The Mech Touch novel Chapter 851

What the Flagrant Vandals needed the most was to get their hands on a mech that beat the breakdown effect.

It would be best if Ves designed a mech that fully resisted the breakdown effect, but he knew his capabilities and didn’t think he’d be able to accomplish something like that. It was fine to dream, but when it came to fulfilling an immediate project, he found it best to be realistic.

"Let’s begin with the basic priorities."

The breakdown-proof mech didn’t need to last for years like conventional mechs, but it absolutely had to keep working for several weeks under arduous conditions. The complexity of the design had to be as small as possible to provide fewer opportunities for faults.

The more complex a mech, the more prone to faults it became.

Therefore, in order to maximize the reliability of his mech, Ves had to abandon many modern advancements in the field of mech design and turn to older styles of mech design.

Mechs from two-hundred, three-hundred and even four-hundred years ago were a lot more simpler and less complicated in their construction. The continued advancements in the field of mech design mostly came as the result of a combination of better materials and more sophisticated applications of technology.

The latter in particular basically traded simplicity for performance.

It was like the question of transportation. A person on foot traveled slower than a person riding on an aircar. A person on an aircar traveled slower than a person riding a shuttle.

Right now, mechs had reached a very refined state where they incorporated many advanced systems to deliver much greater performance than before. However, this came with the downside of being much more difficult to fabricate and maintain.

Even mech pilots suffered from the added complexity.

Once, it took five or so years to become a decent mech pilot. Now, they could forget about it unless they trained at least ten years to pilot the most basic mechs. To most mech pilots, they would only be able to become decent mech pilots after attending the mech academies for at least fifteen years!

As the Age of Mechs flourished, mechs were no longer as simple as someone traveling on foot. They slowly upgraded to traveling with aircars, until they finally reached a state equivalent to traveling aboard a shuttle.

However, if Ves wanted to design a mech that resisted the breakdown effect, more complexity only added to the difficulty of his project. "The current state of mech design emphasizes performance over reliability. If a mech designer can achieve five percent better performance at the cost of a five percent increase in breakdowns, then they wouldn’t hesitate to make this tradeoff!"

After all, breakdowns were a matter of chance. As long as the MTA validated the mech design, it shouldn’t be too shabby in terms of reliability! With proper maintenance and care, a high-performing but brittle mech still provided a lot of value to their buyers.

Yet now the situation was completely different. Ves expected mechs to suffer malfunctions left and right the closer they got to the Starlight Megalodon. Who cared about how well a mech performed when it crashed every couple of days? Which mech pilot wanted to put their lives on the line in a mech that could fail at any second during a battle?

"Reliability should be a top priority of my new mech design!"

So instead of developing something as complex as a shuttle for the purpose of transportation, he should draw back and resort to older but more reliable applications of technology. Going back to traveling with an aircar or even on foot may impact the performance of his design in a drastic fashion, but as long as it worked under pressure, so what?

"Besides designing a mechanically simple mech, it also has to be able to last independently while withstanding the planet’s crushing gravity."

The second demand for his original mech was that it should be able to operate under six times the gravity of Old Earth without depending on gravitic backpacks. Those backpacks emanated a useful antigrav field that lightened a mech enormously, but the antigrav modules built inside the backpacks were highly prone to breakdowns themselves.

The larger the backpack, the higher the risk of shutting down! This would be a highly fatal event if the gravitic backpacks shutdown in the middle of a battle!

The only area where Ves intended to incorporate an antigrav module was inside the cockpit of the mech. He could place several small, redundant antigrav modules inside a cockpit in order to shield the pilot from the debilitating effects of heavy gravity.

Even if one of the antigrav modules failed, one of half-a-dozen of spares could instantly kick in and pick up the slack!

"The rest of the mech should be able to move under its own power."

That made the mech as slow as fast transports or the god species at best. Ves took particular inspiration in the god species. They survived and thrived for thousands of years on this planet despite being huge, slow exobeasts.

What did their existence signify?

"Even under six gravities, it’s not impossible to design a mech that can last for a standard day without replenishing its power cells."

However, this placed incredibly stringent demands on his mech, as Ves already discussed with Mayra. The mech could only be a quadruped light mech that incorporated the most lightweight alloys they could get their hands on. The mech would also be slow due to the need to conserve energy when fighting back against the planet’s heavy gravity.

This was also why he didn’t favor designing a melee mech. While they were lethal up close, how long did it take for them to enter effective range?

Still, melee mechs held a definite edge over fragile ranged mechs in complex terrain. The frontline mechs that Ves envisioned would only be dominant if they fought on flat and open terrain.