User blog comment:USARMP/Ninjas in Mass Effect/@comment-3325589-20120408223908/@comment-1388547-20120410223618

All right, I might be a little behind the times in my understand of present-day armor technologies. I know Kevlar is hard to cut, but still not as effective against cutting weapons as it is against bullets, and since it's a woven material it'd be poor against piercing weapons (say, a stiletto). For improved armor technologies, I was thinking of the shear-thickening fluids people are looking at, which reduce how much the fibers in the Kevlar weave slide past each other when struck by a fast-moving object like a bullet; they let a smaller thickness of fabric stop the same bullet, but don't help against slower impacts. Ceramic plates don't have these weaknesses, though their brittleness may be a problem in the longer run -- even with the plates, I think a piercing weapon like a stiletto or a spiked mace might be the most effective thing against present-day armor. (Or not, I don't know what the plates are really like.) And hey, even though they carry curved swords rather than straight ones, Phantoms like to stab people...