The Mech Touch novel Chapter 368

The draft design took shape in a short amount of time. Even though this was the first time he put his conception of his second original mech into shape, he had always imagined its design beforehand.

In his rich imagination, Ves constantly tinkered with the design elements of his rifleman mech. Every available moment, such as when he fell to sleep or took a bath, his thoughts always flitted back to the design of his mech.

A mech designer never stopped designing mechs. Even without a design program, a mech designer would use his own imagination to define its shape.

Therefore, the design process right now actually consisted of constructing the second draft rather than the first. Ves had already pinned down most of the major design choices he thought about beforehand.

"My mech has to be fast, accurate, enduring and tough. In that order."

Juggling those priorities took a lot of finesse. Over the course of a single day, Ves drew up a three-dimensional wireframe model of what his intended design should look like. He only drew up the broad strokes of his design, but it already set a couple of factors in stone.

First, the new design looked nothing like the Blackbeak. Besides using the same type of armor system, engine and other components, the two designs had nothing in common.

"The Blackbeak’s role is to attract attention. As a knight, it’s inevitable that it’s going to be put to use in attracting enemy firepower."

In contrast, a rifleman mech would never volunteer itself as a target dummy. Only stupid and desperate mech pilots would call out attention to their lightly armored mechs.

A rifleman mech armor carried at least half as less armor than a knight mech. It was not as if rifleman mechs couldn’t pile up the armor if it wished to do so, but the costs outweighed the benefits.

One of the most important reasons why was that all of that armor impacted the accuracy and precision of a ranged mech. This problem became much worse with higher classes of mechs, because the exotics incorporated in armor plating often interfered with the precision of the limbs.

Either a mech can be light or precise, or heavy and strong.

Only heavy mechs circumvented this unspoken rule. They possessed enough space and weight for mech designers to separate the interference and implement all kinds of compensation systems.

"Heavy mechs are mostly designed and produced by states. I won’t be able to get in touch with heavy mechs in a long time."

Right now, Ves had to play by the rules, so he adopted a slimmer medium mech form optimized for speed and accuracy. If he wanted to design a skirmisher mech, he would probably strengthen the arms to make it capable of fighting up close. However, a rifleman mech didn’t need that much power, so he kept them fairly slim.

"It’s not going to take too much strength to lift up a rifle. It’s more important to make sure they’re stable and precise."

The heavier the arms, the harder it became to ensure they operated precisely according to the will of the mech pilot. More mass meant more complications. Therefore, mech designers sought to cut them down to the absolute minimum, with perhaps a small allowance for armor plating.

This was why rifleman mechs made for very poor melee mechs. They wouldn’t be able to wield heavier weapons such as swords and spears effectively, and they made for a pathetic sight if they had to resort to their backup knives.

This was why rifleman mechs needed mobility. An immobile mech was a sitting duck to any skirmisher, swordsman mech or knight that ran up to its face.

"As long as they can run away, they can maintain their combat effectiveness."

Modern mech combat centered around the strategic positioning of rifleman mechs. The goal of both forces would be to smash apart the rifleman mechs of their opponents. As long as one side lost its rifleman mechs, its fate would be sealed.

Ves spent more time than he thought trying to draft up a good pair of legs. Different from skirmisher mechs, they didn’t need to excel in top speed. Rather, they needed to accelerate quickly and be able to halt a mech’s forward momentum in an instant.

This took a fair bit of thought. Stronger legs required larger legs, but larger legs also added to weight, which in turn slowed down the mech again.

Fortunately, Ves already owned a number of high-quality component licenses, most of which he exchanged from the Clifford Society with merits. Those component licenses enabled him to make more generous tradeoffs, thereby allowing him to achieve a decent balance between speed and weight.

With a pair of fairly capable legs, the mech looked a bit unbalanced with the skinny pair of arms. Almost every medium rifleman mech looked this way, so Ves wasn’t worried about the negative consequences.

The rest of the mech looked fairly slim as well. Compared to the Blackbeak, it possessed a much slimmer weight, as Ves had left out most of the excess armor. He only left a fair bit on the front torso, as rifleman mechs would often be employed against enemy rifleman mechs. Ves figured that the amount of armor he had already added should be sufficient to win an even firefight against a regular rifleman mech.

"The armor largely plays the role of a buffer. It gives the mech pilot another chance after he screws up. His mech isn’t supposed to get hit in the first place."

His mech’s high mobility ensured the rifleman mech wouldn’t get hit nearly as often as the Blackbeak. Thus Ves didn’t worry too much about the deficiency in armor.

The rest of his design followed the standard convention for rifleman mechs. Ves did not try to introduce any radical departures from the common standard for rifleman mechs. He needed a lot more skill and experience to attempt such a thing.

Ves decided to adhere to best practices in that regard. This prevented him from introducing potentially fatal flaws, but it also left out any major jumps in performance.

Fortunately, the crystal golem might have forgotten much of its original life, but it still held a wealth of expertise concerning crystal technology. It even amazingly taught him some of its race’s simplest circuits, which facilitated the process of energy siphoning. _{ƒreewebηoveℓ.com}