Modern Technology "Vale Pseudo"

[nordmann]

There's an MA I'm envisioning that I don't think exists yet. It's sort of high-tech (maybe even pie-in-the-sky) but it might theoretically give a somewhat realistic, true Vale Tudo experience (in other words, fights will be dirty and short) while still allowing the likelihood of competitors living to retirement age.

The idea is that you wear gear that not only offers a high level of protection, but that has motion sensors and pressure sensors that detect how much damage would have been done had the wearer not had any protection. You jam a finger into the eye-sized lense of your opponent's goggles with 40 pounds of force, and the goggles sense that you've just crushed your opponent's eye. A shield for the throat would have various sensors located appropriately to detect throat strikes and chokes and such, assigning damage value according to how effective it senses the attacks to be. A rubber mouth on the front of your face mask would be available for fish hooking. And so on.

The key is that the equipment relays the damage information in real time via Bluetooth to a computer that acts as a referee. You might be allowed, say, a hundred points worth of damage before the computer decides you've had enough and calls the match.

I know there are some problems with this idea with today's technology, even if cost were no object. For one thing, I can't really see how you could design protective gear that would protect against overextending a joint. So there's the first class of techniques (such as finger manipulation), that would have to be banned. I'm sure there would be others. But I think you could make it mostly real, and the gear would detect the severity of the attacks, rather than simply protecting against them and allowing the fight to go on as if nothing had happened.

Is anything like this under development?

[SamuraiGuy]

Ummm... just to play devils advocate...

Are you gonna fight the same way you do with all this equipment on as you usually would in shorts and a t-shirt, or whatever it is your wearing....

Grappling could be harder when you've got all this shit going.

You also dont take into account the pain thats caused by the blow, if someone hits me with a crushing right cross, and it just counts as 50 points of damage or whatever, than I just walk right through it and clinch and deliver knees to the head until I "win"... do you see the problem in that.

While my opponent got the 50 points against me, he didnt get the sudden stoppage I get from the punch, the pain that goes into it, little bit of blacking out when you get smashed but not knocked out, that feeling of being rocked... the fact that it stops me from moving forward to feel those moves.

You'd have to take into account the pain you'd feel from each technique.. and to do that, you'd have to let the stuff get through, and therefore if the stuff is getting through, you dont need any of the fancy shit...

[nordmann]

Yes

Yeah, I expect my proposed system will take some fine-tuning. But I actually had thought of the protective gear as a way of legalizing strike targets that are usually banned because of injury concerns while maintaining those targets as vital, match-ending strike points. You make the protective gear so that whatever they take away in the pain you would otherwise feel gets registered as "pain equivalent" in points on the referee computer. So a haymaker to your top of your helmet will give you a point or two, while a strong knife-hand to the carotid would probably end the fight, just as it would probably do in real life.

I guess you would really still have to have traditional point system judges on hand to watch for certain attacks each oppenent is landing on non-vital points that the equipment can't register. Maybe they would manually add equivalent points as they happen to add them to the total. But I'm thinking that dynamometers placed at various points on each opponent (in the helmet, for example) would be able to pretty accurately capture just how much abuse a fighter is taking my measuring the motion caused by the impacts. The opponent would still feel the effects of, say, a front-kick to the solar plexus, but the sensors would assign (or even "suggest" to the human judges) how successful the strike was.

As for the equipment getting unweildy, yes, I suppose that's a downside that protective gear does tend to have, whether or not it is "smart" gear that registers impacts and pressures with a central computer. I would try to make the gear as light as possible, and the idea would not be to give 100% protection, as if you were some medeival night in a suit of armor.

The basic idea would be more like, for example, a groin protector that makes it so that groin strikes can be made legal, and eyewear that makes it legal to do eye-gouges, and then penalizing an opponent with points if he does in fact take a strike on those targets. The points would vary depending on the amount of force detected and the sensitivity of the target. See what I'm saying? The technology is basically there. We have protective gear. We have microchip dynamometers. We have pressure sensors. Now all we need is a trust-fund kid with a few million in loose change lying around to develop the products.