The Mech Touch novel Chapter 4615

Out of all of the combat assets employed for the blitz operation, no mech played a more crucial role than the Mars.

As the only ace mech of the Golden Skull Alliance, its strategic and material value exceeded that of all of the expert mechs put together!

In fact, the Mars was more valuable than several fleet carriers put together. Ves could even make an argument that all of the ships of the Golden Skull Alliance weren't as valuable as a single combination of an ace mech and a mech pilot!

This was because a functional ace mech could defeat entire pioneering fleets on their own, particularly if the latter did not enjoy the protection of an ace mech itself.

In the past, ace mechs at least required the support of a carrier vessel in order to transport it to the battlefield and back, but even that rule was no longer mandatory.

Although the Mars was not expressly designed to engage in interstellar travel, it could travel to another star system in an emergency.

The speed and efficiency was awfully low, though. The Pulsvar V-1 was mainly designed to function as a battlefield-oriented transphasic flight system. This meant that it was good at making a mech move rapidly in short to medium ranges but was not the best at longer cruises.

Warp drives were also around 10 times slower than FTL drives when it came to star hopping, so it might take an ace mech several months to reach a destination!

"We don't need the Mars to engage in superluminal travel." Master Benedict Cortez told Ves as both mech designers stood before the powerful ace mech in question. "It only has to remain fast enough to outspeed the tracking of the Tower of Babel's primary and secondary gun batteries and the rotation of her hull. It also helps if the Mars can outrun the pursuit of the alien phase lord that previously protected the alien battleship against the Unrelenting."

Ves looked up at the Mars. He could just see the elements of the Pulsvar V-1 sticking out of the back of the masterwork ace mech. It looked different than before. It received additional elements that bulked up its construction and likely boosted its performance parameters.

"What did you do to the flight system?" He asked.

Benedict pressed his lips. "Reginald has requested us to find a way to make his ace mech faster. Personally, I am of the opinion that the configuration of the Mars is already optimal, but its pilot does not agree, so I had little choice but to take additional time off my schedule to make the requested changes."

Perhaps an ordinary mech pilot might not be able to force a Master Mech Designer to implement changes to a mech, but an ace pilot was a different story, especially when he also happened to be the leader of the clan that owned everything!

"So the Pulsvar V-1 is stronger now, Master?" Ves guessed.

"Correct. I worked together with the Godwin Institution to develop a more powerful version of its original product. Together, we came up with a variant called the Pulsvar V-1HE. The HE stands for High Energy, as the additional structures added to the base version significantly increases the forward acceleration of the flight system in exchange for consuming substantially more energy. The Pulsvar V-1HE is a hungry beast, and the main reason why I agreed to its inclusion is because I managed to improve my Original Energy Bridge System to compensate for the increased energy consumption."

Ves nodded in understanding. In short, the Mars became a lot faster, but also became a lot more energy inefficient in the process. Improving the Original Energy Bridge System which essentially exploited the skull of a dead expert pilot to extract more energy from… somewhere… prevented the ace mech from running dry too soon!

"I assume that's not the only upgrade, right?" The younger mech designer remarked as he sensed another significant change in the flight system.

"Ah, you are sharp if you managed to deduce that little detail. The Godwin Institution also helped with designing a way to integrate more phasewater into the flight system. The Pulsvar V-1 originally came with 400 grams of phasewater, but the Pulsvar V-1HE now has 600 grams of phasewater. That doesn't mean that the Mars can move 50 percent faster than before, but any incremental speed boost is helpful."

Now that Ves had gained a much greater understanding of phasewater, he realized how impressive that sounded.

While it was easy to stuff more phasewater into a relatively small object like a mech, it became exponentially more difficult to keep it all stable!

Significant concentrations of phasewater had a tendency to mess up the surrounding space. Expensive measures needed to be taken in order to suppress their spatial fluctuations and prevent the mech in question from tearing itself apart.

If this factor didn't play a role, then Master Benedict and the Godwin Institution could have easily stuffed several kilograms of phasewater into the transphasic flight system.

In fact, they could still choose to do so, but they haven't because most of the 'phasewater quota' was already taken up by the Abasis Armor.

One of the reasons why the Mars performed so well in its duel against the Neo Amadeus was because 11 kilograms of phasewater stuffed into the Abasis Armor allowed the ace hybrid mech to withstand a lot of punishing blows!

There was no way that Master Benedict was willing to compromise the excellent defenses of the Mars in exchange for a bit more speed.

Survival mattered the most. The previous Cross Clan had gone from heaven to hell in a single go after Lord Hemmington Cross met an untimely demise.

A repeat of that outcome had to be avoided at all cost!

Once Master Benedict filled Ves in on the changes to the flight system, they moved closer to the mech itself and discussed the other tweaks made to the ace mech.

High-ranking expert mechs always remained in development. Perhaps Master Benedict didn't work on the Mars non-stop, but he should definitely get back to its design from time to time in order to optimize its design, apply incremental improvements and replace outdated parts with newer versions that just became available.

Ves learned a lot from this tour. Though he had taken part in the original design process, he no longer remained up to date on the state of the Mars. His wife received much more information than him because the Mars also incorporated her god body solution.

Though many of the changes were rather incremental in nature, Ves could see what they represented.

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