I am going to start work on a new power armor for them since the M4 SYLPH is noted on its wiki page as discontinued and all but a few units out of service. Unless we just wanna put it back into production?
So far as I can see, there was nothing expressly wrong with the M4-2A Sylph. It just - like the M1 Lamia - stopped being used and given anykind of spotlight in plots, with the Mindy largely stealing the spotlight.
So far as I understand, it had mostly to do with warship payloads. Would you rather have 20 000 Mindy you will definitely use, or have half of that be Sylph IIs (or whatever mecha) that you might not use? This is mainly a broad logistical issue. It's not that mini-nekos weren't given a chance before, it's that they failed to make the most of that chance and Wes eventually changed his mind. for a reason.
It's just like how people, ever since I brought out Melisson, had this idea that playing a Mishhu plot could've been awesome. I wasn't so sure, since there would be many things missing that wouldn't make it an optimal player experience. Gallant did try, but it ultimately didn't pan out. That's why I'm very pessimistic about this and don't see this taking off much once the novelty wears off.
Then it's just a small mecha. I'm talking about powered armor for mini Nekovalkyrja, as in armor you wear.
I don't see that ever working. Like the original Sylph and Harpy, it won't be able to compete. It'd be an awful lot of miniaturization (a.k.a. expensive! / the Mindy was sold 50 000 KS vs a Chiharu-class flagship being sold as military-surplus 250 000 KS in earlier days of SARP... kind of hinting that miniaturization in SARP carries a non-trivial price) that would come to an abrupt end the moment a adult-sized power armor decides to fire at it.
You'd probably find GMs unwilling to use them for the same reason you don't cram your players as pilots of T7 Raccoon shuttles to contribute in spaceship fights; they'd be too brittle - it'd be near-suicide to send them into combat.
Perhaps present lesser threats? That was the tag-line used for justifying less powerful power armors like the Sylph 1/Harpy/Daisy. End result was that difficulty-level never really went down in comparison to when Mindy were in use. The Lamia/Sylph II
at least gave the mini-nekos a fairly equal chance to contribute.
...
If you people truly mean to make the mini-nekos work and make them more than the ideal state of understated (I maintain that this is the healthiest state for them) that the way to 'defeat' previous caveats would be to adapt the Mindy II to have a different mode of operation in which the hemosynthetic insert gets swollen in order to fill the suit's insides (not keep it hollow/take advantage of more volume for extra brawns) and use a different helmet as a cockpit for the mini-neko. In effect, this leaves the Mindy II as the principal unit that needs to be logistically fielded, and only require different helmets to have around on ships (which is a significant jump in versatility for much less taken than having two different specialized suits).
I might have encouraged the same for the Daisy II, except that the StarArmy have, if we're logical about it, no longer much reason to keep them on starships since the M2-2D variant came out - it's largely been obsoleted due to the extra shielding and resilience the Mindy II was given - previously hallmarks of the Daisy/II. The initial Daisy model might have remained competitive simply due to the fact that it was extremely cheap to produce, but Origin upped the bar there wanting to make a better unit, and this may end up shooting them in the foot in the long run (i.e.: there's a reason why the Daisy was using a battery power supply, rather than a fusion power plant).
