Gear Catagories - Powered Armor

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The Huntress

Jun 9, 2019 21:07:15 GMT

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Post by The Huntress on Jun 9, 2019 21:07:15 GMT

Gear Categories: Powered Armor

Region: Orion Spur

Powered Armor is considered to be any artificial, self-powered exoskeletons designed to protect and/or augment the natural physical abilities of the wearer. Typically these are the purview of military units or highly specialized mercenaries and bounty hunters, with unique equipment and weapons being a staple for the latter. Powered suits come in many shapes and sizes from fully enveloping suits of armor to minimalist joints and connectors worn on only a few portions of body. While weapons platform and lift capacity are often the most common usages powered suits are designed for, they do have limits to the physical enhancements a user can utilize, based on species and any kind of augmentation already existing. The most iconic examples of a powered combat armor are the legendary Mjolnir suits of the Spartans, and the ÆSIR powered armors made famous in the Kromus War from 2949 to 2959, suits that no normal human can use without risk of serious, even possibly fatal, injury.

COMBAT FRAMES

Combat frames are partial suits, bare minimal of what classifies as “powered", typically designed to be worn in conjunction with more traditional mundane body armor. They are a common tool for local systems militia and private security units as they allow for integrated weapons, but are lower cost and greater concealability than full powered suits. The downside is lower defensive and enhancing capabilities, though for small protection services and the novice bounty hunter who hasn’t yet made a mark and established themselves, a combat frame can be invaluable as a tool of the trade. Typical weapon mounts include vibration blades, manual load wrist launchers, and various small firearms in equivalent power to most civilian access armaments. Lift capacity is modestly increased, as a combat frame still relies on inherent body mass of the user and is little more than a harness for weapons and equipment.

SEMI-POWERED COMBAT ARMOR

A staple of Confederation Special Forces ODST units, SPC armor is designed for weapons mounting, defensive capabilities, and enhanced movement. Some designs may incorporate low levels of force reactive amplification, but most designed for humans have a limit of how much they can amplify movement and reaction speeds before causing injuries to the unaugmented. Such SPC armors are throttled to a factor of fifty to seventy-five percent increase, but can be adjusted for humanoid species with higher physical capabilities. Other enhancements common to ODST models are mounted melee weapons such as fliplock vibrational blades, personal defense shielding grids, and low power maneuvering thrusters for assisted jumps and descent braking. A number of high category bounty hunters and Star Hunter agents of the Federation use highly customized models of SPC armors, many of which have undisclosed and typically illegal modifications.

POWERED COMBAT ARMOR

Powered Combat Armors are of two classes within its own category. The first is the weaponized combat hardsuit, which offers high protection value and gives high lift capacity enhancement, but are slower and often offer little in the way of reactive force increases. This is because most users of this first class of PCA are unaugmented humans or near-humans that are not physically reinforced or able to move at the speeds needed to not become injured by such amplified forces of movement. Like Semi-Powered Armor, combat hardsuits often have integrated weapons and specialized systems such as stealth gear and/or personal shielding, as well as sealed environmental systems for operations in vacuum or hostile biospheres.

The second category is Augmentive Powered Combat Armor, that which the legendary Mjolnir and ÆSIR powered armors fall under, and no normal human can hope to don such suits and use them to their fullest potential. Force reactive amplification circuits allow for incredible feats of speed and strength, but also enhance the slightest movement into a possible bone shattering reflex that could cripple or even kill an unaugmented human. As the result of incalculable costs and extensive research, PCAs are highly restricted technologies, and are as much a suit of armor as they are an extension of the super soldier who wears them. Common equipment includes personal defense shielding grids, hand to hand combat aids such as a fliplock high frequency vibration blade stored in a gauntlet panel, mid-tier maneuvering repulsors or thrusters for precision boosts of speed, assisted jumps and descent braking, and extensive sensor and data processing suites in the visual lens display arrays, as well as sealed environmental systems for extended vacuum exposure or hostile environments. Armors in the Augmentative category as Mjolnir and ÆSIR also have complex data centers of equal power and capacity to the data networks of a small frigate. Such equipment is almost always in the control of military oversight, though some non-human species have their own enhancing combat harnesses that compare in degrees to such suits.

Edited Dec 6, 2019 21:31:50 GMT By The Huntress