The Mech Touch novel Chapter 4655

Extending the hull of a capital ship was not a simple technical feat.

People often mistook the challenges of the exceedingly complicated technical steps needed to complete this seemingly simple task.

When put in the simplest possible terms, the process mostly amounted to cutting a ship in two separate pieces. The shipyard then inserted a newly manufactured hull section in the middle before fusing the three parts into a single whole again.

Simple, right?

Wrong.

Although Vivian did not have the time to explain the full range of complications and additional work that all of these changes introduced, it was enough for Ves to understand the processes in broad strokes.

"I suppose this is why it is worth it to pay millions of MTA merits to commission an MTA shipyard to do all of the work." Ves remarked. "A lesser shipyard will not be able to control all of the variables to a sufficient degree, resulting in many flaws and misalignments."

"Indeed. We can also use the MTA shipyard's help to rearrange the layout and structural design of our starship to meet our future needs. For example, the importance of shield generators is much greater than we anticipated, so we will need to reserve additional space for more of these devices. We also have to provide the necessary infrastructure such as a greater quantity of first-class power reactors in order to compensate for the drastically increased energy drain."

All of these upgrades along with the drastic upgrades to the sub-light propulsion system all added up to a hefty price tag.

"What about the upgrades to her superluminar travel capabilities?" Ves asked. "Have you explored the possibility of equipping her with a genuine superdrive?"

A superdrive was the most advanced means of traveling across the stars that was accessible to the public.

Though the Big Two definitely mastered more advanced forms of superluminar travel such as portal jump technology, neither the MTA or CFA wanted others to gain access to them. Their value in military operations were too great to be shared.

Superdrives already provided an incredible speed boost compared to the conventional FTL drives of yesteryear. _{freewebnøvel.coɱ}

By combining the active effects of an FTL drive and a warp drive in a single cohesive device, a superdrive could make a starship travel from one side of the Milky Way to the other side of the galaxy in as little as a couple of years!

This was a massive change compared to just a mech generation before. Back before the introduction of phasewater and the Red Ocean, most humans assumed that even the fastest ships required almost a century to travel from one side of the galaxy to another.

"Superdrive technology has come a long way, sir, but they are very much being iterated upon at a rapid pace." Vivian warned the patriarch. "Developers are constantly releasing safer, better, more powerful and more cost-efficient models every year. If you want to spend your MTA merits as wisely as possible, it is best to wait a decade or so until the pace of innovation has slowed down."

Though Ves agreed with this sentiment, when he thought about what happened to the Cenatus Prospecting fleet, he remembered that being a cheapskate would ultimately cost him more in the long run!

"Please explain your proposal first, Vivian. Tell me what we can do to speed up our flagship during FTL travel."

"Very well. When it comes to these new and amazing devices, we can choose between first-class and second-class superdrives. Let me begin with the latter. The most affordable second-class capital ship-grade superdrive we can exchange from the MTA is priced at 120,000 MTA merits."

Ves perked up when he heard this price figure. "That is better than I expected."

"I would advise against this specific model, sir." Vivian's projection looked displeased. "At their lowest, a second-class superdrive can speed up the traversal speed of a ship in FTL travel by ten times. However, the cycle time of the superdrive is identical to that of a standard FTL drive, so the ship in question will still have to spend many hours in realspace or switch to using a second FTL drive."

"We can buy two second-class superdrives then." Ves remarked. "We can alternate between one and the other, thereby permanently traveling through FTL at ten times the speed of a ship using a pair of regular FTL drives."

"That can work, sir, but you cannot sustain this pattern for long. This is because the shorter hops will give the spare superdrives much less time to cycle and recover from their previous exertions. If you alternate between them too quickly, they will quickly accumulate stress and fatigue without giving them enough time to unwind. At worst, they might malfunction or break in situations where we can least afford that to happen."

p An dD ????1.cO,,m Ves thought for a moment. "If I recall, the Spirit of Bentheim can accommodate three FTL drives right now. We can replace them with three superdrives instead. That should give us enough capacity to endure the rigors of long-distance transluminal travel, right?"

"Theoretically, that is true, but don't forget that we have an entire fleet as well." Vivian reminded him. "Without upgrading the drives of our other starships, they will not be able to keep up with the Spirit of Bentheim. With our current budget, we can upgrade drives of all of our capital ships, but that still leaves us with a large number of combat carriers that will also require their own superdrives. Then we need to account for our allies. If the Glory Seekers and the Cross Clan are unwilling to make superdrives standard-issue for all of their own starships, then our expeditionary fleet won't be able to travel faster than before."

This was because the fleet effectively traveled as fast as its slowest element. The best way to deal with this problem was to abandon every element that was too slow to keep up, but Ves was not willing to go that far. The Larkinson Army and Navy weren't strong or numerous enough to stand on their own in the frontier.

Ves had to rule out this unreasonable option.

Verify captcha to read the contentVerify