camwyn | (no subject) (Reply)

I'm trying to justify the workings of Gordon's hazard suit. It's capable of detecting fractures and apparently compensating for them, and it can administer morphine. If it's charged, it can expend some of its own charge to take bullet damage instead of the wearer being hurt. It never seems to fall apart or lose integrity even under heavy damage, and if it's recharged it returns to full capability immediately. That's canon.

Implied in this is quite a lot of capability. Gordon's performance never flags while he has the suit on, despite having morphine in his system and incurring fractures. I can account for the fracture thing by assuming the suit has some kind of electrostim circuitry; there are devices that use small electrical pulses to encourage broken bones to heal faster. Amp that up a good distance and you have what the suit can do. The morphine is more problematic. I'm assuming that the suit's monitoring capacity allows it to judge the morphine dose *extremely* precisely. I'm also guessing that since you can take *radiation damage* and not come out too sick or too hurt to heal, it's got chelation agents that get released into the bloodstream in a hurry to swamp the worst of the radiation's effects. (An experimental drug of this nature just started human trials in the real world. I'm going to claim that Black Mesa had it back in '01. They have teleports, dangit, they can jolly well have CBLB502.)

The big problem is the fact that you can get shot multiple times, or chewed on, and you can come within a hair of dying and then heal right back up. While I can get away with claiming the suit has self-resealing nanotech capabilities, I'm not sure how to account for the human stuff. There are, however, locations in Xen where all you have to do is walk into a glowing blue pool and you heal right up- slowly, but still. I'm going to say that the green stuff in all the health dispensers on the walls is at least partially composed of the healing liquid from Xen, and that it's green because after the initial survey teams started getting collected themselves, Black Mesa had to stretch out their supply and added as much inert but possibly useful liquid as they dared. The medikits you find on the floor probably contain a number of high tech healing items like the foam the DoD's been testing recently- shoot the stuff into a wound and it forms such a strong barrier that an artery pumping hard enough to hit the ceiling from waist height stops so much as *leaking*. There's probably also morphine in there in the higher security areas. And every medikit- not the health dispensers, but the medikits- contains a couple of glucose packets in case of diabetic emergency. Which explains how Gordon can keep going without food for so long.

I'm not sure how he manages without sleep. I'm going to claim that the Xenian chemicals- whatever they are- titrate the fatigue toxins out of his system. They can't do jack for the mental state of 'when did I last sleep?' and 'when does the hurting stop?', but all the ick that accumulates in a muscle or nerve or brain that hasn't slept for a while gets compensated for by the stuff in the health dispensers. The medikits, on the other hand, might wind up going out the door with a light-fingered employee, so they don't contain anything from Xen.