Chapter 2736: Defective Design

At the end of their private discussion, Ves and Melkor came to a new understanding.

The opinions they shared and the decisions they made would profoundly change the Larkinson Clan's first elite mech force.

Commander Melkor insisted on transforming the Avatars of Myth into the spear of the Larkinson Clan!

In order to facilitate this transformation, he intended to increase the intake of offensive melee mech pilots and reduce the emphasis on ranged specialists.

Even though Melkor was a rifleman mech specialist himself, he did not mind the change. There was still a place for ranged mechs in the Avatars. They just wouldn't be the main focus anymore in order to make sure that his entire unit excelled in frontal assaults.

Melkor loosened up after Ves supported his plans and promised to facilitate the transition. He loosened his shoulders and relaxed his posture.

"Thank you, Ves." He said in a more personal tone. "My men and I truly need these changes."

"It's been hard on you, Melkor. Responsibility is never an easy burden to bear. It gets even harder when something awful happened under your watch."

The various battles the Larkinsons had fought since the founding of the clan repeatedly traumatized the clansmen. While the harsh experiences hardened them into battle-worn soldiers, they also incurred other damage.

Commander Melkor was no different. His burden was greater, so he took a greater share of the mental damage than others. It was hard for people who cared about the wellbeing of their underlings to remain unmoved by the significant number of the deaths that had taken place.

Different people coped with the problem in different ways. Some just bore their pain silently. Others turned to alcohol or stimulants. Then there were people like Ves who simply shoved his guilt aside and tried his best to wipe it out from his mind.

It was too bad that not everyone was like Ves. Melkor looked like he could use a hug or a pat on the back.

"You don't need to look so glum, Melkor. Are your Avatars complaining about your leadership?"

"No. I've been spared from suffering the same fate as Commander Magdalena, though sometimes I feel I should."

"She unjustly fell on her sword because that was what was necessary to drag the Living Sentinels out of their slump. She doesn't deserve this fate and neither do you. External factors are the cause for all of the setbacks we've suffered. You did the best you can to respond to all of the developments that threatened our existence."

"Many people say that." Melkor grunted. "Major Verle often tells me that as well. I still feel that a more seasoned and experienced commander could have kept a few more Avatars alive. I often spend hours thinking that I should have pushed through certain decisions that would have lowered our casualties."

"You're getting lost in what-ifs. That's not a healthy habit to have. Introspection is only useful if it helps you become a better person. Since this is not the case right now, you should stop wallowing in the past and focus on the future instead. Your men still need your leadership. They need an authority figure, not a moper."

That spurred Melkor to straighten himself up. No good came from doubting himself to this degree.

After straightening Melkor out, Ves bid goodbye to him as he left.

"I hope you'll succeed in rejuvenating the Avatars."

Once Ves was done with his meetings, he decided to put down his patriarch hat in order to don his mech designer hat. He exited his temporary office and navigated to the large and mostly-empty space that was supposed to be the design lab for the duration of the Larkinson Clan's stay in this star system.

A lot of mech designers were absent at the moment. The missing design teams weren't slacking off. Rather, they were probably preparing to fabricate and test the prototypes at a nearby testing facility.

Ves walked up to Gloriana, who was busy with examining the latest iteration of the Devious design.

"Anything to report?"

His wife shrugged. "Nothing that you don't already know. Well, there is one issue I'd like for you to deal with. The Devious is long overdue a suitable proto-god. While its stealth systems are all functional, they aren't too effective due to the limited design budget of our design. We need to match this capability with a suitable glow in order to make the mech more suitable for stealth operations."

Ves rubbed his palm against his face. He'd been postponing this problem for a while. "I've been trying to find a good solution, but I haven't found any suitable ingredients. We either have two choices. We can either wait for me to scour through the Prosperous Hill System in the hopes of finding a good ingredient, or I can switch over to my backup plan and center the glow around the Superior Mother alone."

"You mean her dust phase aspect?"

"Yes. I think it will help with making the Devious more unnoticeable to mech pilots, but I can't guarantee it will be as good as we hope. If I had the right design spirit, then I would feel much more assured that this model will be able to infiltrate Fridayman positions."

Gloriana looked troubled. This was a hard choice to make. Time was of the essence as the Hex Army urgently needed to obtain some new options to break the current trend of the Komodo War!

"What do you think we should do?" She asked.

She did not hesitate to shift responsibility back to him. If he was the one to make the harsh decisions, she wouldn't be burdened by any guilt. She could sleep easy knowing that Ves was to blame for any mistakes!

Even though Ves didn't like it, he was already used to bearing responsibility over pivotal decisions that could shape the lives of billions if not trillions of people.

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"There is still time." Ves crossed his arms. "I'll be spending a portion of my time on visiting the various locales of Prosperous Hill VI and maybe IV. There's bound to be a lot of exobeasts and genetic products for sale. I'll go look for lifeforms that excel at hiding their presence in the markets I intend to visit over the coming weeks. If any of them are spiritually strong, I'll snap them up no matter the cost."

Gloriana looked assured. "You do that, then. Just like you, this is the first time I've designed a stealth mech. I don't want it to be average. It has to be special like every other mech we've collaborated on. It's hard to do that on a physical level so we need to rely on the Superior Mother and whatever proto-god you create."

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Her words reflected the great constraints placed on the Devious design. It was truly hard to formulate an effective stealth mech with a total design budget of just 200 million hex credits.

While that was more than sufficient to design a mech that could fool the senses of most private sector forces, the military of the Friday Coalitions utilized better sensors. Military-grade detection systems were tuned to detect even the slightest fluctuations that Hexer stealth technology was prone to make.

In fact, it was impossible for stealth systems to erase every single trace of its presence. They merely dampened any outgoing signals and other disturbances to the minimum possible level they could achieve.

As long as they worked properly, that meant that the passage of stealth mechs should only generate fluctuations that were below the alarm thresholds of different detection systems.

If these thresholds were set too low, then the guards would have to respond to way too many false alarms. Therefore, the detection systems were programmed to watch out for short spikes or longer periods of suspicious patterns.

In general, the former only happened if the stealth system malfunctioned or if the mech pilot was too careless.

Most stealth mechs got caught due to taking too long to sneak around. The longer they lurked around, the more suspicious readings they threw out.

The Devious design did not present any special solutions against this problem. Its fairly basic stealth systems were barely enough to dampen all of its emissions to a satisfactory level. It wasn't capable of performing miracles.

The intended glow of this Hexer stealth mech design was designed to solve a different issue.

Every stealth mech had to be careful about tripping the suspicion of nearby hostiles. This was a rather confounding problem as intuition was something that couldn't be quantified. Some people possessed a sharper intuition than others. One person's intuition may be calibrated towards danger while another person's intuition was sensitive towards the weather.

Whatever the case, mech pilots generally possessed greater intuition towards possible intrusion than other people.

If any mech pilot on duty suspected a possible intrusion, then he might choose to investigate regardless of the sensor readings of his mech.

This was something that no conventional stealth system was able to defeat!

Intuition was strange and involved some of the more esoteric and metaphysical aspects of the human mind. There was no way that ordinary states invented a means to fool people's intuitions!

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Yet what Ves attempted to accomplish was exactly that. By formulating a glow that was capable of generating a false sense of security, the Devious would have a much greater chance of slipping in and out without triggering an alarm!

If this actually worked out, Ves wanted to employ the Devious for his own purposes!

"Do you think we can develop a variant of Devious that our Black Cats can make use of?" Ves asked.

"I don't think that's appropriate. It's one thing to allow the Penitent Sisters to pilot the Valkyrie Redeemer. Their Hexer pedigree is sound. This is different. The more we use the Devious, the more its core technologies risk becoming exposed."

"I think you're exaggerating the problem here." Ves accused. "While the risk you describe does exist, I doubt it will work out the way you think. The Hexers will probably use the Devious a lot more times than us, thereby exposing more to the Fridaymen than we ever could."

"I still don't like it. We both designed the Devious as a mech for the armed forces and intelligence services of my home state. It feels wrong to twist it so that we can abuse its powers for its own use. Besides, we can do better. The Devious is too cheap for the likes of us. If we want to make use of stealth mechs ourselves, we should step up and design one that is at least twice as costly."

"I agree with you, but we don't necessarily have to go back to the drawing board and design a new mech from scratch. We can save a lot of time and effort by developing a more expensive and effective variant of our Devious design."

"Let's not get ahead of ourselves, Ves. We should wait until we have completed this project and witness its effectiveness. We can form subsequent plans once we have solid data on its performance."

Both of them eventually set the Devious Project aside. They moved on to consider another nearly-complete mech design.

Gloriana adopted a much more serious demeanor as she looked at the projected design schematics of one of their most ambitious projects.

Even though its design budget was just a paltry 145 million hex credits, this mech had the potential of reversing the Hexer malaise if it lived up to its problem!

Yet Gloriana did not look upbeat when she considered this design.

"Our Blinding Mech is supposed to be our killer weapon against enemy expert mech pilots."

"That's true." Ves slowly nodded.

"THEN WHY DOESN'T IT WORK!?" His wife abruptly blew up! "DURING SEVERAL ROUNDS OF PROTOTYPE TESTING, IT BARELY DID ANYTHING EXCEPT SLIGHTLY IRRITATING EXPERT PILOTS!"

"Hey, our Blinding Mech exhibited significantly greater effectiveness against ordinary mech pilots in those testing sessions!" Ves defensively raised his palms.

"WHO CARES ABOUT THAT?! YOU PROMISED THIS MECH WOULD HELP THE HEGEMONY WIN THE KOMODO WAR, BUT ALL I SEE IS A DEFECTIVE DESIGN THAT DOES NOTHING MORE THAN SHINE AN INVISIBLE FLASHLIGHT IN SOMEONE'S EYES! IT'S USELESS!"

"I'm working on it, honey! I'll find a way to fix this problem!"

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