Re: Mission 5: Amaya's Gate
@Outside Amaya's Gate:
Kotori's Ryusei II fighter-bomber hovered by the Gate, a distance away from the breached hangar, with Mara's Fox shuttle in its shadow.
"Claymere, Freeman, Ichigo," Kotori transmitted. "Stand by. Do not enter the hangar until I finish my attack run."
* * *
@Inside Amaya's Gate:
The retreating shapes of Daisy power armors became retreating shadows as the Mishhumachina over them discharged its deadly ventral weapon, belching out plasma just under where they had been - they fortunately escaped unscathed from that particular attack, but the plasma destroyed Kai's mini-missiles before they got to their target.
As the Black Knights continued retreating, firing back, the Mishhumachina slowly started to follow. Kyou's combined Plasma attack didn't do much more than fizzle harmlessly over the Mishhumachina's energy barrier and her grenade only briefly covered the forcefield with a sheet of flames. The good point was that they softened the barrier enough for Asher to see his first gauss shell collapse it, and the second ram itself into the machine's left ocular cluster, coaxing it to recoil from both the impact and the ensuing explosion.
Asher's missile volley preceded Masako's rush toward the Mishhumachina guarding the hangar's entryway, which fortunately busied that enemy mecha with shooting the missiles out of the air instead of shooting at them. Masako's own plasma shots didn't fare much better than Kyou's on the target behind them, but with the tentacles busy... it looked like they might just be able to jet through and under it with thier fusion packs (before it's flame thrower could catch them, anyhow).
Like blazing fireflies, Masako, Kai, Asher and Kyou jetted into the hangar room. To their right the shattered doors of the hangar bay, which led out into space... and safety from the upcoming attack run from the Taisa's fighter-bomber.
* * *
@In the corridor the Black Knights just left...
Without the fusion pack that helped the rest of her team escape and get clear of the Mishhumachina's ventral plasma weapon, Nimura was forced to shy back from the attack. Her attempt to sneak through the Mishhuvurthyar's tentacles was spoiled by Kyou's incendiary grenade which briefly filled the corridor with flames Nimura didn't dare go through lets it break her thermoptic camouflage. Asher's connecting gauss shell added to her bad luck, actually knocking down the mishhumachina back right into her.
Her power armor was tossed several meters back like a limp ragdoll - the high speed of the knockback spoiling her thermoptic camouflage enough for the third, more distant mishhumachina that had been further behind to manage to get a bearing on her.
With Nimura struggling to get up and with no cover to hide into, her barrier quickly collapsed and gatling cannon's spray ripped across her torso armor, again knocking her down before the mishhumachina got close enough to seize the hapless sprite limbs with its pincer-tipped tentacles... before the servomotors of the tentacles began straining in an effort to quarter the M6 Daisy now in its grasp.
* * *
@Miharu's subdeck:
Yuzuki's task wouldn't be an easy one. In theory, each of Miharu's Conbined Field System units were everybit as good as Plumeria-class when it launched... so for the hardware, even 21 000c was theoretically feasible.
The problem was how the CFS had been designed to all act in unison to support the regenerative shields, a conformal spatial distorsion that would allow the vessel easy passage within nebulas, and also the adjustments done to them to help them function at near-peak efficiency inside the Blue Rift Expanse.
She didn't have time to find a way to make all four units function at 18 500c - it would take too long to do it smoothly. She could, however, perhaps have each and every one of them work independently and quickly adapt the fixes the Daughters of Eve had meant to eventually use for their Sakura gunships. Isolating each meant losing the shields... on the bright side, the energized armor could perhaps make up for it.
Perhaps they could even use Hoshi's less demanding shield systems to give enough vestigial shielding to block teleportation attempts.
She'd need more power. Fortunately, cutting the regenerative shields out would provide just that. Though the way she'd need to reroute it, that meant losing capacitor recharge and disarming the main gun.
As expected, heat would be a problem. The units, because they usually acted in unison, never generated the same kind of heat the single unit on Plumeria-class gunships had; those had much better heatsinks. On Miharu, most of the heatsinks had been built around the capacitors and the main gun junction. Yuzuki figured she could request that the MEGAMI alternate use between the four CFS units in the hope that alternating them would moderate the heat buildup...
But even then, she estimated that it could take from two to five minutes for any individual CFS unit to overheat to the point of breaking down. Flushing coolant was still an alternative... but it was unfortunately not one she could do at the last minute - any abrupt temperature change in the Combined Field System could still end up wrecking the delicate machinery inside when the envelope was being pushed like that.
Finally, assuming that this all worked... all those measures effectively disabled much of Miharu's combat capabilities. Once the Shosa was done racing ahead of the Takumi, it would likely take between 30 to 60 seconds to restore Miharu back into fighting shape.
