The problem with that arguement is that you want to take the "Powered" bit away...
Powered armor of course is powered. It does not however confer any constant bonus like a carapace or a bio-suit does.
The suit will be explained in detail later but here is the basic rundown,
A suit has a built in capacitor that can store a certain amount of power, (500+) plus whatever external capacitors you have added. For the purpose of recharging a power-cell holds 100 units of power. (There are larger power storage units made specifically for vehicles, the suit can also hook into a building to recharge.)
The power pool inside the suit can be used to increase your abilities, different suits cost different amounts for their boosts. For instance the suit in question costs 10 energy to add a +1 to your strength, (18 effective strength points.) so draining an entire powercell into a single punch would give you a devastating +10 to your brawl roll for damage. However a Hercules suit (an industrial labor suit) can convert just 5 energy into a +1 for strength.
Dexterity, Endurance, and Strength can all have their effective values modified by expending charge, some weapons also take charge to activate the recoil dampeners used to compensate for heavy rounds. Shields, sonic dampeners, boosting energy weapons, etc all take charge.
The powers of a suit depend largely on what type of suit you're using and how much power the wielder is ready to sink into it. Aysu suits can cloak and can move more silently than a falling leaf when they need to, Hercules suits can crack open a mans skull like breaking an eggshell, and so forth and so on. Suits are tools of war, nothing more or less. As different from each other as a hammer is different from a wrench or a screwdriver. A suit that is running on sparks is a noisy, slow, and relatively weak deathtrap to whoever is wearing it. A fully charged suit is a death machine.
Important note: A suit spends an amount of charge per turn it moves equal to one half the amount it takes to boost its strength once.
On the subject of weapons that are meant specifically to be used with powered armor:
1. Power is stored inside the powered armor, energy cells are meant to be manipulated by human sized hands so reloading would be a pain in the ass if you had to do it manually. Retractable lines in the wrists hook into the weapon energy feeds to provide the power.
2. Ammunition boxes are hooked to the back rails and connected to the weapon via belt-feed, so like energy cells small arms mags aren't used due to the difficulty of holding them. (Boxes are finite but empty boxes can be replenished by converting clips of an appropriate caliber using a non-combat round)
3. There are exceptions to these rules, the Dybbuk and other launchers that can't be configured for belt feed use standard load mechanisms.
4. Attempting to use a weapon that isn't designed for or hasn't been modified for use with power armor incurs severe penalties to its use if you are wearing a suit, the same applies in reverse as well.
5. Power armor has a number of slots on the back (4-12) and a pair of slots on the shoulders (Though using those does give a slight penalty to your ability to see), each slot can car an ammo box, a capacitor, a special item, a gun, or similar-item-that-I-can't-think-of-right-now-that-you'd-want-to-clip-on-to-your-suit.
Well, we have the perfect training ground. And I wholeheartedly expect it to be the target for just about every heavy weapon used by anyone trying to kill us too.
As for it's current usefulness, I'm going the Soviet route (RA Soviets): Screw subtlety, just barge in and kill them! 
Remember the Finns.
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Topic: Deviation-22. The End of All Things. (Read 529929 times)