The Mech Touch novel Chapter 1219

Life went on. Although the loss of the prototype impacted his mood considerably, Ves knew he shouldn’t dwell on it too much.

"The most important task right now is to finish the design." He whispered to himself.

He cast away as much distractions as possible and let go of his concerns about his volatile surroundings. The contradiction between the reformers and traditionalists still raged on, but his role was set in stone.

Completing the design of the Transcendent Messenger mattered more than anything else. His plans and Calabast’s plans hinged on its success.

When Ves and Ketis finally returned to the workshop, they went back to work. Ves already analyzed a good amount of test data, but the processors at the guest compound were too weak for his purposes. The mech workshop offered much more capable processor banks that specialized in performing mass calculations typical to engineering projects.

"When the design process has reached this stage, the time for second-guessing and major revisions has passed." Ves explained to Ketis as he showed her the preliminary changes he made to the design. "All of our design choices are set. The changes we can afford to make at this stage should not impact any of them negatively. Our goal is to work away the flaws while perfecting what is already good about the design."

Ketis nodded. "I know. If we go back on our design choices at this point, we’d be designing a variant instead of the base model."

Mech designers needed to be decisive in their judgement during the earlier stages of the design process. If their hesitation on some of the choices grew more serious by the time they received the test results of their first prototype, then they didn’t do a good enough job.

"This is important, Ketis. A lot of mech designers get hung up over ’what-ifs’ or magnify the negative aspects of their comprise solutions. They’ll go back to their design and shift the very nature of their mech into something else. That’s not good. You need to have the confidence that you can make your mech great from the decisions you’ve already made. Look forward instead of gazing back at the past."

While Ves already learned this at school, Ketis never entered one. These kinds of suboptimal traits afflicted many mech designers despite receiving plenty of warnings. Perfectionists particularly exhibited this pattern of behavior, causing them to take several times longer to complete their mech designs.

Fortunately, neither Ves nor Ketis exhibited too much tendency to turn back to their designs. Both of them were decisive people and they didn’t worship quality on a pedestal.

Ves wanted his mechs to be as good as possible, but only as far as practical concerns allowed him to. Due to the deadline he imposed on himself, he didn’t have much time left to optimize the Transcendent Messenger. He would just have to make do with one or two more prototypes before he finalized its design.

"Let’s get to work."

Ves performed the bulk of the work this time. Each change, no matter how small, affected a myriad of parameters of the mech. This was very delicate work and required a deep and comprehensive understanding on mech design in order to juggle all of the tradeoffs he needed to make.

At this time, Ketis still lacked this depth and breadth of knowledge, so she could only perform an assisting role by supervising the simulations and such.

The optimization work he performed was like solving puzzles. There were countless ways to solve each problem, but only a small number of them actually led to an actual improvement in the design.

One solution always introduced another problem. The key to improving the design was to make sure the new problem that resulted was smaller or less significant than the old problem. While Ves could never obtain a perfect solution, at the very least the mech design achieved a net gain in performance.

The more he optimized the mech, the harder it became for him to find a solution that resulted in clear improvements. It felt like he needed to make use of a microscope in order to determine whether it was worthwhile to implement his solutions.

Nonetheless, the Transcendent Messenger design became increasingly more polished over the next days. His design seed worked wonders at this stage. He could judge the best solution for many problems without resorting to time-consuming calculations and simulations.

Naturally, his design seed only helped him come up with a solution that he would have been able to figure out on his own.

In other words, his knowledge base formed the foundation of his design seed. If he hadn’t studied too much in a particular field, then his design seed had very little to go on. It possessed the same biases as him and could never come up with a solution based on knowledge that he lacked.

"It’s not an auto designer."

Nonetheless, even if his design seed couldn’t automate everything to perfection, the boost it provided to Ves was just right. He still needed to wrack his brains and perform some manual calculations in order to solve particularly difficult problems. _{fгee𝑤ebɳoveɭ.cøm}

His design seed only came in handy when he faced easier but extremely tedious problems.

All in all, Ves initially expected that he needed at least two weeks to complete the second iteration of the design.

Yet by the time a week had gone by, he no longer found any issues that needed addressing!

"That was fast." Ketis commented after Ves declared they completed the second iteration. "I remember that Mayra worked just as fast when optimizing her designs. You Journeymen are beyond human in this aspect! I can’t even keep up with your problem-solving pace!"

"It’s a convenience, I admit, but it’s not a panacea. You still have to do the most important work yourself. If you want to get to this point, make sure to keep up with your studies and accumulate more knowledge."

"I don’t even know how many books I have to read to match your mind. How come you know so much but never spend much time on studying?" She suspiciously asked.

Ves only smiled coyly in return. "I’m a fast learner."

"Yeah right. I know you’re good at that, but your learning speed is too fast!"

He shrugged off her questions as best he could, but the suspicion lingered. Ketis worked alongside Ves for many months now. She wasn’t blind to the oddities surrounding him. Perhaps the only reason why she didn’t inquire any further was because they were all benign.