If human nature has taught me anything EDNA, it’s that people just can’t keep to themselves.
A brief look at history can show you that man’s incessant need to interfere with one
another has caused every war that ever was. If neighbors could just learn to co-exist,
and if we could all acknowledge that we’re on this earth for but a short time, maybe
the Great War never had to happen. But it did happen, and atop the ashes mankind continues
to ignore the mistakes of the past. You'd think that nuclear showdown between China
and the United States would've taught us something. But I guess we're too stupid to learn, and
too stubborn to die off.
*mocking beep*
Yes EDNA, we’re like cockroaches... Any more of that lip, and I'm prying you open
to see what's gotten into you.
No matter how many soldiers,
tanks, planes, and warships they would pour in, they were still fighting on American soil.
And when the Americans deployed the first T-45s less than a year later, in 2067, they
definitely realized that.
A West-Tek frame featured servomotors and hydraulics mated with the best armor plating
they could come up with. They helped America withstand the Chinese offensive and turn the
tide, not because they were walking tanks, but because of the firepower.
The first T-45s were crude, angular things, but the T-51, finally fielded in 2075, was...
Elegant. Curved organic surfaces, providing balanced protection and mobility. They even
upgraded the T-45s, into the T-60 model, but they all had one thing in common: They couldn't
replace tanks. The T-51 was only rated for 2500 joules of damage absorption, after all.
What they could replace was heavy weapons. A crew-served machine gun or anti-tank missile?
One man could carry that into battle as if they were small arms.
That’s what most people forget about power armor EDNA. The main reason it proves useful
isn’t because of its defensive capabilities, though they are great, but because of its
offensive advantage. Once you’re using one of these frames you’re a certified Hercules,
made stronger by West Tek technology.
It's credit to the Chinese that they managed to withstand the American counterattacks and
still keep fighting, not for one, two, or five years, but almost eleven. From Alaska
in 2066, to their own territories since 2074. The bloodiest war in human history.
How did they do it? By throwing men at the enemy and hoping they would either get tired
or drown under the blood and guts. For eleven years they battled the United States, and
by the end, they were fighting across a frontline five thousand miles long, from Anchorage,
through Shantou, to Mambajao in the Phillippines. And that's in a straight line, EDNA.
You don't hold out for that long just by feeding men into the grinder. You fight it like the
Railroad by going beyond brute force. You fight it with stealth technology.
The Chinese were always ahead of the United States in that aspect and while the U.S. played
catch-up, most notably with RobCo's own Stealth Boy 3001 – not the only thing reverse engineered
from Chinese Hei Gui stealth suits – they never really caught up. Power armor may have
ruled the day, but Communist infiltrators ruled the night. Supply lines cut, officers
assassinated, all against a backdrop of trench warfare,
despite the DIA's best efforts to boot.
The Defense Intelligence Agency was one of the most technologically advanced agencies
of the Old World, trying to outwit the Red Menace. They were the ones who made that Predictive
Machine... Fed it all the data they could find, so that it could come up with a solution.
It certainly helped with small-scale problems, like the Pascale Incident in the Taiwan Straight,
but to prevent nuclear apocalypse, it would have had to play god, able to influence the
course of entire countries and change the minds of millions.
Remember what we dug up in the Capital Wastes?
*inquisitive beep*
That's right. To act, one has to listen. PAM provided reports that indicated that a comprehensive
solution had to be implemented to prevent nuclear war. It inferred with a 91% accuracy
that a stealth submarine program, the Ghost Fleet, was likely being implemented by the
Republic. But did the powers that be care enough to stop? Nope.
They fought a long, bloody war, inventing new weapons to fight it with, spending lives
and currency to uphold their ideology.
Make no mistake EDNA, for all the propaganda
and claims of fighting for the American way, there was little difference between the US
and China in the end.
Concentration camps for the Chinese and Chinese-Americans, mass censorship, brutal occupation of Canada,
killing their own citizens to maintain control... They turned the weapons they made to fight
hardened Chinese troops on civilians.
Look at me EDNA. Can an unarmed civilian stand a chance?
And that's just power armor. The military adapted its vehicle fleets, rebuilding them
around power armor. See this humble infantry fighting vehicle – no, EDNA, it's not an
APC, APCs don't have cannons to provide fire support – and the rear? They would drive
the troops into battle – or a city - and unload them. No need for heavy tanks when
a squad suffices. Then there were the Vertibirds. The VB-01 was a gunship variant designed for
ferrying troops – both regular and in power armor – into combat. Plenty of those were
knocked out of the sky in the aftermath of the Great War, plummeting to the ground, killing
everybody who was on board.
But that’ll have to be a story for another day EDNA, because while we’re here talking
about Old World blues, New World Hope arrives in the Commonwealth…