Iron Man Armor: Mark VII

"The Mark VII is not ready to be deployed." "Skip the spinning rims. We're on the clock."

- J.A.R.V.I.S. and Tony Stark

The Mark VII Armor is Tony Stark's seventh Iron Man suit and was the first suit designed for automatic deployment and assembly. This suit also demonstrated extensive advancements to the suit's flight and weapons systems. When not in use it is stored, and deployed, in a form resembling a cylindrical pod.

History
During an attack on the S.H.I.E.L.D. Helicarrier, in which Loki escaped imprisonment, Tony Stark's Mark VI suit was severely damaged while attempting to repair and restart the Helicarrier's damaged turbines. When Stark realized that Loki intended to carry out his plans from the top of Stark Tower, Tony repaired the Mark VI just enough for him to fly back to Stark Tower himself. Upon arriving Tony relinquished the Mark VI while telling J.A.R.V.I.S. to prepare the Mark VII, Tony's newest Iron Man armor that was in its last phase of development but had yet to be tested.

Tony distracted Loki as J.A.R.V.I.S. prepared the Mark VII, and Tony covertly slipped on a pair of bracelets. After Loki failed to take control of Tony’s mind, he decided to dispose of Tony by throwing him through a window to his death. Distressed, Stark called for J.A.R.V.I.S. to deploy the Mark VII as he was thrown through the window. However, the Mark VII had just arrived on the elevator and quickly deployed, crashing into Loki as it followed Tony out the window. Using its thrusters, the Mark VII was able to catch up to Tony mid-fall and, locating his bracelets, latches onto him while assembling into the Iron Man armor, allowing Tony to fly back up to face Loki and his army as it began to emerge through a portal in the sky.

The armor was quickly put to the test against the Chitauri as it held off a large number of their Chariot flyers and distracted a Leviathan as the rest of the Avengers arrived. Fighting alongside his teammates, Stark used the suit to hold air superiority over the Chitauri and at one point took out a Leviathan by flying through it. As the battle escalated the World Security Council overrode Nick Fury’s authority and launched a nuke to eliminate the invaders. Unable to stop the launch himself, Nick Fury contacted Stark to intercept the missile. Putting all of the Mark VII's power into its flight capabilities he intercepted the missile and redirected it, flying it through the wormhole. However, in space the Mark VII lost power and fell back into the wormhole's gravity field to Earth. In the end the Mark VII had been heavily damaged by the events of the battle.

Eventually the Mark VII was repaired of its damages and continued to be used by Stark as his "default" armor despite his ongoing development of the Iron Legion armors (though he used it interchangeably with the Mark XLII as it was in its final testing phases). Tony used the Mark VII to get to and from the restaurant where he met with James Rhodes to discuss the recent Mandarin attacks.

During the attack on Stark's mansion the Mark VII self-destructed with its predecessors to prevent its technology from being controlled by the Mandarin. Its helmet ultimately survived and was used to relay a message to Pepper Potts that Tony was still alive.

Capabilities
The Mark VII was a leap forward in the Iron Man technology, bringing together all of the ground work and advancements made with the first six versions in addition to greatly expanding on the flight system, as well as the ordinance and laser weapon systems. Additionally the Mark VII showed new advancements in portability and accessibility, a specialization that was first demonstrated in the Mark V armor.

When not in use the armor takes on a form resembling a cylindrical pod in which the chest-plate forms the top and the thrusters from the boots form the bottom, which propel the pod like a rocket. On Tony’s command it can be deployed by J.A.R.V.I.S. and sent to him. It uses a laser guided system, similar to a bar-code scanner, to find a pair of bracelets worn by the user and attaches to them as it assembles around the user’s body. This new system effectively eliminated the need for the gantry system that most of the previous armors required.

Like the previous models, the suit increased the physical abilities of the wearer, giving Stark superhuman strength, durability, movement speed and reflexes. In addition, the Mark VII upgraded the gauntlet repulsor and unibeam weapons as the previous suits had, notably returning to a circular unibeam aperture where the previous suit had used a triangular one.

The Mark VII makes a considerable innovation to the flight system through the addition of a pair of thrusters added to the suit’s back, which give the suit faster flight speed and acceleration, while also providing flight stability, allowing Tony to freely use his palm-mounted repulsors to attack enemies while in flight. The suit also has two ports in the chest plate that house thrusters to counter balance the thrusters added to the back, and to help the suit ascend while flying without the use of the hand repulsors. The suit also contains smaller, auxiliary thrusters in the boots to provide extra thrust when trying to lift or manipulate other objects during flight.

This iteration of the Iron Man armor contained an expansive assortment of weapons, including both new weapons and upgrades to weapon systems from the previous armors. Most notably, the Mark VII possessed a vast armament of miniature, guided air-to-air missiles that are housed in the compartments on each shoulder. Like the previous suits, the Mark VII contained a small anti-armor missile in each gauntlet of the suit. The suit also demonstrated the use of flair launchers, located at the suit’s hips that were present in most of the previous suits.

Additionally, the Mark VII possessed an advanced version of the hand mounted laser weapon system introduced in the Mark VI. Unlike the Mark VI’s lasers, which could only be fired once, the Mark VII’s lasers could fire nearly continuously by drawing power directly from the Arc Reactor. Each laser module fired three lasers with one larger, central laser, and two flanking lasers for a heavier attack.

While the suit makes vast improvements over earlier models, it was still not capable of feats such as space travel. When Tony crossed through the Tesseract’s portal into space while redirecting the missile meant to destroy New York to the Chitauri command ship, his systems shut down, causing him to pass out and fall back to Earth, nearly killing him.

Despite all of its successors, the Mark VII has demonstrated the greatest combat potential, as most of the subsequent models were either specialized variants or not yet perfected prototypes.