The Mech Touch novel Chapter 345

While Lucky prodded a clearly artificial object buried inside the asteroid, Ves began to test his initial graser rifle design in a simulation.

The simulated weapon immediately blew up in the hands of the mech.

"What?!"

Ves was sure he nailed the design. It should have spat out at least an anemic gamma laser beam. To blow up in the face of the simulated mech was out of the realm of possibilities.

Thinking that the environment may had played a role, Ves repeated the simulation in different environments. He shifted from space to terrestrial environments such as forests or ice-capped terrain.

The graser rifle continued to explode without fail.

"I thought I was so close!"

He underestimated the technical challenges involved with turning a concept of a weapon into reality. He derived the bulk of his work from the research notes. Evidently, he made a mistake at some point. Perhaps he derived too much from the research notes and failed to adjust them to his own design.

Ves performed the simulations again and called up some data from the moment the simulated mech pulled the trigger.

Everything went fine in the start. It only started to go wrong when an abundance of power ran through the mechanisms responsible for generating the actual graser beam.

Certain components couldn’t handle the load and melted down, leading to a variety of awful effects that cascaded into a dreadful explosion.

"Damnit, this mechanism isn’t strong enough."

For some reason, Dr. Kawasaki made it work. The research notes abundantly laid out the detailed design process for the internal mechanisms. When Ves followed the instructions to design his own version of the mechanism, it failed to withstand the load.

"Let’s see what happens if I dial down the power."

The graser rifle kept exploding until it reached a threshold where the mechanism failed to perform at all. Gamma ray lasers demanded a lot of power. Without a sufficient amount of power, the mechanisms failed to work at all.

"This is a problem." Ves said as he pressed his fists against his waist.

The constant isolation was getting to him somewhat. If not for the bumbling presence of Lucky, he might have turned erratic.

More than the lack of people, his inability to access the galactic net and stay connected to the rest of the galaxy irked him a lot.

"I have no idea how the war is progressing."

Historically, the Vesians cautiously probed the Republic’s defenses. Their most destructive actions consisted of raids against Republican infrastructure and industry. The Vesians loved to take out soft targets early in the war before they could be of help to the Brighters.

He didn’t worry too much about the LMC. It wasn’t a high priority target and his workers should have already started moving his assets to the underground manufacturing complex. Sanyal-Ablin’s substantial presence there was sufficient to deter any casual raid.

"I should focus on completing my own tasks."

He spent the next hours trying to puzzle out the exact failure point. He uncovered a number components that performed well below their theoretical parameters.

He’d been far too sloppy too sloppy in his design work.

"Rather than say I’ve been sloppy, it’s more fitting to say that the graser rifle can’t tolerate any failures."

Ves deliberately designed a bigger rifle to make it easier for him to design a workable heat rod and battery, but the design choice introduced its own complexities. Certain components couldn’t be scaled at all. Other parts performed strangely when Ves had increased their size.

It took several more days for him to solve these problems. He ran over each component one by one and tweaked them until their parameters fell within the expected range. To be honest, he had to resort to a lot of kludging and improvisation in order to get the mechanisms to work with each other.

Ves had never designed a conventional laser rifle from scratch. Trying to design its big brother in a single go turned out to be highly unrealistic.

As the days passed by, Ves began to get a hang of trying to get his laser rifle to work. It started out with a maze of problems, but by tackling the most obvious issues one at a time, he steadily reduced the unworkable nature of his homegrown design.

He put his weapon to the test yet again in another basic simulation in space.

The weapon fired a graser beam without problem this time. The only issue was that the beam’s power fell well below his intended output. Too much energy had been wasted in the conversion process.

"I’m getting close."

In truth, he could have already started to fabricate the current design, but his perfectionist streak started to take over. His interest in getting his graser rifle to work had engulfed his mind. He unconsciously poured his passion into improving his design.

In the meantime, Lucky through the asteroid and encountered more rectangular crystals. In its eyes, they looked a lot like windows. However, they couldn’t be broken or melted at all. No matter how many times he scratched them with his energy claws or chewed them with his mineral-breaking teeth, the panes of crystals remained as whole as ever.

Lucky meowed angrily at the latest crystal window barring his tunnel. Couldn’t a gem cat burrow through an asteroid in peace?

No sound actually escaped from his maw, as the vacuum environment couldn’t convey any sound.

It was the thought that counted.

Nevertheless, the crystals annoying him to such an extent that he began to dig them out of the asteroid and carry them out of his tunnels. With a modest application of his gravity manipulation, he sent out the indestructible crystals out into space.

One by one, they escaped their resting place and flew out into the asteroid cloud.

In time, many of those crystals bumped into other asteroids. They burrowed rather deep in their new abodes. After thousands or millions of years, they would continue to rest inside the asteroids without incident.

Strangely enough, that didn’t happen. The crystal windows thrown out onto other asteroid began to grow active. They shone with light as some unknown alien systems embedded into the transparent crystals wearily turned active.

Eons had passed since they last became active.

As the asteroids brought them tumbling away from each other, the crystals finally unleashed a portion of their might. They connected to each other with bright, intangible strings of energy.

The asteroids they resided on suddenly stopped their senseless tumbling. Their trajectory came to a halt as these heavy objects had been fixed into a forceful stop.

Then they began to move.