The Mech Touch novel Chapter 1991

Chapter 1991 Original Charm

Was Ves bashing his head against a wall?

He certainly felt like it after trying to come up with several alternate mech concepts. Each time, he attempted to come up with a mech shape that was able to offer better and more tailored performance compared to what a bog-standard vanilla humanoid striker mech had to offer!

"I refuse to give up! I refuse to give in! I'm a mech designer! I can work with multiple mech shapes!"

Designing humanoid mechs was very familiar territory to Ves. He almost never designed a mech that deviated from the premise of an upright machine that walked on two legs and used its two arms to wield its primary armaments.

This standard was very popular in the mech community, and for good reason.

Ves didn't need to reiterate that it was a shape that was easy to pick up and understand by his customers.

He didn't need to say that research on humanoid mechs had been done to death, so there were a lot of standard layouts that offered immediate answers on how to structure their internals and artificial musculature systems.

All of these advantages and more turned humanoid mechs into the predominant mech shape in human space. Bestial mechs took second place, but were very popular in certain states and star sectors.

Outside of these established conventions, there was still room for more mech shapes, some of which weren't inspired by the shapes of existing humans and beasts.

These days, the mech industry came up with a lot of standards and best practices. A lot of excellent mech designers over the generations experimented with what they could do. The MTA and other organizations gathered all of the results and aggregated them in order to determine which one was the best out of all of them. After a very long process, the solution the MTA chose would eventually become the most optimal standard which every mech designer had to respect!

Was there anything nefarious behind this drive towards pushing standards on the mech industry? Not necessarily. They were often the most optimal solution to most situations. It was a waste of time trying to explore other options when the existing standards were already the best!

"Still, it's a mistake to assume that the standards are unquestionably the best in every situation."

Technology constantly progressed, opening up newer options and making unviable choices more practical.

The imagination of the entire mech industry was vast, but not unlimited. The most deviant minds who weren't satisfied with the existing standards always tried to figure out if there was a better way to solve a problem!

Most attempts ended in failure, but occasionally someone got lucky. Still, their successes were usually marginal and limited to specific circumstances. After so much technological development, it was very rare that a single mech designer was able to come up with a radical solution that was good enough to overturn existing standards!

Changing the shape of a mech to suit a certain purpose was not that unusual. However, most mechs designed in this fashion still fell within the boundaries of conventional standards.

Not many mech designers chose to take it a step further and design a true deviation from the standard.

Now that Ves started to tackle this challenge himself, he found out first hand why even Seniors and Masters declined to explore this direction further.

"It's too difficult!"

He felt as if he was straining his creativity to come up with good ideas. Most of them sounded promising at first, but as soon as Ves sketched a rough draft, they turned out to be very deficient in certain aspects.

So far, many of his mechs came across as demented frontline mechs. Removing the legs and turning the arms into flamethrower mounts vastly increased the capacity and efficiency of his mech.

However, these design choices neutered his striker mech's ability to defend against melee threats. This was not something striker mech pilots liked to see. Their mech types were designed to fend off approaching melee mechs, so they were at high risk of getting attacked by enemy mechs up close!

"They'll probably equate my mech to a starfighter." Ves tiredly remarked as he mentally threw his latest draft design into his implant's trash bin.

Spaceborn frontline mechs were often indistinguishable from starfighters past a certain point. The only reason why they still fell under the category of mechs at all was because they required a pilot with the right neural aptitude to operate.

That said, which mech pilot wanted to pilot such a limiting machine? Mech pilots possessed their own pride! They spent at least eight, ten or twelve years learning how to pilot complicated, multi-limbed war machines! Putting them into the cockpit of a glorified starfighter was an insult to their identity!

After making so many futile attempts, Ves was out of inspiration. He no longer possessed the drive and energy to research alternate concepts.

"Enough!"

Ves threw his hands and decided to end this session. He wouldn't gain anything when his inspiration ran dry. Even his creativity had limits! _{frёeweɓηovel.coɱ}

Even though he hadn't gained any concrete results so far, Ves nonetheless gained at least some satisfaction.

He felt he was going back to his roots. Lately, Ves had been pushing off a lot of problems to Gloriana. It felt good to tackle a technical problem by himself. Unlike the other problems, Ves cared a lot about this issue, so he was fully invested in trying to solve it in a better way than the standard formulas could achieve.

It reminded him what mech design was really all about. His design philosophy had more in common with spiritual sorcery than the nuts and bolts of creating technically-sophisticated war machines. It was easy for Ves to become more and more detached from the technical side of mech design, especially since his girlfriend was so good in this aspect.

Ves couldn't help but be reminded of a warning he received from Master Moira Willix.

"Specialization is good for gaining greater efficiency in my workflow, but not necessarily good for my development. If I keep handing off work I don't like to my girlfriend, I will eventually lose the ability to perform this work myself!"

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