The Mech Touch novel Chapter 3773

Chapter 3773 - Commercial Training Mech

Designing a training mech was a must. It fit the concept of growth mechs too well.

On top of that, the training mechs that Ves had designed in the past already showed that they were highly compatible with his design philosophy.

A training mech model that aligned with his new direction would definitely provide a lot of value to the market. Ves almost decided to keep it in the clan if not for its growing need for money!

However, just because Ves believed that his training mech had the potential to become a revolutionary new product didn't mean that it could achieve commercial success!

He had to overcome the inertia in the mech market in order to sell enough mechs.

"The market for training mechs is a lot harder to enter than others." Gloriana warned Ves. "There are many reasons for that. Training mechs are crucial machines that are used to train humanity's future mech pilots. They need to be extremely well-designed so that the dangers of using them are suppressed to a minimum. In other words, the soundness and optimization of their designs need to be extremely high."

She was right. Ves already understood a thing or two about training mechs. He already did a lot of research on the market for these special products back when he designed the Chiron.

"You cannot spend a few months on this project and think that it will become a bestseller." His wife continued. "Safety and reliability must be guaranteed first before other priorities come into consideration. If just a single accident occurs that can be traced back to a design flaw, the mech academies would rather pull your training mech from the lineup than to risk an incident that could completely ruin their reputations. You have to realize that mech academies live and die by their public perception."

That was also true. Mech academies were rather unique customers in the mech market. They did not buy the toughest or the most lethal mechs. They did not pay that much attention to top performance at all. Since the mech academies mostly intended to put immature mech cadets in the cockpits, the training mechs had to provide a lot of safety assurances when they were handled poorly.

This demanded a lot of attention on the solidness and the stability of the mech frame.

It didn't matter whether a mech academy was just a rural school or an elite establishment. The teenagers and young adolescents that piloted them on a regular basis were bound to screw up sooner or later.

They might trip their mechs. They might collide them against each other. They might get hit by uncontrolled attacks.

So many different accidents took place in a lot of mech academies that training mechs had to possess an excellent tolerance for abuse!

"We already designed the Chiron." Ves stated. "I haven't paid much attention to its use after our Larkinson Mech Academy put our first training mech model into service, but I have heard it is a beloved machine among our mech cadets."

His wife nodded. "It is indeed a mech that has earned a lot of fans over at the Discentibus, but don't think that its track record will be enough to convince customers to buy your new commercial training mech. The Chiron works for us because it is alive, because it is an in-house design and because we have never given our mech academy much choice about adopting it. Those favorable conditions won't apply to other customers, especially when they have never come across this kind of product. If you want to get our foot in the door, you will need to make sure our training mech meets the prevailing market standard."

In other words, it had to meet extremely high standards in terms of technical design!

Although the training mech didn't necessarily have to be expensive and too high-end in terms of performance, it had to be as unflappable as possible.

The training mech must be able to stand up and fight if it tumbled off a cliff.

The training mech had to remain in adequate working condition after enduring a year's worth of regular usage.

The training mech needed to be easy to repair and maintain.

In addition, the training mech had to be affordable in order to make it economically viable! Not every mech academy enjoyed an unlimited budget.

Most mech academies were public institutions that relied on the support of a state in order to pay the bills. It was extremely expensive to buy and maintain a collection of training mechs.

Whatever tuition that normal families could afford to pay out of their own pockets would never cover the costs of running a mech academy!

For this reason, these public mech academies were often conservative when it came to their buying behavior.

They only bought training mechs if they had to. If possible, they were willing to hang on to their machines for multiple decades if possible!

The longevity of a mech was therefore an important selling point as they directly affected the bottom line of the institution.

Although many states understood the importance of directing sufficient funding in the training and education of mech cadets, the reality was that their public spending could only cover so many priorities.

It was not unusual to see mech academies, especially the ones servicing poorer and more rural areas, train their mech cadets by relying on second-hand or even third-hand training mechs!

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