PRAETORIAN-Class Mjolnir

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"The Universe has proven, time and time again, that the only thing that matters isn't a moral compass or a sense of right and wrong. The universe is impartial in its affairs, and uniform in any destruction it chooses to meter out. It has neither pity nor mercy, simply draconian laws that it enforces with a logistical efficiency we could only ever dream of."

- Commander in Chief of the Office of Naval Intelligence Admiral Serin Osman, 2555

The ███ ████ ██ ████ armour, also known as 'PRAETORIAN'-class MJOLNIR, is a specialised suit of worn by  personnel. Though the title of PRAETORIAN is in fact a misnomer, use by elite personnel has given the armour its name, owed to Office censorship and NDAs, signed by both researchers and operators. It is forbidden for even the personnel who make use of the PRAETORIAN armour to discuss its specifications, classification, or name, thus giving rise to the unofficial yet widely-adopted moniker of 'PRAETORIAN'.

Developed by the  some time post-Covenant war, the armour would remain in design and theory phase for years before significant funding, resources, and personnel could be assigned to the task of creating and perfecting the armour system.

During prototype-phase testing, the early iterations of the armour proved too much for even augmented individuals to handle. The sheer volume of initial features, both electronic and physical, would induce sensory overload, heightened by enhanced augmented senses and reaction times. This proved a challenge to overcome without sacrificing the armour's overall effectiveness in combat.

Subsequent variants of the armour would be deployed prior to official completion, in areas of high strategic importance, as a way to properly field test the armour in real-world combat scenarios.

Despite completion of the project to develop the armour system, and despite the successful track record of deployment, ONI files and information on the armour is still classified, punishable by incarceration in the Midnight facility, or summary execution for treason and possible sedition. All research personnel and operators are under heavy observation.

The armour features design inspirations from several previous iterations of MJOLNIR, and combines them in an effort to increase user survivability. Though the official goal was to increase the armours survivability rate in combat, and user longevity was simply a side effect.

By 2556, the armour was in use by no more than fifteen S-IV personnel. The limited operators making use of the system were brought together under one banner; Delta-V. As an unofficial mirror to Kilo-Five, Delta-V would answer and receive orders directly from the highest line of ONI Command, answering only to them.

Delta-Vs perceived elitism and lack of respect for local command chains would cause friction with other members of UNSC staff in the coming years.

By 2557, production was shut down in favour of quality rather than quantity, and because costs were too high to continue. Between 2556, and 2557, only two more suits were constructed, both of them were replacements for heavily damaged units. Replacement components for damaged suits became increasingly rare, and some technology was disseminated throughout existing suits of MJOLNIR, most notably the improved electronic warfare suites, and the Midnight Redux VISR.

=Design History=

"In the Universal sense, the only thing that really matters is survival. Mankind has had its survival tested in these past decades, more than it ever has before. We barely rose to the challenge, and even with outside forces aiding our victory, we struggled to push the enemy back. No more."

- CINCONI Admiral Serin Osman, 2555

In late 2550, several researchers and Engineers at ONI Section III's Materials Group came together under an unofficial banner to design and create an armour system of unparalleled sophistication, technological advancement, and physical prowess. The result of this joint theoretical exercise would form the early bases for PRAETORIAN.

However, the project, then unnamed, would not see any progress for the next three years, due to the development of the far more ergonomical and cost-efficient MJOLNIR GEN2 variants, as well as the existence of. Due to both of these factors, the fledgling PRAETORIAN suit would be shelved, and the research personnel re-assigned to separate projects in 2553.

Despite this, the researchers would still meet up at least once a month, and compare notes and potential ideas. Now, they needed to get past the theoretical stages, and into the practical. Three of the seven researchers worked with materials that were key in the construction of MJOLNIR. Their departments soon reported strange absences of said materials.

All eight of the Engineers were able to claim funds from their respective departments to gather other resources for the construction and testing of rudimentary PRAETORIAN components. This went on for nearly a full year before caught wind of these activities, and had the researchers and engineers forcibly removed, and the entire operation shut down, pending investigation.

In late 2553, despite making breakthroughs on the implementation of multiple features, and despite having an almost-functioning prototype iteration ready for testing, the entire project was shut down, and threats of imprisonment were made.

In May of 2554, Admiral Parangosky stepped down as CINCONI, and was succeeded by Admiral Serin Osman. In a missive addressed to the researchers of what she would dub 'Project: Nightingale', Osman applauded the efforts of the researchers to go above and beyond in their experiments. Rather than reprimand them for the siphoning of materials and funds towards their own exploits, she instead gave them a lab, allowed them access to other suits of MJOLNIR, and told them to keep working.

Project: NIGHTINGALE
With official backing by the Office, and threats of imprisonment no longer dogging their steps, the researchers and engineers of Project: NIGHTINGALE were free to experiment almost with impunity. They were free to now formally requisition other, more exotic materials; nanomachines, nano-laminate plating, and other suits of MJOLNIR. Their goals began to take shape as an impenetrable suit of armour, and many of the personnel working on NIGHTINGALE were excited to think that perhaps this would be the new generation of armour.

Instead, their experiments ran into a snag, as the armour had not the BIOS software to run as many features as they wanted to implement, their request for exotic materials was denied, and the power usage of the armour forced it to be hooked up to an external generator to supplement its systems. These drawbacks, and the bureaucratic red-tape, stonewalled the development team for months while they attempted to find ways around them.

Eventually, many of the researchers instead began to believe that the armour was a dead-end, and they should focus, like many other manufacturers did, on specialisation, and focusing on one aspect of a Spartan's operative capacity, rather than attempt to broadly cover as much as possible with one brush.

A rift formed between researchers, and the two camps often found themselves at odds. All the while, Admiral Serin Osman, growing weary of seeing funds go to waste, issued an ultimatum; decide on a course of action, or she would decide for them.

Nanolaminate Dreams
Against the better judgment of the other half of the researchers, the original group banded together and attempted to broker a settlement between the two camps, by forcing their hands and giving them a direction with which to focus their efforts. Four other suits of MJOLNIR armour were requested by the researchers;


 * A rare suit of the newly-produced and heavily-scrutinized Helioskrill armour.
 * A damaged suit of EOD armour.
 * A pre-processed suit of HAZOP armour.
 * A defunct suit of MkVII armour.

The team were called into a meeting with Osman, once the requests were sent up the chain of command. For three hours they were in her office, and refused to share details of the meeting to anyone but each other once they emerged. All four requests were approved by Osman later that afternoon.

With the suits delivered, the team could finally begin. The suits were revealed to the group at large, with the revelation that they were going to attempt to combine the armour sets into one—their suit of PRAETORIAN armour. The functionality and survivability of EOD, the hazardous operational capacity of HAZOP, the nanolaminate plating of Helioskrill, and the nanomachines from MkVII. This would be the culmination of human technological advancement, all they had to do was make it work.

The initial attempt to remove the nanolaminate materials from Helioskrill while preserving their integrity proved to be a failure. Nanolamination by itself was a process that was at least fundamentally understood by Humanity, though the process by which the Sangheili and the Covenant created their materials was still widely regarded as a mystery.

Harvesting the material proved tedious, and difficult, as human understanding of Covenant materials was still somewhat lackluster.

In a process similar to how one separates gold and silver from, researchers bathed the armour in an acidic compound, alongside a reclaimed sheet of nanolaminate material taken from the armour. The armour, set to rotate slowly, was stripped of all Nanolaminate plating, which formed in complex crystalline structures on the positively-charged sheet.

Researchers found that these crystalline structures were themselves incredibly dense, and in reconstituting the material with human nanolamination procedures, much of the initial strength of the Covenant plating was lost, except when used in very thin, compressed strands. These strands, when weaved together with Titanium fibers, created an incredibly flexible and tear-resistant bodysuit, with an effective thermal resistance threshold almost twice that of titanium alone.

Nano-Integration
With the bodysuit undergoing modifications to include nanolaminate microweave, a second party of researchers took a look at the hydrostatic gel found within it. Seeking a way to improve upon it, the researchers experimented with introducing nanomachines harvested from the MkVII suit, and inserting them as micro-supports, arranging themselves into structural formations within the layers of the bodysuit, effectively increasing the impact-absorbing properties of the suit itself.

The nanomachines were also programmed to seek out clumped up and solidified hydrostatic clusters, where the gel had congealed due to repeated impacts, or long-term use. The nanomachines proved highly effective at this role, and so serve the purposes of bodysuit repair, hydrostatic gel maintenance, and absorption increases.

No changes were made to the liquid metal crystal layer.

With the bodysuit complete, the researchers and engineers could now work on the armour, the helmet, and the fusion reactor.

Factory Overclock
Owed to the planned features and electronic warfare portion of the armour, engineers found that the armour's single miniaturised fusion reactor was insufficient to provide power to the bodysuit, the armour, and the OS and various programs attached to it. Engineers and research personnel began experimenting on the four micro-fusion reactors that they had from the different requisitioned suits, first attempting to run them all into a single destination, then hooking them up together to run on the same system.

What they found was that two or more fusion reactors together could cause a feedback loop and lead to disastrous consequences, including internal cascade failures, breaches, and detonation.

This research would later go on to influence the functionality of the DMS-11 Materiél Denial system, implemented into the armour upon its completion.

For the meantime, researchers focused on controlling and directing this feedback loop, inducing it in the remaining two reactors, and sustaining it in a controlled way. What they found was that, not only could the two reactors provide sufficient power, but the controlled feedback loop, when induced, would produce an 'overclock' effect, that would push the armour system to heightened levels of efficiency, at the risk of danger to the armour and occupant should the loop be sustained.

The Sangheili-manufactured pinch-fusion reactor from the Helioskrill set was not delivered with the armour system, when requisitioned.

System Diagnostics
Installation of the various electronic and counter-espionage programs and suites from the different armours became problematic, as many overlapped with redundant features and contradictory data feedback. This was not simply a case of lifting them from one suit into the other, programming engineers had to jump over each different program, omitting or deleting various different functions to get the different components of the programs to gel. An example would be the compound analytics inherent in EOD suits conflicting with compound scanning tools found in HAZOP gear.

Eventually, the programmers considered using a rudimentary virtual assistance program to assist the user with running and collating the data so that other programs and subroutines were not activated, thus conflicting with the current program. This idea was ultimately scrapped, as higher powers wished for the operators to function as autonomously as possible.

Eventually it was found that stripping the different suites down to barebones functionality and building them back up helped to save space and deal with the conflicts, however this would give the engineers a different problem; gaps in virtual functionality. Now, the compound analysis of EOD and the scanning of HAZOP would not conflict, however, the user could no longer perform a task as simple as scan the composition of the surrounding atmosphere; a feature inherent in the vast majority of MJOLNIR and non-MJOLNIR armour suits.

The inclusion of Artemis Tracking on a wrist-mounted external device helped bridge these remaining gaps, and the BIOS was altered to allow for the different digital architecture to fit into place seamlessly, with limited autonomous regulation.

Sister Project: SPARROW
A sister project to NIGHTINGALE was implemented shortly after the missive sent by Osman to the research staff working on PRAETORIAN. This sister project, undertaken by a separate team, was an effort to create a Directed Energy Weapon with a mounted dedicated power supply. A pinch fusion reactor from a defunct and broken suit of Helioskrill armour was used to generate the plasma and power needed to operate the weapon, while an external feedbox provided charged particles of exotic matter, increasing the weapon's lethality.

The pack and weapon, wieldable only by augmented individuals, could be mounted on the back of a suit of MJOLNIR armour. An attached reactor feed cable was placed on the pack to allow for possible harmony between a MJOLNIR fusion reactor and the pinch-fusion reactor of the weaponry, allowing the user greater rate of fire. When overclocked, the twin fusion reactors of PRAETORIAN increases this rate of fire even further, to the point where, if pushed to the absolute limit, the weapon may produce an endless stream of energy, decimating any opponent in its path.

Helmet
The helmet itself went through a number of iterative changes before the agreed-upon EOD-inspired design. Originally, a modified MJOLNIR variant of the ODST helmet was to be used, for functionality and operational efficiency, however, fears arose over the exterior visor being so large, and relatively under-armoured when compared to the supplementary plating the rest of the armour was receiving.

Eventually, the base architecture was re-designed to resemble EOD at least in some respects, while the ODST-variant was shelved for potential component harvesting and emergency replacement, should the need arise. This change did not come before ONI used a render of the armour in recruitment messages to chosen S-IV operatives, nor did it come before operators wearing the PRAETORIAN suit were deployed on at least two combat scenarios to field-test the armour.

Researchers and Engineers both heard the rumour that Serin Osman herself had ordered the change, for reasons as yet undisclosed, and the concerns about the visor being under armoured were produced as a cover to hide CINCONI's interference in the project.

Shaped Shields
Shaped Energy Shielding technology, having already been implemented in the GEN2 DECIMATOR MJOLNIR variant, was added at the request of one of the original researchers. The shaping modulator was added as an attachment to the Artemis system, as a way to manually modulate their configurations into one of three possible variations; interlocking shielding for increased protection, air brakes for controlled descent, and standard shaped formation over the additional plating for greater efficiency.

Due to the researchers not being able to requisition yet another suit of MJOLNIR, the shaped energy shielding had to be reverse-engineered from existing Materials Group research documents and trial-and-error testing. Eventually the system was implemented in a rudimentary fashion for the earlier versions of the armour, and would later be refined for the official final build.

Implementation
Adding a human element to the PRAETORIAN suit was the last, and arguably most dangerous, step in the process. Finding users with high enough aptitude to handle the armour's myriad systems without inducing sensory overload was challenging, nigh impossible, in fact. Eventually, booster shots were administered to assist the user in processing the information received.

However, concerns were raised over the health of the operator, and long-term viability of using 'enhancements' in the personnel they employed.

Unwilling to change the armour's electronic functionality, and unwilling to compromise on user comfort, the decision was made to repurpose the biofoam injectors to deploy enhancements only when the user felt them absolutely necessary. In combat scenarios, a maximum of two enhancements to the user could be injected before stores would need to be replenished. For health reasons, these enhancements were not to be used unless the user requires maximum functionality in combat scenarios where they would otherwise be in danger of death.

Production
Once volunteers were secured, researchers and engineers presented their work to Osman and a board of five individuals from the upper echelons of the Office. Satisfied with the work presented, questions of cost were now asked. The overall use of five full suits of MJOLNIR armour, including two incredibly rare sets, meant that the armour was immediately infeasible for large-scale production. However, a small handful of suits could be created for a single fireteam of perhaps a half dozen individuals, but that alone would be twice the cost of the Home Fleet.

In an effort to demonstrate the effectiveness of the armour, two extra suits were fast-tracked through the production stage by Serin Osman, and three chosen operators were deployed on a real-world combat operation to field test the armour in 2555.

The researchers and engineers decried the potential waste of resources should anything go awry, but their concerns were overridden by Osman's rebuttal that if the armour was indeed all they aspired to make it, then there would be no trouble at all. At this stage, the armour was in its penultimate iteration, featuring an ODST helmet and less electronic features, notably absent was the Artemis Tracking Device. However, the twin Operators were able to complete their mission objectives, and gather valuable data for researchers and engineers to make last-minute tweaks to the system's OS.

Now thoroughly convinced, Osman approved the construction of three more suits over the coming few years. It was at this point the helmet underwent its changes from an ODST inspired design to an EOD inspired design.

The nanolaminate and nanomachines were siphoned from other projects under the guise of experimental, non-standard testing. Sourcing materials from other projects under the Materials Group's wide umbrella helped mitigate some of the cost, as while the money was still being spent, now more of it was indirectly funnelled into the suit through covert means.

Eventually the armour made it to the production stage, and the suits began construction earlier than anticipated, due to the length of the process.

=Recruitment=

"With this project, we guard the Rome of our age. We safeguard human civilisation, and take new steps into the future where Mankind survives, no matter the moral quandaries that would bog down the individual. We stand tall, and if the time comes where the universe must choose between us, or everyone else, we will force it to choose us"

- CINCONI Admiral Serin Osman, 2555

At some point during the design phase, human subjects were introduced to the armour to help better pair an augmented individual with it. Initially, the armour caused severe mental stress, sensory overload, and, in one case, a problem with the nanomachine components caused the armour to permanently lock up and constrict the wearer to the point where several of the subject's bones developed hairline fractures.

=Combat Role=

The PRAETORIAN suit occupies a niche in armour system functionality in that it occupies no niche. It is a jack-of-all-trades armour system, that focuses in being unfocused in its specialty. Due to the dynamic nature of Delta-V deployment objectives, and the constantly-shifting nature of the theatres they are employed in, andthe low number of suits and operators, the design scope of the PRAETORIAN armour came to encompass as many potential operational scenarios that the operators may encounter as possible.

For forward/force recon, the armour features peer-to-peer uplink suites and electronic warfare capabilities. For direct action, the armour comes with an optional attached DEW cannon. For stealth actions, the armour can be fitted with several different enhancements and abilities, and for heavy assault, the armour can be fine tuned to have shaped energy shielding, increased power reserves, and unrivalled speed.

This significantly drives up production costs, deployment, and maintenance times, and requires a complex diagnostics feature that the operators must learn to navigate prior to donning the armour.

First Blood
While the suits of companion armour were still being produced, the single active suit and operator were deployed

The first official deployment of the PRAETORIAN armour, on the moon of Reichenbach, saw three members of the newly-formed Delta-V recovered personnel and equipment from several downed UNSC aircraft, all while engaging Jackal scavengers. The use of the suits in combat gave researchers valuable information and data on how to fine-tune the later, and final stages, of the PRAETORIAN suit. All three suits, and their operators, survived.

Whetstone Initiative
The PRAETORIAN armour is maintained and repaired under the Whetstone Initiative, which deals with the maintenance and continued operation of all ONI-affiliated S-IV operators and MJOLNIR armour units, as well as attached SOF forces. This is separate from those under NAVSPECWAR jurisdiction.