Mecha, a man's romance.
Who hadn't dreamed as a child of climbing into a giant mecha, then brawling with another enormous creature? Or pulling a laser cannon from behind their back and blasting their opponent hard enough to make it howl?
Of course, with current technology, there was still no way to build a controllable, flying mecha dozens of meters tall that could pull a laser cannon from behind its back.
Unless you used some shady little gadget and piloted one in a dream.
Otherwise, you really wouldn't get to see one.
If those giant mecha were a man's romance, then Fourth-Generation Tactical Mecha were District 25's romance.
They were expensive, but worth every penny. Put them on any battlefield, and their powerful firepower, paired with a competent Mecha Pilot or AI, would turn them into reapers of life, transforming the entire battlefield into a meat grinder.
There was a saying about that.
Others needed repeated improvements, adjustments, and research to become the strongest mecha. All you needed to do was switch on, and you were an ace that could change the battlefield-a born ace.
That was no joke. Compared with other mecha, Fourth-Generation Tactical Mecha had the beauty of a monster with absurdly high stats.
Nothing else mattered with mecha. As long as your materials were tougher and your systems better, you could crush everything.
What if an ace Mecha Pilot showed up whose manual piloting was better than an AI's?
Then throw money at the problem. They still had to consume energy, didn't they? Surely a hundred AI-controlled Fourth-Generation Tactical Mecha could overwhelm them?
That was all well and good, but money didn't appear out of thin air. Achieving mass production wasn't enough; they also had to make sufficient improvements to the Fourth-Generation Tactical Mecha.
That was what