an area where there is liable to be shooting, yeah?

If you’re a grunt in the field dealing with a roadside IED, you aren’t gonna have fancy bomb disposal kits or suits, you’re gonna either simply flag the threat and clear the area until someone else can come handle it, or you’re going to purposefully set it off from a safe distance somehow. And if you’re a Minesweeper with specialized equipment, are the guys calling the shots really gonna send you into a live-fire situation where you can be targetted? You don’t expose your highly trained specialists to needless risks, you keep them as safe as you can manage.

And if the usage of olive drag actually is to reduce visibility and keep the EOD personnel from being targetted, why not go ahead and use actual camouflage?

Is there some other sort of reasoning at work here? Maybe material limitations? Maybe the stuff they use to make this suit blast and heat resistant also makes it hard to produce in other colors, or with patterns for camouflage?

Now that you mention it, those bomb disposal outfits from The Hurt Locker did seem rather uninspired. Where’s the flair?

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Also, do not underestimate the power of TactiCool: Regardless of the exact skew (active military probably sees more explosive devices per person; but has more options in terms of controlled detonation/minesweeping vehicles/etc., cops probably see comparatively little action; but there are lot of police departments that need to tick the ‘have bomb squad’ feature box from time to time whether they actually use it, and that makes them a reliable customer base), is there any reason to suspect that the people who buy blast-resistant suits wouldn’t want them to ooze as much ‘I’m a serious badass, doing serious badass stuff’ flavor as possible?

Given the enthusiasm for ‘tactical’ features in totally non-tactical products, used by blatantly civilian wannabes, I’d assume that the people who actually do wear bomb suits in seriousness on occasion don’t object to olive drab.

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How could I not have posted this yet:

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From drab to FAB!

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That was incredible. I’m tracking down a copy of that film stat.

Dude. DUDE! What used to be called DRMO (the Defense Reutilization and blah blah can’t recall) and is now DLA sells equipment no longer needed by the military. Having worked on a base with a DRMO/DAL unit back in the day, they had all sorts of fun stuff for re-use (military) or auction (civvie), although at the time it was either monthly or quarterly auctions, IIRC.
While they don’t sell any ammo or weapons, the range of items available is astonishing.

That certainly would have been an improvement for the film, but only because almost anything would have been. :wink: