The Mech Touch novel Chapter 4579

"Are we looking at an alien or a human warship?"

This question was surprisingly hard to answer.

Mech designers such as Ves possessed a great understanding in engineering, but their expertise did not encompass shipbuilding. There was too much about starship design that still eluded their understanding.

Though Ves and many other mech designers formed their own theories, they could not speak with authority on this issue.

They mainly leaned on their resident ship experts to make sense of the grainy, low-quality readings transmitted by the low-profile probes.

It just so happened that the Larkinson Clan's versatility and comprehensiveness became a boon at this time. The Larkinson Navy had brought along an entire ship repair and shipbuilding vessel in the form of the Diligent Ovenbird.

This recently upgraded capital ship previously functioned as a stationary shipyard in Davute, but when the preparations for the Trailblazer Expedition commenced, the Larkinsons had converted her back into a mobile capital ship, though at the cost of compromising much of her shipbuilding capacity.

Nevertheless, the Diligent Ovenbird still retained much of her shipbuilding crew. Thousands of ship designers, naval engineers, ship system specialists and technicians crewed the vessel.

These days, many of these workers busied themselves with repairing the combat carriers that incurred damage in the previous battle. They also worked on studying, breaking down and recycling the alien warship debris from that same battle.

The shipwrights under the lead of Vivian Tsai mainly developed new and interesting starship designs for the Larkinson Clan. Even if the Larkinson Clan faced heavy constraints in ship production, it did not stop the ship designers from increasing the stockpile of effective ship designs.

However, the ship designers also spent a lot of time on analyzing the design and construction of alien vessels. The Battle of the Boryan Belt had given them excellent access to different alien warships. They had access to a huge amount of high-quality battle footage, but more importantly than that they also had actual samples of warship debris to examine and deconstruct in person.

While it was difficult for most people to imagine how all of this would convert into tangible benefits, Ves was thankful that he had invested so much into building up the Naval Design Department.

Compared to where it was in the past, the Naval Design Department had undergone an extensive period of expansion and professionalization.

The department hired many shipwrights, some of whom even possessed greater experience and qualifications than their relatively junior head.

Ves saw no reason to replace Miss Tsai with any of these highly competent shipwrights, though. He trusted her and was familiar with her. He also believed that she would continue to grow into the role and be able to serve the clan well for many decades to come.

Given the importance of figuring out the identity and the details of the unknown hybrid warship, Ves personally marched over to the hangar bay so that he could shuttle over to the Diligent Ovenbird.

The vessel looked a lot more industrial than the other ships in the fleet. The Ovenbird might have a silly name, but she had become as important to the Larkinsons as the Spirit of Bentheim!

Right now, the critical ship repair vessel was being flanked by both the Gorgoneion and the Graveyard. These two bulky capital ships physically protected the relatively fragile civilian-grade vessel from multiple angles.

No capital ship had docked at her Big Oven at this time. It was highly inconvenient to repair and conduct maintenance on starships during this tense and dangerous period.

When Ves stepped out of his shuttle, he noticed that much of the industrial gear had been locked down or stowed away.

Fewer workers were moving around as there just wasn't as much work to do at the moment. Everyone in the fleet had to be ready to respond to any emergencies at any time.

An air of uncertainty and oppression had descended onto the Golden Skull Alliance. Each of them had already witnessed the enormous firepower of an alien battleship.

Even if the flagship of the Unspoken was considerably larger and more powerful than the unidentified alien warship hiding underneath the surface of the brown dwarf star, the latter was much more modern and up to date!

A direct conflict against the unknown hybrid battleship would go a lot differently than the fight against the V'gahnt-Zezne.

In the last battle, a temporary coalition consisting of six pioneering fleets dispatched seven impressive ace mechs against the massive orven battleship.

With many of these powerhouse machines harassing the V'gahnt-Zezne at close range, her powerful but extremely sluggish and inflexible primary armaments were completely unable to retaliate against the fast and agile ace mechs!

The situation was completely different this time. The Golden Skull Alliance was on its own and could not dispatch more than a single ace mech.

The hostile environment of the brown dwarf star prevented the mech forces of the expeditionary fleet from getting close and using their mobility to their advantage.

This essentially meant that the Golden Skull Alliance had little choice but to engage the strange battleship at long range, which was exactly where warships held the greatest advantage!

Any ship with primary weapon batteries that were larger than several heavy mechs put together loved nothing more than to sit back at a comfortable distance and bombard their targets with overwhelming firepower.

This was the reason why everyone was so nervous at this time. A battle against a single alien battleship might cause the expeditionary fleet to incur horrendous damage.

As a precaution, the expeditionary fleet had already taken the initiative to move behind the rocky planet so that much of its bulk would shield the vulnerable starships from direct strikes.

This was not a permanent solution, though. Any decent alien warship possessed the ability to maneuver surprisingly rapidly on the battlefield as long as there weren't any powerful warp inhibition effects.

Given the enormous threat level of the hybrid battleship, Ves sped up his pace and quickly arrived at a compartment where numerous ship designers and other specialists were quietly analyzing the data collected by the probes.

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