The Mech Touch

Ves immediately got sidetracked. Though finishing the luminar crystal rifle was important, he could not get rid of the notion of developing a new luminar crystal formula that could essentially substitute the role of P-stones.

Though the material composition of P-stones varied considerably, they all had one property in common.

They were capable of storing spiritual energy. Their capacity was quite big for their size. What was truly remarkable about them was that they were stable and reliable. Even if Ves filled them to the brim with spiritual energy, he was fully confident he could leave them out for years and come back later to regain everything he put in without missing any portion.

As far as he was aware, the energy stored in P-stones did not decay over time!

If not for the fact that P-stones were naturally occurring rocks that were rare and difficult to find, it could have become one of his staple materials. As it was, their incessant scarcity prevented Ves from expanding his reserves of spiritual energy and applying the P-stone to a whole list of spiritual engineering projects.

Yet what if luminar crystals could perform the same function?

Even if luminar crystals could only a minute amount of spiritual energy, this was already a major advancement in his eyes! He could always improve and refine the initial versions of a storage type luminar crystal as it was a synthetic product that he could make by hand.

Currently, the greatest potential use case of such a storage medium would be to make more prime mechs.

While this new type of mech sat in an awkward middle ground between standard mechs and expert mechs, their value was great.

Not only did they offer expert pilots without expert mechs an opportunity to exercise their resonance strengths, they also had the potential to accelerate the progression of expert candidates.

Though the latter was only a theory, Ves guessed that as long as he tuned down the amount of Ves in a prime mech, an expert candidate should be able to gain a huge amount of exercise as well as a lot of assistance from a design spirit while piloting such a powerful machine.

"In fact, the two might even be made for each other!" Ves boldly guessed!

Expert candidates sat in an awkward position as well. Pilots such as Isobel Kotin-Larkinson, Commander Casella Ingvar and Commander Taon Melin had long outgrown their standard mechs, but they were far too weak to pilot a genuine expert mech.

Prime mechs had the potential to give them enough room to display their expanded piloting skills while at the same time help them firm up their formative force of wills.

"Still, designing and making all of those prime mechs will take a fair amount of time and effort." Ves muttered.

The list of mechs he needed to design after concluding the current round of mech design projects became longer and longer. The only consolation was that he did not need to design prime mechs from scratch. Just like last time, it was already sufficient to design a variant of an existing standard mech design.

He didn't even need to bother with customizing each individual prime mech to each individual expert candidate. Though the piloting experience would probably suffer, Ves did not have to commit to designing a new prime mech whenever the Larkinson Clan welcomed a new expert candidate.

However, all of these considerations might end up going nowhere if Ves did not succeed in creating the crucial ingredient that made it all possible.

He already had a hunch that formulating a storage type luminar crystal was a lot harder than it sounded.

Before he embarked on this new side project, he had already spent several weeks tinkering with successively larger luminar crystals. He gained a considerably greater feel on what they were and how they behaved.

"The key to manipulating their spiritual interaction is by altering their internal circuitry patterns!" He concluded based on his existing knowledge.

There were many ways he could vary the hardness, opacity, density and other basic properties of luminar crystals by synthesizing them out of different raw ingredients.

Yet their more special properties such as transforming an influx of energy into a physical light beam were all derived from the tiny alien runes that Ves had yet to fully master.

Ves lacked far too much understanding in this area to play around with the circuitry in order to achieve different results. All of the circuitry patterns his luminar crystals gained so far were derived from either the crystal cube, the Illustrious One or both. He only made minor adjustments and contributions to the existing patterns.

As a result, when Ves tried to find out whether the crystal cube or the Illustrious One possessed a circuitry pattern that was capable of holding or storing spiritual energy, he ended up with nothing.

The crystal cube seemed to be filled with circuitry patterns that were associated with a large variety of attack phases, but it did not hold much else. The Illustrious One was even less helpful since his scattered knowledge that he inherited from his predecessors did not cover this area at all. All of this meant that Ves did not have an easy way to accomplish his goal.

It was either difficult or impossible for the luminars to make a storage type crystal. Ves wasn't sure which one was the case. In fact, it could also be that the luminars never felt the need to develop such a crystal.

"Perhaps they never saw the need to store their spiritual energy."

It could also be that they had ready access to an alternate storage solution. P-stone or some other useful materials might have been a lot more abundant in the past.

Whatever the case, Ves soon hit an insurmountable wall. Unless he was willing to waste many years of his life to manually play around with circuitry patterns, it was extremely unlikely for him to come up with a viable solution.

He reluctantly shelved this research project, though he vowed to revisit it once he made more advances in luminar crystal technology. As long as he managed to decipher the secrets of the circuitry patterns that the luminar race was so fond of, he had great confidence that he could achieve his goal.

He sighed. "It's not easy to get to this point, though."

It was as if he was confronted with a brand-new programming language that had nothing in common with the existing programming languages that he knew. The syntax, meaning and even the letters were all different.

It would have been nice if the Illustrious One was a full-time programmer, but he was not. He was the amalgamation of a leader and a mutated outcast sprinkled with a dash of chaos and life. Ves had already exhausted much of the help this luminar design spirit could provide in his crystal projects.

"Oh well. At least I managed to make my crystal rifle."

Since his latest side project went nowhere, Ves set everything aside and decided to wait until his fleet started moving again to properly test the mech-sized weapon.

Now that he no longer directed all of his attention on his R&D activities, he could finally catch up to all of the changes that took place within the Larkinson Clan.

As expected, enough time has passed for the Larkinsons to barely make the newly-acquired capital ships space worthy. A lot more work still had to be done to activate their primary functions, something which was very hard to do when they were all severely undercrewed.

The Larkinson Clan shuffled over a lot of personnel from the sub-capital ships in order to hasten the preparations, but the clan mainly needed to hire a lot more trained and certified spacers.

At this point, the clan had already tapped out the recruitment potential of the Pelsa Ryndover System. The merchant mariners and spacers for hire that were open to working for the Larkinsons had already been picked up. Those that did not accept their offers were unlikely to change their minds.

"How soon until we are ready to depart from this port system, Benny?"

"Our fleet is already ready to go aside from the new vessels. As soon as all of the critical work on the four capital ships is done, we can resume our journey. According to the latest estimates, this will take a few more days barring any complications."

"Has anything else happened that needs to be called to my attention?"

"Hmm, nothing in particular." Gavin answered. "The LMC's sales have continued to flatten and the new Sanctuary Treatment Editions are still not catching on in the market. We don't expect these trends to change, so it is becoming increasingly more important for you to publish a new and useful mech design."

Ves crossed his arms. "That will have to wait. While I'm just as eager as anyone to design a batch of new mechs with great sales potential, our expert mechs come first. We're making brisk progress on them but it will still take a lot of time to complete the remaining ones."

This was not a critical issue in his eyes as the LMC was not the kind of mech company that had to offer a full lineup of mech types. It rose to prominence by selling wildly useful individual mech models. What Ves needed to do was not to rush a lot of mechs to market, but take the time to properly design a single winner that could sell at least a million copies a month.

The importance of money became a lot greater once he reached the Red Ocean. Prices of products over there were incredibly inflated due to several factors.

First, a lot of the pioneers that had already come before were used to spending many times more money than Ves. They came from the more prosperous regions of the galaxy and could often rely on powerful backing back home.

Second, the supply of many goods and services was severely constrained. This was a huge issue that Ves had already grappled with many times despite the fact that he hadn't even reached the Red Ocean!

Third, the ability for the Larkinson Clan to earn revenue in the Red Ocean would definitely not be impressive, at least at the start. The Spirit of Bentheim could only produce so many mechs a month and also had to fulfill the demands of the clan itself.

Ves seriously doubted that he could outsource production to major third-party manufacturers since there were so few of them. Besides, they were too busy trying to push their internally-developed mechs. Why should they help their competitors?

For these reasons and more, the LMC's mech business in his native star cluster was still significant to the Larkinson Clan. Ves might act nonchalant for now, but he knew very well he could not allow the LMC's existing market presence to collapse entirely.

"You know, we already talked about this, but have you considered releasing the second-class version of the Ferocious Piranha? Now that we have left the Yeina Star Cluster, we won't get affected by the backlash coming from this region anymore." Gavin tentatively suggested.

For a moment, Ves seriously considered this option. Gavin was right that the equation had changed.

"No." Ves shook his head. "You make a good point, Benny, but there are more reasons why I'm reluctant to release the Ferocious Piranha IB. Not only does this mech play a vital strategic purpose to the defense of our clan, I'm also worried whether the Friday Coalition will make use of it in some way."

"You can do something about that, right?"

"I can, but the other reasons still apply. I don't want to give away an advantage and compromise the defense of our fleet just to earn extra money. From what I heard, our finances are still decent even if we increased our leverage as of late."

It was a pity that the Sanctuary variants failed to catch on. He had great hopes that their sales would be able to inject a lot more cash into the coffers of the Larkinson Clan, but so far his stubborn pricing scheme did not do him any favors.