: The armor designs alone are worth getting interested
: in whatever you people are cooking up.

: The original standard incarnations of MJOLNIR worn by the Master Chief are
: some of the most simple and iconic armor sets worn in any property. Much
: of what we see nowadays in Halo looks like it could be in anything from
: Call of Duty to Unreal, but early Halo stuck to its own design language
: and I appreciate that you're sticking to that.

: Your team's rendition of
: Mark IV as a final transitional model to Mark V is totally evident in the
: individual pieces to the unique curvature. I can also see a bit of Mark VI
: in there as well, whether that was intentional or not, and it still looks
: amazing.

Why thank you. ^_^ Indeed there are bits of design in there that are based on parts that would come to be classified under the generational category of "Mark 6." Very much intentional. :)

: Whether bare or adorned with pouches this rendition of Mark IV
: truly looks like it should have a place in canon.

: I do have a bit of a concern though. The unique female builds for Spartans in
: every game since Reach have gotten progressively worse. From what was
: reasonable in Reach with Kat and FemSix became rather absurd in Halo 4 and
: Halo 5. I can't say that I'd imagine most female Spartans having such a
: petite build to them. Additionally, armor sets for women are no longer
: form-fitting like they are on male models. They look way too bulky and
: seem like they would restrict movement to a great degree.

You can rest easy. The journey I went on researching the male S2 physique (and what I learned from that research) pales in comparison to the journey that I had to go on when I did the same for the female S2 physique.

Oh. My. Glob.

Insanity. It was insanity to hunt down all of those references (CRAZY difficult to find!); it was insanity to take all of those references and build a mental model of just how, specifically, the female body is different from the male body (and then parse through those differences for the ones relevant to what we were trying to achieve -- spinal differences, for example); and then it was insanity to take all of that information and then apply it, in a way that produced something visual, to the concept of what a Reclaimer of The Mantle of Responsibility For All Life would look like, if said Reclaimer were both rocking double-X chromosomes and had been altered/augmented towards optimizing their participation in 26th-century combat.

It is no joke to say that the attention paid to the details in this particular pursuit (female S2s) has made what could have been something "quick and easy" take a tremendous amount of time to get right. This is also why the image seen of the physique is described as the initial piece -- we're still applying what we've learned to the design.

One thing I will say of that initial character art, though, is that that is one dense body. It's not yet the crazy-detailed sort of image that you got with the S2 Content Creation Guide, but all of that visual information is definitely in the design -- it's just not expressed, yet.

: Luckily your
: rendition of Mark IV itself looks less like an adaptation for women and
: more akin to a uniquely crafted armor set, stemming from a general design
: concept as it would with men.

It makes the most sense to me that the optimal situation is for each cybernetic union between "man and machine" to be uniquely tweaked for each operator, for maximum results.