Umbral Carapace

The Umbral Carapace is a prototype semi-powered armor, designed by Martian Assembly Lines, that never reached full production.

Overview
The Umbral Carapace was an attempt to design and create a set of "power armor" matching the displayed effectiveness of fictional power armors from other narratives.

Etymology
The Umbral Carapace is named as such due to a combination of the black coating applied to its exterior (thus the "Umbral") and its vague resemblance to an insect's outer shell (thus the "Carapace").

Design
Visually the Umbral Carapace resembles a combination of medieval knight, samurai, insect exoskeleton, and ceramic plate insert armors.

The Umbral Carapace consists of three sub-parts: the compression suit, the armor, and the backpack.

Compression suit
The Umbral Carapace includes a skin-tight compression suit that is worn on the user's body under the main armor and allows the user to directly interface with the Umbral Carapace.

The compression suit encloses the user's body much in the same way a tight glove encloses over a hand. The suit seals around the user's neck and provides an airtight pressure against the skin, allowing the user to survive vacuum and cold exposure to the body below the neck. The polymer weave that the suit is made of provides a limited amount of protection against CBRN-E threats.

The compression suit contains interfaces designed to work with the auto-injector in the Umbral Carapace backpack. Through this interface, which requires the user to have one or more compatible central catheters, the auto-injector can deliver medicine directly to the user. See the Backpack sub-section for more detail on this.

Armor
The main part of the Umbral Carapace is a suit of armor that makes up most of its mass and serves the purpose of protecting and strengthening its user.

The armor suit is made of an inner exoskeleton that provides the user with additional physical capabilities and an outer casing the provides protection against a wide range of damage sources.

The inner exoskeleton interfaces with the user with the aid of the compression suit, allowing it to mimic the user's movements smoothly. The exoskeleton can exert far more force than a person can; this, in conjunction with its mimicry of the user's movements and the durability of the armor suit, allows the user to perform actions that would normally be impossible due to the limitations of biology. The exoskeleton and the outer casing are joined together and overlay directly onto the compression suit.

The outer casing grants the user exceptional protection against small arms up to 0.50 caliber (including armor piercing rounds), laser pulses, most CBRN-E conditions, blunt trauma and sharp cuts, and other dangers that the user might encounter in battle. It consists of multiple layers of ceramic, composite, light alloy, and meta-material armor, with a surface layer of a ceramic-metal composite forming a tough and durable shell. The chest, head, and backpack areas, the most important parts, of the Umbral Carapace, are reinforced to the greatest extent. Other areas, such as the limbs and hands, receive less (but still substantial) protection since wounds sustained to those locations are survivable.

The armor suit encloses the body fully and forms a gas-tight seal, allowing the user to operate in the vacuum of space (with attached oxygen supply). The amount of materials used in the casing, combined with a heavy backpack and the design choice of sacrificing some joint mobility for additional protection, makes the Umbral Carapace slightly unwieldy to operate.

The detachable face mask, which connects with the stahlhelm design helmet and the main armor suit, contains infrared / night vision goggles in place of a visor, a head's up display overlaid onto the goggle display, and an integrated rebreather with a tube leading from the mouth region to the backpack. The helmet contains equipment slots for illumination lamps on both sides.

Backpack
The Umbral Carapace includes a large multi-purpose pack that can be attached to and detached from a mount-interface on the back of the armor. It provides the user with ammunition, medical and food supplies, and power for both the armor suit and any weapons the user operates. The packs are heavy and bulky due to the many sub-components stored within, reducing the Umbral Carapace's mobility over long distances and in confined spaces.

The interior of the pack is divided into the top, upper, lower, and bottom quarters, each containing a major sub-component.

Located in the top quarter of the pack are a pair of micro-gas-turbines. The turbines run at all times when the pack is active, drawing diesel or another energy-dense fuel and burning them to generate power for the armor suit and attached weapons. The active operation of the turbines produce a distinctive whine-roar that can be heard from across most battlefield distances, rendering the user incapable of stealth. Large vents on the exposed face of the pack allow the turbines to suck in ambient atmosphere, while thermoelectric converters in the exhaust vents squeeze more energy out of the process.

A pair of internal fluid tanks in the upper quarter of the pack provides fuel to the turbines, with options to attach additional drop tanks to the sides of the pack. The internal fluid tanks can each be accessed, removed, and replaced by hand, and the turbines can run as long as one fluid tank - internal or external - supplies fuel. This allows the Umbral Carapace to be refueled without shutting down.

Located in the lower quarter of the pack is a fluid dispenser that interfaces with the body glove's auto-injector network. The dispenser contains a number of vials, canisters, and packs that each contain medicine, stimulants, blood replacement, liquid food, and other consumables that cannot be easily administered to the user through the Umbral Carapace. The dispenser can deploy vials and packs to the auto-injector at the command of the user or automatically upon detecting the correct preconditions. For users with the correct augmentations, the dispensers can artificially oxygenate the user's blood by injecting oxygen-rich solvent directly into the user's bloodstream.

The bottom quarter of the pack is an ammunition dispenser. It accepts a charged battery for most energy weapons, a box containing a single disintegrating belt for kinetic weapons, or a lasing chemical canister for some energy weapons. The lower left and right sides of the pack contains slots for power cables and chemical tubes and feeders for the ammo belt to pass through. The feeders can accept belts of ammo up to 40mm grenades and 20mm rounds in size and length.

Operators
No civilian or military force makes use of the Umbral Carapace. A small number of units are on display in various museums.