The lighter plasteel plate of a squire's walker — thinner than a Questoris's shell, but still armour a foot thick. An Armiger's hull grants a fixed body-grade save, the protection every light war-engine carries as part of its frame. It is not a mark to be swapped or upgraded; it is simply what an Armiger is made of. Beneath the Ion Shield's directional field, it is the save that holds when the field faces the wrong way.
A targeter-array wired into a war-engine's machine-senses — the auspex that lets a titan see through smoke, gloom and cunning. While carried, it strips an enemy of hidden setup within its reach and lets the engine take a free Aim into its declared arc, sharpening the killing shot. It is the difference between a giant firing blind and one that sees the ambush coming — cheap machine-sight for a war-engine that cannot afford a wasted shot.
The shoulder hard-point every Questoris carries — a reinforced mount above the main armament for a secondary weapon. It is not a weapon itself but the cradle for one, bearing a heavy stubber or an ironstorm missile pod so the war-engine can lay down supporting fire while its macro-gun does the killing. Part of the chassis, it comes with the hull and carries whatever the Household bolts to it.
The war-engine's defining armour — layered ceramite and adamantium plate a hand's-breadth thick, proof against all but the heaviest fire. A Questoris or Dominus hull grants a fixed body-grade save, the shell that keeps a titan standing under a storm of fire even when its Ion Shield faces the wrong way. It is not worn or removed; it is the body of the engine itself, the reason a Knight can walk into fire that would erase a lesser fighter.
The frag and krak charges a household's human crew carry into battle — the only ordnance a Sacristan or a Squire can throw. Frag scatters a clustered foe; krak cracks a hard target the crewman could never fight hand-to-hand. Neither will trouble a war-engine, but between the titans' legs a well-thrown grenade buys a crewman the moment he needs. A consumable band, spent and restocked between battles.
A spire raised high on the war-engine's carapace, hung with the victory-banners of the Household and the shattered heraldry of the foes it has broken across ten thousand years. It is memory made into a standard, and the lance takes heart from its shadow: a crewman or a squire on the point of breaking looks up, sees the spire still standing, and finds the nerve to hold one moment longer. Where the Preceptor's own banner carries the formal Honour of the Household, the trophy-spire is the quieter thing — the weight of the dead and the won pressing steadiness into the living who fight beneath it.
The Household's oath-standard — the heraldry of a lineage that has not broken in ten thousand years, borne aloft on the Preceptor's or Seneschal's war-engine. More than decoration, the banner carries the Honour of the Household: while it stands, the lance and its crew rally on it, steadied against fear and death within its reach. A household that raises its banner fights as one; a household that loses it fights alone.
A combat gauntlet fitted with a secondary field generator — the arm-option for a Questoris built to hold its ground. While carried, it reinforces the front-arc Ion Shield by one, hardening the facing the war-engine leads with as it advances into the enemy's fire. It doubles as a close-combat fist, but its worth is the field: the sword-and-board build for a titan that means to be struck head-on and shrug it off.
The defining system of a Knight war-engine — a directional energy field, projected one facing at a time, that turns aside whatever its declared arc can meet. At the start of each round the pilot declares a facing; until the next, attacks from within that arc are met by an invulnerable save that ignores armour-piercing entirely. Attacks from any other angle strike only the fixed hull. The field faces one way — the open flank and rear are the seam every foe of the Household learns to exploit.
A bonded cyber-cherub, half servo-skull and half reliquary, that drifts about the war-engine on humming gravplates and tends the temper of its ancient machine-spirit. The Sacristans consider one a blessing and a nuisance in equal measure: it chirrs its liturgies over their shoulders as they work, and once each fight its meddling turns a fumbled repair right — a weld that should have failed takes, a shield that should have stayed dead flickers back up. The familiar cannot be commanded and will not be hurried, but a Household whose engine carries one finds its titans rise from harm a little more often than they have any right to.
The Sacristan's anti-engine ordnance — a fusion demolition charge carried for the one job a frail crewman can do to a war machine. Pressed against a hull and left to burn through, it delivers the kind of blow no human arm could otherwise land, cracking armour or a fortified position wide open. It is issued sparingly and spent at great risk, for placing it means closing with something that could crush the bearer flat.
The half-sentient heart of a war-engine — an ancient machine-spirit reactor that drives the titan and, in its death, avenges it. When a war-engine is finally destroyed, the core can go critical, detonating in a blast that scythes down friend and foe alike around the wreck. It is inherent to every engine, no more removable than its soul: the reason even killing a Knight is a dangerous thing to stand near.
The much-mended augmetics of a household thrall — the bionic limbs and organs that keep a life-long Sacristan working long after the flesh alone would have failed. They are not a purchase or an upgrade but the ordinary condition of a crewman who has spent decades beneath the war-engines, patched as often as the hulls he tends. They mark a Sacristan as a creature of the Household, made as much of machine as the titans he serves.
The Sacristan's tool-set — the welders, jacks and cutting gear a crewman hauls to mend a wounded war-engine in the field. It is the rig that drives the Bondsman repair action: working within reach of a hull, a Sacristan uses it to weld lost Wounds whole or haul a downed Ion Shield back into place. Inherent to the crew, it is the household's only means of keeping a titan on its feet once the fire has found it.
A relic field generator, an heirloom of the oldest Households — the answer, in part, to being surrounded. Where an ordinary Ion Shield guards a single declared facing, the Sanctuary projector spreads the field across two adjacent arcs, closing one of the seams a swarm relies on. It does not make a titan proof from every side; the far flank and rear still lie open. But a war-engine bearing it is a far harder thing to encircle.
A drifting scout-skull, part cyber-mastiff and part relic — the household's eyes beyond the reach of a titan's own senses. Ranging ahead of the lance, it marks targets for the war-engines' arc-of-fire, letting a giant bring its guns to bear on a foe it might not otherwise have seen in time to turn. Small, expendable and endlessly patient, it is the difference between a titan that reacts and one that is already aiming.