TL 14 Vacc Suit & TL15 Tailored Vacc Suit

[heron61]

I was disappointed that the CSC didn't have higher tech vacc suits and I miss the tailored vacc suit, so here are my versions of 2 advanced vacc suits.

The TL 14 vacc suit is the natural extension of the development of vacc suits. It is lighter and provides better protection against damage and radiation than previous models, but it is also a garment designed to only be worn in hostile environments. Without the helmet, it is almost light enough to be worn as clothing, but not comfortable for everyday shipboard wear.

TL 15 Tailored vacc suit represents a convergence of the vacc suit and the TL 10 pressure sleeve. The suit itself consists of a light, durable garment that can be worn as ordinary clothing and has a mass of 2 kg. It features detachable gloves and boots, integral temperature control, and contains a portion of the suit's integral electronics suite (Computer 3, Geiger counter, radio transceiver), as well as an integral environmental reader and a short-term life support system. The suit also possesses the self-sealing and smart fabric modifications. If the wearer's environment becomes hostile, the suit alerts the wearer to don their gloves and it deploys a flexible transparent bubble helmet from the collar. This combined with the integral rebreather provides life support for 30 minutes.

To gain access to the full electronics suite and longer term life support, the wearer must don the helmet (which contains the sensor suite) and the yoke, which contains the life support. The modifications chameleon IR & chameleon visilight apply to both the suit and the helmet and yoke, but the modifications extended life support, medikit, and thruster pack are all added to the yoke and cannot be used if the yoke it not worn. The yoke and helmet together has a mass of 2 kg and are not designed to be worn as part of everyday use.

 

[Condottiere]

I would think the helmet would be lightened.

A gorilla glass goldfish bowl.

 

[Spartan159]

Nice stuff. I did something similar. your TL 15 stats are what I used for my TL 14 Tailored. My 15 tailored was armor 8 and 90 rads. I was thinking of the gel cloth from book 8 dilettant as a basis when I did it I think. I need to take another look at vacc suits for 2e. The original Tailored Vacc Suit from CT had I want to say 6? 12? Hours duration using Ultra-High-Pressure tanks. I'm pretty sure it was 12 hours with the hard helmet and 6 hours with the soft helmet. Yep, found it. JTAS 23. The air tanks are described as oversized CO2 cartridges, and the suit has an electronic carbon scrubber which breaks down expelled carbon dioxide.

Art by Bryan Gibson on Deviantart:
http://sabakakrazny.deviantart.com/art/Fishbutt-427211420
http://www.deviantart.com/art/Sushi-EVA-gone-wrong-339767720

Bryan Gibson's Photobucket:
http://s5.photobucket.com/user/sabakakrazny/media/Sushissuitcopy.jpg.html

For me Gibson's art defined the Tailored Vacc Suit.

 

[heron61]

I would think the helmet would be lightened.

A gorilla glass goldfish bowl.

I think you'd need more than a transparent bubble to contain the various optical sensors that are part of the standard TL 15 electronics suite - eye protection would simply be ultra-fast photo-gray, but it also has IR, LI, scope, and PRIS capabilities, which don't seem like they'd work with a goldfish bowl.

 

[Spartan159]

I would think the helmet would be lightened.

A gorilla glass goldfish bowl.

I think you'd need more than a transparent bubble to contain the various optical sensors that are part of the standard TL 15 electronics suite - eye protection would simply be ultra-fast photo-gray, but it also has IR, LI, scope, and PRIS capabilities, which don't seem like they'd work with a goldfish bowl.

At those tech levels who says the optics have to be macro in size?

 

[heron61]

I would think the helmet would be lightened.

A gorilla glass goldfish bowl.

I think you'd need more than a transparent bubble to contain the various optical sensors that are part of the standard TL 15 electronics suite - eye protection would simply be ultra-fast photo-gray, but it also has IR, LI, scope, and PRIS capabilities, which don't seem like they'd work with a goldfish bowl.

At those tech levels who says the optics have to be macro in size?

That's an excellent point, I could easily see a helmet like this one http://sabakakrazny.deviantart.com/art/Sushi-EVA-gone-wrong-339767720 or maybe even like this https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/564x/f8/ff/b6/f8ffb616d86e5b74539a6a7ca3da557c.jpg, but I think the accompanying yoke would be smaller than these (at least in the back, and definitely w/o the shoulder pieces): https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/17m8dq90na6bijpg.jpg

 

[Spartan159]

Yep. A lot of the design depends on how large the bubble is going to be, is it something you turn your head around in, in which case it can be rigid, or is it conformal, like a motorcycle helmet or Master Chief's helmet, in which case you need a flexible neck. Either way, you can only twist your head so far and so a portion of the helmet does not need to be transparent and can support electronics etc. With a conformal helmet, you can have even more room since the field of vision is only so large and you are turning your whole helmet to see. The latter is less susceptible to things like whiplash too I'd think, and padded to boot. One thing with the large clear helmet designs is the need for Hollywood to be able to see the actor inside.

 

[heron61]

Yep. A lot of the design depends on how large the bubble is going to be, is it something you turn your head around in, in which case it can be rigid, or is it conformal, like a motorcycle helmet or Master Chief's helmet, in which case you need a flexible neck. Either way, you can only twist your head so far and so a portion of the helmet does not need to be transparent and can support electronics etc. With a conformal helmet, you can have even more room since the field of vision is only so large and you are turning your whole helmet to see. The latter is less susceptible to things like whiplash too I'd think, and padded to boot. One thing with the large clear helmet designs is the need for Hollywood to be able to see the actor inside.

If the tailored vacc suit uses a suit + yoke & helmet design, then the most likely answer seems to me to be a large rigid helmet, since a flexible joint between the yoke and the helmet seems needlessly complicated and also less sturdy. I went with a suit yoke & helmet design because it avoids the problem of needing to add a complex helmet coupling to connect it to a suit designed for everyday shipboard wear. Here's another version of a yoke that looks reasonable to me (kitbashed from the suits from Prometheus):

 

[Condottiere]

They're meant to be customizable.

The fish bowl should be good for peripheral vision.

 

[Epicenter]

After long centuries of refinement (as would occur in a Traveller universe, presumably) you'd probably see both conformal (eg; the motorcycle helmet) and shoulder-mounted goldfish bowl styles of suit for different reasons.

The conformal helmet would likely dominate designs where you're intended to only wear the helmet for short periods of time (an hour at most) or as a survival measure. This ties in well with the point of a tailored vacc suit in my opinion - their primary role would be protection against vacuum and not really protection against the other harmful stuff (particularly radiation or cooling in the Life Zone of a solar system) would be minimal and would require the use of a "backpack" that isn't normally worn; this is because it'd be your shipboard uniform. Slipping on a helmet and gloves would be sufficient to survive loss of atmosphere. Of course some people would insist on using such a vacc suit for more utility purposes in the same way there are plenty of people out there who do things like working with molten metal or caustic chemicals in t-shirts and shorts, but it's not intended to be so. It's intended to be a lightweight system that doesn't get in your way and is comfortable enough for everyday wear and will still allow you to survive in the hull of your starship in the case of life support failure, at least long enough to get the life support working again or to make your way to the ship's "danger room" / lifeboat.

The shoulder mounted "dome" style would likely be more common on heavier suits intended for EVA work and similar longer-endurance purposes. The reason is because it's simply much more comfortable. The neck does not need to support the weight of the helmet. It's less claustrophobic than a motorcycle-style helmet. It would be made with access (probably towards the base of the helmet) where you remove an armored panel and there's a vacuum-rated fabric membrane you can shove your hand and forearm into so you can itch your face and head, rub your eyes, and likely with the aid of a small cloth clipped to the inside of the dome, wipe away sweat or clean the inside of the dome if you sneeze - basically a reverse of those biological isolation boxes you see in labs. The dome would be armored and would likely have some protection against bright sunlight, but for the most part would have minimal sensors - its role would be to maintain atmosphere for the wearer. At lower TLs, any special sensors would likely be mounted on the shoulders then feed in their information onto a lightweight visor worn on the head inside the dome - this makes the "dome" style helmet cheap since if you don't need those fancy sensors, you don't need to buy them. At higher TLs, the dome would be selectively permeable to incoming radiation and the (now small and lightweight) sensors would be mounted directly onto the visor itself, again worn on the head directly.

 

[heron61]

After long centuries of refinement (as would occur in a Traveller universe, presumably) you'd probably see both conformal (eg; the motorcycle helmet) and shoulder-mounted goldfish bowl styles of suit for different reasons.

The conformal helmet would likely dominate designs where you're intended to only wear the helmet for short periods of time (an hour at most) or as a survival measure. This ties in well with the point of a tailored vacc suit in my opinion - their primary role would be protection against vacuum and not really protection against the other harmful stuff (particularly radiation or cooling in the Life Zone of a solar system) would be minimal and would require the use of a "backpack" that isn't normally worn; this is because it'd be your shipboard uniform. Slipping on a helmet and gloves would be sufficient to survive loss of atmosphere.

I see two problems with this approach - the first is that having a rigid collar that's designed to attach to a rigid motorcycle-like helmet sounds like such a suit would make a seriously uncomfortable shipboard uniform, even if the collar can become somewhat flexible, it doesn't sounds remotely like something you'd want to lounge around in. More importantly, in an emergency, having to attach a helmet to a collar sounds seriously problematic in terms of the time and difficulty involved.

My idea of the yoke + helmet is that these are really easy to put on - put them both over your head, make sure both are facing in the correct direction, and you're done. Also, with the tailored vacc suit I suggested, in an emergency, the flexible bubble helmet (basically, a really high-tech air-inflated transparent plastic bag) stored in the collar would automatically deploy, and so at most (if it didn't automatically do this) you'd need to pull it over your head and snap it in the front. Then, you have 20 minutes or so to either fix the problem or find the yoke and bubble helmet and put those on. Once you put on the yoke and bubble helmet, you trigger the flexible helmet to retract back into the suit's (non-rigid) collar, and you're good for many hours.

 

[Condottiere]

Opens halfway, or quarter, depending on how you look at it.