The Mech Touch

6010 Pauper's Perspective

Diandi Base beca lot quieter now that Tusa and Gloriana departed.

Both of them boarded one of the destroyers of the Bluejay Fleet in order to make their way to one of the larger strongholds of the Red Association.

The mechers clearly wanted to put greater effort into deepening their relationship with the two young stars, so they prepared a grander reception for the newly ascended ace pilot and Senior Mech Designer.

Ves did not really mind this. Better treatment translated into greater power and influence. He was not afraid that his cousin and his wife would put the cart before the horse and put the interests of the Red Association above the interests of the Larkinson Clan.

From a strategic perspective, it was better if other Larkinsons helped to prop up the clan aside from their patriarch.

Due to his rise in status, Ves had becway too busy these days. He may have removed a lot of tasks from his to-do list, but it still contained way more stuff than he could handle by himself.

He needed to delegate more. He also had to give up on a few goals and focus on the ones that mattered.

"At least I can settle down for a few years." He smiled.

He experienced enough excitement for a while. He had attracted way too much heat over the span of a few months. There was no need to burnish his reputation further. His greatest priorities was to develop the Premier Branch, modernize all of his second-class mech designs to the Hyper Generation, upgrade the remaining expert mechs of the Larkinson Clan to the slevel as the Dark Zephyr Mark III, promote to a first-class mech designer and prepare for the public rollout of Carmine mechs.

This was anything but an exhaustive list. Ves also had to take care of other matters, such as raising his children, attending the virtual sessions of the Interim Leadership Council, gathering enough first-class starships to form a capable first- class fleet and preparing for the establishment of at least 1 'sect' aligned with the Larkinson Clan.

"That is way too much." Ves rubbed his face with his palm. "I really wish I could split myself into multiple partitions of myself."

There were actually people who managed to do that, but they tended to be first-raters who employed exotic alien tech or other high tech solutions.

Ves could already split himself to an extent. He merely had to remove his cyleg and allow it to make decisions on his behalf.

Usually, he kept it behind in the design lab so that it continued to design mechs while the rest of his body took care of other affairs.

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There were also times where he reunited with his cyleg and used the combined brainpower to increase his productivity during difficult design sessions.

As his mech designs becincreasingly more technologically advanced, the demand for processing power and highly developed analytical skills increased.

The E-computers accumulated in the Blinkyverse helped a lot to boost his effective processing power, but mech design had never been a purely mathematical excercise where rote calculations could solve every design problem.

The intersection of so much advanced technology imposed a greater demand on creativity, ingenuity and high-level problem solving.

It was easy for Ves to design a serviceable second-class mech. He could do so a lot more effectively in half the tcompared to a few years ago. He had improved too much since the start of the Age of Dawn.

Of course, that did not necessarily mean he could design bestseller mechs at will. Trying to elevate the performance of a second-class mech beyond market standard still required a lot of ingenuity and hard work. The law of diminishing returns struck hard, forcing him to spend months of design work just to improve the overall performance of a mech design by 5 percent or less.

The competition still had a chance of pushing back against the market dominance of LMC mechs, especially now that more and more mech designers started to develop more advanced applications of hyper technology.

Ves did not think that their inventions could compete against his newly developed Ultimate Modules, but the latter was a bit too high-end to be integrated into his mass production models for the tbeing.

Ultimate Modules were powerful beyond a doubt, but they were heavily dependent on high-grade hyper materials to produce extraordinary results.

It took a huge amount of money to grant the Dark Zephyr Mark III the ability to cripple first-class multipurpose mechs in an instant with a single activation of his Dark Wind Module!

Although Ves had not conducted enough tests to be certain about this, he estimated that Ultimate Modules made out of weaker and more affordable hyper materials were not worth the effort to include in his mass production models.

Not only did his ordinary products have to wait until they evolved into third order living mechs, the estimated power of an Ultimate Module was probably so low that it bechard to justify their inclusion.

Ultimate Modules took up valuable space that could easily be used to add extra energy cells, thicker armor or other handy modules.

"Maybe I can figure out a way to make them useful for mass production models." Ves mused.

That required additional research, which demanded a hefty tinvestment. As he reviewed his to-do list once again, he found it difficult to squeeze in additional time.

"That's fine. It is best if I focus on consolidation anyway."

He harvested many gains during his last business trip. He was not even close to processing all of his insights and new ideas.

Ves returned to his usual routine, though he had less mech design projects to worry about than before.

Gloriana's temporary absence changed the dynamic in the Design Department. No other woman in the Design Department could match her intensity.

Although Alexa Streon and Kelsey Ampatoch attempted to fill in her shoes, their leadership and management approaches were much milder in comparison. The deputy directors kept everything simple and only made sure that every design team continued to remain on schedule with their assigned projects.

This was not necessarily bad. The people working in the Design Department gained a lot more room to breath now that Gloriana wasn't hovering over their shoulders as much. Everyone treated this period as a partial vacation more or less.

The recent completion of the Dark Zephyr Mark III Project had removed a large burden from Ves' shoulders.

Although Gloriana would soon be keen on designing the next iteration on a bunch of other expert mechs of the Larkinson Clan, Ves could work on that later.

Ves was contemplating whether he should restart one of the whimsical personal design projects that got stalled due to lack of time. He had a lot of ambitious ideas, but he was not sure whether this was the right tto realize them. Perhaps it might be better to wait until he beca first-class mech designer. That would allow him to expand his possibilities by 11:03

working with much more powerful tech.

"Let's check up on the progress of my students."

The growth of Gloriana, Ketis, Alexa and so on reminded Ves that the rise of other mech designers could relieve his burden to an extent. The more mech designers stood out from the crowd and started to demonstrate a lot of value, the less Ves had to do in order to prop up the Larkinson Clan by himself.

Ketis and Alexa were already doing fine by themselves. They had found their direction and still made a lot of progress every day.

The swordmaster had made a lot of strides in developing the commercialized version of the Stormblade Samurai. It shouldn't take too long for her to complete the first iteration. After that, it should probably take a few more months to test the prototype and optimize the design before Ketis decided to publish her work.

Ves had high hopes that the Stormblade Samurai Mark II could turn into a bestseller. It had already won a lot of praise from the Swordmaidens assigned to the expeditionary fleet.

Of course, the recently completed Storm Sword model won even more praise due to its much higher performance levels!

Alexa had broken through to Journeyman a lot more recently, so she was still at an earlier stage of her journey.

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Despite her relative youth, Alexa mastered a lot more knowledge. She possessed vastly more book knowledge on high technologies than Ves and Gloriana!

However, she still had a lot to go before she could combine all of that knowledge of advanced tech into attractive mech designs. She was hardly the only scion of a Terran ancient clan who enjoyed the best learning resources.

Even then, these young elites never really had a chance of carving out a place in the first-class mech market. The competition was simply too fierce, and customers were way too discerning to waste their ton products that hadn't been designed by Master Mech Designers or Star Designers.

However, Alexa planned to circumvent this by designing mechs for third-raters.

Ves grew curious at whether she was able to adapt to the much more constricting and rudimentary standards of the third-class mech market.

As a former third-class mech designer himself, he knew exactly how poor and limiting it was to design mechs with so few possibilities.

"It is difficult." Alexa admitted to Ves in private after he had entered her personal design lab. "Theoretically, a third-class mech still shares the sfundamentals as a first-class mech. In practice, I have found that I require an entirely different attitude and skill set in order to design a good third-class mech."

Ves smiled in amusement. "You need to think like a pauper if you want to sell your products to third-raters. Every third-

class customer always prioritizes price above everything else. If your mech isn't cost-effective enough, it has no chance of getting sold. Letsee your work so far. I am sure that you have already attempted to design a few basic third-class mechs for practice. It doesn't take as much tto design a working mech at this tech level, but it takes real understanding and ingenuity to develop one that is both powerful and cheap."

From the look on the young Journeyman's face, Alexa clearly learned this lesson the hard way.

Although she was ashamed to show any works that were not good enough to be presented to the public, Ves was her mentor, so there was not as much shin showing her practice results. She reluctantly pulled up a few of her recent design files and projected them into the air.

The designs were indeed much sloppier than a proper work. A few of them were incomplete as Alexa did not find it worthwhile to do a lot of detailing work.

It didn't matter. Ves easily figured out where Alexa stood when it cto designing third-class mechs.

"There are a couple of issues that you need to work on." He said. "First, you are trying to put too much stuff into your designs. It is not viable to design multipurpose mechs at the third-class level. Miniaturization on a budget always leads to bad results. You need to suppress your urge to add extra modules and weapon systems when they aren't strictly necessary. The classical mech archetypes may seem incredibly limiting to you, but they have all withstood the test of time. Before you even think about deviating from these standard templates, you should at least put in the effort to master them and understand how they work in their most basic forms."

Alexa nodded. "I have already started to make this realization myself, but… it is difficult forto break my old habits. I do not understand why so many of these melee mechs do not reserve any room for at least a basic ranged weapon system. They are so vulnerable to enemies that can threaten them from a distance that it seems stupid that swordsman mechs and knight mechs are unable to retaliate in the slightest. How are they supposed to deter enemy ranged units?"

"They don't." Ves flatly replied. "Third-class mech forces don't have the luxury to kit out all of their mechs with so many solutions. What they do instead is rely on specialization. Any adequate mech force will have a mix of ranged and melee mechs. The former is usually responsible for covering the latter. This is how it is supposed to work. Is that so difficult to understand?"

"I find it difficult to believe that third-class mechs cannot carry any secondary armaments while still retaining their overall combat effectiveness…"