Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

From Starship Troopers, page numbers will vary by edittion so I won't cite them.
Chapter 5 first references powered armor...

Chapter 7 describes it:

"Powered armor is one-half the reason we call ourselves "mobile infantry" instead of just "infantry." (The other half are the
spaceships that drop us and the capsules we drop in.) Our suits give us better eyes, better ears, stronger backs (to carry heavier weapons and more ammo), better legs, more intelligence ("intelligence" in the military meaning; a man in a suit can be just as stupid as anybody else only he had better not be), more firepower, greater endurance, less vulnerability.
A suit isn't a space suit -- although it can serve as one. It is not primarily armor -- although the Knights of the Round Table were not armored as well as we are. It isn't a tank -- but a single M. I. private could take on a squadron of those things and knock them off unassisted if anybody was silly enough to put tanks against M. I. A suit is not a ship but it can fly,
a little on the other hand neither spaceships nor atmosphere craft can fight against a man in a suit except by saturation bombing of the area he is in (like burning down a house to get one flea!). Contrariwise wthings that no ship -- air, submersible, or space -- can do. "

"Suited up, you look like a big steel gorilla, armed with gorilla-sized weapons. (This may be why a sergeant generally opens his remarks with "You apes -- " However, it seems more likely that Caesar's sergeants used the same honorific.) But the suits are considerably stronger than a gorilla. If an M. I. in a suit swapped hugs with a gorilla, the gorilla would be dead, crushed; the M. I. and the suit wouldn't be mussed...

Two thousand pounds of it, maybe, in full kit -- yet the very first time you are fitted into one you can immediately walk, run, jump, lie down, pick up an egg without breaking it (that takes a trifle of practice, but anything improves with practice), dance a jig (if you can dance a jig, that is, without a suit) --to a feather landing. "


It goes one for paragraphs explaining how the suit takes commands and how a MI uses it and is trained. Describing the helmet inside and out.

"There are three main types of M. I. armor: marauder, command, and scout. Scout suits are very fast and very long-range, but lightly armed. Command suits are heavy on go juice and jump juice, are fast and can jump high; they have three times as much comm & radar gear as other suits, and a dead-reckoning tracker, inertial. Maraudthe sleepy look -- the executioners.
"
"And had my power cut in the air. This doesn't hurt you; it's a delayed
action, executed by your landing. I grounded and there I stuck, squatting,
held upright by gyros but unable to move. Your surrounded by a ton of metal with your power dead."


They really are wearing powered armour, perhaps terminator style in the ST book. Chapter 7 does about all the description you'll get though. It also never says space marine. Space Navy and MI. are what is used. Heinlein did write a short story called Misfit in 1939 that seems to have coined the term Space MArines though.