The Mech Touch

"Are we looking at an alien or a human warship?"

This question was surprisingly hard to answer.

Mech designers such as Ves possessed a great understanding in engineering, but their expertise did not encompass shipbuilding. There was too much about starship design that still eluded their understanding.

Though Ves and many other mech designers formed their own theories, they could not speak with authority on this issue.

They mainly leaned on their resident ship experts to make sense of the grainy, low-quality readings transmitted by the low-profile probes.

It just so happened that the Larkinson Clan's versatility and comprehensiveness became a boon at this time. The Larkinson Navy had brought along an entire ship repair and shipbuilding vessel in the form of the Diligent Ovenbird.

This recently upgraded capital ship previously functioned as a stationary shipyard in Davute, but when the preparations for the Trailblazer Expedition commenced, the Larkinsons had converted her back into a mobile capital ship, though at the cost of compromising much of her shipbuilding capacity.

Nevertheless, the Diligent Ovenbird still retained much of her shipbuilding crew. Thousands of ship designers, naval engineers, ship system specialists and technicians crewed the vessel.

These days, many of these workers busied themselves with repairing the combat carriers that incurred damage in the previous battle. They also worked on studying, breaking down and recycling the alien warship debris from that same battle.

The shipwrights under the lead of Vivian Tsai mainly developed new and interesting starship designs for the Larkinson Clan. Even if the Larkinson Clan faced heavy constraints in ship production, it did not stop the ship designers from increasing the stockpile of effective ship designs.

However, the ship designers also spent a lot of time on analyzing the design and construction of alien vessels. The Battle of the Boryan Belt had given them excellent access to different alien warships. They had access to a huge amount of high-quality battle footage, but more importantly than that they also had actual samples of warship debris to examine and deconstruct in person.

While it was difficult for most people to imagine how all of this would convert into tangible benefits, Ves was thankful that he had invested so much into building up the Naval Design Department.

Compared to where it was in the past, the Naval Design Department had undergone an extensive period of expansion and professionalization.

The department hired many shipwrights, some of whom even possessed greater experience and qualifications than their relatively junior head.

Ves saw no reason to replace Miss Tsai with any of these highly competent shipwrights, though. He trusted her and was familiar with her. He also believed that she would continue to grow into the role and be able to serve the clan well for many decades to come.

Given the importance of figuring out the identity and the details of the unknown hybrid warship, Ves personally marched over to the hangar bay so that he could shuttle over to the Diligent Ovenbird.

The vessel looked a lot more industrial than the other ships in the fleet. The Ovenbird might have a silly name, but she had become as important to the Larkinsons as the Spirit of Bentheim!

Right now, the critical ship repair vessel was being flanked by both the Gorgoneion and the Graveyard. These two bulky capital ships physically protected the relatively fragile civilian-grade vessel from multiple angles.

No capital ship had docked at her Big Oven at this time. It was highly inconvenient to repair and conduct maintenance on starships during this tense and dangerous period.

When Ves stepped out of his shuttle, he noticed that much of the industrial gear had been locked down or stowed away.

Fewer workers were moving around as there just wasn't as much work to do at the moment. Everyone in the fleet had to be ready to respond to any emergencies at any time.

An air of uncertainty and oppression had descended onto the Golden Skull Alliance. Each of them had already witnessed the enormous firepower of an alien battleship.

Even if the flagship of the Unspoken was considerably larger and more powerful than the unidentified alien warship hiding underneath the surface of the brown dwarf star, the latter was much more modern and up to date!

A direct conflict against the unknown hybrid battleship would go a lot differently than the fight against the V'gahnt-Zezne.

In the last battle, a temporary coalition consisting of six pioneering fleets dispatched seven impressive ace mechs against the massive orven battleship.

With many of these powerhouse machines harassing the V'gahnt-Zezne at close range, her powerful but extremely sluggish and inflexible primary armaments were completely unable to retaliate against the fast and agile ace mechs!

The situation was completely different this time. The Golden Skull Alliance was on its own and could not dispatch more than a single ace mech.

The hostile environment of the brown dwarf star prevented the mech forces of the expeditionary fleet from getting close and using their mobility to their advantage.

This essentially meant that the Golden Skull Alliance had little choice but to engage the strange battleship at long range, which was exactly where warships held the greatest advantage!

Any ship with primary weapon batteries that were larger than several heavy mechs put together loved nothing more than to sit back at a comfortable distance and bombard their targets with overwhelming firepower.

This was the reason why everyone was so nervous at this time. A battle against a single alien battleship might cause the expeditionary fleet to incur horrendous damage.

As a precaution, the expeditionary fleet had already taken the initiative to move behind the rocky planet so that much of its bulk would shield the vulnerable starships from direct strikes.

This was not a permanent solution, though. Any decent alien warship possessed the ability to maneuver surprisingly rapidly on the battlefield as long as there weren't any powerful warp inhibition effects.

Given the enormous threat level of the hybrid battleship, Ves sped up his pace and quickly arrived at a compartment where numerous ship designers and other specialists were quietly analyzing the data collected by the probes.

"Sir. You are here. Please come and sit." Chief Shipwright Vivian Tsai waved her suited arm at a central table.

When Ves moved forward and sat down on a sturdy chair, he glanced around before focusing his sights on the table projection.

Enough time had passed for the relevant experts to expand the details of the technical schematic of the hybrid battleship. They had identified many more smaller weapon batteries, sensor modules, exterior hatches and other interesting traits.

Vivian Tsai eventually finished her discussion with her leading subordinates and moved over to the table.

"How are you doing, Vivian? Is the ship giving you a lot of trouble?"

"You don't know half of it." The fairly young but already maturing woman said with a grimace. "The environment where the unknown battleship resides is making our jobs much more difficult, and I wish the probes were better equipped to make long-ranged observations. I know better than to ask whether we can move the probes any closer, but it is still frustrating to know that we can deduce at least twice as much information if those probes are willing to move just a few kilometers forward."

Ves shook his head. "That's not a good idea. The probes are currently hiding in the periphery of the alien battleship's detection range. The gasses of the brown dwarf star helps a lot with reducing their chances of getting detected, but moving them forward just a little bit will quickly double or triple the probability of exposure."

Vivian Tsai already knew that as she possessed a good understanding of sensor and detecting technology, but she still felt the need to complain.

She did not forget her duties, though, so she quickly moved on to business.

"I am sure that you are wondering who has designed, built and crewed this battleship that we have temporarily codenamed the Tower of Babel." She began. "While we do not have enough information to say anything solid about the latter two, we can at least form a fairly solid conclusion about the former. This... is a ship designed by a collaboration of shipwrights hailing from different alien races."

Ves frowned when he heard that. "Didn't you tell me earlier that you believe that this is primarily a nunser warship? The basic ship structure is built like a tower, which is exactly what the nunsers prefer."

"That is true, and I have no doubt that the nunsers likely played the greatest role in the design of the Tower of Babel, but she contains several elements that violate core nunser design principles."

She gestured towards the projection and caused the outline of the ship schematic to glow in red.

"Let us start with the silhouette and contours of this vessel. We have collected a lot of evidence that she is a vertically arranged starship, which means that the bow section is the top while the stern section that holds the main thrusters constitute the bottom."

"Why is that important?"

"It is highly inconvenient to construct a relatively long and narrow starship but arrange her internal structure in such a vertical fashion. The amount of stairways, ramps and elevators needed to facilitate movement will be excessive."

That did sound strange. It was the result of two poorly matching design choices.

"Why is this relevant?" Ves asked.

"I am getting to that, sir. The nunsers are evolved herbivores. They are like cattle that have quickly grown intelligent and managed to carve their own place in the Red Ocean. That said, they still retain many of the instincts and customs of their more primitive selves, one of which is the desire to live in large and expensive open plains."

"Well, this narrow tower-shaped ship certainly won't be able to offer that if she is vertically arranged."

Vivian curled her lips. "Do you see? The implication here is that the Tower of Babel is not crewed by nunsers, at least not in great numbers."

Ves was impressed by this deduction. "That makes a lot of sense. What else have you found?"

"Let us look at the elements that are obviously derived from the tech developed by other races. Let us zoom in on their main weapon batteries, which we have tried to reconstruct in this schematic as best as possible. What stands out in your eyes?"

The projection changed to zoom in on one of the primary armaments. The turret looked a bit too oversized on the relatively slender hull.

"The base of the turret is rounded. It's a cylinder pretty much." Ves observed. "The top of the weapon battery is shaped like a domed half-circle. That makes it pretty good at deflecting blows at an angle. There are three large kinetic cannon barrels, but instead of being placed in a row, they are installed in a triangular pattern, which is pretty perplexing as it will just make fire control more complicated."

Vivian nodded. "This is a classic puelmer kinetic weapon battery. It sort of fits onto the Tower of Babel. Normal nunser warships are generally much broader. They have the volume to mount larger and more massive weapon batteries. The puelmers on the other hand are fine with smaller warships and their weapon systems are scaled accordingly."

"I see." Ves looked intrigued. "I suppose that all of these puelmer weapon systems need puelmer crew members to operate them. Maybe other alien races will be able to operate them adequately enough, but it is really better to put those who know them best in charge of their controls."

"That is also probable." Vivian Tsai said. "There is more, though. Let me highlight these modules to you. They are fairly small and difficult to notice, but when we performed comparison analysis with the help of archival footage of the Battle of the Boryan Belt, we came across several suspicious matches."

The ship schematic highlighted dozens of strange, flat surface modules.

"What are they?"

"They are sensors that are specifically designed to facilitate the operation of energy shields, more precisely segmented transphasic energy shields. We have found similar if much older types of modules on the exterior of the V'gahnt-Zezne."

Ves already began to groan. "So what you're saying is that the Tower of Babel is protected by orven energy shield technology?"

"That is correct. While transphasic energy shield technology is so widespread that every technological race has developed their own applications of it, the orvens are particularly good in this field. You can never go wrong with mounting orven energy shields onto a starship."

Hearing that the orvens were involved with the Tower of Babel complicated this entire affair even further. What the hell had his expeditionary fleet gotten itself into this time?!