The Mech Touch

Chapter 7520 Mapping the Distortions

The Saint Commander claimed to have read their enemy's intentions.

She refused to split her core assets, fearing that doing so would play into the opposing commander's machinations.

Yet keeping all of her units close at hand vastly limited her options.

Despite these conditions, she still had faith in the combined fleet's ability to resolve its current predicament.

Many people began to pay close attention to the Amaranto Mark III.

The ace marksman mech had fought in enough battles after her most recent upgrade that she had built up an impressive track record.

Saint Davia Stark had cemented herself as one of the most accurate and dependable snipers of her rank!

Although there were a number of senior ace pilots of different major powers that managed to achieve comparable hit rates at even greater ranges, nobody in her generation had managed to become her equal.

When it came to quick or instant takedowns at longer ranges, she and her battle partner were by far the best choice!

However, the Amaranto Mark III was not effective in every situation.

The current environment could easily be regarded as suboptimal for an ace marksman mech.

Visibility was extremely poor outside of the perimeter of the enemy fleet.

The fabric of reality had become distorted due to the abundance of destabilizing exotic energies.

The enemy spell array produced a range of effects, and the human analysts did not dare to claim they had mapped them out in full.

Other powerful enemy units with unfathomable abilities most definitely lurked within the darkness.

All of these conditions and more made it unfeasible for a marksman mech to successfully land a straight shot at a fairly distant target.

"Will this even work?" Gloriana skeptically felt the need to ask. "The spacetime distortions outside of the protective bubble of Casella's Command Field and the defensive spell array are not too strong, but they are not weak either. What matters more is the distance between the Amaranto and the target. The greater the range, the greater the distortions. It is already difficult to calculate a precise and accurate targeting solution on a relatively static object that is obscured by so much dark miasma."

"Davia's Stark willpower is strong. The Amaranto's full-powered shot will not bend easily in the face of all of the distortions that you have mentioned." Ves had a little more faith in the Saint Commander's decision.

His wife did not accept this argument. "That may be true, but this will not help much with target acquisition. In order to land her shot, she will need to pinpoint the enemy formation anchor under very poor conditions. All of the Amaranto's firepower will go to waste if her aim is off by a fraction of a degree. I do not believe that Davia's intuition and her other qualities as a saint can compensate for all of these variables. That is asking for too much. Even miracles have to be grounded in reality in order to occur."

She raised a good point. Extraordinary willpower could help keep the energy beam straight, but it did not offer as much assistance when it came to trying to home in on the target.

Ves already figured out how to solve this particular issue.

"The Amaranto Mark III is not alone. Have you noticed how the smart AIs of the Tortuous Scream along with the processing banks of other starships are being tasked to help with the calculations?"

"Hm?"

Under the coordination of the Minerva Mark II, the Tortuous Scream and several other larger warships such as the Tarrasque and the Babylon Excavator all pooled their processing power together to perform extremely intensive calculations!

All of the processors allocated to this priority task began to construct an extremely large and complex mathematical model of the distortions produced by the activated energy fields controlled by the opposition!

This was not a simple endeavor in the slightest.

The model had to be constructed based on a huge amount of raw data input.

These primarily came from the many sensor systems of the mechs and ships of the combined fleet.

Much of it was limited in value. They only provided a limited perspective of all of the distortions and energy currents in the local environment.

What truly enriched the database was the input provided by the surviving Woodsap mechs!

Even if only a handful of them had made it back, they at least managed to deliver a lot of new data on the behavior of the hostile energy field and many other relevant variables well outside of the range of familiar territory.

Of course, all of this data put together did not come close to providing the red humans with a complete picture of the surrounding space.

This was why the high-tech processors of all of those first-class warships had to work hard. They needed to fill up the gaps by making a huge number of 'educated guesses'!

Ves did not even begin to think about the astronomical amount of calculations needed to produce a virtual map of the surrounding distortions.

He found it difficult to imagine that any human aside from a literal Star Designer could construct a fairly 'accurate' and 'reliable' mathematical model without the use of first-class processor clusters!

Not even Gloriana with her Mentalyst Crystal fragment-based cranial implant set could muster up the minimum amount of pure processor power needed to perform an insane amount of number crunching!

Fortunately, the smart AIs of the combined fleet had no need to draw upon her relatively meager amount of processing powers, nor did they have to borrow her human creativity and ingenuity.

The smart AIs themselves could already fill this essential gap.

As one of the flagship products of the Red Fleet in the new age, the smart AIs possessed genuine life and sentience.

That made a huge difference in situations like these because they could adequately find solutions or improve existing ones by drawing upon their intangible qualities.

For example, Stella of the STAR WATCHER template took charge of the work. Her programming specialized in navigation and space surveys. She was practically made for this task!

Yet in order to anticipate unexpected variables and solve certain problems that lacked obvious solutions, Aria of the STARVING ARTIST template also involved herself in the work.

In fact, Aria held the highest authority inside the Tortuous Scream's SF-02 Smart AI Data Processing Center!

This was a deliberate decision that reflected the Larkinson Clan's culture of valuing creativity over certainty.

The latter may provide more accurate solutions in situations where every variable had been accounted for, but performed much more poorly in situations with lots of uncertainty.

The current conditions precisely aligned with the latter scenario, hence why Aria was in her element at the moment!

Most of the red humans could not see or feel the huge amount of calculations taking place.

The mathematical model slowly took shape despite the lack of input. Aria and Stella had been forced to make so many guesses and assumptions that the reliability of their results could never be guaranteed.

Yet it was the best that they could come up with at this time.

A new projection came to life in front of Ves and other leaders.

They depicted a much more dynamic map of the surrounding space.

Translucent energy lines flowed in many different directions. These lines represented some of the many chaotic distortions that the model had mapped out at this time.

What was important was that it not only tried to map out the situation in real-time, but could also be used to predict the changes that would take place a second or two in advance!

Of course, trying to do the latter rapidly compromised the reliability of the output.

The further they tried to predict the distortions that would take place in the future, the greater the chance of being led astray!

Fortunately for the combined fleet, Saint Stark did not need to map out the distortions so far ahead.

The Instrument of Vengeance was a powerful transphasic hyper luminar crystal weapon that could shoot out an energy beam at light-speed or a significant fraction of it depending on its configuration.

Under the current circumstances, the difference between the two was slight.

Although the Woodsap mechs failed to analyze the enemy formation anchors in full, they still managed to collect enough data to conclude that the latter was made out of relatively normal alloys.

They did not have reasons to believe that the deathborn had incorporated much if any superdimensional matter into their formation anchors.

This meant that a resonance-empowered shot from the Instrument of Vengeance should definitely be able to burn a gap through the entire structure!

What mattered more was target acquisition.

After the smart AIs had done the heavy lifting, they began their attempts to provide accurate targeting data to the Amaranto Mark III.

There was no need to dump the full model along with all of the raw data into the ace mech. Aria and Stella merely provided the most condensed output to the living mech, knowing that the Amaranto Mark III needed nothing more to do her work!

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