The Mech Touch (Web Novel)

5929 Homeship Conversion Difficulty

After Kezi came up with the fantastic idea of resorting to captured alien battleships as a stopgap solution, he quickly looked up the relevant rules and regulations.

The Rubarthan shipwright's efficiency was high. He only needed a couple of minutes to dig through all of the dense and complicated legal and technical language to gain a clear idea on how to proceed.

"The idea is viable." The physical projection of Kezi told Ves with a grin. "It has never been done before, but that means we will be the first to take advantage of this loophole. We have the fleeters to thank for that. They are so proud and boastful about their battleships that they have constantly raised the requirements that an armed capital ship has to meet in order to earn the classification of a battleship. The majority of alien 'battleships' in the Red Ocean simply do not meet those standards. They are not just lacking in terms of alloy hardness and thickness, but also other parameters such as redundancies, FTL drives, information security and mandatory design features."

In other words, the alien battleships were not actually battleships according to human definition. They were battlecruisers for all intents and purposes.

To be honest, it was not as if the native aliens used their own version of the term 'battleship' either. Many of them treated their vessels as homes, as evidenced by their ability to land on the surface of planets and serve as fixed structures.

The aliens themselves preferred to call their vessels homes or 'homeships' in their own native languages. There was no distinction between a home and a warship, so they readily combined the two so that they could enjoy the advantages of both.

This was also one of the reasons why their homeships were so poorly armored despite the use of transphasic alloys. The native aliens had to abide by hard mass and volume requirements in order to enable a homeship to land on a terrestrial planet with a certain amount of gravity.

If the homeship became too heavy or too big, it would become too difficult to safely descend to or ascend from the surface of a planet. This was why they needed to be more frugal in how much metal they added to their hulls.

The fact that it saved them a lot of phasewater by cutting down on the mass and volume of their homeships also helped!

The native aliens never minded this drawback because they heavily relied on transphasic shield generators to compensate for the lacking material defenses of their homeships.

Transphasic shield generators offered superior defenses at much lower costs. They were far smaller and lighter than a thick application of hull plating.

Even if the good ones had to be built with high-grade materials and larger quantities of phasewater, it still beat trying to pad the structure and exterior of a homeship that was several kilometers long!

While these shield generators were certainly not small or light, the amount of capacity they took up on a homeship was not too significant. They were the perfect solution to employ if a homeship needed greater defenses without burdening down the hull with lots of mass.

Of course, transphasic shield generators came with their own downsides. They vastly increased the energy requirements of a homeship. If the power supply ever got interrupted for whatever reason, these devices wouldn't be able to last long by relying on their batteries or other backup power sources!

Humanity had a very long tradition of emphasizing armor over energy shields. It was only relatively recently that the Phasewater Generation had changed the game.

Though more and more people began to get accustomed to relying on the surprisingly effective azure energy shields, not everyone was rich and powerful enough to supply the phasewater required to obtain the necessary generators.

Armor was still the most preferred and dominant form of protection to most humans. This contributed greatly to the slow pace of change in human society.

The best energy shields that the general population had access to were hyper energy shields. So long as there was no phasewater involved, the defensive performance was not that spectacular.

It all came down to resources in the end. If red humanity had access to just as much phasewater as the native aliens, people would have embraced the superiority of azure energy shields to a much greater extent!

"There is only one cumbersome condition we have to meet before we can employ an alien battleship in combat." Kezi said, pulling Ves back from his musings about energy shields.

"Is it troublesome?"

The chief shipwright nodded. "It will cause significant delays, but I consider this to be a necessary step. The Red Fleet will not allow humans to actively make use of any alien starship unless the hull in question has undergone a full inspection and conversion. Whatever is done to the vessel in question, the end result must abide by the minimum standards that the fleeters apply to any starship."

Just as how the mechers regulated the use of mechs, the fleeters took responsibility over the usage of starships, armed or otherwise.

From what Ves knew about the fleeters, they generally did not really care about third-class and second-class starships. The standards they had to meet were fairly generous and easy to satisfy.

The story was a bit different for first-class starships. That was when the fleeters really started to pay attention. Every starship of this tech level was equipped with much harder alloys and always made use of much more potent power reactors.

This turned them into greater hazards if anything went wrong. The fleeters therefore insisted that first-class starships had to meet a lot of safety requirements in order to permit people to make use of their powerful features.

Ves frowned as he pondered over this demand. "The homeships of the 13 major races are equivalent to first-class warships, is that correct?"

"They vary considerably, sir. The most premier alien forces under the Red Cabal make use of newly constructed battleships that are heavily integrated with stolen human technologies. These are by far the most modern and powerful enemy vessels that red humanity has encountered. These are the enemies that are keeping the Red Two occupied."

"There is little chance that the expeditionary fleet of the Golden Skull Alliance will be able to bump into those powerful alien warships." Ves replied with a frown. "Even if our forces encounter them, it is extremely unwise to confront them in battle. Even if our fleet enjoys the protection of several ace mechs, they are all built to second-class standards. There is no need to force a battle when there is a clear and obvious tech disparity."

Kezi did not argue with that. "Then your expeditionary fleet should target the hulls that they have already defeated in their previous battles. The homeships that accompany the alien raiding fleets are inferior in every way. They are often decades or centuries old. They have often been damaged and repaired multiple times over the course of their lifespan. Much of their tech is either outdated or not that high-end in the first place. Despite these common flaws, the homeships in question often straddle the line between first-class and second-class, which means that the Red Fleet often treats them as first-class warships. They are too powerful for second-class fleets, but too weak for first-class fleets."

"I see." Ves mildly said. "These older and outdated alien warships are hardly ideal for my purposes, but I guess there isn't much grounds for me to complain. All I want to know is how much work is required to convert a typical alien warship."

Kezi responded with a helpless expression. "That can only be determined on a case-by-case basis. Of the 13 major races that employ homeships, each of them have developed their own distinctive homeship doctrines. Even then, different groups within a single alien society may have developed their own unique and distinctive design philosophies for their vessels. It can take half a year to a decade to convert a single alien homeship into a usable warship for human usage."

The reason why the range was so wide was because the necessary modifications could easily range from a quick refit to a whole redesign project!

"Time is of the essence, Kezi. I need a powerful warship sooner rather than later. If it takes a decade to convert an alien homeship, then we might as well wait for the E-66 Experimental Yard to complete the Grave Exemplar before starting our new battlecruiser project. What sort of alien homeships will take the least amount of time for us to convert?"

Kezi smiled at that. He already anticipated this question.

"Of the 13 major alien races of the Red Ocean, there is only one that resembles the human race the most. The orvens may be taller and much furrier than us, but they are still bipedal organisms that share many habits and inclinations with us. The orvens also maintain a strong presence on this side of the dwarf galaxy, so our race has managed to encounter and defeat many of their homeships. The Red Two along with many other powerful groups have already captured so many orven homeships that they have managed to crack their security features and reverse engineered much of their distinctive technologies. Much of that knowledge is either publicly available or easily accessible as long as you are willing to spend MTA merits."

Orven homeships were indeed easier to deal with than the hulls of other races.

The zzamayels for example were not only rare on this side of the Red Ocean, but their warships were also a lot weirder, especially on the inside!

Since the race was made up of slime-like organisms, the zzamayels had the annoying habit of making their entrances and exits extremely small and slim. This hindered the ability for any aliens other than the zzamayels to move through the interior of their own homeships!

The puelmers were smaller and shorter than almost every other race. They took advantage of that by making the corridors and compartments of their own homeships a lot smaller and harder to navigate.

Trying to convert the captured vessels of either race into warships fit for human use was a nightmare!

The best way to tackle such a difficult demand was to break down the original hulls and use much of the salvaged materials to construct a proper human warship!

In contrast, orven warships did not have to be rebuilt from the ground up in order for humans to make use of them. The new owners just had to apply a lot of easy fixes such as reprogram the alien operating systems, eliminate a lot of well-

known vulnerabilities and replace the larger and taller orven-

sized furniture with smaller equivalents.

As Kezi quickly summarized the major steps that a shipyard needed to take to convert a typical orvan homeship into a converted battlecruiser, Ves found that pretty much any first-

class shipyard of the appropriate size could do the job.

The time needed to complete the conversion process still varied widely depending on the specific cases, but it shouldn't take more than 2 years to convert the largest orven hulls.

"This has been an informative discussion." Ves said as the meeting eventually came to an end. "Please prepare a thorough report for the expeditionary fleet. I will instruct them to prioritize the capture of orven homeships, but they vary so wildly that you need to help them pick the right targets."

"We will get on it right away, sir. It should not be difficult to form a list of desirable properties. The most important criteria is the amount of phasewater invested in the hull. It is very difficult and expensive to improve the phasewater density of the entire structure of a homeship, so it is better to target an existing alien vessel that already scores well enough in this area."

"I agree, though I doubt the ones assigned to raiding duty have that much phasewater in the first place. The expeditionary fleet may have to venture deeper into enemy space in order to seek out a suitable hull."

That was riskier but also a lot more rewarding.