Chapter 646 A Man's Romance

Lee Joon-ho and Ayaka were walking toward the New New New South Wales Research Base, a couple tons of raw materials hovering in the air behind them, courtesy of Joon-ho’s affinity. “So what do you think the emperor will do? Will he actually come here?” Joon-ho asked.

(Ed note: Added another New to New New South Wales since they’re rebuilding it. Not an error, just me being silly and wondering just how many “New”s we’ll be able to add before this arc is finished.)

“I’m not sure. I mean, I’m pretty sure he won’t order us to forcefully subjugate the Proximans. I’ve never met him before, but if you look at the history of the empire’s founding and the years leading up to it, he doesn’t seem like the kind of leader to initiate wars of aggression. Even when the rest of the world formed a coalition against Eden, he only defended himself and it wasn’t until they launched pretty much the entire world’s nuclear arsenal at him that he retaliated. And after that, he even put the world leaders on trial instead of executing them. It wasn’t even in a kangaroo court, either—the trials were fair, and some leaders were even left as heads of their countries.

“But will he come here? I don’t know. It’d take an awfully long time... he’d be in transit for a full year, plus however long it took him to convince Lady Birch and the others once he arrived.” “I guess that’s fair,” Joon-ho mused. “But wouldn’t it be awesome for him to actually show up? He’s my hero, you know.”

Ayaka just smiled at the youngster and refrained from patting his head as they continued working on the infrastructure of the New New New South Wales Research Base.

......

Task Force Proxima had hundreds of different teams and many more ad-hoc workgroups dealing with various issues ranging from the mundane to the critical. It was like a complex machine made up of many moving parts, each of which contributing something that made the whole far greater than the sum of its parts. But in practice, what that meant was....

Meetings. Hundreds, if not thousands of meetings. At any given moment, whether it be day, night, or some unholy combination of the two, someone, somewhere, was stuck in a meeting.

Currently, one of the more important of those meetings was taking place on the protostellar forge between the engineers responsible for designing and producing new hardware.

It wasn’t an emergency meeting; far from it. It was just a routine monthly meeting where the attendees reported what they had accomplished over the month before and any minor problems they were currently facing that didn’t merit an actual emergency meeting. It was also during routine meetings like this one that people would submit proposals, either for new products or suggestions on how to streamline the production process of a product they already had in their design catalogue. And when the chairperson of today’s meeting opened the floor to new business, a light lit up in front of one of the junior engineers in attendance, signaling that he had new business to introduce.

The meeting chair nodded at the junior engineer and said, “The floor is yours.”

“Thank you.” The engineer stood and waved his hand, generating a hologram of a giant over the conference table. “Based on our data, they should be approximately ten times as strong as humans, as a baseline. And it’s fairly obvious that we don’t have any vehicles that would accommodate their size, nor could we make them and have them remain even moderately combat effective.

“So my suggestion is that we implement power armor for the giants, and mecha of equivalent size for human-sized combatants. Giving the giants power armor would amplify their strength and provide power to ship-class weaponry. We could probably fit cruiser-class point-defense lasers on their shoulders, along with a corvette-class coilgun modified to be carried as a rifle.” He paused for a moment, realizing that he was wandering slightly off topic.

“But we don’t necessarily need to stop there,” he continued. “We can design mecha for human-sized pilots, along with even bigger reactors powering stronger weaponry. I suggest, though, that due to the more complex nature of mecha compared to power armor, we should design the power armor to act more along the lines of close-ranged shock troops and use the mecha as long-ranged support and highly mobile artillery platforms. That way we maximize the benefits and minimize the drawbacks of each platform, all while keeping them to a size that should be effective in combat against any enemy they come across.”

The engineer threw a data file to the others around the conference table and the room went silent as everyone read the file from start to finish. Although some of them were disappointed when they saw that the mecha and armor in question would only be ten to fifteen meters tall, and completely unlike their childhood “giant robots, fuck yeah!” dreams, they understood the realities of combat. Giant robots may be a man’s romance, and they may look good in movies and cartoons, but when it came to reality, simply trying to maneuver thirty-story-tall robots around a city without completely destroying it would be functionally impossible.

Thus, based on the information they had at hand, giants would be the perfect shock troopers. They wouldn’t require as much power from a reactor or fusion battery to move under the mass of their armor, which meant more of a limited power resource could be diverted to beefed up weaponry. Shoulder-mounted lasers, naval-class coilguns, and even close-quarters weaponry like plasma swords and vibroknives the size of a standard human sword were all on the table.

Mecha, on the other hand, were too inherently fragile to withstand the shock of melee combat. They were comprised of entirely too many moving parts, which meant they would be perfect as long-range fire platforms. And since humans were much smaller than giants, the engineers could fit entire fusion reactors into the mecha form factor, which would lead to Really Big Guns being a possibility. For example, some of the secondary weapons on a battleship, like plasma casters, grasers, and even entire missile control and coordination suites were a possibility!

Everyone at the conference table got lost in the possibilities presented by mecha as a combat platform and the silence stretched out until someone broke it with an inadvertent sneeze.

“Excellent suggestion,” the meeting chairman said, startled out of his daze by the sudden noise. “I think we’ll adjourn here for the day and when we meet again in a month, bring potential mecha and power armor designs with you for approval. But we’re done for today, ladies and gentlemen.”