Q: What is the use of grid of basic engineering suit? I can insert any equipment into it...
A: It is intended for installing primary batteries from Schall Primary Battery mod, which is for powering up the chainsaw or laser weapons from Schall Recharging Weapon.
It is by NO means in replacing a proper modular armour or engineering suit, which are the minimum standard to use those equipment. This is what the word "basic" means.

Q: Why is the engineering suit not accepting energy shield nor personal laser defense?
A: It is by design. The engineering suit is intended as non-combat suit, NOT as yet another power armour with oversized grid. You will still want to wear a power armour when going out for combat.

Q: Do you plan to change the tech prerequisites, so the equipment can unlock without researching power armour tech?
A: Not for the moment. Modifying vanilla tech prerequisites of power armour technologies are changing the major structure of the tech tree, and likely to be incompatible to many other mods.
To compensate, the tech costs of engineering suits are made quite low, so will unlock rather quickly after their corresponding power armour tech.

Q: I am a mod author. I want some of my equipment usable on engineering suits, what can I do?
A: For basic engineering suit, please add "armor-early" to the list in equipment categories. (Something like categories = {"armor", "armor-early"} in your equipment prototype declarations.)
For the more advanced engineering suits, equipment with category "armor" are automatically supported. This means anything usable in vanilla power armours are also usable in them.

Technical Details

Engineering Suit

Engineering suits are non-combat suit dedicated for engineers. Enhanced carrying capacity and equipment grid allowing lots of construction items to be carried and lots of exoskeletons / personal roboports to be used, base building can be much easier and faster.
But the suits have absolutely no combat capability: barely any damage resistances, not able to install energy shields nor defense equipment. So you should not go into combat with this.

Full List of New (or Changed) Items

Armor

• 5 non-combat suit:
  • Basic engineering suit
  • Engineering suit
  • Engineering suit MK1
  • Engineering suit MK2
  • Engineering suit MK3

Technologies

• 4 armor-related:
  • Engineering suit 0
  • Engineering suit 1
  • Engineering suit 2
  • Engineering suit 3