While Max was working through the frustrations of an all-new Super Heavy Chassis design, Nico was having the time of her life doing the live testing of the X109 Fast Attack Crusader. Built with the angular and humanoid design more common with Line Mecha, and sporting an incredibly powerful thruster array on its back, it could traverse terrain with incredible speed, moving at hundreds of kilometers an hour.
Any enemy that saw a wing of these Mecha coming at them would be rightly scared out of their wits, once they realized what they were seeing.
The Mecha was designed for close to medium range combat, with the new fusion flamer on its left arm, and a sword in its right hand, with an experimental disruptor cannon, mounted over its right shoulder. That was the truly fearsome weapon of the group unless you were in a light Mecha, which would be turned to slag in an instant by the fusion flamer.
The disruptor wasn't perfect yet, but they had found that the side effect of disrupting all electrical activity was just as valuable as the intended effect of breaking molecular bonds.
The weapon was powerful enough to shut down Mecha's reactors from three hundred meters, while at under a hundred meters, it would most often turn any armor it hit directly to ash. When it hit a biological being at a long distance, the radiation fried their neural systems and overwhelmed the body's electrical impulses, killing them instantly, with no visible warning. From close range, organic matter simply vanished in a puff of dust and escaping gasses.
It left no light, no heat, and no noise to indicate that it had been fired, so unless the enemy had a radiation sensor active, they wouldn't even realize why they were dying.
In short, Nico was reasonably sure she was in love.
[If we introduce a wavelength oscillation, I'm pretty sure that we can get the pilot, even if it is through the cockpit shielding.] Nico suggested to the Testing team, which only sighed at her sixteenth lethality increase suggestion of the day.
The problem was that they were all good suggestions, and she usually had some sort of data or algorithm to back them up. The same was true this time, and they added the code for the radiation wavelength oscillation to the simulation and ran it again.
The test started over, with a Line Mecha at five hundred meters, well outside the effective range for the weapon to shut down the reactor or damage the Mecha's armor.
The burst hit the mecha, and something that the team did not expect began to happen began to happen. The temperature of the water-based liquids in the cockpit, including the water in the Pilot's body all instantly spiked to over four hundred degrees Celcius, flash boiling them all to vapor and causing the Pilot themselves to explode.
Half of the team rushed for the trash can as their breakfast threatened to come back up, while Nico and two of the researchers cheered on the successful result.
[Effectiveness still degrades at an exponential rate with distance, but there is hope for it to be lethal against a variety of targets. Moving on to the Crusader Class Tests, and then we can start in on the alien and exotic materials testing.] The team leader announced.
Uncle Lu, who was watching from his office, raised an eyebrow in interest at this development. He hadn't thought about trying to find a radiation range that would penetrate the shielding on the cockpit. They were designed to reject harmful radiation of all sorts, but the Disruptor wasn't just radiation, it only emitted it as a side effect, and the particle beam itself was what was penetrating the shielding, and then emitting the radiation from inside the cockpit.
That meant that more work needed to be done though. If they had a weapon that could penetrate cockpit shielding, eventually someone would reverse engineer it. If they couldn't defend against it, the results would be disastrous.
There was also a more complex secondary problem. International treaties banned the use of weapons designed to maim or cripple. If this weapon was used in an uncontained manner, it could irradiate a huge area and cause widespread radiation poisoning, which was definitely against the International Convention on War.
Uncle Lu might not have known Nico too well, but he knew that the idea of using the Disruptor as an area of effect weapon would come up sooner or later, and he would have to make sure that no such experiments were conducted, so they could never be accused of designing a weapon capable of creating a treaty breach.
In the past, many Mecha reactors had gone critical, before the designs were modified to prevent such catastrophe, and the radiation from them wasn't considered a treaty breach, because it wasn't an intended effect of the power generators. If they didn't test the Disruptor as a dispersed beam, they could claim it was an unexpected failure if it happened in the future.
The Crusader Class tests were a failure until fifty meters or less, as the varied composition of the cockpit shielding stopped the beam well enough to prevent the targeted radiation emissions. That brought a sense of relief to Uncle Lu. A small upgrade to the cockpit shielding on these new Mecha would make their pilots safe from the side effects of friendly fire. If they could effectively shield the power systems as well, it would be possible to use the weapon with friendly Mecha in close contact, instead of treating it like an explosive weapon, not to be used with friendly units near the target.
Between the X109 and the X137, it felt like every item tested led to two more modifications that needed to be made, but they were coming along well. The Chassis of the X109 was nearly flawless, though lackluster in flight, and the X137 was actually functional by the end of the second week.
To Max, it felt like an eternity of minute changes and adjustments, but two weeks was an incredibly short period of time to rush a Chassis design to theoretical functionality by Mecha Development standards. Most new designs took a minimum of five years to work out all the bugs, and another five to be ready for the assembly line.
Uncle Lu had set a goal of six months to get both new Mecha ready for the first rounds of Battlefield Testing. Central Command had declared that the stalemate must end, so they needed something that would change the balance. Three new designs of Mecha, all with significantly improved capabilities and reduced manufacturing demands might be just the thing to overturn the balance of power, and not only put down the remaining Nobility Rebellions, but also deal with the Empire's more hostile neighbors.
