The Mech Touch novel Chapter 1475

Ves only possessed a sparse amount of experience with heavy mechs.

Heavy mechs generally tended to be a mech type that only showed up in military mech regiments. Only military mech designers or those working for a company that serviced the military became exposed to heavy mech designs.

Heavy mechs were big, expensive and put an enormous strain on a mech unit’s logistical capacity. They also only truly unearthed their potential in major battles and campaigns.

For these reasons, hardly any private outfit wanted to put up with these costly elephants. It was practically impossible to run a mercenary corps at a profit by fielding heavy mechs!

Not just the end users, but also the mech designers experienced headaches whenever they came in touch with heavy mechs.

It took a lot more effort to design a heavy mech. Their far greater mass and volume limits meant that mech designers had a lot more room to work with. This sounded like a great thing as they could stuff all kinds of goodies into their heavy mech designs, but there was a downside to it as well.

"Anyone can fill up an empty mech design. However, it takes skill to turn the mech design into something effective!"

This wasn’t the extent of the problems. Heavy mechs possessed very different performance characteristics from medium mechs.

Due to their very pronounced characteristics, heavy mechs were judged by different standards.

Heavy mech designers adopted distinctly different design paradigms.

This posed some problems to Ves. He wasn’t entirely familiar with the divergent design paradigms. What was bad for medium mechs might in fact be good for heavy mechs.

However, even if that was the case, Ves still managed to work on the Spyre Helix as if he was a natural with heavy mechs.

With his current capabilities, he easily understood the various nuances and complexities concerning heavy mechs even if he hadn’t read any textbooks dedicated to the topic.

Furthermore, many of the Skills and Sub-Skills he acquired from the System also dedicated some portions to heavy mechs. To say that Ves was a complete newcomer to heavy mechs was not quite true.

In addition, the base model of the Spyre Helix was in itself a great teacher to Ves. In fact, having ready access to the physical copy helped his understanding of doom crawlers enormously.

While Ves hadn’t derived enough insights to design his own doom crawler, he was more than capable enough to competently modify an existing design!

Since Ves encountered few serious issues in the process of designing his variant, he began to divert some of his attention to other priorities.

He hadn’t forgotten about his priority to minimize his connection to the Spyre Helix Annihilator, which he named his variant as its altered design took shape.

He made a conscious effort to obfuscate his design style in his work on the variant. He purposefully made his design style more bland, as if Ves directly adhered to all of the recommendations of the MTA.

Ves believed he had done a good job in minimizing his fingerprints in his work. In his judgement, any orthodox Journeyman Mech Designer could have performed the modifications!

In fact, Ves went a step ahead and tried to inject deliberately different design traits into the Annihilator design.

He went as far as constructing a spiritual mask of a ’different’ mech designer before donning it in order to subconsciously lay a trail of false bread crumbs.

Doing this meant that his falsehoods appeared a lot more authentic than if he deliberately tried to insert some red herrings into the Annihilator design!

"Hehehe."

The important point about the false trails was that they came across as authentic! Even if a Senior encountered the Spyre Helix Annihilator, the older mech designer would probably tie its designer to someone completely different than Ves!

"I’m actually really good at this!"

Ves saw a lot of potential with this application of spiritual masking.

In fact, if he put a lot more effort into constructing a mask, he could even impersonate other mech designers!

Ves wondered how far he could take this technique. Perhaps he might be able to imitate another mech designer’s design philosophy by stealing their spiritual fragments before merging them into his mask!

"The possibilities.. are frightening!"

Would he be able to apply this technique in other ways? For example, to emulate a collaborative work?

If his suspicions were true, as long as he refined his spiritual masking technique further, he’d be able to design a mech alone that required others to combine their efforts!

It was the ultimate spiritual technique for loner mech designers!

In other words, it was tailor-made for a paranoid, solitary bastard like Ves!

"Ugh!" Ves shook his head inside his helmet.

He was attempting to move away from that! He put so much effort into socializing with other mech designers and recruiting future mech designers lately in order to find willing collaborators and assistants.

He really missed having someone like Ketis on hand to bounce ideas and to offload work he didn’t enjoy.

If he had a dozen more subordinate mech designers at his disposal, his productivity would skyrocket!

Unfortunately, Ves didn’t have enough time to explore these possibilities any further right now. He was in a hurry to finish the Annihilator so he only adopted a bland and generic design style for simplicity and expedience.

Though it sounded rather basic, his measures were enough to erase all but the most subtle commonalities to his distinctive design style.

In fact, he spent much of the remainder of his design session on going over his Annihilator design in order to scour away any design elements that might possibly tie back to his work!