Chapter 6052 Designed For Single Fights As more and more people heard about an upcoming alien offensive and began to prepare for a period of intense fighting, Task Force Solus was still struggling to make progress on Reticula Corein V. Swordmaster Ketis had been waiting for a response from the strike force that she had sent to the dreaded Emperor Tree located not too far away from Chimera Base. The small elite strike force was led by her husband Joshua. The goal was to retrieve critical samples of the calamity plant that dominated the entire region surrounding his major Solus Gas deposit. She hoped she picked the correct time to dispatch the strike force now that there were much less hostile beasts in the entire region. The waves of maddened exobeast attacks had abated to an extent. The continued drain on the local environment had reached an unsustainable level. The Emperor Tree had been too ruthless in throwing all of the exobeasts that strayed into his territory against the humans that dared to set up a base near his deposit! After so many waves of repelling exobeasts, the worst was finally over, at least for the time being. However, the price of holding back all of those powerful and numerous beasts had not been light. Many Stormblade Samurais had been damaged and repaired over four times in the past few weeks. While their mech pilots learned quickly and wielded their shocking stormblades with increasing skill, the frequent pressure and the lack of proper rest was beginning to wear them down. The pilots of the Storm Swords fared much better by virtue of piloting vastly superior quasi-first-class mechs. The powerful transphasic hyper mechs moved faster, resisted a lot more damage and most importantly killed almost every beast with just a single swing of their blades! Only the occasional mutated beasts gave these powerful machines a bit more challenge if they fought by themselves, but as long as the Storm Swords teamed up, they could defeat damn near every monster! That said, accidents could not be avoided. Mutated beasts came in all shapes and sizes, and a few of them developed exotic powers that occasionally bypassed the azure energy shields of Storm Swords and debilitated them directly! Ketis always studied these encounters carefully. If the incident was serious enough, she even instructed the Swordmaidens to ship the Storm Sword in question back to the Wild Torch so that she could study the damage in person. She noticed that her mech designs still suffered from a persistent shortcoming. No matter how well she designed her mechs and no matter how much she relied on the contributions of other mech designers, her swordsman mechs still weren't robust enough to withstand frequent and persistent high-intensity combat. Ketis designed her mechs in a way that made her want to pilot them herself. She always sought to configure and tune her swordsman mechs to offer the best possible performance when they were in their best or almost best states. She wanted her fellow Swordmaidens and other pilots to experience the joy of fighting the battle of their lives, to perform at their most powerful states and find the spark they needed to push past their limits. The initial performance of most of the swordsman mechs in the field tended to match her intentions. The Monster Slayers, the Stormblade Samurais and the Storm Swords all performed smoothly when controlled by mech pilots who knew their way around with swords. However, after fighting multiple grinding battles against hordes of mindless exobeasts, the escalating degrees of wear and tear started to take a toll on the mech frames that had not been optimized for any form of attrition warfare. The mech technicians serving aboard the Wild Torch and the other accompanying ships of Task Force Solus were already working as hard as possible to service and repair the hundreds of worn machines. A part of Ketis regretted that she did not opt to bring along more ranged mechs. The Transcendent Punisher Mark III's of the Eye of Ylvaine had proven to be disproportionately effective at clearing out large amounts of packed and concentrated beast swarms. Even though the modern heavy artillery mechs required maintenance as well after blasting their artillery cannons and other heavy cannons on a repeated basis, their designs clearly took this kind of scenario into account! Ketis never really had much interest in examining the designs of other mechs, particularly if they fell outside of her specialization, but the relatively poor showing of her swordsman mechs caused her to make an exception. The Transcendent Punisher Mark III design was full of charm. The mech was large, robust and contained so many redundancies that it could continue to fire its guns even if over seventy percent of its frame had been wrecked! What Ketis found most important was how the Transcendent Punisher Mark III had been designed with a very different purpose and idea in mind. Instead of pursuing the best possible fight in a single important fight, the heavy artillery mech was designed with years of serious usage in mind. Even if Ketis did not specialize in this kind of machine, she could still trace many instances where Ves or another designer could have pushed performance to a higher level, but at the cost of a lot of stability and reliability. The Transcendent Punisher Mark III's were generally well taken care of after every serious fight, but Ves accounted for the possibility that they would be fielded in imperfect conditions where regular maintenance became a distant luxury. If that ever happened, the heavy artillery mechs were able to perform just as reliably as before. They could spend multiple days in a fight without needing to fear that they would malfunction or blow up all of a sudden. If the Transcendent Punisher Mark III's ever began to succumb to wear and tear, it would be through repeated use over multiple years. Even that possibility was not likely to happen as the mech technicians of the Larkinson Clan were obligated to provide at least one thorough round of servicing to every Larkinson mech. She knew that Ves had insisted on this policy after seeing too many mechs break down or underperform due to lacking maintenance. Mechs may be strong on the surface, but there was a huge amount of logistics and industry that created them and kept them in shape. The larger and more sophisticated the machine, the greater the maintenance demands. This was a rule that Ketis thought she understood, but it appeared that she had underestimated the severity of constant pressure onto her mech designs. The contrast became especially obvious when she made comparisons between her machines and that of the other Larkinson mechs. She felt so bothered by this issue that she took the initiative to call Ves in order to explore his views on this subject. The physical projection of Ves smiled as he gazed at the workshop environment. A heavily wrecked and partially disassembled Monster Slayer rested nearby. The relatively older and outdated swordsman mech had been one of the worst performers during this expedition. The lack of flight capabilities may have caused it to excel more in combat on land, but it made it a lot more difficult for the machine to escape difficult situations in a hurry. The Larkinsons stationed at Chimera Base had learned the hard way that they needed to provide more fire support for the Monster Slayers in order to prevent them from getting surrounded and overwhelmed from multiple directions. The vast majority of Monster Slayers did not fall because they lost in a duel against a single exobeast, but usually faltered when struck from two or three directions at the same time! "I don't think that you have made the wrong design choices." Ves calmly expressed his opinion. "Your swordsman mechs perform extremely well in the situations they were principally designed to operate in. Whether it is a big space battle, a duel in the mech arena or a challenging hunt on an untamed planet, your swordsman mechs have always served their pilots in ways that make it difficult to think of machines that can do a better job at their price levels. Just because they do not fare too well in the kind of attrition battles that your task force is currently embroiled in is not a fundamental flaw. You cannot expect rifleman mechs to defeat melee mechs at close range." His arguments made a lot of sense. Ketis was not stupid enough to expect she was capable of designing mechs that could excel in any combat environment. "I am still proud of my works, but… they are products designed for a different purpose. Maybe now that the Red War is becoming increasingly hotter, it may be better for me to re-specify the Stormblade Samurai Mark II so that it becomes more robust. Its expected performance as a second-class hyper mech is already good enough by most people's standards, so it is worth it to sacrifice peak performance to increase the design's robustness and fault tolerance. It will delay the completion of the design project by at least a month, but I do not want my customers to suffer from my mistakes." "Again, it is not your fault, Ketis. Every mech has its strengths and weaknesses. Landbound combat has always been an area that the Larkinsons have overlooked. If we waged more ground campaigns, then you would have known about this sooner. It is actually good that I dispatched you to this star system in order to lead the operation to harvest Solus Gas. The losses that our clan has suffered here is not light, but it could have been worse. These exobeasts are incredibly numerous, but they are pretty stupid. More mech pilots would have fallen if they fought against sapient alien beings." Ves thought about what he heard about the upcoming offensive and slowly nodded. "I don't regard your design choices as errors, but it is true that it may be a good idea to adapt to changing market circumstances. The Stormblade Samurai and the Storm Swords are explicitly designed for the Larkinson Clan, which always invests a lot of effort into maintaining its mechs. Other customers might not be willing or able to invest as much money, resources and manpower into servicing their machines. You need to account for their behavior as well as try to play it safer. The users of your products may be able to accept slightly less performance, but they will not accept malfunctions and breakdowns that can threaten their lives at critical moments." Ketis wished she had learned that lesson earlier. Numerous Swordmaiden mech pilots would have been able to live if that was the case. The Reticula Corein V Expedition had taught her more than enough bloody lessons. "I will do better next time." She vowed. "Again, it is not your fault, Ketis. Every mech has its strengths and weaknesses. Landbound combat has always been an area that the Larkinsons have overlooked. If we waged more ground campaigns, then you would have known about this sooner. It is actually good that I dispatched you to this star system in order to lead the operation to harvest Solus Gas. The losses that our clan has suffered here is not light, but it could have been worse. These exobeasts are incredibly numerous, but they are pretty stupid. More mech pilots would have fallen if they fought against sapient alien beings." That was true. The Emperor Tree may possess the power to brainwash every exobeast in the region and send them on a suicide attack, but it could not perfectly control each creature's fighting capabilities. Ketis' eyes grew sharper. "Speaking of the Emperor Tree, we should be regaining contact with Joshua and the rest of his strike force within a couple of hours if everything goes well. We will finally be able to retrieve samples of that calamity plant and gain a much better understanding of its direct fighting capabilities." "We don't have to wait that long in order to track their progress." "Did you forget that the thick concentration of Solus Gas around the Emperor Tree blocks all forms of communication, Ves? This includes E energy or connections, so not even our design spirits can maintain contact with the mechs sent inside." This property alone made Solus Gas a lot more scary, especially if it was employed against the Larkinson Clan one day! It practically functioned as an enhanced gas version of B-stone! Ves smiled. "I haven't forgotten, Ketis. It is true that Solus Gas can block spiritual networks and such, but have you forgotten about masterworks? Each one we make from our own hands carries a tiny part of ourselves. If the masterworks happen to possess growth properties, then these tiny fragments can grow a little more powerful over time. I am not entirely certain about this, but I think we can exploit this intrinsic connection to form at least a tentative connection to our best products within an environment that is saturated with Solus Gas." Ketis widened her eyes. She hadn't thought about it, but now that she contemplated this theory, it might actually work!