The Mech Touch novel Chapter 2180

Chapter 2180 Chiron

Every mech academy possessed mechs to allow their pupils to experience what it was like to pilot actual machines.

A mech pilot that trained exclusively with virtual mechs would never perform well on the battlefield. There were simply too many lessons that could only be learned while piloting a physical mech!

For this reason, mech academies demanded special mechs that specifically accommodated their desire to educate mech cadets.

This was the origin of teaching mechs. They differed from normal combat mechs in several ways.

First, their lethality came under heavy restraints. Whether permanently or conditional, the firepower and damage potential of these mechs had to be reined in and kept under control.

A single ordinary mech was easily capable of wiping out an entire city block in an instant! Putting so much destructive potential in the hands of partially-trained teenagers was a disaster in the making!

Therefore, teaching mechs had to be designed from the ground up with many safeguards. Remote kill switches along with hard limits on performance allowed mech academies to field mechs that weren't capable of killing hundreds of students or wiping out entire schools.

The second requirement of teaching mechs was that they should offer a realistic learning experience to mech cadets. This meant that teaching mechs had to resemble combat mechs to a sufficient degree so that the people that piloted them could easily transition to piloting full-strength mechs in the future.

Obviously, the second requirement partially contradicted the first requirement. In many cases, mech academies tended to favor safety over providing a more realistic piloting experience.

Cheaper teaching mechs were only capable of fulfilling one of these priorities. Mech academies had to spend much more to obtain teaching mechs that were both safe and effective!

The third requirement was that they needed to provide as much protection as possible to its current pilot. If the mech cadet improperly handled the mech or suffered some sort of accident, the young student could easily put his own life at risk!

Teaching mechs needed to be robust enough to keep the pilot alive in the event of an accident. Basic mistakes such as the mech losing its footing and tripping on its feet could easily damage the cockpit of a fragile mech. Such incidents happened quite a lot in the early years. If a mech couldn't protect its mech pilot upon falling, it wasn't suitable teaching mech!

The fourth and last requirement of a teaching mech was that it had to be cost-effective. It not only needed to come at an affordable price, it also had to be resilient enough to withstand daily abuse for a very long time.

The longer the teaching mech lasted, the less money the mech academy had to spend on servicing, repairing and replacing it. These activities just happened to be the primary reasons why mech academies went bankrupt!

When Merrill calmly explained these requirements, she finally revealed how her mech design proposal tied into them. "The Chiron is an adjustable mech design that aims to provide an individualized teaching experience to any mech cadet that uses it for practice."

The projection of the Chiron displayed the proposed design in several different ways. Sometimes, the mech wielded a sword. Other times, it held a rifle. Some of the Chirons were taller and others were shorter. Half of the mechs featured a flight system and the rest could only walk on land.

The assistants observing the projection still recognized the same underlying DNA, but they were confused why the mech came in so many versions.

"The main emphasis of the Chiron is its adaptability. It is a humanoid mech that is designed to match the mech cadet's physique as best as possible. As everyone knows, people are always the best at controlling their own bodies. The Chiron takes advantage of this fact by incorporating several shape-changing mechanisms that can adjust its physical proportions."

There was more to the adaptability trait than just changing the length of its limbs.

"In addition, the Chiron is not specifically reserved to a single mech type. Just like the Bright Warrior, its overall configuration is partially modular. With the right configuration and loadout, it can function as a knight mech, a swordsman mech, a lancer mech, a rifleman mech and so on to a realistic degree. While the combat effectiveness of each configuration isn't very strong, a teaching mech doesn't need to be powerful."

Miles Tovar interrupted her presentation. "All of this sounds good, but adaptable and adjustable teaching mechs aren't foreign concepts. The more exclusive and well-funded mech academies often possess a number of them to train some of their elite mech cadets."

"That's a fair point." Merill nodded in acknowledgement. "What I have mentioned up to this point is not strictly new. What makes the Chiron stand out from adaptable teaching mechs is the added value of its glow."

She manipulated the projection again, causing the Young Blood and the Old Soul to appear alongside the Chiron.

"The Young Blood is a spear-wielding knight mech that teaches mech cadets how to pilot melee mechs. According to user feedback, its mech pilots always feel as if there is something inside the mech that helps them in battle and points out the areas they need to work on. The Old Soul performs a similar function in the form of a marksman mech. Both of these mechs are products of Mr. Larkinson in the beginning of his career when he was just an Apprentice."

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