The Mech Touch

6041 Exchange Stability for Power

With the help of Jovy's input, the Riot Mark III was shaping up to becan increasingly more interesting Larkinson expert mech.

Ves couldn't help but develop a greater interest in the outcof this upgrade project. The recent changes to the planning of the Riot Mark III Project vindicated his decision to invite Jovy to collaborate with him and his wife.

If they managed to succeed in meeting all of their goals for the Riot Mark III, there was a good chance that the resulting end product might actually be able to match the magnificence of the Amaranto Mark III!

"I like what we are doing with the Riot Mark III." Gloriana admitted to Ves after they concluded another in-person meeting with Jovy. "I never imagined that it would becso much easier to gain access to the resources and expertise of the Red Association. The scope of the project has increased by a large extent, but your friend is conscientious enough to offer solutions to the problems that he has raised. It is quite… comfortable to work alongside such a helpful and thoughtful mech designer."

"I know, Gloriana. Don't get used to it, though. It is okay to borrow from outside expertise every now and then, but if we want to becbetter mech designers, we constantly need to hone our problem solving abilities. No Master Mech Designer is able to reach such a high rank by relying on handouts all of the time."

"You do not need to remindof this lesson. I will still undertake a large amount of work myself. Do you think it is easy to combine Destroyer resistant materials and unstable energetic materials? I also have to design an all-hyper material archemetal frfor the Amaranto Mark III, which is a completely different challenge altogether. I barely have any tleft to design the low-tier expert mechs for the latest demigods of the clan."

It was a good thing that Gloriana had already decided to reduce the clan's commitment to designing low-tier expert mechs. The reduced requirements along with delegating a lot of work to a handful of the many Journeyman Mech Designers of the Design Department allowed her to cope with her workload.

Everyone immediately beca lot busier than before. Both the Amaranto Mark III and the Riot Mark III demanded a lot of tand effort in order to make substantial progress, but none of the mech designers involved had any reason to complain.

The work was fulfilling as they yearned to fulfill their dreams for the two high-end upgrade projects!

Ves found it fascinating to alternate between the two different projects.

While the Amaranto Mark III and the Riot Mark III shared a lot of similarities, their designs radically diverged in many areas.

What Ves loved about the Amaranto Mark III was that her design attempted to turn her into an absolute beast in terms of firepower.

Gloriana's attempt to design an archemetal frthat consisted almost entirely out of hyper materials would make the high-tier expert mech and potentially ace mech a lot more fragile than equivalent machines. This forced her to be careful about any design choice she made as the unusual material composition amplified the consequences for any faults and weak points in her work.

Yet when she thought about how much more power the new and improved Amaranto could channel in either of her soon-

to-be-upgraded weapons, she gained another burst of motivation and worked with greater gusto than before!

In contrast to the extrperformance profile of the Amaranto Mark III, the Riot Mark III demanded a completely different response.

The high-tier expert spearman mech needed to exemplify the role of an assault mech. This meant that aside from ranged attack capabilities, the Riot needed to perform well in both offense and defense.

Oh, his mobility needed to be decent as well, otherwise a lot of powerful opponents would simply be able to counter the Riot by maintaining their distance from a relatively powerful but sluggish mech!

Mech design was a process of making lots of compromises and tradeoffs. It was difficult to design a mech that scored well in multiple areas. The original Riot was patterned after a spearman mech, which was largely considered an offensive mech archetype.

However, in order to strengthen the living mech's ability to trade blows with threatening enemies, Ves had chosen to put a lot of emphasis on the Riot's armor system and other defensive measures.

This resulted in a package that sort of fulfilled his requirements, but did so in a clunky and imperfect fashion.

The Riot was able to inflict a considerable amount of damage up close, but he could never compete against the First Sword in terms of pure lethality.

There was no need to hold a contest because Venerable Orfan would probably be the first to admit that she was not able to keep up with Venerable Dise when it cto inflicting the most damage in the samount of time!

The disparity was just that obvious!

Of course, Venerable Orfan would also be the first to crow about her machine's much better ability to withstand abuse.

Unlike the First Sword whose relatively lighter and less armored mech frwas designed for evasion and maneuverability, the Riot functioned like a defensive mech without looking like one.

Anyone who thought they could make quick work of the expert spearman mech would definitely becunpleasantly surprised by how long the hardy machine was able to last, all without relying on a physical tower shield like the Bastion!

Of course, no one was willing to bet that the Riot could absorb more damage than a heavy space knight like the Bastion. The former might possess a surprising amount of defensive strength, but the spearman mech was ultimately limited by his original archetype.

The Riot Mark III did not completely inherit this original pattern.

Instead, the myriad of suggestions painted a vision that exceeded many of the compromises of the earlier iterations of the expert mech!

By employing a Destroyer spear in a deliberately less stable manner, the Riot Mark III had the potential to catch up to the lethality of the First Sword when the latter also received an upgrade!

By incorporating a lot of unstable energetic materials in the archemech frof the Riot, the expert mech's ability to cope with damage would definitely jump to another level!

In short, the compromises becless costly than before. The sweet spots improved to such an extent that the Riot possessed the least amount of shortcomings out of all of the Larkinson expert mechs!

However, Ves did not forget the fundamental truth that everything cat a price.

The not so secret tradeoffs to designing the Riot Mark III this way was a huge drop in stability.

This was normally antithetical to Ves' design approach. He always tried to put in greater effort to increase the reliability and fault tolerance of his mech designs. He wanted his customers to be able to partner up with his living mechs for the long haul. It was not conducive to his purpose to design living mechs that fell apart after years of moderate to heavy use.

Yet that was exactly what he and his collaborators set out to create. Under any other circumstances, designing a mech with so many unstable factors stacked on top of each other was a recipe for disaster!

Expert mech or not, such a machine was still at risk of blowing apart when much of the mech frliterally consisted of explosive materials!

The reason why Ves, Gloriana and Jovy went ahead with this anyway was because they were confident in Venerable Orfan's ability to control her expert mech and manage the risks.

Years of piloting the Riot and developing her abilities to better suit the characteristics of her battle partner had turned Rosa Orfan into a champion who becproficient at navigating chaos!

So long as the volatile elements did not actually reach a critical state and explode, their greater power would boost the Riot's performance to a much greater extent than normal!

While it was rather risky for Venerable Orfan to pilot the Riot Mark III at the expert pilot stage, Ves had much greater confidence in her ability to control the risk factors when she becan ace pilot!

By then, her resonance strength would grow so powerful that she could literally reshape her machine through willpower baptism.

Of course, once the Riot Mark III becqualified to wield the tier 3 Destroyer spear, the risk of losing control would shoot up again. Orfan would never be able to pilot her upgraded machine in complete comfort. She constantly needed to exert a lot of willpower to maintain her control over all of the unstable elements.

This was why it was important for her to deepen her familiarity with chaos. Only by mastering its rules and mechanisms would she be able to wield its potent power without suffering too many backlashes.

"If we design the Riot Mark III according to this plan, then we cannot eliminate all of the risks to the mech and pilot." Gloriana warned Ves. "According to our preliminary calculations, the mech will occasionally suffer from self-harm. The probability that this happens increases when the Riot is engaged in active combat. The greater the stress, the greater the chance of losing control."

That was indeed a major problem. "Are you recommending that we should dial it back?"

"Not yet, Ves. I think that the Riot Mark III can still beca highly effective asset, but the premise is that the power of the mech vastly exceeds the damage produced by backlashes. Every tthe expert spearman mech deploys into battle, Venerable Orfan will have to take a gamble on how often her mech suffers an accident and how severely the damage will impair the machine."

In other words, the Riot Mark III would always be a machine that would regularly incur damage. Ves pitied the poor maintenance team that would becresponsible for servicing the dangerous living mech in the future.

Ves crossed his arms in thought. "Once we complete the Riot Mark III, we will have to monitor his performance closely. I suppose we are doing that for every expert mech we have recently worked upon, but we need to take this a lot more seriously for Rosa Orfan's expert mech. If it turns out that the costs exceed the benefits, we need to be prepared to rework the Riot Mark III into a more stable iteration at the cost of giving up a bit of power. The goal is to design a chaos machine. It is not our purpose to design a literal torture machine."

Hopefully, it would not cto that. As long as Venerable Orfan broke through early enough, Ves believed that her improved strength should be adequate enough to keep a handle on most danger factors.

As Ves and the others resumed their design work, a few major developments occurred that represented a break in routine.

First, Gavin Neumann was finally scheduled to return to New Constantinople VIII.

Second, the Interim Leadership Council held a second meeting.

The latter caused Ves to head down to the underground Hyper Chamber once again where he attended another virtual meeting in the sopulent circular meeting hall.

As Ves and many others who attended the meeting by remote took their seats around the enormous round table, they all waited for the Evolution Witch to arrive and open a discussion on the next topic in contention.

One curious change compared to the last meeting was that less people attended than before.

Sof the missing councilors sent substitutes to represent their voice, but others just kept their high-backed seats empty.

"Where are the rest?"

"They are subject to communication lockdowns." Master Vayro Goldstein helpfully explained to Ves. "There are signs that the native aliens are on the verge of launching a large offensive. Our soldiers must be ready to respond and fight at any moment."

"Oh…"