Condottiere
Emperor Mongoose
What if it's mortgaged?
Subdermal Armor too strong
- Thread starter Sty0pa
- Start date
Not anymore. The errata for the Central Supply Catalogue has updated armor layering rules - you can't wear a cloth trench coat over a protective suit at all, only over anti-energy, standard, or archaic armor.
Luckmann
Mongoose
Protection Suits are not armor, and the rules on Cloth Trench Coat in the pre-2026 update (which we started with) and the recently introduced "Layering Armour" section in the 2026 update specifies "can be worn outside one other layer of standard, archaic or anti-energy armour". Even if you'd consider Protective Suits as "armour" (because they are in that overall chapter) Protective Suits are not "standard, archaic or anti-energy armour".
My initial assumption when my character got it as his first major acquisition was that it could go under his cloth armor coveralls because it's literally skin-tight like a.. well.. skin-suit, but my ref has judged that it combines with nothing. He even sounded hesitant when I asked if I could at least wear my robes/scarves over it.
I really think that the Skinsuit should have something added to it that says that it can be combined with anti-energy armour or lighter standard armours up to no more than +8 Protection and/or 5kg of weight, with anything higher or heavier restricting the skinsuit's internals resulting in rapid overheating. Obviously any such layers immediately interfere with the skinsuit's camouflage capabilities. But now we're completely off-topic.
Apologies if I'm hijacking the thread a bit, I just wanted to make a tongue-in-cheek commentary regarding my own use case of Subdermal Armor. I do recognize the issue when faced with min-maxing combat monsters.
- Legitimate question; Subdermal Armor should have some weight to it, at least. It might even arguably be one of the few legitimate ways to tell if someone even has Subdermal Armor.
- Nanomachines, son.
But I don't think this needs any more explanation than "How does my brain not fry when it is filled with enough scrap for me to pick up transmissions from Mars?" or "How does my eyes function when there's something hijacking the optical nerve to give me an internal heads-up display?". - It is a mesh of ballistic fibers added to the skin (or presumably mostly under the skin), and a reinforcement of the bones. The way it is written, in my interpretation is that it is actually very thin, like the bones wrapped in a supporting wire mesh, and the skin just having a layer that is significantly thinner than the skin itself. It's not, like, ceramic inserts or anything.
I did not see this before posting.
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actionman
Emperor Mongoose
Just a thought, IMO, the military would have nothing to do with subdermal armor.
It requires permanent expensive life-altering surgery.
It interferes with medical treatment, which may be conducted under battlefield conditions without proper supplies and equipment.
Who knows what long term medical effects it will have, possibly impairing troops after 10 or 15 years.
Hundreds of thousands of discharged veterans will be walking around with military grade subdermal armor, possibly causing a problem for law enforcement.
There are limits to how much armor a surgeon can implant inside someone's body, and will this armor be effective against common weapons, like gauss rifles, ACR's, or even snub pistols with HEAP rounds? Is the cost/benefit ratio worth it?
Why would the military bother with subdermal armor when it can issue body armor of various types, which it can issue to soldiers throughout the life cycle of the equipment, rather than losing it when the soldier leaves service?
Traveller's game mechanics aren't granular enough to grapple with these types of issues.
actionman
Emperor Mongoose
I wonder how blood vessels, fascia, mobility, and skin being firmly attached to the body would all be affected. The skin might not be able to radiate heat effectively because blood vessels can't deliver enough warm blood to the skin to exchange heat. If too much bone is replaced, is there still enough bone marrow and so on to perform its function, etc. The human body is an amazing vastly complex system of interconnected connected systems, and IMO one can only do so much before things start going wrong, like implant rejection (happens with dental implants, even), toxicity from metals and chemicals in the implanted components, and so on.
But, none of this matters, because a lot of players just want cool secret armor. But, if you have a decent idea of how the body works, how it's not just a car for your mind that you can modify and trick out, it gets laughably unrealistic, like "if you swallow an apple seed an apple tree will grow out of your stomach" unrealistic. It makes one's suspension of disbelief work overtime so much that it makes it hard to take the game seriously.
Consider Cyberpunk, with all the electronics implanted in people's bodies and brains. Consider how hot a mobile phone can get after using it for a couple of hours. Now consider the effect those hot electronics would have on someone's brain tissue. But, none of that matters, because it's Cyberpunk, and we're not supposed to look behind the curtain.
MonsterX
Emperor Mongoose
It seems more like the kind of thing you might put in a covert agent. It does increase the risk of detection, though, over what no armour would do. So it is for missions when you really need a durable agent, and they can't have visible armour. At the same time it permanently alters an agent who is likely highly trained and therefore an expensive, high value asset in a way that makes them detectable - they will be easily discoverable as probably some sort of agent with a quick medical check. So it seems like its use would be highly specialized.
It might also find favour with paranoid crazy rich people who have many enemies. They need to be the sort of hard cases who would literally allow themselves to be skinned alive for the sake of a little bit of protection.
There is also the most important military procurement driver, that of cost.
Soldiers don't generally need discrete. Everyone knows they are there to fight. Carapace for the elite troops, cloth for the PBI. Both can be supplemented by cloth trench coats.
If you do muster out with a cyber implant it is more likely to be a prosthetic, a comm or wafer jack or maybe genetic modification if you were staitoned somewhere exotic for an extended period. No-one is mustering out with the Soldier's Organ Package regardless of the name
actionman
Emperor Mongoose
Intelligence agents who are in it for life (no ever leaves the Secret Squirrel Agency).
Professional security men who get it done at their own expense because it's their chosen vocation.
Criminals who are routinely exposed to violence.
And like you mentioned, rich or powerful people, or politicians, aristocrats, or other high visibility people who have threats to worry about.
MonsterX
Emperor Mongoose
The SSA of course implants it in all new recruits as a matter of policy.
J. L. Brown
Emperor Mongoose
I agree; subdermal armor seems like something for VIPs, not soldiers. But I was offering thoughts along the lines that Luckmann had laid out -- their GM has ruled that subdermal armor is extremely tightly controlled 'military' technology. It is not my place to dispute their rulings.
In my Traveller Universe, militaries tend to regard soldiers as 'that mostly standardized (and fairly expendable) bit which we swap between different, mission-specific (and generally far more expensive), sets of equipment'.
Condottiere
Emperor Mongoose
It works in Cyberpunk, because of the anarchic nature of the setting, where you're reliant on yourself, or a very close clique.
Less rentacop, more Yojimbo.
Less rentacop, more Yojimbo.
Correct. A TL14 world would pick that up in the scan and have established procedures to cope. Microtractor surgery, nanosurgery, etc.
And... let's not forget that if a charcater is basically armoured up to light vehicle standards, heavy weapons are still going to be effective, most environmental effects are still going to affect them and so on. Subdermal armour does nothing to help with a suit breach.
To be fair, the Cyberpunk ethos is also very much "live fast, die young". And the Punk in Cyberpunk includes body modification kinks.
A modest amount of enhancement is akin to some modern medical stuff to help with disabilites (bionic ears are a real thing). I'd expect most military enhancements are just replacement organs following trauma. You can fudge precisely WHEN benefits are obtained, but I'd expect a lot of them are actually installed around the time the character suffered their career ending injury and mustered out.
I don't see any need to make subdermal armour restricted any more than body armour. But there may be a reluctance for ethical surgeons to install it, as well as some of the other gear, such as performing amputations. On the other hand, unethical surgeons may not be that hard to find, and things may be considered different on a world where you can get that limb regrown in a few months anyway.
Pretty much everything said about subdermal armor can be said about cybernetics (and to a large degree, genetic engineering) in general. If they are a feature of the setting, medical personnel likely have protocols for dealing with it. It's not any different than having some disease on a low tech planet. Maybe someone will have downloaded a file on how to treat malaria or maybe they won't.
The game doesn't put any special skills in it for dealing with cybernetics, because cybernetics are not usually a significant part of the setting. If you want it to be, you should decide whether it's covered by Medic or incorporate another skill. Or make the Profession: Cyberneticist something that comes up often enough to be relevant to the campaign.
The game doesn't put any special skills in it for dealing with cybernetics, because cybernetics are not usually a significant part of the setting. If you want it to be, you should decide whether it's covered by Medic or incorporate another skill. Or make the Profession: Cyberneticist something that comes up often enough to be relevant to the campaign.
Luckmann
Mongoose
You won't hear any argument from me on this point, but I am not the one to decide.
That said, while I agree that it shouldn't be considered military grade carte blanche, I could see it being individually banned on some planets or in some select jurisdictions, same as you see protective knife vests/bullet-proof vests illegalized in some of our more dystopian countries on Earth, like Sweden and Brazil.
Fweeba
Banded Mongoose
I could definitely see subdermal armour being an elective option for troops expecting to be deployed into heavy fighting. Particularly those who routinely operate Battle Dress, where every point matters for surviving stuff like automatic gauss weapons loaded with APDS and you're already spending a lot of money per soldier. Or high-end mercenaries and special forces, where you're really trying to concentrate as much force and skill in as small a space as possible.
Stuff like the Soldier's Organ Package shows us that there is room in the setting for spending a lot of money on individual soldiers sometimes (Even if it's not a regular occurance), and subdermal armour is a drop in the bucket compared to that, plus it doesn't come with horrible early aging and sanity altering downsides like the package.
Stuff like the Soldier's Organ Package shows us that there is room in the setting for spending a lot of money on individual soldiers sometimes (Even if it's not a regular occurance), and subdermal armour is a drop in the bucket compared to that, plus it doesn't come with horrible early aging and sanity altering downsides like the package.
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Condottiere
Emperor Mongoose
Probably does require minimum age.
Since, it wouldn't grow with the rest of the body.
Since, it wouldn't grow with the rest of the body.
That's just an assumption. It may be true. It might not be, as we don't know anything about the technology involved. There could be nano or biotech components that allow for some degree of growth over time. There might not.
Subdermal armor seems unlikely to be the sort of thing you'd implant in a child for a variety of reasons. But we are talking about wholly imaginary technologies and cultures.
actionman
Emperor Mongoose
Weird how defenses are illegalized.
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