---
title: "Leave it to Australians to resurrect gladiator duels with carbon-fiber suits"
description: "An Australian company is on a mission to bring back weapons-based fighting, and have spent the last few years developing a special type of armor that would avoid injury."
date: "2015-02-23"
modified: "2015-02-23"
authors:
  - name: "Alex Klokus"
    link: "https://futurism.com/authors/alex-klokus"
url: "https://futurism.com/leave-it-to-australians-to-resurrect-gladiator-duels-with-carbon-fiber-suits"
categories:
  - "Future Society"
---

# Leave it to Australians to resurrect gladiator duels with carbon-fiber suits

![Default Futurism featured image](<https://futurism.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/Futurism-Filler-Image.jpg>)

- The Unified in Unified Weapons Master is about bringing all the different weapons arts from all around the world together in a single competition. There’s roughly 300 distinct martial arts practiced around the world, and of those styles, 96 of them are either entirely weapons-based.
- To make all of this possible and enable this sort of next-gen gladiator fighting, UWM’s founders have spent the past two years engineering a special suit called the Lorica. On the outside there’s some impact- and penetrative-resistant materials such as carbon fiber, and beneath that there’s a bunch of polycarbonate material and elastomeric foam, which is impact absorbent.
- Underneath all that carbon fiber and impact-resistant foam, the Lorica is outfitted with a dizzying array of sensors, all of which are designed to detect when a given part of the armor is struck and the impact of the blow. Amazingly, all of this data is collected by the suit in real time during a fight and beamed wirelessly to a special ringside computer system that keeps score.

### Author social links  
[LinkedIn](<https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexklokus>)