[1-200] THE MECH TOUCH

Chapter 34: Arm and Leg

Hans stepped into the gauntlet with a running start. The drake raised eyebrows when it first appeared. Its humanoid form moved around with raptor legs and featured stubby wings on its back for an extra boost. While its rounded shield and good quality sword told everyone that its main role was a knight, the Drake also featured two strange elongated boxes on its shoulders.

"Did you put together your own shoulder mounted lasers? What was wrong with using the readily available ones?" Carlos asked in confusion.

"The ones from the junk pile don't bite hard enough."

"Oh. The shoulder mounts look like they weigh a lot. Is your mech able to handle all of it?"

"That's why I went with the raptor legs in the first place. They are able to maintain their speed better even when carrying a bigger burden."

"Yeah, but they're made for raptor mechs in specific. The balance of your half-humanoid mech must be hell."

"I spent some time adjusting its default modes, and I'm sure Hans can handle the rest."

"That's a lot of trust you're putting in the test pilot."

Indeed he did. While Ves was able to accomplish a lot in twelve hours, he couldn't optimize the balance of the mech completely. He hoped that with Hans experience in piloting all kinds of mechs would come to good use here. And from the look of the Drake's fluent gait, he encountered no insurmountable problems.

The clipped flight system came brilliantly to life. Hans took advantage of its diminished output to put an extra spring in his steps. At certain moments, the Drake moved faster than light mechs even as it weighed as much as the heavier medium mechs. While it wasn't able to avoid detection due to the heat it generated, it was able to outrun a couple of groups.

When the Drake encountered an ambush of two heavy mechs and a smattering of other weight classes, Hans aggressively charged closer despite the disparity in firepower. The large round shield drew most of the firepower, allowing the Drake to come closer enough to make a few quick attacks with his sword that disabled most of the vulnerable weapon mounts on the heavy mechs.

Having taken care of the heavy firepower, Hans darted back and forth and dueled the more mobile mechs at their terms. With the wings acting as jump jets, the Drake was often able to close the distance abruptly with the enemy. While the laser cannons suffered from poor accuracy and tracking, if the Drake came close enough, the damage they caused always slowed down the opponent, softening them up for a lethal sword blow. The Drake progressed forward on a bloody path.

Unfortunately, the constant activation of both its flight system and laser cannons rapidly built up heat while draining the mech's energy. Ves wasn't worried about the energy, as he had packed the Drake with enough energy cells to last the entire gauntlet. Heat was a very different problem, and once the Drake neared its limit, its effectiveness would drop drastically.

Heat accumulation troubled designers ever since the first mechs came into existence. Even after 400 years of mech development, modern mechs still faced the plain old dilemma of balancing power and heat. Newer power reactors outputted higher amounts of energy, while energy cells packed more and more capacity with each new iteration. Heat absorption and heat dissipation technology only barely kept up with the times.

Air was a very poor conductor of heat. This was a good thing for some people, as it meant their coffees and soups wouldn't cool down to room temperature in seconds. For mechs, this presented a big problem, as even the most effective passive radiators could do so much in normal Terran-standard air conditions that so many worlds had terraformed into. It was worse in locations of low air and vacuum conditions like on lifeless moons.