[1-200] THE MECH TOUCH

Chapter 50: Hunter

"It's too slow though." Ves noticed the hole in such a tactic. "There's no way the Octagon can jump on an alert opponent."

In real life situations, mech pilots never knew how many opponents were on the battlefield. That wasn't the case with arena-style matches, as the game always gave a team an equal amount of opponents. With such information in hand, the pilots would never let their guard down if they haven't killed the expected number of adversaries.

"There's no way I am getting out of this without buying a stealth module."

Ves let out a resigned sigh and followed his instincts. It kept nagging at him to plug this hole. He exited the Designer and turned to his desk terminal. He booted up Iron Spirit and visited the 2-star section of the market. He skipped all of the other goodies in his sight and focused solely on the stealth components.

When it came to hiding mechs from the senses of others, the market offered many options. None of them were perfect but all of them cost a fortune.

The particle ejector was the cheapest option. It worked by throwing a bunch of specialized particles in the air and let it spread wide in other to overwhelm his opponents with false readings. Specialized anchoring incorporated in the minute particles allowed them to hover in the air for an extended amount of time.

The problem with such an approach was that it did not distinguish between friend or foe. You were likely to blind yourself and your allies if you pumped a lot of junk in the air. It also pretty much announced to the enemy that you lurked nearby and wished to come close and jump at them. Furthermore, the particles followed the wind and could be blown away easily in certain situations despite their anchoring.

Another option involved employing active sensor countermeasures such as ECM. They came in many flavors and sometimes could do a lot of things at once. They could pump out noise that disabled certain long-ranged sensors. They could project a fake mech a distance away or they could produce many identical mechs in a small area to make it seem a single mech came in a big group.

Ves wasn't entirely unfamiliar with ECM systems. He used such a thing before in the Seraphim and the Phantasm and it supplemented the evasion of those mechs. It could benefit the Octagon as well as this model relied heavily on evasion when under fire.

ECM came with its own downsides though. The more powerful modules slurped plenty of energy, could not fool all types of sensors and the act of turning it on full blast already radiated signals that could alert an unsuspecting opponent. It also couldn't fool exotic sensors such as those that measured ground vibration. Lastly, the enemy pilot could simply cease relying on his machine and used his human senses to observe the battlefield.

The last type of stealth measure was the use of specialized coating or armor. By cladding the mech with an outer layer that suppressed signals from bouncing back to the opponent's sensors, it could quietly sneak around without getting detected by the enemy.

However, same as the other options, such a trick was unable to suppress other signals such as sound and vibration. Opting for stealth coating or armor also meant missing out on more damage resistant options. For example, a popular add-on mech pilots like to buy was a special reflective coating that slightly negated incoming damage from lasers.

The three options of chaff, ECM and stealth coating represented the limited progress of stealth technology at the time. More sophisticated solutions started to pop up in the following decades, but Ves had no access to them due to their higher star ratings.

"The Octagon isn't a saboteur, even though it can work as one."

There was an important distinction in role. Saboteurs generally avoided seeking out conflicts and operated mainly behind enemy lines to attack critical infrastructure nodes. The Octagon on the other hand specialized in pure combat in dense, complex environments. What it needed was an aid to help it kill its enemies better, not a way to elude detection entirely.