Y-17 trauma override harness

Y-17 trauma harnesses are automated casualty retrieval suits pioneered at Big MT that continue to stalk it as far as 2281.

Background
One of the most impressive inventions created in the laboratories of the Big MT, the Y-17 trauma harness is a full body suit designed to automatically retrieve injured soldiers and return them to their home base by automatically taking over their motor functions and "walking" them to the base. The complex network of artificial muscle and fibers that encases the user and enables this functionality, can also effectively "learn" new behaviors by recording neuro-auto-muscular movements, up to and including shooting and fighting reflexes.

Of course, such a technology can be unpredictable and the trauma harness is no exception. As the Big MT research teams soon learned, the harness design had several design problems that precluded it from entering general production, at least, until the issues were rectified. The primary problem was that calibrating the injury threshold that would trigger the suit was problematic, leading to unpredictable behavior. The harness is also unable to identify whether the occupant expired and will continue to function, even if they are completely dead. This functionality was quickly considered a feature, as autonomous corpse retrieval would also be useful on the battlefield.

The enthusiastic approach to this new technology was premature. If no home base was designated for the suit, it would enter an unpredictable wander state. With no way to identify friendly targets or respond to shut-down commands, this would also be equivalent to a berserk mode should a harness unit be able to replicate combat behavior. This is exactly what happened when, amidst the chaos caused by malfunctioning technology and the Great War, scientists, soldiers, and even test subjects would die and trigger the wander state, attacking everyone in sight. One of the first such incidents occured at the X-8 research center. The situation only went downhill from there.

Specifications
The Y-17 trauma harnesses resemble nothing else than the walking dead, skeletons clad in red rubber suits, heads encased in spherical glass helmets. The suits have oxygen tanks on its back, which are in turn attached to additional armor plating around the neck and shoulder area, the area which the helmet is hermetically sealed to.

Gameplay attributes
The basic harness comes in several different varieties that are calculated to match the player's level. Their armaments vary quite a bit depending on the player's level also. Although they have exactly the same medium-to-high amount of hit points as lobotomites, on balance trauma harnesses are much more dangerous opponents, since they have much better armor as well as a wider variety of weapons available. Their armor is equivalent to a suit of Combat armor, reinforced mark 2 or Ranger combat armor, and at high levels they can be seen wielding heavy incinerators, Gatling lasers, Tesla cannons, Gauss rifles and even plasma casters.

Y-17 trauma override harness
Y-17 trauma override harnesses are pre-War autonomous suits created to evacuate wounded soldiers from the battlefield by taking over their motor functions. However, certain design mishaps coupled with the harness recording feature resulted in these harnesses becoming literal walking dead, technological horrors stalking the Big MT.

Y-17 Master trauma harness
An expired researcher from the X-12 research center, the Master trauma harness has been active since before the Great War, sealed behind the force field that has kept X-12 off limits for centuries. It is nearly identical to a normal high level trauma override harness, with the exception of lower radiation and poison resistances.

Notable Y-17 trauma override harnesses

 * Y-17 master trauma harness

Behind the scenes
With the Wild Wasteland trait, the Y-17 master trauma harness will say "Hey, who turned out the lights?!" This is a reference to the Doctor Who episodes "Silence in the Library" and "Forest of the Dead" when a group of microorganisms called the "Vashta Nerada" ate a character (Proper Dave) during one of the episodes. Said character had been wearing an environmental suit that shares a passing resemblance to a space suit, and his skull had been pressed to the visor on his helmet while the Vashta Nerada inside the suit made it walk around, similarly to the helmet-wearing trauma harnesses. The suit also had a thought based communication system that tended to retain echoes of the user's consciousness known as "data ghosts" that deteriorated into repeating single sentences, "Hey, who turned out the lights" being the sentence repeated by the suit after Dave's death.

Bugs

 * They may not respawn after completion of Make up Your Mind or after completion of Old World Blues
 * A head shot on the variation without the glass dome over the skull may still result in graphics of glass shattering from the skull.
 * The master trauma harness may glitch and cross the forcefield in the Y-17 medical facility. This allows the player to obtain the K-9000 before being able to remove forcefields.

Appearances
The Y-17 trauma override harness appears only in the Fallout: New Vegas add-on Old World Blues.