The Mech Touch

"So how are our high-end projects coming along?"

Gloriana looked up and directed an annoyed glance towards her approaching husband.

"You have eyes. You can see for yourself. I do not need to explain everything about a project that you were supposed to help with. If you cannot keep up at this point, you may as well keep yourself out entirely."

Ves entered her lab without any forewarning, thereby disrupting the scheduled time period that she intended to devote to an intensive solitary design session.

The projection of the incredibly intricate, half-completed design of the Minerva Mark II unfolded before her gaze.

The upgrade project for the Minerva was much more expansive than what she had done for the Dark Zephyr.

In the case of the first Larkinson ace mech, the Dark Zephyr first got upgraded from his Mark II version to the Mark III version. Tusa broke through immediately after piloting this edition for the first time, which prompted the need to design the Mark III Revision 2 in order to accommodate his strength as an ace pilot.

The Minerva skipped this intermediary step. She went straight from a quasi-first-class low-to-mid tier expert mech to a true first-class ace mech.

Combined with all of the other drastic game-changing upgrades such as archetech and a brand-new Ultimate Module, the divide between the Minerva Mark I and the Minerva Mark II was incredibly vast!

It was not disingenuous to say that the Mark II could very well be regarded as an entirely new mech that just happened to imitate some of the vestiges of the previous version!

All of this extra work should have demanded a lot more time and effort in order to complete this ambitious project.

However, the reality was that the extra workload was quite modest. Sure, the Minerva Mark II Project most definitely presented numerous new challenges that demanded a lot of time in order to resolve, but there were also many familiar elements that Ves and Gloriana already tackled in their last projects.

Just as Ves envisioned, the Dark Zephyr Mark III and the Mark III Revision 2 served as trailblazers for an entirely new generation of Larkinson high-end mechs.

Gloriana had already solved the massive issues with trying to learn enough archetech to successfully adapt it to her mech designs.

Though she personally believed that she needed to master archetech to a much greater extent before trying to transform it into her own 'Glorianatech', her current progress was already sufficient enough to serve as an excellent technical base for the high-ranking mechs of the Larkinson Clan.

This saved a lot of time as the recycling of old solutions from the Dark Zephyr enabled Gloriana to 'fast-forward' a lot of design steps that previously should have taken days, weeks or months to complete.

The Minerva Mark II Project was therefore progressing at a comfortable rate. There was no chance to complete it in the next month, but it should probably be done within half a year, especially once Ves was able to devote more time to project.

"I see there is something missing in the design." Ves frowned as he studied the half-completed design a bit more. He noticed a distinct gap in the design that Gloriana deliberately left empty for whatever reason. "The hyper technology applied to this design is unusual. You have minimized the use of hyper material. Aside from the inclusion of water hypers to increase the performance of the azure shield generator and other established combinations, you have declined to impart a heavy attribute slant on this design."

"Finally, you noticed. Can you deduce what kind of attribute or hyper material I want to add to the Minerva? What powerful new hyper material complements a command specialist the best?"

That put Ves to thought.

Unlike pure combat mechs such as the Dark Zephyr and so on, the Minerva was never designed to fight in person all of the time.

Her original incarnation could still look like a decent rifleman mech, but her mech frame also accommodated a lot of command and control modules that took the place of more combat-relevant parts.

The Minerva Mark II took this shift a step further by devoting even more internal capacity to squeezing in as many powerful first-class command and control systems as possible.

This ensured that the first-class ace command mech would be able to penetrate through lots of interference, remain in contact with millions of machines and process a huge amount of data without blowing up the computing systems.

The addition of extremely powerful processors was extremely important to a command mech as it would grant Saint Commander Casella the ability to shunt a lot of data-intensive tasks to her mech as opposed to her transcendent but ultimately limited brain.

Casella Ingvar was already doing pretty fine with the Minerva Mark I Revision 2. The hastily and modestly upgraded expert mech was not able to channel the new ace commander's splendor, but the living mech still did an adequate job of serving as a stopgap solution in the past half year.

Ves eagerly looked forward to granting the Saint Commander a powerful ace command mech that would enable her to truly unleash her power, but a lot of work still had to be done before he could make this vision come true.

"You are missing a high-end application of hyper technology that is meant to amplify the performance of the command and control modules." Ves eventually figured out the situation after studying the incomplete design. "You are not seeking to enhance the firepower or other direct combat-related parameters of the Minerva Mark II. There is an obvious contrast between this design and what you did with the Amaranto Mark III Project. What is interesting is the specific approach you have chosen for this design."

His wife looked rather amused by this time. "Oh? What is my master plan, Ves?"

"You have discarded the use of regular medium to high-grade hyper materials. This allows you to increase the proportion of high-grade exotics used in the construction of C&C modules, thereby increasing their performance in one way, but taking it away in another sense. All of this will only produce a net positive change on total performance if you compensate for this design choice by adding in a very powerful hyper material at the conspicuous gap in the center. In fact, you deliberately designed this entire section around this key hyper material. The only question now is what hyper material you have chosen as the centerpiece. It has to be more powerful than usual, and it also has to be related to all of this activity."

Red humanity managed to discover and invent a lot of new hyper materials as of late. Most of them were fairly moderate in power, but the development of exciting new hyper alloys opened a range of new options for eager mech designers.

Ves did not think in this direction, though. The vast majority of new hyper alloys were overwhelmingly slanted towards amplifying the direct combat power of mechs. They functioned as force multipliers for weapon systems, armor systems, flight systems and so on. Few research institutions were interested in developing new solutions that did not possess a direct combat application.

His mind therefore settled on a powerful mind-attributed hyper material that still remained extremely rare but also highly coveted in human society.

It was a very luxurious material that Ves was already familiar with, because both his wife and personal assistant relied on it every day to perform way past the human norm!

"Mentalist Crystal." Ves uttered his increasingly more certain guess. "You want to augmented all of the C&C systems with one of the few and by far the most powerful mind-attributed hyper materials that red humanity has discovered."

Gloriana finally grinned. "Exactly! Casella's greatest weapon is not her marksmanship, which is good but not the best, nor her sword dueling skills, which are actually quite mediocre compared to her peers. Her greatest weapon is her comprehensive command ability. This not only encompasses her 'mortal' leadership abilities, but also her ability to empower other mechs with her Command Field. I have looked hard to find a hyper material that can complement and amplify the performance of both areas instead of just one. I have trialed many different alternatives that are more readily available, but none of them are able to satisfy my demands. It was only when I was able to borrow a sample loaned to me by the Mech Supremacist Faction that I discovered that a Mentalist Crystal is the solution to all of my problems."

She changed the projection to show a version of the Minerva Mark II with a whole Mentalist Crystal slotted in its place of pride.

"I have experimented with both a whole Crystal and a fragment of one. The latter is considerably more common and easier to acquire, but it is not powerful enough to choose over other hyper materials. Only a single, whole Mentalist Crystal that remains pristine after harvesting it from the brain of a dead mutated beast can fulfill all of the criteria that I have set. From the limited testing that I have conducted with the cooperation of the Saint Commander, I have modeled the approximate increase in performance in a large range of parameters. Here are my estimates."

She flicked her finger, activating a projection of research report that was filled with graphs and data tables.

Ves skimmed through the report. He quickly comprehended his wife's experimental design and applauded her for coming up with a scheme that enabled her to gather a lot of data under very limited circumstances.

Though the accuracy and validity of the data was not too high, the numbers could still be used to pain a broad sketch.

RIght now, that sketch looked incredibly powerful and ambitious. Ves quickly skipped over how a Mentalist Crystal could boost the performance of the processors and so on and moved straight over to the more extraordinary characteristics of the Minerva.

"Wait, are these estimates for real? Do you really think you can amplify the range of Casella's Command Field by 20 percent with the help of a Mentalist Crystal?"

"Yes!"

This was a massive improvement! As far as Ves knew, Casella's Command Field was shaped like a three-dimensional sphere, which meant that increasing the radius by a single meter required exponentially greater effort and energy. If Casella's Command Field was smaller, then the use of a Mentalist Crystal could potentially double or triple its range instead!

A boost of 20 percent at this point was already a massive gain as that enabled Casella to keep track of everything in every direction a lot easier than before.

The Saint Commander and her Minerva wouldn't be forced to expose themselves to the enemy as much as they could affect the entire battlefield while remaining safely in the rear.

Saint Commander Casella would also be able to detect and respond to flanking enemy units that sought to take her by surprise.

"What about the estimated performance boost to her Commandeering and Enfeoffment abilities?"

"The estimates I made in relation to these topics are less certain than the others. Nonetheless, I predict that a Mentalist Crystal will produce a quantitative performance increase to Casella's iconic abilities."

Ves looked a little disappointed. He hoped that using a more powerful mind-attributed hyper material would enable Casella to empower a select group of mechs into Counts as opposed to Barons.

That was a significant power boost as it meant the difference between the combat power of low-tier expert mechs and the combat power of mid-tier expert mechs!

Ves scrolled down to the table that contained the relevant estimates.

His wife predicted that the much more likely effect of a Mentalist Crystal was to enable Commander Casella to spread significant concentrations of her true resonance to a greater quantity of lucky mechs.

For example, if Casella was able to Enfeoff 35 mechs with the Minerva Mark I Revision 2, then she should be able to Enfoeff 40 or 45 mechs with the Minerva Mark II!

It was not impossible for this figure to rise even further if the design contained additional synergies.

This was the difference that a good ace mech could make to Commander Casella!

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