Power Dressing! Linear Frames Revisited

Linear Frames. Metal Gear. Power Armour. Powered Spacesuits. Powered Sportsuits! Deep Sea Pressure Suits. Articulated Smartgun Harnesses. Iron Man...

We might not have our flying cars yet, but Cyberpunk 2020's linear frames are just around the corner - there's Lockheed Martin's HULC, the Japanese Hybrid Assistive Limb, the Raytheon Sarcos, to name a few. These things have so many potential uses, I imagine they'll be fairly common within a decade. I imagine them serving dockworkers, construction workers, search and rescue crews, line infantry soldiers, fire fighters, EMTs...

I've been intermittently engaged in a sisyphean task to expand and update the CP2020 equipment lists whenever I have the time and inclination (which isn't often, to be fair!). Powered suits of one sort or other keep coming up - linear frames, but also space suits, environment suits, "metal gear" and others. Each of these systems seemed to require separate rules, so I've decided to condense them. I'm always in favour of reducing everything down to a short statline! 

The rules below cover everything from Vasquez's smartgun harness in Aliens to the Knight Saber suits in Bubblegum Crisis to the deep sea hardsuits in Blue Planet. Personally, I intend to use them as a much simpler alternative to the ACPA rules in Maximum Metal, treating PA suits as Shells with massive SP values and lots of internal option slots. 

In general, I've erred on the side of simplicity. I absolutely did not want to apply any kind of technology assumptions to the rules - they should be able to handle anything from vanilla CP2020 technology through Crysis through Starcraft - or change the rules according to the designed function of the suit. That last decision is down to ideology: as far as I'm concerned, the street finds its own use for things, and that "sports" harness could become an "assault" harness in the hands of a techie very quickly!

It's for all of those reasons that I've decided to ignore the "power question" altogether. The technological variables determining how long a frame's internal batteries should last make my head hurt, frankly. There's an argument for adding an extra segment to the statline - "Power," a number indicating how long a frame will run on a full charge. If you want to, add that with my blessing. As far I'm concerned, a PA's internal batteries last as long as necessary, or until an exciting narrative demands otherwise!

Anyway, I hope you enjoy the prototype rules below (and in this googledoc)! I've included a few sample suits at the bottom, and might just manage to create a follow-up post with more in the next few days...
=====================================================================

ARTICULATED FRAMES

LINEAR FRAMES, SPACESUITS, POWER ARMOUR

Littering the galaxy, one sweaty footprint at a time!

The universe is full of trash. There's evidence to suggest life is ten billion years old young in the galaxy at large, with a four billion plus history on Earth. The lifetime of a person or even an interstellar civilisation is nothing. A million cultures could have emerged in that time, expanded across dozens of systems, destroyed themselves with decadence or plague or murderbots or relativistic kill vehicles or trans-sapient speciation or simple ennui (or an ascent transcendence), been forgotten. 

Ruins on Earth, battered by the wind and pollution and microorganisms and looters, can last thousands of years. Here's the thing - on an airless world, or in airless space, or even on atmosphere'd worlds abandoned and lifeless for many centuries - ruins and litter will stand for eons. Neil Armstrong's footprints will last forever (if they aren't disturbed by tourists, which they will be soon). The Voyager probe will continue to drift for an eternity, lost between systems (until it collides with a Sirian generation ark and kills twenty trillion electronic personalities stored within its transport pods). 

The kind of evidence space-faring civilisations leave behind need not be as grandiose as any stark black rectangle or space ark. Any culture embracing regular spaceflight is going to leave behind footprints, mining camps, abandoned machines... even if "regular spaceflight" meant a few atomic rockets burning around a single solar system.