The Mech Touch

"I honestly don't know whether it can even work." Ves honestly replied.

If he wasn't in the presence of an extremely distinguished company, Ves would have scratched his head by this time.

He always considered himself to be a creative thinker who could come up with the wildest ideas, but it turned out that he was just an amateur compared to these older and much more competent professionals!

They cast their gazes far beyond what was obvious from the surface.The way they analyzed the Carmine System from so many more angles could easily boggle the minds of less imaginative people!

Even Ves had to spend a lot of time catching up to the latest tangents sprung by the panel members.

"According to your limited awareness of your own invention, do you judge it plausible enough for this scaled-down 'demimech' to work?" Master Xena Wintress continued to press. "There is no need for you to provide answers with a high degree of confidence. We are more than aware of your lack of empirical data. We only wish you to provide input based on your own perspective and understanding."

Ves furrowed his brows as he tried to imagine this 'mech' in action.

"Even though it is scaled down to the point where it is as large as a suit of heavy combat armor, it should operate close to a mech more or less. The variables I am not certain about is how it is like to move a limb. Both the limbs of the 'pilot' and the servos of the mechanical construct around them will have to move in unison. This is different from a more traditional mech as the body of the pilot merely has to remain seated. If you truly want my judgment, then 1 don't think these differences will matter too much. I think the potential results will actually be quite astounding. The closer a mech resembles the human body, the easier it is for a pilot to control the machine. The difficulty of 'piloting' your reduced mechs should not require nearly as much training."

Wintress nodded in agreement.

"These are insightful replies. Let me present you with another scenario."

She began to weave her fingers in order to design a set of three different mechs.

They were a light mech, a medium mech and a heavy mech.

While all of them looked fairly generic as far as Ves could tell, the three spontaneous mech designs happened to possess the same diverging trait.

They did not possess traditional cockpits!

Instead, the cockpit looked like a tube that was attached to control systems, much of which Ves couldn't recognize.

What also stood out was that the mechs all came with their own facsimiles of the Carmine System.

A number of biomechanical components were absent, though.

It soon became clear why Master Wintress replaced a traditional cockpit with this reduced contraption.

The female Master waved her hand, causing the projected image of the so-called demimech to enter a port and fit into the tube of the light mech!

Once the demimech entered the space that was tailor-made to accommodate it, numerous different mechanical parts sprung forth to lock the smaller construct in place.

That was not all.

The Carmine Systems of both the demimech and the light mech began to make contact and connect with each other!

The integration between the two looked so good that it became impossible to determine that they were originally separate if Ves came across this combination from the beginning!

"Is this scenario plausible, Professor Larkinson?"

"Uhh... I am not sure, actually." Ves hesitantly replied. "It depends on how strictly the Blood Pact is being interpreted. Personally, I think there is enough leeway here to avoid setting off the restriction of being limited to one mech. The key here is that while the demimech and the light mech have merged on a physical level, they remain separate on a metaphysical level. This means that while it is theoretically possible for the pilot to control the light mech using the demimech as a connecting medium, the experience won't quite be the same."

That caused all three panel members to look thoughtful. The answer was not as good as they hoped, but it was better than nothing.

Master Wintress then proceeded to manipulate the projection yet again.

This time, the demimech disengaged from the light mech, thereby turning them into separate machines again.

The demimech proceeded to enter the tube of the medium mech, causing the two to merge together on a physical level.

"Is it possible to circumvent the restriction of only being able to pilot a single mech by using it as the control interface for larger and more combat capable mechs?"

"1 think... it is plausible enough to work." Ves slowly answered. "If it works on one mech, there is no reason to think that it doesn't work on the other mech. The only essential constant is that the demimech must remain the same in conception. If the pilot somehow lost his demimech, it is impossible for him to pilot any further mechs."

"Understood."

Wintress then began to design a completely different machine altogether!

Ves started to feel a bit of deja vu as the Master rapidly drafted a juggernaut.

Although the design lacked a lot of details in order to save on time, the overall message was clear.

When the demimech slotted into a tiny tube embedded in the chest area of the enormous humanoid construct, Master Wintress looked pointedly at Ves.

"Is this plausible as well?"

"I... don't know." Ves repeated the same answer yet again. "I don't even know how the Carmine System works for juggernauts in a normal capacity. This implementation of yours completely falls into my blindspot. My very loose guess is that it will probably work, but only barely as it shares the same problem with pilots trying to grapple with conventional juggernauts. The sheer size and amount of active systems produce so much data that there simply isn't enough bandwidth and mental processing power to exert a good degree of control over the enormous juggernaut frame."

The problem rested with the juggernaut, not necessarily with the Carmine System.

Ves briefly recalled Polak Neziri's obsession with large multi-pilot mechs. Would his interpretation of juggernauts be able to solve this particular problem?

It was an idea worth exploring if he had the time.

Master Wintress presented one more scenario before she was done. She waved away the projections of all of the mechs and sketched out another design.

The scale of the machine was even larger than a juggernaut. As the loose lines became increasingly clearer, it turned out that Wintress did not set out to create a mech this time.

She had drafted an enormous capital ship!

The ship was roughly five kilometers long and featured enough main gun batteries to lay waste to cities in short order.

Yet what made the battleship different was that Wintress actually added an enormously scaled up version of the Carmine System within her hull structure.

A thick and branching structure of organic blood veins spread out and maintained contact with each and every single compartment of the battleship!

A familiar tube rested in the depths of the armed warship's citadel. When Wintress inserted the familiar demimech inside this cavity, the pilot became connected to a mechanical construct that was unimaginable in size!

"Please share your opinion with us, Professor Larkinson. Is this plausible?"

Ves found the projected scenario to be so absurd that he thought it was silly to ask his opinion on this matter. He lacked so much data and information that there was no way he could give an authoritative answer on whether this ridiculous concept could even work!

"Theoretically, attempting to enable a single human individual to pilot an entire warship will stumble upon the same problems as with trying to do the same with a juggernaut. There are too many systems that the mech pilot has to take into consideration. Even if the pilot has studied all of the required courses needed to understand the functioning of an entire battleship, this single person has to track and control so many systems that his mind simply won't be able to take it. 1 expect this experiment to end in a violent and explosive fashion."

Master Wintress and Master Goldstein both nodded after hearing this answer.

The Mace of Retaliation exhibited a different reaction. He decided to interject at this time.

"In the last two cases, you identified the pilot as the weakest link in the chain. What if you replace this hypothetical pilot with a stronger individual? Let us assume that the replacement has a much greater capacity to process large streams of data such as myself. Would I be able to effectively pilot a juggernaut or a battleship by myself through the Carmine System?"

Ves looked almost completely lost by this time.

He had to admit that the scenarios presented by the Mace of Retaliation were much more optimistic.

"It is... slightly more plausible." Ves eventually replied. "I think that you will find it a bit more difficult to produce true resonance across all of the juggernaut or battleship. From what 1 have been able to understand, expert pilots and possibly higher-ranking pilots are unable to effectively empower and reinforce mechs with true resonance once they exceed a certain size. They have to be small and compact enough to prevent this from happening. I don't know whether it makes any difference if the pilot uses a neural interface or a Carmine System."

"What if the pilot uses both?" The only ace pilot on the panel asked. "You stated in your initial presentation that the neural interface and the Carmine System are not mutually exclusive. They can operate both independently and concurrently on the same mech. Do you believe it is possible to amplify the true resonance range of a typical expert pilot or ace pilot by employing both the neural interface and the Carmine System at once?"

The possibilities alluded by the Mace of Relation's latest question had massive implications!

Not just Ves, but also the other two Master Mech Designers in the chamber couldn't remain calm anymore once they envisioned the possibilities.

Expert pilots were no longer confined to piloting standard-sized mechs anymore. They could effectively pilot juggernauts or other large constructs while retaining the benefit of empowering all of their mechanical structures with true resonance!

Of course, the pilots had to be strong enough to spread his power so far and wide. It may be that piloting ultra-sized constructs at full strength was only limited to ace pilots and higher.

Even so, that could already change the landscape of high-end mechs as Ves knew it! Once expert mechs and ace mechs were no longer strictly limited by scale, it might be possible to design a juggernaut the size of a cruiser.

Such a juggernaut would not only possess all of the traditional strengths of a cruiser of this size, but also gained a lot of empowerment from true resonance, which would completely transform the combat effectiveness of this enormous machine!

It could effectively amplify the combat power of an expert pilot or an ace pilot by at least an order of magnitude!

The power amplification may even be two orders of magnitude greater if the juggernaut was as large as a sizable battleship!

Ves could not imagine this scenario. Ace pilots such as Patriarch Reginald Cross and Saintess Ulrika Vraken were already extremely powerful when paired with normal-sized ace mechs.

What if the mass and volume of their ace mechs multiplied by a factor of 100?

The faint presumption was that these junior ace pilots suddenly gained so much combat power at once that they could approximate the overwhelming raw strength of a god pilot!

While the ace pilots would still exhibit a lot of deficiencies compared to genuine god pilots when they piloted these large but clumsy frames, what mattered was that their defenses and firepower had the potential to enter into god mech territory!