The Mech Touch novel Chapter 406

Ves had to arrange a lot of stuff before his impending departure. Over the next week, he accomplished a lot of things.

He held a board meeting where he introduced Calsie and rammed through a couple of changes in the corporate chapter.

He kept himself up to date with the Marketing Department’s plan to roll out of the Crystal Lord models.

On some moments, Ves squeezed out the time to visit Lucky. His gem cat meowed weakly at him whenever he visited. It seemed that Lucky still needed a couple of months to get back into shape.

"I’ll be going away soon. According to the regulations of the Mech Corps, I can’t bring any possession along with me. You’ll have to stay behind."

"Meow..."

"Just keep an eye on the Mech Nursery, alright? Hang around Calsie and Melkor if you can, and scare away anyone who issues threats to them. They’re my two most influential agents and I can’t have them succumb to any outside coercion while I’m away.

"Meow."

"I’ll be sure to arrange for a steady supply of choice minerals and exotics. You’ll never starve as long as the LMC exists."

"Meow..."

He hugged and played with Lucky for a couple of times, but he regretfully kept these tender moments brief.

"There’s one more thing I need you to take care of." Ves said and slowly detached his trusty comm from his wrist. He subsequently bound it to Lucky’s neck. The comm’s advanced construction quickly shifted into a locked configuration. "Keep my comm on you at all times, and never let it anyone grab a hold of it. Got it?"

"Meow?"

"Yes, it contains the System."

"Meow!"

"I know, but I don’t have any other choice! The Mech Corps take security very seriously. I heard that any incoming mech designer will be stripped of his possessions and be issued new ones instead. I can’t have this comm falling out of my sight and into someone else’s hands."

This not only applied to his comm, but also his shield generator and all of his anti-grav clothes, which he planned to stash in the vault.

Spending a long time without the System daunted him a little. Ves admitted to himself that he became dependent on having the possibility to spend DP at any time to get out of a fix. Being forced to forgo his safety rope unsettled him more than he thought.

"I couldn’t have made it this far without the System."

On the flipside, this would be a rare moment in time where he could prove that he could make do without the System’s many conveniences. True mech designers built up their careers by themselves. Though many of the successful ones benefited from a lot of outside help, Ves figured that no one enjoyed a leg-up as much as him over the same period of time.

From a talentless hack to a rising young star, Ves owed the System more than he could ever repay. The thought constantly lingered in the back of his mind. One day, a reckoning might come where he may have to pay an awful price.

For now, it was not as if Ves lost a lot of capabilities. It would be impossible for him to earn a lot of DP while he worked for the Mech Corps.

"Added to that, the Crystal Lord is a Superpublished design. In exchange for elevating its quality, I lost the opportunity to earn any DP from its sales."

That would affect him a lot, he knew. The handsome trickle of DP he earned from the Blackbeak alone was very substantial. Once the LMC allocated some of its production capacity to the Crystal Lord, his DP income would be cut in half at the very least.

Therefore, losing access to the System for a time wouldn’t affect him too much. This made it a little easier for Ves to stomach going without this aid.

For now, he made do with a generic comm that contained nothing important.

As he went through his to-do list, he also spoke with Captain Silvestra. She thought highly of the Trieste TRLC-343 light carriers. However, his suggestion to put her in charge of the starship contingent of the Avatars of Myth met a surprising objection from the female captain.

"Thank you for thinking so highly of me, sir, but I’m not qualified to hold a multi-ship command." She replied over the comm. "In both the mercantile and mercenary navies, it’s something of a taboo to thrust a junior captain like me in a position of leadership over multiple fully-fledged ships. It takes decades of training and experience to become a senior captain or fleet commander. They are the only ones competent enough to keep track of multiple vessels and effectively command them in battle."

This posed a problem for Ves. "I don’t know any senior captains and I don’t know a thing about running a fleet. Can you assist Melkor in finding a good and trustworthy senior captain that can crew and run the two Trieste-class light carriers that I’ll be ordering soon?"

"That won’t be a problem." The captain of the Barracuda smiled. "I know a handful of former mentors who may be interested in commanding over a fleet of state-of-the-art light carriers."

Therefore, Ves and the Marketing Department did not count on collectors alone to hype the Crystal Lord. They needed to reach their intended market segment which would be responsible for the bulk of their sales.

"We’ve got to find a way to make our value proposition relevant to the private sector."

This was not a matter of delivering a certain amount of performance or including an innovative new gimmick. At the heart of it, mech designers like Ves produced machines of war that aimed to meet the needs of those who relied on them to do their jobs.

What kind of mech pilots did his mech appeal to the most?

The elites. The commanders. The talents. The Crystal Lord wasn’t called a Lord for nothing. Both its price and performance elevated the model past most of its peers. Potential customers ranged from outfits that nurtured promising talents, or mech commanders that wanted to make a bigger impact on the battlefield.

The LMC’s Marketing Department worked with this premise and started priming the local media environment with teaser ads of the new model. With the help of Marcella who knew the market inside and out, they found the best ways to spark some interest in the upcoming press conference.

All of this cost a lot of money, of course. The LMC already lost some cash by issuing dividends, and now it spent even more to fund an advertising campaign for a product that hadn’t even been sold yet.

The increased spending delayed the acquisition of more production lines, but Ves believed his company would be better off in the long run by investing so early in marketing the Crystal Lord.

In the meantime, Ves slaved away his time by churning out mechs after mechs from the Dortmund production line. A constant rotation of mech technicians stood at a distance and observed his every move. They needed to learn how to fabricate a copy of the Crystal Lord on their own after Ves was gone.

Though the Crystal Lord used up less materials than the Blackbeak, its fabrication process was a lot more complex. From the HRF armor to highly intricate mechanisms, this mech required a lot of finesse.

At best, he could complete one Crystal Lord in a little more than two days. Perhaps over time, he and his mech technicians would become more familiar with the process, but the time savings wouldn’t be too much.

"This is a mech that’s difficult to mass produce."

Ves did not consciously design the Crystal Lord to be so troublesome to fabricate. The cramped volume and lack of space reminded him of his troubles with the Caesar Augustus and the Mark II. His vast experience with those two outdated designs taught him how to handle situations like this, but that did not mean his employees could go over these bumps as well.

"Being difficult to produce isn’t necessarily a bad thing. At least it will cut down on the imitations."