The Machine Shop - Eidolon Wraith

[Enkidu]

“Keffiyehs are cool, yup.” Nesrin smiled backhandedly at Foulke - out of all the officers in the in the battlegroup’s command core, he was one of the few who’d she’d trust to dive for cover if someone yelled grenade, rather than requiring a sixteen hundred word independently reviewed academic dissertation first. Like her, he was ex-services, and Khan had never quite lost that deep institutional respect the Armed Forces and the Liberty Navy held for each other. But damn if he hadn’t learnt all the wrong lessons from war - the man was somewhere between the human analogue of a bench press and Nietzsche’s less charitable stepmother, with a side order of Freddy Kruger and an abdomen that’d make a rhino evacuate itself. Dependable, trustworthy, paranoid enough to be worth his weight in body scanners, but you never quite knew where you were with him. Foulke was a boxing glove filled full of thorns.

“Alright, I think I’m starting to share your vision. Overall concept could be functional, but you’re not going to be the most appealing poster boy in human resources wearing that. “You’d look like an artillery piece crossbred with an anime.” She wasn’t sure the marine was even listening to him - he had the expression of a kid about to cause an industrial accident on a chocolate factory tour.

“Look, you don’t want all the sensors in the helmet. Olfactory enhancers can be moved around the body. You only want your electromagnetic sensors in the helmet - perspective and all. I’d increase the stiffness of the wrists - you hit something at an odd angle and you’re going to snap your hand off.”

She gestured to another part of the diagram, tapping a finger through the hologram’s chest. “Increase the molybdenum density here, and run active cooling lines through there to the arms or you’ll burn the skin off your chest when you take a laser. People always aim for the torso. Think in deflection angles.”

“You don’t want the dart launchers on the wrists. If they’re micro missiles, move them to the shoulders. Means you can fire them around the cone of the gun. Neurally activated. Your knuckles are tungsten, thus highly conductive, so you’ve got a free electroshock weapon there. Tasing the people you touch has obvious crowd control uses.” She flipped the model around as easily as a Chinese turn table.

“Jetpacks don’t give you stable flight regimes. Gravity null fields and small thermal thrusters running off the same gluon plasma that your plasma projector uses will give you superior performance for less volume, mass and personal risk. Jets also don’t work in space. This does.”

She tailored the settings until she’d visualised a design that looked appropriately refined - a mishmash of interlocking iconel-boron-molydenium-carbon alloys tough enough to stop a twenty millimetre DU round to the breast. It had calves like a racehorse, and a transmitter antenna rakish enough to put any helmet wings to shame.

“Here you go, do everything kill everything reactive combat armour. Combines the aesthetics of a main battle tank with the dexterity of a ninjutsu master. If you uncapped its performance envelope you’d be able to run at seventy miles an hour plus depending on traction, although I wouldn’t recommend busting fifty since you’ll trash your body, inertial dampeners or not. Physical stress counteraction isn’t a perfect science.”

The templar pushed the suit around, displaying its front and rear alternately. “Entire suit is forward oriented. The heat exchanger and female fuel port is on your back plate - get that shot out and you’ll overheat real fas. The back of the neck is also fairly weak plate - don’t expect to take large caliber rifles to the back of the head - you have to sacrifice armour somewhere. The suit will eject you automatically if internal conditions start getting hazardous, but you can turn that feature off if you really want to. Crotch and back plates open up if you need to pee, crap or have sex with Miranda without fouling up yourself, the whole suit is air and watertight, but you won’t be able to swim unless you remodulate the gravity. Whole thing is covered with a rust resistant layer of carbon nanotubes, but try not to get the thing immersed if you don’t need to. The helmet is deceptive - your eyes are going to be level with the glass - over your skull sits the computer core necessary for filtering all your sensor data. Don’t worry, it’s got its own integrated cooling system and shouldn’t melt your brains. Plasma projectors in both wrists, grappling hooks on the side of the elbows - remember, they’re not strictly hooks, they’re gravity clamps. They’ll stick the walls of anything, including shield bubbles. Bonus perk is the ability to drag just about anything under a handful of tonnes flying towards you if you anchor your gravity field up to full. The whole design works as a space suit, but wearing it you’re going to be as nearly as tall as me and a good few inches wider, so you might have to do some cockpit mods. Plenty of magnetic attachment points for guns, grenades, whatever you might desire. Comms are good through a few hundred metres of steel, more if you use lepton comms. A few extras include Loriclytic cyst based cloaking fields, if you really want to carry bits of live nomad around on your person all day long. Beyond that, you should be able to strap whatever you want onto this bad boy.”

“Wearing this, you’re going to look like a knight in white armour. Really got that gothpanzer superman chique.”

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Designers: William Foulke and Nesrin Khan.
Unit Specification: Modular Warfare System (MWS) F-1 Prototype.
Purpose: Armoured Cavalry Shock Infantry Support Armour (ACSISA).
Design Date: 20th July, 823 AS.
Estimated Cost: 12.000.000 SC.

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