[1-200] THE MECH TOUCH

Chapter 48: 2-star Designs

"Hey System, can I ask you something? Since I can earn 1 DP when I design a 1-star mech and 50 DP when I design a 5-star mech, what are the rewards for designing 2, 3 and 4-star mechs?"

[The base rewards for designing a 2-star mech is 5 Design Points. The rewards go up to 10 Design Points for 3-star mechs. The reward further increases to 25 Design Points for 4-star mechs. Do note that these rewards are lower when selling a mech based on your designs. Please work diligently in improving your designs so that you may work proficiently with more advanced models.]

In other words, the System told him to get off his butt and start designing higher starred mechs.

Though he owned a pair of 5-star virtual licenses, his skills were too insufficient. The Marc Antony generated only a piddling amount of sales, and Ves doubted that would ever change since he hadn't really brought anything unique to the design other than the X-Factor. And even that last feature got diminished when Ves relied on the game server to produce new copies of his mechs.

"I shouldn't bite off more than I can chew. Obsessing over the Caesar Augustus will just warp me into Kozlowski's design philosophy. I should keep an open mind and develop my own principles."

Considering his generous budget, he felt it was a good idea to start upgrading to 2-star designs. To be honest, he could skip a grade and purchase a few ultra-discounted budget 3-star virtual licenses, but he still had plenty of time to reach this grade with a proper reserve of cash. For now, he preferred to make a gradual progression through the generations of mechs. By experiencing each major generational group, Ves could increase his insights into the history of mechs and their major developments.

As soon as he made up his mind, Ves eagerly logged into the game for the first time in weeks. He happily sauntered over to the location in the virtual city where they sold the virtual licenses. As he stepped inside a shop featuring endless 2-star licenses of any kind, Ves felt as if he stepped into a candy store.

The 2-star mechs represented the age where the most viable ideas from the previous generations got refined. The simple division of light, medium and heavy mechs solidified and the designers of the time started to incorporate components that only worked in their weight-class. For example, a laser rifle meant to be wielded by a heavy mech would burden a light mech excessively as both its weight and power draw were too much to handle.

"Since I'm only going to work on medium mechs from now on, I can filter out all the outer crap."

The projection of mechs and components on sale lost much of its clutter.

"That's better."

The crowded view thinned out again when he removed the variants. He wasn't going to produce a variant of a variant, that was just stupid.

Ves started to browse the mech designs first. If he wanted to design a new variant, then the choice of the base model was of utmost importance. The previous times, he got handed out a model from the System. This was the first time he actually had a choice in determining his future direction.

He considered getting his hands on an animal-shaped mechs. The bird and mammal-shaped mechs that started to feature in the 2-star generations incorporated design philosophies that largely extended to today. If he wanted to branch out his mech range to something other than bipedal mechs, then right now was the perfect opportunity to do so.

"Hm, animal mechs are much less popular than their humanoid counterparts. While I don't face as much competition, my clientele also won't be as diverse."

Going by the potential sales he could generate, then Ves was not optimistic in excelling at designing animal mechs. The mech designers who worked with such abnormal mechs usually put their whole careers into optimizing such designs. As someone who only intended to dabble with the unusual designs, he could never make a living out of it by half-assing his efforts.