"First of all, we encountered some major problems with stuffing essence of emptiness into spatial storage," Philip explains. "At best it would refuse to go in, and at other times it would just dissipate into the storage space. That is the source of the first drawback; space. The shells have to have a certain size. But a good chunk of that space is already used by the propellant and the explosive charge."

"So adding containers for some essence of emptiness reduces both of those key ingredients, right?" I deduce, and the two Fabricators nod.

"Indeed," the Goblin says with a wry smile. "But that's not all, stuffing enough essence of emptiness for it to have an effect that will last more than a millisecond requires great pressures; and making small tanks capable of enduring so much pressure for an extended amount of time is not an easy task."

"There were some explosions during the testing phase," Krognar continues, "But we found a solution, albeit I don't know if you would like it."

I raise an eyebrow, "And why wouldn't I like it?"

"We found a way to make tanks capable of enduring the pressures we need to get enough essence of emptiness into the shell, but it requires a costly alloy that is also tough to process. It wears down our tools faster than anything else in our production lines."

That is a big negative point. While it might not seem like much at first glance, magical tooling is not cheap and replacing our tools more often is going to make a dent in our budget, not to mention that making or buying the alloy is not going to be cheap either.

"But still, we have the tanks." Krognar says with a bit of pride, "Another problem was releasing the essence from its containers. As you can probably guess, releasing a pressure equal to thousands of times that of the atmosphere tends to cause problems."

I can imagine. The stress the shell has to endure is already quite significant thanks to Krognar's fuel and the runes engraved onto the guns of the Hammer, so adding any more intense pressure on the shell would likely cause it to rupture.

"We had a few solutions to this problem. First of all, we tried to make the walls of the shell thicker, but that didn't work. Our first prototypes snapped in half and would have decapitated us if not for our shields." Philip recalls with a slight tremor. "Then we decided to change the materials of the shell's casing."

Philip glances at the shell next to him and makes a difficult expression which looks like a mix between pride and disappointment. I can't help but raise an eyebrow, what could possibly make this old man feel so conflicted?

"We iterated through a lot of different materials and design changes until we found a compromise that we feel is good enough." The Fabricator continues. "We made the walls of the shells slightly thicker around the area where the essence is released. We also changed the metal from an alloy- What was its name again? It could barely fit on the page, and I cannot remember it for the life of me."

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I wave my hand in the air, "Those details are not important for now, I expect to see them in a report sooner than later." I say before prompting the two geniuses to continue.

"Right," Philip says, "The metal we used can barely withstand the stress we're putting it through, but that comes at a price. The shells produced by this method are heavy, incredibly heavy. It wouldn't be a lie if I said that we could probably flatten Imperial soldiers by dropping the shells onto them."

I'm beginning to see a pattern here.

"And let me guess, this material is also hard to process?" I ask.

"You have no idea," Krognar makes an empty laugh, "We wore down a brand new set of tools in less than a minute when we first tried to machine the metal. At first, we thought that the metal chips we were seeing were from the material being cut, but it was just pieces of the tools flying off as it was being ground into dust."

"So let me get this straight. You have made a shell that is at least thirty times as heavy as a regular one, and greatly decreased its capacity to hold fuel? And now I bet you're going to say that you used costly tools to machine an already ludicrously expensive material?"

The two Fabricators exchange a glance before lowering their heads, "That's pretty much it." Krognar says with no even a hint of a smile.

"Is that all?" I ask while tapping my foot onto the ground. The base idea was good, and they apparently managed to make something that works, but their execution is beyond terrible. I'm sure we could refine their project, but it is worth the time or the cost?

The Fabricators, who understand my silence as an order to continue, keeps explaining the other aspects of their design.

"We also had trouble with actually making the shell go through the barrier," Philip explains. "Our fuses are not suitable to release the gas a little bit before the munition touches the barrier. We tried to make the fuses more sensitive and better, but it almost made the shell explode at the slightest hint of mana."

Great, just great. I'm starting to think that those two don't understand the concept of convincing someone.

"So we switched to another sensor package, one with a longer range and faster processing time." Philip continues. "The caveat is that it takes up more space in the shell, and is just a tiny bit more expensive than what we are using everywhere else."

"But switching to another fuse brought its own set of problems," Philip explains as a very complex diagram of what I assume is the interior of the shell appears near him. My jaw drops; the thing looks nothing like what a standard shell should look like. Our current ammunitions for the Hammer are quite simple; there's a compartment for the propellant and one for the warhead. The warhead themselves are very low-tech all things considering, just a simple impact-detection rune along linked to either the penetrator system or only explosives.

But what I'm seeing is on another level. It looks like the internal diagram for a very complex piece of clockwork with tons of moving parts and different runes. The size of the effective payload is also ridiculous compared to what we are used to; this specific diagram only shows a 'light' version of our penetrator system, but I have my doubts about its effectiveness.

"Is this even able to destroy a barrier from the inside? Those locations are usually well-defended." I ask with a raised eyebrow.

"We aren't one hundred percent sure, but it should work on most targets we encountered so far." Krognar replies.

"So, to make it clear." I take a deep breath as my exasperation is reaching its peak, "You spend who knows how many Credits and resources on something too heavy to have good speed, and it also cannot hold enough fuel to reach the speeds of our old shells. You're also telling me that it's made of expensive components and requires a lot of machining steps, thus making their production slow. It also can barely hold a warhead potent enough to actually breach Imperial defenses, and- Is that number the price estimate per unit?" I interrupt myself as I gesture towards a suspiciously large number.

"...Yes." Krognar replies.

I check the current price of our shells before Rewinding to make them believe that I knew how much our regular ammo cost. Let's say that I'm lucky that the Order has so much money, or else we would have gone bankrupt a long time ago.

"And each of those shells is the price of almost fifteen penetrators, which is more than what we use on average to break most barriers," I say as I hammer the final nail in the coffin for this particular project. The idea was interesting since it could have made our assaults slightly faster and cheaper, but the two Fabricators failed. The resulting shell does apparently work, but it is way too expensive, and it is also barely usable.

However, there's a silver lining. We learned a lot thanks to the efforts of Krognar and Philip, and I'm sure that their discoveries will be useful at some point...Right?