The Mech Touch novel Chapter 298

The Blood Claws and their subordinate forces lost too many mechs from a single engagement. Even though the pirates put up a decent fight, the battle shouldn’t have been so deadly to their mechs and pilots.

Ordinarily, mechs could soak a lot of damage. Even uncompressed mechs outperformed conventional tanks due to their mobility which allowed them to dodge or mitigate a lot of incoming attacks.

"It’s this overcharge nonsense." Kanaan uttered as he saw the devastation in front of him. A field of craters and broken parts had been strewn before the pirate base that his men heaped their vengeance upon right now. "Any battle besides an ambush will result in a pyrrhic victory for whoever’s left."

A few of the senior Blood Claws by his side nodded. "Our steeds have become our worst enemies."

"It’s too difficult to guard your energy cells in a larger battle."

"We’ll be turning our pilots into cowards if we allow them to eject too early."

"Mechs have turned into fragile scrap. Even the Mech Corps will run out of mechs by the end of the month at this rate."

Their first actual battle had taught them a lot of lessons on the devastating consequences of the overcharge phenomenon. A single change to the functioning of an energy cell had resulted in far-reaching effects for any force that fielded mechs.

The Blood Claws completely lost their appetite for further battles. None of the men found any glory to be had in the grueling fight they had just concluded. If they hadn’t been compelled to attack the base by the 4th Bentheim Division, they would have never ranged this far from their walls.

"Alright, let’s wrap it up here. Rescue any mech pilots that are trapped and finish off any pirates that are still alive except for the leaders. Have you gotten a hold of Takeru and the rest of the Dragons of the Void?"

"They ran away. They still hid a small corvette in between their carriers which lifted off out of sight behind that hill over there."

"Damn!"

Even if they stomped a dangerous forward outpost, thus reducing the threat to their base, Kanaan still felt sore about the losses.

Over the next days, the news trickled back to the Mech Corps and their affiliate powers. The Whalers especially took the news with a gut punch, because they lost six mechs and four pilots. Proportionally, they suffered the worst casualties out of the outfits that took part in the assault.

This time, the Whalers hadn’t been able to drink their gloom away.

Ves quietly shook his head as he finished modifying the umpteenth mech. He developed an efficient routine that allowed him to come up with some basic modifications on the fly and implement them into the cheap mechs in three hours or less.

He had to cut a lot of corners in order to achieve this speed, but Ves succeeded in overhauling every mech in the hands of the Whalers within a week.

"I can’t waste too much time in this base. The Whalers will be fine without me once I find a solution to the overcharge phenomenon."

Ves had devoted some of his off-time to researching what the Glowing Planet did to achieve this bizarre phenomenon. His current hypothesis was that some energetic exotic mineral emitted an all-pervasive energy field that changed the properties of stored energy.

The worst trait about the energy field was that it couldn’t be blocked by anything. To test this out, Ves repurposed some tons of scrap and built a thick enclosure around a freshly drained and recharged energy cell.

The cell still gained an overcharge after a day.

If Ves couldn’t prevent the field from affecting an energy cell surrounded by meters of alloys, then nothing else but some other exotic alloy would be able to block the energy field. The problem was that Ves had no clue what kind of exotics would qualify.

Walter’s Whalers accumulated more than fifty different minerals from their mining activities over two locations.

The old site contained more active and more valuable minerals, but none seemed to possess any special interaction with energy.

As for the new site, it contained an entirely different mix of exotics, but again nothing seemed to stand out to Ves.

Perhaps some of these exotics held the key to solving the problem, but it would take too much time to probe each type of mineral. Ves needed a faster, surer solution than a gamble with exotics.

Through his casual studies and experimentation, Ves developed a number of approaches on how to tackle the problem.

He could invest in his Physics Sub-Skills and become more knowledgeable in the abstract fields of energy.

He could invest in Metallurgy and reinvigorate his research on exotics in order to come up with a new exotic alloy that might be able to influence the mysterious energy field.

He could also throw a Hail Mary and acquire some eclectic Sub-Skills from the Metaphysics tree. Perhaps a deeper understanding into the imaginary would be needed to fight against the unknown.

After lengthy contemplation, he rejected these approaches. All of them strayed too far from his core competence as a mech designer.

"I’m a mech designer, not a scientist. There’s a difference between the two."

The former took the tools at hand and combined them in a way that solved the problem at hand. The latter wasn’t content with the tools already available, and sought to explore new methods.

Neither approach was wrong. Both had the potential to come up with an effective solution to the overcharge phenomenon, and Ves had to take the approach that fit him best.

"Let’s try it from an mech designer and engineering standpoint."

Ves called up a design for a typical energy cell.

Their design didn’t differ too much from brand to brand. Protective materials and safeguards took up around twenty percent of its volume.

The most important part of an energy cell lay in the patterns and arrays that stored the actual energy. The cheaper cells used mundane alloys while the more expensive ones incorporated exotic resources that drastically increased their maximum capacity.

As far as Ves was aware, the overcharge phenomenon didn’t discriminate between materials. Both cheap and expensive cells suffered from the same problem, though with slight differences in magnitude.

Another correlation he found was that certain structures resulted in a less drastic overcharge than other structures.

Ves focused on the latter for a possible solution. "If I can play with this structure, I might be able to achieve a drastic difference."