Chapter 2186 Adding Character With the weapon systems that Ves and Gloriana selected, the overall strengths of their heavy artillery mech already became clear. The mech design codenamed Cat's Paw was primarily set up to resist a modest amount of very strong opponents. It excelled in inflicting single-target damage. Just half a dozen Cat's Paw mechs would have allowed the Larkinson Clan to repel or outright defeat the powerful second-class mechs of the Coalition Reserve Corps while suffering much less casualties! Back then, the CRC mechs slaughtered third-class mechs with the ease of butchering pigs. The vast performance differences between lesser mechs and greater mechs was simply too great. Whenever Ves played back the archival footage of the Battle of Kesseling VIII, he despaired at the great difficulty of inflicting actual harm to the well-armored mechs of the Friday Coalition. Even if Ves upgraded his entire mech roster to second-class, tougher and stronger mechs still posed considerable threat. What he needed the most was a solution that could crack the tough shells of powerful opponents. He was willing to make a lot of tradeoffs and sacrifices in order to secure this capability. The Xcordon gauss cannon system truly suited his needs. Its size, mass, material requirements and production difficulty were all within acceptable parameters. More powerful gauss cannons no longer fit the Cat's Paw frame, while weaker models significantly declined in strength. The choice that Ves settled upon was just right. What Ves liked the most was that the Xcordon possessed character. It was a gauss cannon model that did not shy away from the fact that it was mainly geared towards propelling ultra-heavy rounds with as much kinetic energy as possible. It was a plain, brutal cannon that did not resort to convoluted technology or highly unusual exotics to achieve its full potential. With his extensive knowledge on ballistic weapons and kinetic weapons, he could keenly tell that the Xcordon was designed with ruggedness and reliability in mind. Despite the great forces acting on the cannon whenever it fired at its maximum power, its strong and well-designed structure was continually able to endure the punishment. The chance that the Xcordon malfunctioned or broke down was very low as long as it was properly maintained! Even without recent maintenance, the weapon system was still rugged enough to function with only a minor reduction in power! Compared to the rather generic Hexer-developed positron beam cannons and rapid-fire pulse cannons, Ves believed the gauss cannons would become the defining weapons of the Cat's Paw design! Just imagining the sheer amount of destruction his Cat's Paws could inflict on second-class mechs excited him to no end. His passion for this project quickly grew! Both Ves and Gloriana observed the current state of their draft design. After hastily slotting in the new components they licensed, They were able to estimate many of the mech's performance parameters. "If we integrate everything correctly while bleeding as little efficiency as possible, then this heavy artillery mech isn't a waste of 600 million hex credits." Ves nodded. "I agree. Spending 600 million hex credits for a mech that can pierce the armor of most second-class mechs with a single hit is well worth it in my eyes. It's not fantastic against overwhelming numbers, but we can leave that responsibility to other mechs." "That said, the physical components are just one aspect of our mech design. Have you decided its divine aspects yet? What proto-god do you intend to add to the Cat's Paw?" Ah. That was a very important question. To be honest, Ves struggled over his options. He could rely on one of his existing design spirits, but none of them complemented a heavy artillery mech design to a fantastic degree. The alternative was to create yet another spiritual product. He hadn't done so after he conducted the huge ritual which birthed the Superior Mother. He knew that as long as he gathered a couple of suitable spiritual fragments and used up a little life-attributed energy derived from the life-prolonging treatment serum, he could create a very powerful spiritual product. The problem was that he didn't feel like doing so at this time. If it wasn't completely necessary, he wanted to conserve his resources. He only possessed so much high-grade serum! Wasting it on creating frivolous or redundant spiritual products would only bite him in the butt in the future. While Ves kept thinking, Gloriana made a surprising suggestion. "You don't have to invent something new when a ready-made solution is already available. Do you still recall the Deliverer? With Prophet Ylvaine inhabiting the design, he was able to lend his precognitive abilities to any Ylvainan mech pilot!" Ves grunted. "You don't have to remind me. While it is admittedly one of my more innovative mech designs, it's not exactly relevant now that we are far away from the Ylvaine Protectorate." "I disagree." She shook her head. "Didn't we absorb thousands of Ylvainans in our clan? The True Ylvaine Dynasty has pretty much merged with us, providing us with crucial trained and skilled personnel at a time when we weren't able to hire enough Brighters to expand our newly-founded clan. Those Ylvainans may have cut off their relations with the Protectorate, but they are still as faithful as ever!" "Even if that is the case, a Larkinson is a Larkinson. The point of outsiders joining our clan is to transform them into Larkinsons. I have no intention of encouraging any of the adopted Larkinsons to keep their foreign cultural traditions alive!" Gloriana's projection appeared increasingly more disgruntled. She placed her hands on her hips. "Ves! I know you have misgivings about our Ylvainan-born clansmen, but you are wasting an extremely precious opportunity here! It is one thing to set aside this option for a commercial ranged mech model because it is too disruptive, but when it comes to our own defense, we should pull out all of the stops! Isn't this why we set a very high budget for our Cat's Paw Project? Since you are readily willing to invest a substantial amount of money in the design and production of our heavy artillery mechs, I don't see why you need to hold back on the choice of proto-god!" "Do we even have enough Ylvainan mech pilots to man all of the Cat's Paw mechs?" "There are hundreds! Our factory ship only needs eighty mechs while the combat carriers can only accommodate half-a-dozen or a dozen. Whatever the case, there are enough Ylvainan mech pilots that are already proficient in marksmanship and who can be trained to pilot a heavy mech to meet the manpower requirements." Even if that was the case, Ves still felt very reluctant to entrust the primary defense of their future factory ship and other important vessels to a design spirit which he didn't entirely trust. He always harbored some suspicions about Ylvaine's spiritual fragment. Unlike many of his other design spirits, it was derived from an actual human and was too scheming for his liking. This was especially so when Ylvaine's spiritual fragment began to hook up with James Ylvaine-Larkinson! The two seemed to have achieved a synergistic bond which had made both of them greater than the sum of their parts. While Ves did not object to reusing Ylvaine's spiritual fragment as the design spirits of other mech designs, the Cat's Paw mech design played an extremely critical role. He would rather entrust this great responsibility to the Golden Cat. At least Ves had no doubt that she was completely committed to the survival of the Larkinson Clan! "Are you thinking about putting the cat in charge again?" She accused him. "As much as I adore her, you shouldn't run to her every time you want to design a mech that is related to our clan. Just look at our Cat's Paw mech objectively. It possesses two major weapon systems that are very powerful against highly-armored targets that aren't very strong on the mobility front. However, aside from relying on its weaker rapid-fire pulse cannons, the Cat's Paw doesn't offer a strong defense against smaller, fast-moving targets!" "I thought we already decided to leave that job to our other mechs?" "Even if that's the case, it is still useful to invest in increasing the accuracy and hit rate of the weapons of our mechs! Do you think that every heavily-armored second-class mech is slow? Both the Friday Coalition and the Hexadric Hegemony are able to field numerous assault mechs that are both tough and fast! Aside from that, many expert mechs all start off with at least good mobility no matter how much mass they carry!" She made a persuasive argument. Even if Ves planned to invest in a strong targeting system for his Cat's Paw mech and even if the mech was able to receive much more accurate targeting data from the ship it was riding on, the fact of the matter was that its weapons would still miss most of their shots. The positron beam cannons may be able to land a hit at near-relativistic speeds, but the ECM employed by mechs made it significantly harder to make a successful strike at extreme ranges. Even though mechs were very big compared to a human, at very ranges, even a tiny error induced by ECM could make a shot go hundreds of meters wild! As for the Xcordon gauss cannons, the Cat's Paw should have a considerably easier time targeting opponents at medium range. At these ranges, the effectiveness of ECM systems sharply dropped. The very powerful sensors and ECCM systems of a starship was easily able to overcome most interference, which meant that most ranged weapons had a much easier time in landing a hit. However, as fast as a gauss cannon round could be propelled into space, they still traveled substantially slower than the relativistic speed of a positron beam! Though it wasn't as bad as third-class ballistic weapons, mech pilots still needed to make continuous predictive judgements and lead their aim in order to land a hit on a fast-moving, evasive target. Unless Ves incorporated high technology that solved or circumvented some of these issues, he could not get around the fact that highly maneuverable opponents were the bane of his Cat's Paw mechs! The conventional answer to this problem was to accept this weakness. The unconventional answer was to try and mitigate this inherent shortcoming. The more he thought about it, the more Ves felt compelled to borrow Ylvaine's predictive capabilities. The Deliverer design already proved that the spiritual fragment was capable of fulfilling its promises. He didn't need to fumble around with figuring out the right spiritual construct to add the right triggered ability to the mech. Ylvaine was pretty much able to do it all by himself as long as the recipient was an Ylvainan mech pilot! He decided to make contact with Ylvaine's spiritual fragment in order to sound out its willingness to lend its power once again. He closed his eyes and concentrated his mind. Just as his mind made contact, Ylvaine already sent a positive reply. The fragment had already anticipated his request and enthusiastically assented to it before he even asked! Ves abruptly broke his concentration. "Goddammit!" Both Ylvaines always possessed the uncanny ability to predict his questions and actions even when they had no right to know them beforehand. Yet whenever Ves asked them to predict something more pertinent such as the likelihood of encountering a serious threat in the next 24 hours or whether he was able to gather 100 million MTA merits within a decade, they both played stupid and muttered some mumble jumble! The cheeky behavior of Ylvaine's spiritual fragment reminded Ves once again why he hesitated in using it as a design spirit in the first place. Yet the great enthusiasm it showed also worried Ves a bit. If Ylvaine's spiritual fragment actively encouraged him to use it as a design spirit for the Cat's Paw design, didn't that mean this decision might have a very great impact in the future?