TECH GEEK NOTE: Nene's Knucklebomber

[Bob Schroeck]

Mind you, all this is frantic handwaving to cover the fact that I took liberties with suit features to fit the needs of the story.

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but it seems to me that these would be 3rd or 4th Generation hardsuits instead of 5th Gen.

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Well, let's see. Assume what they're wearing at the start of the first OAV is 1st Generation, they go through three generations of hardsuit in two years. Assuming they're only using 5th-generation suits three years later is probably doing Sylia a disservice, except that (as I noted in the text) tensions and boomer incidents had been much much lower for at least a year or two, so there's been less impetus for the kind of arms race we saw in the OVAs.

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In my mind, your version of the basic suit looks like the 2nd Gen suit mostly

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Yeah, that's pretty much how I envisioned them, except Nene's has the pure-pink color we see in Crash! instead of the pink-blue two-tone she started with.

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Although I would think that fitting certain armaments around Sylia's flightpack or Nene's sensor booms would prove problematical, to say the least.

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True; I wasn't really thinking much of that when I decided who got what upgrade. However, even so, I think I can justify things: Except for its tank, most of Sylia's upgrade is on her arm, and the tank can piggyback over her flightpack. Nene's flight system mounts lower on her back, closer to her center of gravity, than her hypersensors do, and the wings are offset from her body by about a foot so she doesn't easily swing her arms or anything else into them; that this keeps them out of the way of her sensors is also intentional.
How's that?

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And while we're on the subject, there's something else I should probably mention, now that you have BGC: Before and After. Look at page 67 where they have printed the schematic drawings of the inner musculature and other details of the hardsuits.

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Will do, when I get home tonight.

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The middle drawing on the far right shows that the helmets actually do have significant neck support, in the form of linear actuator attachment points right behind the jawline. Putting the lie to one of Doug's tactical eval points - "There also seemed to be a criminal lack of neck support under those helmets..." from DW-II-09.

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Well, Doug hadn't done an extensive study of the suits... And god knows he's wrong about other things often enough -- we'll put this one on his tab, too.

-- Bob
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Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.