Lord Tarantula
An Arachnid, not a Cephalopod
Image Source: Bungie's Destiny (found here: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/289074869807868925/)
Intent: Multi-purpose personal armor that takes advantage of Lord Tarantula's cybernetics, and is compatible with them.
Development Thread: N/A
Manufacturer: Lord Tarantula (Kyale N'gen)
Model: N/A
Affiliation: Lord Tarantula
Modularity: No
Production: Unique
Material: Plasteel, Reinforced Armor Weave, Miniaturized Computer Components
Classification: Environmental/Anti-Blaster/Anti-Ballistic
Weight: 15 kg
Quality: 6 (armorweave); 7
Special Features:
- Highly blaster resistant
- Plating is ablative
- Mostly armor weave for full mobility
- Seals with Tarantula's cybernetic arms to close completely against hostile environments and vacuum
- Air filters to supplement his own
- HUD that interfaces with the photoreceptors in all four arms and remote-links to Tarantula's combat implants to give him segmented vision if he needs it.
- Resistant to almost any melee weapon short of an actual lightsaber.
Description:
Tarantula's duster was made to both protect and enhance him further than his cybernetics do. The most important part of this is that the bases of his cybernetic arms form a seal with the back of the suit to make him completely safe in vacuum and most hostile environments. On top of this seal, the arms can be modified like any other cybernetic. The nervous system linkage is connected to the armor, however, and needs to be jury-rigged if he wears anything else. Also, because of the massive amount of nerve linkage the rest of the suit has, the nerve adapter for the arms may slightly damage other cybernetics in Tarantula's body if they are knocked offline.
The ablative plating is on a few 'weak spots', such as Tarantula's throat, knees, helmet, and above his heart and cybernetic lungs. It works by having a large number of interlocking plates that take a large bit of damage (a few medium-powered blaster shots, or maybe even a sniper shot), and then quite literally burn off to form a slight vapor that dissipates the Tibanna gas in a blaster shot slightly. Although the plating itself is helpful against ballistic and melee weapons as well, the most the vapor can do against people actively using those is just get into their lungs. The tested success rate of the anti-Tibanna vapor is about 75%. As the ablative plating burns off, it gets slightly weaker, with the bottom layer of armor not weighing much more than the armor weave around it.
When faced with a lightsaber, the only real solution Tarantula has is to try and make sure that each plate only takes one hit. After one solid hit with a lightsaber, the armor plating won't really be able to take a second hit without buckling under the plasma.
The next critical component of the suit is the helmet. Obviously, it's a important thing to have a respirator on an environmental suit, but it also has an HUD that takes the visual scans of the photoreceptors in all four of Tarantula's cybernetic arms. These visual scans are transferred to the combat cybernetics in his visual cortex and allows him to assume direct control of his arms while the helmet is on.
For hopefully obvious reasons... like safety and combat efficiency, the rest of the suit is relatively well-armored, and far heavier than it looks. It can stop most blaster bolts, and will almost definitely stop things like poison darts and most kinds of blades. Of course, an EMP bomb will muck up any interfacing that's happening, and as stated in his profile, if the pulse gets through his flesh he's at risk of being unable to breathe.
