The Mech Touch

Ves immediately acted once he and his fellow Journeymen came to an agreement on how to allocate the new responsibilities.

He activated his comm and logged onto the MTA's internal portal. He accessed their restricted library and picked out the relevant items on the list.

With the cooperation of all of the mech designers, Ves configured each knowledge package to contain the most relevant and useful data and learning resources.

Depending on what Ves wanted to redeem from the MTA, he could spend as little as 7 or 8 million MTA merits.

That would only grant the Larkinsons the core knowledge of a specific aspect of phasewater technology. Journeymen such as Sara and Dulo wouldn't be able to figure it out because they needed to understand a lot of prerequisite subjects first!

This was why Ves threw in enough additional textbooks, articles, tutorials, recorded lectures, experimental logs and so on to reach a target sum of roughly 20 million MTA merits for each knowledge package.

After confirming the composition of packages multiple times, Ves pressed a single projected button, thereby confirming the exchange of MTA merits!

"It's done." Ves declared in a heavy tone. "That is 58,346,713 MTA merits down the drain. I hope you guys don't waste this chance. The sooner you are able to incorporate phasewater technology into your designs, the sooner we can strengthen our expert mechs and elite mechs."

This was an important priority to him. He and his clan depended on the fighting forces of the Larkinson Clan so many times that they would never feel safe unless the Larkinson Army was equipped with the powerful mechs!

Though Ves also harbored ambitions to fulfill commissions centered around designing highly desirable phasewater-empowered mechs, this was secondary to increasing his own security!

He already looked forward to upgrading the latest iterations of mechs such as the Everchanger with phasewater technology.

The masterwork expert mech was already powerful in many ways, but it could not outperform other comparable machines in any area.

The story would be a lot different if the Everchanger was equipped with a combat drive and a sword that could pierce through the chest armor of any opposing expert mech!

It would become such a terror on the battlefield that only other phasewater-empowered expert mechs were able to contend with the new and improved Everchanger!

This example also illustrated one of Ves' greatest concerns.

The Larkinsons weren't the only people with the opportunity to learn phasewater technology.

There were a lot of first-raters and a fair number of second-raters who were also trying to leverage phasewater in their own work!

Sooner or later, a number of these hard-working researchers would begin to release their own improved products. More and more forces would get their hands on phasewater mechs, thereby making life a lot more difficult for rivals that weren't able to acquire these precious machines!

This was why Ves did not regret the decision to spend so much MTA merits so soon. He believed in his fellow mech designers. Each of them were among the more talented and competent cohort of Journeymen in their generation.

Even Dulo Voiken wasn't that bad of a mech designer. The only reason why he had to lower his head in the Larkinson Clan was because he was overshadowed by Ketis. Without her dazzling presence, he would have been able to earn more recognition for his work!

"Now that we're done with this, can we move on to discussing other necessary investments?" Gloriana impatiently asked.

Just because she declined to study phasewater technology didn't mean she had become frugal all of a sudden!

She already set her eyes on other ways to spend the clan's hard-won MTA merits!

"We might as well." Ves slowly nodded. "We still have to reserve a lot of MTA merits to strengthen our core starships. Our fleet is the home and the foundation of our clan. We cannot neglect it. I think I will allow up to 60 million MTA merits to be spent on design-related upgrades."

Gloriana grinned. "That's great! I already formulated a list. Take a look and tell me your thoughts."

She shared a document to every mech designer.

It turned out that Gloriana already put a lot of thought on this. Although Ves initially became a bit overwhelmed by the sheer amount of details in her wish list, he quickly recognized that she did not make any thoughtless purchase decisions.

When it came to her work, Gloriana was utterly serious!

Her greatest obsession was designing good mechs. She would never squander this precious opportunity to upgrade the equipment and facilities that she relied upon to develop her various works!

Her wish list was separated into several different categories. Ves focused on the first and arguably most significant purchase the Larkinson Clan could make.

"You want to upgrade the Spirit of Bentheim's data processing capabilities?" Ves asked.

"Yes. Out of all of the improvements we can obtain, none can make a greater difference than speeding up the calculations we can perform. The ASTERA AI core that you obtained years ago was good at the time, but aside from its deep learning capabilities, its raw processing power has fallen far behind. This is especially the case now that we are joined by more lead designers and work on more design projects per round."

Ves grimaced a bit. Gloriana raised an excellent point. Every serious design project relied on a lot of math and simulations to optimize many different design solutions.

While it was theoretically possible to perform the most essential calculations with the tiny processors that came with every comm, the difference in speed and processing power was so enormous that a mech designer who relied on such a pathetic device would take forever to complete a design that was up to market standard!

The competition at the middle and upper levels of the mech market was extremely fierce. Any products that weren't optimized to a sufficient degree would essentially lose at the starting line!

Even if Ves didn't plan to commercialize a new mech design, he still wanted to provide the best to his soldiers.

This became a lot more difficult during the last design round. The amount of processing power available in the fleet remained the same, but the number of active mech design projects had practically doubled.

All of this meant that Ves, Gloriana and many other lead designers had to wait twice as long to obtain processed data and results!

If Ves could spend MTA merits that could bring the wait time back to its original level, then he could get back to his old schedule.

However, this would only last a short time. Once the Design Department completed another round of recruitment, the addition of multiple lead designers would strain the fleet's processing capabilities once again!

Gloriana obviously wasn't in the mood to endure all of these hardships. She wanted to make a big investment right away so that the Spirit of Bentheim could satisfy her data processing needs for a long time!

"30,000,000 MTA merits." Ves uttered the astonishing sum. "You want to spend half of the budget that I have set on upgrading the primary data vault. Your appetite is quite big!"

"Why are you using that tone on me? You should know very well that increasing our data processing speeds by several orders of magnitude will allow us to complete design projects faster! Not only that, we can perform additional calculations without delaying their completion!"

"I understand that, but we can spend a lot of MTA merits on other improvements. Allocating half of our budget on this item alone means that we will have to forgo many other useful gadgets."

"We don't need them." Gloriana contemptuously said. "We should prioritize the foundation of our work. The quality and soundness of our designs must be as high as possible. We also need the improved processors to handle the more complex analysis and simulation of phasewater technology."

"We can speed up our mastery of phasewater technology if we have access to faster processors." Juliet added her voice. "We can iterate our design solutions and facilitate our research to a greater degree with greater processing power at our disposal."

There were strong arguments in favor of investing so much on data processing alone.

The main reason why Ves was reluctant was because he grew increasingly less comfortable about spending huge sums of MTA merits at once.

30 million MTA merits was almost a third of the price of a second-class fleet beyonder ticket!

Though he had just decided to spend almost 60 million MTA merits on different forms of phasewater technology, he fully believed in the usefulness of these acquisitions.

Additional processing power was also useful, but Ves wasn't sure about spending so much at once.

Just like every other expensive product, the law of diminishing returns made it increasingly more expensive to obtain a small amount of improvement.

Reducing the spending sum to 20 million MTA merits would still provide a powerful boost in processing power. The difference was not that big. Ves was certain that he and his fellow mech designers would not be in a hurry to upgrade their data processing capabilities again within a couple of decades!

"If you look closer at the specific equipment I have selected, you will see that my list encompasses more than processors." Gloriana said. "I've also added modules that can improve the realism of our simulations and enhance the adaptivity of our software. We don't need to solve as many tedious problems anymore as the upgrades to our data network will allow us to take care of them in advance!"

When Ves looked up the modules that Gloriana was referring to, he figured out the setup she had in mind.

"I'm surprised you don't want to replace our original ASTERA artificial intelligence core." He remarked.

"The CFA has good reasons to farm the sandmen for their admiral cores. I have compared its performance to the other adaptive AI cores on the market and learned that the alternatives weren't necessarily superior. We have already worked with the ASTERA core for a number of years. It has learned so much from our work methods that it is already increasing our productivity by as much as twenty percent. If we switch to another AI core, we not only have to spend additional MTA merits, but also reset the deep learning process."

The ASTERA AI core was based on the body of a dead sandman admiral. Its systems were completely different from conventional AI cores that were based on conventional human technology. The two weren't compatible for this reason.

Though Ves did not mind switching over to a conventional AI core, he felt it would be a shame to ditch their current one. The ASTERA AI core was not only one of the most responsible and adaptable data processing tools at his disposal, there was still a lot of room for scaling.

Even if the AI core only possessed limited processing power, he just needed to hook it up to additional processor banks in order to speed up its calculations!

After a bit more discussion, Ves eventually agreed with this investment. Not just Gloriana, but also other mech designers such as Juliet and Sara supported her plan.

Ves looked at the other items on the list. He did not comment on all of the high-quality lab machines that Gloriana wanted to acquire. While they were rather luxurious for Journeymen, research was essential to them. Anything that could help them obtain more detailed and more hidden research data were vital additions to the design labs!

It was only when he shifted his attention to the expenditures related to mech fabrication that he was taken aback for a moment.

"You only plan to upgrade a single personal workshop?"

"Correct." Gloriana said. "Our workshops remain unused for the majority of time. We can make do with only a single upgraded facility. Rather than splitting the remaining budget in order to obtain duplicate amounts of mediocre workshop equipment, it is better to obtain a single copy of every essential workshop machine."

He couldn't argue with her logic. Even he would have made the same choice if he was in her position.

His wife wasn't done. "By the way, my personal workshop needs to be upgraded first. After all, I am the one who is responsible for developing our expert mechs and custom mechs. I need access to the best equipment at our disposal in order to fabricate the highest quality of machines!"

Ves dismissively waved his hand. "That's fine as long as every other lead designer can borrow your workshop when they need to fabricate their own mechs."