The Mech Touch novel Chapter 120

Ves approached his latest design process like a project. Gone were the days where he haphazardly designed a mech ad-hoc in week-long sessions. His improved skills gave him much more possibilities and opened his eyes to many factors he previously missed.

When he previously competed at Leemar, Ves had no time to double-check his work. The brutal time limits imposed by the rules forced him to follow his previous methodology of trusting his intuition that he got it right.

His latest project called for a cycle of design followed by testing and back to design. With his increased base of knowledge, he was able to wield the System’s many mathematical models without acting like a caveman.

With every design choice, he could verify the results through rigorous testing. He could find better solutions and avoid mistakes as long as he spent enough time crunching the numbers.

Certainly, it took time. Despite the System’s prodigious processing power, Ves could only draw a portion of its awesome capabilities. More than that, Ves might frequently resort to tweaking the models in order to simulate many different conditions.

He did not intend to lose sight of his initial goal. Before he began to design, he created a simple schedule.

"Let’s see. Three weeks should be plenty of time to come up with a decent design. Any more than that and it’s not worth the effort. I’ll spend one week on shaping the design, and two weeks on refining it through modeling and simulations."

Ves also split the project up into different phases that corresponded to the parts he modified. He preferred to start from interior and work his way out, so the first phases dealt with the internal frame and the various internal components. Each time he finished modifying the relevant components, he’d test them vigorously until he became satisfied or ran out of time.

He’d go through each phase in this manner until he combed over every part of his design. At the end, he reserved a decent chunk of time to testing out his new mech in a holistic manner.

"Let’s start with the internal frame."

The skeleton of the base model disproportionately favored the waist and legs. The Hoplite put an enormous amount of stress on the legs when it initiated its powerful dash.

Ves decided not to mess around too much with the internal frame. Any minor change he made here cascaded into a ton of follow-up effects. The basic design of the frame already worked okay. He merely updated the two-hundred year old design to modern standards and rigorously tested his changes. The frame’s upper portion resisted heavy impacts a little better.

He turned to the core components next. He did not swap out any of the core parts, but trimmed their design in order to fit its current use. A real mech needed to be robust and last for years. A virtual mech only had to last a couple of team battles at most. The Hoplite offered a lot of redundancies at the cost of putting on a lot of weight.

Due to their self-contained nature, the modifications he made to the power reactor, engine and other parts required little time to test. Lindholm obviously licensed these components from specialist equipment manufacturers, so Ves found very few instances where he could optimize the design even further.

"Those manufacturers and research institutes make their living off licensing their products. They must have spent years in optimizing their builds."

The lack of faults prevented Ves from making gains without losses with regards to these components. Thus, he mainly exchanged robustness for reduced mass in a proportional relationship. Ves considered the tradeoffs he made to be worth the cost.

After that, he moved on to the next phase. He devoted a lot of time on reworking the internal layout of the mech from the ground up. With his Journeyman-level Mechanics and Apprentice-level Electrical Engineering, Ves chose to focus on increasing the mech’s range of motion.

Among all mech types, the knight had the most restrictive range of movements. It didn’t need anymore due to its plentiful armor and sluggish motions. This also made knights an ideal mech for trainee pilots to start with, because they didn’t have to master many maneuvers in order to become proficient in piloting this type.

"The original Hoplite meanly uses its spear to thrust forward with incredible momentum. Lindholm didn’t design the Hoplite to fare well at a closer range. They even included an augmented shield in order to knock back any mechs who came into knife fighting range."

This presented a big problem to any mech designer who wanted to turn the Hoplite into a sword wielder. The mech lacked the responsiveness and range of motion to keep up with a serious clash.

Ves did not wish to compete directly with more experienced designers who tackled the same problem. He only wished to transform the Hoplite into a proficient sword wielder while retaining much of the internal integrity of a knight.

He did not directly reference the old layout. Instead, he built up his own internal layout first before comparing it to the original version, spending a lot of time in the process. Due to the need to maintain a focused intent, Ves required frequent breaks in order to finish this boring hurdle.

When he finally finished his own layout, he compared the new one with the old. The differences were immense. He reconciled the two by adopting the best parts of both, and put the new scheme through a barrage of tests.

With each iteration of tests and tweaks, the resulting design scheme reached a new equilibrium. Ves succeeded in shaving off bits and pieces while keeping enough redundancies in place. The extra space allowed him to improve the range of motion of its arms.

At this point, Ves reached the halfway mark of his project schedule. He spent a significant amount of time doing tests, but gained better results than before.

Along the way, Ves frequently paused his work when he couldn’t maintain his concentration. Since he cared deeply about imprinting the Instructor to his new design, Ves did not dare continue working when his mind started to fray.

In order to distract himself, Ves devoted the majority of his free time to tutoring his new employee. Carlos also worked hard in trying to understand the assembly process, but achieved little success so far.

"This mech is a nightmare!" Carlos moaned during an evening after work. "It’s like someone stuffed two different mechs in a single frame!"

Ves took a sip of a can of beer. "The Marc Antony isn’t pretty once you look past the armor. I did my best to simplify the mess, but there’s only so much I could do at the time. I have some more ideas now. I’ll try them out once I finish my current project."

"You’re planning to update your only real product, right? I’ve been thinking about it while I’ve practiced fabricating it. Don’t you think the missile launchers are kind of redundant? Even the Caesar Augustus rarely finds an opportunity to make effective use of it. There’s not enough capacity or firepower behind the missiles to achieve anything meaningful alone."

To be honest, Ves did not like the shoulder launchers either. They added unnecessary bulk for just two salvos worth of missiles. The mounts were troublesome to detach and even harder to put them back.