The Mech Touch novel Chapter 462

Both the Heavensfall and the XX-REX missiles represent specific types of military ordnance. Compared to the missiles used by mercs and gangs, the missiles used by the Mech legion possessed a lot of advantages.

They hit harder, their ECM wouldn’t be as easy to fool and they accelerated significantly faster as well. Superior development only played a minor role in their performance. The true reason why the Flagrant Vandals feared these missiles was because they incorporated various amounts of exotics.

The use of expensive materials lay at the root of their performance. The Bright Republic generally shied away from such practices, as they considered lacing their missiles with junk exotics or low-grade exotics to be an absolute waste.

A missile launched from a tube would be a missile that could never be recovered. Once it detonated or got intercepted, the wreckage would be strewn over a huge area, and in certain cases be blown by the wind on a planet or carried along their initial impulse in space.

It was safe to say that in cases like that, the expensive exotics would never be recovered.

Yet the Vesians didn’t see it that way. Certainly, their active use of missiles cost a pretty penny, but they treated it as an investment. As long as they inflicted more damage on the enemy than what the missiles cost, then they came out ahead on a net basis.

That put the 150,000 missiles heading in their direction in a very ominous light. The resources put in their manufacture could have been used to acquire another combat carrier or two. If the Mech Corps faced the same equation, then they would have certainly gone for extra ships. Not so for the Vesians, who only thought in terms of how much damage they could inflict.

"Estimated casualties?" Major Verle asked a specialist in charge of simulations.

"A high possibility of three to five combat carriers sustaining heavy damage. One or two may even break apart."

The shipkiller missiles only targeted their ships. The Vesians might wish to target their transports and logistics ships as well because the Flagrant Vandals depended on them to make their way back home.

In any case, the incoming missiles needed to be dealt with. Major Verle stood up. "We’ve trained for this! Engage anti-missile countermeasures!"

With the Vesian propensity for launching mass missile swarms, the Mech Corps drilled relentlessly on how to take them out. Major Verle only needed to mention a few plans and issue a couple of instructions to make his ships and mechs adopt a defensive posture optimized against missiles.

Naturally, the Vesians didn’t make it easy on their enemies to take their missiles out one by one. For one, they staggered their missiles in such a way that all 150,000 of them arrived near-simultaneously at their targets.

The first salvo traveled a little slower and adopted slightly arched trajectories, while the missiles behind them took a more direct approach and burned a little faster. Over time, the distances would diminish until they formed a combined volley of apocalyptic proportions.

The Flagrant Vandals much preferred the missiles to pour in to them one by one. This way, they could focus their full defensive envelope on a couple of missiles at once and take them out before the next one arrived. Sadly, no one with a brain would program their missiles to trickle in this way unless it served a special purpose.

The key to taking out so many missiles coming at them at once was to take potshots of them at extreme range.

"Launch counter-missiles!"

A handful of missileers among the Vandals launched their own missiles. The salvo released by them only numbered just above ten-thousand, an absolutely pathetic amount compared to what the Vesians threw at them. Hopefully, at least half of them would score a hit at the incoming Vesian missiles.

"Lasers, fire at will!"

Every laser-wielding mech in the mech regiment aimed their guns and fired far off into the distance. At this point, not a single mech pilot would be able to spot the missiles with the naked eye. They entrusted the aiming of their weapons entirely to their targeting systems, which all networked back to the powerful processors aboard the combat carriers.

One of the biggest advantages of laser beams over kinetic weapons was that they traveled at the speed of light and that their range was potentially enormous in the emptiness of space.

In practice, space wasn’t completely empty, and the laser beams also tended to become defocused across huge distances. In addition, although the lasers traveled really fast, the missiles didn’t travel in a straight line either.

The Vesian missiles poured a lot of research into improving their capability to dodge extreme-range laser fire. Small boosters embedded along their structure pushed the missiles left and right, up and down and even back and forth.

Extremely sophisticated algorithms governed this behavior, and unless the Mech Corps cracked the code, the Vandals wouldn’t be able to predict their dodging patterns.

Both the Heavensfall and the XX-REX missiles happened to be the one of the newer types of missiles introduced by the Mech Legion in the last couple of years. That meant that the Vandals practically faced them for the first time.

Hundreds of mechs kept firing their lasers off in the distance. They focused on the low-volume XX-REX missiles launched from the second moon because they were bigger and heavier than the Heavensfall missiles. This made them a bit more resilient, but it also made them a lot easier to hit.

Dozens of missiles got shot down as the mechs scored occasional lucky hits. The hit rate slowly increased as the missiles neared the Vandal ships, but it all went far too slow for their tastes. The extreme range along with the devilishly clever dodging patterns made each attempt to take them down a complete gamble.

In situations like this, neither of the mech designers played much of a role. Major Verle turned to others who studied Vesian missiles as their life’s work. What Ves and Alloc knew about missiles wasn’t very much, though Alloc at least tried to be helpful by trying to hack them in some way.

Good luck with that. The Vesians obsessed about having their missiles turn against them, so they employed many convoluted methods in order to prevent such an occurrence. In general, the Mech Corps only managed to crack lastgen missile models. Anything newer than that was pretty much a black box in their regard.

Many minutes passed by as the lasers took their toll on the missile salvos. Mechs that wielded projectile-based weapons stood by and waited for the missiles to come close before unleashing their own storm of fire.

Since their projectiles traveled much slower than the speed of light, it didn’t make sense to fire them right now. The missiles saw the incoming projectiles coming and would have ages of time to adjust their trajectory and move out of the way.