The Mech Touch novel Chapter 1370

Ves came up with a very ambitious reimagining of his smart metal tiger mech. Not only did it have to be truly alive in a sense, it also had to be capable of continuous growth and evolution!

He wanted to achieve this without imposing too many demands on the owners of his mech. This meant that Ves couldn’t rely too much on the competence of the maintenance crew that had to service the Devil Tiger.

In order to accomplish this, Ves opted to apply two measures that solved this particular problem.

"First, I’ll impart some of my knowledge, particularly on metallurgy, to the design spirit!"

This way, his mech could skillfully repair itself without relying on the idiots or the enslaved to repair the damage to the mech after an arduous battle!

"Second, the exterior of my mech has to have a form of smart metal at its base that can assimilate various materials and exotics! It has to be able to replenish itself as well in the right conditions!"

Ves knew that such products existed, but they were prohibitively expensive! They only started showing up in second-class mechs, so for him to get his hands on adaptable smart metal armor plating was easier said than done!

The immense cost and other practical problems associated with his increasingly ambitious design project shocked him out of his excited state.

He palmed his face. "The devil is in the detail! It’s all well and good to daydream about a fantastic mech, but how in the hell am I supposed to get it all together?"

Ves got so caught up in his imagination that he lost sight of his limitations! He made the same mistakes of a mech design student who just pieced some shiny parts together!

He calmed down as he tried to figure out how he could possibly obtain the most critical material, which was the adaptable smart metal armor system, or ASMAS!

"ASMAS is not only expensive, but very hard to obtain."

It sounded like a wonder material. ASMAS basically consisted of nanomachine goop that possessed basic material processing capabilities. If Ves threw a bucket of the goop at a junkyard, the nanomachines would follow its programming and scour the piles of junk for the best materials to form the best possible armor plating that was within their means to create.

Smart metal specialists developed ASMAS as a means to create a mech that required little to no actual maintenance and could subside on the field for years.

To their credit, they succeeded. Only, the price associated with this tech was very prohibitive.

In order to impart material processing capabilities at the microscopic level to a bunch of nanomachines, their complexity had reached an insane height. In order to even make it all possible, each nanomachine had to incorporate numerous traces of medium or even high-grade exotics!

In other words, to form the initial goop of ASMAS, Ves had to make an incredibly expensive investment just to get a bucket of this substance!

"This is also the main reason why no one is afraid that ASMAS will perpetually self-replicate and turn into a grey goo like threat."

There was another reason why grey goo attacks often failed. Plenty of crazies attempted to destroy a planet or even the entire galaxy by unleashing a plague of grey goo.

However, while smart metal could accomplish amazing things, at it base it merely consisted of a huge bunch of nanomachines!

"Sticking ’nano’ in front of a machine doesn’t make it any less of a machine! Every machine can be hacked, particularly those that depend heavily on connectivity and coordination!"

To be fair, the developers of smart metal did their best to make it as difficult as possible to hack their products. Nonetheless, their vulnerability towards hacking was a very huge reason why smart metal never took off in the galaxy.

There was only one exception. Mechs were notoriously difficult to hack because of the man-machine connection. As long as the smart metal hopped on to the man-machine connection, it became a bit less susceptible to hacking.

Normally, this was due to the human mind connected to the smart metal.

However, in the case of the Devil Tiger, Ves believed he may be able to achieve the same effect for his mech by tying the smart metal to the design spirit of the mech.

"That’s yet another assumption I have to put to the test." He muttered.

In short, ASMAS was not only problematic to procure, but also difficult to replenish.

When smart metal mechs sustained damage, chunks of smart metal could easily be separated and thrown from the mech frames. Sometimes, the separated ASMAS could merge back into the mech, but if the nanomachines suffered too much damage, then the damaged mech could salvage only a little bit of exotics.

"What is the point of using an ASMAS mech when it can’t repair itself anymore after a few months of battle?"

That was far from years of continuous use that the inventors of ASMAS envisioned!

Fortunately, the proponents of this tech already devised a solution to this problem. Perhaps the original exotics might be hard to source, but as long as someone shoveled a bunch of inferior substitute materials to the ASMAS, then its volume could partially be restored.

"It’s only a substitute though. Compared to factory-fresh ASMAS, the substitute ASMAS isn’t nearly as good in processing and adapting different materials."

ASMAS mechs had to maintain a minimum level of pure ASMAS in order to retain all of its essential functionality.

After several generations of development, ASMAS mechs got better and better at preserving pure ASMAS. Most of the time, it deployed substitute ASMAS closer to the exterior of the mech. The valuable pure ASMAS would be sequestered deep in the core of the mech, only to be brought out once the fighting stopped in order to facilitate repairs.

Ves scratched his chin. "This is one way to make an ASMAS mech more affordable. Instead of turning sixty percent of the mech into pure ASMAS, I can instead split that up. Perhaps I can get by a tenth as much on the expensive kind of ASMAS, while leaving the rest to substitute ASMAS!"

This potentially lowered the lifespan of the mech, but as long as the mech and mech pilot didn’t suffer catastrophic damage, the pure ASMAS could last for a very long time.

Ves knew because he already read about it before. Some ASMAS mechs lasted for as much as decades! With smarter use, the pure ASMAS could last even longer!

"This is a good basis for my Devil Tiger!"