The Mech Touch novel Chapter 47

The inevitable advance of science and technology rendered today’s machines worthless and turned tomorrow’s miracles into everyday goods.

One of humanity’s better characteristics was the race’s insatiable curiosity of the unknown. Nothing better expressed the rise of humanity better than to track its technological advances. From fire and sticks, the race took a scant blink before it mastered more advanced technologies such as agriculture and forging. A few thousand years after that, humanity escaped the limits of their home planet and spread their presence into the greater galaxy. Each time humanity advanced, it was due to a new scientific breakthrough.

This dynamic process of introducing new technologies to the market was not an entirely positive experience to everyone. To the people involved in the mech industry, many companies might lose all of their customers if they progressed one step slower than other firms.

The earlier years of the mech renaissance was a wild west, with new inventions haphazardly being introduced into the market as soon as they turned economically viable. This led to bizarre situations where there was once just nine years in between one generation to the next. All the businesses that invested heavily in designing and fabricating the mechs of the old generation were left with a huge pile of underperforming junk.

Those who hadn’t yet made the jump got lucky and invested in the new technologies, thereby massively gaining an edge over the producers burdened by old ballast. The financial crash that resulted from the imbalance was the largest since humanity spread out into the stars. So much wealth had been lost that some economists calculated that it set the humans back as much as thirty years.

Losses valued in trillions of credits could potentially continue if this chaotic advance was left unchecked. Fortunately for everyone on the supply side of the industry, the MTA’s restrictive certification and sales procedures imposed some semblance of order in this process of renewal and destruction. The mech industry now adhered to a semi-fixed schedule of grouping technological advances into generations, each lasting about thirty to fifty years.

Commercial mechs that incorporated modern technologies available to be licensed in the open market were regarded as the era’s so-called current generation, or currentgen for short. The generation that preceded it was called the last generation, or lastgen. Generally, the differences in performance between the two was distinct, but not overpowering. As an offhand rule, it took four lastgen mechs to beat three currentgen mechs. This left producers stuck with lastgen designs a period of time to accumulate savings in order to invest in new technologies.

Ves was currently in this boat, except he had much less time to renew his aging assets.

Most analysts plying their opinion in the talk shows warned their audience that the current generation was going to be a short one. As about twenty years had passed since the first currentgen mechs were put on sale, that meant Ves had ten to fifteen years to invest in a new production line.

In practice, his time was shorter as at the last three years, hardly any pilot could be fooled into buying a lastgen mech on the verge of turning obsolete. From now until the generations shifted, the prices of lastgen mechs would continue to decline.

First, he had to come up with a new design. If he chose to produce variants, then he’d have to license a decently good base model, and those often cost a fortune to license. At a minimum Ves expected to fork out a billion credits for a basic currentgen mech. If he wanted anything fancier, then the cost might rise to as much as two to four billion credits.

Then he had to find replacements for his rusty 3D printer and assembler as well. If Ves wanted to fully exercise his growing skills, then he’d have to acquire a more robust assembler system, which amounted to about 300 million credits. He also couldn’t leave out the vital 3D printer. Without renewing his old model, it was impossible to fabricate all of the latest gadgets by himself. A small but premium model could set Ves back by 700 million credits at a minimum.

In total, Ves had to accumulate 2 billion credits in savings in order to survive after ten years. It was a daunting amount of money, and anything could happen within that time that could force Ves to lose his savings or force him to spend it on something else.

With such a colossal spending plan, Ves felt the shadow over his shoulder returning with a vengeance. Though it loomed a bit further away, its shadow nonetheless dwarfed the previous worries in his mind when only his interest payment threatened his business. He’d have to churn out hundreds or even thousands of mechs to accumulate such a sum.

"Do I really have to save up 2 billion credits?" Ves asked himself as he scratched his head.

Replacing the 3D printer and the assembler remained a priority. His current equipment limited his options too much. As for the licenses, Ves thought up an alternative.

"I don’t necessarily need to license a complete mech design. I already had a taste of designing an original mech when I cobbled up the Drake together out of spare parts in the qualifiers for the Fusion Cup."

If Ves was generous in his description, then mech design was simply a process whereby the designer puzzled different components together. Nowhere did it state that the mech designer had to reinvent the wheel and design all of the parts by himself. With the widespread availability of component licenses in the open market, the only thing a mech designer needed to do was to grab a couple of existing parts and stuff them together into a single frame and voila, a new design emerged from his hands!

The benefits of designing an original blueprint were numerous. First, he saved out on licensing costs. The money Ves coughed up to license a full set of components was as much as a quarter to half the amount required to license a complete design. If Ves picked his parts from the lower-end segment of the market, then his total costs would not amount more than 300 million credits.

"The System will also be happy at me for stepping up to original designs."

This was the second benefit of choosing to go this route. The System considered designing variants of existing models to be a low-class occupation. It only offered grains of DP for each new design and sale of a variant mech.

The System in fact awarded him with 28 DP for his first real mech sale. It seemed the System treated real mech sales differently, chopping off six digits from credit price of the sale to determine the amount of DP Ves earned. It sounded like a minor windfall, but considering that the prices of the items in the Skill Tree and Store increased dramatically to purchase the better stuff, then 28 DP per sale might not sustain him for long.

Ves already drooled at the potential amount of DP he could earn from selling his own designs. "The System can’t be that generous, right?"

Original designs also gave Ves an advantage in another way. If the quality of his design surpassed the average of the market, then Ves could potentially enjoy a final benefit. If his mech proved to be a radically popular product, then he could take the opportunity to license out his own design. Needless to say, the amount of money he could potentially earn from such an arrangement was astronomical, and the best thing about it was that he didn’t even have to lift a finger.

"If others produce my design through a license, will the sale of their mechs still earn me DP?"

The System unfortunately kept its mouth shut. This left Ves helpless in determining the answer. Still, from the way the System worked so far, Ves guessed it might not be too stingy. It treated virtual mech sales as a source of DP even if Ves left the production to the game operator’s servers.

Naturally, all of these possibilities were fanciful daydreams. Ves was nowhere close to designing and fabricating an original design, let alone come up with something that could win awards and attract licensing requests. He had to build up both his monetary reserves and his personal skills before he revisited the issue.

"Alright, at least I’ve set a long-term goal for myself. In ten years time, I want to replace my equipment and come up with at least one viable original design."

It was a lofty goal that very few mech designers could fulfill if they stepped into his shoes. In order to create a viable or popular design, it needed to outperform the basic currentgen models in the market while possessing a unique feature that Ves could tout as its main selling point.

Take the Caesar Augustus for example. Despite its many detriments, the mech attracted a small but devoted fanbase. The old design achieved this success by relying on its unique points, that being the merging of outstanding defense with flexible offense.

Coming up with a design that performed marginally better than the mainstream models wasn’t enough. If Ves wanted to stand out with a design just like Jason Kozlowski had all those years ago, then he had to incorporate something unique only to him in his work.

He had to specialize.

"The question is, what will my specialization look like?" _{freewebnøvel.coɱ}