The Mech Touch novel Chapter 7266

The 'skirmish' lasted for a while.

Even if the Goliath Hive did not make a serious commitment, the mutated voribugs stillthrew a formidable quantity of cannon fodder at the defenses.

Every defensive platform had to fire their weapons and expend resources in order torepel the defenses.

From a strategic perspective, the difference it made was fairly limited, but so long as theGoliath Hive kept up the pressure, systems would break down sooner or later.

Most machines were never meant to be used at such a high intensity. Every part andcomponent possessed a life span, and this attribute rapidly diminished during activeuse.

Proper servicing, maintenance and repairs could bring back some of the life span thatwas lost, but that required valuable time where the assets became unavailable for atime.

The defenders of the Philaster Crestia System could not afford to put too much of itsassets in reserve.

While it was still able to place a substantial share of its mechs and warships in reserve,the defensive platforms and orbital fortresses had to keep working in order to ensurethat not a single voribug was able to slip past the orbital network and infiltrate thesurface of the planet.

When Ves pulled up the status of all of the defensive platforms, he could clearly see thatmany of the sections turned yellow or even red.

The proportion of parts that had turned yellow were particularly high. The parts in redwere much less prevalent, which told Ves that the maintenance crews focused most oftheir efforts on addressing complete breakdowns as opposed to preventativemaintenance.

The latter had become a luxury on the new front.

The defense of Philaster Crestia lll was likely doomed at this point. Even withreinforcements, the continued breakdown of so many assets made the act of holdingthis planet untenable.

Sure, Ves brought hundreds of mechs, dozens of sub-capital ships and a whopping 30Ascended Giants to the star system, but none of them possessed the right means todefeat swarms and swarms of voribugs.

Once those defensive platforms and other hardware broke down during anoverwhelming assault, the two squads of Ascended Giants would have to retreat if theywanted to avoid getting exhausted and gnawed to death!

The same applied to the expert mechs and ace mechs in the star system.

To Ves, it didn't matter if Saint Rosa Orphan finally woke up from her coma and was ableto make good use of the Riot Mark Ill.

Even after upgrading the latter to a proper ace mech, it could still get exhausted.

The only way to beat an enemy that was able to send in an astronomical amount ofcannon fodder was to bring a large enough force.

The orbital defenses were not enough. No matter how many more platforms theRubarthans built, they could only be used in a defensive capacity.

To eliminate the threat posed by the mutated voribugs, the Rubarthans would have tobring in lots of mechs and warships before sending them off to cleanse the satellitesbeing used as resource points by the enemy.

This was an incredibly tedious and time-consuming effort. It was also beyond theRubarthan Pact's means to bring out so many troops when it was already straining tofend off the native aliens.

Ves directed his attention to the mechs in the field.

They were very clearly differentiated from each other. The contingent of GammaScorchers dispatched by the Cybernetic Empire stood out the most due to theirextensive use of high-powered energy weapons.

Many of the mechs of this unit no longer fired narrow gamma laser beams because mostof the energy would end up going to waste.

The mutated voribugs had studied the Gamma Scorchers a long time ago and adaptedtheir attack approach. The bugs assumed a very thin and shallow sheet-like formationand sent them forward in the form of regular attack waves.

Each time an energy beam struck an individual voribug, there were no bugs behind it, sothe remainder of the energy of the attack would end up hitting nothing.

Through this simple solution, the voribugs managed to put quite a lot of pressure on theGamma Scorcher mechs until the Cybers had finally adapted them to localcircumstances.

The mech designers and mech technicians had modified the multipurpose mechs sothat they drastically tuned down the frequencies while simultaneously decreasing thefocus and coherency of their attack output.

The result was that the Gamma Scorcher mechs wielded the equivalent of energyThe result was that the Gamma Scorcher mechs wielded the equivalent of energyshotguns.

Each pull of the trigger resulted in large and very visible cones of light that spread outrapidly but did not possess much range.

While this forced the powerful machines to fight against the swarms much closer thanthey were comfortable with, their killing efficiency had skyrocketed!

Even so, Ves did not think the Gamma Scorchers could keep up this performance forlong without enduring problems.

Since the Cyber contingent belonged to a third party, Ves did not gain access to theirdetailed status data.

However, Ves was still able to glean lots of clues by zooming in and observing them inaction.

The Cyber mech industry was approximately two mech generations ahead. Thatresulted in many small technological improvements and innovations, but it did not givethe Cybers enough time to revolutionize the concept of mechs.

These machines were all powerful and demanding first-class multipurpose mechs. Theircomplexity was dizzyingly high. This enabled them to carry a large amount of integratedweapon systems and put up a ferocious fight when put into use.

However, Ves did not get the sense that the mechs of the 24th Gamma ScorchersWarfleet were designed to be used so frequently.

Their superior tech and craftsmanship may have allowed them to remain in bettercondition than usual, but even well-built systems failed sooner or later.

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