Trooper Armor
An anthropomorphic weapons platform designed to augment a soldier’s strength, resilience, and battlefield capabilities. Like almost all warsuits, the Trooper suit was designed as an affordable response to the rise of zeo tech, while enhancing survivability for the workaday soldier on a battlefield that was rapidly changing in the face of new technology.
The chassis is a series of reinforced interlocking nanofiber plates atop an energy-absorbing sandwich of synthetic spidersilk and kinetic gel. Supporting this construction is a powered exoskeleton with load-bearing points at the shoulders and hips. The suit itself is manipulated via a series of micromotors actuated via fast-feedback loops slaved to the pilot’s movements.
Before stepping into the armor, the pilot first dons a bodyglove of similar construction to the spidersilk-and-gel layer mentioned above, for added comfort and protection.
The armor is built to a clamshell design. The pilot steps into it from behind, whereupon pressure plates in the boots respond by clamping the feet firmly in place. The operator, now fully inside, grasps the waldoes within each “glove” and the suit closes behind, sealing them in.
Operating the armor is, at first, counterintuitive. However, the suit’s systems provide real-time feedback cues to help right overcompensations and has several built-in governors to prevent overextension that risks imbalance or mishap.
When it comes to the use of firearms, the same principle applies: the suit understands what weapon the user is currently wielding and compensates for recoil in real time, thus helping to provide the smoothest firing experience for the operator and minimizing ammunition wastage.
It is common among operators of the armor to experience “war legs” for a short time upon de-suiting—giddiness, imbalance—as they reaccustom to operating their smaller, lighter frames without movement compensation.
