Uncle Lu laughed at the shock on everyone's faces as Nico revealed what her team believed they had accomplished.
"Maybe we should hold off on the rest of the meeting. I can already see that nobody will be able to focus until we can create and test a weapons system that integrates these two principles." He suggested.
Many hands went up at once, including Ranarth's, and the decision was made that they would hold off on the other designs until they had a chance to see this combo in action.
That meant rearranging the work spaces back into one large station, where they would both do the digital designs, and then build the first mechanical mockup so that they could test the weapon in the real world and make sure that it worked in a practical sense and not just in theory.
The two designs both had theoretically functional design schematics, thanks to the advanced systems of Max and Nico, so the first step was the easiest. They input the two weapons onto a basic Cutter hull and integrated them for the first Virtual Reality tests.
The scenario was familiar, a Greater Energy Being was attempting to move between layers of space, and they were going to try to stop it.
[First up, we will fire the destabilizing pulse, and then when the Energy Being is prevented from moving back and forth between layers, the Orbital Lance will finish it off. Well, in theory.] Max informed everyone through the text function of the VR simulator.
The target began its offensive, and Nico fired the first round to destabilize the layers. The effect was almost like mud, the being was slowed, but it was too powerful to be torn apart by the calculated energy fluctuations. Then the Orbital Lance hit it, and the disintegration effect seemed to freeze it in place as the secondary fission explosion tore apart its body.
It wasn't a true fission explosion as the creature was pure solidified energy, but the effect was similar. The bonds that held it apart were forcefully destroyed, and the energy burst forth through multiple layers of space, losing cohesion and fading into background radiation.
"It's beautiful." Ranarth sighed as he saw how easily one ship was calculated to be able to take out a Greater Energy Being.
Last time it took their whole fleet, plus a fleet of human ships, to do the job.
Max messaged the observers again.
[As standard procedure, we will run the simulation a hundred times and see what the outcome looks like, and then we will have to test it in the real world. Preferably on lesser Energy Beings first.] He explained.
The second test was similar to the first, but in the third one, something odd happened. If the Greater Energy Being tried to retreat a little, the whole effect was basically cancelled, and it was simply pushed back out of the layer without being destroyed.
Over the course of the tests, that same general effect occurred over thirty times, sending them back to the design sheets to try to adjust the weapon outputs and balances, as well as the timing to attempt to make it a reliable attack.
"Relax, this is how design is supposed to go, it's never perfect the first time." Max assured his team, who were somewhat demoralized by the lack of initial success.
"Really? I seem to recall things going more smoothly." One of them doubted.
One of the Innu from Nico's research team laughed. "That's because we test the ideas that we send to you before anyone here sees what comes out of the Absolution Research Labs."
The others from her team nodded. They went through this frustration on a regular basis, often for weeks or months before they got a design perfect. Then they sent it off for variations and improvements by others.
With two whole teams working on it, they had a new variation ready to test every two hours, with variable results. Some were more stable but less effective, some were more effective when they worked, but rather flaky. This was the hard part of development, making your weapon work in every one of the one hundred scenarios that the computer randomly created.
In order to make the weapon stable and reliable against the Greater Energy Being, they ended up having to change the vessel they were testing with. The solution that ended up being able to surmount most actions that the enemy could take required so much power that a Colony Ship would have to come to a dead stop and use all of their power to activate the weapon.
It was an insane level of output, and the side effects took them days to even begin to mitigate, but they did have a solution as to what the task would realistically take. At least in theory.
Once they finally thought that they had the combination of the two working well enough that it was reliable against the Greater Energy Beings, it was time to try to combine them into one weapon that was usable by the Mecha.
That involved a lot of space management and adjustment, but they already knew what sort of output was necessary, and it could be scaled down in intensity while they would use the weight of numbers to make up for the pure intensity that was needed.
As they started to modify the weapon, Max started to make plans on how this could be worked onto a new Mecha design. They needed something that was on a more Epic scale that would be a match for the Greater Energy beings, but currently they lacked a power source that could keep up with a Colony Ship's Warp Drive and still fit in the chassis of a Mecha.
The very thought was a bit ridiculous and insane. Maybe the Darklings knew of something, but they hadn't let it slip yet if they did.
If they couldn't come up with that, they were either going to need to come up with a way to escape when attacked, or they needed a way to freeze the being in place for a longer period of time so that they could defeat it with smaller numbers.
Neither was going to be an easy task, but there was at least a chance that there was an option to stun lock them more effectively than using an entire fleet of Destroyers.
