The Mech Touch

Not every mech force could support the logistical burden of maintaining a large amount of modularized mechs.

In theory, it all sounded pretty good. By developing a modular mech such as the Bright Warrior Mark II that could equip all kinds of optional modules and equipment, the mech pilots could reach their full potential by piloting the configurations that precisely matched their unique skills and inclinations.

A school of military theorists even proclaimed that personalization at the company, squad or individual level was the future of mech warfare!

After all, why should every mech pilot be stuffed into a standard mech that had never been designed for that person in the first place?

While it was way too extravagant for mech designers such as Gloriana to design bespoke mechs for thousands of rank-and-file mech pilots, the development of a modular mech provided an excellent compromise solution!

The mech designers only needed to develop the base mechs and a large number of varied equipment.

In fact, the design work of the latter didn’t even have to be handled by the original designers of the modular mech models. A bunch of Journeymen or Apprentices could easily design a large amount of adequate equipment as long as they stuck to their specialties!

This way, a mech force would have all of the building blocks in place. The people in charge just needed to piece them together into different mech configurations that best drew out the strengths of the mech pilots while also adapting to the circumstances of the battlefield.

There were groups who managed to make it work, but the majority of the implementations ended up in failure.

All of those thinkers and theorists paid too much attention to the shiny aspects of this implementation but neglected to account for all of the processes in the background that needed to be done right.

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The biggest problem was that a highly modular mech force was not cheap!

The further away from standardization, the more complicated it became to manage all of the different parts and materials!

It was a lot easier to impose uniform standards and train mech units to a consistent level of performance.

Training mech pilots to fight with one consistent mech model also made it easier to correct any flaws. Mech units could also take advantage of the entire group to find more clever ways to exploit the strengths of the same mech.

Another limitation was that the right manpower and facilities needed to be in place to implement an effective modularized force. Without access to enough competent mech designers, it would be a dream to make enough varied modules and equipment available!

While there were plenty of ready-made modular mech ecosystems on the market, these enormous package deals tended to be significantly more expensive than ordinary mech offerings.

After all, mech designers and mech companies did not work for free. They needed enough remuneration to support all of the hours spent on designing an ECM module or additional mech swords.

Then there was the storage or production capacity needed to make all of these goods available.

While this problem was much less significant at fixed locations, it still did not change the fact that a modular mech force tended to field less mechs but took up more space than a conventional mech force.

The stupidest way to maintain a modular mech force was to produce or purchase far more modular equipment than mechs could carry and keep all of the extras in reserve in case they were needed.

The more clever way to handle this was to stockpile a large amount of raw materials and produce any modules needed for an upcoming deployment or campaign. It would be even better if the mech force or the organization behind it could also take back unwanted modules and recycle them into their base materials.

Again, all of this sounded nice in theory, but how many outfits had the money or the skilled labor to operate a factory ship?

It was much cheaper and more effective to stick to a limited selection of carefully chosen mech models than to bother with all of these elaborate exercises! The performance differences simply weren’t worth the trouble of giving every mech pilot the option to personalize the configurations of their machines to a fine degree.

Smaller mech forces didn’t have the budget, manpower and resources to adopt a modularized mech ecosystem.

Larger mech forces were able to field a good variety of specialized mech models that performed significantly better than their modularized equivalents.

As such, just like biomechs, the campaign to make modularization the definite standard in the mech community turned into an abject failure after reality showed that it was much less practical than its proponents believed!

Only a few outlier states and organizations bothered with modularized mech ecosystems these days. The demands to make them viable and useful enough were simply too harsh.

“It’s kind of funny how our clan is one of the few groups that can pull this off.” Ves smiled.

He initially conceived the Bright Warrior as a semi-modular mech platform because he wanted to find the most optimal balance between practicality and fit.

He achieved this goal with the design of the original Bright Warrior, but the Larkinson Clan of today was nearly unrecognizable compared to when his clan only numbered a few hundred to a few thousand members!

Ves hadn’t even realized that his clan slowly ticked all of the boxes that were necessary to implement a modular mech ecosystem.

It wasn’t until he came up with this idea after his talk with Goldie that this concept that everyone disapproved of suddenly became viable for the Larkinson Clan!

First, the Larkinson Clan was not short on money. It could afford to splurge on more expensive and luxurious approaches to organizing its mech forces.

Second, the Larkinson Navy not only included a fair amount of cargo vessels and logistical vessels, but also featured a fully-fledged factory ship that had recently completed a massive upgrade.

Third, as a clan centered around mech design, it possessed much more design capacity than almost every other pioneering organization!

Fourth, its mech pilots and the way it organized its mech legions made it possible to field modularized mechs without making every mech unit disorganized. Not every outfit could cope with the chaos generated by mixing too many different mech configurations together.

Fifth, there was genuine added value to providing greater customization at the squad or individual level. Unlike mech forces that mostly fought against known human opponents, the Larkinson Clan could fight against a phase whale on one day and fend off a voribug swarm the next day!

The diversity between the indigenous alien races was great. While they had all adopted a number of common standards and technologies such as warp drives due to interacting with each other across a huge span of time, they still clung onto their own tech and methods of warfare.

Given these circumstances, it made less sense for the Larkinson Clan to maintain a static mech roster that was unable to adapt to vastly different threats. The introduction of the modularized and upgraded edition of the Bright Warrior added a lot more flexibility and fault tolerance to the Larkinson Army!

Ever since the Design Department introduced the drastic revision of the Bright Warrior to the Larkinson Army, several mech legions embraced it on a wide scale.

The most notable ones to adopt this quintessential Larkinson mech model more than the Avatars of Myth!

It was not as if the Avatars were short of new and powerful specialized models. Unlike a few years ago, its mech pilots had plenty of choice these days.

However, so many veteran Avatars had piloted the older versions of the Bright Warrior line so many times that they had adapted to its traits and quirks.

What also played a role for these sentimental mech pilots was that the Larkinson Clan offered the possibility to upgrade their existing Bright Warrior IB’s to the latest design.

The Avatar mech pilots partnered up with their mechs for several years and had grown up alongside each other. The older Bright Warriors themselves had also bloomed a lot. Their personalities had become much more intelligent, responsive and distinctive from each other.

“I can’t abandon my mech. We’re brothers. Switching to a brand-new mech is like divorcing a wife in order to marry a new girlfriend. It is not honorable. Now that an option to upgrade our Bright Warriors exists, it is even less acceptable to abandon my partner!”

Ves hadn’t fully anticipated how much affection, familiarity and sentiment his mech pilots developed towards their long-standing living mechs.

It was fairly customary in other organizations for mech pilots to be reassigned to different mechs over time.

After all, mechs were merely objects and tools to everyone. Even if certain pilots developed an abnormally deep bond with a specific machine, few leaders ever bothered to upgrade it to keep up with the pace of technological development.

It was much easier to replace old and outdated mechs with new and modern products!

Though Ves appreciated the mech pilots who had become loyal to their living mechs, he recognized that this might not always be a good thing for his clan.

The Bright Warrior was the most flexible mech in the Larkinson Army’s mech roster, but it was certainly not the strongest.

What if no one wanted to adopt a shiny new mech because every mech pilot wanted to remain monogamous? Such a circumstance was detrimental to the health of the Larkinson Army!

“I need to find a better solution to this problem.” Ves recognized.

The problem right now wasn’t too big because the Larkinson Clan hadn’t existed long enough for pilots to develop their ‘marriages’ over multiple decades.

There were still plenty of clansmen who didn’t feel too pained if they had to start a new relationship with a new and different mech.

The proportion of pilots who would be willing to do so would certainly drop in the future. This would significantly hinder the adoption of new mech models within the Larkinson Army in the future!

“The only way to get mech pilots to adopt our new products is to hire new recruits from our mech academies or the job market. That is obviously not a sufficient solution.”

Ves felt more pressure to solve the problem with preserving the partnerships of mechs and mech pilots in the long term.

He could not simultaneously promote affection and commitment between mechs and mech pilots, but at the same time force his clansmen to switch from one living mech to another as if they were swapping out clothes.

A part of him felt that it was becoming increasingly more crucial for him to solve this difficult dilemma!

For now, Ves had more immediate concerns to worry about.

The introduction of the new modularized Bright Warriors may have been met with great enthusiasm among the fans of this mech line, but the Larkinson Army had never tested them out in a major battle.

The confrontation against the Sundered Phalanx in Pima Prime was the best way to test this concept in practice!

Already, the mech squads and mech companies composed of different configurations of the Bright Warrior Mark II’s were finally putting their unique ideas and long-standing training to good use against challenging opponents!

When the Sundered Phalanx mech pilots first encountered these eclectic Bright Warriors up close, they briefly thought that the Larkinsons were messier than expected.

It was only until the unique Bright Warrior units started to showcase their self-developed tactics that the Fridayman mech pilots learned how difficult it was to fight against this opponent!

There was a squad of Bright Warriors armed with grenade launchers that acted as troubleshooters.

Instead of fighting in place, the Bright Warriors patrolled along their own lines and instantly saturated an opposing formation with a deluge of explosions as soon as a friendly unit threatened to collapse!

There was another squad of Bright Warriors in space knight configuration that not only carried solid shields, but also equipped shoulder-mounted laser turrets.

These space knights essentially acted as semi-mobile turrets. They occupied a position on the battlefield and bombarded any nearby opponents with laser beams that could not be stopped!

The varied battle tactics that these Bright Warrior Mark II’s unleashed upon their foes quickly produced a lot of frustration among the Fridayman mech pilots.

“These golden mechs are disgusting!”