Body Armor

Body armor in human space takes several forms.

Battle Dress

"Battle dress" refers to the armored suit worn by Union Army Corps soldiers deployed in the field. Typically, each soldier is issued two sets of battle dress, one designed to fit over a vacc suit and one that fits directly over the soldier's underlayer. The two components of battle dress are the traditionally-styled helmet and the form-fitting, armored body sleeve.
The body sleeve of battle dress is built out of tough layered fabrics, impregnated with magnetorheological (MR) fluid and shear thickening fluid. Passive protection is granted by the shear-thickening layers, hardening immediately on response to impacts. The MR fluid layers, on the other hand, are more useful for active defense and for improving the user's abilities; regions of the suit can selectively harden to resist impacts, or joints and smaller areas can be hardened to stabilize aim or provide a harder strike in hand-to-hand combat. Control of the MR fluid is handled over Link, typically via the user's access jack.
The helmet is quite simple compared to the body sleeve; though the helmet is full-face and forms a CBRN-protective seal with the body sleeve, it is otherwise little more than a lightweight mid-21st-century ballistic helmet. Heads-up display integration is handled through the user's Link rather than any helmet-based display, as is communication. The visor of the helmet offers flash and laser protection, and interferes little with the user's field of view; however, it also is less damage-resistant than the rest of the helmet by necessity. When using the vacuum suit-designed sleeve, the helmet is omitted entirely, using the vacuum suit's own helmet instead.