The Mech Touch novel Chapter 1728

Chapter 1728 Fragile Shell

The Scarlet Rose traveled quietly back to Coalition space. Along the way, she sometimes made some stops in order to allow Aisling to meet with some officials and other people.

Ves shouldn't have noticed anything. Locked within his quarters, the only way he should have been able to ascertain what was going on was by tracking the intervals between FTL transitions.

No one figured out that he managed to tap into the ship's systems!

With Lucky's help, Ves managed to gain a complete overview of all of the parts and systems of the Scarlet Rose.

Though there were plenty of ship components which mystified him, after Lucky performed a thorough investigation, he ruled them out as obstacles to his ploy to take over the ship.

After finishing the survey, Ves carefully studied the diagram of the Scarlet Rose's layout and identified each and every critical part or system that he needed to subvert.

There was a lot he needed to grasp!

A mobile supply frigate might not be a particularly sizable ship class, but a ship like the Scarlet Rose was stuffed with tech!

As a ship commissioned by the Coalition Reserve Force, she was built to a very high standard! Only the military ships of the Friday Coalition contained more safeguards and backup systems!

Ves sighed and shook his head as he held Lucky while soaking in his bath.

He couldn't find any other reasonable opportunity to interact with Lucky aside from holing up in the bathroom.

To open this window of opportunity, Ves pretended to be extremely indignant about being spied upon while he was doing his bathroom business!

He acted like he was immensely shy about his body and thoroughly searched the entire bathroom compartment from top to bottom! He destroyed each and every optical sensor until he was sure there was nothing left!

He gambled that Aisling wouldn't intervene for fear of upsetting him. Luckily, she only admonished him a single time during mealtime before dropping the topic!

The monitoring system of a modern second-class vessel was very pervasive. Optical sensors only consisted of a portion of the monitoring in each compartment. There were heat sensors, sound sensors, gravitic sensors, radiation sensors, mass sensors and a multitude of other ways to track what went on inside a compartment!

Ves did not touch any of them. He only cared about disabling the only sensor type which could expose Lucky.

As for the other sensors, Lucky's ECM systems effortlessly fooled them into thinking that nothing was there!

Once he satisfied this condition, Ves interacted with Lucky without any issue. He could even summon his System comm and purchase some gadgets in order to assist him into taking over the ship.

However, with how easily Lucky could infiltrate and sabotage the various systems and subsystems of the Scarlet Rose, Ves would rather keep his Design Points in reserve.

Who knew what kind of surprise he might encounter during his hijacking attempt! Keeping over 1 million DP in reserve would definitely be able to save him in a pinch!

For now, Ves felt confident he could take over the ship by relying on his existing means.

The engineering section, the security compartment and the bridge all needed to be secured.

At the same time, Ves had to sabotage or subvert every backup system that activated in the event of some sort of failure!

As a ship built to a high standard, the Scarlet Rose featured a lot of backups and redundancies! Not even his Barracuda offered so many redundant systems!

"Every starship is just a fragile shell that protects the people inside from the ravages of space."

Radiation, vacuum, frost, space dust and other threats constantly bombarded space-faring vessels.

Unlike astral beasts, humanity never adapted to space. Fragile humans like Aisling and Patricia had to rely on external tools to master space.

Humanity's reliance on starships was the main reason why the race came to dominate the galaxy!

Though mechs had become ascendent in the Age of Mechs, no human dared to neglect their civilization's dependence on starships!

"Humans are rather helpless." He sighed and idly splashed some bathwater over his head. "Ships give us strength, but they are all potential deathtraps!"

A starship was not so easy to run. They consisted of many different interconnected compartments, components and systems. The complexity of a mobile supply frigate like the Scarlet Rose exceeded that of a mech by at least a hundred times!

This was not just due to her immensely larger size, but also due to all of the functions she was supposed to run on a continuous basis!

The more systems a ship possessed, the greater the chance that something might go wrong!

If the inertial dampeners of the ship suddenly shut off, all of her passengers might slam against the bulkheads the moment the vessel accelerated or decelerated!

If the life support systems failed, the oxygen and temperature levels might drop, causing every human to suffocate while shivering in the cold!

These were just a handful of the many essential components and systems that the crew and passengers of the Scarlet Rose relied upon to preserve their lives!

"If I wanted to, I could instantly kill each and every person aboard this vessel." Ves muttered darkly.

Due to the potential risks, expensive ships tended to offer several redundancies. For each primary system, there was at least a secondary system on standby that was ready to step up in the case of a crisis!

All of these systems were spread out. This was because a ship could easily be rendered impotent if some important compartments incurred catastrophic damage for some reason!

"When it comes to ship design, you can never put all of your eggs in a single basket!"

Fortunately, with Lucky's thorough scouting, Ves identified every relevant system. He only had to program some malicious code and pass on some instructions to his cat in order to subvert their functioning.

Everything had to run normally, or at the very least pose no hindrance to his plans! _{ƒreewebηoveℓ.com}