The Mech Touch

The Sparrow Storm deserved to be treated as the market leader in the second-class mech market.

The functionality provided by its endless variety of Sparrows was amazing.

Even Alexa could not withhold her admiration for the SKL's enduring business success with this product line.

"The Sparrow Storms are relatively expensive to buy upfront. Here in Bortele, a customer has to pay 2.2 MTA credits to obtain a starter Sparrow Storm that comes with a set of 16 Sparrows. That is not as much as the 3 MTA credits that we intend to charge for a Standard Edition of the Fey Project, but the production costs are not on the same level. The mech frame of the Sparrow Storm is made out of inferior materials, but their excellent design and optimization allows the machine to utilize their properties to the extreme."

Ves nodded in understanding. "It is not the mech frame, but the Sparrows that are the real earners for the company, isn't that right?"

"Yes. SKL sells a large variety of Sparrows. They possess many different functions and fall into several different price categories. Since SKL has sold so many Sparrow Storms, each of which regularly run through their stock of Sparrows, the company is able to achieve high economies of scale by producing large quantities of replacement Sparrows. The company also keeps their prices low for multiple reasons. Cheaper Sparrows incentivize existing customers to continue to use their existing sickle mechs. The company also cannot really charge more because it has to compete against third-party developers that sell their own Sparrow models."

SKL cleverly licensed out its Sparrow models under generous conditions. This attracted a lot of development companies that came up with their own unique spin on the small spurs.

Although SKL could only earn a small cut from the sales of these third-party Sparrows, their availability strengthened the appeal of the entire mech platform!

There was no way for the Larkinson Clan to design thousands of different fey. It was also difficult to encourage third-party developers to design their own fey when they were so complex and difficult to fully replicate.

Though the business strategy adopted by SKL was not the most lucrative, it was one that retained existing customers the best!

Most of the Sparrows models were dirt-cheap, and if customers wanted to obtain more powerful ones, then those varieties were available for purchase as well!

Ever since the first editions of the Sparrow Storm line captured a large portion of the second-class drone market, no competitor had ever managed to depose it from its throne.

It was the well-deserved king of drone mechs in the second-class mech market!

"What is the current market share of the Sparrow Storm?" Ves curiously asked as he began to look up footage of this popular drone mech model in action.

"Its market share is around 31 percent according to last month's statistics."

Ves briefly looked up from the projected display. "Hm? Early in the development of the Fey Fianna, I checked this figure myself. I distinctly recall that the Sparrow Storm had a 37 percent market share back then. What changed?"

The young woman smiled. "Two major developments have caused the Sparrow Storm to drop in popularity. The transition to the Hyper Generation has caused the Sparrow Storm Mark XI and all of the tens of thousands of different Sparrow models to become obsolete. Although SLK has moved quickly to design and release the Sparrow Storm Mark XII along with dozens of upgraded Sparrow models that incorporate hyper technology, their performance against alien warships is not stellar. In fact, that was already the case before the Age of Dawn, but that did not matter too much because the Sparrow Storn is primarily designed to fight against other mech forces."

A large amount of battle footage depicted the Sparrow Storm in battles between different mech forces.

This was where they excelled. Multiple Sparrow Storms banding together could easily deploy hundreds of not thousands of Sparrows at a time!

Individually, the Sparrows were relatively weak due to their awfully small sizes. Their attack power was poor and their defenses were pathetic.

What made them so troublesome was that they were relatively fast and difficult to hit!

As long as a drone mech spread out its Sparrows and commanded them to buzz around in random patterns, it became difficult for most ranged mechs to shoot all of them down!

Rifleman mechs and many other ranged mechs practically despaired when they were being harassed by enormous swarms of Sparrows.

The weak laser beams shot by these pitiful-looking spurs could only scratch their armor, but when hundreds of them rained on their mech frames at a time, those laser beams produced horrifying results!

In contrast, the more powerful weapons wielded by these rifleman mechs often had trouble with shooting down individual Sparrows.

Even if the rifleman mechs hit their targets, they still had to chew through hundreds more!

While it was possible to cause these Sparrows to lose control by targeting the drone mechs directly, it would not be easy to take the latter down.

A good mech force would take measures to protect their drone mechs or make it as difficult as possible to attack them directly.

The only effective counter to the Sparrow Storms was to destroy their Sparrows en masse with area weapons.

Flamethrowers, explosive missiles and in certain cases ECM attacks could all take a lot of Sparrows out of the fight.

However, there were still many ways to prevent this from happening, either by placing the Sparrows well out of range or employing active countermeasures.

"The Sparrow Storm truly sounds like the perfect drone mech if quantity is all you care about." Ves remarked with a hint of appreciation. "We are actually lucky that it doesn't appear to be remarkably effective when used against alien warships. This must be the main reason why it has lost its market share."

"That is so for now. Many of the Sparrow models that the existing customer base have used for decades are simply not effective when employed against alien warships. One of the characteristics of energy shields is that stronger attacks drain them at faster rates. The weaker the attacks, the less energy shields become disturbed by them. This effect is still manageable when Sparrows only have to break the defenses of mechs, but warships are far too different. Their transphasic energy shields are so strong that they can practically bounce any attack from these tiny Sparrows."

Energy shields worked like umbrellas. They could easily block a lot of rain drops, but they broke as long as they were struck by a few bullets!

That should have made the Sparrow Storm less useful in the Hyper Generation, but their developer did not give up that easily.

Alexa displayed one of their solutions to Ves by projecting footage of one of the latest Sparrow Storms in action.

"SKL has already tried to compensate for this problem by resorting to the advantages bestowed by hyper technology."

Ves became impressed by the swarm of thousands of Sparrows being put to use against an alien raiding fleet.

Each of these sparrows were mounted with fire hyper laser beams. When each of them started to group together, they formed a pseudo-domain of sorts that contained a lot more fire-attributed E energy than elsewhere!

The large increase in fire energy allowed the Sparrows that were partially built with fire hyper materials to perform considerably better than if they operated in smaller groups!

The boost in firepower was not small. The spurs gained enough lethality to inflict more significant damage against the transphasic energy shields of alien warships!

"Our Fey Fianna can do this as well." Ves tentatively spoke. "Just not as good. Each of our drone mechs start out with only four fey, and it is difficult to increase that number. While each of my fey are much stronger than any of these Sparrows, it is impossible to match their quantity."

"When we hold our product reveal, we need to make a case that our fey can be strong as well without needing to match the quantities of the Sparrows." Alexa advised. "Many people will make this comparison once they learn about the Fey Fianna. We must control the narrative by doing this ourselves. We need to show that our ranged fey can inflict greater damage in much lower numbers."

That was rather tricky. Ves needed to think carefully on how he could make this happen. He had a few ideas, but he might have to build more powerful fey in order to fully show the superiority of his own products.

"That alone shouldn't be enough for SKL to restore the market dominance of its Sparrow Storm line, right?"

"Both SKL and numerous third-party development companies have already announced their intention to design more advanced hyper Sparrows that can borrow the power of E energy radiation to a greater extent." Alexa responded. "What is notable is that these hyper Sparrows are designed to be backwards compatible. Lastgen Sparrow Storms can seamlessly carry and operate currentgen hyper Sparrows after they install a simple software update. This alone is enough to secure the loyalty of its existing customers."

SKL was so good to its customers!

A greedier and more shortsighted mech company would have deliberately made it so that its hyper Sparrows were only compatible with the latest Mark XII version of the Sparrow Storm.

However, that sort of behavior would only damage the loyalty of a lot of disgruntled customers, making it much more likely for them to do business with competing mech companies.

Many of SKL's business decisions repeatedly proved that the company was more than willing to sacrifice short-term windfalls for long-term profitability.

Such companies happened to be the most difficult to compete against. They simply made no mistakes and held their markets in a tight grip!

"We should just stick to our current strategy." Ves concluded. "It actually makes more sense for us to market our products to customers that have never fielded drone mechs before. Everyone else is already satisfied with their Sparrow Storms."

Alexa concurred with this assessment. "Those are my thoughts as well, sir. We need to play to our strengths. All of the user feedback that we have gathered state that our Fey Fianna model is much easier and more comfortable to pilot than other drone mechs. There is no demand for mech pilots to install specialized multitasking cranial implants in order to use our product to its full potential. Any general mech pilot can become proficient in the Fey Fianna after several weeks of training. We have the potential to expand the user base of drone mechs by ourselves!"

Both Ves and Alexa smiled at each other.

This was a clever way to deal with powerful competitors. There was no way that Ves could defeat SKL in its home game, so he simply started his own one that best matched his own advantages!

The only degree of uncertainty was whether Ves could persuade enough customers to switch to the drone mechs. A lot of mech pilots were already fairly comfortable in their own roles. It would take quite a bit of persuasion for them to accept a brand-new concept like the Fey Fianna.

Ves and his new disciple continued to talk about their strongest competition.

Alexa issued a few more warnings.

"If our Fey Fianna model takes off as you think it will, our mech company will need to keep an eye on SKL. Whether directly or indirectly, the latter's market share will drop at a rapid rate. When that happens, our rival company can respond in two different ways. If SKL urgently wishes to restore its market share, it can significantly drop the price of its Sparrow Storm Mark XII model. Do not underestimate this. The profit margins of this model are high, but that means that SKL has plenty of room to wage a price war."

That was indeed a serious threat, but Ves had enough faith in his Fey Fianna that his upcoming customers would stick to it despite it becoming relatively more expensive!

"That sounds concerning, but it is not something we can stop. What else?"

"SKL may assign a design team to develop a superior imitation of our Fey Fianna. Its mech designers have a reputation for arrogance, but it is often well-deserved. Even if they cannot replicate all of the unique strengths of our product, they can design a mech with comparable features that just happen to be better than our own work. More importantly, SKL is most definitely able to produce its own mechs at lower costs, which gives them the option to undercut our prices. The company does not always resort to this measure, but once it does, it always manages to regain its market leadership."

Many competitors found it difficult to cope with this response!