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Rejected Submission Pack Power Armor

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Zack

Zack

Inactive Member
Submission Type: Power Armor (sorta)
Submission URL: https://wiki.stararmy.com/doku.php?id=faction:uso:packpowerarmor

Faction: USO
FM Approved Yet? Yes
Faction requires art? Yes

For Reviewers:
Contains Unapproved Sub-Articles? (Yes/No)
Contains New art? (Yes/No)
Previously Submitted? (Yes/No; explain reason if rejected)

Notes: Team USO needs some power armor, and that's going to mean building power armor for the Vek, For I'ee, for humans, for giant humans, for a dalmation taur, and for a giant sentient-mushroom-robot.

Rather than building one power armor for each of them, I am going to go the route of building a backpack that does everything a power armor does. Of course Uso is no Wazu, and kinda has to throw stuff together using her limited capabilities.

The idea is that as time goes on, USO will develop more homebrew gear and will be able to upgrade what they have on hand. In the mean time they have to deal with early versions of gear that aren't all that great.
 
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@Wes @Doshii Jun just a mention that this thing seems to come pretty close to the personnal force field application.
You might want to rule over if you're okay establishing this as a precedent or not.
 
I don't think personnel-scale items should be emitting armor-scale shields. But a 5 SP (personnel) shield is fine.
 
This is supposed to be a power-armor replacement, so I don't see the problem with it having ADR level shields.

Then again, it'll probably be easier to see it that way once I've got enough parts to flesh out the design, along with a personal armor suit / environmental suit setup for the rest of the armor. Doing this makes a bit clearer what I need to work on next, a good stand-alone sensor article, an article on hyperspace taps, ect, ect. There certainly will be better versions of this article submitted later, and right now this is very much intended to be the crappy first production model that got rushed out.

So I've bumped the shield down to PDR 5, and the backpack has PDR20 worth of 'hp'. Again this is supposed to be a first draft of the item, so I don't see the harm in having this one be PDR scale.
 
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What we're trying to avoid is a precedent eventually leading to us having catgirls fighting in miniskirts with forcefields for protection.

So, presently, barrier system technology has proven rather harmful - or at best extremely uncomfortable - to someone in close vicinity that's exposed to it.

If this is meant to be worn over an armor suit with environmental systems, I don't see much harm in it being ADR. Like Perilous Siege says, there's that precedent. With more context, we should be open to reinterpretation.

Kudos to @Zack for being flexible. Indulging our caution is appreciated.
 
Eventually this will have an ADR level shield, but that is down the line a ways (I still need sensors, an armor article, a pressure suit, ext)

I'be never really given thought to how A DR ( Or SDR!) Shields behave in the atmosphere or near exposed skin. We really should get a generic shield article that covers all this soon.

Turning on a ship's shields while landed could end up killing everyone standing around outside!
 
If this article is to be approved, the DR rules need to be changed to allow personnel to carry personnel class shields. This ultimately rests on @Wes , and though I share Fred's reservations, I think with some proper discussion, a good balance can be set. Limiting this to only PDR 5 with an SP of 5 tops to prevent some concerns is what I'm thinking, but I don't know what others have in mind.
 
Wes said:
I don't think personnel-scale items should be emitting armor-scale shields. But a 5 SP (personnel) shield is fine.
Click to expand...

The DR system doesn't prevent this from being a thing, and a personal-scale device provide personal-scale protection is right in line with the intent of the system. Wes and Fred also both seem to be ok with it, and the end goal is for it to end up being used like a power armor anyways once a suit and other associated articles are finished.
 
It's not explicitly stated, but it's been held as an unwritten rule regarding the DR system that personnel cannot have shields. It's been that way for the longest time, otherwise, I myself would have done an article like this a long, long time ago. I won't be making any assumptions however, and will leave that matter regarding the DR system itself up to Wes.
 
It seems like having a shield to represent the same thing as armor is well within technological capabilities of the setting and seems pretty cool as long as it has disadvantages compared to normal power armor.

Not being able to have shields on top of its armor value seems like a disadvantage.

Fred said:
What we're trying to avoid is a precedent eventually leading to us having catgirls fighting in miniskirts with forcefields for protection.
Click to expand...

Rofl why not? That's the most Yamatai thing ever.
 
My main complaint with this is mostly how it's described... It's called 'pack power armour', and yet it's neither powered armour nor any other kind of armour, despite being intended to substitute for it. The 'powered' part of 'powered armour' refers to self-supporting, strength-augmenting features, which this doesn't have.

Its ability to counteract gravity is sort of like that, but only helps the wearer move around, it doesn't directly help them use weapons like powered armour does. This is like a contragravity backpack that also contains a shield generator (or vice-versa), but from the name, I'd expect something that either transforms into powered armour, or at least uses force fields to augment the wearer's strength and protect them at the same time, so that it can serve the same function.

Maybe it could be called a 'Hover-shield pack' to be descriptive, or 'USO Armour' if that's not the goal (and people pointing out that it's not actually armour is meant to happen in-character). It just seems awkward to literally call it what it's meant to substitute for, even though it's not that at all.

From the sound of it, the end stages of the design aren't going to be powered armour, either... they're going to be non-powered full combat armour augmented with some non-essential features that powered armour usually has in this setting, and that use gravity manipulation instead of artificial muscles to allow the wearer to move around despite the weight.

Just semantics, though... Having a weird and confusing name is neither unprecedented nor implausible for military hardware, I guess. Even the word 'tank' was just used to confuse people at first. It's good to keep in mind that this design is meant to avoid the design and production difficulties inherent in creating a suit that augments the wearer's physique; it's not a substitute for one, whether it's called one or not.
 
Hm. Navian does have a point though. It's a more minor issue in the face of DR, but renaming this would be appropriate as well.
 
@raz I think it goes without saying that the DR value for the pack doesn't protect you from anything unless you happen to get shot in the back. There's a shield value for the shield protecting the user, and a DR value for just the pack itself. If that's not clear I can try and finagle the wording so that it is more explicit.

@Navian Just like how Tank means a certain something today, Power Armor means something fairly specific for SARP. There are a certain amount of features that you can expect to see, flight, limited space travel, shields, armor, enhanced strength, communications, sensors, onboard computing, ect. This is explicitly meant to fill the role of a SARP-level power armor, but with features that are normally distributed around the body all moved to the pack.

As time goes on, you should also expect this submission to start looking more power armor like. As my submissions for sensors and other gear get approved they'll get added into this submission (as a new submission). The reason it is being done this way is because it is way easier from an OOC standpoint to get the basic model of stuff approved so things like 'personal-level shields' can get ironed out before the heavy work is done to make the rest of the submission. It also means that I can have my full featured power armor, then just apply some species-specific suit later on when needed. Ultimately I think it'll look a lot better than the MACS in terms of readability.

Later versions of the armor:
View attachment 6912

If you're concerned about nekos with personal-level shields, I'd start by saying that isn't really related to this. There isn't anything stopping Wes from making power-armor grade nekos and we did have that for a time, but I think the consensus was that wasn't all that fun. There seems to be a good balance of powers and features that make for good RP (and that is explained ICly by balancing efficiency... since if you make a neko with shields, that neko has to maintain that shield generator their entire life!).

Ontop of that personal-grade shield devices have been used before in RP. I've also had my characters standing in and around active shields with no ill effects... so really if you want shields to be dangerous you probably should write that down somewhere and get that approved so everyone is on the same page.

And lastly, I would love to be able to trade out shields for more armor, or have a high-shield ship with low armor. Or trade both of that for weapons... but we've tried a point-buy system in the past and while I loved it, I think I may have been the only one that loved it. As much as everyone says they want more rules complexity to play with, I think we're fine where we are at.

@CadetNewb Wes said personal-scale shields are fine earlier in this thread

Zack said:
Wes said:
I don't think personnel-scale items should be emitting armor-scale shields. But a 5 SP (personnel) shield is fine.
Click to expand...
 
Though Wes said that, we're going to need to be very specific with the details. This is, after all, the first of its kind on the setting. Right now, based off what he said, the SP of the shield is permitted to be 5. You'll have to change your article to reflect that since it's currently 20. Next, the article states the 'shield strength' is PDR 5, which I assume is the threshold. Considering that this is a large pack worn on the back, this should be permissible unless Wes objects.

This goes back to what Navian pointed out however - the way this is shaping up does not look like something power armor grade considering the shield strength. That's not good, particularly when you've pointed out that this is meant to be the first piece of one, or something of that order.
 
As Peri pointed out, this is something that already exists in the setting.

Though I've said it a few times in the thread, I've also added a 'shield threshold' value to further break apart the submissions shield HP and HP-HP.

My current understanding is that people are just uncomfortable with this because it doesn't have an associated armor-bit for the user to put on so I'm not too worried about how this is shaping up. The armored suit can always come later with an appropriately beefed up pack to use with it.
 
The difference is the shield strength though. Origin's pack modules are ADR in both armor plating and shield strength; these however, are PDR. To further clarify the DR rules though, are ADR shields usable on personnel, or do the shields have to remain PDR to match @Wes ?
 
Only armor suits and vehicles get ADR damage capacity.
 
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