Chapter 566 — The Warhammer
Blade of Dawn · Page 1 of 4
Just as sharpened sticks and chipped stones replaced claws and fangs, so too were primitive blades and personal prowess bound to give way to guns and cannons forged of steel. In this far-from-stable world, war shadows every step, and for the sake of survival, inefficient individual force will—and must—yield to the efficient machinery of war. This is the objective law of how things develop.
Gao Heng did not know whether every world obeyed such an objective law, but of this much he was certain: this world did.
Even if this world possessed transcendent powers, even if its transcendent masters could move mountains and fill seas with their might, the principle would not change—those who move mountains and fill seas would inevitably be supplanted by machines that could move mountains and fill seas with greater efficiency, a fact decided on the very day the first wooden stick for hunting was sharpened.
He gazed at the war machine before him in admiration, as though he could see another age stretching ever onward before its tracks.
Rebecca, Hedy, Philip, and Nicholas Egg were with him, and every one of them—the ball included—had their attention fixed on that vehicle just the same.
Rebecca's idea, conceived the moment the arcanomechanical carriage came into being—to mount a cannon on a vehicle—had finally come true, and it had not merely mounted a cannon: it bore armor plating and a shield generator besides.
This war machine, which could barely be called a "tank," was nothing like Gao Yang's original design, and differed greatly even from any tank he understood. It had no sloped armor; the entire body was a nearly perfectly square iron box, that tall box assembled from a great many rivets and weld points, each armor plate no more than a thin sheet of steel. Its tracks bore some resemblance to the tanks in Gao Yang's memory, though noticeably cruder, and on every track plate deep runic indentations could be seen—earth-element runes that reduced the wear where the metal met the ground and slightly strengthened the tracks' resistance to elemental attacks, a suggestion said to have come from a runesmith of the Horsman region. Its turret was likewise impressive: a trapezoidal iron shroud, narrow above and broad below, its front end open, with two parallel metal rails extending straight out from the opening, while a crude optical sighting device was mounted parallel to the rails on the lower half of the shroud.
Constrained by current technology, the main gun it mounted was the smallest-model "Persuader" light railgun, specially lightened for installation on the vehicle; its power was naturally somewhat reduced, but for the battlefields of this era, the thing was already a moving pulverizer.
By its appearance, it was crude as any punk creation, and it conformed not at all to the design philosophy of tanks on Earth.
Almost none of its armor had angles or curves; its armor was thin, and at some of the riveted seams you could even tell that its side plating was nothing but thin steel sheet; and lastly, it had a hull that was, to Gao Yang's eye, quite tall, along with a conspicuous large turret.
These choices greatly reduced the difficulty of manufacturing the vehicle (one reason it could be built so quickly), lowered its cost, cut its weight considerably, and increased both payload and interior space—but all of it brought an obvious problem: its physical defense seemed to be diminished.
In Gao Song's original design documents, the concepts of sloped armor and a low hull had indeed been present, yet in the final product both had been abandoned.
At first he had sought out Rebecca and Kamael over these changes and argued the matter through, but in the end he conceded, for he later discovered that this design, which seemed to lower its defenses, was in fact the most reasonable.