The Mech Touch novel Chapter 2542

Chapter 2542: Electronic Warfare Mechs

Was it easy to blind an expert mech?

"It's possible." Ves guessed.

It almost never happened. Confrontations between expert mechs took place every day in the Komodo War, but Ves had never heard of a story where a bunch of electronic warfare mechs managed to interfere with the sensor systems of a powerful mech.

As Ves gained more interest in this train of thought, he began to research this topic more seriously.

Of course, he did not research this topic by himself. He commanded his new Product Research Department to deploy some manpower to study this topic.

With an army of analysts at work, Ves only had to wait a few days to obtain a comprehensive report. The document he received distilled everything he wanted to know without any superfluous data. If he wanted to dive deeper, he could easily follow up on the references.

As it turned out, blinding expert mechs was possible.

It was just hard. It got harder with each subsequent generation.

Sensor tech became more sophisticated over time. Competition relentlessly drove innovation. Component developers constantly sought to raise resistance against ECM, jamming, interference and other strange effects. Those who failed to keep up would not be able to sell their sensor systems anymore!

There were immense trans-galactic corporations who investigated every exotic, every tech and every combination to see if they could harden sensor systems more.

The most important criteria to judge a sensor system wasn't precision or range, but resilience!

"There is too much jamming on the battlefield!"

Weapons fire already made it difficult for sensors to resolve accurate readings. When thousands of mechs fired their positron beams at once, how could such an enormous discharge of energy not mess up any sensors that were sensitive to electromagnetic emissions?

On top of these chaotic discharges, a lot of modern mechs possessed at least some ECM functionality.

Most of the time, they were fairly weak and basic, granting them some ability to hide against long-ranged sensors.

However, once a large amount of mechs grouped up, the interference they generated overlapped, forming a stronger field that frustrated targeting systems, spoiled precise readings and generated other effects.

There were mechs that were designed to do more than throw up an interference field for self-protection.

These auxiliary mechs carried or integrated powerful directional arrays. Designed for electronic warfare, these machines were capable of projecting interference across a distance!

It was similar to how a person across the street waved at Ves before shining a very bright flashlight in his eyes. It was annoying as hell and disturbed his vision!

At the level of mechs, this flashlight actually consisted of very sophisticated components that operated along principles that were countless times more complicated than projecting a simple beam of light in someone's eyes.

What Ves found curious was that electronic warfare mechs constantly faded in popularity.

In the earlier mech generations, they were quite a regular sight on the battlefield. It was worth fielding them because they truly did interfere with the aim of long-ranged mechs.

However, as the Age of Mechs progressed, sensor development continued to overtake electronic warfare development.

It made less sense to deploy mechs dedicated to electronic warfare.

They weren't necessary in small-scale combat. Mercenaries almost never bothered with them as it made more sense to field an extra mech that possessed actual teeth.

If a hundred electronic warfare mechs all focused on disturbing the sensors of an enemy mech company, then they might be able to disturb most but not all sensor systems.

"This makes no sense. It is much more straightforward to deploy a hundred combat mechs and wipe out the enemy mech company the old-fashioned way."

After all, electronic warfare mechs dedicated most of their capacity towards their interference capabilities. There was hardly any power or space left for self-protection.

Only larger organizations such as mech armies fielded these kinds of mechs as only deploying them in greater numbers allowed them to achieve substantial effects.

To be honest, Ves wasn't too well-versed in how mech militaries fielded these auxiliary mechs. There were major differences in third-class and second-class EW mechs that strongly affected their use. There were also a lot of different tech and methods that targeted specific sensor systems.

"There are too many variables!"

A mech contained at least several dozen different sensor systems. Was it easy to blind all of them at the same time? No! An EW mech simply didn't have the capacity to accomplish such a feat by itself.

The story was a bit more complicated when there were more mechs in the equation, but generally most combatants on the battlefield considered EW mechs to be a nuisance. It was already good enough if these unassuming machines were able to reduce an enemy's sensor range by 10 percent or drop their resolving power by 15 percent.

"These effects hardly make a difference in small-scale battles." Ves shook his head in disappointment.

Of course, these results mainly applied to situations where both sides maintained technical parity, which wasn't always the case.

"The Friday Coalition and the Hexadric Hegemony are roughly equal in this regard."

He was sure the truth was more nuanced, but he was just an outsider. Perhaps some mechs designed by specialists in electronic warfare achieved more stellar results, but Ves didn't have access to this kind of information.

What he did know was that no Hexer electronic warfare mech ever succeeded in blinding a Fridayman expert mech.

"It's futile!"

When Ves read this part of the report, he learned the main reason why expert mechs were so darned hard to interfere with. It was not necessarily their tech.

A second-class sensor system was still a second-class sensor system. No matter if the tech and materials cost 10 million hex credits or 10 billion hex credits, they were still inferior to first-class sensor systems.

Just because the more expensive system was 1000 times more expensive didn't mean it was 1000 more effective. Diminishing returns played a very important role!

"It's actually just 10 or 20 times stronger or something." Ves muttered.

He didn't have enough information to know the exact disparity.

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