The Rikti War & an American Tragedy

The Artillery MKI Battlesuit was enjoying great success in it's testing phases in Paragon City. Several upgrades to its systems had improved the Force Fields and improved the punch (if not the range) of its weaponry systems. There were inevitable setbacks as the design team determined how to deal with enemies employing energy weapons, fire and magical energies.

Then the world went mad. Giant space ship appeared out of portals and began to rain destruction down onto the city as alien soldiers ran amok.

Colonel Edward Phillips, the pilot of the Artillery MKI worked with the other heroes of the city to try and protect the citizens and fend off the invaders. Colonel Phillips made his last stand in Baumton, holding back the invaders while several super speedster heroes evacuated the elementary school he was defending.

In an epic battle Sol. Phillips lost his life, but he is memorialized as a true hero of the city. The colonel and his armor were lost in the ruins of what has become Boomtown. Recent hero excursions into the ruins found the ruins of that school and the remains of this fallen hero. Colonel Phillips and his battlesuit were buried in Arlington with full honors and granted the Medal of Honor.

Project Pegasus scientist were able to recover the performance recorder from the suit. Project scientists had presumed that the MKI failed due to massive overloads of it's protective force fields. But the data showed that the fields held until the Rikti had overloaded Col. Phillips' neural control interface. The project had moved away from using Force Field technology as part of the Artillery program, but this data resurrected that part of the program.

The original Artillery MKI design was rebuilt with a few modifications and was set to hit the streets for further testing as the Artillery MKIa. The pilot of this new suit, Colonel Mark Fredericks, objected to the use of this name. He argued, successfully, that the Artillery MKI name should be retired in honor of Colonel Phillips. So the Artillery MKIa was renamed the Barrage MKI and is currently undergoing stress testing in Paragon City. I expect to have a guest column from Colonel Fredericks occasionally in these pages.

After the MKI there were several other unsuccessful iteration of the Artillery battlesuit. All had innovations, but fell further short of the design goals. After the MKIV failed, Project Pegasus was approached by managers from the Army's Super Soldier program and the USMC's Nanotechnology Lab. They proposed a joint venture to create exactly the soldier they all wanted: Fast, agile, heavy hitting and hard to damage. The result of that program was me, Colonel Jacob Roberts, Artillery MKV. Through a series of classified operations and procedures many of the operations and energy transfer applications that had been the battlesuit's responsibility to carry and generate were added to my biological systems. Only a much lighter combatsuit was needed to control those energies and powers. Only durability was really as issue and the recent return of force field technology to the program added an answer to that problem. Now I surround myself with a protective field and in a real emergency can activate a heavy duty field that will allow me time to recover from battlefield injuries. Upcoming upgrades look like they will include wings for added maneuverability and many smaller improvements to how my powers currently work.

Next: The next generation of firepower & the Dark Side