We have all seen body armor in the movies: a gunfight erupts, bullets fly, and one of the protagonists is knocked over backwards. She has been hit! Is she mortally wounded? No—predictably, she regains consciousness and opens her jacket to reveal an intact bulletproof vest with a shiny bullet perfectly mushroomed from impact. Impressive? Yes. Accurate? Not at all.

Bullet-resistant vests, or “body armor,” have become standard equipment for law enforcement and military. Maximum protection at minimal weight is the ever-advancing goal for body-shielding gear. High hardness makes ceramic materials like silicon carbide (SiC) an ideal candidate for stopping rifle bullets. In fact, SiC inserts, like those made of Saint-Gobain Hexoloy^® sintered SiC (Figure 1), when combined with adapted backing materials and inserted into protective vests, are the most common ceramics in top-performing hard body armor protection systems against high-velocity “armor-piercing” (AP) projectiles.