Osberger TacPoint Plate-Carrier

Written by: Ripshot

Don't get me wrong, I like the softweave ballistic materials and intergrated ceramics common in modern armor; no sense in being ungrateful to whatever shields your mistakes from rifle-calibre hollowpoints. But sometimes, the older set-ups of body armor have their perks, and Crocotta's latest offer to civilian and corpsec customers alike is built off of capitalizing those perks.
The plate-carrier's concept is nice 'n simple: As a base, you've got a primary vest made of fancy lightweight ballistic fibres, slim and flexible enough that you can wear it like a tanktop and nobody'll know what it is until they're in neck-snapping distance. Along with the vest you get a handful of shaped trauma-plates, made from layers of high-strength ceramics and designed to slip into large, slim pockets on the inside of the vest, beefing it up from a concealable vest with basic ballistic protection to a beefy, heavy-duty piece of body-armor that'll even give rifle-caliber rounds trouble getting to your soft parts. The sides and waist also have neat little concealed strips of magnetized organic-polymers, designed for attaching rows of pouches and magazine-holders with corresponding strips so you're not reachiing into your pockets or a duffle-bag to for a new mag.

The bag used to carry all the plates and pouches is also made from ballistic weaves, and can be snapped onto the collar of the vest to serve as a bullet-resistant hood, albeit a pretty dumb looking one...

— Anonymous poster

So what's the benefit of this set-up? Who's it for?

— Anonymous poster

It's mainly marketted towards VIP and high-risk types over actual military or corpsec forces, the sort of people who'd want to keep a lightweight vest on at all times and keep a stack of plates inconspicuously hidden in their desk drawer instead of a whole-ass plated jacket. It's also easier for attending security to slip trauma-plates into place than wrestle on a seperate vest/jacket if their VIP is unconscious and in need of better protection.

— Vulcan Gravy

It's got a pricetag and a half, the vest takes a while to fit to your body and without the plates only provides a nominal amount of protection, but it makes up for all of that in versatility: the base vest is far less conspicuous than many other options, and it's a hell of a lot easier to sneak in a handful of plates and pouches than it is a whole-ass armored jacket. You could do a whole lot worse than this fella, I reckon.

Funny enough, Horizon originally held the rights to the TacPoint design in '62 as a means of giving their suits a degree of upgradeable protection without marring their nonthreatening looks. Ultimately though, they canned the project and sold the rights off in 2071 after deciding that just selling body-armor would be too much of a threat to their squeaky-clean 'we're not like the other violent megas' image. Since then, corps have been fielding their own takes on the design under various names and patents, but for all intents and purposes they function the same give or take some proprietary fasteners or what have you.

— Null Kit

Item type

Armor

Manufacturer

Osberger Law-Enforcement Systems

Rarity

10R

Weight

1.6 KG, 11KG with full plates and pouches.

Base Price

2800¥

Armor-Rating

6(11)

Capacity

8

The base vest has a concealability modfiier of -4 to determine its true purpose. When fitted with its shaped plates and pouches (a process taking roughly one minute), the plate-carrier's amour-rating is increased to 11 and it gains the Gear Access feature, at the expense of its concealability modifier. The plates can be substituted with similarly shaped objects such as scrap metal, but this will adversely affect its armor-rating as the GM sees fit.