The Mech Touch

5728 Many Limitations

The initial reaction towards the stealth field fey was surprise and wonder.

Those who had already encountered it during the exhibition already guessed that it would end up with a high ranking, but all of the other people who were tuning into the broadcast only managed to discover this product for the first time.

This was the debut of the stealth field fey!

Naturally, Ves grew immensely curious at the providence of this special fey. It was not every day that a high-tech development company with definite ties to a first-class power introduced a heavily simplified adaptation of advanced stealth technology to the masses.

Cutting-edge stealth technology was the exclusive preserve of states and major organizations.

Only they possessed the funding and other conditions needed to push the boundaries of this niche technological field.

As far as Ves was aware of, the effort to combine existing stealth technology with hyper technology was still a developing field. Many mech designers and scientists may have managed to produce breakthroughs, but their first priority was to keep their design applications in-house to benefit their own respective groups.

It was rare for a power to have put so much effort into researching successful solutions, only to convert it into a commercial solution where the public could easily gain access to the conclusions of all of that painstaking research.

Even if the company in question sold the stealth field fey at astounding prices, the profits generated from selling them could not compensate for the early loss of a temporary but highly strategic technological advantage.

There had to be more behind this profound move. Ves slightly narrowed his eyes as he looked down at the woman that led this development project.

The dusky-skinned engineer did not look as if she was here to market a product from her company.

She possessed the typical demeanor of a no-nonsense scientist who wanted to do nothing more than to remain behind closed doors and work with numbers all day. She did not look as if she cared about the business side of the technology sector in the slightest.

Her tone only strengthened that impression.

"Our stealth field fey is a strategic contribution of Heq-Lock Integrated Technologies, a subsidiary of the Devos Ancient Clan of the Terran Alliance. It utilizes a second-class adaptation of a new strain of advanced stealth technology that is expressly designed to overcome the common weaknesses of indigenous alien sensor technology, with a particular focus on deceiving their spatial and gravitic sensor systems. The stealth field fey should also be effective against most general human sensor systems, but it is not optimized for this usage."

Ah. That explained much. This was a deliberate ploy from the Devos Ancient Clan, which had become one of the allies of the Larkinson Clan.

The part about being optimized for use against the native aliens was an important distinction.

Stealth technology could be used for all kinds of misdeeds, so the parties that controlled it tried to keep it out of the hands of the general public.

Even if the public gained access to stealth tech, it was usually so outdated that they were prone to fail when confronted by modern detection systems.

The stealth field fey was a little different because it utilized a much more up-to-date variation of stealth technology. The only reason why the Devosans dared to release it was because it had been reduced to second-class and because it was entirely tuned to work against the native aliens.

"We have conducted numerous field tests of our stealth field fey, and we can confirm that they work." Czilia Avoqee continued to explain as if she was reporting to her superiors as opposed to potential customers. "Of the 14 attempts we have made, 12 have managed to advance quietly from a distance and remained undetected until they came within 15 kilometers of different alien forces."

That was an impressive result!

Although getting detected 15 kilometers away was not as good as remaining hidden until reaching point-blank range, the remaining distance was almost nothing in space terms.

There were dreadnoughts that were 15 kilometers long!

"Are the stealth field fey effective in environments outside of open space?"

The lead engineer shook her head. "I am afraid not, professor. Our product is not able to produce an effective stealth field under atmospheric conditions or elsewhere. They are solely designed to be employed in space. It is best if they are employed during an active battle as the presence of interference degrades the performance of enemy sensor systems and reduces the likelihood of detecting inconsistencies. If necessary, the stealth field fey can also be employed outside of a battle, but the risks are elevated in those cases."

Dr. Avoqee proceeded to project a simulation that showed the deployment of a Fey Fianna, four stealth fey and a couple of other mechs within the pyramid-shaped field.

"This is the most basic deployment scenario for the stealth field fey. A set of four fey deployed in a tetrahedron formation can effectively obscure the emissions of a small number of mechs. The exact amount is heavily dependent on the level of active interference at the site, the quantity of mechs, the spacing of the stealth field fey and most importantly the activity levels of the mechs themselves."

The simulation began to highlight a few variables such as the emissions outputted by the mechs.

"In general, the stronger the mechs, the more powerful emissions tend to be. This poses a problem as it becomes exponentially more difficult to minimize their presence. A larger quantity of mechs also imposes greater challenges as the stealth field fey will not only have to increase their distance from each other, but also have to compensate for many more changing variables. Active maneuvers and course changes are especially problematic as they produce much greater pattern changes that all need to be compensated for in real-time. In addition to these complications, hyper mechs and high-ranking mechs always affect the E energy radiation around them. Our stealth field fey can only negate their E energy fluctuations to a limited extent."

The mention of all of these limitations and constraints significantly depressed people's enthusiasm for this fey.

It shouldn't have been a surprise. Obtaining effective stealth capabilities by employing just four of these relatively small fey never came cheap. The development team led by Dr. Avoqee had to make a huge number of sacrifices in order to render it at least somewhat useful in this particular form.

The woman did not seem to care about all of the dismay she was causing with her words.

"However, the greatest constraint to utilizing the stealth field fey is their elevated power consumption. It takes a great amount of energy to maintain even a small active stealth field. Do not expect them to be able to lurk in space for hours or days on end by themselves. Not only will they drain their limited energy cells fairly quickly, but their heat sinks will be stressed to their capacity as well. There is no effective means for us to increase these limits without making the price even more unreasonable."

This was the biggest letdown of the stealth field fey. What use were they when they ran out of juice after being active for a relatively short time?

Still, not everyone gave up on this expensive and overpriced tech demo. Now that Dr. Avoqee had done her due diligence and given her audience a necessary reality check, she began to explain how the stealth field fey could be utilized in an effective manner despite all of the aforementioned limitations.

"Heq-Lock Integrated Technologies still considers the stealth field fey to be the successful outcome of an experimental development project because it has managed to fulfill its mission in numerous real scenarios. In every test, we have employed a variety of different configurations and solutions to increase the success rate."

The projection changed to show annotated footage of these tests.

"Here, you can see that we have managed to secretly deliver up to 30 mechs and 5 boarding shuttles in close proximity to an enemy fleet on standby. The lack of interference makes it much harder to approach in stealth, but we have compensated for that by resorting to numbers. Of the mechs that we have employed in this capacity, 15 of them are comprised of Fey Fianna. Of this group, 10 are entirely equipped with stealth field fey, which means that there are 40 stealth field fey working in total."

40 stealth field fey! That amounted to a large investment as none of them were cheap!

However, relying on numbers clearly worked as close to an entire mech company managed to approach an alien fleet without getting detected in advance!

The footage showed other interesting adaptations.

"In order to minimize the emissions of the mechs, shuttles and fey, they have been launched out of an advancing carrier vessel on a ballistic trajectory. None of the mechs aside from the stealth field fey have been fully activated. This allows the mechs to preserve their energy levels and remain cold for the entire duration. The only serious shortcoming to this tactic is that the lack of active flight significantly extends the time to arrival. The stealth field fey cannot remain active during this entire time interval."

The footage showed how the testers overcame this problem. Not all of the stealth field fey were active at the same time. 30 of them were constantly maintaining a cube-shaped formation while the other 10 remained on standby.

When a stealth field fey started to reach its limit, it dropped out of formation while a spare one moved into place.

Specialized support mechs that traveled with the covert mech unit gently replenished the spent fey. After that, the recharged fey were put on standby until it was their turn to maintain the collective stealth field again.

This was quite an ingenious setup. The use of so many stealth field fey at once not only increased the total coverage, but also added a lot more redundancy to the operation.

The limited runtimes of the stealth field fey were not that big of deal so long as the mech unit had ways to replenish them during the entire journey.

As long as speed was not an issue, the stealth field fey did not have to work excessively hard to obscure the emissions of so many small craft. Mechs that did little else aside from coasting through empty space generally weren't very difficult to hide.

The negation-attributed hyper materials also did their jobs of making sure the hyper mechs did not produce any noticeable wakes or trails in the surrounding E energy flows.

Although sensor systems that could effectively observe and measure the flow of E energy radiation were practically unheard of, it was better to account for this potential threat in advance rather than allow it to be a critical weakness a few years later.

Dr. Avoquee smiled as the footage showed the conclusion of the successful test. The infiltration unit successfully came close enough to sprint the remaining kilometers at full burn and rapidly sneak the boarding shuttles into the open hangar bay of an alien battleship that had failed to activate all of her segmented transphasic energy shields in time.

The footage ended at that point. It did not show how the infiltration unit managed to get away from this incredibly dangerous situation, but it was not necessary.

The point was that it demonstrated that the stealth field fey could open up a lot of new possibilities in the Red War so long as they were properly used!

"We have found that our stealth field fey is most effective when it is operating in larger numbers and as part of a mixed element. They can be utilized to smuggle torpedoes at close proximity or pass through blockades in complete secrecy. They can be used to spy on alien strongholds or extract critical personnel. The use of stealth technology is not uncommon in first-class combat, but with the release of our new fey, we hope that second-class mech forces will be able to leverage this capability to their advantage as well."

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