Did it ever explain exactly how strong they are?

Strong enough to allow one person to take a whole town by themselves. T-51b power armour is what broke China's back and allowed America to over run most of China.

Brotherhood also had cybernetics implants to boots their SPECIAL, along with T-51b, they were very strong. Killing one is very hard to do in Fallout.

The Armor's hydraulics and servos are supposedly strong enough to enable one to carry a helicopter's nose gun around as a personal weapon, and actually fire it while standing up provided you first lock the leg joints in place.

As for the plating, it's designed to take concentrated fire; most conventional weapons won't do much more than put a lot of dents in it, which is why you need the heavy stuff to get through.

These conversations make my head hurt. Of course the gameplay and the lore are going to be a little different. I, for one, think the devs did a great job.

They did do a great job I think. Yeah, I kind of like the idea of power armor making you a walking tank, but it wouldn't make for a very fun game being invincible to 99% of the enemies you come across. It's like in Halo, the books tell you how tough a Spartan really is, and it's never transferred over to the games because of the same reason. The Chief can catch a tank shell in mid-air like a football and he can knock rockets away with just a precision timed palm-slap to the rocket itself. But things like that don't transfer over well to a game where there needs to be some challenge.

This is an interesting topic, and although I'm fine with how PA works in FONV,

I got to wondering if it could work having both a DT value, and a DR value on Power Armors?

That way, PAs could have a slight gameplay edge over medium armors that have the same DT and over other heavy armors, without getting ridiculously powerful with a higher DT value. So just throwing out some ideas as to how DR could be implemented: the T-45 could maybe have a DR of 10% added, the T-51 maybe a DR of 15% and the Remnants with a DR of 20%?

AMR's were originally anti-tank weapons, first developed during World War I on the basis of high-powered "elephant guns" for big game hunting. ATRs used by Poland during the 1939 Nazi invention could punch through 15mm sloped armor at 300 meters and through 33mm armor at 100 meters, which was sufficient to punch through any German tank involved in the fighting. (Which is why after the conclusion of the Poland invasion almost all of the German tank force was recalled to factories for armor upgrade to 50mm). Russian 14.5mm PTRS rifle could punch through 40mm armor at 100m and was successfully used against German armored cars and personnel carriers throughout the war. Today there are AMRs out there firing 20mm HE shells originally designed for World War II-era anti-aircraft autocannons. Those can punch through almost any modern armored vehicle except tanks (and maybe the Israeli heavy APCs which are basically converted tanks, sometimes even with beefed-up armor).

Re: Power armor. I think it should be vunlerable to high-caliber guns like AMR, while other small arms should be able to degrade it with successive hits and punch through on criticals and head shots. This should be coupled with high user cost of the armor; it must run on some sort of power cells and weight so much that it would be impractical for general exploration and scavenging. It should also significantly reduce Agility, walking and turning speed in all models.

I beg to differ. You could never fire enough small arms to penetrate the side of a battleship. It is 21 inches of pure steel. It would take over 20,000 years of oxidization to eat through it.

A bullet could dent it, but the steel can take all the hits forever simply because it is able to absorb the kinetic energy of each bullet.

Wiki doesn't cover mods.

And Even Kevlar isn't bulletproof. If you look at it after it took a shot, you will see that the pullet penetrated several layers. You could not reuse it after that. Kevlar is just very durable.

If they designed it right, making power armor impervious to small arms would be perfectly fine if they made energy weapons more powerful against them.

Game mechanics have no place in a discussion in lore and cannon

I disagree. Gameplay-wise it's restrictive to have even one weapon skills be useless against power armor. The player shouldn't be forced to go the EW route because he can't punch through Power Armor otherwise.
Likewise a player character in power armor would become unstoppable to most NPC enemies, since energy weapons are rare among them. Not to mention that damage doesn't come in category of weapon skill, so you'd have to work with scripts to work it that way.

The best you can do is design Power Armor to be immune (or near immune) to lower level weapons.

The entire thread hinges on that, though, and thus this is not a discussion of solely lore and cannon.
They are discussing how the lore talk in game doesn't match the game-play of Power Armor.

Thats not necessarily a contradiction. Lt. Haggerty, if I recall, makes no mention of NCR Veteran Rangers at the Battle of Helios One. In fact, the Veteran Rangers shoudn't have been in the Mojave at all, since its only later that they are called up "from Baja".

The BOS were more than likely facing NCR grunts with minimal training and experience. This, given their weapons/armor and a defensive position (which we can't really replicate in-game) and they could still put up a "hell of a fight" with a 20 to 1 disadvantage.


This I agree with, and considering how the Remanats "carved a swathe of destruction" through the Legion in one of the endings, it makes it all the more silly.

But once again, its a game mechanic.