The Mech Touch

Ves' mood had become a lot less burdened by depression the day after he had lost the Elemental Lord.

He initially thought that he would remain affected by the grief and loss of losing such a precious creation, but Veronica's most recent conversation with Cynthia changed everything!

Now that his expanded mind became filled with a lot of messy and complicated thoughts about heavenly authorities, his relationships with the three galaxies, the factors that determined the strength of lightning tribulations and the endless depth of multi-elemental cultivation, he had become way too distracted to pay much attention to his failure!

While the premature death and loss of the Elemental Lord still weighed heavily on Ves, he no longer became stuck in the past.

Instead, all of the explosive revelations from his mother had firmly set his sights to the future!

New issues, new threats and new possibilities loomed in the distance. Ves grew excited at the thought of tackling them so that he could ultimately design much stronger mechs than the ones he developed before.

"There is a lot more to hyper technology and E-technology than what I have used before."

Ves felt more ashamed of his precious forays into hyper mechs.

The Lionheart, the Blood Star Mark II and most notably the Elemental Lord all appeared to leverage the power of different elements, but their applications were painfully shallow and simplistic!

If Ves wanted to design much better hyper mechs, then he urgently needed to deepen his comprehension and mastery into specific E energy attributes.

This also lined up with the progression of a traditional blacksmith.

Each of them improved their craft by expanding their understanding of different elements and the materials associated with them. The greater their comprehension, the greater the extent their products could take advantage of an element!

Right now, Ves needed to set aside his obsession of merging the five elements and start off with just a single element.

While it was impossible for Ves to design a true mono-elemental mech given that they were all intrinsically related to metal and other elements, he wanted to improve the application of the water element in his next designs.

Several new mech ideas came to mind.

However, Ves quickly fell back to his Fey Project.

After all of the excitement surrounding the Elemental Lord, it seemed as if he had completely set the original Fey project aside.

"It is still a good mech design."

Though its design did not measure up to his recently raised standards, it was still a fine product and a good drone mech in the early phase of the Hyper Generation.

The Living Mech Corporation had already made preparations to mass produce the commercial variants of his latest mech line. Gavin and many other staffers had also been working hard to set up a high profile product reveal event.

If Ves insisted on going back to the drawing board and finding a way to develop a version of the Fey Project that made much more extensive use of the water element, then that would completely upend the current schedule!

It would probably take at least several months for Ves to design a satisfactory hyper mech that utilized the power of water in more profound ways.

Ves might as well design a variant of the Fey Project, or better yet, a completely new mech design!

Perhaps he could even do both at the same time while also making sure he kept up on his intensive studies!

"My productivity has increased once more."

Ves had already noticed the improvements ever since he returned from the field.

The latest lightning baptism not only amplified the size of his physical body to the point where he had a lot more brain mass than before, it had also furthered the evolution of his mind and spirituality.

The care of the Red Ocean ensured that the recent lightning tribulation strengthened his overall foundation in a holistic manner without producing any sequelae!

Although Ves did not like to pile up a lot of debt, he sincerely felt grateful to the local heavenly authority for increasing his cognitive capabilities.

He was able to design his mechs a lot faster than before!

It was difficult for Ves to estimate how much he improved, and not all of it translated to purely intellectual gains.

Having a big body that was filled with phasewater actually imposed an exponentially greater burden onto Ves. Much of his brain capacity actually had to be dedicated towards managing all of the phasewater and phasewater organs.

If that did not happen, then it was far too easy for the space folding to get messed up or for a drop of phasewater to go berserk and tear a hole in his body!

Ves needed to gain a better understanding of his strange physical state. He was not that eager to find a corner and unfold his true body.

He was much more interested in planning out his next steps in relation to his mech design endeavors!

"Hm... I have already spent enough time on the Fey Project. It is time for me to wrap it up and give it a rest. I can wait until this mech line has become old enough for me to apply a lot of improved hyper technology in the next revisions."

His thoughts strayed towards future mech designs. He wanted to tackle at least one project that had a profound relationship with phasewater so that he could explore more extensive applications of the water element.

The most obvious answer he could think of was a space knight.

The defensive mechs of the Larkinson Clan could certainly use an update. The current versions of the Bright Warriors and the Rigid Walls were still serviceable as far as lastgen mechs went, but their roles were far too marginal in the current war.

Alien warships simply possessed too much firepower. Their attacks could be evaded with a bit of effort, but it was almost impossible for a mech to survive a direct impact with one of the bigger armaments of an armed vessel!

Even the smaller tertiary gun batteries of a warship could tear entire mech companies of space knights apart due to their much greater firing rates!

Offensive melee mechs enjoyed a renaissance in the Hyper Generation due to the release of space suppressors and other supporting technologies, but the same benefits did not apply as well to defensive melee mechs.

The problem was that space knights were usually a lot heavier and slower to close in on an enemy fleet.

Even if they managed to arrive next to their targets, their maneuvering was painfully sluggish, making it a lot easier for gun batteries to track their movements and blast them apart!

Ves was not able to mitigate these dangers entirely, but more extensive utilization of the water element could help them resist the attacks of smaller rapid-fire cannons a lot better than before.

"Is there a way to increase their mobility as well?"

It should be relatively easy to improve the mobility of a mech equipped with a combat drive or a transphasic flight system, but both of them happened to be high-end systems that were usually reserved for high-ranking mechs.

If Ves wanted to design a commercially viable mech, then he needed to control the costs and minimize the dependency on phasewater as much as possible.

"Do I have to split this project in two and design two variants of the same concept at once?"

Perhaps he should. It made sense for him to split the development of the Fey Project in order to design a low-end and a high-end version of the same concept.

The same logic could apply to many other projects as well, particularly the ones that he intended to put on the market one way or another.

It shouldn't be too difficult to enhance the performance of a transphasic space knight with a deeper application of the water element, but what about the cheaper version of the same concept?

"Is it possible to leverage the water element in an effective manner in a mech that has no phasewater?"

Ves became quite troubled by this question. There were definitely a lot of methods that could enhance the performance of such a machine, but the lack of synergy between phasewater and hyper technology limited his options.

"No. That is not correct. Removing phasewater from the equation doesn't necessarily constrain my work. It just takes away all of the powerful handicaps that has allowed transphasic mechs to cheat for a long time."

Transphasic mechs were typical products that relied on a very expensive material to enhance their combat power.

While it was definitely worthwhile to expend these valuable resources for this purpose, it was too bad that the supply of this exotic was wholly insufficient!

The demand for phasewater had never dropped. It had only grown higher and higher, and there were no signs that it would drop anytime soon!

If even the aliens of Messier 87 had reasons to covet phasewater, then it was conceivable that it would never become a common commodity!

This meant that Ves would never be able to capture a large market share by designing transphasic mechs.

Even though his clan could afford it, a lot of other organizations did not have this luxury!

The top market segments could get their hands on phasewater easily enough, but the bulk of the forces fighting for red humanity would probably field non-transphasic mechs for the most part.

Ves could make a much stronger contribution to the survival of red humanity if he was able to design a highly effective hyper mech that did not rely on an expensive crutch such as phasewater!

The more he thought about it, the more he wanted to tackle this challenge!

The main reason why he became excited about this potential new project was because he wanted to see how he could leverage the water element in a defensive capacity.

"Is it possible to imitate the defensive properties of transphasic armor systems and transphasic energy shields without employing phasewater?"

He initially thought that it was impossible for him to accomplish this by making use of relatively cheaper and more abundant hyper materials.

However, he began to doubt this conclusion when he thought about how he could approach such a matter.

"What is phasewater, exactly? Is it a fusion between space energy and water energy that has taken on a material form, or is it something else entirely?"

Even though Ves had put a lot of effort into studying phasewater theory, he still wasn't able to come up with an answer to this question!

This was an indicator that phasewater still had a lot of mysteries left for Ves to explore.

Even though Ves felt that it was far too simplistic to equate phasewater as a special fusion between space energy and water energy, what if he applied this simple combination into a mech design?

"This might actually produce a useful result!"

However, doing so would violate his intention of designing a mono-elemental mech. Trying to combine the water element with any other attribute meant that Ves would be focused on researching exciting new synergies and combinations.

While that was undoubtedly helpful for his mech design project, Ves would be unable to advance his comprehension of the water element as much as he wanted.

"No. I need to restrict my work to just using the water element." Ves frowned. "At most, I will only use the metal element to reinforce the mech frame, but everything else should be carried by the power of water."

That made it a lot harder for Ves to come up with viable ideas.

For example, phasewater synergized extremely well with energy shields, which was why all of the native alien races relied upon transphasic energy shields as their main form of defense.

Could Ves utilize the water element in a similar but also different fashion that would lead to stronger energy shields?

"Water is often associated with motion. What if I can use the water element to make an energy shield more dynamic. Perhaps I can create whirlpools or something that can make it tricker to break the energy shields..."