Shasta No Sekai and their active military arm, the Strays, have been low on material resources and adequate maintenance personnel from the start. The power and reliability of full scale mecha thus takes up most of their budget, leaving expensive considerations like flight-capable power armor for another day. This does not, however, remove the need for a smaller armored hardsuit that can fight in confined areas or survive explosive decompression.

The Barghest was thus designed and fabricated en masse as a stopgap measure, and first issued to exterior patrol units on the airless void of Freehold. The armor is (in most areas) thick enough to withstand many hand-scale weapons, and yet the unit is still small enough to fit inside the cockpit of most Shastacorp mecha, fighters and shuttles. Mobility is somewhat limited, and the strength improvement somewhat paltry, but it can be worn for several days at a time, and at least has good dexterity in the hands for manual tasks.

As many Spacers and Reds would already know, the Nepleslian Green Golem Assault Armor was built using tooling and panel forming techniques that would be a logistical nightmare to acquire outside of their own territory. This left the quartermaster Phage pretending to be a mining consortium, so that she could inquire in Nepleslian and Yamatai space for corporations looking to build 'components for an affordable construction exoskeleton'.

Pirating the schematics and then experimenting with the most affordable micro-nuclear reactor she could throw together, the armor was then rushed into production in YE 46.

• Government: Shasta No Sekai
• Organization: the Strays
• Type: Personal Hardsuit
• Model Number: AF-03b
• Designer: Phage
• Manufacturer: Shasta No Sekai
• Production: Mass Production
• Weight: 74LBS
• Service Lifespan: 4 Years

The Barghest is a relatively straight forward armored exoskeletal system, with ease of maintenance and maximizing shot deflection often coming at the cost of wear comfort.

Made using triple layers of whipple shield-style plating, and an iron wool filled honeycomb underneath, the thickest plates are based around the head, upper torso, shoulders and back. Of perticular note is the poor neck movement, though this does prevent the bullet trap situation that basically every over power armor on the market has. The arms and legs have vambraces, but the hands, biceps, and upper legs are merely kevlar-based dust covers.

The gloves in particular were somewhat necessary, as the suit does not have a tactile feedback- Only the back of the palms is armored, to stop the user breaking their hands when punching things.

Serving mostly as radiation protection, coffee coaster sized rectangles layer the entire upper body, legs and arms. It does offer some additional protection against energy weapons.

Shockingly primitive at first glance, the armor is moved through supportive struts of tubular metal, highly resembling ancient digging devices. In the place of oil, however, pressure is controlled and modified by the sentient zooid nanomaterial known as Liquid Ally. It has reasonable reactive capabilities given the weight, and can self-repair broken joints at least into solid pieces.

It's not supposed to have it's own personality…

Jittery and sometimes prone to overcompensation, it has a fearsome charge, but can fall over if the user turns too quickly. Inexperienced wearers are nicknamed 'crabs', for their tendency to walk around with their arms out.

Another reason that a pseudo-hydraulic system was chosen was the massive variety of shapes and sizes that mutants come in. Any one suit can stretch and shrink between four and seven foot in stature, though at minimum the mobility is very limited, and at maximum the structural rigidity may become compromised. Extra limbs can be added, though this affects the general stability. Those with particularly animalistic heads may have to make do without a helmet.

The transparent Durandium visor has small glowing bars for air and power supply. There is no onboard computer that can be accessed unless the wearer has a mindware adapter, in which case they can alter the self-righting and limb torque settings on the fly.

There are a pair of little lights just above the brow.

There is a tinted pull-down visor, so you don't get blinded by sunlight.

The radio/audio receivers in the 'dog ears' can be manually adjusted by a dial on the side. There is also an antenna on the right side that can be set to audibly report nearby metal/magnetic, radiation, and scalar sources.

An honest to goodness flat pack nuclear reactor, the backpack is huge and noisy with a central turbine and two long, can-width enriched uranium reaction chambers. This unit, combined with the radiation shielding box, takes up 40% the weight of the suit. It is designed to last about four years of continuous use.

Below the reactor are two pressurized air cylinders, and a water/nutrient tube package that leads up to a little straw on the collar. It is designed to keep the user alive for up to four days, though a popular Strays pastime is replacing the liquid with less healthy substances.

1100 DA. It is freely available for use by any organization.

See Damage Rating (Version 3)

• Tier 3, Heavy Anti-Personnel.

Primitive Polygon created this article on 2024/05/18 13:59.

🚧 This article is a work-in-progress. Is it not currently approved.