The Mech Touch

If Ves wanted to design a truly effective growth-oriented training mech, then he had to bestow it with an additional advantage.

The benefits he had in mind were the same as the ones he envisioned for his spirit fruits.

For example, piloting his training mech could slowly activate and draw out a mech cadet's spiritual potential. Piloting his training mech could also increase a mech cadet's talent in a specific fighting skill.

These were benefits that were unique and incomparable to any other product on the market! No other mech designer should be able to impart their mech designs with these fantastic features or else the mech market would have already been dominated by these innovations!

The difficulty of implementing them was much higher as a consequence. Ves had no idea where to begin and he might need to spend a lot more time in order to develop the essential mechanisms.

All of that could still wait as Ves wasn't in a hurry to begin the actual design process. It was already enough for him to come up with the mech concepts and determine whether they were worth pursuing.

Ves and Gloriana eventually picked up their daughter after she had her fun playing in the park. They returned to their grand stateroom together with Lucky and Clixie and enjoyed a private meal before they continued their discussion on the next design round.

"Meow~"

Lucky squinted his eyes in pleasure as Ves scratched the cat's head.

"Miaow miaow."

Clixie cuddling with Aurelia as usual. The cat and little girl looked exceptionally cute as they laid together on a couch.

"Kixie!"

"Miaow!"

"In addition to designing a training mech, I am thinking about designing a second-class version of one of my old products." Ves told his wife.

"Hm?" Gloriana frowned a bit as she paused in brushing the leather of her expensive handbag. "Which ones do you have in mind?"

"I am not certain yet. I have several viable choices, though the Desolate Soldier is the most obvious choice."

"I don't necessarily think that is the most optimal choice, Ves."

"Why not?"

"First, let me ask you this. Where will you sell the new mech? The Yeina Star Cluster or the Red Ocean? You can't sell this product to both markets without putting in additional effort because the production circumstances are much different."

The materials available for producing mechs were always different from region to region. This was especially the case when the regions were separated by hundreds of thousands of light-years!

On top of that, the production standards and the production equipment could vary in different regions.

This was why each mech design had to be customized to the region they were produced and sold at. If not, producing the same mech in a different location might multiply the production cost by two or three times!

While it was possible for mech designers like Ves to quickly design a localized variant of an existing mech design, it wasn't enough to make a hasty attempt this time.

They had to design a mech for a specific region from the ground up if they wanted to enter the second-class mech markets in a proper fashion. That meant they needed to decide where to market their upcoming mech designs right from the beginning!

Ves thought about it for a moment and decided that the added design burden was worth the effort.

"We can't ignore either mech market, Gloriana. I have been receiving regular reports that our business operations in the Yeina Star Cluster have steadily stagnated since we left the place. While our third-class mechs are still useful to the customer base, the lack of excitement and momentum will severely damage the continuation of the LMC if this goes on. We need to revive our third-class mechs as well as tap the second-class mech market in our former home region."

He revealed several new ambitions to his wife. Gloriana did not miss the crucial points of his answer.

"Designing third-class mechs costs time. Designing second-class mechs costs time as well. If we split up our design time even further, it will take years to get anything done. Are you sure it is worthwhile to stay involved in the third-class mech market? The LMC still sells millions of Desolate Soldiers and Ferocious Piranhas a month, but how much profit do we earn for all of that effort?"

"Around 5000 MTA credits a month last I heard." Ves recalled. "I know it doesn't sound like a lot due to the extremely low earnings per sale, but the competition in the third-class mech market is much less threatening towards us, so it is an extremely reliable source of revenue. In addition to that, our current monthly sales volume is hardly the limit that we can reach. Our success in the old galaxy is almost entirely propped up by two third-class mech models. One of them is a spaceborn rifleman mech while the other is a spaceborn light skirmisher. That only covers two of a dozen essential archetypes! If we complete our catalog of third-class mech designs with additional products such as a space knight, a swordsman mech and an artillery mech, we can easily multiply our current earnings figures!"

The Living Mech Corporation hardly participated in the third-class mech market at all at the moment! The mech company was missing far too many opportunities over the years because its lead designers were too preoccupied with designing clan-exclusive mechs all this time!

Ves vowed to rectify that by designing as many commercial mechs as possible in the design round.

Gloriana still didn't agree with his decision. "Even if designing additional third-class mechs is profitable, think about the opportunity costs. We will have to commit a lot of time and effort on designing these third-class mechs. There is hardly any benefit to working them anymore considering that we have largely moved on to designing second-class mechs. Whatever lessons that we learn from designing lesser mechs will not provide that much help in the projects that actually matter to our clan. Aside from that, second-class mechs are much more profitable in general. The price levels are too far apart and the profit of selling a single second-class mech easily exceeds that of many third-class mechs!"

"You're not thinking about the complete picture, Gloriana. First, you are right that our third-class projects will draw time away from our second-class projects, but we can mitigate this as much as possible by handing over much of the work to our design teams. We employ hundreds of assistants. Why not make use of them? While it is a bit questionable for them to take up responsibility for our second-class mech designs, they are more than qualified to design decent third-class mechs. We just have to supervise their work and design a couple of key elements to make sure the work properly reflects our design philosophies."

Gloriana thought about the competences of their large number of assistants and reluctantly agreed that they were up to the task.

Of course, much of that was because she didn't care about third-class mech designs anymore.

She stopped caring about them when Ves finally moved on to designing mechs at her level.

"Okay, I'll give you that. A few of our assistants are talented and promising enough to do a good job with this. Handing over a large amount of responsibilities to them will also help their development. None of them have advanced to Journeymen all of these years, and that is rather shameful. Given the probabilities and our recruitment standards, one or two of them should have advanced to Journeyman by now. Perhaps giving them more room to design a meaningful mech that can potentially affect the lives of many people will give them the impetus they need to become a high-ranking mech designer."

He agreed with her. Although the Larkinson Clan could always hire external Journeymen whenever possible, it was not a good idea to rely so heavily on outside talents all of the time.

The Apprentices who already pledged their loyalty to the Larkinson Clan were much more loyal and dependable.

In addition to that, Ves didn't think it would be good for their Design Department if not a single assistant mech designer was able to leap into the ranks of lead designers. The morale of the Apprentice Mech Designers would take a blow as they all lost confidence in the Larkinson Clan's ability and commitment to support their development.

As a growth-oriented mech designer, Ves found this to be intolerable!

After a bit of discussion, Ves and Gloriana tentatively agreed that it would be worthwhile to design third-class mechs even if the potential earnings per mech model was low.

As long as it didn't require much of their personal effort to complete these easy projects, the benefits outweighed the costs.

"Do you want to design third-class mechs for the Red Ocean as well?"

Ves frowned. "I'm… not so sure about that. We can't sell them in Krakatoa since this is a middle zone. We will have to market them in the lower zones, none of which we are familiar with. We also can't do it ourselves since we don't have any foundation over there. We will have to partner up with third-party manufacturers and hope for the best."

"Why bother, then? I can understand why you want to continue the LMC's success in the Yeina Star Cluster, but it is much harder to get started in the Red Ocean due to the difficult market circumstances here. The third-class mech market in this dwarf galaxy is a lot more troublesome to enter."

"Maybe you're right, but we should still try at least once. If it works, then great. If it doesn't work, then we can skip this course of action next time. It doesn't really matter since we can still offload much of the workload to our assistants."

"Not if we burden them with too many mech design projects. Our assistants will need to spend at least 50 percent more time to design two different localized versions of a single mech."

"Then we will just start off with fewer third-class products than before. We don't need to offer up a complete collection of mech models right at the start."

The two talked about what sort of third-class mech designs they wished to introduce to both mech markets.

"We should design more modern editions of the Desolate Soldier, the Ferocious Piranha, the Doom Guard and the Aurora Titan. I intend to reimagine them all so that they can offer comprehensively better value than before."

His wife understood the desire to refresh the first three mech models. Each of them enjoyed a lot of commercial success and updating their designs would definitely invigorate the LMC's flagging sales!

However, Gloriana did not quite agree with all of his choices.

"Are you certain about the Aurora Titan? It has never achieved much success. Its total sales are negligible compared to our bestsellers."

"That's because I made too many abnormal decisions while not offering enough value. I intend to change the concept of the Aurora Titan so that it adopts a more familiar configuration. If we design it as a more conventional heavy knight, it will probably receive a lot more appreciation."

This was still a risky decision because the current Aurora Titan model had never achieved critical success. Ves and the LMC needed to generate demand for the updated edition from scratch!

"I recall you also have the Crystal Lord. Do you want to design a Mark III version of this third-class mech model?"

Ves shook his head. "No. Not yet at least. I don't think I am ready yet. The Crystal Lord makes use of third-class luminar technology, which I have become a lot more familiar with over the years. That said, there are too many limitations to mechs at this performance level and I am not confident I can deliver a significantly stronger design than the current Crystal Lord Mark II."

He still intended to revisit this mech line, but not before he updated his other lines.