Powered Armoured Mobile Infantry

Yronimos Whateley · 2010-12-07T17:09:34+00:00

Thank you, @Alessio De Carolis - good to see someone doing retro Japanese-style power armor! Looks like there were a few interesting models in the cyberpunk section there, including scenery, corporate/gangster schmucks in suits, security forces, trucks and jeeps, and so on.

Yronimos Whateley
12/13/23, 7:12 AM

Thank you, @Alessio De Carolis - good to see someone doing retro Japanese-style power armor! Looks like there were a few interesting models in the cyberpunk section there, including scenery, corporate/gangster schmucks in suits, security forces, trucks and jeeps, and so on.

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Yronimos Whateley
12/13/23, 7:47 AM

@Stephen Sutton and @Charles Tottington - I think the anatomy involved in this sort of thing is maybe something best just handwaved: I've spent too much time trying to reason through how your legs and hips are supposed to fit in this sort of armor while still being something you can walk in, or what happens when you end up with an itch that needs to be scratched or sweat in your eyes, and realize it's best not thought about, better just accepted in broad strokes.

The larger mecha side of this spectrum - vehicles with cramped aircraft-style cockpits for people to sit in - probably make more sense in terms of practical real-life human(oid) ergonomics (see Japanese-style mecha, Battletech/Mechwarrior, the Imperial walkers from Star Wars, and the Martian war machines from War of the Worlds), as do remotely-controlled drones, artificially intelligent androids or robots, or, in the more dystopian sci-fi angle, installation of a surgically or genetically simplified human body - such as just the brain - into an android, biomechanical, or mechanized body (such as Robocop, Doctor Who's Daleks or Cybermen, or those killer silver spheres from the Phantasm movies!)

Alterntaively, I take it that the basic power armor idea works in the Warhammer 40K universe in spite of the grotesque proportions because the trans-human inside the armor is grotesquely proportioned: genetic engineering and so on result in freakishly wide shoulders and hips, big arms, and so on - space marines can wear that stuff comfortably because they aren't shaped like human beings anymore, they're freakishly-proportioned, genetically-tampered, biologically-engineered, super-soldier mutants!

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Stephen Sutton
12/14/23, 6:41 PM

@Yronimos Whateley I'd like a power armour miniature to look good alongside human minis at the same scale, so I want at least some consideration given to anatomy and ergonomics. I'm absolutely down with taking some creative liberty, as it's a scifi model, but I want to be able to stand it next to another DF model and believably tell people "that's his friend in there".

Astartes' power armour is a very unusual design. They have a powered exoskeleton with its own set of artificial muscles layered over the top of their already enlarged physique, and the armour mostly bolts onto, or clamps around that exo-musculature. They're more super-soldier than power armour, and I think the distinction is important for what we're gunning for here.

When we say power armour we're talking very specifically about a suit that a normal human can wear, that puts them on [at least] the same level as a small vehicle in terms of firepower, durability and mobility. The wearing part is also important, because as soon as we detach too much of the locomotion, or the operation of the weapons from the direct influence of the wearer it becomes something different, like an actual vehicle; say a mini-mech or the like. Those things are fine in their own right, but they're fundamentally not the fantasy of Heinlein's Mobile Infantry, which is what I'm pretty sure most people want from a suit of power armour.

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