The Mech Touch

Ves could practically feel the money rolling in at this time.

The presentation had been an undeniable success. Millions of guests reacted with overwhelming enthusiasm towards the Fey Fianna.

Ves had proven without any doubt that he had advanced the state of hyper technology and E-technology by developing and publishing the Fey Fianna design.

A disproportionately large number of mech designers had already licensed the Fey Fianna design before the presentation had come to an end. Each of these mech designers wanted to study and learn the secrets that Ves had applied to his complicated drone mech design.

This was not an easy job! Since his spiritual engineering existed as an invisible layer of data attached to the actual mech design, mech designers faced an uphill battle in accessing it, let alone trying to decipher his work without a proper understanding in living mechs.

The mech designers would probably have a working copy of the Fey Fianna within their reach in order to make any actual progress, but Ves still did not have high hopes for them. The best that they could do under normal circumstances was to develop their own variants of his new drone mech.

Whatever the case, Ves did not mind it if lots of people studied his work. The Red Association had set the licensing fee for an unrestricted 10-year license of the Standard Edition at 75,000 MTA credits!

Ves had no idea what kind of criteria the mechers utilized to determine the licensing fees of published mech designs. According to private studies, they usually hovered between a hundred to a million times the average production cost of a mech model.

However, there were always outliers where the licensing fee fell way outside of this range, so this was not a hard rule.

What complicated this situation even further was that the standards used by the mechers frequently changed over time. The phases of a mech generation and other macroeconomic conditions could drastically raise or lower the multiplier, which the mech industry used as an unofficial measuring stick of the actual worth of a mech design on the date of its release.

The Red Association was also not entirely identical to the Mech Trade Association.

Ves had read industry publications that suggested that the administrators in charge of this sort of stuff wanted to encourage more knowledge sharing, which in practice translated to legal technology theft.

That meant that many licensing fees set by the Red Association tended to be lower than the historical trend!

The production cost of a Standard Edition was around 2 MTA credits, so that meant that the multiplier of its design had reached as high as 37500. While that was still far from the normal upper boundary, it became exponentially harder for mech designs to surpass a multiplier of 10,000. Only Master Mech Designers and higher could design anything that earned a multiplier of over 100,000, and they did not reach it everytime.

For example, the average production cost of the Sparrow Storm Mark XII was estimated at around 1.4 MTA credits, though Ves did not know for sure as the information was not public.

Yet the up-front licensing fee was priced at only 25,000 MTA credits, which was a huge reduction from the licensing fee of the Mark XI during the previous mech generation!

The Sparrow Storm Mark XII essentially reached a multiplier of only 17857, which was a paltry figure for a megacorporation as dominant as SKL Mech Industries!

This effectively showed that even the Red Association thought that this stopgap model was a disappointment!

Even though the Mark XII came out in the early days of the Hyper Generation, the lack of innovation, the high retention of many old design elements from the previous version of the mech design and the lack of added value to the mech community all negatively impacted its ' score'!

The only saving grace was that the existing market dominance of the Sparrow Storm mech line ensured that customer demand would remain high despite all of these shortcomings.

Ves personally thought that the multiplier for his Fey Fianna was set rather low, though he could guess why the mechers did not make it higher than 37500.

The mech design lacked a high degree of optimization and refinement. Ves could have waited a year or hired a lot more assistant mech designers to improve the Fey Fianna by many small increments.

His work also contained a lot of missed opportunities that he should have taken if he wanted to be more serious about topping the sales charts. He could have brought in knowledgeable specialists who could do a better job at improving the hyper energy shields and the gauss cannon fey.

All of these shortcomings combined with the uncertain prospects of a brand-new mech design that had no existing equivalent in the mech market depressed the multiplier of his Fey Fianna.

He smirked. 75,000 MTA credits was not chump change.

In absolute terms, this was still a large amount of cash. Very few second-class mech designers were willing to spare that much money to study other people's work, but it was practically trivial for first-class mech designers!

Normally, first-class mech designers had little reason to license any second-class mechs, but this might be one of the rare exceptions. Ves was pretty sure that the majority of the people who licensed the Standard Edition of the Fey Fianna came from the upper zones!

One of the indications that this was the case was that over a hundred of them also chose to license the Elite Edition of the Fey Fianna!

Its up-front licensing fee was as high as 6,000,000 MTA credits, which became a new record for Ves!

With a record-breaking multiplier of 70588 for Ves, it became abundantly clear that the mechers appreciated the Elite Edition a lot more!

This was not surprising as its complexity and its absolute combat power were much higher.

The Elite Edition combined more advanced and developed applications of phasewater technology, hyper technology and E-technology. The results accomplished by this variant provided a lot more value to the Red Association and the mech industry at large.

In addition, as a quasi-first-class drone mech, it only took a few targeted upgrades to the power reactor and other sub-standard mech systems to make the Fey Fianna usable in first-class combat.

Even without these steps, the Elite Edition was still a good mech that could produce an outsized impact in any second-class mech force!

Ves' only regret was that virtually no one who licensed Elite Edition intended to develop their own variants and put them on sale. The first-class mech designers only paid 6,000,000 MTA credits for the right to research one of his best works to date.

The story was different for the Standard Edition of the Fey Fianna. As a much more commercially viable mech model, the LMC easily expected it to sell millions of copies!

So long as the Fey Fianna lived up to all of its promises, it could continue to become an enduring seller in the long run.

That could tempt plenty of ambitious mech designers in designing and selling their own variants of the Fey Fianna.

The relatively high multiplier meant that a third-party mech company needed to sell tens of thousands of copies in order to justify the investment.

This was a bit much, as many mech buyers often flocked to original products unless they absolutely demanded features that were not present in the most authentic mech models.

Ves checked the figures yet again.

Over a thousand mech designers and mech companies licensed the Standard Edition, while around 150 of them licensed the Elite Edition.

With the sudden infusion of this amount of cash, the Larkinsons could already afford to fund the establishment of hundreds of branches of the Larkinson Clan in distant middle zones!

It could also be used to place priority orders at second-class shipyards.

The money that Ves earned today might not come close to the profits earned from defeating a large alien fleet, but the difference this time was that he did not have to fight any battles to earn this much money!

This was how mech designers usually solve their money problems.

Even if the LMC did not do anything else with the Fey Fianna, money would continue to roll in so long as there was sufficient demand.

The Living Mech Corporation could just pretend to be a design studio and rely entirely on licensing and royalty fees to profit from the Fey Fianna.

Ves did not mind it if other mech companies succeeded in selling their own variants of his products.

The current policies of the Red Association seemed to set the royalty fee somewhere between 5 to 30 percent of gross sales, though the mechers occasionally adopted other formulas for specific reasons.

Whatever the case, the LMC was entitled to a cut of all of these proceeds, so the more variants got sold, the better!

Ves felt quite gratified that he had managed to solve the LMC and the Larkinson Clan's latent money concerns.

It was rare for a new line of mechs to become so popular at the start. The vast majority of commercial mechs published onto the market failed to attract so much customer demand, let alone rake so much licensing fees!

To think that Ves initially wanted to keep the Fey Fianna to himself. Turning it into another Larkinson-exclusive mech was a waste of its potential and an enormous missed opportunity.

The LMC would assuredly be able to use the Fey Fianna to become prominent again. So long as Ves sustained its momentum by releasing other good hyper mechs in the coming months and years, his mech company would definitely have a chance to become a larger player in the second-class mech market!

As Ves processed all of these thoughts in the privacy of his mind, he continued to address the crowd while holding Lucky in his arms.

Once the Elite Edition had unveiled a portion of their amazing combat potential, Ves explained the pricing, the availability and other commercial information about his new mech line.

"The production of the Standard Edition of the Fey Fianna is likely to fall far short of current demand, so we would like to ask you to be patient. Each of you who orders a batch of this mech will enter a waiting list. The wait times will likely ease in 3 to 6 months as our mech company is actively seeking to outsource production to many more third-party mech manufacturers."

The demand for the Fey Fianna had actually exceeded everyone's expectations. Gavin and the upper management of the LMC must be tearing their hairs out due the huge amount of work required to persuade other mech factories to produce copies of the Fey Fiannas according to a specific production approach!

"The Elite Edition of the Fey Fianna can only be ordered by a select clientele that is willing to draw from their own stock of phasewater." Ves proceeded to add a bit more exclusivity to the current top product of the LMC. "We offer customization services for every acceptable client, so you can be assured that our products can fit into your existing mech roster as seamlessly as possible."

Customers who were able to afford quasi-first-class transphasic mechs always demanded a lot more personalization. Even the best mechs might not be suitable for their needs if the fit was too poor.

"We shall continue to hold numerous demonstrations and exhibitions of the Standard Edition of the Fey Fianna. You can continue to remain in your seats and observe our mechs and fey in use. If that is not enough to satisfy your curiosity, you may send an application to us to test pilot the Fey Fianna for a short amount of time. The arena grounds here will be split in many smaller spaces to allow as many of you to try out our new product. It's first come, first serve, so apply quickly!"

That immediately aroused the interest of a lot of mech pilots in the crowd!

It was one thing to hear and see all of the amazing stuff about the Fey Fianna.

To be able to experience these benefits first-hand was a dream come true for many mech pilots!

For the LMC to allow its invited guests to try out the Fey Fianna on the spot was a definite mark of confidence in its latest product line!