It was very early the next morning when Max got the official message from the Research and Development team that the upgrade for the Mecha was ready to be put into production. The existing vent nacelles for the crystal-based energy cores would be upgraded to vectored thrusters, mostly unsuitable to use on the surface but capable of extremely agile maneuvering in space when coupled with a shield modification to reduce the inertial mass of the Mecha itself, similar to the effect of a warp field, but on a much less extreme level.
The existing repair hangars could produce the thruster units, and the whole upgrade process would take less than a man-hour per Mecha. Overall, it was an upgrade without any downside that Max could see other than the power usage of the thrusters themselves.
Nico had also sent along the details for two forms of upgraded munitions to be used during space combat, one for Super Heavy Mecha and a handheld weapon for the standard pattern Crusader Class Chassis.
Both fired solid projectiles at hypersonic velocities that used an antimatter fusion reaction both as additional thrust and as their primary damage output.
The shells designed for the Thunder Guns were truly terrifying, containing over a kilogram of antimatter, with an output yield of over sixty megatons, by standard human measurement. Not that any planet Max knew of had used TNT in millennia, but it was still the standard by which explosions were measured.
The Thunder Gun projectiles could achieve one-quarter of the speed of light, fast enough to catch most fleeing ships and enough that even if the antimatter explosion somehow failed to trigger, such as in instances where an enemy defensive measure disabled or contained it, the shell itself would do devastating damage to whatever it collided with.
The Alliance was sure to be horrified at this increase in firepower, but for space-based combat, such weapons were essential to actually managing to damage battleships with their immensely powerful shielding and defensive weapons.
She hadn't neglected the new ship itself, and an eyes-only note attached to his copy of the data included sixteen Antimatter Torpedo tubes which would fire Warp Capable projectiles, with outputs ten times that of the Thunder Guns.
If that sort of firepower were turned on a planet, Orbital Lances would be rendered obsolete. The fact that she intended to turn Orbital Lances into a secondary weapon on her new mothership was enough to send Max to the Replicator for something stronger than juice to go with his breakfast.
For a ship that size, it only made sense that the weapons would be scaled up, but to go to this extent was way more than he had expected. With some quick calculations, a single Super Heavy Mecha equipped with antimatter munitions would be capable of taking out a Cruiser Class vessel in a straight fight, assuming that it was using current shield technology and weapons.
She had also attached an addendum to the addendum like she was writing it as she went and didn't prepare her thoughts at all.
[I also made one for Cleansing Light. A handheld replacement for the Orbital Lance Cannon. Three times the yield of the Thunder guns, with a ten-round per second maximum fire rate and hundred-round capacity. Who knows, you might have the urge to shoot someone eventually.]
That was incredibly Nico of her, so Max searched her thoughts to see what she was up to right now and found her in his Mecha bay, working on Cleansing Light. The new thruster system was more mobile than the existing thrusters that it used, and Cleansing Light was Warp Capable, so the drives could be used much more effectively than a standard shield to offset the Mecha's mass and increase mobility.
She had also added an anti-missile defence system, a new setting for the Disruptors that should destabilize incoming antimatter shells and missiles, causing them to detonate early or vaporize in instances where the lasers were insufficient for the task. It hadn't been fully tested yet, since she only came up with the idea on her way to the hangar, but she was fairly sure it would work.
Fairly sure wasn't really a statement that he wanted in the development process of safety equipment, but they couldn't exactly test it outside of a simulator, so he would have to find out the hard way if he really could stop the incoming attacks.
Their new world ship should be capable of the same thing, stopping solid projectiles with disintegrator pulses, giving it a defensive military capability on par with the Alliance Envoys' vessel, which Max assumed was good enough to be considered state of the art.
[Commander, did you see that Thruster upgrade that Research just sent out? Are we expecting to be attacked by a new enemy force in the near future?] Lucci asked from her new office aboard the Cruiser that she had taken over.
The identifier line only had her name on it, and Max wondered when she would officially name her vessel, but that was less important than the upgrade work that needed to be done before the next time the Mecha needed to be used.
[You never know what we will come across. As Klinger pointed out, our new mothership will be a huge floating act of aggression in the eyes of a lot of species, so we should be prepared to have it attacked at any point, including during construction.
I don't have a timeline on completion yet, Nico is still busy with other matters, and the Innu are so full of Caffeine that I'm not willingly looking into their minds right now.]
The holographic image of Lucci burst into laughter, and she muted her microphone for a few seconds while she got herself under control.
[You have it hard, don't you? I don't even want to contemplate ninety percent of what people are thinking about, but you must have heard it all by now. We will get the Mecha upgraded as soon as possible, and we've already made a stock of the new munitions because I couldn't resist getting my hands on some of them.
We will have to take a good look into both human and Alliance Wartime laws before we deploy them, though. In space, I'm pretty sure there isn't an issue, but in orbit or in a planet's atmosphere, that level of antimatter reaction is most likely a war crime of some sort. There are a number of restrictions on the types of weapons that can be deployed against a planetary population.
It's not like we never had more destructive weapons after all. The legends of the pre-founding era were full of horrific weapons, and now it seems increasingly likely that they were actually built back in a time when humans weren't constantly focused on the most efficient military production that they could manage.]
She had a very good point. Too much of human history was lost and forgotten long before he was born, so it was possible that all of their developments had been achieved before but either abandoned or had their production methods lost to time due to various factors over the millennia.
Even among the Kepler equipment, much of the older gear was better than the standard issue units, like Stalwart's shields. Sitting in orbit over a Relic world, with ruins of a species that he had never heard of, that lived right there in the same Galaxy that Humanity currently occupied, was giving him a sense that he was a frog in a well, feeling much more powerful and important than he really was.
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