With Iron Man 3 out at the flicks, like a pandemic, Iron Man fever has hit the world, (Except china who seem miffed). If you haven’t seen it yet here’s a little teaser.
Your friendly neighbourhood Rogue Advisor wanted to delight you all with a comprehensive rundown of the myriad of different armours at his disposal.
Just one problem; every blogger and their freakin’ dog seems to have already produced such an article. Therefore, instead I shall up the ante, and science you upside the head as I am wont to do from time to time.
Thus, Level Up will ‘buck the trend’ and instead detail how Tony creates these multi-alloy masterpieces of sciency sexiness.
That’s right, beloved reader, today we learn some of the seemingly infinite amount of tricks up Mr Stark’s sleeve and get an insight into his extensive metallic wardrobe’s creation process.
Sciencing you upside the head Starktech style
Stark Tower, soon to be the Avenger’s tower in Marvel’s phase 2, is actually the Bitexco Financial Tower in Saigon, Vietnam.
All of our genius playboy philanthropist billionaire hero’s armours are not only constructed from an array of incredibly strong, (and almost all of them being fictional), alloys, they are also bolstered by force fields.
Each different masterpiece of Starktech is a self-contained environment, all of them massively enhancing strength, and other attributes dependant on the model.
Every armour has pretty much every communications and navigations system you can think of, from radio to radar to sonar and of course, the sexiest parts, the assorted on-board weaponry.
They even have a filtration system if you need to take a whizz.
Genius that he is, Stark has multiple energy systems set up, and then some back up power systems such as solar energy, just in case he hasn’t kicked enough ass that day and wants to declare war on Latvia.
The first appearance of Iron Man, March 1963. The MK I armour was actually made of real iron.
“Is it the suit that makes the man, or the man that makes the suit?”
A bit of both. Stark’s armors are not as rigid or solid as they appear, Iron Man’s armour is actually pretty complicated. It is not made out of anything truly solid.
Despite appearances they aren’t thick, encumbering plates, like medieval armour. The structural integrity of the armour is actually a powerful force field permeating each of roughly two million individual, yet working in unison, individual cells.
Each is a tiny and almost sentient unit in its own right; contributing energy and computing power for itself and being a team player with all the other cells in the entire armor; this is why each suit can take substantial damage and still remain highly functional.
Instead, each of the individual cells shift and maneuver unseen to optimize the suits attributes, this also keeps each suit lightweight and flexible.
The armour’s unique composition, the two million aforementioned microscopic units, each has the approximate mass of a grain of sand and are manipulated during the manufacturing process, reshaping them and giving them as large a surface area as possible to optimize their effectiveness.
Our main man wouldn’t be able to relax like that in the armour if was as solid as it looks.
Each suit is as comfortable as wearing a bathrobe.
Whilst Stark designs every aspect of every suit, the production of each armour is must be entirely automated, individually cell by cell. A system created, developed and supervised by Stark every step of the process.
During creation a specialized ‘pre-programmed’ bacteria is utilised, they consume a specifically pre-determined amounts of selected metals.
When it has gobbled the precise portions of each, it then arranges itself on a ‘pre-tagged’ area, a solid template called a ‘chip-wafer’, (manually constructed by Stark himself), then the little fella expires, leaving a miniscule amount of the desired alloy for the tagged area, and always some gallium-arsenide.
The basic principle of the suit is holistic; each part contains the whole, as it were. When inactive, the entire suit can collapse on the microscopic level, the cells ‘folding’ in on themselves to take up a smaller volume, whilst of course having the same mass, like a three-dimensional accordion pleat.
The tome of manufacturing badassery.
All the details of the armor’s construction listed above are laid out in the Iron Manual. However, some armours which appeared after publication of the Iron Manual ignore the amazing ideas it contains, making the writers of those stories total dicks.
The consistent defining abilities of Stark’s armours are the jets installed in the boots and the flight stabilizers in the gauntlets. The repulsor blasters originated from the flight stabilizer and have proven time and time again to double up as an invaluable weapon. They essentially blast off a charged up and directionally manipulated array of magnetised particles, resulting in a force beam.
Another consistent trait are the chest-mounted array of tools / weaponry like the infamous uni-beam, other variations  include the vario beam and tri-beam. What was originally a spotlight has evolved into the proton beam, and has progressed to develop various other weapons, primarily light and force-based.
Why Marvel? Why? Is it an 80’s thing to put Iron Man on roller skates?
 Some unique armours
Okay, beloved reader, you’ve been suitably scienced up, your friendly neighbourhood Rogue Advisor, though he would cool y’all down with a peek at some of the stranger, weirder and sometimes bamboozling parts of the starktech armoury.
Always nice to know what year folk are from when they introduce themselves, eh?
Iron Man 2020 AD Â
This isn’t actually Tony, it’s Arno Stark. Not the illegitimate love child of Stark and Arnold Schwarzenegger, although I wish he were, for that would be a powerful being indeed.
The Iron Man from seven years away, (it was much further in the  future when it was originally published), is in fact Tony’s evil nephew.
Arno Stark inherited Tony’s armoury but instead of righting wrongs and being in cool teams like the Avengers, he turned mercenary and did very bad things with it, including going back in time to cause trouble for the modern-day heroes. Leading one to assume that the heroes of the future just aren’t worth the effort of hassling.
MARK XXVIIIÂ – Asgardian Destroyer Armour
Sometimes referred to a the Asgardian buster armour.
One would assume, given the name, it’s purpose is to ‘bust’ Asgardians.
Stark created this armour after Thor went a bit mental in Slovakia, causing so much strife that it had the potential to start World War III. Being the good chum Tony is, he figured he’d slap some sense into him before things got out of hand.
The huge suit was powered by a reactor utilizing an enchanted, super-dense material, an unknown element of unknown origin that was given to Stark by Thor before he lost his cool. The demigod’s intentions were for Stark to turn into a form of sustainable energy source, to be used for the good of mankind.
It allowed the armour to tap into the same energy field that gives Thor’s hammer its strength and also absorbed the son of Odin’s thunderous strikes, it then channeled them through an integrated matrix and send them right back at him.
The movie version looks way cooler. Spikes make everything look cooler.
Stark was giving Thor a brutal kicking but the reactor malfunctioned. Stark hadn’t had time to perfect or test the design given the urgency of the situation.
The tables turned and Thor ripped the armour off of Iron Man, utterly destroying it, but it was merely an exoskeleton. Stark being a man to know when to quit, made a swift getaway in his standard armour that he was wearing underneath.
Anti-Transformer Armour
Stark will take on pretty much anything based on just a rumour.
Even giant transforming alien robots.
That’s right beloved reader, Anti-Transformer armour. The giant transforming robots from Cybertron.  Marvel have the rights to Transformers when it comes to comics, so they thought they’d try and pull off a crazy crossover.
Stark had heard rumours of giant alien robots hiding on Earth. Just a rumour mind you, he hadn’t actually encountered any. But he figured he’d go ahead and create a giant suit of armour, specifically to fight giant transforming robots incase he did.
The armour hadn’t been perfected by the time it saw action, it was tough to power such a massive suit, thus it ran low on energy really quickly and if supplied from an external power source was prone to overload.
Iron Man still managed to kick some Decepticon butt until he was beheaded by the Megatron himself. Stark pulled the old escape-the-Asgardian-maneuver and exited the over-sized armour but continued combat in his Extremis Armour.
The Sorcerer Armour, Model I, Mark I
The armour allowed Stark to ‘cast’ spells faster than any other sorcerer by channelling the Eldritch Forces through its energy system.
For a while, Marvel published a series of comics set in a parallel universe simply titled ‘What If?‘. In issue 13 the hypothetical story line involves a drunken Tony Stark encountering renown surgeon Stephen Strange, (Dr. Strange. sorcerer supreme). Our intoxicated hero severely damaged Dr Strange’s hands, rendering his surgical career caput.
Ridden with guilt and an epic hangover, Stark spends years trying to find a way to correct his mistake and fix Stephen’s hands. His efforts lead him to Tibet where encounters a mystical chap who goes by the ominous name Ancient One.
The Ancient One explains to tony that the rights to his wrongs on the good doctor could only be discovered in mysticism. Thus Stark undergoes through months of sorcerers training, learning how to draw power with incantations from the Eldritch Forces that in the regular universe would have been Dr Stranges vocation, Tony becomes Earth’s Sorcerer Supreme Champion.
To make matters worse an immortal evil entity, Dormammu, also known as The Dread One; Lord of Chaos, The Great Enigma, and Master of the Mindless Ones is on his way to cause whatever havoc immortal entities with multiple scary names like to engage in.
With a new agenda Stark sets about what he does best, making bad-ass Starktech armour. The suit was constructed from materials from different dimensions; the perfect melding of magic and science, specifically designed to enter the Astral Plane and kick seven shades of s**t out of Dormammu.
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