The Mech Touch

The initial review and respecification session was a great success.

Once it got going, the mech designers of the Design Department all provided their input on what they thought about the performance of the derivative products of their current design projects.

The Bright Warrior Mark I Version B design came under intense scrutiny. While it was technically unfinished, it was functionally complete.

Originally, the design teams working on this project thought they would just spend a month or so to put the prototypes through their paces and optimize the design based on the results.

This was no longer the plan.

Ves was so dissatisfied with the performance of his mech forces that he wanted to make sure that they carried their weight in battle next time.

The differences in performance had become especially stark when the mech designers all watched footage of the Larkinson mechs fighting side-by-side with Glory Seeker and Crosser mechs.

Whereas the latter two were roughly able to match the Fridayman and traitor clan mechs blow-for-blow, the Larkinson mechs were like kids trying to enter a sports match played by adults!

The others just thought that the Larkinson mech forces were rather cute. The budget mechs fielded by the Avatars of Myth, Living Sentinels and so on were so lacking in strength that the reputation of the Larkinson Clan should have been in shambles if not for some redeeming factors!

The only bright spots for the clan was the excellent performance of the Transcendent Punishers, the Valkyrie Redeemers, the prime mechs and most notably his battle networks.

These were the only reasons why the Larkinson Clan reluctantly managed to retain the respect of the powerful Crossers.

Of course, this was not a sustainable pattern. The Larkinsons urgently needed to carry their own weight in the expeditionary fleet or else it became untenable for them to maintain a leading position within the alliance.

It didn't matter if Ves possessed more MTA merits than Patriarch Reginald Cross. Battle strength was the ultimate indicator in whether they would be able to survive in the chaotic Red Ocean.

Without the strength to fight against strong opponents, the Larkinsons didn't even need to bother with passing through the beyonder gate. Their rivals and competitors could easily squash them whenever they wished if this was the case!

"Every version of the Bright Warrior IB aside from maybe the lancer mech configuration is deficient in terms of offensive power." Ves opined. "The rifleman mech configuration needs a more powerful rifle. The swordsman mech configuration needs a better weapon and a more powerful means to exert mechanical power through its limbs. While the need to improve the strength of the space knight configuration is not as great, it still shares a common root with the other ones so it will get stronger anyway."

The needs of every configuration was different from the others, so it was not easy to suggest changes that improved all of them at once.

What was particularly challenging was that the rifleman mech configuration possessed different priorities from the melee mech configurations. The mech designers had to be very creative about making changes to the modular components instead of the base platform.

Fortunately, Ves had the assistance of Gloriana and Juliet. Both women excelled at different aspects of technical design and provided workable solutions to many of the identified problems.

Overall, each configuration received comprehensive upgrades to their damage potential. Ves outright decided to raise the design budget by a fourth in order to allow for enough improvements to turn the Bright Warriors into a real threat against second-class military-grade mechs!

This was not a cheap decision to make. Ves felt a bit reluctant to increase the price of what was supposed to be the foundational mech of the Larkinson Clan.

To put it bluntly, the Bright Warrior IB was the 'beginner' mech model that many new recruits were initially supposed to pilot. While the mech model was rather bland and lacked pronounced strength, they were designed to be the ideal mechs to get new mech pilots accustomed to fighting alongside other Larkinsons.

Once the mech pilots 'leveled up' for a lack of a better description, they could move on to piloting the high-level mech models of the Larkinson Clan.

The Transcendent Punisher, the Valkyrie Redeemer, the Giant Killer and the Ferocious Piranha all fell into this category.

Each of them were advanced machines that could deliver much better performance due to their superior specs and vastly higher skill ceilings. Of course, their skill floors were raised as well, so inexperienced mech pilots wouldn't be able to use them at their full potential for quite some time.

That was very obvious when Ves compared the performance of the Ylvainan mech pilots with the performance of the Destiny Hammer mech pilots.

The latter were the real deal. Their marksmanship, control, knowledge and other traits were truly the most impressive that Ves had ever witnessed from heavy artillery specialists.

The duel between the Transcendent Punishers and the Destiny Hammers clearly exposed that just providing good mechs to his mech forces was not enough.

It was better than doing nothing, though.

After a long and fruitful discussion, the mech designers made many significant revisions to the Bright Warrior IB design.

The rifleman mech configuration received a larger and more powerful laser rifle.

"Why do you insist on keeping it paired with a laser rifle?" Gloriana asked. "With the Bright Warrior's current design budget, we can easily retool the design so that it can accommodate positron rifles or other types of energy rifles. Many of them pack a significantly greater punch than pure laser weapons, which is exactly what we are looking for in this revision."

The expressions of most of the assistants showed that the rest were wondering about this as well.

"There are three reasons why." Ves replied. "First, the energy efficiency of laser weapons is considerably higher than those other fancy guns. They don't inflict much damage per discharge, but they can keep going. Their damage output over time is very high, which makes them very suitable for battles of attrition. All of the other Larkinson mechs that our clan will be utilizing will be tailored to our prevailing mech doctrines. This means that we will be trying our best to fight quick decisive battles that do not drag on for days. This also means that we will have few mechs that can take part in an endurance race. The Bright Warrior IB should be one of them due to its suitability with the Living Sentinels."

"I think it's better to design a dedicated rifleman mech that excels at attrition battles." His wife remarked.

"We don't have the time to design redundant mechs. The Bright Warrior IB may not perfectly fit this role, but it does the job well enough that we might as well proceed in this direction."

Ves partially agreed with Gloriana, but he simply couldn't help it. After they completed their current round of projects, they had to begin with designing their expert mechs straight away. There wasn't any room to design any additional mechs.

"Let me continue with the other reasons why I favor sticking with laser weapons. Their high accuracy and lightspeed characteristics makes them very easy to use. Our mech pilots can quickly become battle effective with the rifleman mech configuration if it is armed with a laser weapon."

Laser weapons were considered basic and even primitive by second-class and first-class mech pilots. While they were not completely unjustified in their beliefs, the laser technology was highly scalable, which meant they could still perform decently at higher levels.

As someone with a third-rate background, Ves felt much more at ease with laser weapons than positron weapons.

That was not to say he disliked the latter. He successfully incorporated them in the Transcendent Punisher design. It worked for this particular mech because it possessed so much capacity that Ves could easily put in a lot of support systems to deal with the higher demands of positron weapons.

The Bright Warrior was different from a heavy artillery mech. Its capacity was much more limited so it would come under heavy strain when paired with a positron rifle.

Its deployment time would suffer a lot as it would rapidly expend its energy cells in battle. This was not what Ves wanted to see in this particular design.

"There's also a third reason why I favor laser weapons." He spoke. "We have special tech and solutions that make our laser weapons a bit more effective than normal. The difference is just significant enough to make it worthwhile."

If not for luminar tech and the Illustrious One, Ves would have settled with positron weapons instead. This was because stronger and tougher second-class mechs were very good at defending against normal laser weapons. The weapons wielded by the Bright Warrior needed to pass a minimum threshold in order to make them viable against opponents comparable to Fridayman elites.

Once Ves pushed through this decision, the other mech designers helped with how to increase the threat level of the rifleman mech configuration as much as possible.

It was definitely going to be widely used as soon as the Bright Warrior IB design was complete. In the initial stages, this would become the primary ranged mech of the Larkinson Clan alongside the Transcendent Punisher.

Once the Design Department released some additional standard mech designs, a significant amount of mech pilots would transition over to more powerful and specialized mechs. However, the Living Sentinels would still be sticking with this model, so the rifleman mech had to be strong enough to remain relevant for at least decade.

Ves smiled wider and wider as the Bright Warrior IB design incorporated more and more improvements.

Not just the rifleman mech configuration, but the other configurations received various enhancements as well. While they didn't look very exciting, he estimated that all of the changes to the original design elevated its performance by 10 to 20 percent.

This was not bad!

In the end, the Bright Warrior IB Project was extended by another month in order to provide enough time to incorporate all of the revisions.

While Ves really didn't want to delay the completion of the project, he didn't want to rush it either. He would rather wait an extra month if that was what it took to obtain a proper design.

In the next couple of days, Ves held discussions on the other design projects.

The auxiliary mechs such as the Blinding mech and the Cherub didn't really get to show their potential during the Battle of Reckoning. The lack of data meant that the mech designers had little to add to these designs.

Fortunately, they still had the Ferocious Piranha IB, which performed admirably under the circumstances.

The Piranha Prime piloted by Venerable Tusa Billingsley-Larkinson and one of the prototypes piloted by Raella Larkinson really showed what it was capable of in different circumstances.

Tusa showcased the potential of the Ferocious Piranha as a solitary harasser. At one point in the Battle of Reckoning, Tusa single-handedly paralyzed the Corundian Giants!

As for Raella, she employed the Ferocious Piranha as an offensive support mech.

The footage of her and her mech in action showcased a shrewd way to use the mech in combination with other mechs.

"She isn't even getting close enough to launch attacks." Ketis stated the obvious. "Raella is just weaving between friendly and enemy lines. When her mech approaches any formation of hostile mechs, the Ferocious Piranha only sticks around for a few seconds before darting back to friendly lines."

Some might call this cowardly, but Ves didn't really mind this tactic as long as it was effective.

"The Ferocious Piranha is a valuable asset. Only by remaining intact will it be able to employ its glow the fullest. Look at the reactions of those enemy mech pilots. While the Fridyman mech pilots are strong enough to resist most of the effects, their reaction time and judgement still becomes impaired for a short moment. That is enough to doom some of the offensive mechs."

One of the frustrating aspects about Raella's approach was that her arrival and departure was unpredictable. The enemy mech pilots constantly had to remain on guard for her eventual arrival.

Yet when the Ferocious Piranha finally approached, the Fridayman mech pilots were still caught off-guard due to their overthinking!

Ves laid out what he learned from Raella's fighting methods.

"So far, our premise surrounding the Ferocious Piranha is that we expect it to be deployed in squads or larger units. That's why it's called after a piranha. However, we have not considered an approach like this. If we want to make this mech fit in seamlessly in units that consist of other mechs, then we need to make some tweaks to its design."