The Mech Touch

New theories and ideas flowed into his mind. Ves faced a very challenging problem, and it took the utmost of his creativity and problem-solving skills to derive a viable solution.

His goal sounded simple. He wanted to increase the individual expression of his mechs.

Right now, it took either years of constant use or complete dedication for any mech pilot to mold a specific mech in a unique direction.

Individuality in mechs was rather subtle in the first place. Unless someone could match Jannzi's extreme devotion, the difference it could make in battle was rather marginal.

His ambition didn't really sound that impressive to be honest. Certainly, making a mech more responsive to the mech pilot sounded like a noble goal. However, a competing mech with twenty percent higher firepower could easily beat the inferior mech despite its excellent compatibility with its mech pilot!

The advantage of a mech that maximized performance was that they delivered a predictable level of performance to every mech pilot. In other words, a well-maintained standard mech wouldn't exhibit remarkably better or remarkably worse performance.

This was less so with his own products. Living mechs that possessed the capacity to love or hate their own mech pilots could influence its effective performance by adjusting their fit to their mech pilots.

In other words, by unlocking the capacity for mechs to judge their own mech pilots, Ves introduced a new variable that his customers needed to take into account.

This was not always good. As someone who presided over a thousand mechs himself, he knew that leaders such as him wanted his mechs to be as uniform as possible.

At this scale, mechs that performed unexpectedly worse or better threw off his calculations.

Certainly, if a mech performed better than usual, Ves would welcome this outcome. However, the nature of his design philosophy meant that his mechs could accept as well as reject their mech pilots.

If the latter occurred, then that was quite an unpleasant surprise!

As long as the mech buyer bought the most suitable LMC mech for a mech pilot, then the chances of rejection should be low. However, would every mech buyer be as attentive? What if funding and opportunity constraints prevented a buyer to perform proper matching between mechs and mech pilots?

"There is also the imprinting issue."

What happened when mechs that molded themselves to specific mech pilots received different users?

Would the individuality of a mech prompt it to reject mech pilots they weren't accustomed to accommodating?

That would be quite bad! A mech that had developed an individual character that effectively performed twenty or thirty percent worse was a disaster in an actual battle!

The desirability, practicality and longevity of his products would definitely drop if this became a reality!

However, mechs didn't necessarily have to develop in this fashion. What if he designed the individuality of mechs with successive users in mind from the very start?

As long as he configured the spiritual foundation of his mechs correctly, then they ought to be able to adjust to the next user.

"Perhaps this can even be touted as a benefit rather than a burden!"

The most fitting word that encapsulated this concept was 'legacy'.

Ves wasn't entirely unfamiliar with this concept. Inspired by natural spiritual entities such as Qilanxo, he designed all of his spiritual products with legacy in mind.

In fact, it was even a core feature for his two ancestral spirits! Both the Golden Cat and the Superior Mother were explicitly designed to come into greater power as they grew older. The wisdom and strength they derived from generations of Larkinsons and Hexers constantly allowed them to develop across generations.

Goldie would likely become a completely different spiritual entity a century from now! At that time, she might rival or exceed Qilanxo's current level of strength!

If his mechs developed in a similar fashion, then as they grew older, they would actually be able accrue value over time!

This was different from many other consumer mechs. As technology advanced and tactics evolved, older mechs became increasingly more irrelevant. Their technological constraints caused their performance to lag more and more in relation to more modern mechs.

"What if this is not the case anymore? What if my mechs are able to develop a unique quality over time? What if this quality is so valuable and unable to be replicated in any other way that plenty of people would love to use them on an ongoing basis?"

Such a mech would transcend the definition of commodity! A living, growing mech like this would cease to become interchangeable with comparable mechs.

Even if two living mechs were derived from the same design, fabricated from the same manufacturing complex and worked on by the same crew in the same week, they could become completely different beasts after several years of active use on the battlefield!

His passion for this new category of mechs flared up as his imagination went wild with this idea. His design seed loved the concept of legacy mechs.

"It's not enough to design living mechs. I have to make them desirable to their users in order to ensure they are properly cared for. Older mechs shouldn't be discarded like trash!"

Ves fully embraced this new concept! If possible, he wanted to turn this into one of the main characteristics of most of his mech designs from this point onwards.

Aside from mechs which demanded a high degree of uniformity or temporary mechs such as those designed for single duels, adding the possibility for mechs to grow richer in character would definitely bring him closer to bringing his ambition into fruition!

The whole point about designing living mechs was to make them more valued. Certainly, he hadn't forgotten that they were meant to be used in battle. They would always remain at least somewhat expendable.

That did not mean that his mechs should be treated as trash. Just like how he treated his own clansmen, those who were alive needed to be nurtured and properly taken care of. How else would he be able to send them off to fight a difficult opponent when it truly mattered?

Though there was an inherent contradiction between these two desires, but Ves was used to holding conflicting thoughts. Ves did not seek an absolute with regards to his products. It was fine if their owners valued them as much as their children, but he wouldn't shed a tear if their owners subsequently lost a bunch of LMC mechs in a difficult battle.

Every mech was built for combat. The nature of combat always entailed the prospect of suffering undesirable losses. Any mech designer who couldn't bear the thought of their products suffering ignoble ends weren't suitable for the profession!

His hands twitched. He ached to put his ideas in reality.

Now that Task Force Predator had left Ulimo Citadel and was slowly making its way out of the periphery of the Nyxian Gap, there should be plenty of time for him to develop a means to turn this fantastic concept into reality.

He returned to one of his earlier ideas. To develop the character of a mech, it needed to grow. To do so, the mech needed to be fed with a sufficient amount of spiritual nutrients.

A newly-produced LMC mech and an ordinary mech pilot did not possess much spiritual strength. Neither of the two were able to supply the spirituality needed to develop the character of the mech.

At best, an ordinary mech pilot was just able to keep his mech alive on a starvation diet!

Therefore, the only chance to feed the mech with the spiritual energy required to grow at a rate comparable to the evolution of the Shield of Samar was to tap another source.

This was where his design spirits came in. Most of them possessed too much spiritual energy and weren't able to make effective use of their excess. Instead of throwing their junk away, why not channel it to the hungry little mechs they watched over? One spirit's trash was another mech's treasure!

Ves called up the Chiron design on his desk terminal and studied it for a time.

As a minor design project, his assistants contributed the most to the training mech design. Due to its technical complexity, Gloriana still made sure to solve every difficult problem or give the assistants enough direction for them to come up with solutions themselves.

The entire mech design had already reached a fairly advanced stage. It only needed a month of refinement before it reached the prototype testing phase.

"The entire mech is infused with the essence of adaptability and development." He remarked as he studied the mech from a spiritual angle.

Though much of it was due to his deliberate manipulation, the efforts of Gloriana and the design teams assigned to develop the Chiron all added up as well. Each of them constantly thought about increasing the Chiron's fit to the young Larkinson mech cadets who were destined to pilot it in the future.

As he studied the Chiron design further, he suddenly realized a big issue.

Its current designated design spirit was the Golden Cat.

Since the Chiron was exclusive to the Larkinsons, this was a fitting choice. Ves hoped that every young mech cadet who piloted the Chiron would grow up into a skilled mech pilot that completely dedicated his or her life to the Larkinson Clan!

It helped that the Larkinsons explicitly specialized in piloting mechs. Goldie may not be able to match the likes of the Solemn Guardian in terms of quantity of bonds, but every mech pilot connected to her was much more skilled than average.

Over time, the mech pilots connected to Goldie should also develop a distinctive piloting style unique to the Larkinson Clan.

All of this meant that the Chiron under Goldie taught mech cadets how to pilot a mech the Larkinson way instead of the standard way.

The problem that Ves faced at the moment was that Goldie hadn't reached saturation yet. She was only connected to a modest amount of people compared to his other design spirits. She also had plenty of room to grow. Taking away her spiritual energy at this stage would only slow down her growth.

"Hmm, is that true, though?"

Ves didn't necessarily assume that compelling Goldie to expend her energy would affect her growth. It might be that such an exertion might 'exercise' her instead.

Right now, he lacked too much information. The only way to see what would happen was to implement it in reality, and to do that he needed to conduct some tests with some expendable mech pilots.

Knowing that time was of the essence, Ves began to draw up a quick experiment in his mind to test his ideas.

"I should use an existing mech instead of an incomplete one." He muttered.

The Chiron may have developed to an advanced stage, but it was far from ready to be fielded, especially outside of lab conditions.

He needed to perform his experiments on a different mech. It should be a mature design and one that wasn't too strong.

"The Desolate Soldier fits."

His fleet had plenty of them lying around. Even if they were fairly weak, their glows were still useful in motivating the mech forces that didn't possess the Bright Warrior. The Living Sentinels were especially fans of the classic.

Ves ordered the Living Sentinels to transfer a spare Desolate Soldier mech to the Scarlet Rose's hangar bay.

He wasn't ready to implement his experiments on the entire mech design. That would have been reckless to the extreme.

"I only need to try it out on a single mech first, just to see if my direction is viable."

His current goal was to try and find a way to transform a cheap and fairly disposable Desolate Soldier mech into something greater!

As long as he could do it with a cheap mech, he could do it with a more expensive mech.

Ves raised his fist. "In the future, all of my mechs will turn into legacy mechs!"