Glitter Boy Power Armor

Armed with the most powerful cannon on earth, Glitterboys have served since the golden age of Humanity and defended the planet against supernatural forces since the coming of the rifts. Their stories have been told and passed down through the generations. The suits themselves have also been passed down from hero to hero. Only a few survivng suits remain, and these have been patched and repaired so many times as to bring in to question whether any original parts remain at all. Nevertheless, each of these suits is legendary and their respective pilots are celebrities not by name or by face, but by association with the armor they step out of.

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The following image shows the relative size of a glitterboy and its pilot.

Manufacturing

Glitterboys remain in production in only two locations. The first is a closely guarded secret of the Coalition State of Quebec. Not even Chi-town knows about this, and Quebec is keeping their stocklpile of Glitterboys a secret for their planned secession from the Coalition States. The second manufacturer of Glitterboy armor is the Republic of Japan. Neither Quebec nor Japan has the ability to produce Boom Guns, however, and have instead armed their Glitterboys with Modern versions of railguns, lasers and missiles.
Ammunition for the Boom Gun is more readily available, with Northern Gun and Bandito Arms able to fulfill orders for it. Knock-off ammunition is also available, as is custom ammunition. Even Twiz versions have been made. Most Glitterboy pilots can charge exhorbitant rates for their services, and most do in order to cover the equally exhorbitant prices for their ammunition. Because of this, GB pilots will usually scour their battlefields to collect spent casings for re-use. (One Glitterboy even hired an assistant to follow him around in combat, collecting the casings as they are ejected.)

Boom Boom Boom

The Ballad of the Glitterboy.

Complexity

The Glitter Boy is the culmination of several different technologies, from the nuclear diamond battery infused chromium armor meant to counter the proliferation of laser weaponry on the modern battlefield to the development of ShAKLE, fourth generation Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators, and artificial muscles, to the integration of virtual reality technology into human machine interfaces. And that's just the power armor.

The RG-14 Gas Assist Electromagnetic Rail Gun (a.k.a. Boom Gun) is a weapon system so advanced it has yet to be successfully copied. It uses somewhat conventional 75mm ammunition which it accelerates to ludicrous speed by both narrowing the barrel diameter and applying electromagnetic force to the ammunition once in the barrel. Because of the barrel-narrowing down to only 5mm, only very narrow projectiles can be used. Each round of boom gun ammunition contains two hundred 5mm diameter flechettes which are expelled sequentially. The explosive used in the ammunition is not gunpowder, but advanced CL-21 high-explosive. It has a stable epsilon crystal formation which can only be manufactured by Northern Gun in the Republic of Ishpeming, Triax in the New German Republic and Armatech in the Republic of Japan. Rumors suggest that the Manistique Imperium and Bandito Arms also have the capability to manufacture this explosive.

Surprisingly, of all the technology that goes into the special ammunition and the gun, the simplest is how the sequential release of the 200 flechettes is achieved. Between the explosive charge and the flechettes within the 75mm round is a rupture disk meant to contain the explosive gases of the propellent charge just long enough to build pressure. The disk is scored in a spiral pattern matching up to the end of each flechette. A small cross is scored into one end of the spiral groove. The cross then becomes the weakest point in the rupture disk and the flechette above it is the first one released. As the rupture tears, it follows the pattern of the spiral, releasing each flechette in turn. All 200 flechettes are expelled in less than 0.3 milliseconds.

Using the same principles as a light gas gun, the projectiles and combustion gases are funneled from the 75mm diameter chamber into the 5mm barrel, providing substantially increased projectile velocity. At this time, immensely strong yet just as immensely rapid electromagnetic pulses accelerate each flechette within the barrel, achieving muzzle velocities of about 8,000m/s (or about 24 times the speed of sound).

The destructive potential of the Boom Gun can not be overestimated.

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Discovery

Glitterboys became the masters of the modern battlefield at about the beginning of the 22nd century.
The legendary "Boom Gun" was developed in parallel and was just one potential armament for the Gliitterboy. A lot of hope was placed on the Boom gun because it was also meant for the next generation of tank-busting aircraft, for the USA's next generation main battle tank and the US Navy's next medium calibur deck gun.
Once the boom gun was fitted on the Glitterboy, the systems performed so well together the main battle tank was set aside as unnecessary. by the time of the Great Cataclysm, over 5,000 G-10 Glitterboy power armor suits were in service in the US Armed forces, with another 3,000 or so in use by her allies. Among all the Glitterboys in service, about 90% were equipped with Boom Guns. The other 10% were equipped with anti-aircraft missiles.