The Mech Touch novel Chapter 400

Unforeseen problems always popped up during a design process. Ves previously did his best to minimize inexplicable conundrums by never working with technology beyond his means.

For his first original design, he deliberately chose to start with a knight mech because it was one of the most mechanically simple type of mechs available. Stepping up to a rifleman mech which featured a lot more systems interacting with each other meant that the chances of something going wrong went up.

"I’m not going to draw back because of a single setback." Ves responded to Carlos. "Sure, I can make do without the gimmicks and publish the as is with a couple of touch-ups. But what does that say about me and my approach to designing mechs?"

"That you’re safe?"

"Safe is boring! Safe doesn’t drive any sales! The strongest maxim in the mech industry is that it’s better to publish a mech with flaws but is extremely good at some aspect than to publish an all-round mech with nothing that stands out!"

"This is different than that, Ves! You’re not talking about a flaw that can be worked around, but an outright failure of a core feature! What are you going to do with a crystal that’s a dud?"

Ves faced a lot of pressure to discard the gimmick, but he believed it would be a mistake to do so. It was better not to publish his design at all than to leave it out. The crystal formed a core part of its identity since Ves initially set out his vision for his design.

Certainly, the huge amount of time he spent on incorporating this feature also played a factor. He spent so much time on it already that it would be an awful shame to discard his previous work.

Just like gamblers who threw away good money after bad, Ves maintained his confidence that he could overcome this setback in time. He was honest enough to know that he might be digging a deeper hole for himself, but he just couldn’t stop at this point.

Ves waited for the prototype to return to be shipped to the private workshop, upon which he scoured its entire frame. Almost every part held in place and performed within expectations. Even the control module appeared to be in working order.

It just didn’t work.

"Why not?" Ves scratched his head while furrowing his brows.

In order to test out his suspicions, he removed the control module from the prototype and began to connect it to some of the smaller crystals he hosted in his labs. After adjusting some of the settings in the control module, the connected crystal responded perfectly according to the commands that Ves sent out.

"That’s strange."

The control module worked with smaller crystals but not the bigger one. From what he determined so far, the problem didn’t lie in the control module, but instead the bigger crystal.

"Maybe it’s defective as well?"

Ves brought in the second large crystal that his homebrew synthesizer produced without flaws and tested out the same connection.

Again, it didn’t work.

"Both of these crystals are flawless. They shouldn’t differ from the crystals in the simulations at all?"

So what went wrong with these crystals? He started to perform numerous tests, and found a clue when he observed what happened to the signal being sent out by the control module. The signal seemed to disappear into nowhere once it entered the big crystals.

"I see what’s going on."

These alien crystals reacted strangely to certain input, and it must have treated the incoming signal as an energy source. The crystal subsequently absorbed the signal, preventing it from issuing commands.

"Still, how can I solve this problem?"

Ves didn’t understand why the smaller crystals properly recognized the signal while the bigger ones treated it as an energy source. He must have overlooked something very substantial when he initially scaled up the crystals through extrapolation.

"Maybe I need to scale up the properties of the signal as well."

He proceeded to tinker with the control module and set it to send out a variety of different signals. He increased and decreased its frequency, amplitude, duration and etcetera, only to come up with the same fruitless result.

"There’s something about this supersized crystal that turns it into something completely different than its smaller varieties."

Experimenting with signals hadn’t brought him any closer to a solution, so Ves took a step back and tried to approach the problem from a different angle. Right now, a major discrepancy existed between simulation and reality.

A mathematical model that tried to approach reality could never imitate all of its facets. Ves knew that. He suspected that some obscure effect not baked in the models played a key role in the inability for the crystal to process the signals.

Ves proceeded to compare the data from reality and simulation and tried to spot all of the differences.

"There’s too many differences."

The datasets differed too drastically for him to make any sense where the problem lied. Ves had to manually comb through each discrepancy. It was like trying to find a needle in a haystack.

The work bored him a lot, and Ves hadn’t been able to pin down the reasons why these differences appeared. He knew too little about how reality worked. Not even a Master Mech Designer dared to claim something similar.

"This might not be the right approach."

Maybe he should turn to help. There wasn’t anything preventing him from calling someone knowledgeable to help him out of this fix. Ves considered sending a message to Master Olson or Horatio, her assistant.

"What will that do for their impression of me if I walk up to them like a child who lost his toy?"

Ves felt very reluctant to call for help for something he should be capable of solving on his own. To do otherwise was to admit that he had overreached.