The most common catalyst used in the direct ethanol fuel cell uses platinum. That alone drives up the costs and scarcity of the power source. If we assume that Morrow Industries was a leader in nanotechnology, they could have yield problems on the nanostructured electrocatalysts made from iron, nickle and cobalt. This too would cause a scarcity problem.

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For this kind of application, how much platinum does it need? Right now platinum costs about $31k / kg, and that is not nearly so high to be limiting on something so incredibly useful! Heck, if it used 200kg of the stuff it would still be $6M well spent!

And remember that these things were supposedly in the 1989 loadings, so they had plenty of time afterward to roll some more off the presses!

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I only list that as one constraint. Myomeric polymers would have been bleeding edge technology. Even if they use cheap materials, it is exceedingly likely that there would be a correspondingly high failure rate with only a small percentage usable in a HAAM suit.

Ultimately, it is likely to be a case where the military sees this materiel at being too valuable to not have oversight in the manufacturing. You can only mark so many nearly complete components as bad and save them from destruction before the military gets suspicious.

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I guess I have two issues:

First, if HAAM suits were available for the 1989 load in, then even without any further technological advances there should be a ton of these just based on their utility. Even if they were originally military prototypes, by the time of the 2017 load in there should be a Morrow-only production line churning these out by the thousands! They may be expensive and difficult to build, but they are so unbelievably useful, especially in the post-apocalyptic environment, that the Project would be foolish not to issue them far and wide.

Second, HAAM suits are a transformational technology for anyone. Can you imagine what the US military could do with one of these attached to every rifle squad? If the US military had the ability to make this it would make the early-20th-century focus on tank development look slow and inconsequential. So why aren't there 20 different HAAM designs that the Project has to face? Plus the inevitable Russian and Chinese knock-offs, and the civilian recreational or industrial models?

The HAAM suit is cool, but tremendously inconsistent with the world it is claiming to be a part of.

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You forget that HAAM suits are too radical, most would be at labs and proving grounds, and put into storage like a lot of nifty ideas.

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What do you mean "too radical"? Powered armor has been on military wishlists for half a century, and has been actively developed for a decade. The indicated numbers don't support "labs and proving grounds", those are high even for low-rate production - if the US has more than a dozen or so it is because they are being used.

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The military has been test exo-skeletons for decades, some of the demo models are quite impressive with their enhanced strength, power seems to be the major stumbling block, with current batteries and fuel cells just not capable of going for more than a few hours, adding armor (weight), weapons, ammo, sensors, comm gear (did I mention weight?) Cuts into the operational time.

There is also the issue of ground pressure, you can only apply so much weight into the "footprint" before you start having issues with the suits sinking into soft ground, this is why many of the military's robots are fitted with tracks, that all terrain mobility is critical to the armored suit concept.

Truth be told, I feel that the HAAM suit will never be deployed.

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We also have a type of force field, is it standard? Are the rail guns standard on destroyers? R&D suffers the "use it or lose it" mentality, prototypes suffer from "doesn't fit our current needs". The exoskeleton DoD fools around with allows current individual equipment to be used, HAAM only allows the non electric 20MM round.(Same round electrically primed is used by the navy Phalanx"R2D2".
Boils down to Council of tomorrow sees the HAAM potential and gives the go ahead, Military procurement sees the HAAM and beauracracy ensues. Read about General LeMays purchase of the AR-15 and the fit it caused.

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