Seventy years ago, your grand parents took a contract with the Ilaria corporation to uproot their family and live the astronaut dream mining out an asteroid in the Keiper Belt. It seemed like a good deal at the time, the pay was good and at the time space travel was expensive. It was an adventure for everyone.
It went well for years, but they were tricked. When their contracts were up, nobody could afford the trip back to earth, and almost everyone was forced to re-up their contract for another ten year period. This has continued for the last seven decades, most of those originally signed are dead and gone, replaced by their children, who were put in the same situation upon reaching adulthood. As time went by, the Ilaria Corporation told them, expenses rose, and the miners were expected to pay for food, lodging, electricity. These expenses prevented the contractors from saving up over years to finally get home.
The grandparents passed their resentment to your parents, and your parents passed it to you. This is all you've ever known.
Until an accident ignited the resentment into something more powerful. A mine shaft collapsed. Most of the miners didn't survive the event, and those that did ran out of oxygen before rescue arrived. The only survivors were two Ilaria Corporation overseers, who only lived because of the armored machines that protected them.
The initial revolution only lasted a few hours. Miners and their families, mad with grief, outnumbered the overseers and slaughtered them in their beds that night, and took over the station.
When morning came, heads cleared and some realized the trouble they were in. Beta Outpost, as the station was called, wasn't on any nation's sovereign soil. The Ilaria Corporation was the only law, and everyone knew what was gong to happen next; The Corporation would come in with a tribunal. Every miner would be executed and replaced with a new batch of peasants from Earth. A group of older miners organized a defense. The same armored suits, called Shells, were used by the miners to repel the Corporation's retribution. But that could never be the end of it. The Corporation will never stop trying to get Beta Outpost back, and the miners have been subjected to a never ending onslaught of attempts to retake it. They are lucky, however. The expense of space travel makes it difficult for large forces to go at once. The use of the Shells has proved to be a boon in combat, especially with the inexperienced miners.
It has been months(maybe years, haven't decided) since this slow burning revolt started. The Shells, once uniform machines, have been damaged, repaired, modified, and repaired again so many times that they each have their own unique look and functionality now. Black marketeers have started to send ships up to Beta Outpost to trade the mineral wealth of the asteroid mine for supplies that the miners need.
Shells: These are re-purposed mining machines used on Beta Outpost. The Outpost only had a limited number of them, so the average miner didn't have access to them. They're primary purpose was protecting the life of the pilot in the mine shafts, and so they were only given to people that the Ilaria Corp considered important. The accident that sparked the revolt was not the first time that a Shell saved the life of a corpy(the miner's word for Corporate employees) while miners died. The Shells were commandeered after the corpies on Beta Outpost were slaughtered, and have been instrumental in the continuing revolution.
They are bipedal and anthropomorphic, and are equipped with dexterous hands, as its easier to change out tools by simply putting one down and picking up a new one. They did not have any built in weapons in the base model, but some pilots have had them added to theirs.
The cockpit is an adamantium "shell"(this is where the term for the machine comes from) that is a solid, single piece with only one opening at the top. It is meant to protect the pilot no matter what happens, and has proved to be extremely effective in this regard.
The base model looks like this:
Pretty much all of the Shells have been through a cycle of damage, repair, and modification that has given them all unique appearances and functionality. Most pilots have customized their own machine.
Beta Outpost:
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