What's Junk? (The Mech Touch)

[lost star]

Work never ended, and Bolt was still neck deep in it. His task after the training mech was catching up on paperwork and setting the groundwork for another design. This involved licensing. It was also a royal pain in the rear end. Bolt had to admit that even when he benefited from it. The paperwork requirements alone were extensive, and every part had to be verified and checked out against MTA standards. If the designer didn't get so much money from doing it, he wouldn't bother. Which was likely the point.

Expert mechs were not exempt from this. They did get mostly expedited approvals depending on what people wanted. As custom mechs they were typically rubber stamped under the category of non-public mechs. This category was mechs not authorized for public sales and not regulated by the MTA officially. The party line for mechs of that category was 'buyer beware.' No one would be stupid enough to sabotage an expert mech, but they were unregulated and frequently used to testbed special systems.

Morning Star had extensive special systems. Bolt wanted to patent only one part for individual sales. The wings. Though it was more accurate to say he had to patent that part. It had been adapted from another company's part, and Bubbles had rightfully pointed out that it was a system that could be used for any mech when they revised everything. This meant neglecting to inform the company he'd used the base parts for was a bit negligent. They wouldn't and couldn't call him out for it, but it'd be more than a little insulting if he didn't give them partial credit and access to the part blueprint. Doubly so if he wanted to use it elsewhere.

To clarify some, the Morning Star's wings, the Pride system, meshed a special crystal that absorbed lasers and a custom laser emitter to deflect incoming damage. It was unique, but it also heavily relied on the laser company's research into both the crystals and the part. The system had only come together because the young man had been able to access their materials on it. Bolt was well within his rights to keep it as just an expert system and not inform them of what he'd done. This was getting very close to stealing from Little Big Light though. Morally it was a bit iffy. So, because Bolt tried to be moral when he could, the paperwork had been filed and the company had been notified.

This actually put him in a slightly awkward position when they contacted him back. He did not want to speak with Shen at all. In fact he was unsure if he even could. He didn't get any ominous texts from a very dangerous address so he had to assume he was fine so far. It probably helped that he was speaking with Shen's student Mei and not the senior.

A bit of back and forth clarifying the part followed. Mostly on what worked and what didn't. Bolt had some combat data on it, but not as much as he'd like. He had to assume that the company would handle a lot of that if they were interested. They were in part, but then the questions went to a strange place and eventually they had to arrange a call because he was very confused.

"Why are you asking if I've worked with ballistics?" Bolt asked right off.

Mei, who was a woman in a business suit with a particularly bland expression, didn't seem offput by his immediate question. "Have you been following sector news?"

"I've been far too busy locally." The designer responded with a bit of irritation.

"The peripheral nations are being attacked by an alien species termed Sandmen. Current response from the MTA and CFA are non-existent." Mei replied quietly. "They're resistant to laser fire and require a good volume of ballistics to deal with."

Curious, Bolt tried to find information on the galactic net. It took an infuriating amount of time to find it, and then it became alarming. There was a lot of conflicting information. None of it painted a good picture.

"It's going to take me too much time to summarize all of this. How bad would you say it is now?" Bolt asked.

"The Empties are going to be hit in several months to a year depending on how the shield nations hold up. That nation should hold since their master has a warning and that area doesn't appear to be the primary thrust, but the sandmen will likely flow around them and hit us and and Vesia." Mei informed him in such a bland tone that it verged on sarcastic. "Our company is shifting to ballistic production and we'll need anything that can help. My master is currently in medical isolation and cannot render any assistance himself. This why I inquired about your experience."

Putting aside the surprising news about Shen, Bolt flipped through a few pages of information and narrowed down on something resembling a tactical map. Galactically there were countless small nations on the outer area of the galaxy, the rim. These were frequently called barrier or shield nations and typically acted as a natural sort of barrier between civilized nations and places that were too barren to support full nations. Outside that barrier were typically pirates and aliens.

Almost all of those barrier nations in the sector had chunks missing. This was obviously a very bad sign. All three of the nations bordering his home would then be hit once they dropped. Should any of them fall his planet would be squished as a matter of course. The current death tole was already in trillions, and would continue to rise as planets fell and the sandman basically ground down everything on the surface. It was countless lives measured as a statistic that he'd never even have been aware of if he hadn't been speaking with Mei.

"You know, I should be upset that the MTA isn't doing anything." Bolt concluded with a sincere sense of exhaustion. They were supposed to deal with things like this. That they weren't wasn't even surprising. It was expected.

"There will likely be an official statement shortly. If I were to guess, it will be nothing. The CFA is showing signs of movement, but their official stance is to avoid internal operations." Mei's words were both cold and the opposite of reassuring.

"We can't even help with the defense as is. We lack transport." Bolt said as he evaluated their local position.

The woman on the other side shook her head slowly. "I wouldn't advise moving your forces even if you could. There is going to be a significant amount of activity and opportunists once the sandmen move closer. Your area will be considered a prime target by the desperate."

Ah, that was familiar. The rats fleeing the sinking ships and looking to steal everything on the way out. Bolt took a few minutes to think. What could he do here? Perhaps something, perhaps nothing. He needed to research a few things. The Journeyman ended the call quietly and informed his family about the newest threat to them. Then he found a place to think.

"What's this 'bout an alien invasion?" Lilly asked once she found him.

"Don't know much. It will take time for the news to propagate. It's still in the early stages. Do know that we'll need to start preparing now." Bolt responded with a small groan as he tried to plan out what he could do. "At a minimum I think we need orbital assets. There's a significant chance of people just coming into orbit and dropping down without a care."

"Course there is. Least we got a warning this time." Lilly muttered and sat down next to him before giving him a hug. "Was hoping we'd have a year or two to just relax."

"We technically do have one if you ignore how the neighbors are doing." The designer pointed out and gave a small chuckle as she gave him a hit on the shoulder. "I think we'll see about hiring a few space clans to orbit around us maybe?"

"That'll be expensive and not solve much." His wife pointed out quickly.

"It's a proposal." Bolt mused and closed his eyes. "Be a bit easier if Gadget wasn't still a pre-teen and we had more people." He got out with a chuckle. "Perhaps we could purchase a space station?"

"How 'bout you let everyone else decide that. You got the money but spending it right is better than spending it now." Lilly advised as she pressed her head to his shoulder. "What do we need ta revise things mech wise?"

"Believe it or not our lineup works well enough at the moment. Revision will be needed eventually, but it's not urgent. We probably wanna buy a good cheap rifleman." Bolt reasoned out loud.

"Nope. You already bought one mech blueprint. You're making one now! It's on the list!" Lilly interrupted quickly. "We need an in house monster!"

"In house monster?" Bolt repeated with an amused tone.

"Yep, your mechs are the best, and I don't want ya to get lazy." The expert said with more than a little cheer. "In the meantime, I'll handle the space stuff. Thinking we can vet a few space groups, and then raid Cold Grave again without you this time. We got a handle on the place and we need ta bloody a new group and that'll be the most useful. Will be a quick like three month thing here. I'll use that ta both get some more funds and ta see how the space side is handling things."

That was a plan. It wasn't one that handled everything, but it was a plan.

 

[Negation]

We probably wanna buy a good cheap rifleman." Bolt reasoned out loud

Click to shrink...

I keep on envisioning Bolt's Rifleman doing this:-


View: https://youtu.be/G0a9Ks3P9hk?t=55s

 

[Simonbob]

I wonder why the Senior is in "medical isolation"?


I'm also wondering how well things like the Greed system will fare against the Sandmen. It might be really effective, or completely useless.....


Interesting, all around.

 

[Thomisannoyed]

The system had only come together because the young man had been able to access their materials on it. Bolt was well within his rights to keep it as just an expert system and not inform them of what he'd done. This was getting very close to stealing from Little Big Light though. Morally it was a bit iffy. So, because Bolt tried to be moral when he could, the paperwork had been filed and the company had been notified.

This actually put him in a slightly awkward position when they contacted him back. He did not want to speak with Shen at all. In fact he was unsure if he even could. He didn't get any ominous texts from a very dangerous address so he had to assume he was fine so far. It probably helped that he was speaking with Shen's student Mei and not the senior.

Click to shrink...

Wasn't that system the one that Mei was obsessing over so much she broke her brainwashing, and kept coming back to it even when her boss told her to stop?
Is he going to accidentally ascend a second designer to Senior level?

 

[lost star]

Making a rifleman was honestly not particularly hard. If there was a mech that was standard it was that. Firing a rifle was relatively intuitive and required very little training compared to other systems. Furthermore you didn't need much to make them work. Throw them in a line and have them shoot and you'd at least get a little value. Riflemen therefore existed everywhere. Bolt actually had the design for one of them in his head already. Did it fit what he needed though? The one-winged mech he'd made in his vision would be more of a premium mech. Still very useful, but that wing would be expensive. He wasn't sure it'd be suitable for what they currently needed.

While he thought on that, Bolt wanted to do some quick research. It wouldn't take long and it was something that needed to be done. He took one of the hover trucks they had and made his way out of the mountain. He flew a few minutes until he reached one of the places where they'd thrown destroyed mechs.

Called Junk Piles by the locals, these places were essentially mech graveyards. They were the parts that could be salvaged at some point, but weren't worth touching immediately. Ruined legs, twisted armor, ruptured power cells. All of it was basically placed in a pile and covered with a tarp. Some of it wasn't worth even sorting or dealing with, just trash that needed to be moved into a pile so it wasn't in the way.

It felt so nostalgically familiar that Bolt lingered in front of it all for a few minutes. He'd grown up around places like this and battlefields. His father and mother had spent all his life building up the shop by salvaging from places like this. Good days, bad nights, times when they'd huddled together for warmth and wished for food, times when they had everything they could want.

But he couldn't linger and remember. Bolt moved walked between the piles and thought. He could make a mech from all of this. It would be easy. Easier than it had been thanks to his lessons.

"Note to self, make lessons for new designers." Bolt muttered into his comm.

The young man had to look into the future. He absolutely needed people helping him design. Raising them in house would take time. The population issues were still cropping up here and there and it was particularly crippling for his profession. The only one educated enough was his little sister, and she vehemently opposed to mech design. It'd take a solid decade before the current generation was trained enough for him to even think about taking any of them under his wing. (He didn't want to think of why there was such a generation gap.)

Deciding he'd dithered enough Bolt tapped a few of the parts and began to focus on his special senses. There was precious little around him. Just barely enough to sense. The best description he had was that there was a flow and a tint to the energy here. He wondered if it would have been more vibrant in battle? Bolt held out one of his empty spirit containers and slowly filled it up as he strode through the mech graveyard. The result of his walk was rather small all told. Enough to maybe do half a small device.

He visited a few more areas. The training area. A place where combat had been heavy. He even checked out the shrines and nursery, just to be thorough.

This confirmed more than a few things. Spiritual power accumulated from people. It was stronger around places with a lot of activity. The shrines had a particular flavor of it, as did the mechs. Every other place had a tiny, tiny bit of it. Bolt was never going to be able to pull power directly from the environment unless there was an extreme amount of people and emotions...

"That gives me a terrible idea." Bolt muttered as something occurred to him while he reclined in his designer chair after his trip.

Trillions of people dead. The number was impossible to imagine. Hundreds of worlds scoured clean, and it was a footnote in the history of humanity. The entire sector could be erased and it wouldn't matter one bit to his species survival. Yet somewhere out there was a family that would never see another sunrise. Saints and villains, children and grandparents. All of them dead in a day because some alien population had decided to kill them.

Bolt realized he was toying with one of the spiritual containers. The one from the mech graveyard. He could make a spirit, he decided suddenly. He could go to one of those dead planets and pull all the power from it. He had that knowledge. That terrible thing in Cold Grave. He had the ability to get there. A few MTA credits would get him a ride even with lack of care for what was happening. He could create something that would hunt down every alien alive and make damned sure his family would never ever be threatened. He could walk down the path that Ves likely had with his spirits.

With a deliberate motion the young man put down the container and dismissed the whim. No. Perhaps there would come a time when he had to do something like that. Now wasn't that time. That wasn't him and how he'd taken his designs.

He would do something else instead.

"Sorry Lilly, I need ta get this done first." Bolt said to no one in particular and switched to researching.

The Sandmen were a rather strange race even for aliens. They were basically piles of sand with a core the size of someone's palm. There wasn't that much information on them. They typically kept dormant in nests and had actually been pretty boring as a race before this. This recent behavior was completely atypical for what they normally did, which was basically sunbathe. The largest problem with fighting them was that aside from the core they had no weak points. Even First Rate sensors couldn't easily identify the core when the monster was in motion. Killing them therefore just took a lot of firepower, and kinetics worked the best because the aliens both absorbed energy by default and were basically just masses of loose flowing particles.

Individual Sandmen were avoidable threats. As coordinated and aggressive as they'd become? They were genuine threats that required a response. The MTA was silent. The CFA was... Well almost silent. They were likely mobilizing several ships to handle the places the sandmen had spawned according to rumors and the people who watched their warships. The race itself was going to be extinct when they were done, but not before it wiped out a lot of people in the sector.

Bolt wasn't sure if he could change that. He was actually fairly sure he couldn't. The scale was just too large. The best he could do was try to help in the way that all mech designers did.

He started with the basic frame of a spaceborne mech. Third Rate mechs had to specialize, so this mech would be useless on the ground. Once he had the frame setup he stripped out everything that was unnecessary. This mech would be highly, highly specialized. That meant the armor was light, the sensors were low, and there would only be one weapon. It was going to be an intentionally cheap mech. Everything had to be centered around the weapon.

In a way this was familiar. Monster Hunter had been similar by necessity. The mace it had used had been an energy hog and extremely deadly to even use. Had the mech been less armored and stable it would have been damaged from its own weapon. So every part of that mech was meant to handle the weapon.

This nascent mech was just as extreme from a different angle. It was going to be a highly specialized light mech focused around a single point. Sort of a cross between a rifleman and a marksman. The latter was a subset of ranged mechs that focused on long ranged precision firing. Bolt would freely admit that weapons were still not his strongest point. He was getting better, and this one was going to use everything he'd learned.

In this case the weapon he'd settled on was a railgun. These were actually fairly available as a weapon, even in third rate. They weren't frequently used. Railguns were hungry beasts in all respects. They needed a lot of power, a lot of maintenance, and frankly didn't do much more than what your standard propellant based firearms did. Their biggest strength was that they could throw large and specialized munitions. Your standard railgun for mechs usually started off as a heavy component and scaled up.

Slapping it on a lightweight mech like what Bolt was designing was absolutely impossible. This was assuming you did it conventionally. The power requirements alone were rather prohibitive. Increasing the generator would just add weight and then require the mech being scaled up. Perhaps something more high tech and specialized could mitigate that, but the designer didn't have that. He didn't want that.

Bolt had bought one of the most generic of generic railguns for this design. It was a cheap thing that he wasn't actually intending to use at all. He just wanted to take it apart, as in physically create it and take it apart.

The techs involved were more than a little confused at his insistence on this, but Bolt had his reasons. A railgun was at its core an electromagnetic rail that accelerated an object forward. He wanted to see it in action, and then see how to break it. What was the minimum and maximum?

It took a few days of intensive study and work of both the railgun and his own notes from the Stone Shaper weapons. Railguns were finicky little weapons at their core. The rail they derived their name from required a lot of delicate and precision parts. It could also be done away with if you used other mechanics to simulate the rail.

Bolt's revised weapon didn't look like a railgun at all. Nor was it one. It was an almost experimental system that mimicked more advanced weapons in a crude and simplistic fashion. The weapon itself looked like a series of large circles rather than a weapon. The device was meant to be affixed to the back of a mech and would charge up over time. Once it was fully charged the circles would spin. Anything placed in the center would then be propelled forward at a rather cataclysmic speed using a combination of gravitational and electromagnetic forces that he'd copied from half a dozen sources to make functional.

The full weapon looked like a halo once fully assembled. The center propulsion point was a point of space in front of the halo. It took a bit of finagling to get aligned correctly, but it was going to be a bit in front of the head and down slightly. It would only work in a vacuum. It was a bit delicate as well. It worked in the few tests he could manage on the ground though.

This made his creation an extremely specialized and potent weapon, especially when you got to the ammo. Those were multi-layered slugs the size of a mech's fist that used everything he knew about shrapnel and endokinetics to shatter and freeze everything once they impacted something.

Bolt wasn't making this to show off. A marksman didn't work versus the sandmen. The best weapons against them tended to be anything that threw a lot of mass at them. These large slugs weren't meant to pierce. They were meant to break apart. They were designed to do a cone of shrapnel damage. It was absolutely horrible against armor, but against something granular? It would theoretically cause some pretty catastrophic damage. This was assuming it worked as he'd hoped. In all truth it was a fairly untested design that demanded some testing they barely had time to do.

Yet when combined with the rest of the design Bolt figured this mech could help. This design was simple and barebones. The mech was a fairly thin thing. He had stylized it to look like a man with bandages. A bandaged pauper with a payload. The ammo was going to look like a set of prayer beads to complete the look. There were no complicated mechanisms, and while the weapon was fragile it was also very easy to make and maintain.

Performance wise it would be barely functional on land. In space it'd be relatively nimble. Bolt had to add a fair bit of heft to the generator even with the weapon's charging capacitors, so when it wasn't charging it had a lot of energy to spare for the boosters. When it was charging it'd be pretty slow, but a pilot could switch back and forth quickly if needed.

Armor wise the mech had no armor to speak of. It had the bare minimum. The cockpit was reinforced, so Bolt wasn't making a total deathtrap, but this would not take a hit at all. It was a pure glass cannon. Anything mech grade that hit it was likely going to disable the point of impact. This was very deliberate. You could get this mech made with a load of scrap and a cheap parts printer.

The spiritual component was actually the thing that took the most work after the weapon. Not because it was hard, but because Bolt wanted the mech to be easy to produce anywhere. His previous experiments noted that it required a fair bit of focus from the manufacturers to make the spiritual part settle in properly. Bolt had a few theories as to how to work around that, but for this mech they wouldn't be appropriate. Instead he took the flavor of one of the spiritual spots he'd gathered from and added it in. The one thing he had to assume that every manufacturer would be thinking of.

This mech was a desperate prayer. A last resort.

Bolt wasn't sure what the effect of it would be, but he could think of nothing better for this design. He did some cleanup, added some details here and there, and then sent it off to the production line. They'd need to test it out and then submit it to the MTA.

Once all of that was done he looked into his contacts with the Rim Guardians. He expected practically nothing from them, but his request would require about that much. He needed the design available to anyone fighting the Sandmen, and he needed to set it as cheap and as affordable as possible. He'd even take credit. This would require some MTA backing to have happen, but it was really just paperwork. Hopefully they'd at least do that.

 

[TheDerangedOne]

Man it's been ages since I read The Mech Touch. Think Ves made a shotgunner mech during this arc that took off reasonably well.
Honestly I fell off the bandwagon somewhere around Vulkan being introduced to the Dwarves... but that's like five plot arcs of canon down the line at least.

 

[RandolphWill]

Dude you are reading my mine. I was thinking of a space mech that was a angel with a sniper rifle to attack and solar panel wings to save on fuel cost and could recharge if given enough time.

 

[Simonbob]

Huh.

That's a pretty awesome mech. I like the concept, and the style.

 

[Sceptic]

This nauseant mech

Click to shrink...

Either you mean nascent, or this is some kind of pun on nausea that I'm missing.

The rail they derived their name from

Click to shrink...

Rails, plural, unless railguns are something different in this setting. They're a pair of rails which create a circuit through the payload.

Anyhow, sounds to me as if Bolt has reverse engineered a railgun into some kind of coilgun.

 

[lost star]

Getting the mech up to space for testing had been the hardest part. They didn't have any space infrastructure at the moment, and you couldn't just casually build something capable of bringing a mech up. Well you couldn't at Third Rate. Second Rate manufacturing could produce a shuttle capable of getting a mech into space in a few hours along with the appropriate autopilot programs.

Lilly had been forced to negotiate something with one of the merc units that had decided to hang around the planet. It had thankfully been very easy, but it emphasized how much further they had to go. They absolutely needed to get something arranged for the future.

Her newest ride was named Last Prayer. It looked like a bandaged man with a halo. Bolt's now signature aesthetics didn't make it look pretty. It made it look like a starved monk instead. It was thin, it felt kind of weak physically, and it also radiated a presence that made all of the previous points invalid. The mech knew it's purpose.

Lilly naturally loved the feeling. She wasn't here to luxuriate in it though. She was here to put Prayer through his paces. She also wanted to get some experience in space.

It was a far different battlefield than on the ground. Positioning was counterintuitive in space. Every action had an equal and opposite reaction. Good space mechs could compensate for that and stay put when they used their own weapons, but they all needed to account for it because damage could disable the compensators. You also needed to be extremely aware of the big gravity wells if you were close to them.

Most mech battles didn't happen around them thankfully. It made things more than a little dicey on both ends of the fight if you were. Most battles happened in the 'void' so to speak. Far enough away that the gravity wasn't noticeable and usually away from any debris that could cause serious issues. That was where Lilly was at the moment.

The only gravity she could feel right now was what was grounding her in the cockpit. All mechs, even stripped down ones like Last Prayer, had some sort of inertia compensation to allow for the speeds they could get to. This was also what let them have some sort of gravity as well, which allowed for longer deployments. People weren't meant to deal with zero gravity.

"Systems are functional. Filters appear to be working too." Lilly reported.

She was in a sealed suit, but it looked like the mech could have supported her without it. This was the Wrench Rat's first space mech, so there had been a bit of a worry there. The expert grinned as she did a few loops and other maneuvers.

"Boosters fine. Pilots surprisingly well for how specialized it is." The woman continued. "Starting charge."

Behind her mech several capacitors lit up with an ominous white light. The illumination gave the halo a glow from the bottom, as if something was building up. Lilly switched to a few outside cameras and stifled a giggle. Bolt couldn't help himself apparently. Even this was thematic.

Movement was shit now though. Lilly could barely even use the boosters now. The lights in her cockpit had dimmed. The sensors were down to nothing as well. The power was being pulled from damned near everything. Even knowing it was part of the design still didn't make her like it that much.

Lilly flicked off the charge and watched how the mech lit up. Then she did a few more flicks to see how quickly the mech responded. The systems did not like it, but they did as designed.

"Note to Bolt, check to see what rapid switching does to the system." The expert had to assume some moron would try to rapidly toggle that system and would cause some sort of problem. She'd have to test it after she did the other tests. "Full charging."

One, two, three. Lilly counted off the seconds in her head. That was a horrible charging time for any other weapon. For something this specialized, it could be tolerable, assuming the damage was all right.

"Range test one!" The expert called out.

One hand pulled up the chain that was the ammo system. The mech was designed to be as bare bones as possible. No ammo feeding system, nothing complicated. Just a hand carrying a set of spheres. They floated in his hand as he detached one from the chain and held it up. Around him the halo continued to glow and then the bead almost locked into place right in front of him. Inside Lilly aimed at one of the targets they'd setup and triggered the weapon. Between one instant and the next the bead disappeared from conventional sight.

This was the assumed minimum range of what one would expect to engage. About half what a good rifleman would expect to hit accurately. Anything closer would be death for a mech this light. The target was on the smallish side, the size of a mech's head. Lilly could have hit it in her sleep with a mech pistol, but that was because she was an expert. She was actually wasted testing the mech like this, but getting the upper bounds of a mech was still useful and there was something to be said for seeing what the upper bounds of a mech were.

The impact was explosive in a very strange way. First the target was almost pulled in. Then the heat was leached from it. Then it shattered. All of this happened in less than a second, resulting in the target collapsing in on itself and spraying out a set of shrapnel in a wide cone. The primary target was shattered, and the secondary targets were also both frozen and broken apart in a symphony of scrap.

Lilly moved onto the next target. This range was something a marksman could hit. She held up one of the prayer beads as she waited for it to charge and fired as soon as she felt the thing was ready.

Another target was obliterated. The damage reports were near identical. Which wasn't surprising. In atmosphere the air resistance and gravity was a factor. Here it wasn't. In space momentum lasted forever if nothing stopped it. Lilly was testing the accuracy and shot deviation more than the damage it could do. That was relatively good considering the way the weapon worked. Not spectacular, but decent.

So far it functioned as expected. However, this only proved the mech worked. Lilly fired off the rest of the ammo as fast as possible as she tried to stress the mech's firing system. One shot every two to three seconds was not exactly fast. Was the damage enough to justify it? The range was good, the speed of the projectile was good. The power draw was actually... Pretty good.

Bolt had at the bare minimum made a decent rail-gun like weapon on a budget. The ammo system was both the most useful and potentially most expensive part of it, because they could change out the slugs at will. She could even prove that now. A quick word with the people who'd brought her up here and she got a solid slug and a dummy mech out in space.

"Testing with solid metal shot on a target," Lilly squinted at the range finder and just shrugged mentally. "Call that what your average marksman could do?" She said for the record.

This was rather variable, but it was a good ballpark. The exact numbers were in the sensor logs. Lilly held up the metal ball and triggered the release. The ball blurred out of sight, and a second later the dummy mech exploded.

"Huh." The expert got out in mild surprise.

If all else failed, Bolt had made a space marksman that did enough damage to justify the cost. That was some pretty nice damage from what amounted to a hunk of metal. Something more specialized would probably be a lot more damaging. The dummy targets weren't the best at evaluating damage, and they'd need some specialized tests to see how it'd do versus sandmen.

"Final evaluation, it works." Lilly reported.

She would not want to pilot this thing in combat though. One good hit and it'd stop working. The weapon itself was a very big target and not particularly armored. It was a pure glass cannon. Normally that'd be a dealbreaker. It wasn't here. This was a space marksman. They were meant to work at extreme ranges and outside of normal threat zones.

Aside from that, the aiming system wasn't that robust. Lilly as an expert could nail anything she wanted, but a lesser pilot would have issues. The shots were just slow enough that you'd have to predict enemies past a certain range. This wasn't a dealbreaker against the sandmen. It would make it less useful against enemy mechs, assuming you used the default ammo. (Lilly could imagine that some specialized slugs would be nightmares.)

All told, it was all right and would serve its purpose. Which if she thought on it, was actually mildly impressive. This mech was pretty cheap wasn't it? Get a hundred of them and you had some fairly hefty coverage. The biggest limitation in that case was ammo costs. Specialized slugs probably wouldn't be cheap and ammo costs had a tendency to add up.

 

[Golgotha]

A hundred glowing, humming monks on the side of an asteroid, annihilating all the approach.
We've had the undead series, this goes with the laser priestess series.

 

[Pyro Hawk]

A hundred glowing, humming monks on the side of an asteroid, annihilating all the approach.
We've had the undead series, this goes with the laser priestess series.

Click to shrink...

It also likely has some terrifying synergy with the canon Mech Ves makes to solve the Sandman Crisis, that fails from a lack of numbers, provided this mech can maintain a link to a sensor network if that 'Prophet' Mech of Ves' can share it's future-sight sensor data with those around it in some way.

But yeah, we've got entry two of the Holy Warrior 'series'. Even if the two can't work together because one is a ground based defender and the other is a pure space build.