Tech armor for full-force weapons training?

[Galford Weller]

'sup guys. I've just read this and I would like to share this stuff with you and hear your thoughts.

It's an article about a new kind of full armor with sensors designed to receive, endure and measure strikes from martial arts weapons like staffs, swords, etc:

http://singularityhub.com/2014/03/14/will-sensor-packed-body-armor-launch-a-new-bloodless-sport/

So basically, the idea behind this is to give weapon-based martial arts a chance to make full-force training actually possible without causing permanent damage on the practitioner. This may sound quite good and, in certain ways, I think it's actually something that could improve martial arts weapons training.
But as the article says, the first target of this suit/armor is to be used in a sport competition for weapon martial artists. Maybe like UFC but for weapons (yeah, raw example but you get the idea) and without people being split in half with a katana.

Although I don't like the idea of first using this armor only for a competition (which I suppose will leave some cash behind) before releasing it for sale for martial arts dojos and even the military, it may lead to a better sense of how a weapon works in actual attacks. How does it reacts to the strike and stuff.

On the bad side, I think that this kind of armor, in hands of people from McDojos may create even weirder situations of people offering magic solutions for self-defense and combat in general, "proving" the effectiveness of their systems using numbers and statistics from the armor You can guess that the software behing the armor can -and will- be violated.

I agree on the point that martial arts weapons training may feel a little distant for a lot of practitioners since they can't test certain techniques and weapons on living subjects (or at least they shouldn't, LOL), but there's also true that there are ways to practice weapon-based combat without almost destroying someone's body parts.

This subject may lead to a lot of points to discuss, so I would like to hear from ya, guys

[SteyrAUG]

We've been adapting combinations of kendo armor and hockey gear for years. Combine that with rattan staffs, nunchaku and three sectionals and you can go pretty hard. In the beginning we took kendo shinai of various lengths (thank god they made waki lengths) and fabricated escrima sticks, three sectional staffs and even some nunchaku. But we found they were a bit too light and sometimes people didn't even know they were hit.

Generally rattan is the best medium for sparring weapons. Escrimadors have been doing it for years with their version of kendo armor. But for nunchaku you can't buy the crap ones with the ball bearing swivels, they don't last 30 seconds. So far the ones that last the longest with us, and can be manipulated wearing kendo gloves, are escrima sticks cut down to about 16" and strung with nylon cord.