The Mech Touch

6033 ExtrFirepower Redefined

Ves had a lot of affection for the Amaranto. She was his first masterwork expert mech and encapsulated a large part of his past creative madness.

Although the Amaranto's flaws and limitations gradually beca lot more apparent over time, the expert mech was still able to make major contributions in battle on account of her extremphasis on firepower.

With two different luminar crystal weapons at her disposal, the Amaranto could choose to employ a precise and tricky rifle, or a very powerful and overwhelming cannon.

Either way, the Amaranto beca force to be reckoned with from the first tshe went into service!

As Venerable Davia Stark continued to improve her resonance strength and her marksmanship capabilities, the Amaranto in her hands becstronger and achieved greater results.

This improvement was not only due to the increasing strength of their true resonance and the greater display of skill, but also due to the Amaranto's growth as a living mech!

As one of the older and most respected living mechs of the Larkinson Clan, the Amaranto had taken after her pilot and becmore taciturn in terms of personality.

Just like her expert pilot, the Amaranto also harbored very deep animosity towards alien species!

Neither the expert pilot nor the expert mech showed any reluctance when it cto fighting against alien opponents. They especially got fired up whenever they had an opportunity to kill the raiders who sought to destroy human colonies!

Now that the once-broken-but-now-recovered expert pilot had becan ace pilot candidate, Ves was very confident in her ability to break through.

Compared to her peers, Venerable Davia exhibited greater maturity and possessed a much more driven personality.

In fact, Ves was afraid that she had forsaken too much of her humanity in order to pursue her quest for revenge. Would she still be able to break through if she had lost sight of her own personal development?

Aside from this fault, Ves was highly optimistic about her breakthrough chances. Supplying her with a massively upgraded mech should definitely do the trick, especially when the Amaranto was already a masterwork mech!

Ves paid close attention to Gloriana's vision of the Amaranto Mark III. His wife had invested a considerable amount of tand effort into drafting a comprehensive proposal about the next iteration of the Larkinson Clan's original high-end ranged mech.

"Let us start with defense, which is arguably the least dramatic area of improvement." Gloriana stated. "The Mark I stood out for lacking the Unending alloy that was ubiquitous in our other early expert mechs. This was because we were much poorer and only possessed a limited reserve of this special material. By the twe updated the Amaranto to the Mark II, we made up for the deficiency in defense to a large extent, but the expert rifleman mech still does not excel in defense."

She tapped her finger onto the projected draft design. All of the exterior and interior archemetal components lit up in sequence.

"Our circumstances have changed drastically since then, Ves. We can employ much more expensive first-class materials and increase the structural defense of the Amaranto to the sstandard as a first-class mech. The Mark III will therefore experience a large boost in defense, though the increase is not as high as you may expect. This is due to a radical design choice I have made for this design. Can you deduce it, Ves? Can you tellthe tradeoff that I have made that forcesto compromise on the Amaranto's defenses?"

The Amaranto Mark I started off so fragile that she could easily crumble apart if she was attacked by a single expert mech or multiple standard mechs.

The Mark II addressed this shortcoming to an extent, but she still retained her characteristics as an expert marksman mech to an extent.

No matter the version, the Amaranto was never designed to put herself in harm's way!

Her core design concept centered around extrfirepower. In order to realize that, Ves and Gloriana had always made many design choices that made the mech weaker in other aspects.

They believed that the tradeoffs were all worth it because the Amaranto had never been designed with versatility and self-

sufficiency in mind.

She only had one job, and she had always done that extremely well.

As for the other jobs, that was what the rest of the Larkinson Army was for. There was no need to rely on the Amaranto for defense of melee interception.

Now that the thad cto design the Mark III, it becclear that Gloriana had continued their earlier tradition and tried to make the Amaranto's offensive power more pronounced.

As Ves studied the design, he soon noticed a few quirks. The entire mech frlooked different from the Dark Zephyr in a way that caused him to grow suspicious.

He narrowed his eyes as he studied the draft design with a more critical eye. The lack of detail and the absence of data made it harder to figure out what exactly caused him to notice that the Amaranto was different, but as he continued to study the design, he began to approach the truth.

His gaze continued to rake across every visible archemetal component. He noticed how they were designed in a way that assumed that they were weaker and more fragile than what he expected of an archemech of this caliber.

More importantly than that was that Gloriana also made a number of design choices that did not really make sense under normal circumstances.

She had shown unusual restraint and prudence in terms of reducing the possibility of E energy attribute conflicts. This indicated that his wife was unusually concerned about creating accidents whenever the Amaranto channeled a lot of E energy.

"Wait.. this design… is made up almost entirely of hyper materials!" Ves gasped!

"Yes! Good observation! In my current plan, I anticipate that it should be possible to use medium and high-grade hypers to construct at least 90 percent of the entire archemech frame! I am trying hard to explore whether I can make up for the remaining 10 percent, but even if that is not possible, this is already enough forto fulfill my goal."

Ves couldn't help but react with shock at Gloriana's audacity!

Hyper materials were new but great. They introduced a lot of new possibilities to red humanity. Their main contribution was to allow humans to channel the power of E energy in a systematic and effective manner through machines.

If this was all, then it made a lot of sense to build everything important out of hyper materials.

In reality, there were many complicating factors that made this a bad idea.

Hyper materials never really stood out for their strong basic performance characteristics. They were not the toughest of materials. They were not able to absorb the greatest amount of heat. They were also less robust and more prone to producing faults when compared to exotic materials.

The human race had spent a much longer texploring the nature and applications of many different exotics.

People like Ves were also able to use exotics to a very high degree due to benefiting from all of the accumulated wisdom and millenia's worth of technological advancements in the science and application of exotic materials.

Hypers were much newer and less familiar to modern humanity. Even if hypers possessed the potential to perform just as well as exotics in the sfunctions, it was clearly a few hundred or a thousand years too soon to realize this condition.

Humanity's understanding of hyper materials was both scattered and mixed for the tbeing.

Combined with the clues that suggested that hypers would never be as robust as exotics, many mech designers had already concluded that it was foolish to design an entire mech made out of hyper materials!

The machine may indeed be able to attract a large amount of E energy, but it would also beca lot more fragile than a more conventional mech!

The current trend in the mech industry was to treat hyper materials as a more accessible version of resonating materials.

People already started to treat hyper technology as the poor man's version of true resonance.

Regardless, it was common sense that a good mech still needed to be built predominantly out of exotics.

Hypers could only be used as a supplement to augment the basic features of the mech and possibly bestow a few more advanced capabilities.

Gloriana's design approach for the Amaranto almost completely upended this well-established mech framework!

"Why… forsake so many exotics for hyper materials?" Ves skeptically asked. "Your extrdesign choice may still make the Amaranto tough enough to withstand the attacks of lots of standard mechs and most expert mechs, but it will definitely becmore fragile than the Dark Zephyr, which is absurd since the latter is a light mech! I thought that we would agree to pull up the defenses of the Amaranto so that she won't instantly fold if an enemy ever manages to threaten her existence, but you are clearly going in the opposite direction with this. Any ace mech or phase leader that is able to get close enough to inflict serious damage onto the Amaranto can easily crumple our precious machine. For what purpose did you decide to forsake defense to such an unprecedented extent?"

His wife did not deny the faults he mentioned. She was fully cognizant of the consequences of her design choice.

She just believed that she had a very good reason to go in this direction.

Her finger tapped the projection again. The entire archemech started to absorb massive amounts of light-attributed E energy. The mech channeled so much light energy that she had already becblindingly bright!

Then, the light suddenly disappeared.

To be more accurate, the Amaranto directed all of that powerful light energy into her luminar crystal rifle and proceeded to fire the most potent, resonance-empowered light beam that Ves had ever seen!

Even though it was only a very casual simulation, the scene where the Amaranto Mark III channeled so much light energy into pure damage was an awe-inspiring sight!

"Glass cannon is the defining phrase and concept of the Amaranto Mark III." Gloriana proudly stated to her husband. "The Amaranto as a high-tier expert mech and possibly an ace mech should continue her tradition of compromising on everything aside from maximizing her firepower. Her archemetal frdoes not exist to defend her against attacks. Our starships or the Bastion can already perform this job much better as far as I am concerned. The Amaranto's entire archemech frshould completely be dedicated towards maximizing her firepower. The enormous amounts of hyper materials used to construct the next iteration of the Amaranto will all be based on the light attribute. This will turn the Amaranto into the brightest but also the most lethal presence on the battlefield!"

Ves could not imagine how much power the Amaranto could accumulate in a single fully charged shot.

He made a few estimates, but he did not dare to say for certain that they represented the living rifleman mech's upper limit.

The true figure had to be higher! The Amaranto wouldn't be able to justify the fact that most of her archemetal components were made out of hyper materials as opposed to more conventional exotic materials.

Ves guessed what Gloriana wanted to accomplish with this extrdecision.

She wanted to upgrade the Amaranto into a truly fearsranged mech! She wanted the Amaranto to gain the power to penetrate through all of the energy defenses of an alien warship and inflict serious material damage onto the hull!

No other outcwas acceptable! As long as the Amaranto could effectively snipe formidable alien warships from afar, she would turn into an indispensable asset to the Larkinson Clan for many years to come!

"I… love this idea!"