The Mech Touch

As much as many people got caught up by all of the excitement of Operation Night Jazz and the Hyper Generation, no further drastic events took place that upended their plans.

Ves and many other people had formed new plans and returned to their routines.

Months went by as Ves and his fellow Larkinson mech designers reconfigured their incomplete mech designs.

It was annoying to push back the completion of the mech designs he cared about a lot such as the Jupiter Project and the Blood Star Mark II Project, but the additional wait would pay off in spades.

Since Ves and Gloriana already made early attainments in hyper technology, they adapted to the new tech a lot faster than their peers.

Ves possessed a lot more additional insights in the true nature of hyper materials.

This not only gave him strong advantages in the production of higher tiers of specific sympathetic materials, but also allowed him to employ clever tricks to leverage their properties even better!

He had even begun to experiment with attribute combinations. By compounding the effects of different types of hyper materials, he could generate strong synergies that made his mechs stronger!

However, he soon discovered that there were a lot of limits to playing around with combinations of different attributes.

Mixing up more and more attributes meant that the E energy profile of a mech became a lot more muddled.

For example, it became harder for a rifleman mech to fire a hotter laser beam if it became contaminated by unrelated attributes such as water or calm.

The E energy attracted by one part could adversely affect the performance of another part.

Ves thought back on the situation where the Guns of Armageddon leveraged both fire and water at the same time.

The shipwrights and engineers who upgraded the starship hadn't been able to solve the incompatibility between these two opposing elements.

This left the Guns of Armageddon in a rather awkward position. If she relied heavily on her fire energy cannons, then the performance of her azure energy shield would become adversely affected.

Ves was sure that he could engineer a solution to this kind of problem, but he needed inspiration in order to make any serious progress.

Solving this problem fell outside of the scope of his current projects. He just wanted to finish them in a decent timeframe so that he could meet his current obligations and free up his schedule.

Ves gained a lot of renewed interest in the Fey Project.

It was already rather special due to the interesting challenge of turning its fey alive. The recent addition of hyper technology strengthened every aspect while also opening up a lot of new possibilities!

What Ves was most interested in was to design a specific fey model that maximized the use of space suppressors.

Just as his wife had warned, it was truly too difficult to mount anything else on a fey once it carried a space suppressor module.

The most Ves could do was to strengthen its armor and tune up its small propulsion system in order to increase its survival rate.

Ves made a lot of calculations on how effective it would be to employ four smaller space suppressors instead of one larger space suppressor.

The model that was suitable for fey was a lot smaller and weaker than a model fitted for full-sized mechs.

It would not be worthwhile to go through all of this effort, only to produce a substantially weaker effect.

Fortunately, Ves did not have to fear that the fey had lost too much strength.

As he stood in the control room of an underground testing chamber, he watched with interest as four prototype fey buzzed around and converged onto different energy shields.

They had no effect on standard energy shields, which Ves already expected.

A single fey could only slightly weaken a transphasic energy shield.

Four fey sticking together induced a much greater effect, especially if they stayed in close proximity to the surface of the transphasic energy!

While the combined effect of four fey was not as strong as the effect of four mechs equipped with normal space suppressor modules, it was not drastically weaker either!

Their effect became even stronger than average with the inclusion of the Phase King. The design spirit was able to amplify the effect by a minor extent just by contributing his glow.

All of this meant that it was worth it to deploy these space suppressor fey against alien warships!

Ves could already imagine the sight. "Four fey won't be able to make a dent in any warship-grade transphasic energy shields, but what about 40? What about more? An entire mech company can dispatch at least 160 fey, and that is when the Fey Projects have not yet grown!"

160 fey was such a great quantity that their combined effect would undergo a qualitative transformation!

Of course, deploying all of these fey in fairly close proximity also made them vulnerable to certain area attacks such as large explosions or shrapnel blasts.

The most Ves could do was to strengthen their defenses, but even that had its limits as there was simply not enough capacity!

Ves rubbed his tired face with his palm. "Ugh! It is really annoying that I have to squeeze additional components inside this tiny fey!"

"This is why drone mechs are not that popular. It is much more convenient to keep all of the systems contained within a single mech frame." Gloriana commented. "Are you able to test whether the data linkages can be blocked?"

"Not yet, honey. These fey are handmade standalone prototypes. They have yet to be paired with a living mech. I can only conduct this test later on. I just wanted to get ahead and confirm whether my new space suppressor fey is effective enough. I am pretty satisfied with the results."

The fey were not exactly cheap. Ves only tested the regular ones, but the transphasic versions that he had yet to try out were bound to be even more expensive!

Given the diverging demands of different customers, Ves had made the impactful decision to design two different editions of the same mech at the same time.

He mainly designed the transphasic edition of the Fey Project to accommodate the Larkinson Army. It was a top-of-the-line quasi-first-class powerhouse that incorporated a lot of higher end mech systems.

He was open to selling this edition to any private second-class forces with deep pockets so long as they could supply their own phasewater, but he did not expect that it would sell like hotcakes.

This was what the non-transphasic edition was for. It substituted expensive transphasic parts for much more economical alternatives. Their performance was substantially worse in every way, but the inclusion of hyper technology partially compensated for this massive drop.

It was difficult for Ves to properly judge the combat power of both editions. None of the simulation programs could accurately calculate the performance of either of them in any combat scenario because the relevant theoretical frameworks were still incomplete!

The Red Association had already made a lot of strides into trying to construct a workable set of formulas and tables that could help with making predictions in performance, but it would probably take years to bring them up to standard.

This was why it was so important for Ves to conduct physical tests. Seeing the prototype fey in action with his own eyes was much more useful than trying to make a lot of baseless guesses in his mind.

"Alright, I have seen enough. Let us wrap up this testing session. I have gathered enough information to confirm my direction for the Fey Project."

What he had witnessed so far only revealed a glimpse of the potential of this mech design. Ves wanted to complete the design as fast as possible, but tried his best to rein himself in. He needed to do this right and make sure that both editions delivered a lot of value at their respective price points.

Ves could already envision that his work on the Fey Project would affect a lot of people's lives and careers in the future!

The higher its performance, the more copies it would sell.

The more copies it sold, the greater impact Ves would make on society!

After he advanced to Senior and learned the truth about the Kingdom of Mechs, he confirmed that societal impact definitely had a positive effect on his progression.

It had been a long time since Ves last released a commercial mech model that went on to become a bestseller.

The fairly recent Second Eye model had the potential to become a decent seller, but unfortunately the arrival of the Hyper Generation ruined this trajectory!

Who would be stupid enough to buy lastgen mechs in the current climate? Real lives were at stake! The better the mech, the higher the chances of survival. It made a lot more sense for customers to withhold their purchases for half a year to a year so they could place orders on the first batch of hyper mechs released on the market!

Fortunately, Ves or any other Larkinson mech designer could just revisit the design of the Second Eye and straightforwardly replace all of the key parts with the corresponding hyper tech versions.

That was what a lot of mech designers were doing at the moment. The fastest mech designers had already completed this update cycle within the first month of the Hyper Generation!

Ves could have chosen to follow suit, but he looked down on this shallow integration of hyper technology.

None of the original mech designs were designed with the possibilities and performance boosts of hyper technology in mind.

The hasty application of hyper tech also caused the updated mech models to utilize only a fraction of the potential of the hyper materials added into their designs.

Ves held his work to a higher standard. While he did not go as far as scrapping all of his ongoing design projects so that he could start again from the ground up, he sincerely sought to maximize the use of hyper material.

All of these extra demands increased his workload, but he did not complain about it at all. He enjoyed the process of working with new technologies. He gained a huge amount of satisfaction for solving a difficult puzzle and finding yet another way to squeeze more performance out of interesting combinations of different technologies.

Under the concerted efforts of Ves and his fellow collaborators, the two editions of the Fey Project gradually took shape.

Even though Ves still had to split his time on designing other mechs such as the Jupiter Project, there were other mech designers and development partners who made sure to bring them closer to completion.

Every mech design project was a team effort. Ves gained a greater appreciation at how having numerous capable mech designers by his side could increase his productivity to another level.

Of all of the mech designers working on the various projects, Alexa Streon's contribution was indispensable!

She managed to surprise the entire Design Department by how much work she could shoulder by herself.

Her excellent learning ability enabled her to master the basics of hyper technology a lot faster than any second-class mech designer.

Ves and the other Larkinson mech designers gradually entrusted her with more and more work related to incorporating hyper technology into existing mech systems.

While Alexa's work was not sophisticated, she had gained such a strong grasp of the fundamentals that she never made mistakes and always finished her assignments in a short amount of time.

Her productivity was so ridiculously high that Gloriana grew even more jealous at the former Terran's augmentations!

Fortunately, the development of her own custom suite of first-class implants was nearing completion.

Once the Design Department completed the Fey Project, the Jupiter Project and many of the other remaining mechs under development, Gloriana intended to go on a trip in order to complete her surgery!