The Mech Touch novel Chapter 450

No Senior Mech Designer ever made it to their rank by being stupid. Despite her slow responses and her erratic behavior, when it came to mechs, Professor Velten was as razor sharp as any mech designer.

She immediately took note of the abundance of superfluous elements in his design proposal.

"Mr. Larkinson, of all the elements of a mech that you could have chosen to work on, you focused on the cockpit. Worse, besides switching the neural interface systems, most of these changes appear to be purely cosmetic! I can understand if you’ve made the cockpit sturdier or increased its ability to withstand a breach, but all you have done is rearrange its interior! What do you have to say for yourself?!"

Ves held up his hands. "It’s not cosmetic, ma’am! Far from it! Every adjustment I have made is needed to increase the ergonomics of the cockpit!"

In order to cover for his ability to affect a mech pilot through the X-Factor, Ves had delved into real ergonomics several times before. Just for this occasion, he brushed up on his theory by referencing the textbooks the Mech Corps made available through the central database.

"According to Leitzbritz’s theory of luminescent comfort, putting more than three projectors in a row will excessively distract the mech pilot and..."

"The height of the piloting chair is set according to the average height of every mech pilots in the service more than a century ago. That’s fine as a whole, but the average height of the mech lots in the Flagrant Vandals is a little bit shorter than that..."

Ves basically spun a tale of nonsense cloaked in scientific rigor. The vast majority of his adjustments had no point. They were only there so that Ves could leave his fingerprints on the design. While he changed plenty of things inside the interior, getting these changes approved was a very different matter.

After a couple of minutes of blabbering on, Ves reached the end of his prepared speech. He waited in a tense moment of silence as Velten parsed his words.

"I have no doubt that your applications are sound." She conceded slowly and knocked a gnarly knuckle against her desk. "Yet none of it seems worth it. How will any of these changes improve the performance of the Inheritor? As much as you tout the benefits of this proposal, there is an alarming lack of hard estimates on how much the design will improve. How am I supposed to approve to the wholesale modification of every Inheritor in our possession, thereby wasting a large portion of our limited logistical capacity?"

In other words, Ves might have talked a good game, but he hadn’t been able to justify why the Vandals should overhaul the cockpit interiors of every Inheritor. It wouldn’t take a lot of time and effort to rearrange the interior of a single cockpit, but it was an entirely different story when it came to hundreds.

A mech regiment as large as the Flagrant Vandals constantly ran their production equipment night and day, doing all sorts of tasks. The mech technicians always had more things to do. Thus, convincing the Vandals and Professor Velten that his changes was worthwhile would always be an uphill battle.

Fortunately, Ves already prepared an answer to this question. He withdrew a data chip from his pocket and gently put it on the desk. "I have already tested out the changes. The raw data and the results are in the data chip. Please take a look, professor."

The professor looked at him with a little skepticism, but she didn’t dismiss the data chip out of hand. As she slid the secure data device in her terminal, she began to peruse the logs and data that Ves had recorded during the tests.

This was his trump card for this meeting. During his stay with the design department, he heard many stories about Professor Velten. Everyone spoke about her ironclad rigidity on certain matters.

If she expected someone to finish a report within a day, he better well do it or he would face a reckoning.

If she said that someone should increase the performance of a specific component by a couple of percentage point, the entire design team would be forced to slave for weeks or months until they finally achieved their goal.

A mech designer like the professor was set in her ways, and she never showed any leeway in anything. That troubled Ves a lot, and he struggled to think of to deal with this personality trait until he realized that if he played things correctly, it could play to his advantage.

While most of his fellow mech designers grumbled about Velten’s inflexibility, Ves recognized that she was simply a mech designer that worked in terms solid numbers and quantifiable results. In other words, she was a very data driven engineer.

To overcome the objections of someone who was driven by data, Ves merely had to serve up additional data that played in his favor. So in the final day before he had to report to the professor, Ves brought Iris to one of the Wolf Mother’s hangars and conferred with Chief Carmon and Lieutenant Chandis.

"I have a way to renew the Inheritor." He began after pulling them aside. "Iris and I have worked on a set of minor modifications that will boost the performance of a mech pilot. The changes aren’t very big, but it could potentially be the start of something bigger."

Ves proceeded to explain a summary of what he had in mind.

"What do you need us for then?" Chief Carmon asked as she crossed hear hefty arms and chewed on an illegal stimulant. "I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but we’re kind of busy right now. We don’t have time to spend on installing fancy frills like a spiffed up cockpit."

The lieutenant voiced his own objections as well. "My men are used to piloting with bare heads. They won’t take buckethead interfaces very well. Light mech pilots really hate those unwieldy things!"

"Don’t knock it until you try it! I only need one mech and a test pilot to gather some data. What will it hurt? Besides, once I can get this modification proposal approved, it might open the door to further improvements."

They both thought that this was a waste of time, but the carrot that Ves had dangled at the end sounded very tempting. If Ves could get the obstinate professor to approve of further modifications to the Inheritor design, then they stood a chance of vastly improving its survival rate.

To that end, letting Ves free reign on a single Inheritor mech was a cheap price to pay.

"Okay, you’ve convinced me. Go ahead, but don’t change anything else!"