I can upgrade the shelter-Chapter 800 - 698: The Military’s Dilemma

While Chen Xin was preparing his tunneling plan, the military also slowed their offensive, abandoning some previously conquered caverns and tunnels in favor of solidifying the areas they had already secured. They strategically collapsed many passages, sealing off all pathways for the alien creatures to break through upwards, leaving only a few openings for their own use.

With these adjustments, the military only needed a small number of troops to guard a few main passages left open to completely block the alien creatures’ upward attack routes.

And due to this shift from offense to defense, most of the troops originally intended for underground attacks were temporarily freed up.

The military did not let these troops idle. Besides continuing to monitor the entire Dongting Lake Region to prevent alien creatures from possibly digging new tunnels to surface again, they prepared these troops for the upcoming cleanup operations.

Previously, the military’s offensives had not been very smooth, partly due to the weapons and partly because they were not yet accustomed to fighting in the underground tunnel environment.

For these reasons, the military planned to conduct a comprehensive training for the existing troops during the three-month tunneling phase. They aimed to adjust the troops’ conditions and tactics to unleash greater combat power in the subsequent cleanup operations and better adapt to fighting in the underground caverns and tunnels.

To this end, the military intentionally left a short segment of the tunnel that was closer to the surface unsealed and connected it to the surface. They rotated the idle troops into the tunnels to engage with the combat cells inside, studying combat tactics within tunnels and caverns.

Because these were intentionally left tunnels, the number of alien creatures inside wasn’t as overwhelming as other tunnels, giving the military more room to make mistakes and study tactics.

By continuously deploying various units into the tunnels to fight, allowing them to explore more applicable tactics and directly validate them through combat, the military quickly developed a suitable set of tactics and rapidly implemented them across all units.

Despite this, the military was not satisfied. While continuing to let the troops explore tactics, they also approached Chen Xin, hoping he could provide some more practical equipment for underground combat.

Chen Xin had anticipated the military’s request, as they had already mentioned related demands in previous offense plan discussions.

However, Chen Xin had no good ideas for the military’s request.

Constrained by the underground tunnel environment, various heavy vehicles simply couldn’t go down, with the most that could be accommodated being small vehicles like the Lynx assault vehicle.

Moreover, limited by the narrow and complex terrain of the tunnels, various artillery and heavy firepower couldn’t be used at all. After all, a single shot would only travel over a hundred meters before hitting rock walls, with excessive power potentially causing the tunnels to collapse. The military, no matter how stubborn, wouldn’t use heavy weapons under such circumstances. 𝙧𝙚𝙚𝔀𝒆𝓫𝓷𝙤𝓿𝒆𝙡.𝒄𝙤𝓶

Even Titan’s handheld cannons were abandoned in favor of rotary machine guns.

However, even with the rotary heavy machine guns, there was still the problem of bullets ricocheting off rock walls.

This greatly affected the troops’ advancement and combat operations, making it very difficult for the military to achieve impressive results in previous battles.

This also presented significant limitations to Chen Xin’s ideas about new weapons.

Based on the military’s requirements, Chen Xin could only think of tinkering with the Lynx assault vehicle on existing small platforms or designing new weapons for Titans.

The Lynx assault vehicle, as the military’s current main army equipment, is a small, multifunctional vehicle platform boasting advantages such as lightweight, small size, multifunctionality, and strong adaptability. The army had developed a series of variants around it before the disaster, forming a vehicle family.

Among these variants, there were some with 40mm assault guns and 120mm mortar-howitzers, which were truly outrageous.

It’s important to note that the Lynx’s vehicle is very small, with a 6*6 body length of about three meters and weighing less than a ton.

However, even though the Lynx could withstand a 120mm caliber cannon, it couldn’t engage in effective shooting in the underground tunnel environment, and the military wasn’t crazy enough to use such caliber artillery for tunnel warfare, so most of the time, they still relied on models equipped with heavy machine guns or small-caliber weaponry in combat.

Even under such circumstances, many problems were encountered during its use.

This led to the military’s urgent desire to solve the problem of not being able to use high-power weapons in underground tunnels, allowing them to deploy various heavy weapons in combat to gain the upper hand.

However, high-power weapons are highly explosive. In pursuit of killing effects, an 85mm shell can produce about 900 effective fragments, capable of injuring enemies within a 280-square-meter area. In narrow tunnels, one shot often results in mutual destruction.

This resulted in Chen Xin, even with his system, not being able to come up with any good ideas.

After all, high-power weapons, which the military sought, had wide killing areas and couldn’t be effectively used in tunnels.

The military previously mainly relied on heavy mecha and Titans to clear the path, achieving certain results.

But this also inflicted terrible damage on Titans and heavy mecha, with logistics estimating that during the military’s re-engagement period, more Titans and heavy mecha were lost than in the entire previous defense phase!

More crucial was the loss of pilots.

In tunnels, heavy mecha was somewhat better as its size wasn’t too large, allowing some room for maneuvering and dodging. But for Titans, one could almost block a tunnel entirely, having room to evade only in wider caverns. This undoubtedly subjected Titans to lots of attacks and led to a sharp rise in pilot casualties.

Facing this situation, Chen Xin himself was also eager to come up with heavy firepower suitable for use in the underground tunnel environment, enabling the military to exhibit stronger combat power in upcoming battles.

Even if employing a tunneling approach for future operations, the military still had to venture underground to fight. Without new weaponry, merely changing tactics might not sufficiently reduce casualties and equipment losses.

But achieving this wasn’t easily done; even if Chen Xin could save a lot of development time, he still had no clue or inspiration on how to solve this problem.

Frustratedly grabbing his head, he crumpled the draft papers filled with various ideas and tossed them into the corner, Chen Xin was utterly trapped in confusion: "Real ammunition weapons aren’t a feasible path anymore. Should I consider non-real ammunition weapons?"