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// Engineer's Report: Iosan Mechanika 
// Story: Iron Kingdom Equestria 
// by Bitt_Player 
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	From: Neon Lights, Chief Engineer, Project Nimbus
To: Prince Shining Armor

Your Majesty,
First, please allow me to once again say that I am truly thrilled by the opportunity you have given us to study Iosan warjacks. Everypony on the reverse-engineering team here at Engines Equestria has worked diligently to dismantle and examine every single part of the warjacks you brought to us, and while there is still much to learn, I believe we now have enough information for a preliminary report.
At the heart of each warjack seems to be some kind of device which is wholly alien to the designs we acquired from the human nations. This device is connected through strips and panels of rune-carved metals to every moving part in the 'jack, leading us to believe that it is the power source utilized in place of steam pressure. This theory is supported by the fact that each device contains a charge of magical energy. We do not yet know how this charge occurs, and whether the device can be recharged if depleted. Due to the difficulty of accessing the device, it seems that it is not meant to be replaced, leading us to believe that it somehow draws power from the warjack's surroundings. We are tentatively identifying this assembly as an 'arcane reservoir.' The small, curved cylinder behind the head connects to the arcane reservoir, and appears to be a means of venting excess magic.
Among the parts that the arcane reservoir connects to are the joint assemblies. These are sets of rune-carved metal vanes mounted on ball or cylinder joints, which move in response to small amounts of magical power, and are capable of locking in place. We have found that unicorn ponies can easily produce enough magic to get the joints to react, although the actual reactions are still unpredictable, and likely will be until we better understand the design of the Iosan warjacks' cortexes.
The cortex is situated inside the hull, directly above the arcane reservoir. Its exterior is drastically different from the cortexes of human warjacks, being closer to a tapered cylinder than the spherical cortexes produced by humans, and its only connection to the rest of the warjack are a pair of metal vanes that are inserted into slots at the top of the arcane reservoir. The cortex apparently regulates the flow of magical energy through the rest of the machine using these vanes. We believe we can learn much more about the processes involved once we manage to break the Iosan cortex locks.
We next come to the force field generator. This device, situated close to the reservoir, is the source of both the protective barriers and the energy blasts observed by you and Princess Mi Amore Cadenza. The generators seem to be unusually delicate for a device built into a war machine, and in fact between the four warjacks you brought us, we have the parts to assemble only one complete generator. These elaborate systems are clearly designed with the idea that they will be the warjack's main form of defense, as their bulk limits the amount of armor that the chassis can carry, in addition to its own aforementioned fragility. Each generator has a large number of intricately-carved arcane runes, far more than the rest of its warjack combined, which clearly create and control its force field and ranged attacks. We are striving to better understand the function of these generators, as we believe that replicating their effects could be extremely valuable.
As for the arcane runes, they appear to be vital to channeling the force magic that drives the warjacks. The Iosans utilize a runic language unlike the arcane runes we've seen from the humans. For this reason, our only recourse for fully understanding them is to copy them, one by one, and test each rune individually. We have made rapid progress in this line of experimentation, and will soon have a working lexicon of every rune in the recovered warjacks. Some of our experts in runic magic have posited that it may be possible to produce rune plates which combine Iosan and human runes, but we are not yet in a position to test the theory.
As a final note, Minuette, our expert on arcane turbines, has embarked on an attempt to fabricate a turbine that uses Iosan force magic instead of steam power to rotate the field generator. She is seeing limited success with some of the already-translated runes and an arcanodynamic accumulator. Admittedly, it is not nearly as effective as the arcane turbine in the prototype warcaster armor you are currently testing for us, but Minuette has high hopes for the design.
In summary, I believe that these Iosan warjacks will prove highly valuable to the defense of Equestria once we are finished determining the fundamentals of their operation and can begin replicating the functionality of their mechanika.
In the names of the Princesses,

Neon Lights