Bulletproof Vest: Difference between revisions

{{quote|'''Artemus Gordon''': If I may make one last request...that she aim for my heart -- the heart that loved this country so much...

'''Loveless''': [[Dangerously Genre Savvy|...shoot him in the head.]]

 

They cost about $300. They can save your life. Few non-military/police heroes ever wear one, unless they are a major character and it is dramatically required that they get shot. Then [[Unspoken Plan Guarantee|we're not told about it in advance and they'll look dead for a few moments.]]

 

{{examples}}

* Rotton the Wizard probably one of the few people in ''[[Black Lagoon]]'' with the sense to wear one. Shouting out your presence when you have the jump on the enemy not so much.

* [[Gunsmith Cats|Bean Bandit's]] famous armoured jacket seems to be multiple layers of Kevlar wrapped in leather, possibly reinforced with metal. It nearly breaks one character's foot when she accidentally pushed it off a dresser. It'll stop just about anything short of a point-blank assault rifle.

* [[Desert Punk (manga)|Desert Punk]] uses quite a bit of armor.

* Kirei Kotomine in ''[[Fate/Zero]]'' is shown to have bullet-proof priest robes (they're reinforced with Kevlar), which shows just how [[Crazy Prepared]] he is for hunting enemy magi.

 

== Comic Books ==

*** Made more baffling by the fact that earlier in the same scene the bullets are shown shooting through the front plate of a bulldozer. The bullets are also demonstrated by being fired into a vest hung on a stand. The bullet easily passes through both the front and back sides of the hanging vest, thus proving the bullets could easily penetrate a double thickness of vest.

* In ''[[Kick-Ass (film)|Kick-Ass]]'', [[Training from Hell|the introductory scene for Big Daddy and Hit Girl]]. Later she mentions that she wears kevlar all the way down to her underwear.

* The film ''[[Missing in Action]]'' features an on-the-run [[Chuck Norris]] buying a large raft-like speedboat made from "the same stuff that [[Bullet Proof Vests]] are made of". The salesman demonstrates this by getting into his handy-dandy rotating turret machine gun and putting a few hundred rounds into it, not getting a scratch on it. In reality, some boats are made from such material, but are hardly bulletproof. [[Chuck Norris]] heroically steals the super-boat by [[Ballistic Discount|holding up the salesman with his own turret gun]] and forcing him to accept a nominal sum.

* Notably averted in ''[[Black Hawk Down]]'', when the US soldiers remove the reinforced steel plate from their kevlar body armor before the mission to lighten their load. Because past experience had led them to assume that they would not be fired upon, the soldiers chose to sacrifice protection for maneuverability. Ultimately they find themselves in a heavy fire-fight and suffer casualties that might have been prevented by the steel plating. Ultimately the real event helped create a restructuring of military policy that prohibits soldiers in combat zones from leaving behind their assigned equipment, though some still do.

* The ''[[Criminal Minds]]'' team suit up in Kevlar vests [[Once an Episode]].

* Subverted in ''Lost''. Ben shoots Charlotte and she is saved by her vest. Despite this, she is knocked unconscious, suffers extreme injuries from the impact and is in a lot of pain from getting hit with a bullet.

 

== Music ==

 

== Video Games ==

* In ''Goldeneye'', ''James Bond 007: Nightfire'', <s>''[[Perfect Dark]]''</s>, ''[[Time Splitters]]'', and ''[[Command & Conquer]]: Renegade'' you can pick up a bulletproof vest that essentially acts as a second health bar. Headshots still hurt, though.

** Perfect Dark uses an energy shield that has the same effect though, except that it does block head shots.

* ''[[Splinter Cell]]: Chaos Theory'' actually plays this quite realistically; if Sam triggers two or more alarms, guards will don body armor and helmets. While the armor is relatively effective against his rifle and renders his pistol practically useless except for headshots below the helmets' brims, his knife goes straight through their armor, and his nonlethal unarmed attacks, which aim for the base of the skull or nose, still knock enemies unconscious.

* Just like in real life, kevlar armors in ''[[Counter-Strike]]'' do little more than increasing your firefight life expectancy from 2 seconds to 3 seconds. Kevlar helmets, meanwhile, are only effective against pistols and ''maybe'' against 5.56&nbsp;mm rifles.

* In the ''[[X-COM]]'' games unarmoured soldiers will [[Redshirt Army|die with disgusting ease]]. Personal Armour and even Power Armour is available but by the time it's in use, most aliens are packing weapons which will still inflict lethal damage no matter how heavy the armour, and mobile nightmare objects the [[Demonic Spiders|Chryssalids]] ignore armour anyway.

** Primarily because the RNG is horrible/evil, and your soldiers can take up to ''200%'' of the listed damage shown in the UFOpaedia. On the other hand, they can also take ''0%'' of the listed damage, depending on what the RNG rolls. So your troopers can literally survive a point blank headshot without taking a single point of damage. Sometimes, the RNG only ever rolls 200s or 0s. This can lead to interesting situations where a soldier survives half a dozen heavy plasma shots only to get pinged to death by a plasma pistol shot the next turn.

* ''[[The Godfather (video game)|The Godfather]] 2'' has bulletproof vests as a reward for completing the diamond smuggling crime ring. They only reduce damage and don't guard the head or limbs.

* ''SWAT 4'' has you and your team wear light Kevlar vests and helmets by default, and the expansion pack allows you to use Heavy or even no armor in multiplayer. Suspects get armor too in some missions, but due to the game being big on realism, said body armors are only marginally effective in most situations.

 

== Webcomics ==

** The effectiveness of body armor is highly underestimated. As [http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/west_midlands/7321647.stm this] article demonstrates, modern body armor can receive a full-contact grenade blast.

** Many army medics in Iraq reported that soldiers who survived an IED blast would often have shrapnel injuries on the limbs that would stop in a very neat line where their body armor started.

* A primitive version of such a vest is reputed to have been used by tax-gatherers. It consisted of a plank of wood hanging under the clothes on their back, and apparently it was not unknown for them to go about their business with arrows sticking out of it.

* [[w:Ned Kelly|Ned Kelly]], outlaw and Australian [[Folk Hero]], is famous for his standoff with the police with him and his gang dressed in body armor forged from plow parts. Unfortunately for the gang, they didn't armor their legs and only Ned survived to sit trial.