It's hard to survive in the wasteland without proper weapon, armour and bottle of firewater. Let's see what kind of items mercenaries in Wasteland punk like to take with themselves. 

Each character has 6 equipment slots. There goes: weapon. armour, 2 accessories. And depending on class up to 2 talismans. 

Each piece of equipment has its own list of attributes. When you equip an item on a character it will increase his attributes by the same amount. Pretty simple. Now, let's look at the weapon. 

Each base class have a weapon type connected to it. For medics, its a shotgun, warriors use big, heavy sticks and so on. You won't be able to equip the weapon of different class on a character. Warriors will never(hopefully) learn how to shoot a gun. Weapons also have unique parameter associated with them - "Firepower". It empowers skills same way attributes do. 

Armours, on the other hand, don't have class restrictions. You can equip all your team in chem suits before diving in the acid lake with no gameplay problems. 

Accessories are some small items, that don't fit in other categories. It could be laser\optical sight. Very useful when attached to axe btw. You can't equip 2 accessories at the same time at once. But any other combination will work just fine. 

I won't cover talismans and how they work in this article. But I promise to come back to them when the time comes. 

There are 3 main sources of new equipment. You can ask the city mechanic to craft it for you. Some can drop from a combat encounter or quest. And factions have something to offer you if you are on good terms with them. 

I guess it's all for now. I will tell more about equipment attributes, in the article about crafting.