In Knight's & Magic (MAL, Wiki), Silhouette Knight (mecha) development takes a long time, which is why Ernesti is making such waves. However, it seems that commanders have more powerful units. For example, Knight Commander Morten Fredholm's Haimerwort in episode 5. The Earlcumber, and the King's unit also come to mind.
What makes these units special and/or more powerful? Could they possibly be using
custom ether reactors from demon beasts,
rather than the standard, mined, ones?
What I think that they mean is that developing a completely new Silhouette Knight is long. Think about the time taken from the development of the war chariot to the tank (I know it is not the best analogy but it works), but developing small incremental updates is not so hard (think on different variants of the same tank model).
This is where Ernesti is making a revolution, each of his designs is completely new and he is creating a lot of new tech from the ground up.
Now let's tackle the commander units. The base soldier is given a standard SK but commanders are given slightly better units, maybe a hunt provided some better demon beasts so they have some custom ether reactors on hand, so they make a more powerful version of the same unit, and they can carry bigger versions of the same weapons. So basically they are the same unit but slightly better (think a barebones car, and a full-equip one, they are the same, but the full equip one, is more expensive and has better performance than the barebones one)
During the Casadesus Fort incident, the commander mentioned that the Tellestarle had strenght equivalent to his own machine, but they were smaller (Karrdator-sized) which gave them more mobility. So, and this is purely speculation on my part, the commander machines (and the king's by extension) probably have a bigger Ether reactor (made of better materials or whatever) to support a larger frame, but this in turn means you can't mass produce them.
Quoting Skythewood's translation of Vol 2. Ch. 16:
“Hmm, so this is the power of the new model, to think it could match my Hymerwort. Although I want it to be part of my Knights, it is a hindrance right now!!”
The new models that fell into the hands of the opponents were troubling. With the size of a Karrdator and as powerful as the Hymerwort, it was like a bad joke.
