Armor is some inanimate, physical shielding used to cover oneself in. There is a considerable variety of armor available, balancing weight, protection, cost, features, and (in GearHead 2) stats bonuses.
Armor is always equipped, not installed. This means that you can easily obtain the armor of defeated enemies after a battle. Each armor component can cover exactly one type of body part. You cannot wear a helmet on your body, or protect a mecha's legs with arm armor components.
Personal armor[]
Personal armor comes in a variety of brands and names. Two important factors are their weight, which may slow you down, and armor class (AC), which is the number of damage points (DP) they can take before becoming useless scrap hanging on your body. Cost is clearly an issue for less wealthy characters, but it is not a good idea to cut corners on personal safety for richer ones. In GearHead 2, it is usually wise to stick to space suits as you will be seeing a lot of space combat. Recently corporations have been producing limited numbers of experimental active armor for sale in affiliated stores, that work with the user to increase their stats. In the modern commercial centers of GearHead 2 spinners, personal armor is often sold in packages, such as a space suit set containing airtight, rebreathing armor for a whole body: the head, body, both arms and both legs.
Note that the given DP rating of an armor component is no guarantee. Attacks do not need to destroy all the armor on a body part before damaging the internals. This is especially true for high-DC or hard-hitting armorpiercing and armor-skipping weapons. On the other hand, diffusive weapons, such as explosives and shrapnel, tend to wear out armor very quickly but evenly, only reaching the internals after most of the armor has been chipped away at. How and how well armored your opponents are should influence your choice of weaponry and tactics.
Mecha armor[]
Armor for mecha is not very different, except they tend to be fairly generic, with most armor identified by class, and are rated by DP instead of AC. Class 1 armor has 50 DP of integrity, with each additional class adding 50 more DP. Heavier armour also tends to add on lots of weight to your mecha. Posh mecha, on the other hand, are usually covered in expensive but more lightweight armor, made from composite materials. Some mecha producers laboriously craft special armor for their favorite mecha series, and give the armor unique names.
Mecha armor all have 1 CMX of internal capacity, allowing one to install other components in armor using the Mecha Engineering skill. This feature is most often abused in GearHead 1, allowing one to fit dozens of CMX points of weapons and propulsion systems into a single slab of armor, a habit shared by many hobbyists and mecha designers alike. Personal-scale armor can also conceal various weapons, but these are permanently built in by the manufacturer.
See also[]
- Shields
- List of armor obtainable in GearHead
- Mecha design guide for hobbyists
- GearHead hacking guide for developers