The Mech Touch novel Chapter 1033

Now that Ves came around to accepting this mixed blessing of an offer, he wanted to take maximum advantage of this opportunity.

Seniors rarely accommodated Apprentices when it came to designing mechs. The differences in ability and perspective were too vast. If they showed off their prowess too much, not only would the role of the junior mech designers be diminished to grunt workers polishing the design from the side, they might also be incalculably damaged by the exposure to advantaged techniques their minds couldn’t comprehend!

Ves happened to be fairly resistant to the latter problem. He was like a Journeyman in that sense as his mind was strong enough to bear the exposure with minimal effects.

At least he thought so. Well, his previous flirting with trying to understand high technology worked well enough for him, he figured, so what was the harm?

Another reason why Seniors didn’t let Apprentices take charge was because it was usually detrimental to their own advancement trajectory. Mech designers needed to learn how to design mechs and mech parts through their own efforts.

While this did not preclude any assistance from fellow mech designers, there was a difference between teamwork and handholding. The assistance of a Senior could easily turn into outright handholding as the latter fixed all of the mistakes of the former. _{freewebnσvel.cѳm}

This was a very real risk with the current joint project. However, Ves did not plan to involve the Senior at all until the latter stages of the design phases where he completed taking all of the major conceptual decisions that defined his design.

If Ves made some mistakes at this juncture, it would be very inconvenient and time consuming to correct them. It would also break the integrity of his vision if he needed to reverse course due to a mistake.

Therefore, simply put, Ves needed to put on his very best performance. His fourth original design, after the Blackbeak, Crystal Lord and the Enduring Protector, needed to be a stellar mech even before Professor Ventag got his hands on the design!

To put it in another way, Ves intended to design his mech in a largely solo affair and deliver a feature-complete product that could immediately be brought to market after some testing. Instead of doing so, he would hand the design over to the Senior, who would make an extensive pass over the design and tweak and optimise it in a limited fashion.

The goal at this stage wasn’t necessarily to add new features, but to improve and optimize the existing ones while working away at any flaws that didn’t take too much effort to mitigate.

Such a method actually reminded him of the Superpublish function, which he had only used once some time ago to give his Crystal Lord some extra oomph.

It was too bad the Superpublish function came at a high price. In return for slightly elevating the quality and performance of his design by ten percent, it painfully prevented Ves from earning any DP on completing its design and selling its copies to the market.

Ves must have lost tens of thousands of DP from missing the earnings of selling the Crystal Lord model!

Even so, he did not regret the decision. Back then, the Crystal Lord needed to be of breakout quality in order to make a splash in the market. If not for designing a mech whose quality surpassed his current ability back then, it wouldn’t have been such an enduring seller these days just when the LMC most needed a steady cash flow.

At this time, Ves did not have access to the System nor its Superpublish function. Instead, he had something even better. The formidable ability and experience of a Senior could potentially elevate the parameters of a design by much more than ten percent in some areas!

Best of all, Ves did not have to give up his right to claim the DP earnings from selling the mech, although he did wonder how the System would treat sales of mechs designed in collaboration. Would Ves be able to earn the full DP amount or only a proportion of his contribution?

No matter. Just like with credits, Ves was ready to accept a cut in his DP earnings so long as the mech became a major hit and much of NORA Consolidated existing customer base bought the new product in large quantities!

Professor Ventag saw Ves still deliberating on the choice of what kind of mech he wanted to design. In order to help the younger mech designer along, he provided some guidance.

"You should keep the current conditions of the mech market in mind. We are in the twilight of the current mech generation. The next generation will set upon us within five to ten years. What you need to do is to come up with a vision of a mech that will not only sell well in the current generation, but also in the next generation."

Ves looked up at that. Ventag may have some insider knowledge on this transition. "Do you know exactly when the MTA will introduce the next mech generation?"

"Nobody knows, least of all the MTA." Ventag shook his head. "The contents and timing of the introduction of new mech technologies, standards and regulations is a complex affair that involves many different interests in the galaxy. Both from within and without, the MTA is constantly being lobbied by every mech designer with a stake in what kind of standards the organization wishes to popularize and standardize. Each decision will make some influences a big winner while relegating many other influences to losers. Even now, negotiations are still very much ongoing, and until they end the new generation won’t arrive."

In other words, it was anyone’s guess on what the exact date would be. However, the general time frame of five to ten years was already sufficient enough to plan around.

"So if I want to design a good mech, I’ll have to straddle between the generations, huh?"

"That is my advice if you want to avoid designing a mech that will only be relevant for five to ten years. In general, the price categories of your mechs downgrade by one level after the transition to a new mech generation. For example, your Blackbeaks and Crystal Lords are both categorized as premium mechs. In the next generation, they become less attractive as their performance won’t be able to keep up with the newer mechs that come out. Your LMC will be forced to discount them by at least twenty percent, pushing their prices down into midrange territory. Do you understand?"