The Jackal was an unconventional Titan. All the Titans of the present day were; it was their unique systems that gave each an identity well and separate. However, while this was true, most laymen in the sciences that were used and explored these concepts to build the Titans lacked the expert levels of theoretical and practical knowledge to make proper differentiations among each Titan.
More so than that, none of the Titans had obvious external additions that hinted at what they could do any more than the others. The Dervish of Palm may have its heavy pendulums, but why were they included in its design?
If an unaware serviceman received the hint that one of the core themes was gravity, what would their conclusion be? They would ask further, tertiary clarifiers first. One of them would be determining the difference between the Dervish of Palm's design themes and the Ancheros, which also had gravity as one of its points of attraction.
The Jackal was double unique compared to its brethren. One isolating quality was that it relied upon a separate and isolated branch of science to impart its most devastating influences upon a skirmish or battle.
Most Titans took an existing branch of auxiliary technology humanity had mastered through continuous R&D, and elevated it through extreme measures, often making them larger or superior through quality.
The Jackal, the sly and agile thing, held its greatest reliances on the NDS. The Neurochemical Disruptor System couldn't make as much headway with direct confrontation as other measures.
It couldn't kill Aud fast. It couldn't do something outrageous such as blind them or make them turn on their own with the snap of a finger. So what made its inclusion as a core system of the Titan so imperative?
The answer would lie in its bombastic amount of versatility offered. When studying its capabilities, the servicemen responsible for crewing and maintaining its peak condition shouldn't have asked what it could do--which so happened to be a mistake many made anyway--but rather what it couldn't.
Aud exposed to its multitude of delivery modules would undergo induced dizziness, hypersalivation, motor loops, pathfinding errors, and spatial misjudgment.
Those were the sole options used the most, due to their reliability and effectiveness per most situations the Jackal found itself deployed to address. And what a variety of delivery modules it had!
At long range, aerosol and gas capsules could launch, no different in trajectory or firing preparation from cylinders. When Aud made ground, the servicemen operating the NDS would subject them to modified sonics that shot no physical projectiles, but instead pure sound.
Many jested these variations were far more deserving of the name of the original. They would work in tandem with pheromones shot and released from secondary capsules that were either launched or seeded into terrain prior to engagement to debilitate while Aud remained exposed to the chemical cocktails and other wonders that performed their work with all the inevitability of science.
When the Aud were close enough for the Jackal to become justified in engaging in energy-intensive maneuvers meant to increase longevity and survivability while caught in engagements, contact pads leaving powder trails on the ground and in the air, and pneumatic dispersers jetting out of the Titan's vertebral column would ensure that any battlefield it trekked with would be swift on its way to becoming contaminated by all manners of chemical maladies; a work of pathogenesis warfare.
Under any typical circumstances, such a combat doctrine would leave strategists hard-pressed to find methods to include the Jackal's presence in any form of violence that involved even a single unprotected human soldier or non-military personnel.
And the Jackal's nature as an energy-hungry skirmisher made isolated deployments more untenable when compared to its brethren. The Nyx Breaker, though its systems were even more hungry for the output of its energy grid, could bear the burden due to all the redundancies included in its design, such as the extra generators that could enter into and out of action at an order.
Here was where its other patch of uniqueness came into play: the Jackal was, to put it light, small. Not tiny--no one would ever call a Titan that. Nor was it squat, scaled-down, miniature, or any other descriptor of similar meaning.
It was a matter of misfortune that all Titans, as merited by their size, relied on large components and individual parts of similar scale to remain in perfect operation. Its generators required impressive expanses of space, should its design crews deposit them outside of it during refits.
Its eyes shined spotlights bright enough to engulf a good chunk of the Last Light's defenses, even though it looked beyond them into the unforgiving Gaiss Hollow. Its hundreds upon hundreds of individual scutumsteel plates were tons apiece.
Even among the smallest servos assisting the movement of the joints, curious engineers or techs would find it impossible to find anything smaller than an equivalent volume and weight of dozens of heavy WAV pilots--within their suits--smushed together to mimic its shape.
Being "small" for its size class while possessing a simultaneous need for design inclusions made for larger and larger Titans meant that the Jackal's design teams had to maintain frugality from the beginning; space constraints tied their hands.
And they couldn't have piled into it as many generators as needed, else forcing out by necessity something of equal importance--maybe some of the microchip stores providing real-time aid to the targeting programs or autonomous intelligences, or assistive inclusions for the NDS that made its operation smoother. That was what left limits on the staying power of the Titan while deployed.
Both meant that the Titan became doomed, or destined, to work within a supportive or ambush role on any skirmish field or battlefield.
Since superiors could never rely upon it with confidence to complete a task alone, the weaknesses plaguing its NDS that hampered the viability of open cooperation with other servicemen not under the protection of Titans or within similar indoor, atmospherically sealed settings faced the logical need for addressal.
After a time, as came with all good things, R&D staff for the Sixth installed a new rendition of the NDS within the Jackal, free of adverse effects upon the humans that would fight and flee beside it, while the Aud would face as much neurochemical pressure as before. The old version faced retirement.
Though for the curious and knowledgeable that had poured through the Ninth's more exclusive government archives, the official documentation of its repurposement and assigned decommissioned status lacked just enough critical detail to raise an eyebrow or two.
Quite a shame that the coauthors of said documentation had long reached their natural expiry, as had all others with some relation to the design, construction, installation, operation, removal, and subsequent decommissioning of the original NDS.