The Mech Touch

Everything was slowly heading in the right direction. The announcement of the Trailblazer Expedition generated a lot of support and invigorated all of the parties involved.

The unveiling of the tentative new plan also invited a lot of feedback from many people. A lot of Larkinsons, Crossers and Glory Seekers met together and shared their insights and suggestions.

Many of them were not particularly relevant, but with so many people available, a few ideas were bound to raise good points!

With several years to go before the kickoff of the Trailblazer Expedition, all of the parties involved had plenty of time to prepare beforehand.

One of the factors that Ves cared the most was the amount of mechs that they could bring along the journey.

The latest estimates that Ves received was that the Larkinson Clan was aiming to field 10,000 mechs from the main fleet.

The Glory Seekers promised to do their best to bring 5,000 mechs to the expedition while the Cross Clan was confident it could meet its target of 12,000 mechs.

In total, the expeditionary fleet would therefore be able to field 27,000 mechs at once, which was much greater than before but still rather insufficient considering the potential opposition that they might face!

“If we can’t bring anymore mechs, then we have to make sure to strengthen the ones we have as much as possible!” Ves concluded.

This resulted in a revised design strategy that called for designing new Larkinson-exclusive mechs and upgrading existing mech models at much higher performance standards than before!

The amount of design work required to accomplish all of this was considerate. The Design Department had to allocate more mech designers away from commercial mech design projects in order to meet the internal needs of the clan.

In order to prevent the LMC from sinking into stagnation again by slowing down the release of new commercial mech models, Ves and Gloriana paid extra attention to hiring additional batches of mech designers.

It was easy enough to hire low-ranking mech designers. If there was one type of professional that would never run out, it was Novice Mech Designers and Apprentice Mech Designers who were struggling to build their careers!

Just because they managed to move to the Red Ocean did not mean that their fortunes suddenly turned. The competition was higher and the standards were higher as well.

The different market and industry conditions ruined a lot of hopes. The painful truth was that mech designers who originally came from poorer states from the galactic rim possessed the least chances to get a good job.

Few people wanted them because these mech designers were not as qualified to work with heartland-level materials and equipment that had become the norm in the new frontier!

Though Gloriana was extremely picky about the mech designers that applied to join the Design Department, Ves was not as discerning. He paid attention to a lot of other traits such as loyalty, humility and obedience.

“Look, you can put forth all of the demands you want when it comes to hiring Journeymen, but our assistant mech designers don’t need to be as good.” Ves pushed back against her when recruiting had slowed down. “All of the good ones would rather work for the Cross Clan since rumors that Professor Benedict Cortez is close to realizing his design philosophy have already spread out. A lot of mech designers are eager to work for Master Mech Designers even if they can only speak to such an impressive person only once a year. We on the other hand aren’t attractive enough because a lot of colleagues think they can do better than us, as absurd as that sounds.”

Gloriana grimaced as she held a sleeping Andraste against her chest. “Those fools. Just because we are still Journeymen does not mean we are in the same league anymore. Can’t those mech designers pay more attention to our accomplishments?”

Ves shrugged. “It’s hard for them to take us seriously. The newcomers who are still fresh off the boat are particularly ignorant of our true strength. The genuine talents will all be snapped up by more reputable and established mech designers anyway. Just give up on hiring the best prospects and try to look among the group of people that are not as desirable at first glance. I’m confident that you’ll be able to find a couple of hidden gems.”

His wife did not look impressed.

“So what you are telling me is that I should go dumpster diving in the job market, is that it? I have to sift through tons of garbage in order to find a single relatively clean and relatively nice gem, is that it? Are you crazy?!”

If Gloriana wasn’t holding one of their sleeping daughters right now, she would have certainly expressed her feelings louder!

“Hey, if you are feeling so stressed out about hiring the right personnel, you can leave the job to me. I have a good eye for talent.” Ves boasted.

“No! I won’t let you botch this job or bring in any weirdos into our Design Department! I will do this myself because that is the only way I ensure we do it properly!”

In the end, they decided to split their responsibilities.

Ves mainly concerned himself with recruiting low-ranking mech designers. The amount of applicants was rather abundant, but it was still a challenge to identify those that were the most honest, productive and suitable to work in large design teams.

In the interest of recruiting as many potential Journeymen as possible, Ves tried his best to recruit mech designers with spiritual potential.

Unfortunately, they were quite rare!

If Ves wanted to maximize the chances of breakthroughs among his own people, then he would have to string out his recruitment campaigns across several years, all the while rejecting the majority of applicants.

This was not sustainable. If word spread about how the Larkinson Clan turned away most applicants including those with excellent qualifications, then less and less mech designers would make the attempt.

In addition, there were lots of talents among those with no spiritual potential. Just because they were unlikely to advance to Journeyman and higher did not mean they had no uses in the Larkinson Clan.

Plenty of the more senior assistants had gone on to become team leaders. As the amount of projects the Larkinsons needed to complete had skyrocketed as of late, more senior leadership positions had come into existence as well in order to keep everything organized.

As such, Ves no longer paid as much attention to spiritual potential and kept to a more reasonable set of recruitment criteria.

Since his goal was to expand the amount of assistant mech designers at his disposal to 1000 individuals, the Design Department quickly experienced a lot of changes!

The Genesis Lab at the Cat Nest became a lot busier as more and more bodies moved back and forth.

A lot of new faces showed up and newcomers were being introduced to old hands every week.

Though the frequent changes disrupted the schedules and routines of every mech designer, the amount of design work that got done nonetheless increased by a massive degree, which made everyone happy in the end!

“We can complete more parallel variant design projects per design round!”

As bestsellers such as the Pacifier, the War Squire and the ever-popular Ferocious Piranha continued to be sold in massive numbers, the demand for official first-party variants that excelled in different areas rose as well.

“One size never fits all in the mech industry. There are many different mech forces that all work under different circumstances. As much as their leaders would like to adopt our mechs, if it doesn’t fit into their system, it’s no use adopting our products.”

The massive increase in assistant mech designers proved to be essential to getting a lot of work done on the variant designs.

The difficulty of designing the alterations was nowhere near comparable to designing a completely new mech model from scratch, so Ves and the lead designers readily entrusted most of the work to the ordinary design teams.

What was interesting was that many of the first generation of assistant mech designers that had worked for Ves and Gloriana from the start all took up management and leadership positions in order to herd all of the cats.

Ves could already tell that many of these mech designers were probably planning to dedicate all of their attention to leading other mech designers as opposed to continuing to expand their own design capabilities.

He sighed. “Not everyone has the same opportunities as others. Life isn’t fair sometimes.”

Just like genetic aptitude, there were intrinsic factors that prevented mech designers from fulfilling their dreams.

Some people found out their true situation fairly soon. That, or they just gave up too easily.

Other people were rather late in their willingness to admit defeat. There were even stubborn fools that insisted that they still possessed the chance of advancing to Journeymen!

Though Ves could clearly tell whether a person possessed spiritual potential or not, he did not intervene or say anything to anyone.

This was a journey that every mech designer had to go through. He also believed that even the most talentless person still had a chance of developing and activating spiritual potential later in their lives.

As time went by, an increasing number of mech designers cut their teeth in many different design projects.

The more ambitious individuals among the assistant mech designers also spent much of their free time on designing their own mechs.

Though their work was in no way comparable to the primary output of the Design Department, the Living Mech Corporation still offered to sell the homebrew mechs through its own sales channels.

Of course, there was no way that Ves wanted to sell these messy and inconsistent mechs under his main business brand, so he specifically ordered the LMC to set up an alternate brand that specialized in selling low quantities of these products.

The Hammerworks possessed such great production capacity that there was still room to produce small batches of relatively low-quality mechs.

“Let’s call our new brand the Emergent Boutique.” Ves proposed. “The mechs that will be sold under this label might represent the future of our clan one day.”

From a commercial standpoint, the Emergent Boutique was an abject failure.

In a market environment where there were an abundance of good mechs that were designed by highly-skilled Masters, it was extremely hard for the works of Novices and Apprentices to get taken seriously!

The only way for any of these mechs to get sold was by competing in terms of price, and that was a lot more difficult in the Red Ocean due to the high cost of raw materials.

No matter how much the assistant mech designers cut back on the design budgets of their projects, the painful truth was that their machines were unlikely to get sold unless they charged a price that was significantly below the cost of production.

In other words, the Larkinson Clan lost money for every Emergent Boutique mech that got sold!

This was an insane business model and would most certainly get shut down if this went on without any signs of improvements.

However, Ves never set out to make a profit with the Emergent Boutique. He accepted the losses it incurred because its existence kept his assistant mech designers content.

It only took a single sale of a mech of their own design to make them happy! The satisfaction and fulfillment they gained at the realization that someone actually saw value in their work was precious to every mech designer.

As a large proportion of the roughly 1000 assistants of the Design Department took advantage of the Emergent Boutique, they improved significantly faster than before.

Being able to work outside of their narrow responsibilities on other people’s design projects provided many more challenges and rewards!

Each independent design project they completed brought them closer to a critical turning point.

Soon enough, the Design Department welcomed its first batch of assistant mech designers that managed to break through to the rank of Journeyman Mech Designer!

“Finally!”