The Mech Touch novel Chapter 3125

Chapter 3125: Vivacious Wal

Scaling up luminar crystal weapons came with considerable challenges.

It wasn't so bad at first. Ves first started with scaling up his standard assault rifles to heavy assault rifles.

The former was light enough to allow regular baseline humans to handle them without any significant hindrance. While the weapon was certainly a bit hefty, Zanthar didn't exhibit too many issues when he test-fired the standard rifle.

The latter only looked a bit longer and thicker, but its total volume had scaled up drastically. This caused the weapon to become very dense and heavy, so much so that even Ves felt uncomfortable with handling it despite his augmented strength.

It wasn't just the weight that made it difficult to handle. Its exaggerated proportions and its longer rifle barrel made it harder to balance it in a person's hands.

The truth was that the heavy variant was not meant to be wielded by ordinary people at all. Ves designed it to match the heavy rifles that were customarily assigned to infantry in medium and heavy combat armor.

Their augmented, powered suits of combat armor not only granted them the strength to carry these heavy weapons, but also provided them with a stable platform to utilize them in an effective manner.

When Ves made these larger rifles, he began to encounter new problems relating to scaling. Each of them required him to come up with solutions that were derived from multiple sources, such as his material understanding of the crystals to the insights on alien circuitry borrowed from the Illustrious One.

Alien circuitry patterns that worked for smaller crystals no longer functioned quite as well when applied to larger crystals.

The greater mass and volume of a crystal caused the effects of the circuitry to be diluted.

Ves couldn't solve this problem by engraving these crystals with larger circuitry. Luminar technology didn't seem to work that way. Instead, he had to channel the Illustrious One for long periods of time in order to come up with longer and more elaborate patterns that took the increased volume into account.

This was tedious work because every unique crystal design needed its own separate circuitry that was tailored to both its physical properties and its intended purpose. Two crystals with identical shapes could contain completely different circuitry if one was made for physical damage resistance and the other was made for heat absorption.

Still, as much as Ves lamented the time required to reconfigure the enlarged luminar crystals, the outcome was worth it as the heavy assault rifles packed a much greater punch than the original version.

The slicer beam even cut right through the dummy and the rear wall of the firing range! If not for the shield generator that Ves had installed as a precaution, the beam would have gone on to destroy the rack of equipment further in its path!

"Damn, I need to beef up the protections before I resume the tests!"

It didn't take much time for him to install additional slabs of metal in order to prevent the near-disaster from repeating. Ves also made sure he stayed further away and examined the tests from a much safer distance.

Ves spent an entire week tinkering with these heavy rifles. Even after creating the new circuitry for the enlarged crystals, he still encountered several issues that reduced the efficiency of the weapon or increased its power consumption beyond reason.

As much of the Larkinson Clan continued to work on making the Vivacious Wal, the Andrenidae, the Discentibus and the Blinding Banshee fit for travel, Ves practically spent his entire waking hours in his personal workshop as he became more fascinated by making significant improvements with each new heavy crystal rifle he designed and crafted.

He made sure to thoroughly detect and address every adverse change in performance from scaling up the crystal rifle design. This led him to produce a pile of expensive weapons.

Instead of disposing of them, Ves selected the best twelve heavy luminar crystal rifles and handed them over to his honor guard.

"Here you go. These rifles are leagues better than the ones you are currently using."

The honor guard were all happy with receiving their new weapons. Despite their experimental and uncertain reliability, the many tests that Ves had conducted over the past few days had fully proven how much firepower and versatility they possessed!

Though it was too laborious for Ves to equip all of the infantry soldiers with powerful handmade weapons, it was not a big deal for him to give his bodyguards an extra boost.

"Besides, strengthening my bodyguards will increase my safety. It is more than worth it to give them my attention."

Once he was satisfied that he had mastered the heavy rifle version of the luminar crystal rifle concept, he decided to scale it up another notch.

He did not move on to designing and creating mech-sized rifles just yet. Instead, he settled on a middle ground and created a weapon system that was too large and heavy to be wielded by infantry but could easily be mounted on shuttles.

The Larkinson Clan did not have a habit of mounting weapons onto shuttles, though, so it was likely that these guns would not be put to use. Ves therefore tried to make as little of them as possible.

"It costs exponentially more money and resources to make them as well." Ves frowned.

Just one of these guns used up enough materials to outfit his entire honor guard with heavy luminar crystal rifles!

The fact that Ves was trying to develop a high-quality rifle for an expert mech meant that he could not cheap out on materials. He needed to gain a greater understanding of all of the materials used to make the strongest and most potent crystals. He also had to familiarize himself with all of the properties of these types of crystals whether they were scaled for infantry soldiers or mechs.

Verify captcha to read the contentVerify