The Mech Touch

Chapter 6481 A New Chance For the Unfortunates

There was one more group of people who were even more suitable to pilot Carmine mechs aside from infantry soldiers.

There was nothing particularly wrong about converting infantry into Carmine mech pilots. Even if they never came into prominence due to the idolization of mech pilots, it was incredibly cheap to train and employ these troops.

As long as there was no demand for elite commandos or whatever, the cost to raise and employ an entire infantry troop from scratch for several decades could never exceed the cost of purchasing a single mech!

However, most groups knew it was useless to field millions of infantry soldiers on the battlefield.

A few mech companies would tear them to shreds, mostly at a distance but also up close when it suited them. The combat power of a single mech was simply too much, and their effectiveness rose when they fought alongside other complementary mechs. Infantry was only really useful in trying to conquer enemy warships, clearing out enemy fortifications without blowing everything up and occupying conquered territories.

The vast majority of infantry troops were therefore trained to fulfill these roles. They were not expected to carry the war by themselves, but merely served to support the operations of mechs.

Infantry was often used to clean up the messes behind by rampaging mechs. Nobody was optimistic about them, but they could not neglect their roles either, as a force without any infantry at its disposal could easily succumb against those that did not make this mistake.

Now, infantry had gained a resurgence. Each of them had turned into useful assets. Their weapon handling skills, their ability to work in a military hierarchy and their mental tempering all turned them into one of the most suitable choices to put into the cockpits of Carmine mechs!

It only took days for many far-sighted groups to regard their own infantry forces as a reserve manpower pool for Carmine mech pilots.

While it would still take a couple of years for them to train the necessary skills and learn the theoretical knowledge to pilot Carmine mechs competently, this was still incredibly fast compared to the traditional process of turning potentates into professional mech pilots!

The manpower pool of potentates and conventional mech pilots had been shrinking rapidly.

The native alien's preference for attrition warfare had taken an awful toll on human defenders in the past few years, not just during the Red Tide Offensive.

If the supply of potentates wasn't so small, then the Polymath's plan to produce a huge amount of batch humans and the Red Fleet's efforts to promote the Starfighter Corps would not have happened!

Many of these solutions had largely become redundant after the release of Carmine mechs.

While the solution was not perfect, red humanity already had so many infantry forces at its disposal that it should readily be able to transform billions of footsoldiers into reserve Carmine mech pilots as long as the supply of Yellow Jackets was sufficient. At the very least, manpower was no longer the most concerning bottleneck that limited red humanity's warmaking potential. That granted a lot of relief to leaders. They instead had to face the problem of limited war resources, which was not as troublesome to solve.

Just the salvage retrieved from captured and destroyed alien warships was enough to choke the manufacturing complexes!

The biggest problem facing red humanity was that there was still a buffer time before the conversions could be finished. Two or three years might not sound like a big deal, but the frontlines might not be able to last this long!

This was why the various forces had turned to not one manpower pool, but actually two different pools that used to hold no value, but suddenly became a lot more attractive!

One of them was disabled veteran mech pilots, Brain damage and other heavy physical injuries were not common in mech warfare. Cockpit breaches usually resulted in fatal outcomes. This was why most mech pilots tended to remain completely healthy or die without leaving a recognizable body behind.

In the rare edge cases where the cockpits got breached but the pilots still managed to survive a heavy blow launched by a mech, defensive fortification or warship, then there was a considerable chance that they would become disabled.

This was a fate that many mech pilots feared. There were even warriors who considered it to be a fate worse than death, because there was no glory in returning to civilian life!

While incidents of mech pilots being forced to retire due to brain damage did not happen often, they still occurred frequently enough in a population base as large as red humanity for millions of them to accumulate over time.

A proportion of them were actually quite promising back when they were still combat capable.

There were even expert pilots among them who suffered the same miserable outcome as Benjamin Larkinson.

Now that Yellow Jackets had become available, all of these disabled veterans finally saw an opportunity to regain their former glory and make up for the regrets of their

lives!

Many military mech forces were also extremely eager to pick them up and allocate Yellow Jackets to them as they only required a month or two of retraining and familiarization with their new Carmine mechs in order to get ready for battle!

These disabled veteran mech pilots had become the best showcase of what the Yellow Jackets were capable of in the hands of skilled mech pilots.

One of the downsides to releasing the Yellow Jackets to the public was that too much footage of amateurs failing to control their brand new machines had flooded the

galactic net.

Even if most of the viewers did not judge the exuberant Carmine mech pilots harshly for their lack of control, Ves still became annoyed that more and more people gained the impressions that his Yellow Jackets were weak and useless!

Fortunately, the footage of squads or companies of Yellow Jackets piloted by disabled veterans started to show up and gain prominence in the news.

Their ability to leverage the greater potential of the Yellow Jackets was much greater. They did not have to start off in the most simplest configuration by attaching just one modular weapon slot to the mech frame.

They immediately started with 2, 3 or even 4 limbs, thereby mimicking the configurations of the conventional mechs they used to pilot!

Each of them only exhibited moderate signs of unfamiliarity and lack of precise control. Piloting a mech through the Blood Pact was different from relying on a traditional man-machine connection, so these veterans had to unlearn a few habits. and master new ones in order to regain their old level of combat effectiveness. Nonetheless, the approach to controlling a mech was similar enough in both cases that they did not require more than a few weeks to smooth out all of the wrinkles! This was good news for everyone as the frontlines would start to get reinforced by a lot of Yellow Jackets in a month or less!

Even if the veterans converted into Carmine mech pilots had not yet completed their retraining programs yet, they should have already spent enough time with their Yellow Jackets to avoid ending up as liabilities on the battlefield.

Their entry in the most crucial contested star systems did much to compensate for the sudden deflation of the Starfighter Corps!

"The invention of Carmine mechs has almost collapsed the Starfighter Corps overnight." Gavin spoke with a hint of glee in his voice. "There is almost no one who

wants to pilot a starfighter when they can pilot a Carmine mech instead. The only issue is that the loss of recruitment and the defection of many starfighter pilots has

gap in reinforcements. The mobilization of Carmine mechs piloted by disabled veterans will do much to address this problem, but the numbers do not entirely add up. We still need starfighters to make up the numbers, but no matter what the fleeters do, they can't attract more people into piloting their strike craft. The only solution left is conscription, but this is a highly controversial decision."

The mention of conscription caused Ves to frown. The Red War would become a lot. uglier if there weren't enough mech pilots and volunteers anymore to do the hard

fighting.

"The Starfighter Corps isn't the only initiative started by the fleeters. There is also the Auxiliary Warship Program. Can't they divert resources from the former into the

latter?"

"It is not that simple, boss. You of all should know that. Starfighters are small, light on resources relatively simple. They can easily be mass produced by any factory that is capable of fabricating mechs, and don't drain too much resources if the fighter craft are predominantly made of abundantly available materials. Warships on the other hand can only be built in orbital shipyards or low-gravity moons. It takes a large amount of highly educated naval engineers and a huge amount of capital to construct all of those shipyards. They also need to be fed with a huge amount of bulk materials on a regular basis, which also imposes a huge burden on logistics. None of the states can produce too many warships at a time. Even third-class and second-class warships require at least half a year to a year in order to complete. Quality is also a big issue as all of the newly constructed shipyards are staffed by new and inexperienced workers." In other words, red humanity could not rely on auxiliary warships to save the day in

the short term.

"At least there is another manpower pool that Carmine mechs can tap into." Ves

remarked.

Aside from disabled veterans, there was another group of sad and unfortunate people

that suddenly became a lot more useful.

They were low-aptitude mech pilots.

Many potentates that discovered that they possessed suitable genetic aptitude to pilot

mechs, yet only receive a score of E or D were perhaps the most tragic people of the

modern era!

Each of them barely possessed the capacity to pilot mechs, yet could only make do with frontline mechs, if anyone even bothered to hire them in the first place.

A lot of mech academies disdained to waste their valuable resources into training

them. When the manpower pool of professional mech pilots still remained adequate, there was far too little demand for these untalented fellows!

A lot of low-aptitude potentates simply gave up and proceeded to live as civilians after their spirits got crushed by the rejection of society.

Yet there were still potentates that loved mechs so much that they could not bear to

give up their dreams.

As far as they were concerned, they were still better off than norms because they at

least possessed the ability to pilot a mech, even if they would never have a chance to fight on an actual battlefield!

There were still shabby mech academies that weren't picky about genetic aptitudes and gladly trained their low-aptitude mech cadets.

Of course, the quality and rigor of these academic programs was not up to par with

the more standard programs, but it was not as if low-aptitude pilots could make use of more advanced mechs.

There were actually a lot of potentates that possessed lower-than-average genetic aptitudes, so this manpower pool was not small!

They already received greater attention than before due to the increased shortage of

mech units. Many of them had already been recruited to form frontline mech units, but now that the Yellow Jackets had come out, they suddenly received better opportunities!

Even though the Yellow Jacket could halfway be considered a frontline mech, the

difference was that the Carmine System enabled these low-aptitude mech pilots to exert much stronger control over their machines!

At minimum, their 'effective genetic aptitudes' reached the C-grade, which meant that they were able to control their Yellow Jackets as well as professional mech pilots with C-grade genetic aptitudes!

This made an enormous difference to these untalented mech pilots! Many of them had

already fallen in love with their assigned Yellow Jackets as they no longer fought as if they were partially disabled!