Chapter 6672 Evolving Alien Strike Craft Doctrines Unlike red humanity, the native aliens never really developed an obsession with their own small craft. While they did use them to varying degrees in the past, they never placed much emphasis on these craft. They were mostly used as patrols and occasionally screening units for their homeships. They were mainly useful for doing the jobs that were too small for ships to bothered with most of the time. That changed when red humanity won their battles one after another by relying on mechs alone. Compared to warships, mechs were far smaller and possessed only a fraction of the power. Yet it was precisely because they were small and maneuverable that they were able to evade a large amount of warship attacks and concentrate their power in ways that allowed them to achieve maximum results with minimum investment. Even if human mechs won as many battles as they lost, the native aliens actually lost out in a material sense as warships were much more expensive and took much more resources to build! The native aliens may have their pride, but most of them could not ignore the reality in front of them. They had begun to imitate their human foes in order to shore up their weaknesses and close the gap. The problem with their behavior was that they could never surpass red humanity through imitation alone. No matter whether it was the orvens, the puelmers or the zzamayel, none of them had been able to replicate a mech that could work for their race. Even the active collusion of the Cosmopolitan Movement could not overcome the fundamental technological obstacles that stood in the way of this ambitious endeavor! Neural interface technology was solely developed with human brains in mind. Alien species that looked close to humans actually possessed very different biologies and brain structures. It was impossible for the same neural interface that was solely designed with humans in mind to work perfectly with an alien. This caused the native aliens to remain stuck with phasefighters. To be fair, the alien scientists and engineers had actually done an excellent job of modernizing their old starfighters with human-derived technologies. Now that the higher ups were willing to invest serious money, resources and manpower into them, the speed of development of phasefighters had skyrocketed. The phasefighters developed in the current year were much better than the ones the While this rapid improvement phase would eventually reach a plateau, this was probably years away. For now, the native aliens had only spent a few years on focused development of their phasefighter concept. The weapon platform was still relatively fresh and new to them, which meant that they were just beginning to think about making more impactful changes than simply arming them with upgraded weapons and shield generators! What the puelmers had just unveiled was deeply concerning to red humanity. They had moved beyond imitation and had begun to innovate their own solutions on how to make use of phasefighters! An analyst began to share his key observations with the command group over a separate communication channel. "The puelmer elite phasefighters are equipped with different tech and modules, but their frames are nearly identical in shape and dimensions. It appears that this unit has adopted this common form factor to allow them to combine together into a combination gunship. Once 6 of the craft have attached themselves to a seventh puelmer phasefighter, they automatically begin to fuse their energy generation, their azure energy shields, their computing systems and sensor systems. This will not only make them tougher and more resistant against our attacks, but it can also enable them to fire transphasic energy weapons at a power level that far exceeds the damage output of a quasi-first-class mech! The mechs that had been struck by the super energy beam attack were actually struck down by a strike that even first-class multipurpose mechs would struggle to resist!" All Melkor knew when he heard that was that none of the mechs under his command could withstand such a powerful strike! He briefly checked the conditions of the mechs and mech pilots affected by the devastating enemy strike. The second-class mechs had been severed apart to the point where the cockpits outright vaporized with their mech pilots still inside! The quasi-first-class mechs managed to fare a lot better, but they sustained so much damage that they were no longer able to participate in the ongoing battle. The ones equipped with stronger azure energy shields and thicker armor were able to limp away under their own power. The other quasi-first-class mechs that were too heavily slanted towards offensive clearly suffered a lot more crippling damage due to their inadequate defenses. Fortunately, many of the mech pilots still managed to survive thanks to their well-shielded cockpits. They were able to eject without a problem as their rear side had not suffered as much thermal damage as the front side. to intercept and down our clansmen!" Whether the cockpits would make it back was uncertain, but Melkor was forced to shift his attention to the elite puelmer phasefighters. The quirky alien race had brought 21 in total. They had already formed into 3 combination gunships, with each of them outputting elevated energy emissions that far surpassed that of any individual mech or phasefighter! The good news was that the combination gunship that just launched a huge attack did not appear to be capable of discharging such a powerful attack in a short amount of time. It had retracted its super positron cannon and instead began to use a multitude of regular phasefighter cannons to launch a multiple of weaker and more manageable attacks. The gunship still remained dangerous and difficult to deal with, but as long as it was not able to eliminate a lot of quasi-first-class mechs in a single sweep, then its threat level had dropped to a more reasonable level. There were two other combination gunships. They both shared similar aesthetics, but were mounted with different modules developed and installed by the puelmer fighter pilots themselves. Melkor could not underestimate their power. He distinctly gained the impression that the puelmers had purposefully tried to develop a solution that relied on a greater scale in order to more effectively resist expert mechs! 𝙛𝒓𝒆𝙚𝒘𝒆𝓫𝙣𝓸𝙫𝓮𝒍.𝒄𝒐𝓶 "It's so obvious, but none of us everr thought about it before because our thinking has always been constrained by the MTA and RA's rules and limitations on the sizes of mechs." Melkor figured out. "The native aliens aren't subject to those rules, and they don't have a strong bias to the current size range for mechs. It is pretty logical for them to explore the concept of slightly larger craft such as gunships in order to develop a more convenient anti-mech solution. The aliens are evolving their strike craft doctrines!" Even though there were merely three of the combination gunships on the battlefield at the moment, their impact was nothing less than a low-tier expert mech due to their much stronger attack and defenses! Their mobility had taken a big hit, though. Their forward acceleration had improved by a notable extent, but their turning radius and responsiveness had deteriorated by a large extent, causing them to become vulnerable to flanking attacks. The aliens were not stupid, though. Soon enough, the three combination gunships became surrounded by a large escort of regular phasefighters! This made it much harder for the mechs of the Larkinson Clan to storm them with melee mechs or wear them down from a distance with ranged mechs. Although Melkor had already issued a set of new orders, the mechs tasked with trying to get past the screen and disable the combination gunships struggled to produce results. While the Fey Fiannas, Valkyrie Redeemers, Red Axes, Second Swords, Storm Swords and so on were able to chew through regular phasefighters at a decent pace, they were all bogged down by the cannon fodder. While there were ranged mechs that were able to gain an unobstructed angle towards one of the three combination gunships, their attacks were akin to drops in an ocean as the combined energy defenses of 7 puelmer phasefighters easily resisted these incidental strikes! This put the combination gunships in a perfect position to strike back! Equipped with the latest stolen human and alien technologies, the combination gunships strafed every mech in their sights with a diverse combination of laser beams, positron beams, graser beams, plasma bolts, electrical bolts, gaus projectiles, micro-missiles and even more exotic weapons. Not only were most of these weapons as powerful as the ones used by real first-class multipurpose mechs, but the puelmer combination gunships were scarily accurate in their weapons fire! The puelmers had always been infamous for possessing better targeting systems and fire control systems than the other alien races. Their warships were able to track and predict the movements of mechs better than every race, including red humans! The gunships had not reached that exaggerated level, but they came pretty close. "These gunships are shredding our mechs apart!" "It's like were fighting against three expert mechs!" "Their power reactors are much better than ours! They won't run out of energy anytime soon. If we do not eliminate them right away, most of us will die!" Melkor grimaced. He and the rest of the Larkinsons had severely underestimated their enemies. They based the strength of this alien strike force on past encounters, which was a mistake due to the fact that the native aliens were rapidly improving their phasefighters. He could not see a way to overcome this acute problem through regular solutions. Anytime he ordered his mech units to circle around and strike at the combination gunships from another angle, the aliens would react right away and make sure to send enough phasefighters to block this flanking attempt from succeeding. If Melkor had more mechs at his disposal, then he could have overwhelmed the enemy Unfortunately, he neither had the numbers nor the champions to turn this situation around. At best, his mech force would be able to attain a pyrrhic victory for a battle that was ultimately not worth all of the losses. At worst, the alien phasefighters could annihilate everyone, especially considering that the human skirmishing forces were so dispersed from each other that reinforcements would take at least half an hour or longer to arrive! "I can't delay this any longer." He concluded. The only way he could think of that could turn the battle around was to deploy his spell array. The formation anchors corresponding to a relatively simple confinement array had already been placed in the correct coordinates. The ensuing battle had only slightly caused them to drift away from their most optimal positions. "What should I attempt to seal with this spell array?" If he could temporarily confine the bulk of enemy phasefighters in a sealed space generated by the spell array, then the puelmer gunships would suddenly lose much of their protective screen, making them a lot easier to attack and take down. However, if the puelmer gunships turned all of their guns onto the spell array, they could potentially overwhelm it and cause it to break down a lot sooner than intended. The same would happen if they happened to be trapped inside. It would just take longer for them to get free as the spell array was inherently designed to prevent the people inside from breaking out of their cages. "However, trapping fewer aliens inside the confinement array will cause the ritual to take a lot longer to complete. Can I afford to remain stuck here for so long?" Melkor tried his best to think of a good way to employ his sealing spell array. There were no perfect solutions available, so he had to choose between two risky and suboptimal courses of action. Should he attempt to confine a large quantity of cannon fodder craft, or should he attempt to trap the much more powerful combination gunships?