The Mech Touch

6926  Gradual Transformation

There were many possible ways to upgrade the Tortuous Scream, but the most significant ones demanded the use of a large orbital shipyard over long periods of time.

This was the trouble with starships and especially capital ships. For all of their power and scale, it took exponentially greater facilities to construct them and upgrade their hulls.

Ves much preferred to work with mechs. Their much more compact nature made it easy for a professional crew of mech technicians to repair, modify or upgrade the machines.

Even if the effort was a bit too expensive and cumbersome, the additional costs should still fall within a tolerable range.

Such a modest setup did not apply to an alien battleship as massive as the Tortuous Scream.

Even the E-66 Experimental Shipyard struggled to transform the Tortuous Scream. The facility was only rated to construct ships measuring up to 2.3 kilometers in length.

The shipbuilders and engineers over there had to perform a lot of work in open space where the lack of control over the environment resulted in greater hazards and mistakes.

All of this meant that the Tortuous Scream's conversion rate was not as great as Ves imagined.

"We have initially tamed and trained this battleship into an unruly but somewhat obedient mount." High Captain Gilbert de Raanvanchas informed Ves. "However, we have yet to fully decipher her alien programming or identify all of her hidden coding. Her orven operating system is akin to the instincts of a wild beast. Removing it entirely will result in death, which is not what we want. We have no choice but to install control implants, place physical restraints and rely on various verbal commands and physical signals to tell the beast to move and fight at our command."

Ves frowned when he heard that. This sounded distinctly more precarious than he expected.