774 774 Tweak and Tune
Once Yuri had left and the alert status had ended, Nico dragged Max into the repair bay to start upgrading their Mecha for the situations that they were likely to face here in this new territory.
“First up, that Orbital Lance needs to fire more quickly in dispersed mode, or we need a way to increase the output of your defensive lasers to deal with masses of lighter War Walkers. Then we need a better way of deploying the thrusters for mobility.
They’re not bad, but the input lag is still a bit high, and if we’re going to be doing all our fighting in space, we want more stability for shooting. Your System Talent is great, but it would be better if we didn’t have to rely on it to adjust for the shaking of the Mecha.
Then a quick tweak of the shielding so that we don’t take so much damage from those damnable heavy weapons, and I think we should be ready for the next mission.” Nico decided.
“Oh, so nothing major then?” Max quipped back, and Nico smiled.
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They both got to work, tweaking the Mecha to Nico’s specifications before Nico modified them to the best extent that she could, and then Max [Optimized] them.
“That’s an improvement on the thrusters. Now to work on the shields, and then we can start on the weapons.” Nico congratulated him as she dove right back into her work. They really should have brought one of the Innu along. They could have worked on the upgrade plans while the two of them were fighting, and they wouldn’t need to leave the ship unattended.
The question was if he was ready to deal with those two hyper minds at once for the foreseeable future.
Strangely, the idea didn’t bother him all that much since he knew that it would come with distinct advantages that some random Pilot for the ship wouldn’t, so Max began to plan how he would bring it up to Nico without encouraging her to bring an entire team here to the ship, which would put even more lives at risk.
The shield tweaking didn’t take long since they were only optimizing it for the specific weapons that they had seen the Arisen Army using, like creating a preset configuration in the system so that they could change back and forth from their default to the Arisen-specific setting in an instant. It was the weapon modifications that would take some time.
Nico had already put a lot of work into making them the very best that they could be, so trying to change things up now wouldn’t be easy.
Four hours later, and after sixteen rounds of refining and optimizing, Nico had managed to create a secondary power routing system that would allow the dispersed pattern to activate twice as fast at lower speeds, independently of the main activation circuit, which could still be charged at the same time.
In theory, he could now attack with the two sets of three Disruptors, in a wide pattern, nearly every second, with a combined Orbital Lance every ten seconds, or independently firing each Disruptor once a second for six shots a second in a condensed beam.
“It will have to do. I don’t think that they are going to just hang around for us to blast them to pieces anymore, not after today’s show. They seemed like the sort of enemy that adapts quickly, even if they don’t advance quickly, so we will have to fight a lot of them up close in the future, where we can’t hit as many with our weapons.” Max reminded her.
“That’s fine. The shields are optimized for that, and you will be able to take their hits more easily, so you should have the advantage over their Command Walkers again next time.”
Max gave her a pat on the head, then hopped into Cleansing Light to boot everything up and make sure that there were no issues with any of their most recent upgrades before he called it a night. Not that he was expecting anything with both him and Nico working on it, but you could never skip the debugging stage, especially with a combat unit that might have hidden damages.
“All good. Everything checks out.” Max informed her as he put Cleansing Light back into locked standby mode, waiting for him to return.
“Same here, everything is good, no more damages to report. Let’s get some sleep before the Arisen return. I have high hopes for them after seeing that they know a bit about your combat style. I really want to know where they learned that, and I don’t care how many of them I have to chop apart to find the answer.” Nico replied with a smile.
Max woke up the next morning to unusual silence. Nico was still next to him, and the ship didn’t report any unusual activities, but there was a silence in his mind that he wasn’t used to. There were far too few minds awake in the area, considering that they were attached to a space station.
Max used Nico’s skill to check the ship’s logs, and found that only one large vessel had left the area, and they had received no messages about activation requests. It looked like they had sent a large part of their army to a secondary position, and what was left was a skeleton crew at the station, and whatever other ships were in the area.
Hopefully that would be enough.
Max dug into the logs, and tried to check on the levels of military forces in the area. There wasn’t much data available, but it looked like all of the interceptor ships were still on standby, and fully equipped, so they wouldn’t be short for a normal mission, only for an emergency full deployment like the last battle at the station.
Once Yuri was up, he would ask the Koleska Commander about it and see if something had happened that didn’t make it to any of the communications which he had intercepted.