The Mech Touch

Ves always knew that luminar crystals held a lot more potential that he had never managed to tap. His fundamental understanding of this tech was too shallow and his reliance on external help was too great.

This caused him to hit walls fairly early. It was quite frustrating to know that he could easily improve his implementation if he mastered the tech a little more.

He was sure that all of those ancient luminar engineers would have laughed at him if he presented his work to them. He was an outright amateur compared to what the luminar race had pushed their signature tech!

This was why the Superpublished version of the Sentry Project was so precious. The overall improvement of the mech was 10 percent, but there was more to this proportionate boost than met the eye.

In the aspects where the Sentry Project was weak at, this little boost was extremely interesting to Gloriana but not so much to Ves.

If the different parameters of the original expert rifleman mech design was graded into standardized numerical scores, then if its offensive capabilities was set at 100, its defensive and mobility capabilities would roughly fall at 13 and 25 respectively.

Of course, these numbers could change drastically depending on what kind of scoring criteria Ves adopted, but the general range shouldn't deviate too much.

The point was that a 10 percent boost in defense would only effectively increase the Sentry Project's defenses by just over 1 point.

1 point.

In relative terms, this was a huge change. In absolute terms, an enemy expert mech that tried its best to smash the Sentry Project to pieces would hardly notice any differences!

An attack that was powerful enough to penetrate the armor of Venerable Stark's expert mech would punch through regardless if it was just a bit stronger!

The boost in mobility was a little more significant. With an increase of 2.5 points, the mech became a bit faster and more maneuverable. The greater performance was just significant enough for Venerable Stark to clearly benefit from it in desperate battle situations.

"Yet.. it's the boost in offense that is truly remarkable!"

The Sentry Project was an expert mech that was designed with extreme offense in mind. Ves and the rest deliberately made a lot of tradeoffs that made the expert mech slower and easier to break relative to other expert rifleman mechs. They did not hesitate in doing so because these sacrifices enabled them to push the offensive capabilities of the precision-oriented expert mech to become the ultimate sniper machine of the Larkinson Clan!

With an offensive score of 100 points, a 10 percent boost took on an entirely different meaning in this area. Ves had already done his best to pile up as much power and efficiency as possible in the rifle. He also worked together with Gloriana to adjust the mech frame so that it offered much greater support for its luminar crystal weapon. They pushed until they were no longer able to squeeze any more performance out of the whole design.

Now that someone — or something  — else casually strolled in and made a few incredibly advanced changes that easily pushed the limits upwards by a whopping 10 points, the end result was much more impressive!

As mech design was a discipline where greater performance was often subject to the laws of diminishing returns, the adjustments made to the expert mech design effectively elevated it from a Journeyman-level design to a Senior-level design!

Ves wasn't sure how close the firepower boost was to reaching Master-level, but from a technical perspective the Superpublished expert mech design was a substantially more dangerous combat asset due to this concentrated improvement!

After the Journeyman slowly realized how much had changed, they couldn't wait to study the adjustments in detail in order to figure out the effects and underlying theory why they worked.

It was not enough for them to enjoy the Superpublished mech design as a single work. If they wanted to apply all of these solutions to the mech designs going forward, then it was crucial for them to reverse engineer all of the changes down to the last details!

This was why they quickly split up and moved to their respective workplaces in order to puzzle out the answers they wanted to see the most.

When Ves settled down in order to study all of the improvements made to the crystal luminar rifle, he soon realized that deriving useful insights from the design was far from simple.

"Some of the effects of the improved crystals can't be described in words and numbers. I have to see how it performs for real."

This required him to reproduce the improved crystal luminar weapon for real, but that was a bit of a problem as the complete rifle design was not only huge, but also extremely expensive and difficult to make. The Opticonium integrated in the design also made it prohibitive to make a weapon just for study purposes.

"I should wait until I am truly ready to fabricate the Sentry Project before I make this powerful rifle."

Ves decided to take a step back and simply apply some of the new and improved methods on a smaller infantry-grade crystal luminar rifle. Even though the hugely reduced scale meant that he had to adopt a substantially different design approach, the general principles remained the same.

Thus, when Ves quickly fabricated a crystal luminar rifle that incorporated at least 70 percent of the new and improved implementations, he eagerly handed it over to a bot in order to witness it in action.

"Fire!"

When a bright and searing beam struck the target dummy at the other end of the reinforced test firing range, Ves paid close attention to the sensor readings.

"A 5 percent increase in maximum firepower! The efficiency is a little higher as well!"

Though this improvement was only half as much as the original boost, this was still a huge difference considering that only a couple of hours had passed since Ves first studied the new design.

With more time and effort, Ves could easily derive further gains from the Superpublished design and push himself closer to the standard of the newly-updated version of Sentry Project!

He frowned a bit. "The only problem is that I need to master the theory behind these changes as soon as possible if I want to maximize the quality of the Sentry Project."

The key to making a good mech was to understand how it worked. The more he comprehended what made it good, the more he was able to ensure the physical product was as ideal as possible.

Ves decided to try out an unconventional approach. He retrieved the crystal cube and settled in to perform a rigorous comparison between the normal and Superpublished versions of the Sentry Project.

"Illustrious One! I need your help!"

He expended a lot of spiritual energy in order to merge with the luminar design spirit and study the altered crystals from an alien perspective.

As his entire aura and demeanor became more radiant, his eyes glowed with light as they blazed at all of the intricate design details that held his interest. The crystal object in his hands glowed as well as it became partially active.

Hours went by as Ves slowly gained more insights. He did not focus that much on the improvements in material composition. There was hardly any mystery behind them, though he had a feeling that the MTA would be really interested in how to make better second-class luminar crystals.

No. What Ves truly tried to study was the more esoteric aspects of the improved crystals. He regularly referenced the hastily-improved test rifle that he made and studied it in detail with his spiritual senses.

Though a mech design only consisted of a blueprint of a complete product at its basic level, this was actually not the complete package. A proper design always included essential documentation which may or may not include design logs, clarification, a fabrication plan and so on. Though the System hadn't really added a lot of extra material, the handful of pages of essential information needed to fabricate the improved luminar crystals were extremely crucial.

They were free instructions that came as a side effect of Superpublishing an expert mech that centered around a luminar crystal rifle!

Through these clues and more, Ves and the Illustrious One were able to combine their respective know-how to deconstruct or decipher the majority of the changes. While they hadn't yet figured out the knack behind the more abstruse but impactful design tweaks, Ves was quite happy with the progress he accomplished.

If I design a new luminar crystal rifle, then its performance will probably be 8 percent better than normal!"

Much of it was because he was able to implement more efficient and effective internal circuitry patterns. While their fundamental workings were still unclear to him, he felt as if he had taken one step closer to the truth.

"They're not just transforming energy from one form to another. They also seem to distort reality to an extent. This is why the output of these luminar crystals are so disproportionately powerful or abnormal."

He still had a long way to go before he became an expert in this field, but at least he was able to move past an obstacle in his research.

What Ves really appreciated was that he had managed to achieve a couple of minor breakthroughs in how to utilize the spiritual properties of luminar crystals!

As he performed some impromptu experiments by making a couple of luminar crystals, he began to infuse his spiritual energy into the developing product in different and more intricate ways.

Not all of his experiments succeeded. He still had to employ plenty of trial and error in order to achieve a result that was closer to what he knew was possible.

In truth, Ves hadn't gained as much as he hoped from this study. The marginal increase in how to employ spiritual energy more effectively in the production of luminar crystals did not teach him a lot of useful new insights. His theoretical framework on luminar crystals hardly budged.

That didn't mean he thought that this was a wasted moment. The new directions that the Superpublished design was pointing towards gave Ves a lot of useful hints. If he chose to go deeper in a specific direction, then he would probably be able to make more substantial gains sooner than later.

Ves was still in the dark as far as luminar crystal technology was concerned, but at least he was able to spot some lights in the distance!

A few days quietly passed by as every Journeyman spent so much time on researching the improved mech design that the Larkinson fleet had already dropped out of FTL some time ago. Given that Ves had instructed the fleet to stay put in realspace, he could not delay the fabrication of the Sentry Project any further.

All four Journeymen gathered together again. They exchanged happy and knowing looks as they were already able to tell that each of them made substantial gains. Even Ketis learned a few profound lessons.

"We have to decide how to go forward with this project." Gloriana stated. "Should we experiment more with the improved expert mech design or should we proceed with fabricating it straight away?"

"I doubt we can improve it any further than that." Ves voiced his skepticism. "I know you want to build up on the better design, but it has already reached a level that is way beyond our ability. Any changes we'll make have a greater chance of disrupting the highly optimized arrangements than producing actual gains. I say we just move forward and fabricate it as is. Don't forget that it is an expert mech design that we already possess a limited understanding of its workings. Now that it has become more opaque, our ability to control its factors has decreased."

"Ves… is right. Let us trust in the mech designer who presented us with this improved design. The last thing we should do is to despoil this great design with our lack of vision."