The Mech Touch

Eventually, Ves shot down Captain Byrd’s insane idea of implementing the god crystals into the design of the Enduring Protector.

"It’s not feasible." He replied as he rapidly went through the implications of her suggestion. "The god crystals aren’t very effective by themselves. A single god crystal takes far too long to recharge. The dwarf brains that we’ve repurposed as their organic controllers lose concentration long before the recharge cycle is finished. We also can’t recharge the god crystal very often for some reason. If the siphoning process is botched, we’ll have to wait another day before they can be recharged."

Captain Byrd looked disappointed, but she offered a suggestion. "What if we commit a full god crystal generator aboard one of the transports accompanying the red zone force?"

"This... there are pros and cons to such a decision, captain." He said with a thoughtful expression. "As long as we can protect the god crystal generator, the mechs and troops entering the red zone don’t have to worry about their energy budget at all. They can remain in the zone indefinitely as long as their other supplies last. However, committing a strategic god crystal generator is like putting all of our eggs in a single basket. If an enemy takes out the generator, it’s a disaster."

"Can you design your mechs to take advantage of the available energy?"

It would entail a near-complete redesign, as Ves had not taken such an option into account. He designed the Enduring Protector around the assumption that energy would be extremely scarce.

"The performance of my mech can be boosted immediately if they don’t have to take into account how much energy they expend, but it is still vastly underpowered compared to regular mechs. I can redesign the Enduring Protector to cope with a higher level of performance, but there are limits to how much I can expand its upper bounds. Resisting the breakdown effect is its highest priority, so it can’t shake loose its dependence on obsolete, low-tech parts, ma’am."

Ves pointed out a couple of examples through the projector. Unless he completely scrapped more than three week’s worth of design work and begin anew, the Enduring Protector design would always be a design oriented around breakdown resistance and energy efficiency.

He always relegated performance as a third or fourth priority. He couldn’t afford the luxury of focusing upon it when he already had his hands full trying to keep his design afloat in the red zone where the breakdown effect reigned supreme.

After a brief discussion, Ves pointed out the greatest risk of bringing in a god crystal generator into the red zone.

"Our rivals are facing the same awful prospect as us, ma’am. With machines failing left and right, it gets increasingly harder to keep their power generators working. If we show up with a god crystal generator and call down an energy tornado that can be seen from a huge distance, aren’t we taunting them that we’re loaded with energy? There’s a huge chance that they’ll gang up on us if they haven’t developed any alternatives to their energy shortages."

"I think we can take that chance." Captain Byrd said confidently. "I have faith in our research prowess. As long as we maintain a decisive edge and pair your new design with Qilanxo and the melee mech design the Swordmaidens are cooking up, we can easily defeat a force that is ten times as numerous. When it comes to securing the treasures of the Starlight Megalodon, we have to be bold enough to resist the combined advances of all of our rivals at once."

"I’m not sure if it will be that easy, captain. I have a suspicion that the Vesians aren’t any worse than us in developing alternatives to cope with the problems we’ve been dealing with over the month."

"Mr. Larkinson, while we shouldn’t underestimate our foes, we shouldn’t overestimate their capabilities either." She said. "We possess inestimable advantages and we must stake our lives on them if we wish to achieve success."

The meeting ended quickly after that. Ves left her office and remained pensive throughout his return to the workshops.

The statements expressed by Captain Byrd told him that she was done with trying to remain cautious. While many Vandals thought Captain Byrd was overly timid compared to Captain Orfan, that was only because the former didn’t throw herself headlong into a battle she wasn’t confident in winning.

However, all of the research gains the Flagrant Swordmaidens achieved lately strengthened their ground forces and made them vastly more powerful in this unique environment. Captain Byrd believed the time to gather their strength had gone long enough!

Now was the time to leverage their advantages and steamroll the opposition!

"Reckless." Ves quietly muttered to himself as he seated himself behind his terminal again. "How can she discount our threats so easily? The other forces aren’t so simple either. Even if they lack our research capacity, I’m sure they’re resourceful enough to think of another solution."

Still, Ves had his orders. As the highest commanding officer of the Vandal ground forces, Captain Byrd dictated their approach. If she wanted to adopt an aggressive strategy, then everyone else had to dance to her tune.

Ves looked at his Enduring Protector and thought of how he could increase the upper bounds of its relatively lackluster performance. Right now, it couldn’t fully leverage an overabundance of energy, because it couldn’t move fast enough or fire strong-enough lasers to expend all of that extra energy.

He hated the sudden shift in design priorities. If Captain Byrd expressed this kind of intention at the start, then Ves could have designed the Enduring Protector with an elevated level of performance in mind.

Now, his workload increased massively as his first iteration fit poorly in the strategy adopted by the Vandals.

The strategy changed mid-way!

"Arrggh!" He shouted in frustration. "Do I have to start all over again?"

He didn’t want to. He labored so much over the Enduring Protector’s design that he felt loathe to discard it like a piece of trash. He invested so much time and energy in developing a viable breakdown-proof mech that he felt sick at the thought of starting over.

He decided to retain the design, but modify it as best as possible to account for the new demands. Not only would it save time, it also allowed the Enduring Protector to cope with different levels of energy availability.

"Increasing its upper bounds in performance doesn’t mean the Enduring Protector will turn into an energy hungry design. As soon as their energy supply cuts off, they can immediately transition into a low power mode."

This gave his design some added flexibility in case their enemies took out the god crystal generator.

As Ves thought through the changes he needed to make in his design, he found that if he made some limited compromises, he’d still be able to retain the essence of his design.

"I’ll have to focus on channeling the extra power onto the components that best scale with it. There’s no need to stress the other parts when they’ll just drown in the extra energy."

He already formed a good idea where to channel the extra energy. After concentrating his Spirituality and allowing Beast Rider Bubal to settle into the forefront of his mind, he began to work.

The first thing he did was to scrap the underpowered laser rifle barrels and replaced them with a simple laser cannon barrel from the local database. Its design may be old, but it scaled incredibly well with varying levels of power settings.

The adapted laser cannons could fire a laser beam as weak as one shot from a laser pistol to releasing a full blast that was half as strong as a laser beam fired from an Akkara heavy cannoneer!

"This is more than enough power to hamper any crippled mechs designed to operate in the red zone."

The only major downside to using these cannons was that their tracking speed couldn’t keep up with the movements of fast-moving objects.

However, to Ves, this was no downside at all. The strong and pervasive breakdown effect prevented light mechs from bursting out with incredible speed because their gravitic backpacks were affected most of all!

"In the red zone, every mech is as slow as a snail, no matter if they are light mechs or heavy mechs. The balance between mobility and armor has shifted away from the former because it’s impossible for mechs to retain their speed."

What did this mean? It meant that replacing the nimbler and faster laser rifle barrels with larger and slower laser cannon barrels effectively came with no repercussions! The downsides associated with exchanging a lighter weapon for a heavier weapon didn’t apply at this time!

Ves spent a couple of days to incorporate this change. He optimized the placements of the new weapon systems and made sure the internal architecture could cope with the increased energy expenditure.

Once he became satisfied with his revision to the weapon systems, he found that his design began to have heat management problems.

If it fired its laser cannons at their highest power settings, it rapidly built up heat. This was an inevitable problem, and Ves couldn’t do much to compensate for it besides exchanging some redundant energy cells for extra heat sinks.

This tradeoff made it so that the Enduring Protector wouldn’t be able to last as long when cut off from a power source. However, the added heat sinks significantly increased the Enduring Protector’s lethality during high-intensity battles as it could fire a bit more full-powered laser beams without worrying about overheating their frames.

Beast Rider Bubal relished in the changes. Both the dwarf and the wild god preferred to fight quick and decisive engagements rather than drawn-out slugging fests.

Ves smiled at the eventual result. The only setback he suffered was when he tried but failed to divert extra power anywhere else. The power reactor couldn’t output much more juice and Ves couldn’t squeeze out any more performance out of the extremely outdated engine model.

He contemplated replacing the current engine with a different model, but declined to do so after browsing some of the alternatives.

"There are better, newer engines out there that scale better with added power, but they’re far more prone to breakdowns."

It wasn’t as if a more powerful engine drastically increased the speed of the Enduring Protector. Snails were snails. A faster snail might move faster than a slower snail, but a hopping rabbit left them both in the dust!

A more powerful engine wouldn’t be able to speed up his design. The only solution was to find a way to allow the gravitic backpacks to work despite the breakdown effect doing its very best to screw them up. Yet for all the research capacity the Vandals enjoyed, they hadn’t figured out how to improve the reliability of the gravitic backpacks at all.

Therefore, Ves gave up on channeling the extra power elsewhere. "It’s already sufficient for me to improve the offensive power of my design. This is it’s core function and its strongest suit."

An increase in offensive power directly magnified the combat effectiveness of a combined force that consisted of Enduring Protectors, Qilanxo and Mayra’s tiger mechs.

As Ves began the long and tedious process of optimizing his design and putting it through its paces in many different combat scenarios, an alarm suddenly sounded out in the workshop.

"What?" Ves looked up from his terminal. The alert signified that an enemy attack may be imminent in the next couple of hours!

And this wouldn’t be an attack by a single crazy wild god or anything. The tone of the alarm indicated that a mech force may be setting upon the Flagrant Swordmaidens!

Captain Byrd’s voice suddenly broadcasted from every available speaker. "Vandals, prepare for battle! Our scouts have detected an approaching force of mechs, wild gods and dwarves! They are aware of our location and are moving to attack us at their best speed!"

The energy tornados developed by the god crystal project gave away their position! On this huge planet, the odds of encountering a rival mech force should have been minimal, but all of that changed once the god crystal generators started calling down energy tornados left and right.

The Flagrant Swordmaidens finally paid the price for their inventions!