"We need to get closer!" The distance between the Spirit of Bentheim and the alien warships still precluded many ranged mechs from taking part in the ongoing firefight. Only the most extreme mechs and warships possessed the capability to strike targets across a distance of over a hundred-thousands of kilometers, especially when both sides actively maneuvered around in space. The Spirit of Bentheim avidly put her newly upgraded main thrusters and maneuvering thrusters to good use. As massive and sluggish the factory ship may be, she was able to move considerably faster in space than she ought to, especially once she began to engage the warp function of her superdrive at a low setting! The spatial distortions produced by the superdrive made it a little more difficult for the factory ship's sensors to make more precise and delicate observations of their distant foes. However, the distortion factor was not too great so long as the superdrive did not generate a strong warp babble. The ship also tapped into the sensor systems of nearby drones and hidden listening posts in order to gather more data. As the powerful secondary laser cannon batteries of Stingray 1 kept trying to strike the maneuvering Spirit of Bentheim, the Macharia Excelsia also did its best to exert more pressure on the opposing vessels. The alien ships all began to accelerate and maneuver in ways that inhibited the powerful ace mech from launching repeated strikes at any single starship. Saintess Ulrika Vraken was not at fault. She managed to attain an impressively high hit rate with a positron rifle that was not optimally designed for long-ranged combat. She demonstrated superhuman skill, judgment and control over her mech with each and every shot fired by her potent machine! Ves would have loved to have several more ranged ace mechs at his disposal. In fact, if Patriarch Reginald Cross hadn't impulsively decided to join the Warborn, this phase would have become a lot more effective! Even if the Mars could not possibly match the hit rate of the Macharia Excelsia, its ARCEUS System granted it a much higher volume of fire, thereby giving the ace hybrid mech a lot more chances to produce repeated hits! As Ves observed the proceedings while he seated on his elevated command throne, he formed many different thoughts. It would have been nice if his forces included a specialized mech unit that could deal effective damage at this range. He briefly held a discussion with Commander Casella Ingvar about this topic. "Under normal circumstances, it's not technically feasible to fabricate weapons that can effectively hit targets at this extreme distance." He told her. "It can only be done if a weapon is especially designed for this mode of combat and is fabricated with the utmost precision and care." "Can you produce such a weapon, sir?" Casella asked while she remained on standby in her Minerva. "It would help our clan out a lot if our main fleet can still contribute to a battle against warships while remaining outside the effective range of our most dangerous opponents. It is frustrating to have so many mechs at our disposal that are forced to remain idle." "Our clan doesn't have the capabilities to produce the ultra-precision rifles that you are asking for." Ves regretfully shook his head. "I am not trained and experienced in this specific area of fabrication. I will need to spend a lot of time in virtual simulation training to shore up my skills. The real limitation is our production equipment. I have a set of excellent first-class production machines including the AP-VEX superfab, but even they cannot help me attain the insane level of precision required to produce a laser rifle that can fire beams that are both precise and cohesive enough to actually hit a distant target." This was why the Transcendent Punishers did not even bother to fire despite their reputation for landing shots by relying on the prescience of their design spirit. Ylvaine could make all of the predictions he wanted, but if the luminar crystal cannons and the gauss cannons were so technically shaky that no amount of calculation could perfectly predict where a shot would actually land, even he would get overwhelmed by the sheer amount of possible outcomes! "You can overcome this by buying a new set of production equipment, am I correct?" Ves nodded. "That is true. A materializer will be able to solve most of our technical problems in this regard, but they can be ridiculously expensive. This is the most advanced industrial precision production machine mastered by the human race. Do you know how much it costs to obtain a relatively affordable production unit?" Casella frowned. "I have heard that it is not cheap." "Try 5 billion MTA credits." The expert pilot almost lost her composure when she heard that sum! "That is... considerably outside of our budget." "Only first-raters have the financial muscle to play with materialization technology. That said, it is not entirely out of the question for us to get our hands on a device. I think the Red Association allows us to exchange a working materializer for around 1 billion MTA merits or so, but we will have to defeat several more alien raiding fleets in order to redeem such an extravagant reward. Do you think that is a worthwhile goal for us to work towards?" Casella shook her head. "I understand your point. We will lose more than we can gain if we try to overreach and chase after a reward that we are not yet qualified to handle." "That is also why I am not in a hurry to upgrade our forces to first-class standards even if we technically have the funds and means to do so. We will throw away our strong position in the second-class community only for us to get pushed to the very bottom of the first-class community. We will promote to first-raters when we are truly ready to do so, and not before." Ves did not object to selectively procuring pieces of high technology in advance. What was important was that they paid for themselves by providing greater value in return. The first-class workshop and lab equipment along with the brand-new Hyper Chamber all opened up a lot of promising opportunities. He did not think that adding an expensive materializer to his factory ship would make that much of a difference. "So there is no realistic way for us to fight at these distances in the short term, sir?" Casella asked. "Probably." Ves replied. "Technology is undergoing rapid changes in the Age of Dawn. There may be ways to increase the precision of long-ranged weapons without sacrificing too much. We will just have to wait and see. Perhaps the aliens have the tech we want." "Let us hope so. We should try to keep these puelmer ships as intact as possible." As the two concluded their discussion, General Verle had just decided to close the distance! "Advance but stay in warp. This will affect the hit rates of our other mechs, but it is necessary to prevent our ship from getting overwhelmed. Do not forget that our primary goal is to lure a part of the enemy warships away from Stingray 1. As long as we get close enough to pose a serious threat to any of them, the aliens will be forced to respond." Against intelligent aliens that possessed the capacity for rational thought, this was an open conspiracy. The aliens could clearly figure out that the strange human ship wanted to lure at least a part of their warships away. Yet they might not have another choice if it turned out they were at a disadvantage in combat at these extreme ranges. The Golden Skull Alliance observed the conditions of the enemy warships long enough to know that most of them were not that useful at these distances. The technical states of the yurzen warships were nowhere near as fine as that of the puelmer heavy cruisers! So far, the former played no role in this firefight aside from serving as additional targets. The only way for the yurzens to properly make use of their numbers advantage was to get closer, but would the aliens be willing to take bait? Everyone was about to find out as the Spirit of Bentheim gradually moved closer. People's hearts started to beat faster as the factory ship closed the distance at a relatively past face under light warp travel conditions. Ves had to admit that a superdrive offered a starship a lot of conveniences. His clan would have never dared to pull off a plan like this if the flagship could not move around the battlefield at such exaggerated speeds. However, everyone also realized that it did not take much to rob them of this crucial advantage. If the aliens ever destroyed or debilitated the superdrive in any fashion, the Spirit of Bentheim would instantly lose the ability to retreat. Dozens of alien warships with working warp drives could easily surround the Spirit of Bentheim and overwhelm her defenses from every direction! This was why no one took this situation lightly. Most of the crew of the factory ship probably never expected to take part in frontline combat, but the Larkinsons did not shirk their duty. They all knew what was at stake. As the Spirit of Bentheim closed the distance at an oblique angle, the aliens began to make more threatening movements. The relatively lower tech yurzen warships formed several squadrons that sought to cover multiple angles and limit the maneuvering space of the human capital ship. Stingray 2 began to move slightly closer under warp and began to open fire with her secondary laser cannon batteries yet again. This time the threatening puelmer heavy cruiser clearly showed that she was getting serious about fighting the intruding human starship. "The attacks against us have intensified! Both Stingray 1 and Stingray 2 are striking our ship with much greater regularity!" The new set of transphasic energy shields installed by the MTA were doing their jobs. Though every single attack by a laser cannon inflicted a lot more damage than a bunch of mechs, the protective measures were not weak! It cost the Larkinson Clan over 50 million MTA merits as well as 33 kilograms of phasewater to procure a set of basic first-class shield generators. In truth, no proper first-class outfit would be cheap enough to employ this kind of model of shield generators. They demanded so much phasewater that it was a lot more cost-efficient to spend all of those resources to invest in more premium shield generators! Nonetheless, despite their relatively low capacities, the shield generators were genuinely capable of resisting the damage output of serious alien warships, at least for a time. The main limitation that prevented them from lasting so long was their insanely high energy requirements. It costs a lot of energy to keep these hungry devices running! The Larkinsons tried to mitigate these demands as much as possible by exposing just one of the sides of the factory ship's hull at a time whenever possible. However, the crew also took advantage of all of the power reactors that were ordinarily used to meet the energy requirements of all of the Spirit of Bentheim's production lines. Ves especially prized the first-class power reactor that was ordinary used to keep the advanced AP-VEX superfab as well as the other first-class workshop equipment running! The greatest difference between first-raters and second-raters was how much energy they consumed to make their machines work. Ves suspected that the mechers never thought that Ves would take advantage of the fact that his 'non-combat vessel' was equipped with a genuine first-class power reactor to use her as an improvised warship! This was definitely an oversight on their part! Who knew that Ves and his Larkinsons would be crazy enough to send forth an industrial ship of all choices and use her to confront over a hundred alien warships at once?! Clearly these people underestimated the extent of Ves' madness! "Go forward! We need to get closer! We've got so many other mechs that are doing nothing right now. Let's not waste their firepower!"