The Mech Touch

Whatever Lady Romanda Devos did at the secret Terran research institution, she clearly came away with a few odd ideas in mind.

After she got released from her contract, she immediately set up a small design studio and mech boutique that was meant to showcase the benefits of her design philosophy.

This was not a completely unfamiliar career choice for first-class mech designers who aspired to become entrepreneurs.

It was too difficult for them to gain any traction in the highly competitive first-class mech market. Terran Journeymen had it especially hard as the mech market was completely dominated by established market leaders that were always led by Master Mech Designers.

Journeymen with enough confidence and ideas would start small companies and publish mech designs that would never see any practical use in reality, but would showcase their specializations and as well as potential.

Major mech companies were constantly on the hunt for new talents and lucrative investments. A number of Terran mech companies obviously developed a slight degree of interest towards Lady Romanda's work, as they allowed her to contribute on some of the lesser and more niche product variations.

What Romanda brought to the table was not a first-class mech that struck its targets harder, nor was it capable of withstanding more attacks. Her products did not possess any remarkable endurance and did not come equipped with an advanced technological gadget that allowed them to take their enemies by surprise.

Instead, she focused on improving — or better phrased as reinventing — the cockpit of a mech.

Originally, mech designers envisioned the cockpit of a mech as the human control center of the machine.

It was an essential but rather undesirable addition to the mech frame. The reason for that was that the cockpit occupied precious space that could have been used to increase the hard performance of the machine in many different ways.

The cockpit space could have been devoted to fitting a larger and more capable power reactor.

The cockpit space could have been used to implement additional weapon systems to the mech.

The cockpit space could have been replaced by additional armor and structural components that vastly increased the robustness of the mech.

In short, there were many choices that mech designers would rather use up the capacity occupied by the cockpit.

They had no choice, though. A mech was defined by its ability to interface with a human mech pilot. Where else could the human in question go if not inside the upper torso, which was usually considered the safest part of a mech frame?

Any other choice was unworkable, or else it would have become a lot more common!

In the early years of the Age of Mechs, a few adventurous mech designers tried various alternate configurations, but they usually ended up in disaster.

For example, one mech designer who placed the cockpit in the head saw many of her products getting targeted in the head just to take out the pilot and render the machine inoperate in an instant!

Even though the head was a relatively small component of a typical humanoid mech, that did not change the fact that it protruded out of the torso and looked awfully exposed!

It was impossible to wrap the head with too much armor, or else it would unbalance the machine and unjustifiably increase the cost of the product.

At most, the mech designer who came up with this concept was only able to make certain adaptations such as shaping the head into an angled dome or pyramid that did not look as obvious as a target. The thickened and angled layers of armor also helped with blocking and deflecting incoming attacks more easily.

Ultimately, the mech industry came to a consensus that the only place this idea belonged was in the trash bin.

Another idea was to attach the cockpit as an external module that could be affixed to the upper or lower back of the mech.

This proposal worked great as long as the mech faced the enemy from the front and from the sides to an extent.

However, a lot of mech combat tended to be mobile and dynamic. Mechs presented their rear sections to enemies plenty of times. As long as an enemy unit managed to get a clear shot at the back of this unusual mech, the cockpit and the pilot could easily be eliminated.

Light skirmishers in particular just loved to kill enemy soldiers and disable the corresponding mechs at the same time by sneaking behind such a machine!

Another idea that gained traction for a time was to completely control the mechs by remote.

Different from turning a mech into a completely automated battle bot, the mech instead replaced the cockpit for more compact communication systems.

As long as a nearby mothership or base could establish a strong and secure connection with the cockpit-less mech, the latter could easily be controlled remotely with hardly any dip in performance!

Unfortunately, this idea crashed and burned as well as enemies that understood what they were facing simply amplified their jamming efforts.

All kinds of jamming, interference and ECM technologies quickly experienced rapid development for the sole purpose of giving people an easier way to defeat these remote-controlled mechs!

Once these techs reached a scary degree of development, remote-controlled mechs quickly turned into a failed experiment!

In the end, the mech industry came to a consensus that the current approach of installing a small and relatively moderately armored cockpit inside the chest cavity of a mech was the best all-round choice.

It was not perfect, but it protected the mech pilots from attacks coming in each direction pretty adequately.

The only vulnerability was to the rear, but that was because most humanoid mechs did not really bother to layer their backs with too much armor.

This compromise solution hit the sweet spot and became the established standard for the entire remaining duration of the Age of Mechs and beyond.

It became so ingrained that the vast majority of mech designers never even questioned this design choice anymore!

Not even Ves bothered to question why the mech industry set the standard for cockpits this way.

While mech designers were allowed to vary the cockpits a bit by increasing their armor, adding extra thrusters or even applying a stealth system around the shell, the moment they took it a step too far, people would begin to ask incessant questions about the point of all of these changes!

That was exactly what happened to Lady Romanda Devos. The side branch member of the Devos Ancient Clan enjoyed a good start and managed to earn quite a lot of recognition for excelling in her studies and working for two decades in a secret Terran research institution.

However, her star instantly dimmed when she boldly presented her design philosophy to the public.

Of all of the tech that she could specialize in, why did the descendant of the Devos Ancient Clan choose to dedicate her craft to turning a normal mech cockpit into a weird oversized contraption that behaved like a starfighter when separated from the mech frame?

It was an absurd idea!

It was a solution that was looking for a problem!

Officially, the Mech Trade Association designated her specialization as a Class IX design philosophy centered around Ultra-Large Enhanced Cockpit Systems.

This was a rather sophisticated description of an approach to mech design that broke several rules and contradicted numerous core principles of the mech industry!

The most egregious violation that Lady Romanda Devos committed with her works was the fact that she designed her work with failure in mind!

Before she thought about how her mechs would fare if they attained success in the battlefield, she already began to add features designed to mitigate the damage in the event of a loss!

There was nothing fundamentally wrong with this design approach. Beginning the design process by thinking what would happen if the machine broke down and the mech pilot was left to his own devices could lead to drastically higher survival rates for the user in question.

However, most of the mech community rejected this approach because they thought that Lady Romanda Devos was being overly defeatist whenever she designed her machines!

Mech pilots loved to be winners, and they did not really spend that much thought on what would happen if their mechs endured catastrophic damage that forced them to eject their cockpits.

They especially did not like to think what would happen if the enemy struck their machines so hard that their fragile cockpits got breached!

Whether these pilots were in denial or not, they would rather imagine themselves as the heroes of their own stories and make use of mechs that better enabled their fantasies.

A mech designed by Romanda did the opposite! It tore down their unrealistic fantasies and brought them back to reality in a brutal fashion by reminding them how safe they would be if they piloted her work.

All of these factors and more caused Romanda and her work to gain a rather infamous reputation in the Terran mech industry and community.

Due to the huge amount of space occupied by the ultra-large cockpits that characterized much of her works, any first-class mech that incorporated such a massive module tended to perform significantly worse than other equivalent machines!

The conventional first-class multipurpose mechs reserved more space for additional weapon modules, energy cells and all kinds of other useful parts and systems.

While their cockpits were admittedly not that capable of defending the life of the mech pilot once it got ejected into an open battlefield, the best way for mech pilots to make themselves vulnerable like this was to utilize the strong combat capabilities of their machines to win their fights outright!

As long as they defeated the enemy faster with the help of the superior performance of their first-class mechs, there was no need to worry about the inadequacies related to their cockpits!

In contrast, the first-class mechs designed by Lady Romanda performed worse on the onset due to the inclusion of her ultra-large cockpits. Though the Terran mech designer had taken steps to mitigate this performance reduction by sharing functions between her special cockpits and the rest of the mech, there was only so much she could do to avoid overlap between two fundamentally different craft.

Perhaps the only strong point of her work was that her specialization indeed delivered on its promises. Her first-class mechs offered an enhanced cockpit experience that allowed mech pilots to feel safe no matter the circumstances.

If their weaker and less impactful first-class mechs eventually fell in battle, the mech pilots could gain a 'second life' on the battlefield by continuing to pilot their enhanced cockpits like ultralight fighter craft.

They could either choose to persist in battle in an attempt to finish off their weakened opponents, or they could turn their fighter craft around and blitz back to their base or mothership with unparalleled speed and maneuverability!

It was due to the excellent performance of her ultra-heavy cockpits that Lady Romanda was still able to earn a living despite her tarnished reputation among the Terrans.

She was even able to build up a small but dedicated clientele of mech pilots who could essentially be described as cowards!

These mech pilots did not possess a warrior's heart. They feared combat, but were pushed into it due to circumstances outside of their control.

These were the ideal customers for Lady Romanda as they were willing to pay quite a premium to pilot a decent first-class mech that attained the highest pilot survivability rates out of all of the other products on the market!

Perhaps these scaredy cats would never be able to become greater than life and exceed their mortal limitations, but they didn't care. At least they were much more certain that they would live long enough to retire in comfort, unlike many of their other colleagues whose daredevil behavior often caused them to suffer mishaps over their careers!

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