Chapter 3907: Paracelsus Optimus
The Red Ocean was the current focus of human civilization. The Big Two were the major pushers of the invasion of the dwarf galaxy.
In fact, despite the arrival of billions of humans through the beyonder gate every day, the expansion effort was still led by the Mech Trade Association and the Common Fleet Alliance.
The resources they monopolized and the tech they had mastered for a long time served as the basis of their unstoppable progress in the frontlines of the expansionary war.
No alien civilization could possibly hope to match the might of the Big Two's battleships and mechs.
Under the unceasing advance of humanity's greatest war machines, entire alien fleets went asunder and whole developed planets were scoured of life.
The huge power disparity between a top power in the Milky Way and the local powers of the Red Ocean meant that the former did not have to play nice with the latter!
Why bother with utilizing slow and time-consuming strategies such as divide and conquer when the Big Two could just declare all-out war and defeat all of the indigenous alien races at once?
This was the privilege of power!
Of course, just because the Red Ocean was weak didn't mean it was a pushover. If the Big Two acted too perfunctory in their attempt to conquer the dwarf galaxy, then the aliens they despised could potentially drive humanity back!
This was unacceptable!
This was why the MTA and CFA committed a lot of powerful combat assets to the Red Ocean.
Many of the warships and mechs fighting on the frontlines originally came from the Milky Way. Since each of them were designed to fight against humanity's familiar alien rivals that still occupied the other half of the old galaxy, their might was great.
However, the Big Two could not afford to transfer too many warfleets to the new frontier. Many of them were still needed to guard the foundation of human space and prevent the other occupants of the old galaxy from making a comeback.
This was why the Big Two started to develop and build starships that were specifically designed to operate in the Red Ocean.
The Paracelsus Optimus was a warship that was especially developed to fulfill multiple roles at once. The ships of her class filled the MTA's need for a vessel that primarily focused on exploring and cleaning up remnant alien traces in recently-occupied territory.
Space was big and largely empty. It was too difficult for the Big Two to sweep up every single alien settlement or fleet as they expanded humanity's territory.
Normally, the job of getting rid of all of these mice that had fallen through the cracks was left to the pioneers that followed after the initial conquest.
It was a pity that not every pioneer was up to the task of defeating the alien remnants!
Stories spread every day about pioneering fleets suffering the bad luck of bumping into an angry phase whale or a remnant peulmer fleet and suffering the brunt of alien animosity towards the invaders from the Milky Way!
This was why the rearguard of the Big Two needed assets that could handle the more formidable threats that were far too powerful for most pioneers.
The Paracelsus Optimus was one of the many answers to this persistent problem. She was a new breed of warship that was not only developed with the Red Ocean's resources and mission requirements in mind, but also adhered to an MTA operational doctrine that sought to evolve or even reinvent the entire concept of starships as weapons of war!
It was no secret that the Mech Trade Association found it incredibly awkward to continue to rely on battleships as their top war weapons.
Although the mechers continually developed new technologies and design applications that constantly elevated mechs to a greater height, all of these innovations could not change the fact that mechs were miniscule compared to any warship!
This was why the MTA still employed battleships such as the Hessarian Bardine that largely resembled the ones utilized by the CFA.
The Paracelsus Optimus was an attempted break from this old and traditional style of designing warships.
While there were many good reasons while the old formula of battleships was still an enduring success, the MTA's shipwrights were not content with sticking to what already worked and were much more willing to buck tradition in order to create a better formula!
The important goal was to develop a new warship concept that specifically complemented the MTA's preferred approach towards combat and other missions.
The Paracelsus Optimus amply met those requirements.
As soon as she appeared through the portal created by the Simile Halifax, the so-called battlecarrier immediately brought her various functions to bear.
First, she activated her rich collection of sensor arrays, taking in not only the unstable tectonic activity happening on Auralis, but also collecting far more data about the rest of the star system!
The sensor and scanning systems of the Blinding Banshee couldn't even come close to matching their counterparts on the Paracelsus Optimus!
Even the small and relatively limited Simile Halifax was the equivalent to a blind mole in front of the excellent data-gathering abilities by the Paracelsus Optimus.
With her powerful processing banks, sophisticated AIs and thousands of dedicated sensor operators and data analysts, the Paracelsus Optimus only needed a couple of minutes to figure out more secrets and hidden details in the Garimel System than the Simile Halifax!
Information was power and the Paracelsus Optimus exemplified this phrase by possessing superior observation and analysis capabilities than many battleships!
With a clearer understanding of what might be going on in the Garimel System, the officers in charge did not hesitate to prepare the ship for combat against a major threat.
Her two formidable main turrets came online. One of them was able to fire energy beams that struck like stars while the other were able to fire gigantic kinetic rounds at relativistic speeds!
The triple-barreled weapon mounts were the battlecarrier's main guarantee against battleships and equivalent threats.
Of course, compared to actual battleships, the Paracelsus Optimos was rather lightly-armed for a 7-kilometer long warship.
The battlecarrier possessed a relatively modest array of other weapon systems to round out her direct combat capabilities.
Over 800 secondary turrets were interspersed around her hull.
While space peasants had to go through the convoluted process of building bunkers on their starships in order to provide them with basic self-defense capabilities, this rule didn't apply the MTA.
Despite their relatively small and compact sizes, the firepower of each secondary turret far exceeded that of a first-class bunker mech!
They were not discrete combat units but made up tiny parts of an enormous whole that was the battlecarrier. Heat and energy were fully shared while many other functions made sure they performed at their peak as much as possible.
With these guns, the Paracelsus Optimus was capable of tearing apart entire mech armies before they got close!
Of course, the modern MTA warship also possessed an array of missile launchers. With 1 grand missile launchers capable of unleashing some of the deadliest payloads of humanity and 40 large missile launchers that could fire an incredibly diverse amount of missile types, the battlecarrier made sure that it always had answers to many different problems.
The missile launchers were just a sideshow, though.
In fact, her ability to function as a battleship and a research vessel were both secondary to her primary function, which was to serve as a carrier for the MTA's proudest mechs!
Given the observations the Paracelsus Optimus had made along with the intelligence passed on by the Simile Halifax, the officers in charge decided to make a show of force and enter into battle with the full might of the battlecarrier's mech roster!
Her large contingent of mechs and mech pilots had already been put on standby before the vessel passed through the portal.
With the help of fast and precise launching systems, the mechs of the Paracelsus Optimus launched into space at a stupendous rate!
It took only a couple of minutes for 3000 mechs to enter space and form into organized mech units, all without colliding against each other!
Many mech units already received specific instructions that compelled them to move to different coordinates.
A lot of lighter and faster first-class multipurpose mechs spread out and utilized their limited warp travel capabilities to traverse a lot of distance in a short amount of time.
The tougher and heavier-looking machines did not move too far away. Instead, they assumed many different formations while positioning themselves around their mothership.
Back aboard the bridge of the Spirit of Bentheim, Ves zoomed in the live feed provided by the scout ship that was still in the process of speeding away from the cracking planet.
He was rather thankful that the new arrivals did not bother to jam or throw a lot of interference to obscure what they were doing. Perhaps the mechers felt that they didn't even need to bother with this precaution.
"These mechs…"
The visual feed showed the first-class multipurpose mechs of the MTA in their full glory.
Unlike their mothership's dark green color scheme with orange stripes, the mechs were coated in a variety of different styles that spoke of a high degree of individualization and customization at the mech company level.
A quick snapshot of the entire mech force already made it clear to Ves that it contained over a hundred different mech models!
"Interesting. They all look complicated, but I can still guess their overall role and emphasis."
First-class multipurpose mechs were generally thought of as omnimechs that could do everything and were equally good in every single mission.
This was an impossible ideal. Not even Star Designers succeeded in designing such a perfect, all-purpose mech.
The general approach to designing a first-class mech was to center them around a primary role and supplement it with a number of secondary roles.
The extra functionality provided by the latter were largely aimed at shoring up the first-class mech's most obvious shortcomings while also complimenting its main role.
A typical example of that in the mech lineup of the Paracelsus Optimus was a mech model that the IFF system denoted as the Interstellar Harpooner.
Ves quickly looked up this mech model on the galactic net. According to the MTA's brief database description, the Interstellar Harpooner was a mech specifically designed to fight against the phase whale race!
Made with materials that were highly stable and incredibly resistant against all manner of spatial fluctuations, this large and solid humanoid mech was not afraid of confronting the most powerful race of the Red Ocean!
As its name suggested, the Interstellar Harpooner was armed with an enormous launcher that was capable of launching special harpoons that could sink through some of the toughest phase whale hides.
One of the most annoying tactics of the phase whales was that they often utilized their spatial mastery to teleport away or speed up their flight to stay one step ahead of their opponents!
Harpooning these elusive phase whales was a simple but effective way of pinning these phase whales in place.
A single first-class multipurpose mech might not be able to trap a phase whale alone, but what about a hundred?
The Paracelsus Optimus most definitely prepared to fight against the phase whales seeing as they were one of the major threats of the new frontier.
The possibility of encountering a phase whale variant that was larger and more powerful than the ones the MTA had met so far did not diminish the battle intent of the mechers.
The Interstellar Harpooners all readied their main weapon to spear whatever phase whale might emerge from the increasingly more fractured Auralis!
If one harpoon wasn't enough, then they would fire another.
If two harpoons weren't enough, then they would fire more!
Despite the size, mass and other impressive properties of the harpoons, the mechs that were capable of launching weren't short of spares.
With the dimensional ammunition boxes attached to the underside of the launchers, each mech could fire up to 80 harpoons in total!
"These mechs are the nightmare of any phase whale!"