The Mech Touch novel Chapter 441

The 6th Flagrant Vandals only appreciated the Hellcat design due to its iconic status within the mech regiment. Even then, the Vandals hadn’t actually invested a lot of resources into improving the design.

Even if the Mech Corps hardly sent any mech designers to the Vandals, couldn’t they have supplemented their design teams by hiring them on their own?

Ves didn’t understand why they placed so little importance to the design department. Professor Velten was supposed to be chummy with Colonel Lowenfield. Couldn’t the Senior Mech Designer make a better case for her department and stop its gradual deterioration?

"Well, I’ll be taking a look at another piece of the puzzle soon."

Once Ves finished his talks with the other two mech designer, he proceeded to take up his first task. This time, Professor Velten wanted him to focus his efforts towards the Inheritor design first.

"It’s the most prevalent model of the Vandals." The professor told him. "Therefore, I’d like to see if there is any way you can make a contribution to its design. Even a minor improvement can save dozens of lives due to how much the Vandals depends on this design."

Therefore, his first task was to listen to the people who worked with the Inheritor mechs on a day-to-day basis.

Ves looked down at his comm and set his destination. The device flickered to life and projected a small line that led him through the confusing maze of corridors of the massive factory ship.

"I’m finally stepping out of this cage."

As he went through the corridors and took a few lifts downwards, Ves saw lots of new things. He passed by several important compartments, such as a workshop that repaired broken mech components to a mineral processing area that turned raw asteroids into usable resources.

Each of these sights opened his eyes to what the Wolf Mother hosted. At the size of a capital ship, she could truly be called a mobile factory in space.

"There’s so much industry going on inside this ship."

He already knew in an abstract way that the Flagrant Vandals depended on the Wolf Mother along with a couple of smaller logistics ships to keep the entire mech regiment afloat. Yet he never got exposed to the extent to which the Vandals worked to make it possible.

Besides being struck by the scale of these operations was the fact that everyone who worked in these compartments wore the uniform of a Vandal. That basically meant that they were proper servicemen and not some kind of civilian help they picked off the streets.

It made sense for the Wolf Mother to be staffed by so many support personnel, but his estimate on how many people worked aboard the ship had to be adjusted upwards by several thousand people.

"Repairing broken mechs and fabricating new ones is a massive industry in itself." _{fгee𝑤ebɳoveɭ.cøm}

Ves genuinely admired the entrepreneurial spirit of the Vandals. Without access to external sources of funding, the Vandals managed to scrape by on their own with the help of their factory ship. And besides the whacky FTL engine, the Wolf Mother was very well put together for a vessel that the Vandals constantly worked upon. Ves hardly noticed any flaws in the structural integrity of the areas he walked by.

After a long walk, he finally reached one of the hangars where the Vandals assigned a squad of spaceborn mechs. Though the Wolf Mother always tried to stay out of fights, sometimes the fight came to her. It was imperative for the factory ship to possess some means of defending herself.

As Ves came up to the nearest hangar, he went through a security check before being allowed inside.

"Wow."

The space wasn’t very big. Compared to the cavernous hangars of the Ark Horizon, the hangar he entered could only fit a squad of ten mechs and some spare machines. In order to save a lot of space, the ceiling of the hangar was kept as low as possible. This made it rather awkward to move around the spaceborn mechs as they couldn’t utilize their flight systems without mashing their heads to pieces.

After looking around, he spotted a Vandal wearing the markings of a chief technician. Ves waved at the woman and approached her as she supervised the modification process of an unknown Vesian mech.

"Chief Carnon?"

The middle-aged woman nodded her robust-looking head while she chewed a stimulant. "You must be the new kid the old hag told us about. She made you out to be some kind of mech whisperer. Well, you don’t look like it."

Chief Jezebel Carmon didn’t look to impressed with Ves, and he didn’t blame her for that. His official track record was rather thin and he was still very young to be working with designs on this level.

"Are all chiefs supposed to be acting as tough as nails?"

"It comes with the job. You try ordering around a bunch of numbskulls for a couple of years. My men will do the strangest things if I’m not around to keep them in line."

Chief technicians knew their way around with machines a lot better than the average mech technician, but their true value lay in their leadership abilities. Without their steady presence, any mech maintenance department would fall apart.

"I’m here to help with the Inheritor design. First up, can you lead me to a copy of this mech?"

"Sure. Follow me."

A couple of mech pilots milled about. With the Wolf Mother constantly travelling in FTL, there wasn’t a great need to keep the mech pilots on hand. Still, in the event the fleet she travelled with entered into an ambush, at least a couple of mech pilots needed to be ready and waiting at all times in order to deploy the moment the Wolf Mother returned to realspace.

Ves imagined the mech pilots of the Vandals to be a little rowdy, the opposite of the mech pilots of the elite regiments or companies. What he actually saw were mech pilots that fell in between.

They didn’t look as classy as someone like Captain Vicar, but neither did their appearances resemble the disheveled gang members of Walter’s Whalers.