closest Space/Ultratech equiv to the giant power armors used by Marines in Starcraft?

[Plane]

Until seeing this it never really hit home to me just how much of the in-game unit size is due to mechanical enhancements, it's a lot more like the Rifts Glitter Boy than it is to just a suit of Dead Boy armor, in terms of limb extension and size increase, basically...

Kind of wondering if there are any examples in one of the supplements that come close to this kind of PA and if the take the "vehicle as ally" or "vehicle as gadget advantages" approach to doing it.

Trying to think of realistic bare-bones minimums you would have for the HP and DR of such things. What you would expect as the lower threshold of what metal exoskeleta like these would provide. Is this the type of thing done in games like Warhammer?

This just makes me realize how absurd it is for Starcraft to treat these units as entirely organic when the majority of their durability surely must be mechanics. Maybe not to the same degree as a Siege Tank or SCV but still at least 50% mechanics not biologics.

I guess a similar criticism could be made of Warcraft, some of that HP has gotta be "armor" repairable via peasants as a Transport is (weirdly not Ballistas... I guess it takes more skill to build a balista than a transport) rather than helped w/ healing touch of a Paladin.

I suppose unless you use "Damage to Armor" rules in Low-Tech GURPS operates in a simialr way though because in these games they have 'armor' stats equivalent to the "never goes away DR" that armor provides under Basic Set rules. But since GURPS does have such tools it allows for more realistic thinking about iconic things of these old RTS games.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Plane

U

Kind of wondering if there are any examples in one of the supplements that come close to this kind of PA

The closest thing in 4e materials would be the TL9 Combat Walkers in UT which would probably be fairly close to Battletech Clan Elemental aremor if illustrated. They are definitely larger than man-sized and "climbed into" rather than "worn".

Being in UT they are simply gear bought with money.

[AlexanderHowl]

Being TL9, they are technically capable of being mass produced in a realistic TL8 society, though it would involve the difficulties involved in realistic invention and mass production (and finding a military that wants to pay nearly a $1 million each for them). In a TL10+ setting though, they have largely been replaced by heavy battlesuits (a TL10 version of a combat walker should probably increase the bonuses and DR given by 50%, while keeping the same price). In any case, +30 Lifting, +30 Striking ST, and DR 300/180 may only be worth the intimidation factor, as TL 10 weapons can punch through armor rather easily.

[RedMattis]

Starcraft, especially the first one could basically be described as hillbillies in space. Iirc. the Terrans there are basically rejects sent far far far away to colonize.

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.

I'd put Starcraft in the 'Space Fantasy' category where they are basically operating at TL8^ or TL9^ with bits and pieces of higher tech-levels (AI, FTL, ...). Heck, you might even declare that much of Terrain tech basically operates by the power of WH40K-orc-style "WAAAGH!", and it would probably feel perfectly fine. Might explain why marines seem to have been bred to be dumber than a box of rocks too. Don't ask questions about how your stuff works, just take the drugs and shoot.

[Anthony]

The idea that Starcraft is a ripoff of WH40 and Warcraft is a ripoff of Warhammer is... probably accurate.

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.

[AlexanderHowl]

In a SM+2 suit, you could function through having the leg controls in the upper legs and the arm controls in the upper arms, though there may be difficulties with fine control.

[Rolando]

Starcraft ripoffed Starship Trooper, not WH40k. I think it deserve some respect :)

Big battlesuits don't dislocate people limbs, limbs usually extend to the shoulders and the hips, or something... it depends on the design. It is a matter of designer choice, it is not real engineering or science, just decide how it work and it will work like that.

you just have to look for it
https://starcraft.fandom.com/wiki/CM...ed_Combat_Suit

There you get all the specs you need for a conversion, the rest is handwave and game design choice (put as much armor to stop the weapons you want it to stop, etc).

With weight you can get hit points too.

You can also get GURPS Mecha (3ed) and make it more "accurately", the translation from 3ed to 4ed for that type of equipment is not big, you can use 3ed mecha straight from the book in 4ed games.

[Plane]

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.

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.

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.

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.