Editing The Machine (section)

===More Equipment===
How about equipment? Having had no actual experience with expeditions of any kind, I can only assume that in an environment like the Machine, one would obviously need a lot of rations and water (since none, or at least very little of it exists there) and a lot of heavy equipment probably would be necessary (radios, various camera equipment, grappling guns). Still, you don't want to be bogged down by a lot of heavy gear when you're risking getting caught in a giant cog and crushed to death, so I can assume they just bring exactly what they need (maybe even less) and nothing more.

As for weapons, I'm thinking they just bring the bare minimum. Big caliber pistols for punching through any hostile Engineers and scaring off plunderers, and that's about it. No need to bring clunky assault rifles or SMGs.

The general tech level is what bothers me most. In an environment where exploring the Machine is such a priority, I can only assume that the most important thing would be communications, data storage devices of various kinds and miscellaneous survival gear. But how advanced should these be?

I liked the idea in one of the threads about advanced grappling guns reverse engineered from the Machine. The radios will probably be powerful and compact enough that you would be able to communicate with base camp from quite a distance without bringing a heavy hunk of metal. The data storage devices, however, are giving me a headache. I'm thinking some kind of PDA deal with cameras and various analyzing soft- and hardware, but I don't really want it to be a tricorderish thing.