HAAM suits.

[ArmySGT.]

These very much need an update. They are to useful to discard and too powerful to give out to players as more than one or two.

[cosmicfish]

TMP in many ways seemed like someone brainstormed a post-apocalyptic game, and then decided to just include every idea without asking if they were consistent or made sense. The HAAM suit is wildly inconsistent with the rest of the game, and so mismatched in power that I cannot see any way it could be used in a game without making every subsequent mission a joke.

Kill it. Or change it to something much simpler and more limited.

[nuke11]

Think when the game was originally developed and what where the sci-fi games at that time to compete with

Aftermath and Gamma World, there are others, but the names escape me at the moment.

So we have the Blue Undead and HAAM suits and other oddities in the game.

Do they make sense, no in most cases, but they make sense if you are developing a game in that time period.

[cosmicfish]

Do they make sense, no in most cases, but they make sense if you are developing a game in that time period.

The HAAM suit and Blue Undead scream Gamma World to me, but that was the mistake - be distinctive, don't copy! And now is probably not a good time to emulate games that were popular so long ago. TMP 4ed should have no qualms about overwriting the decisions of 3ed and older.

[RandyT0001]

No Blue Undead in 4th edition.

HAAM suits are acceptable because the Project only has about seventy or so, one per Mars 1, one per Science 1, one at each regional command base and one at each of two regional supply bases. With twelve regions that accounts for 48 suits. If PB1 and PB2 each have ten for MARS service or as replacements that makes the total 68.

Most HAAM suits went to the US military (p. 186, 4th ed.). If the WoK were able to secure a US military base (pre-war) where HAAM suits were being issued then WoK might have ten to a hundred suits. After 150 years maybe half survived and are still functional.

[cosmicfish]

Why so few, when they are so unbelievably useful and powerful And how did the US military get any, I thought they were always a Project invention

[RandyT0001]

"Most of the production runs of the suit went to the US military. The Project was able to divert and produce a limited number for its own use." Bottom of p. 186, 4th edition TMP core rule book

IMO, the best ratio of diverted HAAM suits would be 10% of the production runs. At that ratio the US military has (had) about 700 suits (maybe an 'armed, armored individual', AAI battalion or five to six SF 'AAI' companies), most located at a secret base. A few might be the original test vehicles of 10 to 100 (squad to company sized unit testing) at a evaluation site of a base separate from the secret base (maybe WoK found out about this location and sacked it just pre-war). Of course, all might have perished in the attack and only MP has any surviving examples.

[mmartin798]

Why so few, when they are so unbelievably useful and powerful And how did the US military get any, I thought they were always a Project invention

The most common catalyst used in the direct ethanol fuel cell uses platinum. That alone drives up the costs and scarcity of the power source. If we assume that Morrow Industries was a leader in nanotechnology, they could have yield problems on the nanostructured electrocatalysts made from iron, nickle and cobalt. This too would cause a scarcity problem.

[cosmicfish]

The most common catalyst used in the direct ethanol fuel cell uses platinum. That alone drives up the costs and scarcity of the power source. If we assume that Morrow Industries was a leader in nanotechnology, they could have yield problems on the nanostructured electrocatalysts made from iron, nickle and cobalt. This too would cause a scarcity problem.

For this kind of application, how much platinum does it need Right now platinum costs about $31k / kg, and that is not nearly so high to be limiting on something so incredibly useful! Heck, if it used 200kg of the stuff it would still be $6M well spent!

And remember that these things were supposedly in the 1989 loadings, so they had plenty of time afterward to roll some more off the presses!

[mmartin798]

For this kind of application, how much platinum does it need Right now platinum costs about $31k / kg, and that is not nearly so high to be limiting on something so incredibly useful! Heck, if it used 200kg of the stuff it would still be $6M well spent!

And remember that these things were supposedly in the 1989 loadings, so they had plenty of time afterward to roll some more off the presses!

I only list that as one constraint. Myomeric polymers would have been bleeding edge technology. Even if they use cheap materials, it is exceedingly likely that there would be a correspondingly high failure rate with only a small percentage usable in a HAAM suit.

Ultimately, it is likely to be a case where the military sees this materiel at being too valuable to not have oversight in the manufacturing. You can only mark so many nearly complete components as bad and save them from destruction before the military gets suspicious.

[cosmicfish]

I only list that as one constraint. Myomeric polymers would have been bleeding edge technology. Even if they use cheap materials, it is exceedingly likely that there would be a correspondingly high failure rate with only a small percentage usable in a HAAM suit.

Ultimately, it is likely to be a case where the military sees this materiel at being too valuable to not have oversight in the manufacturing. You can only mark so many nearly complete components as bad and save them from destruction before the military gets suspicious.

I guess I have two issues:

First, if HAAM suits were available for the 1989 load in, then even without any further technological advances there should be a ton of these just based on their utility. Even if they were originally military prototypes, by the time of the 2017 load in there should be a Morrow-only production line churning these out by the thousands! They may be expensive and difficult to build, but they are so unbelievably useful, especially in the post-apocalyptic environment, that the Project would be foolish not to issue them far and wide.

Second, HAAM suits are a transformational technology for anyone. Can you imagine what the US military could do with one of these attached to every rifle squad If the US military had the ability to make this it would make the early-20th-century focus on tank development look slow and inconsequential. So why aren't there 20 different HAAM designs that the Project has to face Plus the inevitable Russian and Chinese knock-offs, and the civilian recreational or industrial models

The HAAM suit is cool, but tremendously inconsistent with the world it is claiming to be a part of.

[.45cultist]

You forget that HAAM suits are too radical, most would be at labs and proving grounds, and put into storage like a lot of nifty ideas.

[cosmicfish]

You forget that HAAM suits are too radical, most would be at labs and proving grounds, and put into storage like a lot of nifty ideas.

What do you mean "too radical" Powered armor has been on military wishlists for half a century, and has been actively developed for a decade. The indicated numbers don't support "labs and proving grounds", those are high even for low-rate production - if the US has more than a dozen or so it is because they are being used.

[dragoon500ly]

The military has been test exo-skeletons for decades, some of the demo models are quite impressive with their enhanced strength, power seems to be the major stumbling block, with current batteries and fuel cells just not capable of going for more than a few hours, adding armor (weight), weapons, ammo, sensors, comm gear (did I mention weight) Cuts into the operational time.

There is also the issue of ground pressure, you can only apply so much weight into the "footprint" before you start having issues with the suits sinking into soft ground, this is why many of the military's robots are fitted with tracks, that all terrain mobility is critical to the armored suit concept.

Truth be told, I feel that the HAAM suit will never be deployed.

[mikeo80]

Here is something for you to think about.

http://news.yahoo.com/military-39-39-iron-man-39-suit-may-141715486.html

Not a HAAM suit. Not Iron Man either. But, this seems to have potential. We will see.

My $0.02

Mike