Solar Auxilia Power Armor

What marked the Solar Auxilia apart from the other elements of the Imperial Army during the Great Crusade was the fact that they were not simply a single regiment raised from a particular culture or displaced from a warlike compliant world to serve the Imperium. The Solar Auxilia were a culture of warfare, an order of battle successfully replicated on hundreds of worlds. The Imperium fell, but Solar Auxilia armor was never matched as a mass-produced armor set until its fall, a sign of the Imperium’s technological degeneracy through ideological stagnation.

Saturnyne Void Armor was the core of SA armor designs, though this wargear was supplemented with additional variant weapons and equipment designed with hazardous environment and void use with unaugmented humans in mind. Overall, these became known as "Solar" Pattern, a designation provided by the Mechanicum in keeping with the "Solar" Auxilia forces for which they were intended. Their void armor is a carapace-reinforced, full environmental combat body armour with a fully integrated life support unit. The armour is fully sealed, capable of resisting small arms fire, ballistic impacts and shock trauma. It is self-healing against minor penetrations and lacerations, and is particularly resilient against radiation and thermal effects, making it highly effective for combat operations in hostile environments of many kinds, not simply the open void. The armor is further equipped with Cognis-Signum arrays, a mix of advanced sensory devices, Cogitator-assisted communications and telemetry arrays that enable the wearer to coordinate battlefield data with blinding speed.

Although efficient and resilient, Void Armour should not, however, be considered to be a match in regards to durability or sophistication to Legiones Astartes Power Armour, which operates at a greater order of magnitude in terms of defence and endurance, and Atlantean Power Armor even more so. Even so however, there are many valuable lessons to be learned from such venerated armor that has withstood thirteen millennia of battles across the entire galaxy. The first proposal was for a basic upgrade to our non-power armor infantry forces, militia, and DDF, using elements of SA armor to improve their abilities even further. While relatively simple upgrades, the sheer scale of the upgrade across billions of soldiers would require substantial industrial capacity dedicated to producing enough. First, though, the actual improved armor would have to be designed before production could begin.

A number of the SA suits came with integrated Cyber-Familiars, a variety of semi-autonomous devices such as Servo-Skulls, Mek-Spiders and other smaller drone units and lesser robotic haemonculites tied into the direct neural control of their operator. Utilised by Techmarines and the Adepts of the Mechanicum, these minion-drones are an extension of their master's will and provide them with a host of additional senses and capabilities. Selica Tesla and the Empress immediately saw the value in these systems, seeing a valuable upgrade to existing military drones, as well as integrating improved Cyber-Familiar designs into existing suits to amplify their combat abilities.

**(New Income Type Opened: Armor Income. +6B D per turn. Incorporates sales of not only Power Armor, but all other armor types throughout Dominion space.)**

**(Research Unlocked: Infantry Armor Upgrade - Minor) (OOC: Basically, “unarmored” non-power armor infantry will end up with something very much like Halo ODST armor, w/more of a substantial integrated exoskeleton in it.)**

**(Research Unlocked: Cognis-Signum Array Comms Upgrade - Minor)**

**(Research Unlocked: Cyber-Familiar Drones - Minor)**