The Mech Touch novel Chapter 5505

Chapter 5505 Sparrow Storm

The Sparrow Storm deserved to be treated as the market leader in the second-class mech market.

The functionality provided by its endless variety of Sparrows was amazing.

Even Alexa could not withhold her admiration for the SKL's enduring business success with this product line.

"The Sparrow Storms are relatively expensive to buy upfront. Here in Bortele, a customer has to pay 2.2 MTA credits to obtain a starter Sparrow Storm that comes with a set of 16 Sparrows. That is not as much as the 3 MTA credits that we intend to charge for a Standard Edition of the Fey Project, but the production costs are not on the same level. The mech frame of the Sparrow Storm is made out of inferior materials, but their excellent design and optimization allows the machine to utilize their properties to the extreme."

Ves nodded in understanding. "It is not the mech frame, but the Sparrows that are the real earners for the company, isn't that right?"

"Yes. SKL sells a large variety of Sparrows. They possess many different functions and fall into several different price categories. Since SKL has sold so many Sparrow Storms, each of which regularly run through their stock of Sparrows, the company is able to achieve high economies of scale by producing large quantities of replacement Sparrows. The company also keeps their prices low for multiple reasons. Cheaper Sparrows incentivize existing customers to continue to use their existing sickle mechs. The company also cannot really charge more because it has to compete against third-party developers that sell their own Sparrow models."

SKL cleverly licensed out its Sparrow models under generous conditions. This attracted a lot of development companies that came up with their own unique spin on the small spurs.

Although SKL could only earn a small cut from the sales of these third-party Sparrows, their availability strengthened the appeal of the entire mech platform!

There was no way for the Larkinson Clan to design thousands of different fey. It was also difficult to encourage third-party developers to design their own fey when they were so complex and difficult to fully replicate.

Though the business strategy adopted by SKL was not the most lucrative, it was one that retained existing customers the best!

Most of the Sparrows models were dirt-cheap, and if customers wanted to obtain more powerful ones, then those varieties were available for purchase as well!

Ever since the first editions of the Sparrow Storm line captured a large portion of the second-class drone market, no competitor had ever managed to depose it from its throne.

It was the well-deserved king of drone mechs in the second-class mech market!

"What is the current market share of the Sparrow Storm?" Ves curiously asked as he began to look up footage of this popular drone mech model in action.

"Its market share is around 31 percent according to last month's statistics."

Ves briefly looked up from the projected display. "Hm? Early in the development of the Fey Fianna, I checked this figure myself. I distinctly recall that the Sparrow Storm had a 37 percent market share back then. What changed?"

The young woman smiled. "Two major developments have caused the Sparrow Storm to drop in popularity. The transition to the Hyper Generation has caused the Sparrow Storm Mark XI and all of the tens of thousands of different Sparrow models to become obsolete. Although SLK has moved quickly to design and release the Sparrow Storm Mark XII along with dozens of upgraded Sparrow models that incorporate hyper technology, their performance against alien warships is not stellar. In fact, that was already the case before the Age of Dawn, but that did not matter too much because the Sparrow Storn is primarily designed to fight against other mech forces."

A large amount of battle footage depicted the Sparrow Storm in battles between different mech forces.

This was where they excelled. Multiple Sparrow Storms banding together could easily deploy hundreds of not thousands of Sparrows at a time!

Individually, the Sparrows were relatively weak due to their awfully small sizes. Their attack power was poor and their defenses were pathetic.

What made them so troublesome was that they were relatively fast and difficult to hit!

As long as a drone mech spread out its Sparrows and commanded them to buzz around in random patterns, it became difficult for most ranged mechs to shoot all of them down!

Rifleman mechs and many other ranged mechs practically despaired when they were being harassed by enormous swarms of Sparrows.

The weak laser beams shot by these pitiful-looking spurs could only scratch their armor, but when hundreds of them rained on their mech frames at a time, those laser beams produced horrifying results!

In contrast, the more powerful weapons wielded by these rifleman mechs often had trouble with shooting down individual Sparrows.

Even if the rifleman mechs hit their targets, they still had to chew through hundreds more!

While it was possible to cause these Sparrows to lose control by targeting the drone mechs directly, it would not be easy to take the latter down.

A good mech force would take measures to protect their drone mechs or make it as difficult as possible to attack them directly.

The only effective counter to the Sparrow Storms was to destroy their Sparrows en masse with area weapons.

Flamethrowers, explosive missiles and in certain cases ECM attacks could all take a lot of Sparrows out of the fight.

However, there were still many ways to prevent this from happening, either by placing the Sparrows well out of range or employing active countermeasures.

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