The Mech Touch

The Bluejay Fleet cut through space like a sharp knife. The vessels of the Red Association had become much more visible and active throughout human-occupied space, so they did not attract too much attention.

Nonetheless, many parties had developed a strong interest in tracking the movements of Professor Ves Larkinson.

It was not difficult to find out that he was scheduled to hold a product reveal in the Bortele System in less than a month.

The 9 ships of the Bluejay Fleet followed the right trajectory for the most part. Their powerful superdrives made the journey much shorter than what was possible just a decade or so before.

This gave Ves less time to practice his flute playing skills, not that he was able to devote much time on this activity to begin with, just because he set out on a vacation did not mean he could drop his other obligations so easily.

Though he had made sure to clear his schedule for an entire week upon the moment he arrived at Ocanon VI, he had to make up for that by putting in extra work.

Fortunately, his productivity had increased by another degree after his second lightning baptism. It did not bring any notable qualitative improvements to his cognitive capabilities, but the quantitative improvements were quite notable!

Ves utilized this boost to quickly revise and expand the spiritual designs of the Supremo Project and the Transcendent Punisher Mark III Project.

It was not easy for him to convert them from mono-spirit living mechs into multi-spirit living mechs.

He not only had to figure out a lot of new solutions in order to cram multiple living entities in a single cohesive mech frame, but he also had to build up the theoretical framework that systemized this novel approach.

According to his latest theoretical model, living mechs could be divided into two different categories.

Almost all of his previous works could be categorized as mono-spirit living mechs. Leaving out the variable of design spirits, living mechs always embodied just a single living spirit.

It was only after Ves designed the Fey Fianna that he broke this pattern. Though he had confined the additional spiritual entities into the fey, they were still subordinate and connected to the main body.

From this result, Ves derived two variations that he could pursue in order to develop additional variations of his central living mech concept.

The first variation was the one he was trying to realize with his two heavy artillery mech design projects.

Asymmetrical multi-spirit living mechs encompassed any of his products that contained a hierarchy of multiple spirits.

The Fey Fianna was actually the first mech model of this kind. Ves currently sought to determine whether he could also apply this approach to mechs without any external equipment or spurs.

The word 'asymmetrical' denoted the existence of an unequal relationship between the different spirits. A hierarchy had to exist where there was at least one master spirit and multiple slave spirits.

"Hm, maybe that is the wrong terminology to use. It's better to use the terms dominant spirit and subordinate spirits instead."

In any case, no matter how much the different spirits got along, when it came down to it, only one of them had the greatest say.

A battlefield was no place to engage in any quarrels. Efficiency and quick decision-making mattered more than debating over the most effective solutions.

Ves believed it was always better to leave one spirit in charge of any of the other ones he put inside his works.

"Of course, the mech pilot has the ultimate say over everything. His will supersedes everything."

He intended to pay close attention to the actual performance of the Fey Fianna, the Supremo Project and the Transcendent Punisher Mark III in reality.

So long as the asymmetrical multi-spirit arrangement applied by Ves worked out well in three different cases, he planned to make it the standard of all of his living mech designs going forward!

So long as it did not introduce any serious shortcomings, Ves saw little reason why he should stick to mono-spirit living mechs.

This could be considered a generational evolution of living mechs.

"Thinking about asymmetrical living mechs also caused Ves to wonder what would happen if he designed a living mech that was not asymmetrical."

It was an interesting thought experiment. What if he stuffed multiple equal spirits into a single mech frame and did not establish an explicit hierarchy?

Would the two spirits work out their own responsibilities and split their duties in a harmonious fashion?

Or would the two spirits try to fight and devour each other in an attempt to 'monopolize' the mech they inhabited?

Ves truly did not know what would happen, and that made him excited. He just needed to come up with the right mech concept in order to develop such an interesting mech.

That was not all. Since Ves was able to design a living mech that contained multiple interconnected spirits inside its mech frame, what if he went into the other direction and spread them out over multiple mech bodies instead?

This could be regarded as an extrapolation of the Fey Fianna.

Instead of designing a single living mech that was accompanied by several living spurs, Ves wondered what would happen if he replaced the latter with complete living mechs instead.

"If this works out the way I think it will, I can effectively create a superorganism among mechs!"

This would be another radical new application of living mechs!

Instead of designing living mechs that all took on the role of independent machines that could be combined and separated without any issue, he wanted to form permanent spiritual bonds between them all that discouraged any separation.

"It would be like designing a Fey Fianna while replacing its living fey with dependent mechs."

The dominant mech would serve as the hive queen or pack leader of a larger number of subordinate mechs.

The former was able to exist on its own, but was designed to perform much better if it actively led a squad or a company of permanently bonded low-ranked units.

The latter would operate at reduced effectiveness when left on their own, but would be able to provide a lot more value on the battlefield if led by a suitable leader unit!

Ves imagined several possible scenarios where an arrangement like this could be better than grouping mechs in a traditional manner.

For example, the dominant mech could be piloted by an experienced and battle-hardened mech officer. The pilot of this machine did not even have to possess good combat skills. So long as his judgment and leadership abilities were good enough, even injured leaders could contribute to the battle with the help of a supportive machine!

As for the subordinate mechs, there was no reason to make them too powerful or expensive.

The best possible use for them was to put younger, inexperienced and lesser qualified mech pilots into their cockpits.

They could be reservists who never experienced a life-and-death battle in their lives.

They could be less talented mech pilots whose genetic aptitudes scored below C.

They could even be old and retired veterans whose skills had degraded and found it difficult to maintain situational awareness on a chaotic battlefield.

Whatever the case, so long as these lesser-qualified mech pilots interfaced with their machines, they not only developed a connection with living mechs, but also formed an indirect bond with their superior officer!

This would make it so that all of the mech pilots in this unit fought in a much more coordinated fashion.

"I would love to tackle this project."

Ves recognized that there should definitely be a demand for this kind of concept. While he did not think it would catch on in the first-class mech market, he believed it should be of considerable value in both the second-class and third-class mech markets!

"This is an especially good way to effectively mobilize a lot of low-skilled third-class mech pilots!"

From what Ves recalled of the time he lived in the Bright Republic, there were an awful lot of potentates that lacked the talent or the money to attend a mech academy.

They either learned how to pilot mechs on a part-time basis or simply attended a crappy mech academy before settling down as security guards or whatever.

Throwing all of these poorly qualified mech pilots into the meat grinder that was the ongoing war between red humanity and the native alien races without any preparation would just be sending them to their deaths!

In an ideal scenario, the people in charge would send all of these lesser pilots through intensive retraining courses in order to bring them up to standard.

However, this was not a realistic solution. Red humanity couldn't afford to wait so many years to put so many mech pilots into action.

The manpower, mechs and other resources needed to train or retrain so many mech pilots was considerable as well. Those resources could be better spent on supporting existing mech armies.

Before he knew it, Ves had already begun to sketch out a few hypothetical mechs that conformed to his latest idea.

He needed to be especially careful with embarking on this complicated project because he essentially had to design two interdependent mechs at the same time!

Any mistake in one mech directly affected the performance of another mech.

Ves felt more challenged than ever by the added requirements and the much greater variables that could go wrong.

"It is all worth it as long as I can make it work. I do not think that there is any mech that can more closely bind different mech pilots and living mechs together with each other!"

According to his vision, this might be an alternative and more accessible way to enhance the coordination between mech officers and their subordinates.

Command-oriented mech pilots such as Casella Ingvar possessed the ability to Commandeer any subordinates that were willing to obey her instructions.

Certain mechs designed with enhanced coordination in mind such as the works of Master Toqueman Huron were able to produce similar results, but only after satisfying a lot of heavy demands.

Ves owed a lot to Master Huron.

The Fridayman Master Mech Designer had inspired Ves to create many of his most valuable and innovative design solutions.

He would have never been able to come up with the kinship network, battle network, design network and so on without drawing inspiration from Master Huron's iconic neural networks!

While Ves did not study neural interfaces too deeply, he actually considered himself to be the Master Huron's best apprentice!

It was funny. Master Huron not only belonged to a hostile state, but never met his talented and overachieving 'student' in reality!

Ves had even killed one of his formal disciples, so his actual relationship with the Fridayman Master was complex to say the least.

Nonetheless, there was so much synergy between networks and living mechs that Ves couldn't stop himself from replicating or surpassing Master Huron's works.

As far as he recalled, Master Huron had designed different variations of these asymmetrical neurally networked mechs in the past.

One of them happened to be piloted by Venerable Ghanso Larkinson!

The Charlemagne and its 44 accompanying quasi-expert mechs had been formidable in combat. Ves drew a lot of inspiration from them when he designed the Minerva.

Now, Ves wanted to see if he could replicate the same scheme at the standard mech level.

While there were no powerful expert pilots that could enhance their control and supervision over a bunch of subordinate mech pilots, Ves believed he could partially make up for this shortcoming by shifting their responsibilities to the living mechs.

In effect, the dominant living mech would serve as a non-human adjunct officer that performed much of the more labor-intensive duties, thereby allowing the mech officer to focus on the truly important issues!

"How can I strengthen their cooperation further?"

Better teamwork alone was not enough to win a battle. Ves needed to find a way to better leverage the increased coordination of an interconnected mech unit.

"What about hyper technology?"