[1-200] THE MECH TOUCH

Chapter 120: Iterating

Ves approached his latest design process like a project. Gone were the days where he haphazardly designed a mech ad-hoc in week-long sessions. His improved skills gave him much more possibilities and opened his eyes to many factors he previously missed.

When he previously competed at Leemar, Ves had no time to double-check his work. The brutal time limits imposed by the rules forced him to follow his previous methodology of trusting his intuition that he got it right.

His latest project called for a cycle of design followed by testing and back to design. With his increased base of knowledge, he was able to wield the System's many mathematical models without acting like a caveman.

With every design choice, he could verify the results through rigorous testing. He could find better solutions and avoid mistakes as long as he spent enough time crunching the numbers.

Certainly, it took time. Despite the System's prodigious processing power, Ves could only draw a portion of its awesome capabilities. More than that, Ves might frequently resort to tweaking the models in order to simulate many different conditions.

He did not intend to lose sight of his initial goal. Before he began to design, he created a simple schedule.

"Let's see. Three weeks should be plenty of time to come up with a decent design. Any more than that and it's not worth the effort. I'll spend one week on shaping the design, and two weeks on refining it through modeling and simulations."

Ves also split the project up into different phases that corresponded to the parts he modified. He preferred to start from interior and work his way out, so the first phases dealt with the internal frame and the various internal components. Each time he finished modifying the relevant components, he'd test them vigorously until he became satisfied or ran out of time.

He'd go through each phase in this manner until he combed over every part of his design. At the end, he reserved a decent chunk of time to testing out his new mech in a holistic manner.

"Let's start with the internal frame."

The skeleton of the base model disproportionately favored the waist and legs. The Hoplite put an enormous amount of stress on the legs when it initiated its powerful dash.

Ves decided not to mess around too much with the internal frame. Any minor change he made here cascaded into a ton of follow-up effects. The basic design of the frame already worked okay. He merely updated the two-hundred year old design to modern standards and rigorously tested his changes. The frame's upper portion resisted heavy impacts a little better.

He turned to the core components next. He did not swap out any of the core parts, but trimmed their design in order to fit its current use. A real mech needed to be robust and last for years. A virtual mech only had to last a couple of team battles at most. The Hoplite offered a lot of redundancies at the cost of putting on a lot of weight.

Due to their self-contained nature, the modifications he made to the power reactor, engine and other parts required little time to test. Lindholm obviously licensed these components from specialist equipment manufacturers, so Ves found very few instances where he could optimize the design even further.

"Those manufacturers and research institutes make their living off licensing their products. They must have spent years in optimizing their builds."

The lack of faults prevented Ves from making gains without losses with regards to these components. Thus, he mainly exchanged robustness for reduced mass in a proportional relationship. Ves considered the tradeoffs he made to be worth the cost.

After that, he moved on to the next phase. He devoted a lot of time on reworking the internal layout of the mech from the ground up. With his Journeyman-level Mechanics and Apprentice-level Electrical Engineering, Ves chose to focus on increasing the mech's range of motion.