the shape of things to come

ZM: Good morning, campers! They call me Sergeant Major
Macintyre, but you will address me as “Sergeant”! I don’t care
where you’ve come from or what you had to do to get here.
You may be some badass Special Forces type. Maybe you’re
here from a line regiment and fi gure this for an easy gig. Or
perhaps you’re fresh out of boot camp and still damp around
the ears. It don’t matter here, because you’re all starting right
at the beginning. So settle down, pin your ears back and pay
attention! The enemy will be giving you an exam later.
Most people think these tin cans we call battle armor
are just baby BattleMechs. As you have all volunteered to
become grade-A SPAM, you’ll soon enough know they are
dead wrong.
Over here we have a genuine Toad suit, or Elemental battle
armor as the Clanners call it. Don’t let the bullet holes and
bloodstains faze you.
Your battle armor falls into several classes. Power armor
is not much more than an armored exoskeleton, and
weighs up to four hundred kilograms. You don’t see it out
on the battlefield much, but suits like the Nighthawk and
Tornado are best for special ops work. Some don’t consider
them true battle armor, but don’t go discounting
them out of hand.
Next up, you have the light class, coming in at up to 750 kilos.
Suits like the Kobold and Kage are fast and agile, so they tend
to show up as scouts, though they can still lay a world of pain
on anything that gets in their way. Still, they just can’t carry the
kind of armor needed to stand up to heavy weapons.
Toadie here is a medium-weight suit. Weighing in at a full
ton, his mix of mobility, weapons and armor makes him one
of the most balanced battle armor types you’ll ever run into.
Up to one and a half tons, you get the heavy class. These
babies can pack some serious armor and fi repower, but they
pay for it in speed and agility. As a result, you don’t see them
as much. The Clanners have started fi elding the Gnome, and
we have our Sloth. Both move about as well as a stuck pig,
but pack a solid wallop nonetheless.
Last of all, you get the assault class. Now here, you’re riding
the curve of diminishing returns. At up to two tons in weight,
these things are slow and as clumsy as hell. Of course, they
can also carry enough armor to stop just about any mobile
weapon system you care to mention—short of an orbital fi re
support mission from a passing WarShip—and they can pack
more fi repower than some light ’Mechs.
Now that this sucker is opened up, you can see the chassis
don’t look all that diff erent from the powered exoskeletons
you’ve seen used for boring civilian work. Of course, in this
case, weight and strength are real important. You’ll never fi nd
a civilian exoskeleton made out of this stuff . It takes some
fancy zero-G manufacturing, and it’s not cheap. Just like the
rest of the gear on the suits you’ll be playing with. Bring them
back. We can aff ord to lose you, but we can’t spare the suit.
Remember that.
The chassis is just like a skeleton. Everything else mates to it.
Most battlesuits are like Toad Boy here. They walk around on
two legs just like you. Gather ’round. Come closer, everyone.
See here? You can see these bundles of rubbery stuff attached
to the chassis. That’s your musculature—just like myomers
on a BattleMech, except the fi bers in these are shorter—designed
to work on this reduced scale. Pass electricity though
an actuator at one end and watch them contract. Works just
like your own muscles, only this stuff is way stronger.
Don’t pull that, soldier! You don’t know what it’s attached
to.
Next up, we have the power packs right back here.
These little beauties will keep you going for about a day
of heavy use. Longer if you shut down everything but the
essentials between fi ghts. These things charge your life
support, comms and movement. Your weapons run off
their own power packs, so don’t go wild spraying laser fi re
everywhere. I hear tell the Clans messed with using a lightweight
fusion reactor to power their Toads. Didn’t work out
too well, apparently. You really don’t want to have reactor
containment fail when you’ve got a ball of million-degree
plasma sitting between your shoulder blades. Your average
recharger will fi ll you up in under an hour. Techs can
swap the packs out in a few minutes. Some suits rigged for
longer endurance carry additional power packs, and if you
can hitch a lift on a friendly OmniMech you can just plug in
and draw juice straight from the engine.
So the chassis supports the weight of all your gear, the
myomer muscles are strong enough to move it all, and you
have power to make everything work. How do you make
the can you’re wearing do what you want it to? The key
is the suit lining, which is fi lled with pressure sensors. The
sensors detect every movement you make and then trigger
the suit’s myomers to mimic the motion. What this means
to you is, you don’t have to think about driving or controlling
the suit like a tank or a ‘Mech. Just move, and the suit
moves with you.
Ahh! I hear you all cry out in dismay. If it’s that simple, why
can’t anybody just strap on a suit of battle armor and go?
First off , the suit has to be adjusted to fi t each person like
a glove if it’s going to work right. That takes time and skill.
Second, the control system not only mimics your movements,
but uses that fancy musculature to amplify the effect.
So a lot of what you’ll be doing over the next month is
learning how to avoid killing yourself and your buddies by
accident. And then there are suits with a jump pack built in.
Jumping in one of these is a tricky skill to pick up, and the
only way to do it is practice.
Understand this. Some of you are going to get hurt during
your training. Maybe hurt dead. And nine times out of
ten it will be during jump practice. Talking of jumping, some
gizmos can boost jump range. The late, great GDL came up
with a jump booster for their scout suits, and the Combine
came up with its own partial wing system.
Your hands are going to be busy controlling the weapons.
So you’ve got to use your head. There’s a heads-up display
inside your helmet to give you targeting info and tell you
what shape you’re in. All the controls are activated by voice
or eye movement. Also built into that fancy heads-up display
are IR and light amplifi cation systems. Don’t get too dependent
on them, though. The bad guys can use all sorts of
INTRODUCTION
CONSTRUCTION
BASICS
BATTLEMECH
CONSTRUCTION
INDUSTRIALMECH
CONSTRUCTION
PROTOMECH
CONSTRUCTION
COMBAT VEHICLE
CONSTRUCTION
SUPPORT VEHICLE
CONSTRUCTION
CONV. INFANTRY
CONSTRUCTION
BATTLE ARMOR
CONSTRUCTION
AEROSPACE UNIT
CONSTRUCTION
WEAPONS AND
HEAVY EQUIPMENT
INFANTRY WEAPONS
AND EQUIPMENT
COSTS AND
AVAILABILITY
BATTLE VALUE
INDEX
RECORD SHEETS
157