The rest of the week went the same way, Max tested the incremental improvements to the orbital insertion fighter jet while Nico worked with the team on the practical tests of the Exoskeleton. They eventually forced the coding team to write up fully articulated dendrites to replace the crane boom arms, making for better access in tight areas, and better overall articulation without moving the user’s physical body.
Ten suits had been made so far, and the Testing Department were all jealous of the staff of Bay 29, who were wearing them all day, for “Testing Purposes” as they did the modifications on the medical version dubbed the [Medical Adept Toolkit v3]. The extra arms increased productivity and precision, as well as reduced user fatigue, and petitions had already been launched to declare the suit as suitable for service so that the other bays could get them as well.
The digital design of the fighter plane had come a long way in a single week, with the structural integrity increasing by over forty percent, allowing much more comfortable maneuvering for Pilots like Max from a remote position. They also got the reload time on the Rail Cannons down to three seconds from six. That let the pair fire one shot every second and a half, an acceptable rate if you fired them alternately.
That somewhat limited the damage output, but the impact force of the shells tore through nearly anything, so the spray and pray method wasn’t really necessary.
The Kepler military was big on precision, and well-aimed shots with deadly weapons, but Max also knew that simply saturating an area in weapons fire worked just as well, with a much lower skill threshold. Unofficially, it was the way of the infantry already, though it was seen as beneath the Mecha Pilots.
The Testing Department got one day off every week, and Max was getting ready for his first true day off from the new posting when laughter in the locker room caught his attention. They were looking out into the labs, half of them still naked from the shower, but they had run out to see whatever was going on anyhow, so it must be good.
Max came out to see that the notice on the wall was declaring that the two new exoskeletons had passed testing and were now decreed ready for laboratory general use. The testing team had decided that this was the perfect time for a show, and they had assembled outfits to match their project. Five men in Coveralls and Lab Coats, with the [Tech Adept] exoskeleton on, and six women, including Nico, wearing the [Medical Adept] version in very short nurse outfits, complete with the hats.
It was the first good laugh anyone had all week, and they were going all out cheering for the upgraded equipment. Or maybe for the flying nurses, but that was the same thing, really. They were all coming off shift as well, so they flew over to the changing room to get out of the suits, where Nico showed them a trick to get undressed. If they had the grasping arms of the suit hold onto the hangars in the locker, they could simply power down and step out of them, and the suit would retract automatically to a compact form for storage.
“Congratulations on the successful testing, Bay 29. Starting tomorrow you will be on the X109 Mecha testing. It won’t be quite as rapid as the exosuits, but it is an all-new design, Crusader Class, with new weapons systems. You will be testing the entire integrated unit at once.” Colonel Noor declared, killing their joy for a moment. An all-new mecha, with all new weapons, would take a significant amount of time to finish testing.
“Also, the X137 Chassis has moved to digital testing, so you can finally escape Jet Fighter testing Major Max. I’m sure the design team will thank me for approving live tests instead of letting you make more extreme modifications to their design.” The Colonel added, then left the room.
That was what Max had been waiting for all week. The X137 was the Chassis that the Tri-Axis Variable Velocity Mass Driver, now officially code-named the Thunder Gun, was supposed to be mounted on.
That would finally get him back in a Mecha, even if it was simulated, and end a week of torture by boredom. Max wasn’t under any illusions that the digital testing of a mecha would be that much more exhilarating, but at least it would be a mecha.
Max decided to make a stop off at the Games Room for a drink, caving to Nico’s insistence that he needed to learn to have fun at some point. Not that she did much of anything, spending half her evenings watching movies with him and the other half of them discussing Mecha design with Uncle Lu.
Max was in on most of those conversations as well, and the constant thinking about new Mecha was helping to refresh his memories of the Mecha in his past life. From what he could tell, they were much more advanced than the ones that the Kepler Military used, ahead of even the designs that were making it to the testing floor of the Lab, but he was still missing some essential knowledge of his past, and couldn’t seem to find the memories of exactly how they worked or enough of the design details to explain them, running into the last bits of fog in his memory when he tried.
He had been trying, but the fog simply wouldn’t budge. It also felt different than the other parts of his memory that he had to work to recover like it had been blocked on purpose and not by coincidence. There was a chance that the being that reincarnated him had locked this portion away on purpose, hiding things that it didn’t think Max would need or that would hinder his next life, but some of them, like Mecha Weapons design he would have preferred to have access to.
Though maybe that was the point? He had spent centuries in boredom as a Nation’s hero in his past life. What if the Mecha he piloted had something to do with it? If that were the case, he might irrevocably damage his happiness in this life, leaving him in a level of boredom and drudgery even more monotonous than digital design testing for the remainder of his natural life, and that would never do. Once the upgraded Mecha for the next generation of Military deployments was finished he was going to work to get himself reassigned to combat.
Maybe live fire testing of the new X137 that Uncle Lu had designed for him would be a good enough excuse?