Author's Note:

Intelligence Officer: Michael Harrison

Alright so I'm the one whose got the thankless job of taking a creepy, egotistical, quite possibly evil and insane, skeleton man's Disorganised Munchkin notes about taking random crap from different species and some how frankensteining them together into something we can use to kill monsters with and putting it all into a language that you, my esteem employers who write my paychecks, can understand without making you think I think you're stupid. Let's begin shall we?

The Premise: Project Dragoon

So basically the admiralty, fresh off of blowing up the Unbidden basically looked around and saw another monster they had to kill, only this one actually takes planets instead of just using them as a smoothy so they had to come up with a method of sending actual people down there and burning them out. Here are a list of things that Ol Skeletor came up with.

* Why These people are gonna be bad-ass reason 1. The Gene Seed

Each of the bulletin's below either comes from a alien that we are on friendly terms with, or who our friendly neighbourhood mad scientist managed to come up with after years of experience of turning people into more scary skeleton men like him.

1. The Lapisos Aka The Bones of Stone: So you know those big stone dudes that look like they came out of a fantasy RPG but can destroy a ship's plumping if they try and take a dump in it's toilet? Yeah. Apparently our mad scientist took one look at these guys and thought 'Bones.' I would've gone with the Kaboom myself but then I'm not a scientist. Basically what he did was surgically dig holes into where the bones are most solid and shoving chips taken from these guys inside. The Fantasy Golem magic, because nobody has yet to explain to me how sentient rocks work yet, then hooks up to and hijacks the existing bone structure. The poor mook you do this to is then fed a IV solution consisting of some how dissolved minerals that's then continuously absorbed into their bones as they slowly start to out grow the rest of the body which would be bad except for...

2. The Jotun Gland: So basically the scary skeleton man I've been chained to for the past month recognises that your skeleton becoming bigger than the rest of your body is a problem, to be fair that's more credit then what I gave him, and worked on a solution. So some people as it turns out naturally have bigger muscles than everyone else because of something to do with their Thyroid and Skeletor said 'I can work with that.' So he got a bunch of people together, took their DNA, isolated the part that gives the super muscle building brain gland, put that on steroids, and shoved it inside and tada! You're no longer in danger of having your skeleton turn into an exo-skeleton.

3. The Belcher's Gut: Now the problem with having Lithoid bones and roughly twice as much muscle as everyone else is that you need to eat minerals in order to maintain that bone structure and some pretty heavy duty food. Then some genius showed Skeletor footage of the Preythoryn barfing acid all over our ships and he responded with 'I can work with that.' So now there's people with a digestive track strong enough to eat through solid metal and melt armour with their spit. Still no exploding excrement by the way.

4. The Lignum Pulmonis Aka The Wooden Lung: So you've managed to make a two meter tall person and not tear them apart limb from limb in the process of growing nor did you starve them to death because you do too much body building, fantastic but that's not all muscles need because now instead of starving to death your super soldier is going to suffocate to death because he can't breath. Not to fear: Skeletor is here! With his new friend the Nivlac. Basically he looked at these guys, saw how they fart oxygen instead of carbon dioxide, drain ship batteries for nutrients, and went 'I can work with that too.' So he cut one of the poor saps open, took a tissue sample out, and made a third lung out of it, now your blood has more oxygen in it because the Carbon Dioxide your body produces is actively being turned into Oxygen. Ah but there's more: have you ever wondered what it'd be like if you could breath the kinda air that would make most people's organs leak out through their anus? Well guess what? The little bastards are so tough they can do that, and now so can you!

5. The Secundo Corde AKA The Second Heart: What's that? Your grotesquely oversized muscles aren't getting enough blood pumped into them? Well here's a obvious solution for yah: get another heart! I would like to say it's as simple as it sounds but Skeletor went the extra mile and made a heart that cranks up your blood pressure to 11 so that it can go the extra mile. Apparently that wasn't good enough because...

6. The Tertius Corde AKA The Third Heart: Because he was so nice he did it twice. Where as the Second one's job is to raise your blood pressure the third one is the one that only kicks in a emergency and floods the body with a weird sorta bacteria stem cell/platelet hybrid called Medi-gel that'll fix you up like crazy in a emergency situation. Don't worry though this one's not connected to your ordinary boring veins.

7. The Adaptor: More fun with glands. Help's you to adapt to the different harsh conditions our people are being sent to kill monsters on, Nivlac fungus get pumped into your blood by the gland so your body adapts faster thanks to the little Spore Junkies.

8. The Ferro Intus AKA Steel Within: Before you ask, I asked him already and no it's not actual steel. What it is though is the same kind of living alloy that's used as muscle for synth's and as part of our Dragon Scale armour. Apparently this is top grade Mots because pound for pound it can lift 1000 times it's own weight. The man who has repeatedly insisted that he's a genius says that by taking these wires and shoving them into people's bones, muscles and skin we can dramatically augment durability, strength and durability (Yes I know I said it twice) because apparently we didn't have enough of that before. These painfully inserted wires are apparently all hollow so they can pump genetically altered stem cells/drugs AKA Medi-gel to every inch of your body from your third heart and instantly fix any pesky battlefield wounds you somehow still acquired after all of this.

9. The Grey Box: A Medical implant of questionable legality that usually acts as a cure for Alzheimer's but in this case is being used to control all of your cybernetics.

10. The Symbiote: So you're all probably thinking 'We're already half way through this list and our soldiers seem pretty super so what else can we do?' So yeah, apparently there's slugs out there that make you smarter if you let them latch onto your brain stem. Does horrible things to your libido but in all honesty at this point in time there's already seven other things you have to worry about just a 'little' bit more.

11. The Mintis Armis AKA The Mind's Armour: So turns out that the Skeleton's use to hunt a monster from the shroud called the Corrupted Avatar for shit's and giggles and as a result learned how to super charge brain growth in organics, probably explains how they made the cat's go from gorilla cats to cat people. Only it's not just your grey matter, but the rest of the body's neurons too so now you got a secondary nervous system fitted to all of your extra muscle mass too, no downside at all, yah know except for the part where your super soldier turns into a rage monster if he stubs his toe.

12. The Hasta Mintis AKA The Mind's Spear: So turns out that if you take just a tiny pinch of scary Skeleton man brain tissue and insert it into your rapidly growing grey matter courtesy of the Shroud, you too can also learn how to snap someone's neck with your mind or melt their brain out through their tear ducts.

13. The Magnificant AKA The Amplifier: Another case of what it says on the tin, scaled down version of the kind used by our friendly neighbourhood dragon god so that she can focus her psionic energy into a shield to protect herself when she goes around wrecking Prethoryn scourge and doesn't want to get wrecked in the exchange.

14. The Interface: Plugs located in your major muscle groups so that your super soldier's brain can connect directly to his power armour instead of having to operate everything Manually like the rest of us schmucks.

15. The Recorder: Sort of like your gall bladder, collects all the stem cells from all your fancy new organs in one place so that in a few years your local mad scientist doesn't have to do all this collecting again when he wants to make another one like you. Seems kinda pointless if you ask me considering he was suppose to stop nine organs ago he'll probably have another fifteen the next time this comes up again.

In short, your average Dragoon is gonna be two meters tall, weigh something like four hundred pounds, have a lifting capacity of roughly 18000 to 20000 Kilograms and can melt people's minds or psychically snap their necks. Does this mean that all the races in the galaxy are about to get replaced by this new generation of Uber Men? No. Because having all these extra features means that you're gonna burn through over ten times the calories a normal person does on top of all of that it's non-hereditary, even if you made a clone out of the poor sap you did all this to it's just gonna result in a normal version of whatever species you did this to instead of another super soldier, which also means they're expensive as hell to produce, and optimised installation means spending a lot time in a tank letting your body getting adjusted to all the random Mot shoved into you while a bunch of wires are connected to your skull putting your brain into a simulation so that you don't go insane. Course you might go insane anyway since that simulation tends to cycle through years worth of simulated warfare on ice, jungle, ocean, desert and urban environments to train up our new super soldiers. First Gen went under the knife fifteen years ago and are only now in fighting shape, and a lot of people didn't survive the process. That might change in the future but it isn't happening right now. My opinion? Use em to break hard targets and then send the normal people to finish them off.

Why these people are gonna be bad ass reason 2. The Armour

So all of you are probably thinking 'Hey Harris what's the big deal about these exoskeletons? I use mine all the time in my job at the mines what makes these ones so special?' Well my uninformed friend allow me to enlighten you.

You're average Rhino Model exo-skeleton is a basic Mineral frame super imposed over the human, draconian, flerkin, Etc Etc body with servo motor's for joints and electrolysis based muscles that with this your lifting capacity get's another 2000 Kilograms added on which don't get me wrong is cool and all but it means that even without their own in your face better than you armour your average Dragoon is still gonna be stronger than you.

Which leads to the next point what kinds of armour are these ladies and gents gonna be riding around in. All three of the 'Scale Mail' variants in question are gonna be built with Living Alloy as the main ingredient in the muscles so that they're strong as hell with even the weakest model able to lift over 10 000 Kilograms when you flex all those shiny artificial muscles. On top of that is a cold fusion reactor which directly converts the energy for the benefit of your personal muscle power. Normally you wouldn't want something this radioactive strapped to your chest but thanks to all of the enhancements to resist extreme environments our soldiers have received this isn't really a issue. Other quality of life improvements include a sophisticated sensor array that keeps the Dragoon up to date on any audio, visual or chemical readings in the immediate area. Finally the armour is composed of a composite Drake Skin silica bacteria so not only can it take a hit but it also fixes itself when damaged.

1. Wyvern

Lightly armoured flight born unit supported by a combination of wing mounted propellers and rocket thruster boots to fast traversal with little in the way of obstacles for scout and sniper units.

2. Serpent

Now we start putting on the pounds, a agility focused armour designed for close quarters combat while being flexible for the usual ninja samurai business people seem to think is better than plain old guns.

3. Drake

Heavy armour unit with roughly triple the well, everything really of the Wyvern, triple armour, triple muscle, and triple the number of people motting their pants in terror when they see the damned thing.

Why these people are gonna be bad ass reason 3. The Weapons

So as a rule we move forward assuming our enemies fight wars the same way that we do, which is to say that we employ a combination of range weapons along four categories, shot gun, sniper and machine with various different flavours of ammo in between depending on what day it is with melee thrown in between cause a lot of the horror's of the galaxy like to get up close and personal when they screw you over. So here's the standard issue.

800-M Claymore Shot Gun

Of course normal shotguns just aren't metal enough for our horrifically mutilated super soldiers. So instead the 800-M Claymore is a double barrelled Exotic gas thrower with a tank full of liquid X-gas that squirts the stuff into a chamber, lights it, and then fires it at a target via a magnetic rail gun. Expensive to arm, even more so in council space, ask our Dragoons if it's worth it or not. My advice? Save it for heavy targets, preferably the ones with Biotics because for some reason Exotic plasma hates Biotic barriers and it wants them to suffer.

Katana Particle Beam

So basically someone looked at the laser beams our ships spit out and thought 'geez wouldn't it be great if everyone had one of these.' So basically we took the same technology that goes into a Rare Crystal laser beam and scaled it down into a portable particle thrower. Takes a few seconds of continuous fire for the beam to 'warm up' as it were and really starts to let loose on the damage for this reason it might be better to sweep targets instead of landing precision bursts. On the other hand since everything gets so damn hot after a few minutes of continuous fire the whole thing will have to cool down before you can fire again.

200-M Javelin Rifle

A portable gel based rail gun. Unlike conventional projectile weapons of the past that have been reliant on gun powder to get the job done the Javelin squirts a gel composed of liquified exotic gas mixed with a Powdered Mot to produce a high yield explosive. For ammunition the slugs uses a one inch .3 Kilogram depleted uranium round with a three milimeter coating of magnetized steel. The projectile is expelled between a pair of focused magnetic rail capable of firing the projectile at 5400 miles per hour hitting a target up to 110 miles away. During the flight the steel coating is stripped off of the projectile by the sheer friction, whatever isn't destroyed in the path of the projectile instead suffers severe radiation poison from the radioactive material spread in the area during the shot. Here's the thing though, one like the case with the Claymore there's only a limited number of these things even a Dragoon can carry, those things, by design, are heavy as hell so that more force can be applied when fired. Secondly that's a crazy amount of force those things are under, every couple of consecutive shots and the gun's auto repair function kicks in to keep the thing from exploding in your face. Luckily this being a sniper rifle our men will be taking advantage of that crazy long range to snipe targets from a hundred miles away as opposed to twenty feet away so the auto-repair cool down isn't much of a issue.

That summarises the guns but again everyone seems to eventually resort to Melee for some reason so...

Ascalon

A strip of retractable and size adjusting living alloy, able to fully retract itself into a handle or extend as far out as two meters when energy is applied to it's main strip it becomes hard and rigid and when energy is applied to it's secondary and tertiary strips the claw begins vibrating at a enormously high speed granting enormous cutting, slashing, chopping basically all the techniques for reducing something to sliced sashimi.

Gravity Hammer

Basically you take a anti-gravity control module and you put it on the end of a stick. By controlling Gravity output you can easily deliver crushing blows to the heads of your enemies, or alternatively you could go the opposite direction and rig the thing to push everything it hits away send your enemies flying and putting spiderweb cracks into the walls of your enemies.

Talon Modules

Exclusive to the wyvern, basically take the same kind of vibrating high penetration blades used for the Ascalon and attach them to the feet of the wyvern. When you drop down on the heads of your enemies you're immediately put into a position to either carry them off or rip them to shreds. Whatever works for you.

In Conclusion

So basically don't expect the Prethoryn or the Council or whatever else has gotten on you guy's bad side to be much of a problem for too much longer, whatever doesn't get smashed immediately isn't probably going to have much time to re-consider it's life choices. Have a nice day.

Re From Admiral Sheppard:

Thank-you officer Harrison, please kindly never leave anything on my desk again.