The Mech Touch novel Chapter 34

Hans stepped into the gauntlet with a running start. The drake raised eyebrows when it first appeared. Its humanoid form moved around with raptor legs and featured stubby wings on its back for an extra boost. While its rounded shield and good quality sword told everyone that its main role was a knight, the Drake also featured two strange elongated boxes on its shoulders.

"Did you put together your own shoulder mounted lasers? What was wrong with using the readily available ones?" Carlos asked in confusion.

"The ones from the junk pile don’t bite hard enough."

"Oh. The shoulder mounts look like they weigh a lot. Is your mech able to handle all of it?"

"That’s why I went with the raptor legs in the first place. They are able to maintain their speed better even when carrying a bigger burden."

"Yeah, but they’re made for raptor mechs in specific. The balance of your half-humanoid mech must be hell."

"I spent some time adjusting its default modes, and I’m sure Hans can handle the rest."

"That’s a lot of trust you’re putting in the test pilot."

Indeed he did. While Ves was able to accomplish a lot in twelve hours, he couldn’t optimize the balance of the mech completely. He hoped that with Hans experience in piloting all kinds of mechs would come to good use here. And from the look of the Drake’s fluent gait, he encountered no insurmountable problems.

The clipped flight system came brilliantly to life. Hans took advantage of its diminished output to put an extra spring in his steps. At certain moments, the Drake moved faster than light mechs even as it weighed as much as the heavier medium mechs. While it wasn’t able to avoid detection due to the heat it generated, it was able to outrun a couple of groups.

When the Drake encountered an ambush of two heavy mechs and a smattering of other weight classes, Hans aggressively charged closer despite the disparity in firepower. The large round shield drew most of the firepower, allowing the Drake to come closer enough to make a few quick attacks with his sword that disabled most of the vulnerable weapon mounts on the heavy mechs.

Having taken care of the heavy firepower, Hans darted back and forth and dueled the more mobile mechs at their terms. With the wings acting as jump jets, the Drake was often able to close the distance abruptly with the enemy. While the laser cannons suffered from poor accuracy and tracking, if the Drake came close enough, the damage they caused always slowed down the opponent, softening them up for a lethal sword blow. The Drake progressed forward on a bloody path.

Unfortunately, the constant activation of both its flight system and laser cannons rapidly built up heat while draining the mech’s energy. Ves wasn’t worried about the energy, as he had packed the Drake with enough energy cells to last the entire gauntlet. Heat was a very different problem, and once the Drake neared its limit, its effectiveness would drop drastically.

Heat accumulation troubled designers ever since the first mechs came into existence. Even after 400 years of mech development, modern mechs still faced the plain old dilemma of balancing power and heat. Newer power reactors outputted higher amounts of energy, while energy cells packed more and more capacity with each new iteration. Heat absorption and heat dissipation technology only barely kept up with the times.

Air was a very poor conductor of heat. This was a good thing for some people, as it meant their coffees and soups wouldn’t cool down to room temperature in seconds. For mechs, this presented a big problem, as even the most effective passive radiators could do so much in normal Terran-standard air conditions that so many worlds had terraformed into. It was worse in locations of low air and vacuum conditions like on lifeless moons.

The biggest advancement in heat dissipation happened about three hundred years ago. The first heavy mechs introduced primarily used missile and ballistic weaponry. Their ammunition took a lot of space, but they generated much less heat than pure energy-based weapons like lasers.

A heavy mech built-in with lots of lasers was seen as an unrealistic fantasy by most mech insiders at the time. As long as they kept shooting their lasers for a couple of minutes, their mechs turned so hot you could cook an egg on its surface.

Out comes a mech designer who one day thought while mechs were not so good at dissipating heat into the air, then what about the ground? Their feet always touched the ground. So the mech designer reworked the internals of a mech and basically reinvented the concept of legs not just as a way of moving and a way to support weight, but also as a tool to help mechs transfer heat into the ground. Through incorporating sophisticated heat-conducting alloys, that brilliant mech designer developed revolutionary new legs with widened feet that could actually siphon off heat pretty decently.

Shortly after this bombshell invention got out, other mech developers got into the action. If two legs conducted this amount of heat, what about four legs? The first quadrupedal mechs were born. These so-called animal and centaur mechs looked highly unusual, but having more legs offered many advantages besides increased heat transfer. The introduction of spider mechs followed quickly after, but that was when the whole leg craze peaked. The one man who tried to design a centipede mech failed miserably, and his abomination was quickly forgotten.

Methods to deal with heat had come a long way since then. From the use of evaporating coolants, to the incorporation of replaceable heat sinks, mech designers had more choice in how to handle this problem.

Ves hadn’t included any of that in his mech. Worse, as Hans often hopped and glided around, the Drake’s feet wasn’t touching the ground, thus further limiting its heat dissipation. Hans kept avoiding the heavy mechs with his mobility while cutting down the medium mechs by jumping close and taking them out with his sword and shield. Only the light mechs posed a problem as the laser cannons couldn’t be fired too fast in order to avoid overheating the Drake. Worse, the laser fire the Drake received only increased its heat levels.

About 7 kilometers through the gauntlet, Hans decided it was enough and detached the laser mounts and stubby flight system from the Drake. The mech lost a lot of its mobility and ranged options, but at least its heat generation was cut. Through a mix of clever positioning and a lot of running, Hans was able to pilot his lightened Drake through several blockades.

The entire crowd adopted strange expressions when they saw Hans kept surviving ambush after ambush. The Drake often slipped past by the skin of its teeth, its exterior armor and its shield accumulating more and more holes and burn marks. Yet despite the extensive damage, none of them hit anything critical. Hans was somehow able to keep going with the Drake even when the mechs of other contestants would have malfunctioned at this point.

"Damn son, did you really spend just twelve hours on your mech? It’s still going strong!"

"I haven’t done a thing." Ves helplessly shrugged his shoulders. "I was on the stage just as you. It’s not even possible for me to cheat."

"Maybe you got word of the competition format beforehand. This must be why Patricia aced the qualifiers. Did the two of you do some unspeakable actions in order to get an advantage?"