In my son’s games, models could save their plastic asses from the casualty pile stacked at the edge of the table by rolling six sided dice (D6). The lower the number, the greater the chance of them surviving, so a ‘two plus’ armour save is awesome and the sort of thing you’d find on a space marine in their heaviest power armour: terminator power armour.

A ‘five plus’ is what the Imperial Guard get with their flak armour that supposedly covers everything but their thighs, and my servitors, in their carapace armour, or the tau with their body armour get a ‘four plus’ armour save. A normal space marine is a ‘three plus’.

That sounds great and all, but the problem is I watched my servitors get butchered by that ark rifle and a carbine like they were sheep and I am pretty certain the armour wouldn’t do much good against the tau pulse rifles, which I really need to know about as I may have to fight them again and can’t afford to keep losing servitors.

I’m going to be really annoyed if I find this power armour I’ve been wearing is a bit pointless.

The first thing I discover, while checking the armoury list to see what is available for testing, is that flak armour is nothing like I thought it was. It is neither standardised or equal: some are woven fibres, others are plates of ceramite, or armaplas, a plastic composite. The coverage each type offers varies wildly from big greatcoats and hard vests to complete torso armour with armoured boots and joint pads.

Sure they’re all ‘five plus’ but I suspect the nuance of it is going to make a massive difference.

In the end, I select a Krieg greatcoat, a flak vest, a Cadian breastplate, and a mesh suit, the imperial version, not my Federation one. A servitor delivers them from the armoury and I take them to a long grey room, dotted with acoustic pads. Four testing dummies go at one end, each wearing a piece of armour and I collect my weapons.

First up is a plasteel replica of a Beretta M9, with bullets filled with twenty first century explosives, a dual mix of nitrocellulose and nitroglycerine and a few other minor additives. I load the gun, take aim, and fire.

The shot flies ten metres down range and hits the greatcoat. I continue firing, putting one round into each armour.

The greatcoat is made from synthetic fibre dipped in ceramite and it stops the bullet easily, it doesn’t even fray the fabric. The armaplas flak vest melts slightly, but stops the round. It would take at least a mag in the same spot to get through.

The Cadian breastplate is a mix of fibres and ceramite plates. The round flattens and the sensors report the least damage to the dummy underneath so far. The mesh suit is similar to the greatcoat, though it offers full body coverage, and stops the round, though like the great coat, you’d be feeling that shot for weeks.

My next test is the same M9, this time with fycline, the Imperium’s standard high explosive. If it wasn’t for the power armour, I would have struggled with the recoil, but the M9 survives the experience, as do all the armours, though each take noticeable damage.

I repeat the test with an SA80A3, the British Army rifle. Again, all eight rounds are stopped, though whoever was wearing a greatcoat or mesh suit would have broken ribs and some internal bleeding. A las pistol and a lasgun go next and, they too, are stopped.

For a minute, I stop and stare. It turns out, ‘five plus’ is pretty fucking amazing. The Cadian armour is the best against laser weapons and the armaplas vest holds up better against ballistics. The mesh suit and greatcoat work and offer much better coverage, but would leave the wearer injured.

The mesh suit is the lightest, at two kilograms, or four point five if you add in the gloves, boots, and cowl. It’s also the most difficult to make and is the only set that offers full coverage. Some variants also have temperature regulation and water retention systems.

The Krieg great coat is easy to manufacture and repair. The coat offers chemical protection that none of the other armours do and, when closed, almost offers full body protection too.

The vest only weighs a kilo and is super easy to make and repair, but it only covers the torso. It would be two kilos with a helmet. They have a full face plate and are quite heavy.

The Cadian torso armour, with the accompanying boots and helmet, is five kilograms and a little more complex. While manufacture is easy, its composite construction means repairs leave weak spots and full replacements are better, but that can strain logistics. It’s also the heaviest.

I continue my tests with armour piercing rounds, a plasma gun, a bolter, and a hell pistol. Against these heavier weapons, the armours do less well.

An armour piercing round struggles to penetrate the greatcoat and mesh suit, but pierces the armaplas vest and shatters the Cadian armour, getting caught on the fibres beneath. In all cases, the sensors report an injury a soldier would survive if they received immediate first aid as long as it wasn’t your head or heart.

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The plasma gun, bolter, and hell pistol annihilate flak armour, killing the wearer.

Against the heavier weapons, testing imperial carapace armour and tau armour gets a similar result to the armour piercing stubber rounds for the flak armours: as long as you survive long enough to get help, you’ll hobble away with a story and some new cybernetics.

Unless it’s a bolter. That explosive is terminal if it gets through the armour, so you better hope it doesn’t hit you square on. The variant bolter rounds, like kraken armour piercing rounds, or hellfire mutagenic acid rounds are total overkill against all but the heaviest targets; I have to get new dummies and armours afterwards. There are many more types of bolter rounds, one for every conceivable scenario, but I don’t test any more of them as the result would be the same: death.

The carapace armour offers full coverage and weighs sixteen kilos. My best estimate for tau body armour is twelve kilos. Without a full set, I just can’t be sure.

I do notice, however, that the tau armour has a metallic coating with similar properties to the sparkle paint I found on the federation space station, making tau armour extra effective against energy weapons like las weapons and plasma guns. Its nanocrystalline structure, however, is similar to ceramite and prone to shattering when hit with sufficient kinetic force, though it would require a crew served weapon or bolter to do so.

These tests are making it very obvious why space marines love bolters as they have the force to penetrate ballistic armour and shatter energy weapon armour. It’s a real shame almost all bolters require power armour to use and fire expensive, heavy bullets, otherwise every guardsman would be using one too.

It is also clear that the pulse rifles, which are similar in effect to imperial plasma weapons, only distributed to every soldier rather than one or two per company, will shred flak armour and disable servitors wearing carapace. It’s also clear lasguns are particularly useless against the tau; I will need to expand my loadouts drastically.

My opponent already has some solutions. The extra shoulder armour that the tau fire warriors have, which acts like a buckler when a fire warrior takes a knee, really appeals to me. It’s just the thing to keep an explosive penetrating round wasting its payload away from the wearer's torso.

I will have to think about how I can add something similar to the servitor loadout.

My favourite test is on a spare set of dragonscale armour as it survives everything I throw at it, though repeated blasts of the more powerful weapons would get through if you hit the same spot three or four times. It can’t take multiple kraken bolts, though it does dissipate enough force that, with my implants, I would survive the experience.

I’m so glad I have power armour and a refractor shield. Looting a Mechanicus light cruiser is awesome. Wearing it, I almost feel safe.

I throw the data I have collected into the research matrix to see if it can optimise my servitor body armour and feed it a few of my ideas as a starting point.

Feeling jolly, I end my research for the day and seek out Quaani. It's not good to leave a teenage psyker to brood and I fancy a heroic feast. If I’m going to risk my life against the tau for people I’ve never met, I’m damn well going to celebrate my success and wash away the fear with amasec and steak.

A new day, and fourteen months later, sees me in another fine mood. I have discovered that, even with perfect digital twins for simulation, tireless cyborg slave labour, and machine-spirit optimised schedules, mega projects take a long time.

Even so! Today is the big day.

A cavernous asteroid stretches out before me in an epic eight by three kilometre cylinder. Metal gantries and their supporting tracks run up and down the structure and dozens of kilometres of catwalks fill in the gaps, all bolted to the ferrocrete reinforced walls.

Within the interior float six, five kilometre adamantine beams, slowly being manoeuvred into a hexagon, two kilometres across. Another six, three kilometres beams lie at one end, arranged to slide between the six larger beams.

The beams are twenty metres thick, pretty tiny in relation to the entire ship, yet their strength, once connected in an adamantine lattice, similar in shape to carbon sixty, is great enough to withstand the forces that will act on the ship.

The beams and lattice will support the main hull plates, welded by nanites, to create a single continuous double skinned cylinder, upon which the remainder of the vessel will be built out. The vessel will receive an outer hull lattice, connected to the inner hull with great struts, that will bear the majority of the vessel’s armour and fold out to create additional manufactory space when the shipyard is in use and provide access to many of the ship’s myriad systems.

All the folding mechanisms make it less sturdy than an imperial vessel, though it will no doubt take significant fire to destroy the ship, damaging its production capabilities will be fairly easy. I will really need to keep this vessel from combat, but with it, I can build a fleet, outfit an army, or build up a planet and its orbitals wherever I please.

I’m really excited about finishing it. I’ll even have twenty years to train and outfit the crew if my schedule goes to plan. Keeping that thought in mind, I leave the shipyard, though I have five minds focused on it at all times, and head for the academy I founded four months ago.

I had intended to hold classes on the ground, but that plan evaporated beneath the heated glare of hundreds of plasma torches when I started dismantling and looting the enclave, using the machines and materials to build my shipyard and trading post.

Entering the classroom, I see all twelve of my new students are waiting for me. There are only two women in the group. While the Mechanicus considers sex and gender a quirk of the flesh, Marwolv has significant division of labour based on sex and gender. The two women were teachers and the men were bone smiths.

My students wear mesh suits under kilts or kilted skirts, white shirts, and red waistcoats. I chose the uniform for its protection and to give them a connection to their home.

For now, I am teaching twelve classes of twelve students, who each get a one hour class once a week. The remainder of the time is spent in self, or communal study using the sophisticated owl class machine-spirits on their datapads that create personalised courses for each student. It is an immensely efficient and effective system, one that has pushed my role from lecturer to pastor.

You know what? I think that makes me a real tech-priest.