The Mech Touch novel Chapter 372

Ves wanted to go crazy. Over the past two years, he gained so many new Skills and experienced so many new things. His enhanced Creativity constantly overflowed his mind with interesting mech concepts.

"I can finally unleash my wildest thoughts!"

Naturally, he had to be somewhat discrete in his methods. If his products under the Crazy War Criminal account resembled his existing offerings under the Chasing Clouds account, then people would easily be able to draw the lines.

That would defeat the purpose of operating a second account.

Therefore, Ves had to adopt a different design method and avoid resorting to the same old methods.

"That won’t be much of a challenge. As my Skills keep growing, so do my bag of tricks."

Deeper knowledge allowed for more elaborate branching of methods. Perhaps when he used to be poorly skilled, he could only tentatively utilize a single method to solve a specific problem. Once his knowledge widened, he became more proficient in applying that specific method, but he also became familiar with alternatives.

"It’s like traveling from Cloudy Curtain to Bentheim. Previously, the only way I could travel from star system to star system was to book a second-class ticket on an average passenger ship. Now, I’m still able to travel cheap if I want to, but I can also upgrade to a first-class ticket. Not that I need to, now that I have the Barracuda as my personal corvette." _{ƒгeewebnovёl.com}

The same principles applied to mech design. With a broadened perspective, Ves could easily disguise his work by forcing himself to adopt different methods. Though the quality of his work would decline, trying out something different was still a useful exercise.

Considering his options, he preferred to design a heavy mech rather than a light mech due to the wealth of design options available to him. Heavy mechs boasted vastly more weight and volume allowances, enabling Ves to stuff as many systems as he wanted onto a suitable frame.

"The only problem with this option is that it takes a lot of time to design a heavy mech."

Even if he designed a variant based off an existing design, he would still have to spend many hours in modifying and optimizing his frame just to achieve a basic level of quality.

"It’s no joke to design a heavy mech."

Ves had never really attempted to design a heavy mech, even a virtual one. The only experience he had with working with heavy mechs was when he took part in the Young Tigers Exhibition. Charlotte Hoffmeister’s Kirby made an unforgettable impression to Ves.

He also remembered that his former classmate Patricia Schneider specialized in designing heavy mechs as well. Ever since she got snapped up by Master Null in the Leemar Open Competition, Ves hadn’t heard any news of her since.

It would be nice to get in touch with her again, he thought. They shared the same class back at Rittersberg and they had also been the only mech designers from the Bright Republic to have reached the finals in the Open Competition.

Ves even harbored a tentative dream to collaborate on a design.

Sadly, every message he sent to the woman disappeared into a black hole. Ves didn’t know if Patricia received his message, let alone deign to send out a reply. The only thing he got out of the Clifford Society was that Patricia had never Leemar even once.

"She’s likely taking her time to shore up her foundation."

If Ves was a conventional mech designer, he’d be doing the same thing. Fortunately, the Mech Designer System cut short the time it took for him to expand his knowledge, so he had no need to go to school again.

After a moment of consideration, Ves decided to make the practical choice and chose to design a light mech. Their smaller, slimmer builds left him with very little room for error, but it had the advantage that it didn’t take too much time to slap a working mech together.

"It’s not worth the effort if it takes more than a week for me to finish a virtual mech design."

In this brief amount of time, Ves wanted to test his capabilities to the limit by rushing together a design that would successfully make an impact in the virtual market. In order to achieve the latter, Ves had to be creative and design a sufficiently shocking mech to overcome his second account’s lack of renown.

Now that he pinned down the weight class, he needed to decide on its star tier and archetype. While he was capable of designing modern 5-star mechs, Ves chose to take a step back and tackle the more modest 3-star range.

3-star mechs might be outdated by more than two-hundred years, but that also made them a lot easier to work with, thereby speeding up his design process.

"3-star mechs are also much more widely sold than 5-star mechs."

The latter may be more prestigious, but they didn’t necessarily led to higher sales. Ves wanted to earn a modest sum of 20,000 DP in order to afford his next Mastery. While 5-star mechs came with higher DP caps, thereby ultimately earning Ves a lot more points, it would take months to get that far.

Ves needed immediate short-term gains instead of long-term investments.

As for the archetype, he thought about designing an aerial mech. He hadn’t designed much of them, but his increased knowledge base gave him the option of working somewhat well with flight systems.

"I’ll be designing an aerial production mech sooner or later, so it might be useful to get some practice."

Thus, Ves settled on a aerial light mech. As for the type, Ves previously designed the Seraphim, which utilized a long-ranged rifle. Therefore, Ves thought about going for a melee type this time.

In general, aerial melee mechs in the light weight class mostly consisted of skirmisher and scout role. They made for ideal mechs to ambush unsuspecting rifleman mechs that fared poorly in a fight up close.