Armor on non-humanoid ancestries

[Moximus]

So in the process of creating a Novian Solarian, I had the puzzling thought - how do you put armor of any kind on a floating ball of plasma?

The majority of armors are made for characters in a somewhat humanoid shape. For all the non-humanoid ancestries, what armor do they wear?

Do we just handwave it as "an equivalent with identical stats is available for your ancestry"?

Or should those oddly shaped ancestries stick to armors like Hardlight or Swarm Suits, so it's more force fields or nanites which can deal with the odd shapes?

[Driftbourne]

Skttermanders, Humans, and Shobads are all humanoids; none of them have the same number of arms, and they are all different sizes. Elebrains and Kasatha are also humanoids but have differently shaped heads. Point being, all new armor is assumed to be fitter to the wearer.

A Novian in heavy armor is kind of like a mini Dyson sphere, although Novian-powered power armor would be a true mini Dyson sphere. The other way to look at Novians in armor is that the armor is also a containment system so they don't catch everything around them on fire.

Doing a quick search, I don't see any specific SF2e rules on it, but in SF1e Core Rulebook it says.

"Armor comes in different sizes for different creatures, and you might have to adjust a suit of armor to fit you if it wasn’t made for your race. A ysoki can’t effectively wear armor made for a human, and a kasatha needs to adjust armor that was made for a two-armed creature. If it’s in doubt whether a creature can fit the suit, the GM decides whether the armor needs to be adjusted. When you buy armor new, the purchase price includes any adjustments."

"If you get secondhand armor that wasn’t tailored for you, you can have it adjusted, which requires a successful Engineering check (DC = 10 + 2 × the armor’s level). Alternatively, you can spend 10% of the armor’s purchase price to have it adjusted by a professional—typically an armorsmith or anyone with multiple ranks in Engineering."

[Moximus]

Yeah, I too failed to find anything in the SF2E rules. Nice to know they actually thought about it in first edition.

Going with "use the stats as written, and re-flavor the description as needed to suit the beings shape".

Though loving the image of the miniature Dyson sphere!

[Driftbourne]

I play a Barathu Solarian with the Brutaris Player background. Plays on a pirate-themed Brutaris team. The team uniform is Freebooter Armor. I have the breastplate as a top shell cover and the overcoat described as wide straps of overlapping leather. When resting, they look like a scrap pile of leather.

I did think about using Hardlight armor, but they are too low dex to make it work, and once I came up with the pirate-themed team, the Freebooter Armor was perfect.

[Justnobodyfqwl]

Yeah, I read it as "this is a cosmopolitan scifi setting where a non-zero amount of the population are sapient stars". I just assume that all armor and weapons have the best version of the Back to the Future 2 velco straps, or otherwise literally nothing good is lootable.

[Zoken44]

I would also imagine anyone with a maker's app would be able to find "conversion guides" online to making armor for one species work for another.

and as Far as Novians go, I would imagine the armor could just kind of float in your gravitational field, like rotating plates that kind of swirl over your surface.

[Perpdepog]

I personally think of novian armor as a ton of tiny, flat, "stations" or "satellites" that float in tight formation around the novian with gaps for their plasma limbs to reach out.

Or, for heavier armors, something like a squat, floating mech with the novian's body sitting where the power core/reactor might go.