The Mech Touch novel Chapter 1841

Chapter 1841 Better Shield

During the time William Urbesh underwent examinations, Ves and Gloriana turned their attention to other matters.

The day after the experiment, they returned to the design lab in order to design a custom revision of the Aurora Titan.

The variants developed by the two design teams gave Ves a lot of ideas and decent solutions.

Naturally, neither Ves nor Gloriana intended to borrow from them wholesale. The quality of the revision would only drop if they blindly took over the work of Novices and Apprentices.

When the pair settled down in a private design office, they began to plan out their own changes.

"This revision is not meant to renew the Aurora Titan line." Ves explained. "Instead, it's solely meant to upgrade a single copy, the one that my cousin Jannzi Larkinson has adopted."

"Does that mean you intend to fabricate a brand new Aurora Titan?"

Ves shook his head. "No. Jannzi cares a lot about her unique mech and developed a very strong bond with the machine. It's vitally important for her progression that she can maintain her bond with the Shield Of Samar. We can do so by ensuring sufficient continuity between the old version of this mech and the new version of the mech. She has to pilot the 'same' mech, essentially."

Not only did the Shield of Samar accrue some history and forge a bond with its mech pilot, it also carried the Ardent Wish!

Both of them were priceless qualities which couldn't be replaced!

Though Ves set a simple-sounding condition, Gloriana immediately recognized a problem.

"Modifying an existing mech inherently changes its properties. How many alterations can we get away with before the Shield of Samar is no longer the 'same' mech?"

"That's a good question."

He became stumped by this question.

How much could he change while still making sure the Shield of Samar still retained its identity as an Aurora Titan mech?

Ves knew from various modifications done to his mechs that they possessed a decent amount of tolerance towards these kinds of changes.

For example, the LMC was aware that some mech designer once swapped out many of the parts of the Blackbeak and converted it into a rifleman mech.

These changes, though drastic, still retained at least some portion of its X-Factor, thereby retaining its connection to the Black Phoenix, the Blackbeak's long-standing design spirit!

Maintaining the design spirit's connection with the mech was an essential requirement. Without its bond with Qilanxo, the Shield of Samar would never be able to work so well with Jannzi!

This clued Ves into the answer of this complicated question.

"The heart and essence of the Aurora Titan model has to be retained." He guessed. "What I mean by that is that the character, vision and concept should remain the same. If you think about it, an Aurora Titan is still an Aurora Titan if you strip out its armor system and replace it with something with similar or better properties. However, it's an entirely different story if you replace it with an uncompressed armor system that is vastly inferior."

"The former change retains or improves the defensive character of the Aurora Titan, while the latter change removes that to a large extent." Gloriana followed his logic.

"Correct. As the lead designer of the LMC, I've observed many different files on LMC mechs that have been modified by their owners over the course of their uses. The amount of Desolate Soldiers that have been modified far beyond their factory configuration and specs probably amount to more than 100.000 units!"

This was an incredible amount of modified mechs, enough for the LMC to harvest a huge amount of data and study it through countless angles.

One of the results of these studies was that an LMC mech had a range of tolerance towards modification and alteration. Smaller changes didn't affect its intrinsic character at all, but once they grew more significant, the glows of the mechs started to decrease.

This detrimental change reflected the increasingly smaller relation with the altered mechs and its original design spirit.

Once a mech changed beyond recognition, it no longer bore any direct relation to its original model! It had transformed into an entirely different mech that belonged to its own unique model!

After Ves summarized these observations to Gloriana, his girlfriend slowly nodded in understanding.

"I get it. To put it simply, the upgraded Shield of Samar has to be able to do what the old version of the mech can do. It doesn't matter if its performance drops a little bit! As long as its performance isn't absolutely terrible in an important aspect, it will still retain its original character! However..."

"However...?"

"Some variants are drastically different from the base model, but they're still part of the same product line. Take the Peaceful Soldier for example. It's designed to operate on land as opposed to the Desolate Soldier which is mainly a spaceborn mech. Are they still related to each other?"

"They are." Ves definitely said. "I think this is because of my specialty that I'm able to stretch the Desolate Soldier's identity to this extent in the Peaceful Soldier. If you or any other mech designer developed a variant like the Peaceful Soldier on your own, you would definitely damage its spiritual foundation!"

Though this sounded like a very pedantic issue, in truth it was extremely important for Ves and Gloriana to set these matters straight. Even though they hadn't managed to come up with a solid answer, they at least knew what to watch out for. If they proceeded to modify the Aurora Titan design without becoming aware of the potential pitfalls, then they might ruin the Shield of Samar as a result!