IOWA

The Immediate Overland Weaponised Armour is an advanced artillery platform designed by arms manufacturing firm Kaerhart-Zoraki. In essence it compresses the offensive power of the last big-gun battleships of the 1940s along with far superior defence into a human-sized platform.

Technical overview
The IOWA consists of a humanoid pilot’s suit three meters in height and an attached metal frame with the four weapon turrets mounted on it.

Armament and associated technology
20.3mm cannons: The IOWA’s primary weapons, of which twelve are mounted in four three-gun turrets. Each cannon, using railgun technology to accelerate its shells, has a maximum range of 40 kilometres and a maximum fire rate of 20 rounds per minute. Standard armour-piercing shells can penetrate armour equivalent to 5 meters of conventional steel. The yield of light explosive shells us undiclosed at this time. Heavy explosive shells have a yield of 15 kilotons of TNT.

6.35mm guns: eight of these guns are mounted in four two-gun sponsons on the side of the turrets. Each cannon, using coilgun technology to accelerate its shells, has a range of 4 kilometres, a maximum fire rate of 150 rounds per minute. The types of shells available and their yield and armour penetration are undisclosed at this time.

CIWS turrets: Two 1mm Gatling railguns mounted in sub-turrets on top of the upper main turrets. Extensive tests in controlled environments and in the field have proven them to be capable of a maximum target saturation of fifty Torrent anti-armour missiles per second in omnidirectional salvoes.

Fire control: Modern targeting computers and fire control systems allow the IOWA to place a full volley of twelve 20.3mm shells in a radius of one meter of the targeted point and steadily decrease that radius with continuous fire on the same target point, or to target every individual 20.3mm and 6.35mm gun on a different point simultaneously with no loss of accuracy, all while co-ordinating the point-defence turrets at maximum target saturation. Firing on the move is no impediment to accuracy even at maximum speed.

Easy Logistics: The IOWA is one of the first systems to employ Kaerhart-Zoraki’s revolutionary Easy Logistics technology. Using specialised biometallic nanomachines and exotic pseudo-magnets the suit can consume metallic substances within a certain distance of it and transmute them into shells and explosives to replenish its magazines.

Armour and composition
The IOWA pilot suit is constructed of biometallic composites, a fusion of shape-shifting supermetals and genetically engineered pseudo-organic materials. It would be wrong to call the suit a cyborg construct as that term implies an organic body enhanced by distinct machine parts; studying a sample of biometallic composite one would be hard-pressed to determine what parts of its composition are mechanical and what parts are in fact flesh. The outer armour layer, three millimetres thick and encompassing the entire suit, provides equivalent protection to 3 metres of conventional steel.

Components outside the suit use duryllium armour, an advanced alloy whose composition is kept a closely-guarded secret by destructive anti-theft nanotechnology and the tireless work of Mitsuko Zoraki’s lawyers. The turrets are armoured in one tenth of a millimetre of duryllium offering equivalent protection to 5 metres of conventional steel.

Mobility and maneuverability
The suit possesses incredibly advanced biometallic musculature, allowing it to run at a maximum speed of 60 kilometres per hour. Advanced inertial dampeners allow it to turn in a tiny radius even at full speed and an internal shock suit prevents the pilot from being injured by such movement.

As the pilot’s brain is interfaced directly with the suit’s computers his or her reaction times are drastically boosted to match the suit’s full potential; even inexperienced users have proven themselves able to dodge fully-automatic bursts of fire from early 21st-century assault rifles at point-blank range in controlled tests.