The Mech Touch novel Chapter 48

Ves considered hiring a fabricator in order to ease the pressure on his time. If he wanted to advance his skills, he had to kept pumping out designs. If he wanted to earn lots of money, then he had to fabricate lots of mechs for Marcella to sell. He lacked the time to invest in both activities if his sales volume grew to more than three mechs a month.

The only problem with hiring someone was that keeping the System secret might be difficult. As much as the System appeared harmless, it was actually a miraculous invention that straight-up defied the laws of reality as Ves knew it. Such a precious treasure attracted covetous intentions, many of whom had the power to squash him like a bug. Letting the System’s existence leak to anyone else was just asking for trouble.

Another problem which concerned Ves was that hiring someone else to do his fabrication would lead to sub-standard products. A full-time fabricator might be a wizard when it came to working with the 3D printer and assembler, but if he was ignorant of the X-Factor then the mechs he made would be devoid of life. Selling cheap products under his name only dragged him down just when he wanted to build up his brand.

As Ves couldn’t figure out the solution to this dilemma, he called up Marcella.

"Heya Ves, I’m kind of busy right now, so keep it short."

"I’m having a bit of an issue here." Ves said, then explained his thoughts regarding his potential hire.

Marcella smiled at him as if the problem was trivial. "Well, it’s too early to hire a mech technician, so you have plenty of time to think it over. If you want my opinion, why not do both? You can sell the mechs produced by your personnel at the standard price and charge a premium if the client wants a mech handmade by the designer. Just set the price point high enough so you don’t get too burdened."

That was actually a great idea. It kept Ves busy without leaving the fabricator with nothing to do. He’d essentially leave the grunt work to his employee and only come out and fabricate in person if the money was worth it. Still, it depended on whether the clients were willing to fork out the extra cash.

"Don’t worry about generating sales for your premium variant. I’ll take care to pace you with such requests so you don’t spend too much time on it. There are always at least some clients who make some requests to modify the design a bit. Sometimes they want the mech to be flashier. Other times they want the mech to bear a customized emblem in its armor pattern. I think the going rate for such customizations is 2 million credits."

Earning an additional two million credits per sale was a generous amount. Naturally he’d charge more if the client requested more drastic changes.

Marcella hung up in order to get back to her work. Before she left, she warned him to expect another prospective sale in about four weeks or so. That was enough time for their first client to provide feedback on the Phoenix Cry’s performance in the field.

Ves considered the issue of hiring a fabricator later when he got a good idea of how many sales Marcella achieved. Instead, he turned to a much more interesting activity.

He was ready to go back to designing virtual mechs. He recalled the experience of designing different variants of the Fantasia and the Caesar Augustus and how much experience he gained in applying his growing skills. If Ves wanted to grow to the point of designing a viable original mech, then he’d have to become as good as the seasoned mech producers with a couple of successful designs under their belt.

With 2.8 million credits in his spending account, his scope had widened. Though he could easily login to Iron Spirit’s market and purchase a huge amount of 1-star designs, what would be the point? He’d earn only scraps of DP with each successful design and sale.

"Hey System, can I ask you something? Since I can earn 1 DP when I design a 1-star mech and 50 DP when I design a 5-star mech, what are the rewards for designing 2, 3 and 4-star mechs?"

[The base rewards for designing a 2-star mech is 5 Design Points. The rewards go up to 10 Design Points for 3-star mechs. The reward further increases to 25 Design Points for 4-star mechs. Do note that these rewards are lower when selling a mech based on your designs. Please work diligently in improving your designs so that you may work proficiently with more advanced models.]

In other words, the System told him to get off his butt and start designing higher starred mechs.

Though he owned a pair of 5-star virtual licenses, his skills were too insufficient. The Marc Antony generated only a piddling amount of sales, and Ves doubted that would ever change since he hadn’t really brought anything unique to the design other than the X-Factor. And even that last feature got diminished when Ves relied on the game server to produce new copies of his mechs.

"I shouldn’t bite off more than I can chew. Obsessing over the Caesar Augustus will just warp me into Kozlowski’s design philosophy. I should keep an open mind and develop my own principles."

Considering his generous budget, he felt it was a good idea to start upgrading to 2-star designs. To be honest, he could skip a grade and purchase a few ultra-discounted budget 3-star virtual licenses, but he still had plenty of time to reach this grade with a proper reserve of cash. For now, he preferred to make a gradual progression through the generations of mechs. By experiencing each major generational group, Ves could increase his insights into the history of mechs and their major developments.

As soon as he made up his mind, Ves eagerly logged into the game for the first time in weeks. He happily sauntered over to the location in the virtual city where they sold the virtual licenses. As he stepped inside a shop featuring endless 2-star licenses of any kind, Ves felt as if he stepped into a candy store.

The 2-star mechs represented the age where the most viable ideas from the previous generations got refined. The simple division of light, medium and heavy mechs solidified and the designers of the time started to incorporate components that only worked in their weight-class. For example, a laser rifle meant to be wielded by a heavy mech would burden a light mech excessively as both its weight and power draw were too much to handle.

"Since I’m only going to work on medium mechs from now on, I can filter out all the outer crap."

The projection of mechs and components on sale lost much of its clutter.

"That’s better."

The crowded view thinned out again when he removed the variants. He wasn’t going to produce a variant of a variant, that was just stupid.

Ves started to browse the mech designs first. If he wanted to design a new variant, then the choice of the base model was of utmost importance. The previous times, he got handed out a model from the System. This was the first time he actually had a choice in determining his future direction.

He considered getting his hands on an animal-shaped mechs. The bird and mammal-shaped mechs that started to feature in the 2-star generations incorporated design philosophies that largely extended to today. If he wanted to branch out his mech range to something other than bipedal mechs, then right now was the perfect opportunity to do so.

"Hm, animal mechs are much less popular than their humanoid counterparts. While I don’t face as much competition, my clientele also won’t be as diverse."

Going by the potential sales he could generate, then Ves was not optimistic in excelling at designing animal mechs. The mech designers who worked with such abnormal mechs usually put their whole careers into optimizing such designs. As someone who only intended to dabble with the unusual designs, he could never make a living out of it by half-assing his efforts.