The Mech Touch

Chapter 6585 Design By Template

While Ves happily inspected the latest batch of gems produced by Lucky, all the way out in the Milky Way, a certain Cyborg Cat just concluded her latest design session. Veronica let out a tired breath as she sat back on the floating pillow that served as her seat. The biomechanical feline incarnation had been working almost continuously on a single mech design project ever since the Evolution Witch unveiled the Oblivion Gates.

The Oblivion Empress personally commanded her daughter to design the first

Carmine mech for a massive human society that was frankly not ready to adopt it on a larger scale.

It was too bad that the Oblivion Gate Consortium had no intentions of prepping the masses for the immense disruption that would ensue after the mass proliferation of mechs that could be piloted by norms.

There were times where Veronica felt bad about becoming complicit to the outbreak of war and conflict on a scale that original humanity had never witnessed since the start of the Age of Mechs.

Her creation may very well serve as the first inciting factor that could ultimately lead to the downfall of the Big Two!

The Age of Mechs may finally come to an end in the Milky Way Galaxy!

Could Veronica bear the responsibility for contributing to these man-made calamities?

She didn't know.

Her mother gave her no choice but to work, so she did her best to set aside her misgivings and do her job as a mech designer.

One of the main factors that made the days and weeks so much more bearable was the company of an old friend from the Survivalist Faction.

Master Moira Willix served as a true heavyweight in the Rule Breaker Project.

While Veronica contributed her unique Carmine System, Master Willix practically excelled in taking care of everything else.

She made it possible for Veronica to tackle the high-level challenge of designing a series of modular mech platforms for every tech level that could also be localized to every region of human-occupied space.

That last part was especially tricky to do for a relatively young and inexperienced mech designer like Veronica.

Unlike red humanity which only occupied a single corner of a dwarf galaxy, original humanity had expanded its reach across half of a main galaxy.

This meant that it was not that simple to reproduce a single mech design in every region of human space!

The quantity and type of resources available in the Komodo Star Sector was much different than any of the star sectors in the galactic center!

In order to make a mech design work across almost every region of the galaxy, high-ranking mech designers developed a special approach to make it possible.

"It is called design by template." Master Willix explained to Veronica at the start of the Rule Breaker Project. "Have you heard of it before?"

"No." The silvery cat responded. "I never needed to resort to such means in the Red Ocean."

"I am not surprised. It is an advanced method that is beyond your scope normally. Design by template is an intermediate design process that introduces additional complexity, delays and cost. There is more room for error, and it is a nightmare to maintain consistency of a product line throughout the entire mech market. The only groups that can earn a profit while designing by template are the major trans-galactic corporations. They have the funding, reach, manpower, scale and infrastructure to develop detailed mech templates and use them to design localized mech designs that perform very similar to each other despite their diverging material compositions." Master Moira Willix gave Veronica an example of a mech template by presenting the younger mech designer with one of her older works.

A projection appeared that showed a mech design... or at least it looked like one on the surface.

Veronica's artificial eyes glowed brighter as she became fascinated by how the template differed from a mech design.

The two possessed a lot of similarities. They consisted of a very detailed set of instructions on how to reproduce a mech.

The divergence came in the level of detail and specificity.

A mech design might demand that the head of a mech must be made out of Unending alloy.

A mech template would demand that the head of a mech must be made out of a metallic material that should closely match the mass, density, toughness, conductivity, flexibility and more.

The latter was not a mech design, but it could help mech designers make one

themselves.n/o/vel/b//in dot c//om

The simplest way to describe a mech template in this professional context was that it was a do-it-yourself kit of a mech design.

It was a rather interesting way to solve the lack of universality of the old galaxy's

sprawling mech sector.

"I get it." The Cyborg Cat said as she studied the mech template of a first-class multipurpose mech design that was a few generations old. "These mech templates are preparatory works that are meant to instruct regional design teams on how to localize a mech line so that it can be produced and sold within a single star cluster. This will reduce the dependence on long-distance shipping and thereby make the product line more competitive in terms of pricing and local market adaptations."

"That is a good summary of this approach. While it has become the established design approach for every mech design that is intended for distribution across the entire galaxy, the design by template approach comes with many disadvantages. Can you name them, Veronica?"

"Well, you have already mentioned them earlier, so I only need to expand on these factors." Veronica said. "The most obvious downside is that the mech template is not an exact mech design. Unless the original designer is willing to sit down and design hundreds of localized variants in person, the last stage of this expansive process must be completed by regional design teams that understand the market and supply conditions of their star clusters the best. These mech designers are usually not as good as the lead designers of the mech template, and they may occasionally misinterpret or make outright mistakes in trying to preserve the original intent of the mech template. That will not only cause the localized mech designs to be inferior in quality and performance, but also have difficulty reproducing the original design philosophies."

Master Willix nodded. "That is a good analysis. Adding an additional step between mech template and mech design introduces errors and mistranslations. This is an unavoidable consequence, but well-organized mech corporations try to minimize the deviations as much as possible by training the localizers as best as possible. The leaders in charge of them have usually worked directly under the lead designers for at least a decade. Even then, localized mech designs will still not be perfect."

"I take it that this is a big deal."

"It is, Veronica. Mech templates are notoriously sensitive towards deviations. If a localized mech design diverges a little too much from its original template, the end product no longer holds the empowerment of the design philosophies of the lead and contributing mech designers. That is regarded as a failure as the botched mech design is no longer competitive on the market. Other trans-national corporations will ruthlessly try to fill up the gap in the market with their own localized mech designs if they smell an opportunity."

Much of the mech market of the old galaxy was hypercompetitive. What Master Willix described was more than plausible!

"Does this happen a lot?" Veronica wondered as she rubbed her paw against her smooth metallic chin.

"I do not have access to the statistics, but according to my own unreliable estimates, it is likely happening on a fairly frequent basis. The trans-galactic mech corporations simply refuse to publicise these failures, preferring to delay the galaxy-wide release of their new product lines so that they can quietly remedy the problem. In the most egregious cases, the members of the original design team may have to serve as consultants in order to ensure that the localized mech design truly represents their

philosophies."

That indeed sounded like a troublesome issue.

"This is probably why the design work must be done inhouse." Veronica remarked. "It

is not a good idea to farm out these designs to third-party design studios. The mech designers for hire are likely unfamiliar with the design philosophies of the original design team, so they will do a much worse job and fail to complete a fully functional

mech design. Wait."

The Cyborg Cat looked increasingly more disturbed as she began to apply these descriptions to her own situation!

She and Master Willix were supposed to complete the Rule Breaker Project without.

the benefit of all of that manpower and infrastructure!

How the hell were they supposed to imitate those gigantic trans-galactic corporations and release a mech line throughout the entire old galaxy?!

"Calm down. Designing a mech template is challenging, but it is not as intimidating as you think." Master Willix said. "The simplest and crudest approach to forming a mech template is to design a normal mech design first. After that, you can steadily convert it into a mech template by replacing concrete material selections with more ambiguous material requirements. This is an imperfect method as the conversion from a mech design to a mech template will cause small but significant details to get lost in translation. It is best to design a mech template from the onset."

"That is too advanced for me, Master. I have no experience with this stuff. I don't think

I can get it right the first time."

"It is not a mistake to admit your lack of competence. It is good that you recognize your limits and be willing to inform me about it. We will adopt the simplest approach if that is the case. You can go ahead and design a mech with the exotics and alloys that

you used to work with in the Yeina Star Cluster. Once the design is complete, I will uphold most of the responsibility of translating it into a template, though you should be involved as well in order to accrue experience in this process. You will need to learn how to create qualified mech templates by yourself if you want to release other

Carmine mechs across the Milky Way Galaxy."

Veronica definitely harbored that ambition!

She did not want the Rule Breaker Project to be the only major work that catered to the demands of her customers across the old galaxy.

"If we do this, the mech template will most certainly be flawed. If we subsequently release it onto the galactic net and allow third-party mech designers to play with it,

they will soon come out with a huge quantity of even more imperfect mech designs. It will be a wonder if they still manage to retain my design philosophy which is essential to making the Carmine System work."

Master Willix did not appear bothered by these problems.

"We are working under highly suboptimal circumstances. It is a dream to design a high-quality mech template. You should accept our less-than-ideal working conditions and focus on doing your best to put actual working Carmine mechs in the hands of many humans. The machines do not have to match the performance of market leaders. They just need to work well enough to give norms a chance to transform their lives and fulfill their fantasy of becoming mech pilots. Trust me, these customers will not think too badly about the inferior performance and the imperfect localization efforts. There are no other competitors in this galaxy aside from yourself, so you can completely capture this market regardless of quality and performance

issues." The RA Master Mech Designer made a good point. Veronica fell silent for a while. She obsessed too much about the quality of her

products when the norms of original humanity frankly didn't care about that kind of

stuff! Even if her Carmine mechs came in the form of shambling rust buckets, there would still be an astronomical amount of norms willing to bond their lives to these machines! If that was the case, then Veronica might as well not worry about this issue anymore and focus on meeting the most essential demands of her future customer base.