The Machine Shop - Eidolon Wraith

[Enkidu]

Nesrin’s face prematurely ages as she started mentally tacking zeros onto the cost estimate of Foulke’s suit. She was approaching brain death by the seventh figure as she dragged herself over to the work station and grabbed the overenthusiastic trooper by the wrists.


“Slow down Inspector Gadget. Woah. Please. The more functionality you tack onto the suit, the more I have to miniaturise the components, the more likely something goes wrong, the more likely you get yourself killed. For every extra feature, triple the failure modes. Start at the beginning. What do you see yourself doing in it? Active stealth systems could be anything from painting an image of what’s behind you by transposing photons to make you invisible to the eye or anything up to a full-blown man portable cloaking device. The more sophisticated, the more complex, the more mass, the more volume. You want to be able to move your limbs and fit through doorways. Be careful what you wish for.”


She flashed up a dizzying array of diagrams on the console.

“That jetpack you indicated - the centre of thrust doesn’t run through the centre of mass - you’d upend your brains over the regolith at sixteen gee. The sensor suite you designed into the helmet would disorient you - you simply cannot process that much information that rapidly on the battlefield - you need to be able to pick and choose. Flame throwers require a lot of volume due to fuel - and you don’t want to be carrying a vast amount of volatiles around with you. I’d suggest a plasma projector - same effect, dramatically higher temperatures, biological targets immolate and explode, metallic targets melt. Down side is that it requires a reactor to be strapped to your torso somewhere. The heavier you go, the more likely you’ll need it to be mechanically actuated. This is no bad thing - you will feel like a demigod, but any calibration mistakes and you’ll dislocate limbs. Grappling hooks will splatter you inside your armour without inertial dampeners, and you’ll probably want an inbuilt zee-gee field to give you three directions of movement. In short, you can’t just have features. You need features to make said features work.”

“I think we can work with this. It’s just going to cost as much as a fighter. Which means you’re going to have to get some use out of this, Foulke, not just use it to pick up deckhands like you’re fricking Hercules.”

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THE SYNDIC LEAGUES
(A co-operative of Rheinland's outlawed trade unions, determined to take the underworld for themselves.)

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