The Mech Touch novel Chapter 661

Ves had no idea how an attempt to acquire knowledge of stealth tech and how to fabricate an ultracompact battery spiralled into a full blown lecture and tutoring session.

If he ignored the fact he was wearing a heavily embellished suit of light combat armor that could have been torn straight from a modern day pirate drama, he might have thought he travelled back in time to his student days.

Of course, with a professor like Reno Jimenez instructing him on how to do better, in a pirate admiral’s uniform no less, the situation turned into a completely unbelievable event.

Though the Skull Architect may not be the most pleasant individual to converse with, he took a surprisingly patient attitude with Ves when the topic shifted to the technical aspects of their Leiner Grey design.

They did not have to converse that much, since both of them had tasted each other’s design philosophies. They also read through each other’s design choices and characteristics.

Reading a mech design was a fundamental ability of any mech designer. Ves knew of most of the secrets of the Leiner Grey, and could say with confidence he could reproduce an identical light skirmisher with a seventy percent similarity! The only aspects he failed to get a grasp on were those that concerned higher concepts, areas in which Ves could only begin to touch upon when he advanced to the rank of Journeyman.

As for his counterpart, the Skull Architect might have grasped up to ninety-nine percent of his design style! The two stood at different stages in a mech designer’s career. Practically nothing Ves had implemented in his own version of the Leiner Grey could be hidden from an elder mech designer’s sight.

Considering the vast experience gap between them, Ves had made several notable errors in his design.

The Skull Architect highlighted the joint sections near the waist. "One of the more egregious loss in performance is the way you handled the leg joints. I can understand why you’ve thickened these sections, but this size increase leads to a whole cascade of changes..."

The man brutally pointed out several of these major errors, each one illuminating Ves even more. It couldn’t be helped, as Ves had been handed over the Leiner Grey design without any manuals or instructions. He inevitably misunderstood some minor details which turned out to have an enormous effect!

As the Senior found nothing else worth noting on, he waved his hand, causing the projections of the designs to fade. "Learn from this experience. Seek out active collaborations. There is no rule in mech design that states that a mech designer ought to work alone. Some of the best mechs come about through combining the strengths of several mech designers. While each contributing mech designer adds another complicating element, the reward is often worth the effort. Tell me, boy, what is your evaluation of your version of the Leiner Grey if it were to be published on the market?"

Ves frowned at this question. "The Leiner Grey is one of the best put-together designs I’ve had the pleasure of working with, but it makes use of outdated alloys and techniques. It won’t gain any traction on the market except for a possible role as training mech, but even then its premium material costs makes it unsuitable for that task. My apologies, it is hard for me to make accurate estimates of the market performance of a second-class mech design."

"The market for second-class mechs is more diverse than the market for third-class mechs. An abundance of wealth and vastly higher budgets allow for greater combinations of exotics to be used. Other than that, the market for more mundane mech types is more similar than you think. Let me put the question in a different context. What if I decided to publish your variant of the Leiner Grey instead of my original creation as its original design all those years ago?"

"That... I have not performed any detailed market research about how the Friday Coalition’s mech market worked like. I’m missing too much information to make a confident judgement about is market performance. That said, even if the simplified version of the Leiner Grey performs fifteen percent worse than the purer version, the design’s base specs have always been higher than the average. Therefore, the decrease in performance should still put the Leiner Grey in an acceptable range."

"Yet the cost of the Leiner Grey is too high." The Skull Architect jabbed. "The market may be filled with fools, but if the disparity between your Leiner Grey and its direct competitors is too big, introducing this model on the market will result in more losses than gains."

That unfortunately rang more true for Ves than he’d like. What he did was to take a high-performing mech built with high-quality performance and simplified its operation so that it became more suitable for the mass market.

Yet one of the defining traits of a mass market mech was that its price had to be within a reasonable range! This demand directly contradicted with the high-quality components of the Leiner Grey!

Ves had to admit defeat in this aspect. "The Leiner Grey that I’ve designed won’t do so well because it utilizes expensive, high-performing parts that I’m not using to their full potential. If I had more control over the design, then I would have swapped those unnecessarily expensive parts with cheaper ones that can do the job just as well. The impact on performance will be small, but the costs can easily be reduced by a third!"

"A mech that is modified to such an extent can no longer be called the Leiner Grey." The Senior shook his head, as if disappointed at the solution Ves had come up with. "No matter. This is merely an exercise with an outdated mech design. I have no interest in putting the Leiner Grey for sale again. Let us move to a different matter."

Ves already had an inkling of what Jimenez had to say.

From Mayra, he gained the impression that the Skull Architect valued his time highly. He wouldn’t waste a single second on Ves if the possible gains from the conversation didn’t surpass the opportunity cost of spending time to improve his designs.

Almost mech designer from the older generation that came in touch with Ves gained a good impression of him. Ves didn’t fit the mold of an average mech designer, and that tickled their interest.