Galm Fae
Guardian Solutions
DARKSTAR ARMY
115
   |
Posted - 2013.10.14 06:29:00 -
[1] - Quote
I agree, in stealth situations they are useless. But you can't operate the visor without them, so I have just learned to love them. Overall I have conjured up a few reasons why they were ever incorporated into our suits in the first place.
Your running light idea may very well be the reason, as supported by how they shut off when our clone is pronounced terminated. This is likely for triage reasons as well. When our physical form has reached a state that it can not feasibly be resurrected, the lights go dark. To medics, this is a major sign that they should give up on recovering the dead clone and redirect attention to other wounded allies.
Inversely, it could also display who is still alive. Most of the time, death comes relatively quickly for us. Hybrid rounds rip through you, the light fades, and the cycle begins anew. But then there are days where you catch a locus grenade with your face. In my days in the Legion, I once say a guy that lost three fourths of his face to an explosive charge. Physical therapists and mechanical surgeons had managed to staple him back together with cybernetics, but he was still a ghastly fellow to look at. Apparently after the charge had gone off he was still alive and semiconscious for three hours until the firefight subsided and both sides could collect their dead.
They were picking up his body to move into a mass grave when he latched onto the harness of the soldier who was dragging him. Apparently that gave the poor kid a heart attack, so a medic had to come running over to check on both of them at once.
My point is, there are some fates worse than death. When your are rolling around on the field begging for death that just won't come and you are too incoherent to ask your squad mates to finish you off, you are going to be glad you had a little flashing light that lets them know you are still alive. I'd gladly take a bullet to the brain to get me out of a clone with a sucking chest wound, scrabbled nanites, or a snapped spinal cord. Better to die quickly then to be left alive on a battlefield for weeks waiting for death. |