Starship Troopers Armored Suits

Robert A. Heinlein invented the Armored Suit for his 1959 military adventure, Starship Troopers.

Modern readers will see the Mobile Infantry’s armored suits through the lens of their own experience with microelectronics, and 60 years of experience and advances in guidance and control software.

Heinlein probably was not at all familiar with digital electronics when he wrote Starship Troopers. He was almost certainly more of an analog, or even electro-mechanical computer guy in 1959, even though one of the main characters of 1966s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is a IBM-style electronic computer.

Heinlein was born in 1907, graduated from the US Naval Academy in 1929, and served in radio communications and as a gunnery officer on board US Navy ships between 1929 and 1934. Gunnery officer would have had training in the fire-control computers of the day.

During WW2, Heinlein worked as a “civilian aeronautical engineer”, employed by the Navy, clearly slide rule territory. We know from his 1958 book Have Spacesuit, Will Travel that Heinlein was an aficionado of the slide rule.

Ken Shiriff’s teardowns and reverse engineering of a 1955 electro-mechanical computer and a 1960s-70s Soviet mechanical orbit locator give some examples of what Heinlein might have envisioned as the inner workings of his MI armored suits.