For one of the BoS missions, i got a legendary piece of power armour as a reward. Since i only use power armour sometimes, i figured it'd be more useful putting it on Paladin Danse, my current companion.

He's normally lugging around several heavy weapons for me, and near-capacity on his inventory, so i had to take the Fat Man off him in order to give him the new plate. That done, i told him to equip it. Immediate visual change, it worked.

However the old chestplate he was wearing, doesn't appear in his inventory. I've seen this before with base outfits on settlers, so i figured just close and reopen his inventory. Nope, still not there.

So i figure, maybe the game just deleted it when i replaced it. Well whatever, i tried to give him the Fat Man back. But he has no inventory space .He's lugging around an invisible chestplate he's not using, and i can't remove it.

Clearly this has gone all wrong, i'm trying to back out. So i took the new chestplate off of him, expecting his old one to magically reappear.

Nope.

So now i'm in a sticky situation. I either let danse keep the new chestplate, and forever carry around an unremovable 24lb weight, or i take it off him, restoring his carrying capacity to normal, but leaving him with a huge hole in his armour. Both of these situations are stupid.

Help me

The ideal would be to find and remove the old plate.

Failing that, how can i just make his old plate reappear

Is this 'his' armour that you replaced. Like, I mean his vanilla armour?

If so I'm not sure that they do appear. Maybe to stop players stealing his power armour?

Try reloading an earlier save.

The suit of power armour he wears by default, yes.

That would be silly, if you have access to the BoS, its very easy to get a suit of T60, heck you're given one almost at the start of the game.

is there any way to get him to take off his power armour?

for now i've managed to reload a save from before i did it, but i'd still like to make this work

I'm not sure otherwise. I'll have a go myself to see if I can break him too. So if anyone else comes up with something before, all the better.

Sorry I'm not much help right now

It seems that much like the companion weapons, Danse's power armor pieces are hidden from the player. When it comes to armor and NPCs, unlike the weapons, they don't equip gear armor, even if you leave it in their inventory. I've seen some Caravan guards naked even though they have armor in their inventory. I wish it was like F3/NV where they would equip the best gear in their inventory automatically after changing areas, with the exception of the armor that you choose for them.

Anyway, companions can carry an unlimited amount of items, no matter their weight, as long as you drop it and order them to pick them up, it takes a bit of time and have to keep ordering them at least once per item (Or twice when they're past their weight limit), but it works with Danse's armor issue.

They never fixed that?

[censored] yeah! 600 bottles of purified water for everyone!