The Mech Touch novel Chapter 2991

Chapter 2991: Multiple Loadouts

At some point during the conversations, the cats left the desk and settled onto the laps of the visitors.

Ketis played host to Blinky. The spiritual cat laid his back onto her lap and offered up his starry belly for rubs.

Mrow~ Mrow~

Meanwhile, Venerable Joshua was pampering Lucky. The expert pilot rubbed the mechanical cat on the back and tickled his pointy ears. Though the gem cat's exterior was made of hard material, Lucky was still able to feel pleasure from his treatment.

"Meow~"

The pair of lovers quietly waited as Ves quickly sketched out a couple more mounted wargear loadouts. They didn't look real, but that wasn't the point. The sketches were merely supposed to direct their thoughts.

In a couple of minutes, Ves managed to draw two additional loadouts. When they were superimposed on top of the core mech, then they always seem to supersize Joshua's expert mech. The artillery loadout was the biggest one, but the other ones weren't that much worse off. They would have slowed down the expert mech to a crawl if they didn't come with thrusters and boosters.

"The purpose of mounted wargear is to add new powerful capabilities to existing mechs on a non-permanent basis." Ves explained as he put the final touches to his hasty wireframe drawings. "Some of them are meant to be worn near-permanently by their base platforms. This turns them into something akin to a modular mech platform but to a much bigger extent. If there are any situations where an enemy is able to cripple the wargear components, the expert mech can simply purge it all and free itself from its burden in order to continue its fight in a more conventional manner."

He tapped the projection and caused the expert mech mounted with artillery gear to drop all of its extra burden. When he tapped it another time, the gear attached itself to the expert mech again.

"So the best way to look at this gear is to treat it as additional equipment. The mounted wargear loadouts will give extra options, but due to the nature of how I plan to design them, they won't last long and they're not as durable as the core mech. It's no worth bringing them out when fighting against weaker opponents, but if we ever face something like the Fridayman ambush again, then having this option is a great way to fight against other expert mechs."

While it was an extravagant and wasteful solution, it had one redeeming factor.

A single expert pilot was fully capable of controlling all of those additional systems. The Larkinson Clan did not have a lot of expert pilots at the moment. While there were plenty of expert candidates, it was questionable whether they would break through anytime soon when there were no battles on the horizon.

This meant that Ves had a great interest in maximizing the power of every expert mech. Aside from stuffing them with high-quality resonating materials, making them bigger was a possible solution. Yet making mechs bigger reduced their mobility, which was something very critical to expert mechs when they dueled each other.

How could Ves increase the power of an expert mech yet simultaneously retain their mobility advantage in duels?

The solution he settled with was the best possible compromise in his opinion. He could already tell that the design challenges would keep him up day and night, but he was incredibly excited to realize this vision.

His passion had fired up. By diverting the Chimera Project from its original bland direction, he succeeded in becoming invested in its success.

Though Joshua and Ketis still exhibited some misgivings, Ves did not allow them to become skeptical of his plan.

He turned his attention back to his presentation. "Aside from this artillery variant, there are two additional mounted wargear loadouts that I think are interesting. As you all know, we are still lacking a powerful lancer mech. We need an expert mech that can charge straight towards the enemy and punch through any obstacle, whether it is an array of defensive mechs or a powerful capital ship. Remember the earlier phases of the Battle against the Abyss where we confronted the Gravidus Knarlax?"

"I remember." Venerable Joshua looked a bit grimmer as he stoked Lucky's back. "A lot of good Larkinsons died that day, and not just against those 'dark gods'. I never want to fight a pirate warship again."

"There is no guarantee that your wish will come true, Joshua. Do you understand the environment we will be entering soon? The Red Ocean is not as tame and regulated as regular human space. The Big Two may be sweeping the indigeonous alien empires that are rooted there, but I have heard plenty of tales of fish slipping through the net. According to the galactic net, these aliens don't have a tradition for using mechs. Instead, just like humanity in the past, their main war-making potential consists of warships. Alien warships."

The strengths of these warships varied wildly depending on the alien species and other variables. Some were beatable by third-class outfits while others were so powerful that they demanded the MTA and CFA to put in a serious effort to crush the alien fleets.

No one doubted that the Big Two would be able to wipe the dwarf galaxy clean of sentient alien inhabitants, but the problem was that conquering any galaxy took a lot of time, even if it was just a miniature-sized one. Since the Big Two could not afford to direct too many warfleets away from the Milky Way, it would probably take a few decades to an entire century to finish the job.

In the meantime, the Big Two's warfleets along with all of the pioneer fleets that traveled through the Red Ocean risked getting attacked by alien warships at any time!

Fortunately, the chance of encountering a large, intact alien warfleet was very low. The ones that lurked in the territories that were recently conquered by humans were mostly isolated warships that managed to survive one way or another.

Yet a single one of them could easily slaughter thousands of mechs in some cases!

"Don't we have another expert mech in the works that can do this already?" Ketis asked. "The Vanguard Project is supposed to fulfill this role to an extent."

"It's not enough." Ves shook his head. "The Vanguard Project is not a dedicated lancer mech. It needs to retain enough dueling capabilities, so we will have to implement a lot of compromises to its design. It's a spearman mech, not a lancer mech. You can think of it as a bigger and beefier version of the Valkyrie Redeemer."

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