With ti to kill during their travel back to the front lines, Max got to work analyzing and optimizing their new complent of cha as Sylvie finished them.
Unlike the ship itself, the alloys weren't quite primitive. Instead, they were mostly ceramic armoured, which was energy efficient to produce, despite its complex structure, with the downside that it was brittle and considered a wear item, replaced after battle.
Unlike the cha that Max was used to, which were repaired and maintained with the sa basic structure for decades or even centuries, these were designed to be modular and easy to section out and rebuild between engagents.
As long as your repair bay had the parts, you could have the whole armour set and a limb replaced in under an hour.
It wasn't ineffective, just a different approach to battle that needed more logistics staff than was usually sent with a Kepler military unit. But with bioengineered soldiers suited for every task, they could have all the logistics staff that they wanted, and they wouldn't see it as a failing to get into a better job.
The weapons on the unit he was inspecting were the impressive part. While the Fusion Core of the World Ship had been designed to a lower standard than the plasma weapons of modern human cha, the Plasma weapons on the cha were incredibly advanced.
They were designed for planetary combat, which the Great Enemy also seed to prefer, given the way that they blockaded planets they attacked to prevent space battles. So, they contained a smaller reserve of gases for the Plasma weapons, but they had the ability to filter and purify multiple input gases to alter their output against different targets.
It was an interesting proposition, but Max could see how it would work. Most energy shields were optimized against certain wavelengths of energy. Changing the wavelength or type of energy that you were using would defeat the purpose of the optimized shielding and reduce the output power that your weapons needed.
It was identical in theory to the way that they had made the variable Disintegrator able to alter its pattern to get past shielding.
"You know, Sylvie. These weapons have really stood the test of ti. The cha themselves are designed for a different style of combat than our generals advocate for these days, but the weapons would work with any combat style that they are put in." Max comnted as he worked.
"Thank you. I had a role in choosing these ones when we were first deployed. After careful analysis of the war zone, this is the selection that I approved and created for the inventory." The AI explained.
"You did a good job. This is the smallest class you created, I believe. Or did you make one smaller than the ten-tre class?" Max asked.
"No, these are the smallest on board. The lighter units were previously determined to be inefficient due to limited power output. Also, the zone that I was assigned to was known for enemy biochanical war machines in the ten-tre class, as well as heavily ard mobile armour."
Max rembered those. The energy beings had warped the growth of certain soldiers to ld them completely with their cha in a horrific three-way combination of mortal, chanical and demonic entities, with the lesser Energy Being providing the loyalty and blood thirst that the Great Enemy demanded.
They hadn't seen many of those in this wave of attacks, but there had been so reports from within the alliance of possessed machines, which might be the sa thing.
"Should we alter the remaining units to better suit the modern battlefield?" Sylvie asked.
"Only a little. While the ablative armour is outdated, it is effective. We just need to improve the energy shielding over the units, and then it will be a much smaller issue without altering the design.
So, what I suggest is that we alter all the power plants to this new design, and then add the Void Shield generators to them, in addition to their existing refractor shield. That should bring them up to modern standards and allow for faster charging of the weapons systems for an increased firing rate." Max decided.
Sylvie humd happily as she worked, a noise that Max was beginning to equate with the verbal equivalent of the loading screen, or the spinning loading cursor icon.
"Done. The remaining units will be made to that spec, while the existing ten percent of the force will be held in reserve until upgraded." She announced.
"That is acceptable to . Will the rest of the production be finished before we make it to the combat lines? We might not have the crew yet, but it is best if we can get the equipnt prepared in case of a need for ergency deploynt." Max asked.
"It will be. But what sort of ergency deploynt could we do without Pilots?" Sylvie asked.
"How are your Piloting skills? We let the AI on the Drone vessels make all the tactical decisions, and it pilots all the drones while the Androids Pilot the cha." Max explained.
He could acutally feel the projection vibrate under his hand as Sylvie processed the concept that she might be asked to pilot the entire ship full of cha in the future. She had never extended herself beyond the ship before, much less tried to split her processes into that many pieces.
The calculations said that it was possible, and that the cha computers could be used as additional processing cores to continue running her subroutines if they were cut off from the whole, in the sa way that the Androids functioned.
It would take so work to create a codebase for her to work with. No, wait, she had one to work with. If she just used the digital data from Nico, she could use it as the base for her piloting programming, as the Cyborg had already digitized all the relevant data. Then she would implant her own personality and code over top, and program it into an emitter and the data banks of the cha.
"It will take approximately three days for to adapt my programming and the cha to prepare for remote Piloting by AI." She announced once the calculations were complete.
"Alright then. Prepare the contingency plan, so we are ready if we are attacked before we have a crew ready."
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