TCTS 3 Chapter 42 (Patreon)

Mark stood at the base of the seventh War-Frame's cradle, looking up at the twenty-meter machine that had occupied their nights and weekends and most of their waking thoughts since the distributed-interface design had been finalized, and he said what everyone in the room had been thinking but no one had been willing to say first. "It's too big."

Octavia, who was sitting cross-legged on a crate with a tablet balanced on one knee, looked up. "Say that again."

"The frame," Mark said. "I think that twenty meters is too much machine. Every additional meter of height adds structural mass, which adds joint load, which adds sensor surface, which adds data throughput to the pilot. I'm just now realizing that we've been trying to build an interface that can handle the bandwidth of a twenty-meter War-Frame when the smarter move would be to build a War-Frame that generates less bandwidth in the first place."

The bay went quiet, and Aurelia, who had been inspecting a joint actuator at the far end, set down her tools. Kenjiro also stopped drawing on the crate he'd been using as a desk and looked over.

"You want to shrink it?" Marcos asked.

"More like I want to right-size it," Mark said. "I mean, the Strathari were taller than us, and God knows why they built these frames as big as they did. For all we know, they probably did it to match their proportions and their biology. It's not like Talos knows the full history of War Frames. Plus, the Stratahri had the resonance cortices to handle the data load of a twenty-meter machine. We don't. So instead of building a bigger, how about we build smaller?"

Octavia set the tablet down. "How much are you thinking?"

"Hell if I know. I'm not exactly a mech engineer or something," Mark said. "How small can we go before we lose combat effectiveness?"

And with that single question, a four-month conversation that reshaped everything they'd built was started.

They had to strip down the frame of the mech once again and lay out every component on the bay floor in a grid that stretched sixty meters. Actuators, joint housings, sensor arrays, power conduits, armor plating, weapons mounts, cooling systems, structural members, etc. As they did so, Marcos mapped the complete data footprint of every system.

"From my scans, I'd say that just about seventy-three percent of the frame's total data output comes from three systems," Marcos reported, projecting a breakdown across the bay's main display. "First, there is the proprioceptive sensor array, which tells the pilot where the frame's body is in space. Then we have the structural integrity network, which monitors stress loads across every joint and plate. And finally, we have the environmental awareness suite, which scans the surrounding terrain and feeds threat data to the pilot. Together, those three systems would be generating the bulk of the bandwidth that the pilot's neural links and twelve ports will be in charge of carrying."

"Which ones can we cut?" Mark asked.

"None of them," Octavia said. "At least not entirely. You need proprioception or the pilot can't move without looking. You need structural integrity or they won't know they've taken damage until a leg falls off. And you need environmental awareness or they're fighting blind."

"But do you need all of it at a twenty-meter scale?" Kenjiro asked from behind his crate, where he was already sketching. "The proprioceptive array on this frame has over sixteen thousand individual sensors. I think it's pretty fair to say that this is only because of the fact that there are twenty meters of surface area to cover. What Mark is proposing is true. If we shrink the frame, then we would also be shrinking the sensor count, which would in turn shrink the data load. The math is mathing."

With their new principles set in stone, they began to build off them since every reduction in height cascaded through the entire system. A shorter frame meant less structural mass, which meant fewer joints, which meant fewer actuators, which meant fewer stress sensors, which meant less data for the pilot to carry. Each meter they cut took weight off the throughput and shaved percentage points off the synchronization ceiling a pilot needed to reach.

They tested different heights against projected combat profiles for over a week, and they kept arriving at a result that bordered on eleven meters. It was tall enough to carry meaningful armor and weapons, and short enough to fit through most terrain without presenting the kind of target profile that a twenty-meter frame made unavoidable. And critically, its total data footprint fell within the bandwidth ceiling of the distributed interface at eight ports, with twelve ports giving the pilot a synchronization margin wide enough to fight aggressively.

"Eleven meters," Octavia said when the final simulation came back clean. "That's barely taller than a three-story building."

"It's also barely shorter than what I need to take the head off anything on this planet," Knox said from the speakers. He had been running threat assessments against every hostile the colony had encountered, modeling the new frame's combat performance in each scenario. "At eleven meters with the right loadout, this thing is faster than anything at twenty meters, harder to hit, easier to maintain, and still capable of going through a Sentinel like a boot through wet cardboard. I approve."

"High praise from the man who approved of nothing," Ceres chimed in from somewhere in the network.

"I approve of things that kill efficiently," Knox said. "And this one is shaping up to be a ripper."

Over the following months, the redesign of the War-Frame progressed.

The structural engineers led the rebuild, a team of six structural engineers were now applying that same instinct for load-bearing efficiency to a machine that needed to walk, fight, and not fall apart while doing either. They redesigned the frame's skeleton from the ground up rather than trying to scale down the Strathari original, ensuring that every structural member had to justify its existence.

The Strathari frame used elongated limbs with massive actuators at each joint to handle the load of a machine the size of a building, which the structural team cut the proportions of, widening the stance and lowering the center of gravity. The new legs were shorter, thicker through the thigh and calf, and built around heavy-gauge actuators that traded the Strathari frame's height for raw stability.

The foot assemblies were broad and flat, each one a slab of reinforced alloy with articulated toes that could grip uneven terrain and absorb the impact of a hard landing without transmitting the shock up through the cockpit.

The torso was also rebuilt around the cockpit rather than the other way around. In the original frame, the cockpit sat behind thick layers of armor and structural plating, buried deep in the chest. However, the new design made the cockpit the core, and everything else, the power core, the weapons mounts, and the sensor arrays, were packed tightly around it.

This allowed them to cut dead space and eliminate the redundant structural members the larger frame had used to fill the gaps, resulting in a chest that was broad and angular, sloped forward at the upper plate to deflect incoming fire upward rather than absorbing it head-on, and at its center sat a circular sensor housing, a wide-aperture array recessed into the chest armor that gave the frame a three-hundred-sixty-degree awareness field without requiring the exposed sensor masts that the Strathari design had used.

Kenjiro's work started the moment the power core entered the conversation. Thanks to Mark's previous endeavors months ago, they were able to come up with a compact fusion core that matched the smaller frame's demands, and the question of where to put it and how to keep it cool was the kind of problem Kenjiro had spent his entire career preparing for without knowing it. He and Mark spent three straight days in the bay mapping thermal loads, tracing heat paths through the frame's skeleton just as they had once done for starship hulls, and what they found was that the eleven-meter frame had a problem the twenty-meter frame never did. That problem was its density.

"A bigger machine has room to breathe," Kenjiro pushed his glasses up on his forehead as he explained a cooling schematic projected in front of him. "The Strathari frame spreads its heat sources across twenty meters of structure, which allows for a natural separation between the reactor, the actuators, and the cockpit through air gaps, structural voids, and passive dissipation surfaces. In other words, the heat has places to go. Unfortunately for us, we don't have that luxury since we've packed a fusion core, twelve high-torque actuators, a full weapons suite, and a living pilot into eleven meters, leaving everything closer to everything else, and heat that would've dissipated passively in the bigger frame is now going to stack."

"So why don't we just build it in?" Mark asked. "Same as the IUC corvette."

"Bingo!" Kenjiro pulled up the torso cross-section and began marking routes with his finger. "If we mount the core in the upper back, directly behind the cockpit, where its mass works with the center of gravity instead of against it, then we can run the coolant through the structural members themselves. We would essentially be creating dual-purpose channels, turning the skeletal frame itself into a radiator. Every strut, cross-member, and joint housing would pull heat away from the core and distribute it across the whole structure."

"But what about the cockpit?" Octavia asked. "The pilot would be sitting directly in front of the hottest thing in the frame."

"We can create a thermal barrier between the core housing and the cockpit backwall," Kenjiro said. "We use a layered composite with a vacuum gap using the same principle as a thermos, just scaled up. That way the pilot's docking cradle gets its own independent cooling loop on a separate circuit, so if the main thermal system takes damage, the cockpit is able to stay habitable."

"What about any exhaust?" Octavia asked.

"That would be vented through the shoulder blades." Kenjiro marked the exit points. "The waste heat channels up and out through ports on the upper back. Knox is going to hate the thermal signature, but it's the most efficient path, and if he wants me to fight thermodynamics, he'll need to find me a different universe to work in."

"You're right. I do hate it," Knox confirmed.

"Yeah, well, that's too damn bad," Kenjiro said. "Your hate is overruled by physics."

Having found a way to move past that barrier, the actuators became the second thermal challenge. There would be twelve high-torque joints driving an eleven-meter frame through combat maneuvers, which would generate tons of friction heat that conventional cooling wouldn't be able to keep up with during a sustained engagement.

To address this issue, Kenjiro came up with a capillary cooling system for each major joint, essentially microchannels of synthetic coolant woven directly into the actuator housings. The coolant circulated passively during low-output movement and kicked into active pumping under stress. But for that, they would also need to develop a system smart enough to anticipate heat spikes, which meant creating an AI that would predict movements and pre-cool the joints before the load arrived.

As things developed, Octavia began to handle the cockpit. Though she wasn't exactly an engineer, nor did she have any experience in the field, but she was still a pilot. So, her developments and suggestions were key since they also gave an insight into what the how comfortable and uasable things were for the pilot.

She helped design the pilot's seat as an integrated docking cradle with the backrest fitted with fourteen receiver ports arranged in a vertical line, twelve for the thoracic spine and two for the neural links at the skull and neck. The receivers were made with extreme precision, produced in a single extrusion, each one containing a contact array that would mate with the corresponding port in the pilot's spine.

"Speaking as a pilot, it would be so much more comfortable and easy to just sit and lean back for the ports to engage," she said, explaining the reasoning behind her design choices. "Once you do that, then each receiver locks with a quarter-turn and pressurizes, sealing the connection against vibration, impact, and thermal expansion. The neural links at the skull and neck should sync wirelessly to the frame's command processor, dropping the projected connection time from sitting to full sync to under four seconds."

"How would they handle an emergency disconnect?" Mark asked.

"It would be done through a single command," she answered. "The receivers would depressurize and release simultaneously, and the pilot's out in under two seconds. Non-emergency runs a six-second controlled shutdown that prevents the kind of neural feedback spike a hard disconnect would likely cause."

"Well, emergencies do come with their ups and downs," Mark said with a nod. "Your expertise and experience as a pilot have been crucial for this."

"Thank you, Sir," Octaivia said with a small smile. "I'm sorry if I overstep my bounds, but I must ask. Why didn't you also include Talos in this? He's a pilot as well, and his experience would be just as valuable as mine, if not more."

 "Well, the answer is simple," Mark said. "While what you said is true, Talos is a Strathari, and his experience as a pilot is vastly different from yours, considering how he interfaced with the War Frame itself. And if I'm being honest with you, I'd much rather trust someone like you, one of my Elites, than Talos, whom we came to know less than a year ago."

"But you also came to know the rest of the Elites and me almost a year ago," Octavia said in confusion.

"Yes," Mark nodded. "But we are tied by something much deeper than a mere friendship or blood itself."

"The System," Octavia said softly.

"The System," Mark confirmed.

Mark left Octavia with that and returned to meet with Knox for the weapons configuration.

There was no doctrine to reference, or an existing manual for how an eleven-meter war-frame should fight, because no human had ever built one before, and no human had ever fought in one. Everything they decided would become the first page of a book that, for humanity, didn't exist yet.

"So what do we want this thing to be?" was the first thing Mark had asked when they had first begun their weapons review.

"It is a killer that controls the engagement," Knox answered without hesitation. "Something that can close the distance and take a fight apart at close quarters, but isn't helpless if the range opens up. You want a frame that dictates where the fight happens, not one that has to hope the fight happens where it's comfortable."

"So you're recommending we focus on making it close-range primary and mid-range secondary," Mark said.

"Close range is where a pilot's instincts matter most," Knox agreed. "Reaction time, spatial awareness, and heightened levels of aggression are human strengths. At range, you're competing with targeting computers and ballistic math, and a motherboard will always do that better than any meat ever would. But inside arm's reach, the pilot who thinks faster and moves harder wins. That is an edge we should build around."

"And mid-range covers the approach," a female voice from behind Mark stated, causing him to turn around and see that Octavia had followed him to the meeting. "You need the ability to suppress and punish something that's trying to keep you at a distance. But you also need to be able to cover a retreat if the engagement turns."

They talked for a while longer, and using Octavia's input as a combat-proven pilot in her previous universe, they decided to follow her lead and build a loadout around that thinking.

The right arm would carry a rotary cannon that was inspired by the flechette launcher from the sentine they had faced, and would be capable of putting rounds downrange. It was a suppression tool first and a killing tool second, something to keep a target's head down or chew through armor while the frame covered the distance. The ammunition feed ran through the arm's interior, drawing from a drum housed in the right shoulder assembly. The system would be able to sustain continuous fire for eighteen seconds before the drum ran dry.

Both forearms were also mounted with integrated retractable blades. While stowed, they locked flat along the outer forearm in armored channels, flush with the plating, adding nothing to the profile. While deployed, they extended past the fists in long, tapered points that could punch through heavy plating and carve structural members apart, each blade running just under four meters and edged on both sides, and lightweight enough that they wouldn't raise any issues for the arms' mobility.

The deployment mechanism was a mechanical system in the form of a spring-loaded release that snapped the blades forward in under a quarter second. The frame could fight with one blade or both, deploying and retracting them independently, and allowing for a level of flexibility that meant a pilot could adapt mid-fight in ways a fixed-weapon platform never could.

"The cannon keeps them honest on the approach, and the blades finish the conversation," Knox said. "For the record, I don't have a single objection."

"Someone write that down," Marcos said. "Frame it, and put it on the wall. It may be the one and only time he may not have an objection to something."

Additional hardpoints were added along the shoulders and hips, which allowed for modular weapon pods, grenade launchers, or supplementary armor plates to be carried and deployed, depending on the mission profile. The shoulders themselves were built heavy, with angular pauldrons that served triple duty as armor, heat venting surfaces for Kenjiro's thermal system, and mounting points for the modular pods.

A mid-range loadout could swap the shoulder pods for a pair of guided missile racks, giving the frame reach when the situation called for it without compromising the close-quarters core. The whole loadout could be swapped in under twenty minutes by a ground crew, which was just another benefit of the port-based system's modularity.

But while they were doing so, Knox brought up a good point.

"The pilot's still carrying too much," he said while Mark and Marcos were reviewing the latest sync simulations three months into the build. "Even at eleven meters, even with the reduced data footprint, even with twelve ports and both neural links, the pilot is managing weapons, movement, targeting, threat assessment, structural monitoring, and environmental awareness simultaneously. A human, even an augmented one, is going to hit cognitive saturation in a sustained engagement."

"I fear that he has a point," Marcos said.

"I always have a point," Knox replied. "People just don't like hearing it."

"So spit it out," Mark said. "What are you saying we should do?"

"Instead of just having the AI be there to manage a handful of systems, turn it into a co-pilot," Knox said. "It's already in the frame itself, so why not have it operating alongside the pilot, handling the systems the pilot doesn't need to think about so the pilot can focus on the ones they do."

Marcos picked up the thread. "A frame-integrated AI could manage the environmental awareness suite autonomously, process threat data and present it to the pilot as filtered and prioritized information rather than raw sensor feeds. In essence, you'd be splitting the cognitive load between a human who makes the decisions and a machine that manages the details."

"Like a weapons officer," Mark said slowly. "The captain or pilot steers while the weapons officer shoots."

"Exactly like that," Knox said.

Mark thought about it. The concept was sound, and it addressed the single biggest vulnerability in the whole design, the fact that a human brain, even an augmented one, was not built to parallel-process the way a Strathari brain could. An onboard AI would complete the pilot, handling the background processes that would otherwise eat into the pilot's attention and leave them slower, less responsive, and more likely to miss the thing that killed them.

"I don't see a reason why not," Mark said. "Marcos, you and Knox draft a framework, but keep it lean. The AI needs to be smart enough to manage those systems autonomously, but not so independent that it argues with the pilot in the middle of a fight. It's more of a support than anything else with a clear hierarchy."

"You got it," Marcos said. "I'll model it on a simplified version of this bolthead's- I mean,  Knox's behavioral architecture, since his threat-assessment instincts are the closest match to what a frame AI would need. The AI will maintain a persistent communication link with the pilot through the neural interface, able to relay tactical data, flag threats, and manage subsystems in real time. Think of it as a voice in the pilot's head that knows the frame's body as well as the pilot knows their own."

"Nah," Mark said. "Make it so that it actually has to communicate via verbal cues, though it would still have the ability to communicate with the pilot through the neural link, just for emergencies. We're making this to lower the amount of information a pilot would get, not increase it."

"Wise choice," Marcos said.

"And what if the pilot goes down?" Aurelia asked from her corner of the bay. "Unconscious from neural shock or whatever. Does the AI just stand there?"

"It would follow defensive protocols," Knox said immediately. "If the pilot is incapacitated, the frame AI locks the cockpit, activates reactive armor, and either holds position or retreats to the nearest safe zone depending on the tactical situation. Its sole mission becomes the survival of its pilot and await recovery or extraction."

Once everything internal was all said and done, the armor was the last piece of the puzzle that remained. Aurelia, being the military engineer, worked with the structural team to develop a layered protection scheme that made the eleven-meter frame hit well above its weight class.

The outer shell was made of a thick and angular S-Alloy composite, printed in interlocking plates that could be individually replaced when damaged. Every surface was sloped or angled, with a geometry built to deflect impacts rather than absorb them, and beneath the outer plates, a reactive underlayer deformed on contact and redistributed force across a wider area. The cockpit and the power core got the heaviest treatment, with the chest and upper back armored to an incredible density that only worked because the frame's reduced size kept the total mass manageable.

As a finishing touch, Octavia argued that they should add a head. It was the detail that made the frame look like something with a will of its own, but would also serve to house a compact sensor housing mounted on a short, armored neck, carrying the primary optical array and the communication suite. Two angular protrusions swept back from the crown, housing secondary antenna arrays and electronic warfare modules, giving the head a horned silhouette that made the frame look like it was watching you even when it was powered down. Yet, even the horns were functional, since they served to carry the ECM Array (Electronic Countermeasures).

The frame was finished, the last plate was seated, and the systems came online for the first time ever. The War-Frame stood in its cradle at 11 meters tall, a completely different animal from the Strathari machines standing behind it. Where they were tall and slender, this thing was compact and dense, thick through the chest and shoulders, heavy in the legs, and with a wide and low stance that made it seem as if it was leaning forward.

The angular armor had every surface angled to turn a blow and every plate seated flush against the next. The twin forearm blades were locked in their channels, and the rotary cannon hung at the right hip in its travel cradle. The circular sensor array in the chest pulsed once as the power came up, sending a faint red glow behind the armored lens, and the horned head tracked across the bay as the optical systems initialized, sweeping the room.

They shut it down and painted the matte black S-Alloy in a burgundy camouflage pattern that followed the armor's geometry. But standing there in the bay with the overheads cutting across those red plates, the frame carried a certain weight that had nothing to do with tonnage. It was the first war-frame humanity had ever built, and it looked the part. Though the inspiration came from a Starthari War Frame, nothing from it was borrowed, adapted, or reverse-engineered, but instead it had been built from scratch by humans, for humans.

Mark stood before it and smiled to himself. Slowly, he was joined by everyone who had worked on the project, and Marcos finally decided to ask what they were all wondering. "So, what are you gonna call it, Mark?" 

Mark thought for about a minute before nodding his head, having come to a decision.

"Well, it is the first of its kind, and it is a protector, and an aggressor at the same time," he said. "It is the first military weapon this empire has made, and it will defend it and its people... I think it's only fitting to call it a Knight."

"The 'Knight' War Frame has been added to my library as the first ever development of war frames done and completed by the Imperium Rubrarum Solium," Marcos noted. "The IRS had created its first tax collector."

That caused a chuckle to escape Mark, and leave everyone else in confusion. "Never change, Marcos. Never change."