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Before there was several Silhouettes, there was one - and it existed strictly on paper. It was A.U. 0027, 5 years before the Silhouette Project was green lit for full research and development and 8 years before the Holy Crimson Uprising could begin - and Rinoa Harrison had just finished designing her newest project, the ATMF-5700 Beowulf III. Seeing her work being put to use by totally inept pilots who couldn't hit the broadside of a barn without a tactical aiming guide - and without her input by the organization using them - Harrison decided to design a Battle Suit that would be fitting for only the very best of pilots. This Battle Suit was the S81 Chevalier, and it was a design to truly be feared. In addition to being maneuverable beyond belief, it's raw speed matched it's agility. Sporting gatling-style machine cannons, head-mounted CIWS, and beam blades, it's firepower was topped by incredibly powerful Hyper Beam Rifles, capable of wiping out entire swarms of Battle Suits in a single shot.
However, two more factors put the S81 Chevalier above everything else: The S81's powerplant was a strange device of unknown origin that could unleash massive amounts of energy in an instant while also allowing S81 to integrate any weapon it picked up into it's own arsenal permanently if desired and to disconnect it's back mounted-Hyper Beam Rifles from their supporting recharge racks and use them like normal rifles, as well as allowed S81 to seamlessly combine them together into a Twin Hyper Beam Rifle to unleash immense blasts and then return them to their normal forms without harming their functions. S81 also came with a fully sentient AI construct that could learn from it's pilot in order to control S81 better on it's own, though the A.I.'s personality was brash, cocky, and very self-confident, making learning how to fly it's own body difficult for the AI. However, the A.I., combined with the Powerplant, made S81 too dangerous for a normal pilot to handle, and Rinoa Harrison saw the dangerous turn her work was taking and since S81 was impossible to construct in A.U. 0027, she shelved the S81 Project until technology could catch up and a pilot worthy of the unit could appear. S81 would serve as a secret base for the S70 Dragon that was eventually used to green light the entire Silhouette Project.
In A.U. 0129, an attack on Settlement January 12 by the Blue Typhoons causes a young civilian, Giancarlo Giovanni, to fall through a broken factory floor and into a fully constructed and almost fully operational S81 Chevalier Rinoa had built after technology had secretly caught up to the Suit. In flying the Suit, Giancarlo, or "Ian", as he was called by his friends, is revealed to be a natural choice for flying Chevalier, as he quickly masters the seemingly unstoppable Suit and later used it's integration ability to add a pair of normal beam rifles to it's arsenal in order to use it's powerful main armament for important situations only. Though S81's power proved truly terrible, as the A.I., which took the name Koen, used Chevalier's Twin Hyper Beam Rifle to destroy an entire space colony in a single shot. After that, S81 would grow ever stronger thanks to it's pilot as the war continued. 30 years later, during the Imperious Invasion, the two original S81s were still on the front lines and more than capable of holding their own against the advanced battle suits of Imperious' Grand Army.
