The Mech Touch novel Chapter 762

Chief Avanaeon reacted with disbelief when Ves express interest in picking up the fundamentals in understanding FTL drive technology.

"Let me get this straight. You somehow blackmailed Major Verle for a week’s access to engineering textbooks on FTL, and you need my help to make sense of a field that takes the average engineer fifty years of study and practice to get smart enough to understand the very basics?"

"Well... when you put it that way, it sounds a bit unrealistic. However, I didn’t blackmail the big boss. I did him a favor and he allowed me to borrow some books from the local database."

"These aren’t your average textbooks." Avanaeon said. "In fact, there’s more than just the basics included here. I don’t know how you got Major Verle to do it, but he even allowed you access to the next step, which includes basic explanations on all the subcomponents included in most basic models of modern FTL drives."

"And that’s valuable because...?" Ves trailed off.

"FTL drives aren’t like mechs. Any kid can look at a humanoid mech and see it consists of a torso, a pair of arms, a pair of legs and a head. The smarter kids can even say what’s inside the torso like doctors can recall all the organs inside a human body. It’s actually not that obvious with FTL drives because it can consist of up to a hundred different core subcomponents, each of which tweak the drive’s ultimate performance in many different ways."

"A hundred core subcomponents!"

Even a mech only carried around ten to twenty core subcomponents on average, with advanced mechs featuring more systems than frontline mechs which emphasize economy.

Ves could not imagine how a drive that looked to all appearances like one big block to be so complex from within.

"It’s not as bad as it sounds, as the first twenty or so are the most vital ones." The chief engineer continued. "They enable the drive to elevate the ship from the material dimensions to the higher dimensions. The other eighty subcomponents have to do with navigating the gravitic currents and maintain the ship’s course under the various conditions that you can encounter during FTL travel. They are still vital, but an FTL drive won’t suddenly fail if one of them is configured incorrectly."

"And I suppose that’s not the case for the first twenty."

"Correct. If any of them is even a single percent off, it could mean the difference between transitioning out of FTL to a normal destination like the Bentheim System or launching your ship straight into a black hole. If you think black holes are bad enough in realspace, they’re orders of magnitude worse in the higher dimensions!"

In short, Ves needed to gain a decent understanding of the theoretical underpinnings behind the twenty core subcomponents. This gave him the most preliminary level of mastery in FTL drive technology. Although it wouldn’t allow him to design and craft an FTL drive from scratch, it at least gave him the most minimum qualifications to repair one if he ever encountered a slightly damaged drive.

"Genius or not, it’s impossible for you to understand the basics of all twenty subcomponents within a week!" The chief engineer exclaimed. "It’s like studying twenty entirely different fields of science to a fairly deep level, because that’s what it comes down to. Those textbooks provided to you by Major Verle are really great, but they are meant to be accessed only when an engineer has completed over a hundred other courses. The contents won’t make sense in the same way that a novel won’t make sense if you start reading the final pages."

Through his brief tirade, Avanaeon made it more than clear to Ves that he had been a little bit too arrogant for his own good. Ves may have a good depth of knowledge in the fields related to mechs, but he did not even possess the minimum qualifications in astronautics to design and build a basic shuttle on his own.

Ves accepted this argument, because the joint-development of the Six-Sided Dice already showed his complete inability to design a shuttle from the ground up.

"I only have a week to study the contents of my bounty before the encryption scrambles them forever. What do you suggest I do? Go back to the library and borrow some basic engineering textbooks?"

Avanaeon shook his head. "It takes decades for the average engineer to read through all of the prerequisite books. Even a freak like you will take years to go through the materials I bet. With your level of cognitive abilities, there’s a better solution available. Just memorize the most essential materials by rote. As long as you are able to store the contents in your mind, you can always get back to them when you are better read. No one can take your memorized data away from you either."

That was an excellent suggestion!

"I think I can do that! It’s only that the reading material is too much for me to memorize in its entirety. Can you help me select the parts which I absolutely have to memorize and which ones I can skip?"

"Hmm. I can do that as a favor." The chief acquiesced. "Besides, I’m curious to what these textbooks have to say on some of the issues that I’m puzzled about for a while. These books are completely unredacted! Usually you have to earn a large amount of merit before you can unlock the next parts of the books."

"Knowledge is power. It makes sense for the Mech Corps to ration out its library." Ves nodded. This happened everywhere because it took good experts a lot of their time to compose good textbooks that distilled their knowledge down into a pure and untainted form.

They proceeded to work together to select the best content to memorize. Avanaeon selected a slew of formulas, essential theories, massive tables, informative charts and more, consisting about one-third of the average textbook.

"Why so much?" Ves asked. He expected to make do with only a tenth of the contents of a single book.

"Because you’d be lost if you miss any of it. The complicated math and theories that form the foundation of how FTL work can’t be skipped."

Avanaeon browsed through the pages in rapid tempo, selecting each of them by leaving behind a special bookmark in the software. After several hours, he ran through most of the contents, only leaving behind some supplementary materials such as the blueprints.

"These blueprints are extremely valuable. While they’re outdated, they outline the design of a fully functional FTL drive that’s been in use several thousands of years ago. They are the simplest iteration of an FTL drive that’s been stripped with most of the alien idiosyncrasies while not being bogged down with countless minor innovations that make it more complex. They’re well worth your time to study and reference as you go through the theory. I suggest you memorize all of them, but if you do, make sure you memorize their exact dimensions and properties."

"I’ll do that." Ves nodded. "Thanks for your help!"