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Originally Posted by Anthony
The problem with hulking battle suits is that the articulation really doesn't work; try to bend the arms/legs of one of those hulking suits and you dislocate or break your limbs. Either it has to be basically the same size as the wearer, or it has to be big enough that the wearer fits entirely within the torso.
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If you kept elbows/knees locked and most of your limb occupies the proximal half of limbs (thighs/upper arms) it seems like you could use your ankle/wrist to articulate the armor's knee/elbow?
This makes me wonder how you'd create the distinction between "extremities in limb joints" giant armors vs "extremities in extremities" normal armors, when distinguishing overpenetrating damage for wearable allies.
Basically if you wear a smaller SM ally (your SM, or maybe 1 or 2 higher) then if it loses a shin/forearm you're going to lose one too. There might be some small extensions (it can lose a hand/foot without you losing one) to protect your extremities from damage to theirs, but because f a "elbows in elbows and knees inside knees" design, damage you take will more greatly resemble the damage your wearable ally takes in terms of hit location.
If you wear a much bigger SM ally then we get stuff like "it can get blown off at the knee/elbow and my extremity takes damage instead of a limb" or even "I don't take any damage at all because the thigh/upperarm is slightly longer than my full limb length" by the hand/foot controlling pistons above the knee/elbow to operate the knee/elbow.
You'd still be taking damage to some part of your lower body from damage just to the thigh though (maybe 2/1/2/1 odds of it being thigh/knee/shin/foot ?) when you have a "hip inside hip" and "shoulder inside shoulder" design.
To have both hip=hip and shoulder=shoulder would require bots whose torso height matches your own, of course, which would look very odd with long legs/arms but not impossible...
I could be thinking too one-dimensionally (vertical distance) though. Another factor is to have hip/hip and shoulder/shoulder would be that the width between these joints has to roughly match your own, or else you would need to be a LOT more flexible to make the armor do certain things.
Example: if a human has shoulder joints spaced 3ft (1y) apart (sounds above average but doable for a roided marine) then the armor would need that too, giving it a narrow torso which would also look odd if you had long arms.
Marine's power armor seems to resemble human proportions between torso height/width to limb length though so it doesn't fit my theory...
I wonder if this might be even more extreme like "elbows and knees operate the shoulders" ?
This would give an even smaller proportion of your limbs inside the limbs of the armor. Only the proximal halves of the proximal halves (first 50% of thigh, first 50% of upper arm) would be occupied by the distal halves (forearm+hand and shin+foot) of the pilot's limbs. This would have the benefit of protecting them even more from overpenetrating damage to the limbs of their armor. You would definitely be protected from elbow/knee hits and maybe even attacks to the upper arm / thigh might occasionally miss your limb, or at worst lop off an extremity instead.
With that kind of size contrast there's probably also room for a pilot to do a last-minute "yankback" to pull their limb entirely inside the torso if they see it's about to be lost, like if a Zergling is gnawing on it and you can't pull it free, worry-through being unavoidable in the next couples seconds.
You're better off in that cast to free your limb (your PA limb is immobile anyway) to avoid blood loss, and maybe you could even use it to operate something inside the torso?
With a HUGE contrast (as we see in the CMC donned by Shivani Singh ... being a short female I think she might wear a different design than huge guys like Tychus Findlay though? dunno) maybe you'd even have room to store a small weapon like a pistol inside your armor, and even use it to fire wildly outside the "shoulder hole" created when a Zergling rips off your arm?
Probably pointless though because small pistols probably aren't enough to harm a Zergling. The lowest threshold of damage in SC seems to be 5 for SCVs but these are still 12ft tall mining robots who use the power drills (for mining) and plasma torches (for welding repairs) for attacks, which in gurps terms I'm guessing could still be more than 5x more powerful than a low-caliber pistol.
SC has a weird mechanic where all attacks do at least 1 damage regardless of how much armor you have, which I guess in GURPS terms means that to account for such mandatory incrementing any DR you buy should at least be Semi-Ablative so it can be whittled down over time.
Or at least any DR you get that's not Ablative should not be high enough to make 0 damage possible for the lowest caliber of weapon (SCVs I assume... Zerg Drone and Protoss Probe do identical 5 dmg and are probably also giant things 2x the size of a human: seem slightly bigger than marines and def bigger than zerglings which I think are meant to be horse-sized) but you could make it high enough to prevent damage from attacks/sources not actually accounted for in the RTS like say shrapnel from small explosions, walking on sharp rocks, the heat of being adjacent to a firebat's flame w/o getting hit directly, or the burning damage of hot shells ejected from a marine's weapon.
Quote:
Originally Posted by RedMattis
Given that the marines are probably genetically modified giants and they inject themselves with almost lethal drugs (stimpack) I'd guess that their power armor requires exceptional strength to properly use.
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The use of a stimpack in-game has to be researched and gives you extra speed, but that just might be "10x as much stim as I usually use" (it damages them) so you could definitely assume that the long-term use of stim-packs work like roids and make them stronger/faster at baseline than a Terran Scientist / Terran Dropship Pilot / Terran SCV pilot NPC would have.
That would aid in the explanation (aside from the actual skills to use specific suits or weaponry) why you can't reassign certain people to new careers. Part of that also seems to be the crazy-long suit-up process seen in the Wings of Liberty OP.
Marines are bolted into their armors that makes makes the slow suitup Tony Stark did in the Iron Man OP or first live film (as oppose to faster suitup in 3rd film) seem quick by comparison...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZd9n373vf4&t=1m
Actually I guess 1m50s isn't that long (unless they FF'd some parts) I'm sure there are power armors which take longer than that to get into. I imagine by SC2 due to tech advances the process was faster than in SC1. Here you see a bunch of robots helping him put on the armor but maybe they had fewer robots (or slower robots) doing it with earlier Marine production.
I'm betting that's what the "training time" and "mineral cost" of Marines is supposed to be, the Barracks going through that automated process of putting armor on, since it could cause problems to be wearing that kind of thing for long periods of time you would assume that marines would in their leisure time not be wearing it.
Tychus Findlay could be an exception because he seems to keep his armor on even when not fighting, like when hanging out in a bar. I think that's because of the whole "armor is your prison" thing. I'm only a couple missions into the campaign so I want to avoid spoilers but it sounds from opening narration that Mengsk (you memorize his voice if you played SC1) sent him to mess with Raynor's plans.
Raynor by compairson hangs out w/o his marine armor on in the 1st/2nd pre-mission RP fluff, even though he wears it when you can control him in-game as a hero unit.