The Mech Touch (Web Novel)
chapter-6477

The Carmine mechs that Veronica had in mind were designed to help humans fight against monsters.

By monsters, Veronica meant any god pilots, Star Designers, other True Gods, admirals and other warlords that sought to exploit the common folk to advance their own selfish desires!

However, it was far too difficult to raise humans into new generations of god pilots that could effectively launch a counterattack against the schemers and unwitting accomplices that destabilized their society!

If this experiment was successful, then his MW Carmine mechs would become responsible for birthing a lot of god pilots, many of whom previously lived ordinary lives, yet managed to distinguish themselves repeatedly on the battlefield.

Veronica had no expectation at all that most people would amount to anything. Norms that did not undergo formal mech piloting training should generally perform worse than professional mech pilots even with the help of HALM and Partial Convergence Blood Pacts.

Even so, there were always expectations. Those with greater talent, luck or discipline should be able to rise above the rest and excel in their own ways.

How many geniuses comparable to the Chosen Human had humanity missed out upon due to the fact that 96.5 percent of the population was not able to pilot mechs with the help of neural interfaces?

Now that the Carmine System completely eliminated this restriction, Veronica believed that the expanded mech community could welcome the rise of many new heroes whose hidden talents finally became useful!

Those were the true talents that Veronica designed his new Carmine mechs for. HALM and Partial Convergence Blood Pacts were meant to help these raw and uncut gems survive their first years as soldiers. This was when they were at their weakest and most vulnerable as they had not yet developed their potential or proven themselves worthy of greater investment.

Once they managed to survive this vulnerable period and successfully broke through, that was when they would get taken seriously.

They should no longer have any problems with controlling their mechs or beating most of the cannon fodder they encountered in battle.

What they truly had to be careful against was other champions, especially those that fought and honed themselves a lot longer!

Veronica did not expect that high-ranking Carmine mech pilots with poor foundations to be able to win duels against their professional counterparts.

The best way to increase the win rate of the former was by accelerating their growth! As long as their resonance strength was higher than that of their opponents, these expert or ace Carmine mechs should still be able to trounce other experts and aces! In order for Carmine mech pilots to speed up their growth, they still needed to participate in a lot of battles. Demonic cultivation was a process where these pilots could only grow stronger by preying on their defeated opponents.

This was very risky as Carmine mech pilots did not have the luxury of starting over if they ejected their cockpits.

Unlike the Yellow Jacket designs where their oversized organic cockpits or Biodomes essentially served as the cores for the living mechs, the cockpits of his MW Carmine mechs lacked this crucial advantage!

Once the mech frame was lost, the Carmine mech was as good as dead.

The Carmine mech pilots of the Milky Way therefore only had a single chance to make the most out of their piloting careers.

It was not that Veronica wanted to implement a version of the Biodome in her Carmine mech designs, but it was not feasible for several reasons.

The more extensive use of biotechnology increased the logistical burden on the Carmine mechs to an unacceptable level.

Veronica also could not count on Lady Romanda Devos to extend her design philosophy to the Milky Way.

If she had a P.P., then that would give their enemies an incentive to destroy it. There was no way to replace or substitute it as the secretive member of the Cosmopolitan Movement did not have an incarnation equivalent to Veronica in the Milky Way.

It was best to minimize the failure points of his upcoming Carmine mech design by limiting the design team to just Veronica and Master Willix.

While the limitations of the Carmine System would result in a lot of tragedies and setbacks for his future customers in the Milky Way, the harsher penalties for failure should at least draw out the potential of the best of them even further.

None of these Carmine mech pilots could afford to fail!

Only the best of them would be able to rise above their peers and become champions! Once they became high-ranking Carmine mech pilots, their employers should be able to commission a design team to upgrade the corresponding machines into expert. Carmine mechs or greater.

That still wouldn't remove the fundamental problem, but the upgrades should still increase the survival rate for all of these precious and irreplaceable expert and ace Carmine mechs!

could retreat with their machines intact.

As Veronica indirectly outlined her vision by expanding upon her sketches, Master Willix played devil's advocate and thoroughly queried the more questionable points of the bold new proposal.

For example, when Master Willix sketched out a few versions of upgraded Carmine mechs that possessed a few subtle vulnerabilities that might result in catastrophic failures in the cockpit, she posed a very important question in their shared mech designer language.

The Master Mech Designer essentially pointed out that the rate of breakthroughs was largely determined by the rules that governed the behavior of the Kingdom of Mechs.

If the Mech Trade Association wanted to hinder the MW Carmine mechs from producing expert pilots and ace pilots, the mechers could strangle breakthroughs by abusing their control over their Kingdom!

This was indeed serious concern to Ves. The current rules of the Kingdom of Mechs were already restrictive. Mech pilots needed to pass all sorts of invisible character tests in order to trigger a breakthrough process.

Veronica already thought about this potential vulnerability. She would never give the MTA an opportunity to blackmail her or invalidate her vision by changing the rules of the Kingdom of Mechs.

The Cyborg Cat grinned as she hastily sketched two different modular flight systems.

One was based on older but more stable technological paradigms. The other was based on newer and less proven technological advances, much of which originated from research conducted in the Red Ocean.

The cat eventually swiped the older flight system aside and paired the newer one with the proposed MW Carmine mech.

Veronica conveyed her decision to pair her upcoming MW Carmine mech design with the Red Kingdom as opposed to the Kingdom of Mechs!

She was confident that her clout and influence in the Red Ocean was great enough to prevent the Star Designers over there from blocking his insane and highly illegal Carmine mechs.

Of course, she would also have to promise that this mech would never show up in the

Red Ocean.

Master Willix certainly did not expect that the cat would resort to such a radical

solution!

It introduced multiple problems, such as weakening the ability of mech designers in the Milky Way to add their own specializations to the variants of the Carmine mech

designs.

It also prevented Master Willix or other mech designers from applying newer design philosophies that had only been realized in the Kingdom of Mechs as opposed to the

Red Kingdom.

The two used to be one, so they shared the same common base. Unfortunately, starting from the final day of the Survivalist conference, the two intangible Kingdoms had gone their separate ways, thereby causing subsequent advances in mech design to get split up as well.

This was not a big problem for now as only a couple of years had passed, but once a decade or more had passed, the divergence in mech development would become

increasingly more severe!

Veronica could only shrug and scratch her head at this problem. It was not a crippling

problem, just an annoying one.

The only way to truly solve this problem was to connect her MW Carmine mech

designs to the Kingdom of Mechs, but that was unlikely. The Cyborg Cat refused to believe in the goodwill of the Star Designers of the Milky Way, especially since she was not familiar with any of these legendary creators.

Master Willix contemplated the framework that Veronica had expanded upon.

It was only now that it looked viable enough to work at every stage. The combination of HALM, the Partial Convergence Blood Pact, demonic cultivation and the Red Kingdom should result in a deviously effective Carmine mech design, but also one that broke a record in terms of MTA violation!

Veronica would cement herself as one of the best innovators but also the worst war

criminals of the MW mech industry!

Countless norms would celebrate her as the Father-, err, Mother of Carmine Mechs!

Many mechers and other worried people would simultaneously curse her for designing exceedingly dangerous mechs that possessed more risk factors than a flimsy light skirmisher!

The danger of piloting his MW Carmine mechs was not small!

All of the aforementioned design applications devised by Veronica could go terribly

wrong.

High Autonomy Living Mechs introduced the risk of machines rebelling against their human masters.

Veronica liked to believe that her living mechs were all honest and obedient to their human mech pilots, but that was an unrealistic expectation. A conflict between Carmine mechs and their human pilots was bound to happen sooner or later. Partial Convergence Blood Pact came with the risk of contamination of the Carmine mech pilot by his Carmine mech.

This meant that the personality of the pilot might get overridden by the personality of his own machine, resulting in a partial or complete loss of identity!

The transcendence glow altered the behavior of the Carmine mech pilots, particularly

during stressful and dangerous situations, and encouraged them to make reckless decisions that they would otherwise reject!

Veronica feared that repeated exposure to the transcendence glow would indoctrinate

the Carmine mech pilots and permanently distort their personalities and attitude towards combat.

After a decade of hard fighting, would the pilots still retain enough of their former

selves to constitute the same individuals?

Demonic cultivation brought its own obvious risk factors. It was not for nothing that the mere idea of it was enough to disgust a lot of people, particularly the old guard who originally rebelled against the Five Scrolls Compact.

While Veronica tried to make sure to set up her upcoming Carmine mech designs to disincentivize mass slaughter and other dishonorable behavior, this was not a foolproof method.

It was still possible to 'hack' a Carmine mech and disable this secure measure if a

mech designer or cultivator knew what he was doing.

The Cyborg Cat could only do her best and hope that others would not be able to

jailbreak her Carmine mechs on a wider scale.

Finally, connecting her MW Carmine mechs to the Red Kingdom introduced another

host of problems.

Veronica was pretty sure that distance was not a problem due to the insane properties

of this off-shoot pinnacle work.

However, using the Red Kingdom to support a mech that was solely designed to be

used in the Milky Way might constitute a hostile incursion!

This was a big deal!

Once this connection became exposed, red humanity effectively proved its intention

to conduct active sabotage on original humanity.

That would escalate this problem to the highest level!

Even if the Star Designers and the god pilots of original humanity were too far away to

launch any counter attacks against red humanity, they could still point their

crosshairs at the Oblivion Empire!

Veronica, Helena and their mother would come under an even greater threat! The Cyborg Cat had very little confidence that the natural environment of the Nyxian Gap could protect them against the fury of so many tier 1 galactic citizens. Perhaps... the only way for them to safeguard their lives was by accepting the shelter of the Five Scrolls Compact!