Chapter 5600 Private Product Reveal

Chapter 5600 Private Product Reveal

The Supremo Project was unlike any other second-class heavy artillery mech design that Micky Tarukan had seen before.

In fact, no Rubarthan had ever seen such a mech before!

On the surface, the Supremo Project looked like a typical heavy artillery mech that was based around the one-huge-gun mech concept.

These were mech designs that attempted to skirt the line of the MTA-imposed rule that restricted the caliber of ranged weapons.

The general rule of thumb was that weapon systems were only allowed to be as big and powerful so long as they could still be independently carried by a single mech.

This restriction chafed people a lot during the early years of the Age of Mechs. Many of the people who were alive at the time still recalled the awesome firepower of warships.

A standard mech could never come close to matching the firepower of the main cannon of a battleship, but that did not stop mech designers from attempting to close the gap as much as possible!

All sorts of silly mech designs emerged as a consequence that amounted to little more than a big cannon with a mech body vaguely attached to them. From mounting the oversized cannons on their backs to literally turning them into spines, the ultra-heavy cannon mechs did manage to live up to their promise and bestow immensely strong firepower to the mech forces that fielded them in battle!The source of this content can be connected to n0v3lb!n★

Unfortunately, restricted mech combat abided by a completely different set of rules than traditional unrestricted warship combat.

Big guns did not deliver the overwhelming suppression and the easy victories as their promoters envisioned.

The mechs that carried them were too undersized relative to their enormous cannons. This caused them to lose a huge degree of flexibility.

Their ultra-heavy cannons possessed an exceedingly slow firing rate. Their massive frames moved too slowly on the battlefield. They were easily damaged. Their main weapon systems became prone to malfunctions. The most stressed components wore down far too quickly.

While the ultra-heavy cannon mechs barely functioned adequately when employed as a semi-fixed defensive installation, they were terrible when used in attack maneuvers.

Any adversary could easily work around their many obvious weaknesses and take advantage of their complete lack of flexibility and adaptability to target their vulnerabilities!

They were especially vulnerable to light mechs. Any light skirmisher could easily advance while evading the slow-firing attacks from the unwieldy ultra-heavy cannons.

Once the light skirmishers came close, then they could easily avoid the firing arc of the single big weapon and dismantle the vulnerable heavy mechs from the rear or any other unprotected sides!

Of course, the forces that employed the ultra-heavy cannon mechs always made sure to provide their expensive babies with adequate escorts, but that brought its own host of issues.

When a hostile force fielded a more reasonable and flexible roster of heavy artillery mechs, it became easy to eliminate the ultra-heavy cannon mechs by relying on quantity as opposed to quantity.

It was impossible for a small number of ultra-heavy cannon mechs to eliminate a much larger quantity of regular heavy artillery mechs!

The latter had a lot more depth and redundancy. They could also reposition themselves much easier after they fired a salvo, allowing them to avoid counter-battery fire a lot easier.

Micky Tarukan could believe in this claim. The huge size and other obvious characteristics of the main cannon better be able to one-shot a mech, or else it wasn't worth the trouble!

"The main cannon is clearly more suited for direct or low-angle fire in landbound combat. It can function as a suitable long-range siege weapon in spaceborn combat. The heavy artillery cannons that can launch explosive shells should have much lower muzzle velocities. That should only make them suitable for mid-range combat in space battles."

Ves nodded. "That is true. The heavy artillery cannons can load all sorts of standard shells for its caliber, so every mech force has a lot of choice on how to employ them. My favorite is to load them with spaceburst shells that can produce wide-area explosions at set distances. That should be reasonably effective in destroying dense formations of small craft or hitting fast-moving targets."

That sounded useful, but the premise was that the enemy small craft and warships moved close enough to the human starships that carried the Supremo Project in their bunkers.

As long as the range extended past a certain point, the horribly slow muzzle velocities of the traditional artillery cannons would make it so that they could never hit any reasonably moving target in space!

Even so, this was an acceptable tradeoff. The Supremo Project was really all about the big fat gun that was mounted on its front.

The more Micky Tarukan looked at it, the more he became attracted by its possibilities.

How much damage could a mech company comprised entirely of this exaggerated heavy artillery mech inflict?

Such a force might not excel at inflicting wide-area destruction, but it could accurately strike heavily fortified targets with the force of a hammer of god!

Another idea came to mind.

"This cannon... is it capable of firing at orbital targets from the ground?"

Ves grinned. "Yes. That is one of the new objectives that Master Horst and I tried to fulfill. All of the calculations bear this out. The early prototypes have also confirmed this capability. The best way for the Supremo Project to threaten enemy warships in orbit is to load its main cannon with transphasic rounds. This allows the solid projectiles to partially phase through the air, effectively negating a lot of air resistance that ordinarily saps a lot of speed and force. It may be an expensive choice, but with the targeting guidance from Ylvaine, the Supremo Project is capable of making every shot count!"

This made the Supremo Project even more attractive than before! It could function as a legitimate planetary defense unit that could safely bombard enemy warships that had managed to approach a human-occupied planet.

In many cases, enemy warships could easily ignore the threat from the surface so long as the humans kept sticking to their own version of small craft. Mechs simply did not possess the punch needed to inflict significant damage onto shielded warships that leisurely hovered in orbit.

That could change once a heavy artillery mech like the Supremo Project started to get stationed across many different planets!

lightsnοvεl The expense would be great, but the resources needed to field a hundred copies of this radical heavy artillery mech were far lower than the resources that the aliens invested in their own warships!

So long as the Supremo Project could down one enemy warship, then they had already paid for themselves!

The deterrence value alone was already precious enough. If the aliens decided to postpone or slow down their planetary assaults upon detecting large quantities of Supremo Project mechs, then that granted the latter an even greater strategic significance!

Micky Tarukan made a decision.

Isthmus Manufacturing could not let this powerful new mech design slip past its fingers!