Liz, Sydney, and I instantly logged into the design mode, leaving behind the other three, who would likely be practicing against other trainees.

“So what sort of mech are we going to be making? I started the conversation with the other three people in our group.”

“Medium long range,” Liz instantly answered.

“Why?”

“Because the current railgun is horribly out of date. The standard design hasn’t changed in over a decade, but that’s just I haven’t had the chance to play with the modern materials in the civilian version,” Liz answered. I looked at her with a blank look. I knew she was arrogant, but this was flat out ridiculous. Mentally shrugging, I decided to give her the benefit of the doubt, and quickly started asking how much power it would require. Eventually we decided to go with an automatic cannon on one arm, as the railgun would be taking up a majority of the power the aether reactor would put out. We also decided on an advanced sensor package, which made me depressed. Between the capacitors for the railgun taking up one half the torso, and the advanced sensor package and autocannon ammo taking up the other half, there would be no room to fit in my seekers and the computer required to calculate their trajectory.

We had a bit of discussion on overall mech shape, and decided to go with one that would minimize the sensor profile, which would hopefully make the enemy assume we were a light class mech rather than the medium class one we were. For armor we would be going with reactive armor to minimize damage from enemy railguns and automatic cannons, though it would leave us vulnerable to lasers.

We had a discussion with Kenna, and contrary to her usual quiet demeanor, once we started talking about what types of sensors, from aether detectors to standard radar and lidar, she would not be quiet, talking at a rapid pace about all the different options we had.

“Is she always like that when it comes to detection systems?” I asked Liz after she’d gone off to design the sensor suite we’d be using.

Liz let out a mischievous smile as she replied. “Of course! Why else would I have brought her to join us?”

Now that I thought about it, I don’t think that Liz said anything without a smile of one variation or another, but considering how cute she was when she smiled, I could definitely forgive her. Eris caught onto my thoughts, and was radiating a smug feeling across to me, making me frown.

‘I’m still not going to go after her, I’d rather not get kicked off the team,’ I thought at Eris, but she got the better of me with her reply.

‘So if you wouldn’t be risking getting kicked off the team you would?’

I blushed at that, and Liz gave off a questioning look, while Tae, who apparently had been paying attention to us grinned. I gave her a blank look, but her grin only got a bit wider, clearly assuming something.

Deciding to ignore her, I opened design mode and got to working on the mech. I decided to use the base frame of one of my older mechs, and started switching out materials. Along with those, I switched out the joints to more efficient ones that were listed for open use on the military version. While mech designs themselves tended to be unique from person to person, almost all used joints, connectors, and alloys that were open use for their design, as they had become the standard for a reason. I wasn’t yet knowledgeable enough to be designing my own with the new materials, even with the months of schooling I had gone through. It made me happy when I realized that the upgraded capacitors would drastically cut down on space and weight, and considered using the additional space for a couple seekers, but eventually bowed down to reason and simply doubled down on the capacitors adding enough power that the railgun would be able to fire twice consecutively after they were fully filled.

I didn’t even manage to get the basic frame done before dinnertime, and I went to the cafeteria rather than going out to any sort of restaurant. Tae was the only one to join me, and I discussed with her optimizing a computer to use for controlling the seekers I was planning on upgrading, but we would have to hold off until Eris had rewritten the control code, which itself would come after we had redesigned the seekers themselves with the new material.

After dinner, I was free to do as I pleased, and I decided to spend it on the seeker redesign. Just about everything changed, while mostly staying the same design. I used improved microthrusters and fins, a more electronic countermeasure resistant wireless signal, a lighter alloy overall, and a more powerful explosive load. Thankfully, I wasn’t actually doing much designing, just replacing parts with better ones. Eris would have the hard job, she’d need to run countless simulations due to the changes so as to develop a control program for them.

I’d thought I hadn’t spent that long, but by the time I finished, I realized I was going to have to wake up in less than two hours. I rushed as quickly as I could through my nightly ritual before rushing to bed, dreading waking up.

Morning may have been even worse than I was dreading, heavy metal playing within my skull to wake me up as Eris hummed along in my head somehow. Dragging myself from the heavenly warmth of my bed, I got up and got ready, quickly heading to the cafeteria for breakfast. I considered getting some groceries and cooking my own food for a bit, but decided to do that another time. I ate as quickly as I’d been trained to in basic, and quickly met up with the rest of my combat squad, this time having each of their designers along with them to discuss details on what sort of mech they would like.

We went through our four hours of practice, this time trying different maps. Going up against the other aliens was interesting, the Sius mechs all had four legs, and were ridiculously maneuverable. They tended to use mainly combustive weaponry, using the power that would charge lasers or railguns to power active aether armor covering their entire mech. While they wouldn’t take as much of a punishment as an actual active aether armor shield, they wouldn’t get knocked out from a single shot of a sniper class like most mechs would.

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The Rew on the other hand, were the only ones that didn’t use mechs based on their physiology, mostly using quadrupedal mechs, one of which looked suspiciously like a rhino that was covered in active aether armor. I wondered how they managed that for a bit. Humanity had tried using mechs not designed to be humanoid, but they had always ended up causing serious orientation issues, usually ending in the operator ending up violently ill.

We were soon back to designing, and i finished the basic design. It was terribly angular, and looked like an older mech design, but that was the best way to minimize sensor profile, so I simply ignored the fact that it looked a few generations out of date. I wondered a bit at the fact that a lot of modern designs weren’t purely utilitarian, but designed partially for looks as well. Our new mech had angled reactive armor on its torso, giving enough room for the capacitors, sensor package and computer, along with ammo for the autocannon.

I decided to use the default automatic cannon for the right arm. It wouldn’t be quite as good as some of the custom designs people had made, but it was massively reliable, and I evenly distributed the armor around it. I didn’t give it much leeway in tracking horizontally in return for more armor, but made sure it could track well vertically for anti air and anti vehicle purposes. The torso could rotate, which would fix the problem of horizontal tracking anyway.

Once I’d done that, I got down to the details, choosing an explosive reactive armor rather than a passive one. For the metal plates in the armor I went with a pretty basic aethersteel alloy, as I wouldn’t need to cut down on weight due to it being a medium class mech. The only special feature of the armor is that it would absorb slight amounts of aether, which would make it seem a bit fuzzy on aether sensors. That would combine with the shape to hopefully cause the enemies to assume it was a light mech.

I couldn’t work on the design of the left arm until Liz finished the railgun design, and considering how many variables she would have to account for, I didn’t expect her to finish it anytime soon. Weapon design was often far harder than mech design to create a viable product. With mechs, you could at least get down a basic design in just a couple of hours. The hard part came after that, fine tuning joints, weapon choices, shape, and alloys would require a lot of testing in Wartech before you came out with a final design.

For the legs, I went with a very stable design rather than picking less stable ones that were more maneuverable, as I would have to account for the recoil from both weapons. Mechs using plasma cannons and lasers didn’t have this issue, and were able to pick up faster designs.

Annoyingly, the hip joints were of an older design, only slightly changed from the civilian wartech, and I quickly switched them out for the joints I used on my own mechs in the civilian wartech, which would give a bit more flexibility, allowing the mech to turn faster, and giving more lateral motion, while only sacrificing an inconsequential amount of speed. I’d always thought it silly to give up maneuverability for one or two kilometers an hour.

While I was doing this, Eris had spent the connection to a much more powerful computer than the aether one built into my head to run calculations for the seekers, and soon had the base code down. While it was likely possible to optimize the code, we decided to stick with it for now, and quickly found Tae to have her optimize a computer for it.

Computers had drastically changed. Within high density aether areas, we could no longer use proper AI, even an operating system being complex enough to change, as they would begin to react with it, making them form sentience. When some people’s neural implants had started talking to the users, most of them had been helpful, happily performing their tasks, even programming things the user requested. On the downside however, whatever caused the sentience had slowed them down drastically, losing much of the cold calculation abilities they had before, though they could still display information they were passed. The only place where they were actually improvements were game worlds, which managed to become much closer to reality, turning closer to simulators with game mechanics rather than just games. Enough storage and processing power would alleviate the lack of calculation ability, so the massive server farms for games made their AI basically a god in their game world.

With mechs using aether reactors, their aether density would make something as simple as a calculator become sentient, so mechs by necessity needed custom computers that took up stupid amounts of space. My parents had given me a bleeding edge neural implant, not realizing my personal aether density was particularly high, and when I’d decided to install a rudimentary AI on top of the basic operating system, Eris was born.

On the other hand, pure aether computers would not form sentience, though they would need to be installed on the framework of a living brain, and were horrendously expensive for anyone not in the military. I still wasn’t sure how Eris had managed to make and modify the one I had, but considering how helpful it had been in my designing and gaming, I would never complain.

Tae quickly agreed to my request for the computer design, and looked quite driven now that she had something to do other than simply trying to improve the basic computer that all mechs ran on. Mech computers would regularly have improvements, with new materials being constantly created, and slightly smaller or lighter designs being made.

Afterwards, I had a discussion with Kenna on how much space her sensor package would require, along with what I would have to add to the outside of the mech to properly work. After just a short discussion, I was absolutely blown away. She had somehow managed to fit a full advanced sensor package in the the space that that would normally only fit a medium sensor package, and I took advantage of it, happy to add more armor to the mech. Now that I had the basic design down, I would only need to wait for Liz to finish her design and then would come the complicated part: lots and lots of testing in Wartech.

A couple of weeks passed, and each day the dark circles around Liz’s eyes grew darker and darker. I tried to urge her to take a couple of breaks, but each time she would respond in an excited manner about how close she was to creating the perfect railgun. I could only watch in worry as I expected her to collapse. In the meantime, I created some vehicles that would be using my seekers, and also made a missile platform mech for them, using the spare power for lasers.

The missile platform is what finally allowed us to beat wave eight on the wave defense we’d played before, pushing us up to the top five thousand. Simultaneous missiles from above, below, and from the sides made the enemy shields unable to block all of them at once. They were the bane of melee Clyx mechs, as ever since active aether armor had been developed, they would just load it up onto a shield and interpose it between any missiles and their mech. Before that, they would have machine guns to shoot down missiles, and I was sure that if my seeker missiles became something commonly used in reality, the aliens would quickly go back to them. On the other hand, my seekers were mostly useless against the Sius, as they tended to cover their mechs in active aether armor instead of using a shield, and the many propulsion systems of my seekers meant that they had a lower wield warhead than similar sized missiles.

We soon started to get used to the tactics of the different alien races, and not too long after started to find out why playing against fellow pilots was mandatory for pilot trainees. The AI controlled mechs tended to stick to the same patterns over and over, dodging the same way, firing on the same trajectories, targeting the same parts of our mechs.

I made sure to use my seekers in matches against other pilot trainees quite a few times, and they quickly became pretty popular after people saw how hopeless our melee mechs were against them. In response, mechs with large lasers quickly became more popular, as having the large laser focusing on the missile tubes for even a fraction of a second would slag them to uselessness, and they could hit from out of the seekers effective range.

It took a total of three weeks and much of her physical health, but Liz had succeeded in upgrading the railgun design that had been used for over a decade. She had somehow increased the velocity by a good ten percent while somehow decreasing the power draw by five percent. Considering force equals mass times velocity squared, that would be a lot more damage. She tried to explain the science behind the new railgun to me, but it was completely out of my wheelhouse. The only weapons I’d tried to improve myself were automatic cannons, and they functioned nothing like railguns.

I then finished up the left arm for the mech Liz had decided to call the Ante, as it was our plan to buy into military mech design. Now all we had to do was test it and iron out any kinks.