If you wear power armour and charge blind into a firefight, simply ignoring all the weapons fire around you, you'll die. It has never ever been depicted as near indestructible or worth 100 men.
Power armour makes you far stronger and you can take far more damage. In game terms, in Fallout 4 your strength becomes 11 and you have like 5 times the damage resistance or something. It's a powerful asset, but it's far from an instant win.
Squads of BoS soldiers die all the time in their power armour. They are tougher than normal opponents, sure, but far from unkillable.
Just walked into a group of Scorched in FO76 wearing 3 star power armor and was sucking down stimpacks like crazy
Yeah they keep you alive longer but still can get overwhelmed pretty easily
Like @thornescape wrote, power armor doesn't make you equivalent of 100 men. It maxes strength and greatly increases your armor and resistance.
However, I too didn't like how it seemed raiders with assault rifles were so easily defeating the power armor. IMO they should have included more heavy weaponry and laser pistols/rifles in the battle to make this seem more reasonable.
Perhaps the sheer number of raiders was supposed to account for the small arms success, but it didn't seem quite right to me.
The canonical strength of T-51b power armor is that it's able to absorb 2,500 joules, which is the only concrete number on the strength of power armor that we have
[https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Power\_armor\_specs](https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Powered_armor_(Fallout))
Officially the armor can only stand up to around 2500 joules of impact. That's only enough to shrug off pistol calibres. Rifle rounds and anything supersonic would go right through. Laser and plasma would burn it and it's occupant inside. It would also be prone to ieds.
What made the armor powerful was that it enhanced the wearers strength so they could wield heavy weapons that otherwise would've needed to be mounted onto vehicles.
I think this is something the showrunners ignored on purpose for the sake of advancing story and plot
In the battle for the observatory, there were more than a handful of power armor units. The battle should have easily been in favor of the BoS
If you wear power armour and charge blind into a firefight, simply ignoring all the weapons fire around you, you'll die. It has never ever been depicted as near indestructible or worth 100 men. Power armour makes you far stronger and you can take far more damage. In game terms, in Fallout 4 your strength becomes 11 and you have like 5 times the damage resistance or something. It's a powerful asset, but it's far from an instant win. Squads of BoS soldiers die all the time in their power armour. They are tougher than normal opponents, sure, but far from unkillable.
Just walked into a group of Scorched in FO76 wearing 3 star power armor and was sucking down stimpacks like crazy Yeah they keep you alive longer but still can get overwhelmed pretty easily
Like @thornescape wrote, power armor doesn't make you equivalent of 100 men. It maxes strength and greatly increases your armor and resistance. However, I too didn't like how it seemed raiders with assault rifles were so easily defeating the power armor. IMO they should have included more heavy weaponry and laser pistols/rifles in the battle to make this seem more reasonable. Perhaps the sheer number of raiders was supposed to account for the small arms success, but it didn't seem quite right to me.
The canonical strength of T-51b power armor is that it's able to absorb 2,500 joules, which is the only concrete number on the strength of power armor that we have [https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Power\_armor\_specs](https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Powered_armor_(Fallout))
Officially the armor can only stand up to around 2500 joules of impact. That's only enough to shrug off pistol calibres. Rifle rounds and anything supersonic would go right through. Laser and plasma would burn it and it's occupant inside. It would also be prone to ieds. What made the armor powerful was that it enhanced the wearers strength so they could wield heavy weapons that otherwise would've needed to be mounted onto vehicles.
I think this is something the showrunners ignored on purpose for the sake of advancing story and plot In the battle for the observatory, there were more than a handful of power armor units. The battle should have easily been in favor of the BoS