The Mech Touch



As an experienced and talented Journeyman Mech Designer, Ves possessed a high degree of understanding towards mechs.

He had traveled far and wide and experienced many battles involving different mechs up close, perhaps too close for his liking.

No matter whether it was a third-class mech, a second-class mech, a first-class multipurpose mech or even a biomech, Ves possessed enough knowledge to comprehend how they worked in broad strokes.

He could even get a good impression of the personality and design strategy of the mech designers in question. This was a basic ability that everyone in the profession possessed, and it constantly grew more effective as he came in touch with more and more mechs.

At his level, it would be ridiculous and absurd if he saw a new mech and failed to comprehend the meaning of its existence.

Yet that was exactly what he did when he became confronted by a sight of a genuine alien 'mech'!

His first impression upon seeing this alien mechanical monstrosity was that the engineers who worked on it were not unskilled.

Whoever Great Chief Jaharon managed to drag into this pocket space possessed an excellent artistic touch as well as a thorough understanding of war machines in general.

The solid and bulky form of the alien machine reminded Ves of the alien tanks that he had previously observed in the archival footage of the conquest of the planet.

The city state of Davute was the most powerful pescan polity for good reasons, and fielding a strong military was one of them. Supported by an abundance of wealth and knowledgeable researchers, the alien city state's development of tanks, airplanes and other vehicles had reached an impressive state by local standards!

It was not inconceivable for the pescan engineers to make use of their existing expertise in conventional war machines to create an unprecedented mech.

They just had to have the right reasons to work on one. Perhaps the pescan race suffered so much trauma at the hands of human mechs that the survivors thought that only legged war machines could give them a chance to compete against their attackers.

It might also be a desperate attempt of the aliens to cope with the trauma of losing their family and home planet.

Whatever the case, the aliens invested a significant amount of resources and time into the design and construction of their first native mech.

This was an impressive feat for a race that never dealt with them before and had no experience in making.

Ves could see that the aliens had put careful thought on the design of their first mech. He could see that the aliens initially approached the project as a tank but replaced its traditional locomotion with bipedal legs.

Naturally, a mech was more than just a tank with legs. Issues such as trying to maintain the balance of the machine and slimming down the upper parts also became important, and all of that required a lot of careful thought and consideration.

The selection and placement of weapons also introduced a whole set of problems.

However, since the aliens already had a tradition of mounting weapons onto their battle suits, it was not that big of a technical leap for them to mount mech-sized armaments to their arms.

Then there was the matter of control. Ves seriously doubted that the pescans mastered the technologies involved in the creation of neural interfaces. It was impossible for them to invent this kind of tech in a short amount of time and under extreme conditions to boot.

From the stiff and robotic movements of the alien mech, Ves could already conclude that the aliens had likely resorted to the simplest and most convenient control option imaginable.

They utilized a combination of mechanical controls and a high degree of automation to make the mech pilotable.

All of these decisions ultimately caused the pescans to develop their first frontline mech, if only barely.

In truth, not even the most rookie Novice Mech Designer would design such a heap of trash!

The alien mech was abominably slow for its mass and size. Ves could easily utilize the exact same materials put into designing this mech and come up with a tougher, more optimized machine that moved at much more reasonable speeds.

The configuration of the double gun arms was unreasonably long. Most human-developed frontline mechs tended to be more sparing about their length because the tradeoff in flexibility and cost.

The alien mech possessed no neural interface. On top of that, its construction was unreasonably massive and slow. There was no need to extend the arm so long and mount a heavy laser cannon at their ends.

Not only did this make the aiming process even slower, but it also made it a lot harder to maintain the balance of the machine and keep its aim consistent.

Aiming was a serious problem, especially to engineers who were making mechs for the first time. Although the pescans had lots of experience with creating similar integrated weapons in their battle suits, there were still plenty mechanical and physical differences between infantry-sized armor and mechs that massed more than tanks.

The long-ranged accuracy of this first-generation mech was extremely dubious. It might be sufficient for it to strike a target that was a hundred meters or so away, but the hit rate should decrease by an enormous degree at a distance of a kilometer or more!

It was rather fortunate that the pescans rolled out this homebrew mech in a confining battlefield like this. The alien imitation mech would have performed a lot more poorly if it was deployed on open terrain!

In fact, the aliens shouldn't have bothered to develop a mech to begin with. There was no point in making one if the only reasonable means of controlling them was by using mechanical controls with AI assistance.

There was no flexibility or fluidity in its movements. The fine control that played such a great role in allowing human mechs to outperform conventional war machines was completely absent in its entire construction.

The alien pilot had to control way too many settings and pay attention to far too many variables in order to make the most of his cumbersome machine.

A simple tank would have been able to do the same job a lot more effectively while costing less.

The only viable reasons for the pescans to develop a mech was for psychological and research purposes.

Ves could see many signs that this was indeed the case. This was an experimental prototype that had been tinkered many different times. Gloriana could probably see this a lot more clearly,but even he recognized that a lot of parts had been added and removed over the years as the pescans attempted to get a grip on the concept of mechs.

It was too bad that all of those revisions still hadn't brought them close enough to the meaning of human mechs. They were way too far behind and did not understand anything about how mechs should be used.

Even the first mechs unveiled by humanity at the end of the Age of Conquest were much better than the trash presented by the ignorant engineers of the pescan race!

No matter whether they started from scratch or not, these aliens clearly got a good glimpse of a lot of the mechs employed by the Davutan forces.

Since the pescan remnant also possessed the capability to spy on what was taking place on their former home planet, they should have been able to collect a lot of useful data on mechs. Just a study of their physical shapes was enough to give the pescan scientists and engineers a good direction for research.

How could they botch this simple job to such a severe extent when they had years to iterate on their first homebrew mech?!

Ah, it must have been their insistence on trying to design a mech based on a pescan shape.

Ves could see that the designers tried their best to shape the mech according to the pescan humanoid form, whose body parts possessed different proportions than the human norm.

Yet these aliens clearly hadn't put sufficient thought and calculation behind reconciling human mech design principles with such an odd mech shape.

Trying to design a pescan mech while sticking to human mech design principles was like trying to design a human suit for a gorilla. The maker would never be able to meet the goal because the setup was flawed from the start!

Ves realized all of these thoughts and more as the mech gradually lifted up a kinetic gun barrel in his direction.

Even the firepower of this kinetic weapon was seriously flawed. The pescans clearly downsized the weapon in order for the mech to be able to lift it and handle it with reasonable care.

The ammunition feeding system was also an improvised mess. Gloriana would probably be bleeding her eyes out if she ever saw such an awful implementation!

Ves did not waste his time any further. He may have only scratched the surface of the threat posed by the alien mech, but he had already learned enough flaws and shortcomings to make his move!

While the awfully slow and sluggish alien mech was still taking its time to aim its weapon, Ves had already extended his pistol arm.

He merely snapped his gun towards the mech and took an instant of time to adjust his aim to land a more precise hit.

Although Ves was not a trained marksman or a soldier in a sense, his recent sublimation and evolution had increased all of his bodily characteristics, including ones relating to stability and coordination.

His control over his own body was much greater than in the past!

What helped a lot was that laser weapons were extremely easy to aim and use to begin with. They lacked many of the complications of ballistic and gauss weapons due to being able to ignore the effect of muzzle velocity and bullet drop.

Although Ves often had complaints about the Amastendira being devoid of life, it was still an excellent technological product on all fronts. Its aim was extremely precise and calibrated to the point where he could hit a human from one side of a city on the other side as long as his marksmanship and vision were good enough!

As such, when Ves knew he had trained his Amstendira at a specific section of the native mech, he pulled the trigger without hesitation, causing the air in between to flash as a high-powered laser beam cut at the elbow section of the alien mech!

Just as Ves expected, the arm buckled and dropped as it lost the ability to lift the limb!

The aliens hadn't put enough thought in protecting the joints of this mech, especially a section as crucial as the elbows!

As the alien mech staggered from this blow, Ves repeated his move at the other limb.

The second arm collapsed and fell!

Now that the alien mech had lost both of its weapons, it had become a lot less threatening all of a sudden!

It was at this time that the heavy weapon specialists in the rear finally had time to react to this latest threat.

A pair of thick and powerful laser beams struck the mech at the left knee.

The laser cannons discharged a lot of energy by virtue of their far greater sizes, and the concentration of two attacks instantly vaporized the relatively thin armor plating that covered this section before damaging the joints and other sections that ensured that the lower leg was solidly connected to the upper leg!

The alien mech performed exactly like any other bipedal mech once it lost the functionality of a leg.

It started to tip over and fall to the side!

Due to the primitive machine's awkward control scheme, the controller couldn't even respond in time to adjust the falling trajectory of the mech.

The tall machine ended up dropping on top of more than a dozen other pescan combatants! Their battle suits did nothing to prevent their bodies from getting squished by tons of solid metal!

The sounds of battle faded a bit as hundreds of pescans observed what had happened to one of their proud war machines.

The absurdly quick downfall of what they thought to be a powerful new combat unit inflicted a heavy blow on the morale of the survivors!

Ves grinned and boldly stepped forward so that he could encompass more resisting aliens with the glow of his skull!

"Keep pushing forward! These aliens aren't as tough as they look! Let us teach them that only humans are allowed to use mechs!"