The Mech Touch

After Ves interviewed the sixth candidate, he had already started to lose interest in the particulars of the candidates.

Prior to this day, Ves treated every lead designer as a treasure and a high-value investment. Each of them deserved to receive his personal attention because of their importance and their scarcity.

Now that the Design Department was about to welcome a lot of new Journeyman Mech Designers at once, they should no longer be as scarce as before!

As such, Ves already felt it was not worth his time to befriend and familiarize himself with every individual lead designer.

"Should we even call them lead designers by this time?"

It may be wise for Ves to reorganize the Design Department and add additional layers to the hierarchy. It would be stupid to contend with 30 so-called lead designers at the same time!

In any case, Alexa Streon had done a good job at selecting these applicants. Ves had yet to find a single reason to object to their entry into the clan, so it was highly likely that all 25 of them would become Larkinsons by the end of the day!

Since this was the case, Ves should take advantage of his high position to delegate the management of all of the individual Journeymen to a trusted mech designer.

This would leave Ves free to focus on his own projects.

If any of the new recruits managed to excel and stand out from the pack, Ves might have reason to pay renewed attention to them. So long as they became as good as the likes of Gloriana and Ketis, Ves was more than willing to elevate their status in the clan!

However, much like Viktor MacMillan, the new recruits had yet to develop sufficiently enough to shoulder the burdens of the Larkinson Clan by themselves.

If they did manage to reach this esteemed height, then there was no need for them to apply to Ves. They were already qualified enough to start their own successful mech company!

As the Journeymen continued to enter the office and present themselves to their latest employer, Ves found out that over half of them previously worked in other respectable mech companies based in the Bortele System.

However, once they learned that the Larkinson Clan was looking to recruit new Journeymen, they quit their jobs as soon as possible and sent their applications right away!

They took considerable risks to join the Larkinson Clan. If their applications got rejected for any reason, then they had to look for an entirely different job.

While mech designers of their caliber should always be able to find employment, the hassle and the disruptions to their lives were still considerable!

Only one other mech designer managed to arouse a greater degree of interest than normal.

"Name?"

"Harry Haikkonen." A tall, straight-backed mech designer wearing a clean gray business suit responded.

"Design philosophy?"

"I inherited my Class II design philosophy from my Master. It is called Precision Focus Laser Weapon Systems."

Ves immediately perked up when he learned that the tall Journeymen specialized in energy weapons!

"Interesting." He said with a smile. "So your mastery of laser beam weapons is particularly high?"

The man slightly relaxed his posture and started to express his passion. "That is correct, sir. Laser weapons are one of the basic and most fundamental weapons of our civilization since the Age of Stars. Humanity has come in touch with many powerful weapon systems since that time. There are many advantages to using positron weapons, plasma weapons and Destroyer weapons, but despite the growing competition, the most simple and basic laser weapons have never lost their relevance."

It was so interesting for Ves to meet a fellow connoisseur of laser weapons. He immediately understood where Harry Haikkonon was coming from. After all, his luminar crystal weapons also made heavy use of laser beams.

"Laser weapons are versatile, efficient, scaleable, economical and most importantly effective at much longer ranges since their output travels at the speed of light."

"Exactly, professor!" Harry's eyes lit up. "Laser weapons may not be the most powerful choice available to our customers, but they are most effective in spaceborn battles due to their ability to strike at targets that are beyond the range of other weapon systems. However, their effectiveness at closer ranges are not as good. This is where my design philosophy comes in. It is a means to dramatically increase the effective damage inflicted by laser beams at close to medium range."

"Wait, what? Shouldn't precision focus laser weapon systems be oriented around designing armaments that can attain greater accuracies at longer ranges?"

"That is a common misunderstanding. While I am capable of designing precision rifles that are optimized for sniping enemies at longer ranges, my main body of work is different. Many of the mechs that I have designed have all subverted the conventional rule of thumbs when it comes to machines armed with laser weapons. They are still threatening at range, but they are even better when they dogfight their opponents. This is because of the special focusing crystals that I have added to the weapons."

Ves grew more and more interested in Harry Haikkonen. He truly thought that a design philosophy that included the word 'precision' should have been oriented towards marksman mechs, but it turned out that the energy weapon specialist primarily designed mechs that were not afraid of brawling enemies up close!

"What is special about your focusing crystals?"

"I am glad you asked, professor." Harry grinned. "As you know, every laser weapon uses a focusing crystal to even out the laser beam that emerges from the weapon barrel. In the overwhelming majority of cases, the focusing crystals are shaped to straighten the beams as much as possible. The goal is to attain a perfectly straight beam that can maintain perfection cohesion at a theoretically infinite range. This is impossible to attain in practice as the imperfections of the focusing crystal as well as other flaws prevent the laser beams from dispersing across longer distances."

Trying to make energy weapons fire perfectly straight beams was as difficult as telling a person to walk a perfectly straight line for several kilometers on a completely flat and featureless plain.

While Ves heard of high-tech solutions that enabled certain models of first-class multipurpose mechs to achieve this exceptional result, the cost was so prohibitive that it was completely unaffordable for second-class mechs!

As Harry talked, Ves already started to get an inkling of what precision focus laser weapon systems actually meant.

"So your weapons are different? They don't fire perfectly straight laser beams?"

"Yes. That is correct! The focusing crystals of my laser weapons are deliberately more convex in shape than is necessary to produce straight laser beams. Every time my laser weapon opens fire, it unleashes a laser beam that narrows in width until all of the energy of the attack converges on a single point in space! This is the coordinate where all of the power of the weapon discharge is concentrated to the greatest degree possible! Any adversary that is struck by a precisely focused beam will suffer much greater damage than getting hit by a straight and less concentrated laser beam!"

Alexa had already grown familiar with Harry's design philosophy, but this was completely new to Ves!

He readily understood the advantages of being able to land precisely focused laser beams onto a target.

The concentration of damage was much greater, which effectively meant that it became a lot easier to pierce through armor!

Laser beam weapons generally possessed fairly poor penetration power because it was far too easy to disperse their firepower over a much wider surface area.

However, if rifleman mechs started to fire more precisely focused energy beams, the concentration of so much firepower in a tiny surface area would dramatically produce a greater impact on any solid matter!

Even energy shields would find it difficult to withstand these attacks. It was much easier for energy barriers to resist attacks that were more evenly spread across their surface. Highly concentrated attacks induced much greater strain on the energy shield generators as they struggled to resist a spike of outside pressure.

Still, as much as precision focus weapons sounded better than more conventional energy beams, they still possessed one overwhelming flaw.

"As far as I recall, energy weapons that fire converging energy beams have never managed to catch on due to the difficulty of attaining perfect focus on targets, especially fast-moving ones." Ves pointed out. "The advantage of conventional laser weapons is that straight beams are just as deadly at point-blank range and at longer ranges. So long as they strike the target, the mech pilots can be assured that their attacks have dealt consistent and predictable damage. This is not the case if energy beams are only able to attain their optimal damage potential in 3 dimensions rather than 2. The failure rate must be high."

"It is not as bleak as you think." Harry said in a familiar fashion. He must have met many doubtful mech designers over the course of his career. "My Master has worked hard to reduce the limitations of this approach. The key component is the focusing crystal. It is not a pure crystalline object, but it is also organic. This results in a focusing crystal that can increase or decrease its convexity very quickly with minimal lag time."

Ves nodded in understanding. "That indeed sounds useful. The faster the focusing crystal can change the distance where the laser beam converges all of its power to a point in space, the more applicable it becomes. However, this shouldn't be enough. The focusing crystal must concentrate the energy beam at the precise position of a mech in a very small window of time. That requires a lot of data and prediction."

Harry already had an answer for that as well.

"This is why all of my ranged mechs are paired with the accompanying software and hardware adjustments." The Journeyman offered his prepared response. "My mechs should ideally be mounted with special weapon systems that can precisely track and observe the coordinates and movement of enemy mechs and other targets. The mech's software should be able to process this data as quickly as possible so that the focusing crystal can reach the right level of convexity to deliver a perfectly focused laser beam attack at a designated target."

All of this sounded incredibly complicated. Multiple different mech systems had to work together in order to produce the desired results. If just a single link in the chain faltered for whatever reason, the mech could forget about landing precisely focused beams!

"How consistently are your mechs able to achieve perfectly focused hits?"

"It is quite high. Qualified hits happen at roughly 80 percent of the time against most mechs and starfighters. Light mechs and more mobile starfighters are more difficult to pin down, especially when there is heavy jamming, but effective focus can still be attained 30 percent of every hit. You should know that faster targets are usually less protected, so a concentrated laser beam attack can penetrate their defenses much better than more conventional attacks. It is not impossible to cripple an opposing light mech with only a single salvo."

That certainly sounded impressive, but Ves reserved his judgment. There had to be other complications to this quirky weapon system.

"What if the mech is unable to fire or land perfectly focused laser beams? Any laser beam that has missed perfect focus and has already dispersed over a distance is unable to inflict much damage to an enemy target. Getting hit by a dispersed energy beam is not much different from getting illuminated by a spotlight."

Harry did not look concerned at all. "Rest assured that my laser weapons are all equipped to deal with this contingency, professor. My organic focusing crystals can be reset to their neutral states. This means that they function no differently from ordinary focusing crystals that are solely capable of producing straight energy beams. This should be more than enough to preserve the combat effectiveness of my ranged mechs."