Diego

Diego is a product family of Lorica produced by Durandal Arsenal out of OEPU Australia, as a direct inheritor to design concepts of the Lorica Prima design candidates they had proposed. Initially concieved of as a dedicated Assault Type, with a more maintainable and manufacturable design than its precursor model, the Julius, which had been introduced first. Thanks in part to the AATO victory in the war, the Diego model became wildly successful and was considered instrumental in that victory, and is considered to be a successor to both the Julius (with which it shares the distinction of ongoing production) and the Dingo (which it ultimately replaced).

Model Descriptions

The Diego's design and manufacturing successes gave it quite a bit of popularity with OUDF operators and those who were allied with them, and its relatively fixed geometry and single-purpose design orientation made it an easy decision to continue production of new models in the product line even after the termination of the Third World War]. The flood of surplussed, disarmed Diegos into the civilian market after the war has also made them iconic rough-terrain industrial machinery, commonly seen assisting in construction and infrastructure tasks owing to the appropriateness of their fine manipulators.

Stylistically, they have been described as being "stripped down" Julius models, without the armour skirting around the waist of the mobility unit which is so iconic of that class, and with bulkier "waists" to compensate.

Diego Type 31C

Though ultimately unsuccessful in being accepted for the Lorica Prima project, the two most well-known Durandal Arsenal products in the lead-up to the Third World War (Diego and Julius), share a common ancestor - the Durandal Arsenal Dingo. Originally proposed as simply a revision of the Dingo design, the design that would become the Type 31C Diego and enter into service with the OUDF was actually a dramatic improvement. It did away with much of the non-core Dingo design concepts, using a completely redesigned bipedal mobility unit, and a simplified version of the Julius's famous manipulator design, which was also the design used in the Lorica Prima.

While this simpler manipulator design gave those same manipulators a wartime reputation for fussiness, the fact remained that production times for the Diego Type 31C were sometimes as little as one-third those of the comparable Julius Type 28s. The 31C was also adopted by the OUDF five years later, meaning that off-the-shelf Type 31Cs often had better electronics packages than the aging 28s, some of which were over a decade old by the time the Third World War broke out.

That said, this same cookie-cutter approach made the Diego an extremely unpopular Ace Type, and it was deployed almost exclusively in Assault Type Roles, intended for interoperation with other allied-nation designs like the Shoshin Heavy Industries Lupus interceptors. Like most other Lorica of the day, Diego Type 31C shipped with some inbuilt coroutines that could be triggered in addition to those set up in the pilot's personal computer:

• Core Unit: Minor Firecon
• Manipulator Units: Minor Hail
• Mobility Unit: Run and Gun