N.B. The vast majority of what follows is my personal headcanons that I dreamt up while making this mod. To my knowledge none of it actively contradicts the established lore behind power armor.
T-45
The original suit of power armour, slapped together by West-Tek in a few years as tensions with China started to spill over into outright conflict. The engineers on this project were solely focused on getting it to work properly, with the intent of ironing out the kinks later.
This fix-it-later approach certainly shows. The T-45 has acceptable resistances to damage – certainly better than raider power armour and all but the best normal armours – but it will not turn heads. And that protection comes at a high cost: the armour suffers terribly when it comes to energy and environmental resistance, and drains the power supply at an alarming rate. It also has a very primitive servo design, and consequently T-45 legs and arms slow the user’s movement speed and reload by 5% per worn piece.
- T-45a: The original prototype design from West-Tek.
- T-45b: Ballistic padding. Increases ballistic resistance. While most rounds would bounce off the T-45’s shell, the user inside was still vulnerable to spalling. Anti-ballistic fibres applied to the interior (i.e. military-grade duct tape thrown in by overworked engineers) helped reduce this.
- T-45c: Aramid weave lining. Increases energy resistance. After the Chinese deployed ‘dragon troopers’armed with flamethrowers to cook T-45 users inside their own armour, the army
ordered a hurried refitting of a fire-resistant lining to the suit. - T-45d: Mechanised infantry. Increases ballistic and energy resistance. The final mass-production variant that was the most widely distributed.
- T-45e: Hazardous Environment Combat Unit. Upgrade of the T-45d which increases rad andpoison resistance at the cost of armour health. In an effort to disrupt American reinforcements from bolstering the beleaguered Anchorage garrison in 2068, Chinese forces irradiated swathes of the Alaskan border with cobalt-60 dirty bombs. Brutal skirmishes erupted in these irradiated zones between T-45 armoured HECU marines and Chinese vanguard units.
- T-45f. Prototype medic power armour, variant II. Adds very slight health regeneration (+0.25% persecond with all pieces, works during combat). Another variant of medic power armour, which constantly dosed its user with vitamins and an early version of bio-med gel. Some ballistic protection had to be sacrificed to fit the bulky medical gear inside the suit. It was discontinued after a large number of users began to suffer from aggressive forms of cancer.
The idea here is that the T-45 had to go through a couple of iterations before it was field-ready. The upgrades do not require a great number of resources, but those that are needed are uncommon (ballistic fibre, asbestos, lead, etc.). Likewise, the perk requirements are relatively low – a modest investment in armourer and science will see you able to construct any of the linings – and repairing the armour will take little more than steel, adhesive and some other miscellaneous components.
T-45 is the most common type of power armour that you will find in the Commonwealth. After being retired from the front lines, old suits were used by National Guard units and SWAT teams on the home front. However after two centuries of neglect most of the suits you find will be in poor condition. Pieces will be missing and those that remain will be at reduced health, and almost none will have a usable fusion core in them.
By far the biggest drawback to the T-45 suit isits rate of power consumption. A full set of T-45 drains the fusion core 3x faster than an empty power armour frame. It’s so bad, in fact, that you might run out of fusion core charge just fighting the deathclaw in Concord! But don’t worry – there are mods available to reduce this drain to something more manageable.
T-51
T-51 was the absolute pinnacle of pre-war power armour technology, and it shows. It offers fantastic resistances and durability with a wide suite of possible modifications at a much more acceptable rate of power consumption. But this has come at a cost – it is the most expensive power armour to keep repaired, in terms of both material cost and perk investment.
- T-51a: The original prototype design from West-Tek.
- T-51b: Mechanised Cavalry. Increases ballistic and energy protection. T-51 armour incorporated many of the lessons learned from T-45 development, and so took less time to reach full production status.
- T-51c: Ballistic padding. Further increases ballistic protection. Even though the armour was much less vulnerable to bullets than its predecessor, some T-51 operators kept the habit of wearing flak jackets under their armour.
- T-51d: Aramid weave lining. Further increases energy protection. Not as necessary in these models, but some troopers would install this lining from old T-45 sets when facing the last of the Chinese dragon troops in their holdouts on Kodiak Island and the Aleutians.
- T-51e: Advanced ceramics. Increases armour health and ballistic protection. An entirely new generation of ceramics was rolled out for suits bound for the Gobi front in China.
- T-51f: Minesweeper variant. Reduces explosive damage (10% per piece). Hardened suit offers excellent ballistic protection at the cost of energy resistance. Amongst their defensive pulse fields, the Chinese army also scattered traditional minefields and nests of spider drones. Specialised units were tasked with clearing these threats.
With the T-51 the production model was reached quickly, and as a result the additional protection linings are more like optional add-ons rather than stepping stones to a finished product. Its upgrades focus on refining an already impressive piece of technology into being just about the ultimate piece of pre-war power armour.
There are only two stumbling blocks to using T-51 power armour. The first is keeping it repaired, which will require a hefty investment in advanced components such as fibre optics and crystal as well as slightly more common ceramics and fiberglass. The second is actually finding it. The vast majority of America’s T-51 units were deployed in Alaska and the Gobi desert at the time of the Great War and it was a rare sight on the home front. In fact, the sight of T-51 armour was so intrinsically linked with the front lines in the minds of the American public, some corporations would pull strings to be allowed to use surplus or defective models for advertising…
T-60
For the T-60, the aim of the project was to combine the durability and simplicity of the T-45 with the advanced technology of the T-51. By this point, the resource wars and energy crises were really beginning to bite. The focus now was on economy – the new armour had to be cheap to maintain, fuel-efficient and not have any of the glaring vulnerabilities of previous models.
T-60 armour is the jack of all trades – average protection, average repair costs. Where it really shines is in its fuel consumption rates, which are close to an unarmoured frame, and its environmental protection. It is also the only power armour that is equally as protective against both energy and ballistic damage. It’s the perfect design for a post-nuclear army, which is why Maxson’s Brotherhood has fallen in love with it.
- T-60a: The original prototype design from West-Tek.
- T-60b: Knight. Increased ballistic and energy resistance. A minor improvement upon the original designimplemented by Brotherhood scribes.
- T-60c: Knight-Captain. Increased ballistic and energy resistance.
- T-60d: Paladin. Increased ballistic and energy resistance, and increased AP regen rate (5% per piece). The most veteran members of the Brotherhood are clad in higher-quality armour and outfitted with more efficient capacitor banks.
- T-60e: Sentinel. Increased carry weight (+5 per piece) and movement speed (2% per piece). Sentinels often conduct missions semi-independently of the Brotherhood. They pack efficiently, and cover ground fast.
- T-60f: Elder: Torso deals energy damage to nearby foes. All other pieces increase energy damage (up to 15%). Reinforced with Duraframe components and integrated Tesla coils captured from Adams Air Force Base, this is the last word in mechanised protection for the Brotherhood.
Here, the idea is that the original T-60 design was pretty much perfect and the Brotherhood has simply made minor modifications to it over the last 10 years. This is the workhorse of the game and the one you will be walking around in most of the time (provided you can find one, as it had hardly reached full distribution by the time of the war). It can handle most situations well enough, completely eclipsing the T-45 – but you might want to pop home and break out a T-51 suit if you suddenly find yourself staring down too many barrels.
The T-60 will require fewer perks to upgrade than T-51, as it contains less advanced technology. The exception is T-60f, which due to its Duraframe nature will require an accomplished technician to install. It also requires fewer exotic components to repair, but is still more demanding than the T-45. Make sure to pick up plenty of plastic and aluminium.
The easiest way to get yourself a suit of T-60 is to sign up with the Brotherhood of Steel. If that doesn’t strike your fancy, there are a couple of suits to be found out in the Commonwealth. Look in old military installations if you want to find some – the pre-war military was in the process of field-testing it when the bombs dropped.
X-01
This armour is a bit of an oddity. Developed separately from the West-Tek power armours, it was originally used before the war by what would become the Enclave. However, instead of a suit of war, it was a testbed for power armour mods. As a result it had little armour worth the name, and drained power at a rate the army would consider unacceptable. After the Great War, the Enclave found itself with the need for a new power armour to help them combat the horrors of the wasteland. The schematics of the X-01 were built upon time and time again by various Enclave research teams, each one adding to its functionality before they were destroyed by some unforeseen enemy.
When you first find an X-01 suit, your first thought will to be to throw it in the trash. Its armour will be flimsy, its power consumption high, its upgrades difficult and its repairs expensive. This is a suit of armour that you will have to put a lot of love and care into if you want to make viable – but if you pull it off, you’ll be presented with the finest power armour in the Commonwealth. (The final variant, X-01 VI, beats T-51F on resistances, durability and power consumption but is harder to maintain).
- X-01 I: The original testbed prototype.
- X-01 II: Whitespring Schematic. Excellent environmental resistance, other attributes slightly improved. A diagram found in the ruins of a bunker in Appalachia by an enterprising scavenger who later died of a mysterious fungal infection.
- X-01 III: Poseidon Schematic. Excellent environmental and ballistic resistance, other attributes noticeably improved. Schematics found by an NCR salvage team scouring the ruins of the Enclave Oil Rig. Labelling the find 'classified' and 'top secret' only seems to have accelerated its leak onto the black market.
- X-01 IV: Adams AFB Schematic. Excellent resistances, average armour health. Blueprints for the Enclave's new Duraframe material were carried from the Mobile Base Crawler by Enclave remnants fleeing the advancing Brotherhood of Steel.
- X-01 V: Display model (Quantum X-01 armour). Terrible resistances and armour health, but easy to repair I guess. “Wait… this is just a model! It's made of plastic! Oh, for the love of…” Yes, turns out they don't hand over top-secret prototypes to theme parks. Fortunately, whoever was tasked with ripping out the
tech did a bad job, and by careful examination of the casing, a highly skilled technician could probably replicate the advanced components that were supposed to go in here... - X-01 VI: Institute schematic. Excellent resistances, armour health and fusion core efficiency. The energy-conscious Institute made efforts to reduce the power consumption of an X-01 that fell into their hands, but the high material costs of the suit as a whole led them to abandon it.
The X-01 is the model of power armour that sees the most improvement from version to version, as befitting a prototype. As you might expect, you will require a full investment in the armorer and science perks to even begin to upgrade this suit. Later versions may also require ranks of nuclear physicist. However, this is not all – to install the various upgrades, you will also have to find their blueprints out in the world. These come in the form of holotapes which are scattered
around the Commonwealth, one for each upgrade. I have tried to make sure these are not locked behind faction choices, so you don’t have to side with anyone
just to get the upgrade you were hoping for.
- Whitespring schematic – found in Recon Bunker Theta.
- Poseidon schematic – found in Federal Surveillance Centre K-21B.
- Adams AFB schematic – found on top of 35 Court in downtown Boston.
- Institute schematic – found in the disused FEV labs of the Institute.