The Mech Touch

Chapter 1855 The Lancer Problem

As the Larkinson mech project continued to draw closer to its final form, Ves and Gloriana currently turned their focus towards the lancer mech configuration.

Lancer mechs were basically spearman mechs specialized for assault.

Spears in mech combat played a curious role. Their longer reach and ease in penetrating armor turned them into excellent weapons against armored mechs.

Mechs rarely attacked with the haft of their spears. On land, it was practically impossible for a spearman mech to trip an enemy machine by sweeping its legs, for example! The sturdiness of its legs and the immense weight pressed upon them made them very resistant against outside applications of force.

Using the spear like a staff was also ineffective in most cases. Slamming the haft or the flat end of a spear against an enemy mech would only hammer its armor plating. The stricken mech would always be able to absorb much of the shock and force of such attacks!

There was a reason why staff-wielding mechs weren't even a thing. Mace-wielding mechs were a bit more common, but even then their numbers paled in comparison to mechs wielding sharper weapons.

For this reason, most spearman mechs resorted to stabbing to defeat their opponents.

Mech pilots who excelled in spearmanship could even take their utilization of this seemingly simple weapon even further. Their control over their weapon became so good that they could precisely target all of the weak points of an opposing mech!

Lancer mechs could technically fight like a spearman mech, but they were a bit worse in brawls and dogfighting. This was because their structure and configuration was heavily adapted to charging attacks!

Charging attacks were just as simple and brutish as they sounded. They were employed in situations where the lancer mechs needed to run down fleeing ranged mechs or punch through a formation of sturdy and beefy mechs.

Though it took a lot of effort to build up a charge, once a lancer mech got going, a successful impact against a relatively slower target resulted in a huge amount of damage right off the bat!

Strong, overwhelming attacks that were strong enough to destroy or cripple entire mechs were fairly rare. The nature of mechs was that their defensive or evasive capabilities were always reasonably on par with the offensive capabilities of their opposition.

What this basically meant was that it always took at least several minutes for a mech to defeat another mech!

Only after overcoming another mech's defense would the clash finally conclude!

In many cases, the amount of time it took to take out a mech, especially a defensive one, was unacceptable. People started demanding solutions that could take out key mechs faster before they could inflict too much damage, and the mech industry obliged.

Marksman mechs armed with powerful, single-shot weapons were designed to assassinate key targets from afar.

Light skirmishers became more ubiquitous due to their ability to run circles around their larger and more sluggish counterparts. As long as they managed to reach the rear of an enemy mech, the softer armor was no match against their surgical strikes!

Compared to marksman mechs which sought to take out key targets at range and light skirmishers that were extremely fragile and relied entirely on superior mobility, lancer mechs solved the problem in a simpler fashion.

Not much skill was required to make effective use of a lancer mech. The mech pilot simply had to pick a target and fly or run his mech forward until it built up a scary amount of momentum.

After that, they simply had to maintain control of their course and make sure their lance hit the target upon the moment of impact!

Of course, this crucial moment took a lot of skill to pull off correctly. The mech pilot had to keep the lance and the trajectory of his mech on target while his enemy tried his best to evade or defend. This became increasingly harder as the distance narrowed. A single last-second jump to the side was often the reason for charges to miss their mark!

Even if the lancer mech managed to hit the mark, that was not the end of the story. A collision between one multi-ton war machine against another multi-ton war machine was incredibly violent! The sheer impact would definitely devastate the target for certain.

The problem was that the lancer mech itself also came under a huge amount of stress!

Just as Merrill Truman, now O'Brian, stated a few days ago, for every action there was an equal and opposite reaction!

The tighter a lancer mech gripped its weapon and the more the mech transferred its momentum to its opposition, the greater the reaction force exerted onto its frame!

The stresses were unimaginably huge. It was said that pretty much every standard lancer mech accumulated at least some stress and internal damage for every charge they performed. Their wear and tear was some of the worst out of all of the mech types.

Not even defensive knights endured so many forceful shocks on a frequent basis!

This led to the central problem that Ves and Gloriana faced with the lancer mech configuration.

Ves let out a sigh and scratched his head after studying the projection over and over.

"It isn't difficult to turn this configuration into a hard-hitting machine that can crack open a heavy space knight. The downside of that is that our mech will almost certainly suffer almost just as much!"

If they designed an specialized lancer mech, then they would have been able to resort to many of the solutions developed by the mech industry over several centuries.

The simplest way to mitigate the damage to the lancer mech was by designing its structure and internal architecture in a way that best dispersed the force throughout the entire frame.

Whereas the target got hit at one concentrated point, the lancer mech was able to mitigate the reaction force by spreading it around. This was how most interaction between physical weapons and mechs worked, but lancer mechs took this one step further by excelling at force dispersion.

A lancer mech could also resort to various technological solutions such as shock absorbers and components made to defend a mech against the impacts of their own attacks.

"They take up way too much space, though. It's not something you can casually tack onto a design. The internal architecture has to be designed to accommodate these systems from the ground up! It's too difficult to implement them in a modular mech platform!"

Not even Gloriana could conceive of a way to solve this dilemma. She scratched her head just as often as Ves when faced with this seemingly insurmountable issue!

"How do other modular mech platforms solve this problem?" Ves asked.

"They do the best they can stuff inside their lancer mech configurations, which isn't all that much." Gloriana answered. "Then, they put soft limits on the lancer mech and recommend the mech pilots of their products to hold back."

In effect, the mech pilots were told to treat their mechs like fragile porcelain. This was detrimental to the mentality of lancer mech pilots. Ves could almost foresee the deep dissatisfaction from the lancer mech specialists from the Larkinson Clan!

Though Ves never gained a Mastery in lancer mechs, he still knew enough about them that every lancer mech enthusiast was a fanatic about charges!

The faster, the better! The greater the impact, the better! Only by building up a formidable amount of momentum did these mech pilots feel alive!

Anything that caused them to dim their enthusiasm and constrain their charge would severely affect their mindset. This was something that Ves always wanted to avoid. Aside from glows, his mechs were also famous for their high degree of accommodation towards their mech pilots.

He did not wish to break this feature. It was against his nature to spoil the piloting experience of his customers!

"These half-baked solutions are essentially admissions of defeat." Ves told her. "Telling our mech pilots to charge less violently because their mechs are prone to breaking is the last thing I want to hear. We need a real solution!"

Gloriana frowned. "Well, I don't see a way we can achieve what we want. Strengthening the shell of our mech by cladding it with Breyer alloy only ensures the solid parts remain intact. It won't protect the internals from all of the shock without a huge amount of inertial dampeners and other adjustments."

All of those solutions required a lot of space, which wasn't possible with their current design. The point of a modular mech platform was that it shared as much as possible with all of its configurations.

Optimizing the base platform for charge attacks and shock absorption would take away its other strengths.

What Ves needed was a way to mitigate the reaction force without taking too much space.

What exacerbated this problem was the fact that the Larkinson mech was designed to straddle the line between third-class and second-class mechs. This meant that some aspects were on par with superior mechs while other aspects remained inferior.

To describe the situation in a simple way, it was as if Ves mounted an extremely strong suit of armor on a human being. He then instructed the armor-clad human to run straight at a wall!

Anyone would easily be able to imagine that the suit of armor survived the collision unscathed. It didn't even suffer a single dent!

It was different for the fragile human residing inside the suit! The individual's flesh and bone took full brunt of the reaction force. The consequences ranged from bruises, broken bones and damaged internal organs. The armored human could barely participate in a battle after enduring so much suffering!

After half an hour of exchanging fruitless ideas, Gloriana eventually drew back and noted something important.

"Doesn't Breyer alloy contain a trace of Amris? If I recall, this high-grade exotic is used to dampen the shock acting on the alloy!"

"That's true." Ves uttered in surprise. "Yet.. it's not an ideal solution. Amris is very rare and expensive. While it's possible for me to obtain a supply of it, it's extremely costly."

Obtaining Amris was not very difficult for Ves. He just had to take some Breyer alloy and break it down into its constituent materials. He could take away the separated Amris that was still salvageable while dumping the other exotics elsewhere.

The downside of this course of action was that Ves had to waste a lot of Breyer alloy if he wished to recoup a significant amount of Amris! He could have built another mech to extract enough Amris to fabricate another mech!

Ves recalled his study on the materials. "The full name of the formula of the materials we obtain is 235-C Breyer Alloy. This is the standard, low-cost version of a large family of alloy formulas. I think there are several other variations which are much stronger in the shock-absorbing aspect by increasing the proportion of Amris in the alloy formula."

"That sounds great! Why don't we adopt this solution?"

"It's not so simple, Gloriana. Increasing the proportion of Amris does make the resulting Breyer alloy more capable of absorbing strong forces, but that comes at the cost of the toughness of the material."

It was like turning something hard and rigid into something softer and bouncier. This was rather bad analogy, but it succinctly described the tradeoff.

"In other words, we can strengthen our lancer mech's offensive power in exchange for weakening its defensive capabilities." She summarized. "I think we should go for it. Didn't you complain earlier that our Larkinson mech lacks a punch? This is exactly what we need to threaten enemy second-class mechs!"

"It comes at a hefty cost. Amris doesn't fall down from trees!"

"Isn't this your passion project? Why are you letting cost get in the way of your design? Just go for it! This is the only viable solution to turn the lancer configuration into something we can be proud of. Who cares about weaker defense? Breyer alloy is still tough no matter how its formula has been tweaked!"

She had a point. Cost efficiency didn't matter when Ves only planned to build a few hundred lancer mech configurations. He didn't have to pay any money to obtain Breyer alloy and Amris either. He would just have to push back his other uses for those valuable materials!