The Mech Touch

Ves could already imagine how a destructive engine of doom might be useful to certain forces.

In situations where there were limitations to attacking ground settlements from space or from the air, a powerful ground force was needed to sweep them up. A tough and destructive doom crawler that excelled in laying waste to cities and strongholds sounded like an excellent addition to a ground force's arsenal!

The best part about this new product was there was definitely demand for this kind of machine.

The reason for that was that a lot of pioneering fleets tended to colonize planets that were previously occupied by alien races.

Even if these aliens preferred to live in different environments than human beings, they all had one thing in common.

Everyone needed resources in order to thrive.

Whether it was phasewater or other exotics, every sentient race in the Red Ocean sought to occupy the most resource-rich planets in order to fuel their own development.

Before humanity invaded the dwarf galaxy, the native alien races such as the nunsers and the puelmers already occupied all of the resource-rich planets.

Once the MTA and CFA entered the scene, their warfleets didn't just defeat all of the alien combat forces. They also passed through one alien-occupied star system after another, bombing a lot of places flat.

However, just because the Big Two cleaned up the interior of their newly-conquered territories didn't necessarily mean they were thorough.

The Big Two had to sweep through a huge amount of territory, which meant the warfleets and their commanders weren't always that attentive.

Sometimes they missed a few strongholds.

Sometimes the enemy aliens succeeded in slipping through the net.

Sometimes the MTA and CFA outright skipped the less important star systems with weaker alien presences.

Of course, what counted as ‘weak' in the eyes of the Big Two was usually a lot stronger to the pioneers!

All of this meant that the pioneering organizations sometimes had to finish the job in order to claim an attractive planet, and that meant going on a destruction spree.

"There are no mechs that are better at inflicting destruction than heavy artillery mechs and heavy doom crawlers."

Both of them possessed a huge amount of massed firepower. While heavy artillery mechs such as the Transcendent Punisher packed the biggest punch, they weren't designed to confront enemies directly.

Other mechs were supposed to do that in their stead. This was why artillery mechs usually became lambs to the slaughter if any melee mech unit managed to get through the escort mechs and hit these slow and cumbersome machines up close!

Doom crawlers didn't suffer from this weakness. Not as much, at least. They not only carried substantially more armor, but were also better at repelling enemy mechs that came close.

they weren't necessarily superior to artillery mechs or vice versa. They were just different mech types that excelled in different situations.

However, doom crawlers were a bit more suitable to deploy in most conditions in the new frontier due to their greater independence and self-reliance. They were much tougher and didn't require as much babying to handle.

This sounded perfect for the Red Ocean, where pioneering fleets were not only far away from friendly support, but also didn't have access to nearby markets or infrastructure.

Deploying artillery mechs in the field required a lot of thought, preparation and effort. They required constant protection and should never be caught in an enemy counterattack.

While the rewards from using them correctly were great, not everyone had the patience to go through all of this trouble!

It was a lot easier to just field as many doom crawlers as possible and have them advance towards an enemy fortification with unstoppable momentum!

Sure, it sounded like a brain dead strategy, but who cared as long as it worked.

"There should definitely be demand for a good doom crawler model in the Red Ocean's mech market."

That didn't mean it had to be his product that people wanted to buy.

His expression drooped when he realized the competition he was facing.

There were a lot of fantastic Masters and Seniors that were already churning mechs that possessed a lot of distinct advantages!

What was worse was that these prestigious mech designers who had already built up their illustrious reputations in the old galaxy monopolized the bulk of the available resources produced in the Red Ocean.

In this early period of colonization, there were plenty of people who wanted to design and build their own mechs, but the supply of raw materials was too low to accommodate all of their needs!

To Ves, this meant that he couldn't produce and sell mechs in large volumes, at least when it came to the Red Ocean.

Any mech he did manage to produce would have to be sold at wildly-inflated prices due to the high cost of scarce raw materials, which would inevitably depress demand.

Still, Ves was not willing to give up on this interesting idea.

Doom crawlers fascinated him for some reason. Out of every mech type that he was familiar with, doom crawlers possessed a romance about them that pleased Ves in an unexplainable but irrational way.

Ever since he accepted a job to modify a doom crawler design so that it was mounted with weapons of mass destruction, Ves gained a special affinity and destiny with doom crawlers.

Sure, the people who received his work went on to raze entire cities and kill billions of innocent civilians, but that wasn't his fault.

What was undeniable was that Ves got swept in the romance of doom crawlers. Whether it was their slow but unstoppable advances or their ability to take a lot of punishment and keep going, all of this increased his attraction to this mech type!

Still, just because he felt like designing a commercial doom crawler didn't mean he could just go ahead and do it. He still had to solve two different problems.

First, he needed to come up with a viable mech concept that could actually persuade customers into buying the work of a Journeyman over the work of a Master.

Second, he had to find a source of raw materials and probably establish a fixed production facility in order to produce all of his new doom crawlers!

It didn't help that doom crawlers were almost always heavy mechs that demanded a large quantity of tough and expensive materials in order to build.

Vees may have big dreams, but if he could not solve these two fundamental problems, there was no point in starting this new design project.

"Maybe I should wait a couple of years before designing this new mech."

It was a lot easier for Ves to design a sellable product for the Yeina Star Cluster back in the old galaxy. He should prioritize that instead, but doom crawlers didn't sell well in stabler regions.

There was another reason why he thought that doom crawlers were much more promising in the Red Ocean.

Pioneers didn't just want a mech that could help them destroy remnant alien settlements.

Sometimes, they also wanted a machine that could demolish a human settlement.

It was dirty business, but it happened. Not everyone calmly agreed to go the other way when a planet they were eying had already been settled by another pioneer.

The Big Two didn't seem interested in preventing these massacres. There was an implicit assumption that anyone heading into the Red Ocean had to grasp their opportunities by relying on their own efforts.

There was another guiding thought that stated that only the strongest and most successful pioneers had the right to occupy the Red Ocean. There was no place for weaklings in the new frontier.

Instead of spending an unreasonable amount of effort and resources to forcibly support all of these weak and incompetent colonists, the Big Two would rather finish their conquest!

All of this meant that Ves had good reason to assume that doom crawlers would remain a popular product in the Red Ocean's mech market for at least a century.

Ves wanted in on this lucrative business. If he was able to make his stamp early when no other mech company had yet to become the market leader in this product category, a successful doom crawler product line would probably remain a cash cow for several mech generations!

"It's not wrong for me to wait until the market environment improves, but by then it's too late for me to make my move. Other rivals who don't have as much patience as me would have published their own brilliant doom crawler designs by now, thereby securing an early advantage."

This was the dilemma he was currently facing. He could try and design a mech that the LMC could not yet sell at a profit in order to build up an early market presence, or he could just wait and risk getting overtaken by all of the competition.

"Damn. What a difficult choice."

Emotionally, Ves really wanted to design a commercial doom crawler. He had the passion and the drive. He was just as interested in designing it as the previous two mech concepts he came up with earlier.

Rationally, Ves thought this was an exceptionally poor gamble. Not only was it unnecessary for him to insist on designing a commercial doom crawler, the odds that he was actually able to outcompete Master Mech Designers at their own craft was too low!

The biggest hindrance that he faced was his lack of ideas on how to translate his specialty into this commercial design project.

Unlike the previous cases, he wasn't able to come up with solid ideas, especially ones that made use of the spiritual fragment of the Husk Maker.

Perhaps he had expended his creative juices for the day. He should already be happy for coming up with two excellent proposals.

"I'm done here." He said to his wife. "I wish we could get more value out of the 20 MTA credits we paid to access this overpriced gallery, but I'm not getting any new insights anymore."

Gloriana agreed. "Same. Let's head to a restaurant before we continue to our next stop."

The pair together with their baby and their cats nonchalantly headed to the exit and passed through the gates without kicking off any alarms.

Their guards joined them again as they floated outside of the masterwork palace. Now that Ves had seen a lot of different masterwork mechs up close, the structure didn't look so special to him anymore. The only impressive part about it was that its scale was immense for a masterwork.

The couple proceeded to enjoy the rest of their day in Chance Bay. They not only dined at an exotic restaurant, but also visited other interesting sites such as a mall that sold frivolous luxury products sourced from the most developed parts of the Milky Way.

None of these places provided him with any new sources of inspiration, but that left him with more time to flesh out his existing ideas. Half his mind was occupied with work as he explored how he could turn his oddball ideas into working mech designs.

Over the course of the day, Gloriana suddenly brought up an interesting topic that briefly pulled his mind away from his new mech design projects.

"You wanted to add more Journeymen to our Design Department, right?"

"Huh? Ah, yes. That's right. I plan to start my search in a couple of days. There ought to be a bunch of mech designers here that meet my criteria."

"Have you thought about the specialties of the Journeymen you want to recruit?"

"That's not an easy matter to explain." Ves replied with a hint of reluctance. "I have many thoughts about it, but it's difficult to make up my mind. For now, I'm leaning towards obtaining a defensive specialist and a neural interface specialist, but that's not nearly enough to cover every essential area. To be honest, I'm not sure that the Vult Central Star Node even offers any Journeymen with the specialties I'm looking for… I might have to settle for whatever I can get at this point."