As Ves and Juliet fixed up their chs so that they could fight once again, Bobby Orwell and Lizzie Cado reviewed their performance in their past matches and figured out better ways to use the Sensia and Furia in combat.
All of their efforts produced great results.
The Twin Souls possessed significant advantages over most of the other competition chs. Their designs were more sound while the physical fras were well put together.
At the level of competition in the Twin Weapons Tournant, these technical advantages translated to slight advantages in speed, defense, shock absorption, reaction speed, range of motion, balancing, firepower, chanical strength and more.
Team Larkinson also had another advantage that beca increasingly evident as it advanced into the later rounds
Its chs were always in better shape than that of their opponents!
The delay between the rounds had dropped considerably. Only 9 matches were held during the third round and only 4 fights took place during the fourth round.
This chanism rewarded teams whose chs were stronger. After all, in theory the greater the disparity in performance, the less damage the winning side incurred.
Less damage ant that the ch designers needed less ti to fix up their chs!
This beca a lot more evident during the third round.
When Team Larkinson matched up against Team Polter, the chs presented by the latter made for an unusual combination!
It appeared that Team Polter had spent all of their ti on fixing up their striker ch, which was ard with a shotgun that was larger and more powerful than the one held by the Furia.
The dedicated striker ch also carried a lot more shells, allowing it to fire its formidable weapon a lot more tis without worrying about running dry!
Team Polter's light skirmisher on the other hand looked as if it had run through a battlefield and only received patches on its largest holes.
The ch designers could have repaired their damaged light skirmisher to its peak condition, but they chose not to because they needed to ration their ti.
The results of their decisions beca evident.
Team Polter's chs started out strong. The striker ch imdiately managed to blast the Sensia, causing the light skirmisher to get struck by an uncomfortable amount of pellets.
Bobby Orwell did not delay and imdiately fired the Furia's complent of smoke and EM missiles.
However, their effect was surprisingly small!
It turned out that Team Polter had made targeted modifications to their chs to shield their sensor systems and other vulnerable systems from disruption!
Aside from that, the striker ch that got caught in the middle of the smoke cloud had begun to move away as quickly as possible before anything else happened.
This forced the Twin Souls to fight against the chs of Team Polter in a more straightforward clash.
The striker ch was clearly the biggest threat to the Larkinson machines. The Sensia was especially vulnerable to its shotgun as it was a direct counter to all light chs!
However, neither Bobby nor Lizzie concerned themselves too much with the striker ch at first.
"Take out the light skirmisher first!"
While the enemy striker ch tried its best to blast the Sensia to pieces, the Furia unloaded all of its firepower towards the opposing light skirmisher!
The Polter light ch tried its best to evade the incoming laser beams and shotgun attacks. It also did its best to use the striker ch as cover, but with the Sensia circling around to pressure it from another direction, it beca more difficult to maintain this strategy!
Eventually, the Furia managed to strike the legs of the damaged enemy light skirmisher, causing it to fumble at a critical mont!
Lizzie Cado imdiately spotted an opening and dashed her Sensia forward!
A single knife punched through the thin covering material on the center of the opposing light skirmisher's chest. It proceeded to cut through a number of key components, causing the faltering machine to lose a lot of power all of a sudden!
The rest of the match did not last too long after that. Once Team Polter's light skirmisher had been taken out of action before a minute had passed, the Twin Souls imdiately utilized a classic pincer maneuver to terrorize the surviving striker ch.
The well-armored but sluggish machine only managed to fire its shotgun at the Furia a few tis before the daggers stabbing into its back finally caused it to shut down as well!
[Impressive yet again! As expected of Team Larkinson. The patriarch is well on his way to winning the championship. His chs have only incurred surface damage this ti, so both the Sensia and the Furia will be as good as new once the ch designers have replaced their damaged armor plating.]
[It ended too soon. Team Polter had more potential than this. Its chs faltered too soon.]
[The fault does not lie in the ch pilots nor the chs. It is the ch designers of Team Polter that ultimately bear the responsibility of losing. The designs of their chs are rather basic but they are fairly solid and reliable given how little ti the team spent on them. If the striker ch and the light skirmisher both entered the arena in their peak conditions, then the match should have beco much more even than the farce that has just ended.
[Hmmm, I understand where you are going with this. Team Polter's chs have just gone through a tough match in the previous round, so they had to repair a large amount of broken parts. Team Larkinson chs had just concluded a difficult fight against the Double Up and the Triple Spray designed by Team Hendrix. Yet once the third round comnced, the chs of one side are in a considerably better shape than the chs of the other side. What does this reveal?]
[Practical skills matter! If you pull up the records of the ch designers of Team Polter, you will discover that they started out their careers in a design studio. Even after they decided to go independent, they still spent too much ti in their design labs and too little ti in their workshops. That makes much more of a difference than you realize. Not only is Team Polter slow to repair their damaged machines, its ch designers also do not fully understand how to design their chs with repairability in mind. Both their striker ch and their light skirmisher take around 20 percent more ti to repair than they should due to the inclusion of overly complicated components and the design choices that make the repair and replacent process more tedious and ti-consuming than necessary.]
[A ch should not only be judged by their performance when they are in their peak conditions, but also the ease in which an owner can restore its functionality when damaged. Never forget that chs are machines of war. They are expected to operate in rough terrain and take damage from enemy attacks. Repairability is a particularly important criteria for military chs. They must be built to operate under the most punishing circumstances. If they get knocked down, they must be able to get back up as soon as possible. No complaints! If a ch model is too much of a DIVA to endure regular punishnt, then it should disappear and make way for superior products!]
The panel of experts did well to highlight the value of repairability and explain how relevant it was in a ch design tournant like this, but Ves did not believe the Senior ch Designers employed by the DUT understood the full picture.
"They're ignorant of living ch side of our works." He complained to Juliet.
"Can you bla them, Ves? Even our pilots don't really know what they are doing yet. Unlike the other Davutan ch pilots that only need to familiarize themselves with the quirks and properties of their competition chs, Bobbie and Lizzie must also learn how to cooperate with their living chs."
The ch pilots from the Federal Military of Davute may have encountered living chs before, but they never piloted them in person as the Larkinson Clan currently did not supply them with any of its products.
Bobby and Lizzie had undergone the equivalent of a crash course in living chs!
While it helped a lot that Ves had taken the lack of familiarity of the Davutan ch pilots into account when he designed the Twin Souls, there was still a lot of depth to his works!
No amount of simplification could rob his living chs from their varied and comprehensive features, many of which were rather subtle and obtuse.
The learning curve of living chs was asured in years, not days. The earliest ch pilots to co into contact with living chs such as lkor, Jannzi and the rest of the old gang occasionally experienced surprise as they discovered another useful function of their machines.
This phenonon illustrated a profound truth.
It wasn't just the ch pilots that were learning to work with their machines.
The living chs also possessed the capacity to learn and adapt to their ch pilots!
Whenever Ves inspected the spiritual foundations of his two machines, he saw that they had beco more and more in tune with their assigned pilots.
This was a normal process that happened everyti a new living ch ca into contact with a new pilot.
What was different was that Ves had made targeted adjustnts and changes to hasten the process of adaptation.
After all, the combat phase of the Twin Weapons Tournant only lasted for a single day. Team Larkinson only had to win a few more matches to win the entire competition, so Ves had to make sure that the Senia and the Furia did their utmost to assist their pilots in action!
Every period of downti was another opportunity for Ves to covertly apply targeted adjustnts to the spiritual foundations of his competition chs.
He had worked with living chs for many years now and he understood more about their nuances than any other ch designer or spiritual engineer.
The normal process of ch-pilot adaption was normally a gradual process that took months before it reached a threshold.
At that point, the fixed ch pilots that utilized the sa living chs on a regular basis would finally feel their machines had beco uniquely 'theirs'.
Regardless of the actual status of ownerships of the hardware in question, as far as the living chs were concerned, they only had a single true battle partner!
The ch pilot and the living ch trusted each other to such an extent that they could nudge each other and communicate wordlessly as if they were soulmates. This was a wonderful experience to the parties involved, and it was always painful to break up this wonderful partnership in order to reassign the pilot and the living ch to different units.
When Juliet learned what Ves was doing, she looked thoughtful.
"I thought that living chs were akin to dogs that slowly imprint themselves onto their new owners over ti."
"That is a decent description of the adaptation process." Ves nodded as he worked to rip out a few broken parts from the damaged rear side of the Sensia. He also tweaked the spiritual foundation of the light ch while he was at it. "Maybe I should call it an imprinting process instead, because the living chs all start out as little puppies that latch on to the first ch pilot that treat them well."
"If that is the case, Ves, then aren't you interfering with the free will and sanctity of your living chs? You are essentially brainwashing them into loving their ch pilots more. If you did this to a human, you would beco branded as a war criminal. While I am not that well-versed in living chs, I thought that a man of your principles would have beco more reticent about mistreating the machines that you have brought to life."
Juliet brought up a heavy philosophical matter. Ves slowed down a bit as he tried his best to formulate a satisfying answer.
User Comments
0 comments from readers