The Mech Touch novel Chapter 5209

Ves and Jovy barely managed to complete their juggernaut design within the 20-hour deadline.

They both had no compunctions about borrowing from existing juggernaut designs and making heavy use of the auto designer to fill in a lot of gaps.

If not for the fact that the highly intelligent and accurate auto designer program lacked any form of spirituality, it would have been capable of replacing the work of at least 90 percent of all mech designers!

Ves couldn't help but grow increasingly more frightened at the monstrous capabilities of the auto designer program.

Though it was backed up by the potent tech and the gigantic amount of processing power of an RA research battlecarrier, Ves could completely foresee a time where it could easily substitute the work of every Senior Mech Designer lower-ranked mech designers.

Would there still be a place for younger mech designers in the mech market by the time the auto designer program became available to the general public?

Perhaps the mech designers who fell outside of the Red Association might all be driven out of the real mech market and become forced to ply their trade in an elaborate virtual environment like the Design World.

Ves truly hoped that this day would never come.

So long as the Red Association was governed by enough mech designers, it was unlikely for them to tolerate the spread of the auto designer.

Its existence threatened their core interests!

The mechers in charge of the Association would be stupid to release a program that threatened the foundation of their existence!

Fortunately, enough people recognized the threat of excessive automation. Technology existed to make humanity stronger. If the excessive convenience provided by automation went too far, then it would have the opposite effect!

This was why the mechers restricted access to the auto designer.

Ves learned from Jovy that outside of special schools that relied on the auto designer as a teaching tool, it cost mechers a decent amount of MTA merits to utilize its functions.

This was not only to prevent them from growing too dependent on this tool that had the potential to substitute months if not years worth of crunch work

The limitations also served to prevent the auto designer from demanding too much processing power.

All of the computers, chips and other hardware needed to perform countless calculations were not cheap!

Even if the Red Association ranked at the top or close to it when it came to amassing an enormous hoard of processing power, its availability was ultimately finite.

A lot of mech designers as well as other professionals depended on processing power to do their work

From mineral analysis to modeling the performance of a fleet of human warships fighting against a phase whale, every department of the Red Association required a lot of processing power just to undertake their essential responsibilities!

"The auto designer can deliver excellent results when used to its full potential, but the processing power needed to perform all of those calculations are massive." Jovy told Ves in order to reassure the latter's concerns. "It is impossible to make the auto designer available to any private individual or company because there simply isn't enough processing power to satisfy all of their needs. What we can do through a combination of mental digitization and human ingenuity, the AIs programmed by the Polymath can only complete their work through brute force calculations. The latter is much more inefficient than the former."

Ves nodded in understanding. Ultimately, this economic reality was one of the driving reasons that preserved the viability of human mech designers. It was simply cheaper and more efficient to allocate a lot of work to the large amount of mech designers active in the industry today.

It also prevented rational mech designers who augmented their work with the use of the auto designer from becoming too dominant. Their signature ability to imitate the design philosophies of other peers was quite scary, but their work tended to be fairly worse than the real deal.

"Mech design is not cheap." Ves remarked as he put the finishing touches on the nearly completed juggernaut design. "1 never really saw it this way, but the higher you go, the more financial resources are needed to get ahead. Third-class mech designers can go by without any form of augmentation or powerful computers for a time, but once they reach the Journeyman stage, it becomes exponentially harder for them to conduct their research and design more complicated mechs. I bet that Seniors can't become Masters unless they invest a lot more in augmentation as well as many other expensive toys. There is no way for them to turn an impossibility into a reality by relying on a low-budget design lab and mech workshop."

Ves thought about the former Skull Architect. That guy had remained stuck as a Senior for a long time while he languished outside of civilized space.

It was only once he returned to proper civilization and gained access to a lot more resources that he started to make real progress again.

Organizations mattered. Individuals were too small and insignificant in the face of major states and organizations that had access to a lot more resources.

Only by integrating into them and earning a greater share of those collective resources would mech designers be able to break past their limits in a more efficient manner.

This was probably the reason why second-raters rarely if ever managed to advance to the rank of Star Designer.

The few ones that managed to do so had worked hard to promote themselves to first-raters, thereby abandoning much of their original identities for the sake of becoming part of the most dominant groups of humans.

Ves followed a similar trajectory now that he thought about it from this angle. Here he was, trying to develop a bunch of Carmine mechs in record time just so that he could work towards a higher galactic citizenship tier.

The myriad of benefits bestowed by people who reached tier 3 and higher had completely aroused his greed and propelled him to work earnestly to please his new masters!

Ves belatedly realized that he had fallen into a trap.

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