In late YE 39, the Warlock was a dream born from the collective works of many creative minds such as Ashton Acres and Yori Kataoka as the original product of Ken-TEC. Through the end of the year, multiple series of tests were undergone as well as an advertising campaign around the planet Kennewes that culminated in the eventual creation of the KT-M1-1B, otherwise known as the Warlock. While variations are underway as well as additional upgrades, they all started from the Mark I¹⁾ as the first suit in the series.

The Warlock, at its core, is an intended series of suits designed directly to achieve two goals. To compete with the dominating market of the Impulse Powered Armor and the Demon M1 Infantry Power Armor, the two most successful independent market suits around. The other, and primary, goal is to provide a suit unmatched in assisting the working class. While there can be debates over its uses in the battlefield, even through variants and modifications, the true strength of the Warlock is achieved through the success of the second goal. Its history, after all, was that the suit was born by the working folks of Kennewes, to further assist the planetary salvaging and exploration efforts to unearth relics of the planet that often sell-well.

Outfitted with a gravity field emitter in its chest, personal gravity manipulators in its legs, electromagnetic field arrays in the forearms, and arc-welding tesla emitters in its hand, the Warlock was named for its near magical-like arrangement of equipment. But, rather unlike the magical origin, the Warlock is specialized for working in harsh environments and assisting in scrapping jobs far more than most suits of power armor might allow. Paired with the right equipment to further specialize it, the Warlock stands to be a flexible tool for those who want a suit that can take a beating and have strength like Power Armor, yet wield the tools in one combined package similar to the OI-W32-1a Magic Hand or any arc welder.

The Mark I, KT-M1-1B, in its Ken-TEC colors.

The Mark I, otherwise known as the “OG Warlock” to those who made it, is a fairly standard and simply designed suit. The chest is fairly bulky, housing the gravity field emitter, with its opening button positioned on its underside. Strap-like bands of flexible armor seal around the suit's opening lines, with the rest of the torso consisting of a simple torso that opens around a step-plate on the gut. Pauldrons and thigh guards are attached to rails to allow them to shift along the shoulder and thigh for better directional protection. The elbows and knees are fitted with simple armor plating as well, with the elbow plates fixed to the thick gauntlets. The knee armor, however, is placed over the underlayer armor of the legs, connecting to the stylized and smooth boots of the suit. The helmet of the Mark I sports a pair of apparent oxygen vents along its jawline, with a tail that fins up and back from rear of the helmet. The suit can be opened along the inside of these vents, allowing it to hinge up and point the fin/tail of the helmet down to reveal the user's face. Its final feature is a fairly simple, but powerful pack that it carries on its back. This pack houses the additional computer and power systems of the suit, ensuring the Warlock has access to its trademark features despite its very basic and cube design.

The advantages of the Warlock, primarily, are as follows.

• Suite of Systems. A combination of four systems allows the Warlock some powerful tools in various situations. Gravity manipulation, the ability to electro-magnetize and manipulate certain objects afterward, and a built-in welder all allow the Warlock access to some serious situational and useful tools for construction.
• Cheap. Utilizing the salvage economy of Kennewes, the Warlock is kept and produce fairly cheaply. This means that the suit can be bought and utilized by the working class and not just every mercenary with a flush wallet.
• Raw Strength. Born from a mix of Yamataian style and Nepleslian functionality, the Warlock's primary focus as a working suit means that it has tremendous physical power. While it's far from as useful as tools designed purely for cutting or piercing objects, the Warlock could be considered to be one of the most powerful suits when it comes to raw strength exerted. This isn't to be mistaken with the ability to hit hard, however, as the suit's softer armor means that it's better suited simply to being used to lift, push, or carry rather than hit.

Despite the large array of tools in the Mark I, the Warlock suffers from a very apparent issue that goes in-league with why it is far from being a proper military suit.

• Immense Power Needs. If it suffers significant damage to its pack, the suit can begin to suffer immediate power failures. Its supporting systems, such as the welder and the electromagnetic field emitters, will be the first to go offline. Then its gravity field emitter, followed by its personal system, will follow. The shields of the Warlock are, as a result of this, also fairly weak compared to light power armors sold elsewhere.
• Lightly Armored. The Warlock, due to its focus as a construction suit, only utilizes light armoring. The adjustable plates on the suit are the only “medium plates”, but are far from military-grade and will only work against light-arms. Do not expect a Warlock to be a frontline battlesuit, as it's far from being intended to do more than endure a hard hit from debris rather than accelerating plasma.
• Lack of Hardpoints. The Mark I has been getting variations explored precisely because the suit has a tremendous lack of flexibility. Those who want to customize the Warlock will have to look internally and to the addition of actual rigs or using equipment for extra tools. Either that or look into acquiring a future variant.
• Limited Propulsion Method. The suit relies primarily on using its gravity manipulation to move. As such, the actual amount of propulsion on the suit makes moving around without it extremely hard. While this does not mean the suit can't go fast, it means that traditional movement is far from viable and requires significant skill in utilizing gravity to move the suit like a more proper Spacesuit or combat suit.

In terms of mobility, the Warlock is a mixed bag. It does not have very strong traditional propulsion, with the boots, elbows, and the bottom of the pack housing small boosters. These are primarily for turning and moving at slower speeds within zero gravity.

However, the true benefit of the Warlock is that it can both change the gravity around it and its own personal gravity. This means that the suit can essentially emit a small field around it and then use its personal field to aid these boosters. If used properly, this can allow the suit to “swim” in an almost silent manner. This means that while it has poor acceleration and generally a lower speed capability compared to other suits, the Warlock has the ability to essentially control itself with a smooth and elegant lightness or crash itself faster. Of course, the latter is far from beneficial to the operator… but it means that the suit has situational advantages to those that can harness its unique gravity fields.

See Damage Rating (Version 3) for a guide to damage ratings to include.

• Body: Most of the suit (Tier 4 Light Armor)
• Shield System: Conformal Shielding (Tier 4 Light Armor)
• Armor: The chest, pauldrons, gauntlets, thigh guards, and boots. (Tier 4 Light Armor)

To enter the suit, the user must open the suit through a keypad on the chest generator or through remote access. This will cause the chest to rise and lean back over the simple backpack of the suit, while the lower torso widens outward and the belly-plate lowers and extends to form a step. The operator climbs up, turns around, and drops into the suit before sliding their arms into the suit. Once this is done, the Warlock closes around them and re-secures with additional room within to accommodate for operator size. The helmet can then be put on, which will cause the suit to seal through an extending collar and simple tough material.

To exit the suit, the user simply removes the helmet and pushes the chest panel or uses remote access through commands. Once either of these has been done, the suit's chest piece will rise up and off, desyncing with the pilot to allow them to climb up and out of the suit, where they can then walk down and hop off the step to the ground or use the suit to propel themselves in zero-gravity.

A mix of voice command, thought-reading, and an in-house AI, the Warlock relies on a pair of computers to ensure control is slick. The computer in the pack allows it to act with instant-movement, while the main computer in the suit allows the suit to function. Users can modify the suit to rely on one more than the other, but it should be noted that the thought-reading technology within the Warlock is lacking and far from allowing someone to completely rely upon it. The reason for this is that the mix will allow the suit to react for those with less training to protect them (from things such as falling debris) while allowing others to ween certain systems off that they might not rely on (such as Minkans or Neko, who have experience in gravity control so that they could disable the feature from the AI to focus on alertness and protection systems).

A third AI is housed within the helmet, but its primary functions are to relay to the other two AI so that they can better handle sensory information (such as incoming objects). This one is, based on trials, often trained to handle voice commands or tweaked with somewhat better thought-reading to allow the AI to act more appropriately on information such as materials of objects before the suit.

In YE 39, Ashton Acres had begun collecting a group of friends from Kennewes University with a simple goal to produce a suit to help the working man. This was due to Kennewes' very scrap and scavenging-related economy, where people often sorted through war ruins and would lose limbs to old explosives or warbots. For most of the first part of the year, this meant that he was looking into simple power armor options akin to the Impulse on a cheaper scale, to give people something to work with and precisely harness assets that would help a worker such as the various tools. While he was able to implement the simple arc-welder and the electromagnetic field emitters, he found himself at a loss when he began trying to find a way to handle the age-old issue of workers having to work upside down. It was at this time that he reached out to Yori Kataoka, along with gathered his own research, and came to the conclusion to create the gravity emitters.

Various rough testing in the early parts of the year finally proved fruitful, however, when the suit finally worked. It was a far smaller field, the suit falling to the ground without any control, but it showed the Warlock theory could work. More experimenting, live tests and demonstrations at local tech festivals, and further bug fixing and direct work from Yori led the small Ken-TEC team on the proper path to getting the suit operational. One such change was the addition of a second computer in the pack, allowing an AI to adjust for non-Minkans who had no experience with handling zero gravity at a biological level. With each test and stride, Ashton and the team on Kennewes pushed toward creating their suit. The final result, of course, was the KT-M1-1B²⁾.

Utilizing scrap and aiming to utilize grants for encouraging people to attend Kennewes University, the company was able to keep the Warlock's production price down and establish a small market as the end of YE 39 approached, finally preparing to launch the suit into relative mass-production as well as offering custom orders to those within the neighboring nation of Yamatai as well as throughout Nepleslia.

The suit, as briefly mentioned before, houses four primary systems.

• Gravity Field Emitter. This allows the Warlock to completely modify the gravity up to a range of 20 meters in width akin to a bubble in shape. With the unit housed in its chest, this can allow the suit to make the gravity vanish even in atmosphere and gravity influence from planets, though large extremes (such as a Black Hole or deep enough into a gas giant) are beyond the suit's gravitational manipulation.
• Personal Gravity Field. These allow the Warlock to resist its own gravity fields or simply modify its own gravity, housed within its legs. These allow the suit to make things immensely heavy around it, yet lighten the gravity enough to potentially move. The primary use of this is often to allow the suit to fly despite its very weak propulsion methods or to create better work environments for the suit to utilize (such modifying the gravity around them on a ship's surface to keep things from falling, yet still act almost weightless).
• Electromagnetic Field Emitters. Housed within the forearms of the suit, these can be deployed and used primarily to allow the suit to pull and tear an object at a distance. While alone they are best used for bringing tools, the pair can be used together to act as a powerful electro-magnet to allow the suit to influence objects within the gravity field and let the operator have their hands fairly free.
• Arc Welders. Within the palms and lining the pointer and middle fingers, the arc welder is the smallest advantage for the suit. Capable of being channeled intensely, this allows the Warlock to never require a welder, as it can simply rapidly heat an object through its electrical discharging and focusing capabilities.

Most of the suit is made of Durandium Alloy, reinforced with trace amounts of Nerimium. In particular, its chest, boots, pauldrons, gauntlets, and thigh-guards are made almost entirely from Nerimium to ensure they can take a slightly tougher hit than the majority of the suit.

While the shield of the Warlock may be simple, the defenses to hazards is tremendously boosted. A mix of various technology and basic fields, the shields the Warlock utilizes can protect it from nearly all radiation (essentially sealing the user), a high degree of temperature strain, and electronic defenses. This is to allow the common worker to be safe from the hazards such as a reactor overload, working in an irradiated site, and allowing people to work in environments without fear of overheating or freezing.

The Warlock lacks any sort of camouflage systems in the Mark I variant.

The suit boasts a universal filter and scrubber for toxins and gases within an atmosphere, allowing it to cycle and clean the air for oxygen around it as long as it's powered. When put in a void, the suit can utilize up to 24 hours of breathable oxygen it will store while in atmosphere.

In the event of a suit breach, the suit can extend and form seals up to three inches wide. Holes in the suit wider than that, however, are outside of the suit's expansive layering. This can be vital when punctured in space, as it can keep the pilot from near-instant death. Multiple punctures in the same area will not affect this capability.

The primary power of the Warlock is a pair of micro-fusion generators it carries in its backpack. Kinetic drivers and small batteries within the suit can be used in the case of power failure for up to 2 minutes of additional mobility.

The sensory suite of the Warlock is fairly traditional, with a very basic “area detection” suite of sensors traced into the armor. Its primary sensory and communication tools, however, are positioned within the helmet. The max range of the Warlock allow it to communicate with ships in orbit while on a planet, and up to the edge of the solar system if used in wide-open space. In asteroid fields or disruptive areas (with things such as powerful storms), the Warlock loses its dependability and can often become “stranded” speaking to itself.

The Warlock Mark I does not come with traditional weaponry implemented into the suit.

The following hard-points exist for the Mark I:

• Two Backpack Side Mounts: These can be fitted with simple robotic arms to allow the user to carry additional equipment or operate larger tools.
• Two Hip Mounts: Fitted on either side of the waist, these can allow the Warlock to mount smaller tools and weapons to its sides.

Below, one can find the pricing, various accessories, and future variants when made.

Base Warlock: 4,000 KS. Main Gravity System: 1,000 KS Basic Repair Service³⁾: Between 500 KS and 1,500 KS

Robotic Arm⁴⁾: 500 KS each

The following section will house links and brief descriptions of the variations made upon the Mark I Warlock.

Legix created this article on 2017/12/05 18:00. Approved here by META_mahn.