Chapter 15:

Chapter 15: Madness, You Mad Lads!

Transmigrated Into A Famine World, I Became A Mecha-piloting Villainous Mother


“What are you doing, mother?” Aina’s third son Tallo asked after watching his mother open a compartment at the top of the red-green strider.

Aina didn’t even glance down. She leaned in, peering at the dark mass of machinery beneath the armored shell, and answered in a rush.

“The inline-six compression unit is probably cavitating because the fuel injectors aren’t getting proper atomization. See here,” she tapped a pipe with her rag, “the fuel residue is varnishing the intake valves, and with the preheater coil fried the ignition timing’s out of phase. If the crankcase ventilation is backed up, the whole block stalls because the lubrication system’s creating negative pressure against the turbo spool. Basically, the poor thing’s suffocating on its own exhaust gases.”

Tallo blinked at his mother. His eyes glazed over as the words went into one ear and out the next as if there was no processing in between. To his ears, it sounded as if his mother had just recited an incantation in a foreign tongue.

“…Right,” he muttered after a long pause. “So… it’s broken, then?”

“Yes,” Aina said brightly, as if that was obvious. “But not irreparably! If I can scavenge a replacement solenoid or at least jury-rig a bypass on the fuel rail, I can get it humming again. It just needs a clean burn.”

To be frank, Aina had expected something basic and primitive, like a hot-bulb engine or a Lenoir atmospheric engine. The kind that rattled like a bag of hammers and needed a blowtorch just to start. Machines that wasted more fuel than they burned and belched smoke like a funeral pyre.

Not that Aina had ever worked with them before though. She merely studied them in class as part of the history of automotive. If she had to fix them herself, she would’ve probably just thrown her wrench to the ground and given up. There was no point fixing engines that would shake themselves to pieces just from pushing them too hard.

Aina was also curious about the choice in design. Instead of powering a drivetrain, the engine turned an electric generator, which in turn powered the actuators in real time.

If it’s going to be moved in real time, why bother with using electricity? Why not just connect to the gears or drivetrain? Doing it like this would make 10%-20% loss of energy through heat.

However, the more Aina thought about it, the more it made sense. She too used electricity to run her robots as it allowed finer control of its movements, provided instant torque and allowed a wider range of movements. But unlike the striders, she came from a world where electricity was abundant, accessible and cheap.

Her robots also ran independent of electric generators, being powered off a series of batteries that delivered consistent power every moment, every second. Even in the modern world, most diesel engines couldn’t deliver 100% consistent power every second. Relying on a generator to run a machine of war could result in a dip or spike in performance when it was most needed, essentially putting yourself at the mercy of luck in the middle of battle.

Aina crawled under the plating and her eyes widened as she traced the heavy copper leads from the generator straight into the actuator banks. She had expected some form of battery or capacitor to store spikes in electrical production, to be released during a dip, but there was no such thing. The generator truly supplied direct current to the actuators directly. She laughed like a mad dog, if mad dogs would laugh like a human.

“This… this is madness! They’re running the strider directly on raw DC! No buffer, no accumulator, no smoothing stage, nothing. Look at this, Tallo. These lines go straight from the alternator windings into the drive coils. Do you know what that means, Tallo? The instant you spike torque demand… say you lift a leg too fast or twist the torso against load, the current draw triples, maybe quadruples, and the poor generator can’t respond in less than half a second!”

She continued. “That’s a guaranteed brownout, or worse, a full stall cascade. Without a capacitor bank or even a flywheel converter, the actuators are basically screaming into a void every time they want power. And don’t get me started on efficiency. The whole machine has to be oversized just to handle peak current when ninety percent of the time it’s loafing at nominal load. It’s like trying to run a marathon on a mountainous road while starving to death. Madness, absolute madness, you primitive mad lads!”

Her words tumbled out faster, almost breathless, horror battling with a strange, bubbling joy inside her chest. For all its flaws, for all its brute-force clumsiness, it was fascinating. A system so crude it should never have worked. Yet here it was, a towering war machine that had walked into their village and nearly crushed them underfoot. Her fingers itched to tear the whole thing apart, to find out how far they had pushed this lunacy and why.

Tallo just blinked at her, brow furrowed. “What language was that, mother? All I heard was… ‘mad’ three times.”

Aina simply ignored him. She didn’t really know how to explain it in simple terms. The design meant when the system required more power such as when jumping or dashing, the generator would have to rev harder, potentially causing damage to the engine itself. Normally, a battery or capacitor would smooth out the load, absorbing spikes and filling gaps. Without that, the engine had to rev up and down like crazy to keep pace.

And if the engine stalls or hiccups, the whole strider instantly dies. In modern engineering, you’d never want your giant war machine to drop dead just because a piston misfired. Additionally, engines prefer to run at steady RPM. Without a buffer, the generator is forced to chase every tiny fluctuation in power demand, wasting fuel and stressing the machine. They must’ve been forced to change the engine regularly because of this.

“What flawed thinking warrants such a barbaric design philosophy?” Aina asked aloud.

“Who is barbaric, mother?” Tallo asked.

“The barbarians who built this primitive mecha. I bet it runs on raw direct current too. Barbaric, primitive madness!”

“Mecha? What’s direct current? Like a river?”

Without even attempting to answer her son, Aina went on her tirade. “It would start with a huge power surge and you’d need to rev the engine before you do anything that requires more power. Even with a governor, you’d need time to rev it before you can do anything. It’d be so clumsy, so much that it feels like trying to draw a picture while someone’s shaking your elbow. Direct current is definitely NOT the way to go for mecha!”

Again Tallo was at a loss. His mother used to be hard to understand before. But now, it was practically impossible to understand anything his mother said. It was like the downed strider turned his mother into a fool.

But that couldn’t be right. From the way his mother had been touching and inspecting the inside of the warstrider, it looked like she knew how the strider worked. So she couldn’t have been a fool. Tallo, being only 8 years old, wanted to believe that his mother’s complaints were related to the strider, but he really couldn’t tell for sure since he didn’t understand a single word.

So Tallo decided to sit and watch, maybe help out in the hope that he could understand something from doing.

“Mother!” Varn called from the foot of the strider. “Lunch is ready.”

Tallo repeated Varn’s call, but not hearing his mother’s reply, he tried to squeeze his head inside the opening. He looked around inside the darkness of the chamber, but he couldn’t see anything beyond what was close to the entrance.

“Mother?”

“Get out from there, Tallo. If you got stuck in there, nobody could get you out.” Aina said as she pulled him out from behind.

Tallo’s eyes went back and forth between his dirty mother and the open chamber. “But you were inside…”

“It’s not enclosed. There are more than one way to go in and out. Now let’s go have lunch.”

When Aina and Tallo arrived, everyone was already sitting down with their meals, a meager stew of pemmican and beans. Both came from the box of provisions that they took from the striders. It turned out that the other striders were from an enemy nation and they carried a lot more provisions than the pilots from Branvar’s Hold.

When Aina scooped portions of stew for herself and Tallo, the others merely gave them a cursory glance and went back to eating their lunch. While there were some feelings of resentment when Aina merely walked off that morning instead of helping with cooking and foraging, nobody said it aloud. They were already familiar with Rinia’s attitude and didn’t think it was worth the effort or energy to pick fights with her. Not like they have much energy left for a fight anyway.

Thankfully, Aina’s discovery meant they now have food again. It was even highly nutritious food that even one box could feed their eight families for the next two or three days. So that more or less reduced their feeling of resentment towards her for not helping with the meals. That and because her two daughters already helped.

After lunch, Aina went back to the striders. She surveyed the damage a little deeper and considered the red-green strider salvageable. Well, salvageable was just saying it nicely.

Both red-green striders had deep scratches and damaged components, but the damaged components were different. So technically, she could simply swap them out, basically sacrificing one as spare part to repair the other.

As for the blue-black striders, they had more extensive damage. But the damage also mostly seemed to be in different components. So it was still possible to repair one by swapping parts. However, it wouldn’t be so easy, some essential parts would be missing and would need to be made brand new. She wasn’t sure if she could build a makeshift part to cover for the missing ones.

To Aina’s delight however, the most important part, the engines, were surprisingly intact. Aina had thought that all those chainsaws cutting into the engine compartment would’ve destroyed the sensitive and delicate machinery. But luckily all of the attacks missed by only a few feet.

She could build the missing parts, they only needed to be able to hold weight and stress. They could be carved out of wood, which they had plenty of. But engines, that was way more involved and required a little more engineering know-how. Of course she knew how engines work, but she didn’t have the molds nor the ability to melt steel.

So all things considered, getting a mecha of her own was pretty much doable.

“Heh! This mecha, I’m gonna drive it around the mountains. If it’s the last thing I’d do!”

Ima Siriaz
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