By Robert A. Heinlein
1959
Quotes from Ace 1987 edition, 33rd printing
Troop carrier has three launch tubes (port/center/starboard), essentially giant shotguns for troop capsules. After troops launched, multiple decoys, which follow various strategies: drop faster, explode, move sideways, carry attention-getting transponders. The fragments of the trooper's own capsule provide additional cover.
The drop capsule consists of the following layers:
Powered armor is one-half the reason we call ourselves "mobile infantry" instead of just "infantry" (The other half are the spaceships that drop us and the capsules we drop in.) [...] A suit isn't a space suit -- although it can serve as one. It is not primarily armor -- although the Knights of the Round Table were not armored as well as we are. It isn't a tank -- but a single MI private could take on a squadron of those things and knock them off unassisted [...] A suit is not a ship but it can fly, a little -- on the other hand neither spaceships nor atmosphere craft can fight against a man in a suit except by saturation bombing of the area he is in [...] Contrariwise we can do many things that no ship -- air, submersible, or space -- can do [...] We make war as personal as a punch in the nose. We can be selective, applying precisely the required amount of pressure at the specified point at a designated time [...] [We] dig the enemy out of their holes, force them then and there to surrender or die. [p.99]
Two thousand pounds of it, maybe, in full kit -- yet the very first time you are fitted into one you can immediately walk, run, jump, lie down, pickup an egg without breaking it [...] and jump right over the house next door [...] The secret lies in negative feedback and amplification.
The inside of the suit is a mass of pressure receptors, hundreds of them. You push with the heel of your hand; the suit feels it, amplifies it, pushes with you to take the pressure off the receptors that gave the order to push. [p.101]
You jump, that heavy suit jumps, but highter than you can jump in your skin. Jump really hard and suit's jets cut in, amplifying what the suit's leg "muscles" did, giving you a three-jet shove, the axis of pressure of which passes through your center of mass. [p.102]
Since your head is the one part of your body not involved in the pressure receptors controlling the suit's muscles, you use your head -- your jaw muscles, your chin, your neck -- to switch things for you and thereby leave your hands free to fight. A chin plate handles all visual displays the way the jaw switch handles the audios. All diplays are thrown on a mirror in front of your forehead from where the work is actually going on above and back of your head. All this helmet gear makes you look like a hydrocephalic gorilla [...] [p.103]
There are three main types of M.I. armor: marauder, command, and scout. Scout suits are very fast and very long-range, but lightly armed. Command suits are heavy on go juice and jump juice, are fast and can jump high; they have three times as much comm & radar gear as other suits, and a dead-reckoning tracker, inertial. Marauders are for those guys in ranks with the sleepy look --the executioners. [p.104]