Custom Carapace Armor

Hydra is the best place on the surface of Waste World to buy carapace armor. It is far cheaper here than anywhere else and can be bought and tailored to your needs by the numerous genclans who sell it. You can have a suit of custom armor designed to your exact specifications then grown in a lifevat. This suit will be guaranteed to meet your requirements but you must pay the full price in advance.

To buy a suit of custom carapace armor simply choose which type of carapace armor your suit will be based on: light, medium or heavy. Then decide which special powers you want the suit to have. The cost of these powers will be 100 credits times the points cost of the special powers divided by 2. Symbionicists long ago developed biomatrices for all the most common powers so it is a fairly simple matter for them to mix and match them according to your wishes.

Even the armor special power can be added to carapace armor but there are some restrictions. The level of armor added cannot exceed the AR of the suit itself. You can add up to two levels of armor to light carapace, four levels of armor to medium carapace and six levels of armor to heavy carapace.

Custom armor can be used to augment virtually any characteristic. You can buy characteristics for your custom suit in exactly the same way as you buy powers. The cost is 100 credits per point divided by 2. It is important to note that suit characteristics are not added to your own characteristics. When a suit's characteristics are higher than your own, you can use them in place of your own characteristics. When they are less, you can use your own.

Of course you need to find someone capable of creating your suit for you. This takes a great deal of skill. In addition to the raw materials, and matrixes the creator needs to be qualified to supervise the procedure. You will need someone with one level of symbionics for every power you wish to add.

In addition a Symbionicist is limited in the level of characteristics he can add to a suit. From level 1 to 3, he can add characteristics of up to +1. From level 4-6, he can add characteristics of up to +2. At level 7, he can add up to +3. At level 8, +4. Grand Masters of level 9 can add up to +5.

You must pay the Symbionicist one credit per skill level per hour of time spent creating your custom armor. He will spend one hour per point spent on powers and characteristics supervising the growth of your armor. This may seem cheap but the Symbionicist can and probably is supervising the creation of up to 10 creations per skill level at a time.

For example, you wish to create a winged battlesuit which increases your ST and DX to +3 and gives you poisoned claws. This is based on heavy carapace armor but you want to enhance its protective value to the maximum so you add six levels of the armor power, The cost for this will be 2M for the heavy carapace. Now let's add up the points for all those enhancements.

The characteristics cost 60 points each to improve. The wings cost 20 points, the claws cost 10 points, the poison is level 2 kill and costs 19. The total point cost is 169 which translates into 16900 credits/ divided by 2, for a cost of 8450. This is added to the 2M cost of the carapace armor itself to give a final basic cost of 10,450 credits. That's already a lot of money and then you've got to pay for the symbionicist as well. You're adding 4 powers but the real killer are the +3 characteristics. This takes a master Symbionicist of at least level 7. This means you're going to end up paying 7 credits per hour for 169 hours of his time. This adds 1183 credits to the cost. The final cost of your suit is now 11633 credits.

The suit will be created exactly to your specifications and it will work. There is no possibility of warping or rejection during its creation. However the internal balance of such suits are complex and delicate things to maintain. If you want to add a new power to your armor or increase a characteristic you need to check for rejection with a -1 modifier for each power or level of characteristic you have added.

For all its expense, Hydran armor is still a great deal in terms of the points you would spend if you bought it during character creation. Surely there are some disadvantages? Well, yes. The greatest is simply that it can be taken away from you. Armor can be removed from your body when you are unconscious or captured. All those points spent are going to do you no good whatsoever if someone else is wearing your armor. Just remember Hydran armor can adapt itself and stretch to fit almost anybody!

And there's another disadvantage: Hydran armor can take damage when you do. If you take a critical hit to a location, the armor will be damaged there as well. Any critical hit of type 14 or greater will damage the armor in that location.

You won't be able to use any special power that is embedded in that location of the armor. For example, if you have claws and your arm is damaged, you will not be able to use those claws again until the armor is healed.

Hydran armor will heal providing it is bathed in nutrient fluid at least once each day. It takes d6 days for a location to heal properly. Nutrient fluid costs 10 credits per daily dosage. Each day, after the first, part of your armor is left wounded and untreated you must make a rejection roll with the normal modifiers for your armor. If this is failed your armor will die and become useless.

If a hit location is amputated, the armor will be amputated there too and will not regrow. You will need to get a graft for the armor as well as for your lost limb. These cost half as much as for replacement organs. There is a chance of warping and rejection when the graft is attached.