Army wonder armor scaling failure

Army using Conform-process lightweight alloy to make armor rods with extraordinary properties. Tom raised the consolidation-to-plate question at the program review; was told "we'll worry about that later." His response: this is the same failure mode as 1980s rapid-solidification powder consolidation. Santayana quote follows.

The Army's been doing this on a lightweight alloy — I won't tell you what type — and they get tremendous strength and ductility. It's sort of known you can do this. So this is one of the promising areas for the Ground Combat Vehicle, which is the Army's new program. The problem is, you can make it into rods because you're extruding it out, but how do you consolidate those rods into a plate? Usually you like your armor to be plate-shaped rather than rod-shaped. Don't stop a lot of bullets unless they're shooting for your armor. They might try to shoot around your armor if it's just a rod shape. So you have to have a very cooperative enemy, shooting for your armor.