[401-600] THE MECH'S TOUCH

Chapter 440: Built to Raid

Though Ves still felt a little bewildered about it since his accomplishments back home shouldn't have affected him like this, he decided to roll with the punches.

In preparation for the new tasks Professor Velten expected him to complete, Ves needed to get up to date with various protocols and technical data. The extra reading imposed on him didn't help so much because much of the true secrets of the three actively developed designs of the Flagrant Vandals remained enclosed inside impenetrable black boxes.

Though it annoyed him to be deprived of how certain key components worked, he slowly realized that it wasn't just a matter of secrecy. The professor also wanted to preserve his sanity. Spending the last couple of days trying to digest the new information already strained his mind somewhat, though his mental fortitude was a lot stronger than anyone realized.

"The so-called higher concepts don't seem so nebulous now that I think about it." He muttered. "The main reason why they are so dangerous is because they can potentially ruin someone's design philosophy."

From the brief instructions the professor had given him, Ves needed to be very prudent with what he read. Ves remembered what she said back then.

"The process of learning is one of the strengths of a civilized race. Each generation, the human race advances a little more because they learned from the mistakes of their predecessors. Yet we spend so much of our lifetime learning from others that we risk losing the ability to think for ourselves. There are lots of dangers involved with indiscriminate learning. Besides learning faulty information, you also risk narrowing your perspective on matters. Once this transfers to your developing design philosophy, you essentially become prematurely locked to someone else's stance on mechs."

Basically, Velten wanted Ves to study up so he could be of more use, but not go too far with his learning unless he wanted to destroy his ability to cope with the unknown and design mechs that could truly be called as his own work.

Ves knew she had a point, and as much as Ves wanted to dismiss the risks, he couldn't. Though he wouldn't get confused by the higher concepts, the danger to design philosophy and artistic vision remained as potent as ever. The more he learned, the more he agreed with the solutions of the original designers, and the less he tried to figure out alternative solutions.

Designing mechs eventually needed a hands-on approach. The more successful mech designers never reached their heights by relying on learning alone. They also applied their knowledge and tested the boundaries between what they knew and didn't know if it would be possible.

Thus, as much as Ves wanted to delve into the depths of the archives, he forced himself to pull away.

"I know enough about the three designs to get the gist of them all."

He mainly read up on the other two designs developed in-house by the Vandals. Both the Inheritor light skirmisher and the Akkara heavy cannoneer served vital purposes that underpinned many of the strategies employed by the Vandals. Ves needed to become as familiar to their nuances as he understood the Hellcat hybrid knight.

The Vandals heavily slanted towards spaceborn operations.

It was obvious that they designed the spaceborn Inheritor design to be fielded in large numbers. The mech excelled at raiding fleeing trade convoys, but was pretty much useless in many other situations.

The spaceborn Hellcat design served as the big brother of the Inheritor mechs. Larger, more powerful and exceedingly more expensive, the Vandals only needed a couple of them to stiffen up a company of Inheritor mechs.

As for the dual-purpose Akkara design, it provided the Vandals with a heavy amount of ranged firepower, albit in an immobile package. By sacrificing mobility, it was able to field a lot more firepower and armor than usual.