1200 1200 Poke It With A Stick
Max ordered a fast attack group to be diverted to the ongoing battle. The team members were all capable of flight, being Shin in their enclosed light attack craft, and Valkia Archangels. Dropping them from a moving transport shouldn't be an issue, and then they could take the fight directly to the enemy, who was stubbornly remaining out of sight of the artillery.
They had orbital surveillance on the region, but the Great Enemy had been fighting for as long as anyone could remember, and they knew to keep smoke screens or optical camouflage over their positions so that they couldn't be precision targeted.
[Attack team Victor One One Seven inbound on the enemy position. We are entering the artillery range now, preparing for a hot drop.] The Android Thunderbird pilot informed them as the team approached their destination.
Nico sighed, but Max could see that her expression was a bit vacant, so she was actually more focused on her intervention into the Androids battle tactics than the work she was doing with the Portals.
With her, it was difficult to tell. She always had multiple things going on in her mind at the same time, and there was no real way for him to tell what took priority unless she wasn't focused on the one that involved motor skills.
"Alright, I've given them the standard evasion patterns for the Valkia and the Shin to reduce the chances of friendly fire incidents during the assault. They will scale down but not completely stop the artillery." She explained once her attention returned to the room.
It was an annoyance to be stuck in here while the rest of the unit was fighting, but as Commander of the planetary fleet by default, owing to the fact that he had two World Ships under his direct command here, Max knew that he wasn't going to get to go out and fight very much.
But what he could do was borrow Nico's skill to connect himself to the sensor feeds and use that data to improve the targeting of the entire Alliance force.
Most of them didn't know where the extra targeting data was coming from, they just assumed that the humans had upgraded their equipment when they had made it and silently celebrated their good fortune to be able to pick off a target with such ease.
"Admiral, if you enter your Mecha with the symbiotic neural link, you will be able to process sensor data more efficiently. I can link every satellite, drone and Android unit to your feed, and then it should relay from you back through the entire force." Sylvie suggested once she realized what Max was doing with the massive amount of data he was transferring.
"Can the Mecha even keep up with that?" Max asked.
"If you link my mobile emitter with the Emperor Class Mecha's processor and engage the link, it should be more than enough. The unit might be severely limited in its power output here, but that doesn't reduce the processing power that it has, and the unit was designed for a Command role with additional quantum processing capacity."
Max headed for the Mecha, shuddering uncomfortably as the link merged his senses with the Mecha itself, as if it was a second skin. That was very different from how he usually piloted, but with the massive amount of data, it did seem to go more smoothly, and it was how the Androids were processing data, which made it easier to relay his instructions.
"We could use Command Pods like this in all of our major vessels. This is much more efficient than the regular method." Max agreed, as Sylvie linked the Mecha to the World Ship's processors to enable it to keep track of over a million allied units at once, as well as all the enemy targets.
"Has anyone ever told you that your brain is weird? I was not expecting that you would be able to keep track of everything, I thought that it would be like living in a globe simulation, where you could travel instantly and see anything you wanted, not just everything all at once." Sylvie replied.
"It's a unique advantage of my mind. Nico can do something similar, but the added targeting data is unique to me."
"Calculating." Sylvie replied, as she tried to work out the algorithm that the System Nanobots were using to determine all the proper target information. They were a hive mind AI, and she was an AI, so she was fairly certain that there should be some way that she could understand the methodology.
Max didn't bother trying to stop her. If she could figure it out, she could teach the others, and then all of their World Ships would have the ability to use [Unified Force] and [Multi Point Targeting]. That level of advantage would crush the Great Enemy everywhere that the Androids showed up.
Even now, only a few minutes into the Pilot's seat, the dozens of ongoing battles were already turning around as targeting accuracy increased, even while the Pilots were focusing on evasive manoeuvres.
Those wild snapshots as they dodged normally didn't do much, but the Valkia in the Archangel Exoskeletons were taking full advantage of the ability to fire blind and had quickly learned to trust the targeting data.
They would dodge incoming fire and just swing their weapon behind them to fire, trusting that the data was right and they would hit the target. It was ridiculous, but it was working.
It was also incredible for Morale. The Valkia were confident by default, but the Greys were not, and this newfound capability had convinced many of them that their fortunes had taken a turn for the better, and they had become the protagonist in their own story, the next great hero of the Alliance, who would crush an enemy invasion single-handedly and gain the respect of billions.
It was a good thing that Max didn't transmit anything back to them, or his amusement would have crushed their egos. Who would want to learn that they were the living targeting drone for the actual protagonist of the imaginary superhero story in their minds?
