Besides producing simple, crude, effective rockets and mortars, as well as rudimentary three- or four-wheeled vehicles, the armories on the Fel Planet also dealt in more advanced weapons and equipment.
In one enormous cavern deep beneath an armory, several workshops could manufacture microchips.
It was a massive undertaking, covering everything from wafer fabrication to chip packaging and testing!
Supporting it were high-end ancillary industries producing various models of lithography machines, etching machines, photoresists, and more.
These microchips intended for warfare had relatively coarse precision.
But they still required a staggeringly vast industrial supply chain to support them.
This miracle of the microchip industry had taken less than three years to develop from scratch!
Such an astonishing achievement would have been impossible without the Gnome Engineers' nimble little hands and immensely powerful brains.
But without Herad's guidance, the Gnome Engineers would still have been making microchips by hand a hundred or even a thousand years later.
If they could make microchips by hand, why bother with an industrial system that consumed time, effort, and money?
When they saw finished microchips pouring like water out of the completed factory, they immediately felt that their efforts had been worthwhile.
With microchips now available in unlimited quantities, they no longer had to scrimp and hesitate to use weapons and equipment containing them.
Back when microchips were still handmade, missiles were out of the question.
Unmanned equipment was mostly used for reconnaissance, and they were reluctant to let it get damaged lightly.
Explosive sheep capable of chasing down enemies and detonating were mostly kept in display cases.
Neither Gnome nor Goblin Engineers could bear to expend microchips they had painstakingly made by hand so casually.
Now that machines were producing microchips, their attitude had changed!
Even so, they still felt a little reluctant to expend