This is a straight-forward construction path, most of the work went into getting the salt/air right. Unfortunately I have to turn around the output molecule to calcify two of the air atoms so I lose a few cycles doing that.

Mecha is a cost-like metric, in that what matters is the number of access points. My analogy is mecha : cost :: area : bestagon.

This particular construction path does not go below mecha 5. However I am not doing any input suppression, and such a large input is easy to suppress, so it feels like mecha 4 should be possible. The difficulty is that you have lower access to the bonder so wanding is forced. I could not get wanding to work even at mecha 5 so my attempts at mecha 4 were nowhere close.

I don't think mecha 3 can be done but I couldn't disprove it.