The Mech Touch

The Pacifier mech line and the Hymenoptera mech line were the two most popular products sold by the LMC.

Both of them had a lot in common. They were designed to be cheap but offered a high amount of value. They were functional and offered a lot of room for customization and variation. They were also useful while still leaving a lot of room for competing products that performed slightly different roles a lot better.

The training mechs that the Larkinsons had developed were a lot more ambitious in comparison!

When it came to humanoid mechs and tiger mechs, the products that the Larkinson Clan towards the academic sector threatened to displace many competitors!

Many major mech companies and many Masters felt directly threatened by the innovative training mechs that the Larkinson Clan had unleashed onto the market.

The Chiron model was the original Larkinson training mech.

It was already a few years old, and while the LMC's Desig Department had revisited the original design and upgraded it to a massive degree, its significance was still great.

The next generations of Larkinson mech pilots had already stood out compared to the graduates of other mech academies for their superior performance.

Whether it was their piloting skills, their reactions to unexpected situations or their ability to form deeper connections with their mechs, the youngest soldiers of the Larkinson Army already showed a lot of promise!

However, the Chiron at the time was not as impressive and revolutionary as the War Squire mech line.

The War Squire or the Tutor Project when it was still in development was a mech design that was not only sold on the market, but also introduced many innovative features and capabilities that the Larkinsons had gone on to implement in their clan-exclusive mechs!

The War Squire had already achieved a lot of success after only a couple of years after its release. This was quite remarkable as the market for training mechs was just as static and concentrated at the top as the market for law enforcement mechs!

The Curiosity model that came out after the release of the previous mech model looked and sounded like a joke at first.

However, despite the ridicule it attracted, the training mech that just happened to look like an oversized cat had become incredibly popular in both the Larkinson Clan and mech academies that placed a large emphasis on beast mechs!

The War Squire and the Curiosity mech models did not look too special at first. While their technical designs looked adequate enough, their quality, performance, cost efficiency and optimization levels did not meet the strict standards of elite mech academies!

The actual reasons why they stood out from the competition and became increasingly more desirable to mech cadets were twofold.

First, the unique qualities of living mechs provided struggling mech cadets with constant friends and companions that often provided the right guidance at the right moment. This was because the training mechs constantly interfaced with the mech cadets, thereby granting them a deep understanding of the growing soldiers that aspired to pilot combat machines.

Second, the two training mechs included a brilliant new feature that only a crazy mech designer like Ves Larkinson could come up with. This second feature elevated the War Squire and the Curiosity mech models from interesting products to groundbreaking works that could actually win awards!

The journey to develop these amazing mechs was not easy, though. Ves struggled with completing the War Squire that introduced a major breakthrough in mech cadet training solutions.

During the start of the fifth design round, Ves initially drafted the Tutor Project and planned out its ambitious features while spending more time in researching the current state of training mechs at the time.

He discovered that there was a big gap between second-class training mechs and first-class training mechs!

"Damn. No wonder those first-class mech pilots are able to display amazing skills. Their augmentations are indispensable, but their training environment is also impressive!"

First-class mech cadets received the attention of AIs that were so helpful and powerful that they needed the support of extremely powerful supercomputers in order to perform all of the necessary calculations!

Not only that, their training mechs were more powerful and more versatile.

The most expensive products were even capable of repairing themselves on the fly! They accomplish this precious and costly function by relying on nanotechnology or precious exotics with self-repair functions.

The increased damage tolerance of first-class training mechs allowed mech cadets to take part in live practice sessions without holding back too much! The machines were much tougher than their second-class equivalents, allowing mech cadets to get accustomed to attacking with the intent to kill.

What Ves sought to accomplish was not that different from what these overpriced first-class were already capable of. If he could implement a similar function to a second-class mech, then he could provide second-class mech cadets with a portion of the training environment of their batters!

"Where do I start, though?"

Ves did not exactly know where to begin. He needed to develop an extremely elaborate spiritual design in order for his Tutor Project to live up to his expectations.

He decided it was high time for him to tour the Larkinson Clan's mech academies.

After looking up what his clan's educational institutions were doing these days, he discovered without too much surprise that the Davute branch had founded a local mech academy on the surface of Davute VII.

"Interesting."

The ambitiously named First Star Mech Academy was located in the outskirts of Kotor City.

While the distance from the city center was considerable, the land outside of the more desirable districts of the capital city was much more affordable and available.

Though Ves didn't recall ever giving his approval to this plan, one of his chief ministers had apparently approved of the creation of the mech academy and allocated a lot of money and resources to build a large campus from the beginning.

While the academy was built to accommodate over 10,000 mech cadets at a time, it was far too soon for the First Star Mech Academy to hold so many classes at once!

When Ves arrived at the campus of the mech academy via shuttle, he noted how many of the training grounds were empty and unused.

During his shuttle's approach, he only saw a couple of dozen Chiron mechs maneuvering through a giant obstacle course from above.

Ves made his way to the expansive training field and approached a group of veterans and mech instructors that were keeping a close eye on the Chirons moving throug the obstacle course.

"Good day, clansmen."

"Sir! Welcome to our humble mech academy." The head instructor greeted the patriarch. "Please do not mind the lack of activity. We built this academy with future proofing in mind. Once our clan has grown bigger, our campus will become as busy as any other mech academy. We also have plans to accept external enrollment."

Ves looked surprised. "You are actually opening the doors of the First Star Mech Academy to the public?"

"Why not? We may not have a long and storied heritage as trainers, but we have the skills and experience to do a good job. If we combine those strengths with training mechs that are better than anything else on the market, we can raise a large amount of skilled mech pilots that have already spent years piloting our mechs."

The rationale for opening up the First Star Mech Academy was strong. The Larkinson Clan had the space, funding and willingness to turn this landbound institution into another business!

The point of running the academy and opening it up to outsiders was not to earn a lot of tuition fees.

The real purpose for training so many mech cadets was to introduce them to living mechs at an early and impressionable stage!

Once they graduated, not only would they request their employers to stock up on LMC mechs, but also spread positive word of mouth about the Larkinson Clan!

In short, the First Star Mech Academy was a potential way to allow the Larkinson Clan to earn a lot of revenue and influence in the future!

Of course, the academy first needed to convince mech cadets to enroll and attend its courses!

This was easier said than done because neither the Larkinson Clan nor the academy itself earned any renown in the educational sector as of yet! Which mech cadet would be willing to take a gamble on an unknown school that did not possess any track record or source of confidence that could make its programs more attractive?

The only way that the First Star Mech Academy could snatch mech cadets away from other, more reputable educational institutions was to possess a clear superiority in a single aspect!

"We have all heard that you are working on developing a new training mech, patriarch." The head instructor spoke. "We will always be at your disposal if you have any inquiries or demands related to your upcoming training mech."

"That is great to hear. Learning more about the circumstances of our only training mech is exactly why I have come. I haven't been paying too much attention to the Chiron model at this time, so I am curious to hear your feedback on my work. It has already been in service for a couple of years, so I am sure you have collected many stories."

The mech instructors indeed had a lot to say about the main training mech of the Larkinson Clan.

"The Chiron model is good on its onset, but it is most effective in the younger years of a mech cadet's training trajectory. It falls off in the later half of a mech cadet's years in a mech academy because it is too weak, too slow and not able to catch up any further to the performance of currentgen combat mechs."

Ves nodded in understanding. "I can understand why you would say that. The Chiron is indeed targeted towards beginners. It should be excellent at teaching basic fundamentals and it should also provide a lot of dynamic guidance as the mech cadets grow older. However, you are correct that we did not adequately consider the needs for older trainees."

He already planned to upgrade the Chiron model to keep up with the growing demands of his clansmen.

He also intended to revisit and revitalize its spiritual features so that they became the best training machines in the Red Ocean!

However, he first had to complete the development of the Tutor Project.

"The Chiron's configuration is too balanced in my opinion." Another instructor remarked. "It's the training mech version of the Bright Warrior, sir. That is best if we want our future mech pilots to graduate to piloting our Bright Warrior mechs, but they are not adequate enough to prepare them for piloting our more specialized machines. This is why we have procured training mechs that correspond to light mechs, heavy mechs and numerous specialized mech types."

Ves smiled at them. "Don't worry. You won't have to rely too much on commercial training mechs to train our mech cadets in the future. We will develop many different variants of our commercial training mech models. In the past, we were too short on time and manpower to develop those variants, but this is a different time. We have enough lead and assistant mech designers to develop dozens of variations. It might take a bit of time to complete them all, but you will be able to rely much less on the products of other mech companies."

That was good news to the mech instructors. They had all worked with the Chiron model as well as other training mech models and noticed a clear difference in results.

"Is there anything else you wish to say?"

"Yes. The Chiron is a humanoid mech model. There is nothing wrong with that, but many of our mech cadets insist on piloting it so much that they do not have much of an incentive to pilot beast mechs. We should offer them a viable alternative if we wish to staff our own beast mech legion."