What's Junk? (The Mech Touch)

[Rustic]

I actually had thought about the mech and how it depended on potential. When I was thinking about it I was mentally picturing larger cockpit cabins with multiple stations. Such as gunner and pilot bigger mechs would get crews like attack helicopter and tank crews.
Smaller mechs would operate as two man crews.
Blizzard star craft and the Goliath. Which is a three man unit when you purchase it.
I thought about this when the drowning man came up as a slow heavy. But then I moved on to the next chapter.

I had also thought about animal mechs. Before ceberous was introduced. That because one of my favorite mech anyway when I was a kid was zoids. I'm not as much of a fan of Gundam as zoids. Probably because Gundam and most Japanese mechs have weird face art. They stick an aleron on the nose of there mechs. That weird stupid v or the odd stars... Don't like it
Mech warrior is cooler. dinosaur mech and scorpion mechs.. are cool.

 

[lost star]

His name was Jack. He had C minus rank potential, which was about average for the pilots working with the Wrench Rats at the moment. Higher potentials tended to head towards greener pastures. Some preferred working with Biters. Others left planet. You could get a ride for a promise of a few years of service, which was a very good deal compared to staying in a planet that couldn't go a year without some sort of conflict.

Working with the Wrench Rats was not the best deal at the moment. It wasn't the worst deal. He got to play with fancy mechs. His only duties were guard duty and practicing. That was pretty good for someone with no ambitions and a desire for just three square meals a day. It was also risky. The Wrenchies were getting fat, and fat rats looked tasty for the cats. Jack was keeping a big eye on things and wasn't alone in wondering when the hammer would come down. It really depended on how the new expert candidate decided things would go.

Future problems wouldn't get present him fed though. Until something happened he followed orders and did whatever the head techs wanted. Which in this case was testing out a new mech. Called Cerberus, it looked like a muscled bulldog with three heads. Pretty scary looking and also looked like a pain in the ass to pilot. Jack was like one of three other pilots that knew dogs well enough to be confident about this, and he still didn't like sliding into it.

Fortunately, it was just testing things so he didn't hate it enough to protest. If he had to take this monster out onto the field he probably would have had words with someone. Not many words mind you. Just a few like 'what are you drinking?!'

His first impression was that the wonderkid had splurged on the piloting seat. It was nice and comfy, and had long term facilities there. Jack could appreciate that. You've never known misery until you had to pull a twenty-four hour shift in a cockpit just large enough to sit down in. Some junk mechs could get absolutely painful to deal with past a few hours and the less said about what ya had to do there after a few hours the better.

Second impression upon booting up was that the thing was actually pretty calm to start up and move. He'd tried Ghoul and been left bruised for days. Zombie took some work, and he'd be damned before he tried a Berserker. There'd been obvious care to make the stance and walk stable, which wasn't always a given in mechs.

Jack did a few trots up and down the testing range, and then bounced a few times on the paws. The motions went off without a fuss. Surprisingly smooth even, considering it was his first time piloting a dog-mech. He shifted the mech back and forth and felt actually pretty confident and happy at the lack of negative feedback. Some mechs fought him and caused some minor tension pain due to his low potential. There was none of that here.

Prominent in the cockpit was a testing form on the main screen. Jack hated paperwork, but it was part of the job. He carefully filled out the results and made his way down the list to the other tests.

The leap was next. Boosters flared and he jumped. The mech soared through the air for a second before landing with a surprisingly soft thud. Inside the cockpit Jack frowned. He then did it again. He was trying to decide if he liked it or not, and didn't like the range he'd gotten. He shifted the paws deliberately and began to trot around, doing leaps at random.

It took some getting used to. The leap and landings were rather fluid, but it wouldn't win awards for speed or usefulness. It was a quick repositioning that could be done every second. That landed the mech firmly on the slow side of medium.

Weapons testing was next on the list. This held no surprises. Two missile launchers on the shoulders was as generic as it got. The dog form just shifted the targeting position slightly. Jack wasn't using missiles with live rounds here so it was relatively cheap to go through the entire loadout twice. This tested the quick reload and the reliability of the missile tubes. It had a decent rate of fire and ammo in his opinion. Nothing special, but useful enough that he wouldn't mind taking this thing into combat with just those weapons. Despite his lack of potential Jack had been in a few battles, so he'd dealt with jank. This wasn't the best, but was viable. Nothing like that one with the pea shooter and a prayer.

With that done, they had to move onto the last part. Jack glanced at the controls and felt a bit of dread as he readied himself. The Drowned Man had sometimes grated against his senses even on low. That thing had a decent and unconventional sensory system so it could see through the mist it made. At high it gave him a headache and gave nonsensical results if he tried to force it. This one was hopefully better. The notes had explicitly stated that it was supposed to accommodate him. Right now everything was set to zero, which was actually a nice feature that he made sure to note as a good thing. No one liked getting blasted on full volume when they started up the mech.

A few targets popped up around the testing area on his command. Jack took a deep breath and began to adjust the senses. One, two, three. He stopped there, feeling strain. With a grumble the pilot dialed them all down again and noted it. A better pilot would probably be able to handle it all. He couldn't.

The man flipped to sentry mode. A few seconds later he tilted his head. Interesting. He toggled the popups. They pinged briefly on his senses and he could see them illuminated, like a dog who's attention had been caught.

Jack grinned just a bit. "Not bad there." This was actually nice. He felt no strain at all. That was almost novel.

Curious, he switched to hunter mode. That felt different. Less looking for irregularities and more a sense that he needed a target. Pacing up and around the targets made it apparent that it should work as expected, but he'd need an actual target to hunt down to verify how well it worked. They'd need to arrange more tests later.

The man looked it over and then made another notation that it needed a dedicated combat mode. He personally didn't want to switch to that full mode and adjust the dials if a scrap started up suddenly. (He also included a request to call it manual mode instead of full.) The modes themselves seemed rather useful and appropriate though, especially as a sort of focus. He could see even experienced pilots using it.

"Huh, look at me, turning into a proper tester." He muttered to the air.

With a shrug the man continued down the list. This wasn't exactly fun, but he couldn't say he hated the job. Also Cerberus was not unpleasant to pilot. He'd probably hate this more if he had to deal with any high skill mechs. Jack was not a good pilot and most mechs were wasted on him. This one actually felt like something he could use all the time, which was surprising because he'd expected to have trouble with the four legs.

It remained to be seen if he felt that was after everything. Piloted crash testing was next. Not exactly the most pleasant part. The man made sure his harness was secured and readjusted his helmet. This was not actually damage testing. It was essentially forcing the mech into awkward angles and unnatural movements. They'd throw a test dummy into the cockpit and have it go through actual damage testing later. Right now Jack just had to act like a drunken fool to test the joints and resistances. He'd had more practice than he'd like to admit for that part.

Four legs made it actually a bit hard to really stumble. There was a lot of care to the movement of this thing. It was very far from perfect, but it was better than any junk mech he'd used. That was very apparent now that he was trying to move it wrong deliberately.

Come to think of it, he should probably write down how quickly he'd managed to handle this thing. Jack knew for a fact it took a lot to get used to unusual mechs. Seemed like something good to put into writing. Then he went back to testing. Still had to run through the entire list again with another version of the same mech to be doubly sure, then revise them and do retests.

He didn't really get the point of it all, but he figured the people in charge knew more.

(This was their first real production model not done in sims and done on their own. It would have to go to the MTA and get tested by them once they ironed out the prototype's flaws. Bolt's family wanted to do it right and as flawlessly as possible.)

 

[GrindStone]

Some junk mechs could get absolutely painful to deal with past a few hours and the less said about what ya had to do there after a few hours the better.

Click to shrink...

I can't imagine the horror of having a piss jug in a vehicle meant to walk run and jump.

 

[xgodxsendx]

…watch jack have have A+ or S potential in dog mechs in particular

 

[lost star]

As time passed, morale amongst the various forces hunting Lilly turned mixed. It wasn't low by any means, but it couldn't be called high. No one wanted to be hunting an expert candidate on terrain she'd grown up on in a mech designed to hunt down and kill through ambushes. Only the fact that the pilot wasn't going for pilot kills kept everyone in the fight. Even then people were dragging their feet and sticking together rather than using more efficient search patterns. The rumors and the Ghoul line's appearance were not helping at all.

"Saw her for one second then she ate me! I'm having nightmares!" This was the most common sentiment. Dowry combined with Lilly's ability to ambush had instilled an aura of terror that made hunting her an exercise in horror.

One also had to account for the various factions and rivalries inherent in the contest. This wasn't just three hundred people hunting one. It was four teams fighting for different prizes.

Vesia had Lord Selah. He was about middling as nobles went for the nation. This meant he did the bare minimum and didn't abduct and disappear his citizens. (It was a very low bar.) He'd contributed some of his personal elite guard and some custom mechs made by his personal mech designer. The rest was just standard garrison troops. They were actually experienced in search patterns, but skill wise, only the elites were worthy of note. Those all had heavies of various sorts and were being used to counter the other teams than try to catch Lilly.

The Empties had the Order of the Sacred Pyre providing the core of their forces. They were a female exclusive group that functioned as a PR and recruitment group for their planet. They were attractive, had high morale, and loved fire. Skill wise they weren't particularly high, but they did not break in battle. They also kept the morale of their team up, and were therefore the most enthusiastic of the groups. However, that enthusiasm was mostly focused towards eliminating everyone else first. They weren't actually that focused on Lilly at all. The thought amongst them was mostly that they had the most counters to her style of mech and would move in towards the end.

The people from Serene Temples had the largest mix and least organized of the forces. Made up of half semi-mercenaries and half of garrison forces, they were an eclectic group of people led by an expert named Venerable Shin. The expert was explicitly not participating in the contest, but was providing advice and support from outside the battle. His forces were more involved because they wanted to fight rather than anything else. Without Shin on the field their organization was rather poor and they tended to roam in groups looking for targets rather than have an actual operational doctrine.

All of this meant that after the initial dash to capture Lilly had failed, everything had turned to chaos. This was not uncommon. It was why the planet was the way it was.

Most of the battles were attempts at hindering key assets and stealing supplies. Everyone had brought limited supplies into the battlefield and stealing those would be critical to crippling their forces. Mechs could be manufactured and replaced on site if need be. They'd brought enough components and printers for that. Battlefield printers were vital for long deployments, and there'd been no rules for not having them.

There were also no rules for keeping them intact.

Lilly, due to fog of war, didn't know exactly what was going on. Dowry had some of the best sensors on the field though. Bolt's refinement and careful adjustment had increased them from official specifications, and so everyone underestimated her range. She could tell when people were moving, and a mech laying down covered in dirt at low power was rather hard to detect at their level. It was rapidly becoming her favorite tactic actually, Dowry's energy cells were designed for quick bursts of power so she could go from dormant to lunging in a horrifyingly fast matter. (She'd literally given a guy a heart attack already.) This meant she could frequently find choice targets of opportunity. Targets like a bulky printer guarded by heavy mechs.

Roles assigned to mechs were mostly descriptors for official census counts and an overarching strategic view. If you had ten light skirmishers for instance, you knew fast flankers. Five Heavy Artillery meant something. This was a strategic viewpoint, not an individual viewpoint. Everyone knew mechs were different. Some mechs could flex into different roles by changing their loadout slightly. That said, Skirmisher versus anything with the heavy designation was usually a loss for the heavy. Versus two, it was typically a loss for the skirmisher if the heavies had any sort of area denial. So the guard detail was actually pretty good and not something vulnerable to Lilly, normally.

They really didn't account for her running in and just eating whatever she could before disengaging. It was hard to understate how unusual that was from a tactical perspective. She took a lot of damage doing it. It should have been a loss, and would have been had Dowry not been able to repair the damage because she'd eaten some very vital components right under their noses. Multiple heavies were great defending themselves. They were not so great at defending vital equipment that something like Dowry could run in and damage.

Lilly managed to do this not, once, not twice, but five times before the printers were no longer operational for everyone due to a combination of her and everyone else's efforts. She then focused completely on retreat and concealment. This left everyone in a rather awkward spot supply wise. They all had significant raw resources, food, and fuel, but mech parts had become a hot commodity.

They didn't understand this at first. Most of the forces involved were chosen because they were decent pilots and willing to follow orders. They were experienced, but most of the people involved had never been in times of scarce resources. That was typically a tech or logistics job to prevent! Even their support teams didn't quite get the problem at first. The printers being down didn't mean they were out of parts, and they had more than a few stockpiled.

Battles continued as the various forces cashed and countered. Their techs worked as well as they could, but the situation slowly started to degrade as certain vital parts became rare. With repair supplies being spent like water and the printers out of commission, everyone started to become more caution. More and more mechs stopped being fielded at once, and soon they couldn't be fielded at all. No one was in danger of losing all their forces, but attrition was starting to become ugly and was forcing people to be extremely conservative.

In contrast, Lilly was running at full power with no chance of stopping. It helped significantly that Dowry required absolutely no preparation for refuel. The fastest way to refuel required a team of techs and was highly dependent on mech design. Some mechs used energy cells exclusively. Some mechs used liquid composite fuel. Some used both or more exotic solutions. All of it typically required putting the mech in a standby mode, bringing in a crane or some other operational machine and very carefully refueling the mech.

Dowry just ate things. Total time taken? A minute if that. Bolt had ended up arranging for a few supply caches to be buried in various spots. It was a significant advantage that couldn't be understated. Dowry could find a cache, refuel herself and run within minutes. She was not possible to pin down if she did not want it. Things were looking up for the young woman. Her ability to completely ignore logistics for this contest was starting to push things to her advantage.

This was going to be noticed of course. Countering it would require some out of the box thinking that the people in charge didn't necessarily have at the moment though. Their solution was instead likely going to be turtling before massing up and trying to corner her in the last few days. It would theoretically work too, assuming that Lilly couldn't pick off enough of her targets in the time remaining. At her skill level this meant things would get rough and unpredictable towards the end.

 

[Golgotha]

Clever girl
*Ghoul lunges*

 

[Pyro Hawk]

Yeah, there's going to be some seriously traumatised pilots coming out of this... And a lot of attention. Not to mention quite a few mech piloting academies or military training centres grabbing the combat data and ordering their trainees to read. Not necessarily to become good at the lessons they're supposed to learn, but at least to recognise when things are progressing in a direction that could lead to something like this so countermeasures can happen early.

... There's probably going to be more than a few Mech Designers and Mech Designer Schools that do a similar thing, because it really demonstrates what a mech built for a role achieving that role can do. Just like there's probably going to be a fair bit of attention placed on mech-usable nanites after this amongst the three nations, if only to determine what roles the expense is worth it and if there's any way to spread the benefits around to mechs that wouldn't be worth installing nanite systems into themselves.

Sure, current conditions mean that there's only going to be a very narrow set of edge cases that really make the nanites shine but this battle well and truly demonstrates what making them shine allows.

 

[wakshazi]

Sure, current conditions mean that there's only going to be a very narrow set of edge cases that really make the nanites shine but this battle well and truly demonstrates what making them shine allows.

Click to shrink...

Eh, I think if they understand what is going on they will be very interested in how quick they can make refueling. Being able to refuel with no hassle in 60 seconds is something they would recognize as valuable because it is so useful in combat scenarios.

If nothign else Bolt might try to replicate it for other mechs his faction fields just due to how much it can reduce manpower strain.

 

[Rustic]

I going to disagree on this. Ghoul is a mech designed for scarcity. Only in this strange match does it really shine. In every other war. They can just back off and resupply. War are while dangerous come across as ritualistic almost. Meaning there not a real scarcity problem for the contenders. Ghoul will only truly shine in a total war scenario. Behind enemy lines and such. Besides, a couple guys in a pick up truck and a trailer could practically do the same thing as her nanite. But fix a lot more problems. Without the other mechs specify out to be an endurance hunter. It almost a not a mech problem. More a supply and support problem. Get a tech with a tablet and a machine and he or she could do what the bottle of nanite are doing. Without the mech frame and support structure.

 

[Negation]

Which would make the next-gen iteration of Ghoul/Dowery a Werewolf?

 

[lost star]

Ranged fighters were the second worst things for Dowry to fight in Lilly's opinion. The mech had the speed to run them down, but there wasn't a way to avoid getting hit at least once. The damage would add up over time if she wasn't careful, and there was a distinct issue when the rifleman was protected by others. Lilly was good enough to handle two on ones most of the time, but some combos were worse than others.

These three in front of her weren't raw recruits that'd fall for simple tricks anymore either. They were trained and experienced members of the remaining forces against her. One had a wide area shotgun. You couldn't dodge that sort of thing. You had to outrange it or outthink it. There was a distinct possibility that the opposing mech had even fought her too.

Normally Lilly would just avoid the group. Strikers were not typically fast. Light Strikers needed a gimmick or they'd just be prey for their enemies and there was none of that here. She'd needed to take this one down though. Dowry required fuel and more materials to repair herself and this group felt too competent to keep on the board. The question was could she eliminate this group while taking less damage than she'd be able to repair from eating them?

Three mechs, two riflemen with missiles, one striker with a shield and shotgun. This was probably one of the worst configurations that she could fight. Lilly checked her sensors again. Nothing on the horizon. Just a three man group. Or, wait.

Cute.

There was another group coming in discretely. They must have spotted her and tried to lay a trap then. She was being flanked. If Dowry had less impressive sensors or she'd been less alert this would have worked. This was Vesia being clever. Those were the skirmishers meant to take her down. She had to make this fast. Those optimized speedy skirmishers were a pain in the rear to deal with.

Dowry began to walk, then run. As expected her opponents immediately shifted to an on guard position, no longer hiding the fact that she had been spotted. On a barren plains like this, all they could do was place the shield mech between them, but that was enough to make her life hard. Any positioning she could do was going to be countered by just moving a few steps. She had to get through the shield first quickly.

The first shots came at an extreme range. Barely worth dealing with. The bullet didn't even manage to hit her. After the second volley, Lilly dropped down to all fours and then leaped forward, using the boosters to shift her this way and that before touching down and moving again in an erratic fashion. Dowry's frame screamed at the g-forces she was going through, but held with minimal issues. This sort of juking was integral to skirmishers, and why good pilots of them were nightmares. The missiles were let loose then, and one impacted her back and ripped apart some of her armor.

Even with two riflemen firing from stable positions, every shot simply pinged off the sides of her armor rather than striking it right on. Chip damage in other words. Barely worth mentioning, especially since Dowry could repair it in field. That would change as she got closer but it wouldn't be enough to damage her substantially.

Unfortunately even with all of that the big problem still loomed. The striker had not shifted with her dodges. Just calmly tracked her with the shotgun. Once she got into range it let loose. The wide area blast didn't need to be aimed except in the most general sense. Lilly didn't let that stop her even as her mech rocked from the strike. She just eyed the shield positioning. Up or down?

The shield was raised a bit too high and weight positioned on the hip. It was a good counter to the fact she loved to grab onto the top of the shields and climb over if she could. It didn't account for the fact that the Ghoul line could go unnaturally low for mechs.

Mid lunge, Dowry dropped down, putting all her weight on her arms. The reinforced frame did not like that combined with the momentum she was at, but it held as designed. She slid and crawled for two steps, using the shield's own blocky form to cover her movement. Then she was close enough to grab. One hand grabbed and she slid still more before wrenching. Most of the armor and some of the foot's internals came away as she rose up in a smooth motion.

As they'd likely been trained, her opponent shifted to face her, readying the shotgun for another blast. The reflexive motion put weight on the ruined leg and it unbalanced. The mech teetered as the pilot struggled to maintain control. Lilly used that to slam the mech to the ground. Then used the jaws of Dowry to bite it's face clean off before the pilot could make sense of the action. Trained or not, that sort of thing was panic inducing. The enemy's attacks went wide as their priority became getting away and this gave Lilly a clear line to it's vitals. She ripped them out within a second and didn't even bother to get onto her feet before lunging at the other opponents.

Without the cover they were only able to get a few shots into her before she caught up to them. They succeeded on delaying her though. She lacked the time to properly harvest everything after catching them and had to flee before her pursuers could catch up. She let Dowry identify the most priority parts and then ran away at full speed. Lilly only took a moment to rest once she was sure she was in cover and free from observation. Then she initiated repairs.

Drooling into her hands and rubbing it over her body was a rather, well interesting experience that she couldn't say she liked. Lilly could tolerate it though. Dowry's method of self repair would have been very gross had it been organic. As it was she just had to deal with the phantom sensations and that was relatively easy. Everyone had to deal with unpleasant things to survive.

As she did the nanomachine bath, she evaluated how things were going. They seemed to be going well. She getting closer to the end now. Her hunters seemed to have lost anywhere from a half to a quarter of their forces. All of them seemed to have less than stellar repairs, which was amusing. She knew for a fact Bolt and his family could have handled that part of the contest much better.

She probably wasn't helping things, to her great pride and entertainment. She'd been ghosting a few battles carefully and then scavenging what she could. With her ripping out choice parts and destroying the rest she could very well have been responsible for most of the kills in this little contest. Dowry was hell on people trying to recover her victims.

The sheer pressure she'd had to deal with was almost completely gone now. She was certainly still at risk, and towards the end they'd probably be attempting to kill rather than capture her, but for now she could rest. Which she planned on doing, after she found a supply drop. There'd been one squirreled away nearby that she could refuel at.

She hoped there was some material there too. She was out of repair fluid and still damaged. Counter mechs were no joke. Had the pilot been a bit better she'd be in very real danger. As it was, until she found something to scavenge she would have to play it even more careful than normal.

Lilly was pretty sure that no one had expected Dowry to be so good at this. Even she was a bit surprised really. She'd have to give Bolt such a kiss when she got back! Well two, because as much fun as this was, it was very lonely. She had too much time to think.

 

[Tsureai]

Literal face eating monster mech