The Mech Touch

Chapter 6533 Cogs in a Machine

Ketis did not know whether she had made the right decision.

Working for the Cross Clan for a year or so may turn out to be a waste of time.

Patriarch Reginald may have been overly harsh when he accused the mech designers under his employ to be worthless, but his words shouldn't be completely false.

One of the joys of working in the Larkinson Clan was that Ketis was surrounded by talented and competent clansmen.

Even if the mech designers of the Design Department were not necessarily high in rank, they were still young and possessed an abundance of ambitious ideas and rich

imagination.

Spending lots of time with mech designers who possessed a lot of optimism and enough competence to realize their dreams fostered a very positive and encouraging work environment.

This was probably one of the secrets to the Design Department's success.

By deliberately refusing to hire older, more jaded and less imaginative mech designers, the Design Department avoided a situation where creativity and imagination became stifled due to the rigid mindsets of the people who were more likely to hold the most. authority due to their seniority.

Of course, the lack of older and more experienced mech designers also came with its own fair share of disadvantages.

The LMC's Design Department scored relatively poorly in terms of efficiency, volume of output and consistency. It was filled with ambitious and creative minds that did not tend to respond well to monotonous low-level work assignments.

The Design Department therefore reflected the personalities and work approaches of the leaders in charge quite well. Ketis regarded it as an artisan workshop more than a manufacturing room.

From what little information Ketis managed to glean from Patriarch Reginald Cross, the Design Department of the Cross Mech Corporation was set up like a factory.

Every mech designer had a specific role to fulfill. While they were granted just enough time to study new knowledge, design their own mechs and conduct their own research, their mandatory responsibilities forced them to operate precisely according to the demands of Master Benedict Cortez.

As a mech designer who realized a design philosophy based on the efficient use of energy, he was a man who by his very nature treated his subordinates as cogs in a machine.

Master Benedict had very little tolerance for deviations and tried too hard to force every subordinate to fit into the roles he had designated for them. Showing too much

initiative was discouraged as wasting time on improvised and original solutions could result in significant delays to the project timeline.

It sounded like a nightmare work environment that couldn't possibly work, but it was actually quite common in the mech industry.

This was an approach towards mech design that worked best on a larger scale. Thousands of mech designers could work alongside each other without any serious disruptions or delays because everyone remained in sync with each other.

A large design department would also offer a huge variety of jobs and responsibilities. Many different mech designers should be able to find role that was compatible with their own inclinations.

As for those that still didn't manage to fit?

They would just get fired.

The mech designers who worked in these large and highly organized workplaces tended to enjoy the stability they offered. Their work was not too stimulating, but there was a very low probability that they would fail to meet the requirements.

This kind of Design Department offered the best possible support for a mech designer like Master Benedict!

He was the only mech design pillar of the Cross Clan, so he had to shoulder a huge amount of responsibilities by himself. In order to maximize his productivity and increase his output, he needed the help of a large machine filled with mech designers that acted completely according to his needs and nothing more.

This was how Master Benedict was able to juggle dozens of mech design projects and work on them so efficiently that he was able to complete them according to their tight and punishing schedules!

Master Benedict apparently structured his mech design projects in such a way that he only needed to rely on his superior capabilities to solve the most difficult problems in advance. That still left a lot of gaps, but he could delegate all of the remaining grunt work to his subordinates.

As long as Master Benedict was skilled enough to make this work, he had built a pretty good setup for himself.

Unfortunately, this design work model came with a very big downside. It was hardly the best way to help younger mech designers exercise their creativity and broaden their problem-solving skills.

The situation was entirely different in the LMC's Design Department as Ves and Gloriana were much more interested in developing the comprehensive design skills of the talents they carefully selected and recruited into their clan.

It was a waste of time, money, resources and potential if the talented young mech designers failed to develop any useful design applications!

The less strict and more informal work structure within the Larkinson Clan easily allowed assistant and contributing mech designers to take on a variety of highly stimulating assignments.

Even if the difficulty and importance of the grunt work was not all that educational, exposing assistants to a larger variety of problems still allowed them to exercise their design skills in a more comprehensive manner.

It was a lot harder for mech designers to keep up with their work schedule, though. There was a higher demand on competence and they always needed to be ready to take on brand new challenges. Their work was never stable enough for them to be able to do the same work on repeat for months or years.

Ultimately, the two different workplaces tended to propagate very different kinds of mech designers.

Those who did well in climbing up the LMC's Design Department tended to be less efficient but more creative. Ketis felt she was a good example of that as she could not stomach the idea of working as a mech designer in the Cross Clan.

That did not mean that the CMC's Design Department was completely unsuited to develop talents. Those who did well in this kind of workplace were essentially model workers that excelled at getting the most out of the least amount of resources. They were good at producing consistent work and slowly gained the ability to improve technological implementations

Ketis felt very fortunate to have worked in such a stimulating work environment.

She felt she needed to get a better insight on how the Cross Clan developed its mechs, preferably without talking to Master Benedict first.

Ketis and him were old acquaintances who went back a long way, back when Master Benedict was known as the notorious Skull Architect.

Mayra used to be an apprentice of the Skull Architect.

Since Ketis learned mech design from Mayra, that turned Ketis into something of a

'grand-disciple' of Master Benedict Cortez.

Not that it mattered all that much. Everything happened a long time ago in a galaxy that

had become unreachable.

Ketis had very little in common with Master Benedict, and their approach towards mech design diverged considerably.

However, was precisely because they were so different from each other that an

exchange became worthwhile.

Ketis would definitely benefit more from an exchange of knowledge than Master Benedict, but perhaps there were other ways for her to make up the difference.

Patriarch Reginald promised to give her a mandate to 'rectify' the CMC's Design Department. Improving it would not only make the ace pilot happy, but should hopefully

give Master Benedict more useful helpers to share his growing burdens.

In order to do that, she wanted to question a handful of Crossers in order to get a better

idea on how they obtained their mechs.

The swordmaster first decided to approach Saint Linda Cross.

Ketis felt it was a good idea to develop a closer relationship with one of the few ace

pilots that would stay behind the expeditionary fleet.

The Swordmaster decisively shuttled over to the Hemmington Cross and entered a hangar bay where she had an opportunity to admire the Amphis Extremis up close.

"Beautiful."

The Amphis Extremis was a quasi-first-class ace offensive space knight that was clearly based on the original Amphis that Linda Cross piloted as an expert mech. Surprisingly enough, the Amphis Extremis turned out to be a brand new construction.

Ketis was slightly taken aback by this discovery, as she assumed that the Crossers would do the same as the Larkinsons and upgrade an existing expert mech into an ace mech. She soon figured out why the Cross Clan refused to reuse the original Amphis. Different from the Larkinson Clan which tended to value mechs as they grew older and more powerful as they aged, the Cross Clan tended to treat its mechs as machines that inevitably experienced wear and tear and deteriorated in performance unless special measures were taken.

It was logical for the Cross Clan to discard an expert mech that had become outdated and depreciated too much in value and develop a new ace mech from scratch. There were huge differences between expert mechs and ace mechs. Unless the latter was expressly designed to accommodate future upgrades, it was not very cost-effective to transform expert mechs into ace mechs.

Technology, skills, experience, mech doctrines, material availability, enemy types and more had all changed drastically over the years.

This was why Master Benedict Cortez clearly chose to start from scratch and design a

superior ace mech without the need to preserve any of the outdated baggage that were several decades old.

This was why the Amphis Extremis offered superior performance in almost every aspect aside from the ones that could only be gained from age.

It was a pity that the original Amphis never had an opportunity to become a living mech, and that the new Amphis Extremis hadn't gained this trait either.

The Cross Clan clearly did not want to depend too much on Ves Larkinson and his

design philosophy.

Their decision was not necessarily wrong. There was still value in non-living mechs.

Their growth potential was lower, but there was not much need to be fussy about their production or repairs.

The Cross Clan could more easily switch to using new mechs depending on what the situation demanded from its troops.

The older mechs could be sent to the recyclers so that their materials could be used to produce more useful products.

This was the conventional approach to handling mechs.

Ketis actually felt repulsed by this treatment, even though these lifeless mechs did not. have feelings to care about how callously they were being handled.

This was an indication that she had spent too much time in the Larkinson Clan, where

everyone treated mechs as cherished brothers and sisters!

How the Larkinsons treated their mechs was the exception rather than the rule!

Ketis had always known about this on an intellectual level, but it was now that she truly understood what this meant!

She began to smile. To be confronted by a different approach towards managing mechs

already expanded her horizons.

She grew excited. She looked forward to what other novelties and culture shocks the Cross Clan would introduce to her. The abundance of lifeless mechs parked in the hangar bay continued to break apart the assumptions that shackled her cognition and

caused her to stagnate in her research. "Swordmaster Ketis." The female ace pilot greeted as she left her cockpit and floated

down to the deck. "Welcome to the Hemmington Cross. What do you think of my Amphis Extremis."

"It is a fine work of technological essence" Ketis admitted. "I can see how much effort Master Benedict had put into its design. Its shape and parts all scream brutal efficiency to me. Every limb should move smoothly and every force exertion should be able to produce a precise amount of force. Perhaps these design choices have made the physical frame a little less tolerant towards mechanical damage than what I expect from a space knight, but the powerful SA-DIX Shield Generator should prevent that from becoming an easily exploitable weakness."