The Mech Touch novel Chapter 1621

Chapter 1621 Phasewater

"Despite its size, the addition of phasewater allows the minidrive to exhibit wondrous capabilities. As long as the mech possesses enough energy reserves, it is not impossible for a mech to travel across an entire star sector by its own capabilities!"

Such a bold statement belied the fact that hardly anyone could afford the fifty grams of phasewater needed to construct a minidrive module!

How could the MTA be bold enough to announce a so-called 'era of the independent mech' when there was only enough phasewater in the galaxy to build a couple of hundred FTL-capable mech with this tech?

As long as the minidrive depended on an obscene quantity of phasewater, most mech designers could forget about designing FTL-capable mechs in this generation!

Gloriana looked confused. "The MTA isn't this ambitious when it comes to unveiling their signature technologies. While the minidrive is an impressive invention, it will take hundreds of years for it to become practical!"

Whenever a significant new invention emerged, the earliest iterations were usually crude, inefficient and prohibitively expensive.

Only a small number of scientists developed the technology. Even if they were some of the most brilliant specialists in their fields, their manpower and energy were ultimately limited.

Once they published their results, everyone capable would be able to access the new technology. A lot of new research projects would probably commence throughout the entirety of human space!

With so many more researchers delving into the technology the MTA unveiled, various refinements and improvements would quickly follow!

Even if only one out of a million scientists achieved some results due to a fluke, that still represented actual progress!

A single success might not be so significant, but with the sheer amount of researchers studying the same subject, the rate of improvement could be quite substantial!

However, some technologies were easier to advance than others!

With the minidrive tech, many scientists were probably feeling a lot of pain by their inability to procure 50 grams of phasewater needed to perform actual tests!

This would slow down the advancement of minidrive technology tremendously.

At some point, some ingenious researcher would find a way to reduce the amount off phasewater needed to make a minidrive functional.

From 49 grams, 45 grams, 40 grams and so on, the minidrive would become more efficient in terms of cost and material requirements.

In addition, now that humanity discovered such a wonderful use of phasewater, many people would be scouring the galaxy for this extremely rare exotic! Each of them wanted to take advantage of the sky-rocketing prices that ensued after this announcement!

Once so many prospectors and treasure hunters began to search for phasewater, supply would inevitably increase, thereby decreasing the scarcity of this material over time.

Furthermore, many researchers unsatisfied with the lack of access to phasewater would constantly be searching for substitute materials.

Many exotics shared similar properties and effects. This allowed clever material scientists to find a way to substitute the role of an expensive exotic with something cheaper.

In fact, many inventions introduced in earlier generations became more practical and widespread in the poorer parts of the galaxy after material scientists figured out a way to achieve the same effect by blending several cheap exotics together.

It was a much better deal to use large quantities of widely-available low-grade exotics than a smaller quantity of high-grade exotics!

One example of this kind of progress was the ultracompact batteries that Ves had created on his own. Combining sulomnium, beta-otricine and Flesha's Tears was nothing more than a way to create a knockoff of a high-grade exotic!

Some material scientists even believe that many high-grade exotics were compound substances of lower grade materials!

With how amazing the minidrive technology appeared to be, Ves definitely believed that someone would eventually make a breakthrough that removed its dependency on phasewater.

The question was how long it would take. Phasewater seemed to be an incredibly high-grade exotic with strong dimensional properties. Such a strange and powerful effect couldn't be replicated easily.

Nonetheless, Councilor Veyron cheerfully fawned over the minidrive technology as if it would soon spread throughout human space!

"Minidrives have many applications! It is not only useful for mechs, but also for other craft such as shuttles, escape pods and more! With a minidrive in your possession, you can effortlessly travel to any star system within range without relying on a lumbering ship!"

"Who has enough phasewater to waste on other applications?" Gloriana puzzlingly wondered.

Fortunately, Councilor Veyron soon finished elaborating on the minidrive.

"That sums up the highlights of our new minidrive technology. You can obtain more detailed explanations at our virtual portal. Now, let us move on to the next innovations..."

Various mechs flew in and out of view to demonstrate various new capabilities. The innovations that the MTA chose to highlight during this important announcement represented significant advances in mech technology despite their lack of flair compared to the introduction of the minidrive.

The various improvements that Ves took note of ranged from more refined neural interfaces to more efficient power reactors.

Each of these performance improvements came about through several means. In the case of neural interfaces, they performed better mostly due to improvements in design and technical application.

In the case of power reactors, the MTA listed out a variety of newly-discovered exotics that could substitute the role of currently-used exotics. In other words, the improvement purely came about due to the usage of improved materials.

Still, no matter how the improvements came about, the mechs designed according to the new methods became significantly more powerful!

Councilor Veyron swiftly introduced many different improvements. All of them were enough to inspire Ves and Gloriana!

The mechs they wanted to design would certainly become a lot more impressive!

Of course, both of them needed to license a new set of components to be able to do so. While it was possible to rely on leaked and pirated documents to piece together a new generation of mech, no one would be allowed to sell them on the open market.