The Mech Touch novel Chapter 4261

Not every mech force could support the logistical burden of maintaining a large amount of modularized mechs.

In theory, it all sounded pretty good. By developing a modular mech such as the Bright Warrior Mark II that could equip all kinds of optional modules and equipment, the mech pilots could reach their full potential by piloting the configurations that precisely matched their unique skills and inclinations.

A school of military theorists even proclaimed that personalization at the company, squad or individual level was the future of mech warfare!

After all, why should every mech pilot be stuffed into a standard mech that had never been designed for that person in the first place?

While it was way too extravagant for mech designers such as Gloriana to design bespoke mechs for thousands of rank-and-file mech pilots, the development of a modular mech provided an excellent compromise solution!

The mech designers only needed to develop the base mechs and a large number of varied equipment.

In fact, the design work of the latter didn't even have to be handled by the original designers of the modular mech models. A bunch of Journeymen or Apprentices could easily design a large amount of adequate equipment as long as they stuck to their specialties!

This way, a mech force would have all of the building blocks in place. The people in charge just needed to piece them together into different mech configurations that best drew out the strengths of the mech pilots while also adapting to the circumstances of the battlefield.

There were groups who managed to make it work, but the majority of the implementations ended up in failure.

All of those thinkers and theorists paid too much attention to the shiny aspects of this implementation but neglected to account for all of the processes in the background that needed to be done right.

The biggest problem was that a highly modular mech force was not cheap!

The further away from standardization, the more complicated it became to manage all of the different parts and materials!

It was a lot easier to impose uniform standards and train mech units to a consistent level of performance.

Training mech pilots to fight with one consistent mech model also made it easier to correct any flaws. Mech units could also take advantage of the entire group to find more clever ways to exploit the strengths of the same mech.

Another limitation was that the right manpower and facilities needed to be in place to implement an effective modularized force. Without access to enough competent mech designers, it would be a dream to make enough varied modules and equipment available!

While there were plenty of ready-made modular mech ecosystems on the market, these enormous package deals tended to be significantly more expensive than ordinary mech offerings.

After all, mech designers and mech companies did not work for free. They needed enough remuneration to support all of the hours spent on designing an ECM module or additional mech swords.

Then there was the storage or production capacity needed to make all of these goods available.

While this problem was much less significant at fixed locations, it still did not change the fact that a modular mech force tended to field less mechs but took up more space than a conventional mech force.

The stupidest way to maintain a modular mech force was to produce or purchase far more modular equipment than mechs could carry and keep all of the extras in reserve in case they were needed.

The more clever way to handle this was to stockpile a large amount of raw materials and produce any modules needed for an upcoming deployment or campaign. It would be even better if the mech force or the organization behind it could also take back unwanted modules and recycle them into their base materials.

Again, all of this sounded nice in theory, but how many outfits had the money or the skilled labor to operate a factory ship?

It was much cheaper and more effective to stick to a limited selection of carefully chosen mech models than to bother with all of these elaborate exercises! The performance differences simply weren't worth the trouble of giving every mech pilot the option to personalize the configurations of their machines to a fine degree.

Smaller mech forces didn't have the budget, manpower and resources to adopt a modularized mech ecosystem.

Larger mech forces were able to field a good variety of specialized mech models that performed significantly better than their modularized equivalents.

As such, just like biomechs, the campaign to make modularization the definite standard in the mech community turned into an abject failure after reality showed that it was much less practical than its proponents believed!

Only a few outlier states and organizations bothered with modularized mech ecosystems these days. The demands to make them viable and useful enough were simply too harsh.

"It's kind of funny how our clan is one of the few groups that can pull this off." Ves smiled.

He initially conceived the Bright Warrior as a semi-modular mech platform because he wanted to find the most optimal balance between practicality and fit.

He achieved this goal with the design of the original Bright Warrior, but the Larkinson Clan of today was nearly unrecognizable compared to when his clan only numbered a few hundred to a few thousand members!

Ves hadn't even realized that his clan slowly ticked all of the boxes that were necessary to implement a modular mech ecosystem.

It wasn't until he came up with this idea after his talk with Goldie that this concept that everyone disapproved of suddenly became viable for the Larkinson Clan!

First, the Larkinson Clan was not short on money. It could afford to splurge on more expensive and luxurious approaches to organizing its mech forces.

Second, the Larkinson Navy not only included a fair amount of cargo vessels and logistical vessels, but also featured a fully-fledged factory ship that had recently completed a massive upgrade.

Third, as a clan centered around mech design, it possessed much more design capacity than almost every other pioneering organization!

Fourth, its mech pilots and the way it organized its mech legions made it possible to field modularized mechs without making every mech unit disorganized. Not every outfit could cope with the chaos generated by mixing too many different mech configurations together.

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