>>1216
>"powerarmor" project
IRL power armor is another thing we should talk about here, since power armor is also part of this board's topic. And it's another thing where my approach disagrees with the majority of what you see in sci-fi. Most sci-fi power armor looks like it would be too clunky and heavy to use effectively. The designs you see in things like Iron Man, Halo or the Fallout design Hacksmith has chosen to use are all examples of this.
To me, the key distinction between power armor and a mech should be that a mech provides its own actuators. Power armor should instead provide some sort of enhancement to the body directly, as this approach weighs less than a motorized suit. Power armor should be light and easy to move in, maybe not having all that much in the way of actual armor protection. Instead it would be minor armor protection with something like electrical or ultrasonic pulses enhancing your muscle performance to give you super speed or super reflexes, or AI-based predictive algorithms showing you where to dodge. My ideal depiction of power armor is more like Crysis or Metroid Fusion, where the armor is slim and lithe, and it's more about enhancing your own abilities than replacing them with those provided by the armor. If your armor is about replacing human abilities, then it's a vehicle, not a suit, and there frequently isn't even a good reason for a human to be inside it.
A good suit of power armor shouldn't cost that much to make; it should be maybe the cost of a motorcycle. If your power armor costs $10 million per unit, it's pointless, because you're never going to kill $10 million worth of enemy force value with it. So basically every heavy power suit design is out, because one good rocket or drone attack will take it down; it's not armored well enough to tank the hit, but it's also too heavy and slow to dodge. You should either build it up to a full-size mech or strip it down to a bodysuit.