The Mech Touch novel Chapter 1855

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.

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! _{ƒree𝑤ebnσvel.com}