Ves needed a moment to adjust to Professor Benedict's explosive revelations.
Right now, any form of minidrive was new technology to humanity. They were insanely expensive and considerably inefficient depending on their complexity.
It would take multiple generations of continuous development in order to mature the tech to a more practical and affordable state. By that time, the amount of phasewater required to build a minidrive would probably be half or a third as much as before.
This was why most powers weren't in a hurry to add minidrive-equipped mechs into their arsenal.
Though they opened up a lot of new possibilities, investing that money into more or better mechs was much more cost-effective!
"You never mentioned this before in our prior talks about our upcoming collaborative expert mech design project." Ves said.