The Mech Touch (Web Novel)

5662 Competitive Pressure

The Fey Fianna was the first product that could truly be regarded as a mainstream mech model.

In a time where the Hyper Generation had just begun, the Living Mech Corporation cleverly took advantage of a momentary gap in the market and displaced the established brands by releasing a killer drone mech line!

As copies of the Standard Edition rapidly began to fall into the hands of many second-class mech forces, they quickly started to make good use of its many excellent properties.

As a modern hyper mech that happened to be among the easiest drone mechs for mech pilots to get started with, a lot of outfits fell in love with its myriad of capabilities!

One of the greatest disadvantages of a typical mech force was their lack of unit diversity.

This used to be an advantage during the Age of Mechs. In times of peace where the Big Two heavily limited the scope of human-to-human warfare, mechs were more than sufficient to fight the battles that mattered.

Other unit types such as infantry and tanks had their respective uses, but devoting most of the industrial and warmaking potential towards mechs yielded so many advantages that they had more than proven their worth.

However, now that red humanity had begun to fight against a foe that did not play by the rules based on mechs at all, the flaws of developing an overreliance on mechs alone became increasingly more exposed.

The Age of Mechs had come to an end. More and more people gradually realized that the time had finally come for them to graduate from the simpler times of the past.

The four centuries of uninterrupted peace and prosperity in the Milky Way had been a golden age for mechs, but also caused a lot of humans to forget about the usefulness of other unit types.

The Red Fleet experienced a resurgence as it neatly took advantage of the shortcomings exposed by the Red War.

There were good reasons why warships had long served as the dominant war weapons in the conflicts throughout the history of the Milky Way and the Red Ocean!

Their incredible sizes alone easily allowed them to overpower anything else by relying on brute force alone.

This was one of the reasons why the people of the middle zones and lower zones embraced the Auxiliary Warship Program with so much enthusiasm. They finally gained a chance to rely on the same kind of assets that their alien foes took for granted!

The comfort and reassurance provided by warships far exceeded that of mechs. The former had become a lot more mysterious to people nowadays. Every child of the Age of Mechs had grown up in a time where warships had long been removed from their daily lives.

The destruction wrought by alien raiding fleets and the difficulty of defeating enemy warships had caused these vessels to become the latest boogeymen for many red humans.

Gaining a chance to serve on locally built human warships finally gave red humans an opportunity to conquer their fears and use them against their own enemies!

As the rollout of auxiliary warships slowly started to ramp up, the mech industry did not remain idle.

Mechs enjoyed focused development for such a long period of time that their sophistication and combat effectiveness far exceeded that of any other small craft!

The depth and variety of mechs boggled the imagination. The strongest civilization of the Milky Way had poured so much time and energy into elevating all of their aspects that not even the vaunted phasefighters could fight mechs on an equal level.

The fact that many courageous mech forces not only dared to attack alien warships but actually secured a lot of victories in the process was proof that mechs had already broken through the limitations of small craft!

During the second year of the Age of Dawn, two trains of thought had gradually emerged among the populace.

One of them favored a combined arms approach. These were the people who became fed up with the limitations of mechs and favored a diversification approach.

Mechs, warships and possibly other unit types had to work together in order to attain the best results!

The prevailing theory was that only by combining their strengths and covering for their respective weaknesses would they be able to win enough victories to avoid falling behind in the REd War.

There was no other way for red humanity to stand a chance against the immense quantity of alien warships bearing down on human-occupied space!

However, pretty much every human alive today had grown up in a time where the regime of mechs dominated many aspects of society.

People developed blind belief in the superiority of mechs. They especially worshiped mech pilots who transcended their mortal limitations and stepped onto the path of godhood!

With eight immensely powerful god pilots as its standard bearers, the monstrously large and powerful mech community still wielded an immense amount of influence over human society!

While the Red Fleet had to build up public support from scratch, the Red Association had already become deeply rooted in the daily lives of a lot of people!

Mechs had their flaws, but their strengths could not be denied.

Unlike the crews serving aboard warships, mech pilots had a chance to break through and become expert pilots, ace pilots and maybe even ascend to godhood and become one of the top powerhouses of the dwarf galaxy!

The military infrastructure of much of red humanity was already geared towards mechs. The immense economies of scale, the gathering of a lot of mech supply chains into highly efficient and mature industrial hubs and the huge amount of personnel who specialized in every aspect of a mech's product life cycle granted them so many advantages that it would take forever to explain!

The point was that since human civilization was already geared towards making the best possible use of mechs, people may be better off sticking to their existing strengths rather than trying to switch gears.

There were enormous risks associated with switching a lot of infrastructure towards the construction of warships as opposed to mechs.

The mech industry was also fiercely protective of all of the rights and influence that it had accrued over the centuries.

With the strong support of the Red Association, the mech industry did everything in its power to maintain its dominance.

It was not used to being put on the defensive. The artificial monopoly that mechs enjoyed in the Milky Way no longer held true anymore. For the first time in centuries, mechs had to prove their worth and compete against other combat platforms!

Many mech designers eagerly accepted their challenge. It was not just their personal prosperity and raison d'etre that were at stake.

No. This struggle transcended the individual and threatened the survival of the entire of their collective industry!

Every mech designer had a duty to defend their industry and prevent mechs from being regarded as inferior products that needed to make way for better alternatives such as warships!

The release of the Fey Fianna helped a lot because its value proposition was so much higher than earlier products that it renewed a lot of people's confidence in mechs.

More importantly than that, the Fey Fianna taught the rest of the mech industry how mechs could exceed their prior limitations and employ more creative measures to meet the changing needs of the market.

Fighting against a fleet of genuine warships required a different set of skills and tools than fighting against another mech force!

Mech designers who were far too slow to adjust to the changing circumstances quickly saw their market positions disintegrate.

However, there were more than enough bold and creative mech designers who managed to move quickly enough to successfully address the needs of customers who still had faith in mechs.

Even if mechs themselves had their flaws, the use of spurs such as in the case of the Fey Fianna vastly increased their versatility and usefulness when fighting against warships.

Many mech forces managed to win difficult fights and reduce their casualty levels by a large extent by utilizing lots of fey in combat!

The disposable living spurs took on a lot of dangerous roles and regularly got destroyed in combat.

Yet because they were smaller, weaker and more compact than mechs, it was easy for any decent mech force to stuff thousands of spare fey in their cargo holds.

In addition, one of the hidden advantages of using living fey was that their living personalities did not actually die.

They just went back to their base mech and waited for the machine to acquire a replacement fey before the subordinate spirit took its place again!

A lot of first-time buyers of living mechs gradually began to familiarize themselves with the true meaning of LMC products!

In any case, under the backdrop of changing times, the mech industry did not show any weakness towards the resurging warship industry.

As the vibrant mech market continued to generate a lot of buzz due to the releases of other powerful hyper mech models, many mech insiders assumed that Professor Ves Larkinson and the Living Mech Corporation had already released all of their powder.

It was difficult to imagine that a Senior Mech Designer and a fairly modest player in the mech market could support the development of another explosive bestseller.

Even the strange news that the Larkinson Clan had somehow become a big shareholder of a large Rubarthan mech manufacturer did not dispel this assumption.

They were all wrong.

On a certain day, the CEO of Isthmus Manufacturing decided to hold a product reveal event.

This was highly unusual because Isthmus Manufacturing never stood out as a producer of original designs. It had always placed itself as a convenient large-scale manufacturer of mainstream mech models from many different sources.

There was no no need for Isthmus to take risky gambles and compete directly against other mech companies for market share.

It was much more comfortable for Isthmus to leech of the success with successful mech companies instead!

This was why the mysterious announcement generated a lot of unusual buzz in the Rubarthan mech community.

There was no way the CEO would hold a high-profile event just to introduce an average second-class mech design.

A lot of journalists smelled an interesting story. This was especially the case when Isthmus Manufacturing cleverly utilized its familiarity with the Rubarthan media landscape to drop subtle hints and raise people's expectations for this product reveal.

All of these signs showed that Isthmus Manufacturing was so confident in its upcoming release that it did not hesitate to make a spectacle out of this event.

People wondered what Isthmus Manufacturing had managed to obtain that merited so much attention.

If the mech company had overestimated the appeal of its upcoming product, then its competitors would not hesitate to take advantage of the resulting flop to embarrass the mech manufacturer!

Competition within the Rubarthan Pact was intense. The profits were high, but they were only a limited number of players.

Was the confidence of Isthmus justified or had its leaders overestimated the value of its upcoming product?

Many people remained optimistic. A company as well-run as Isthmus was not led by fools. If Micky Tarukan was willing to put his name and face behind this upcoming product, then it had to be legitimate!

This was why a lot of Rubarthan journalists, mech designers, mech commanders and other related individuals attended the event at the company's massive exhibition center next to its headquarters.

The Impresario Principality had drawn the attention of a lot of second-raters in the Rubarthan Pact.

Genuine Rubarthan citizens had little interest in second-class mechs so they did not bother to tune in, but they would probably come to regret their decision by the end of the day.

As a lot of media began to cover the event, Micky Tarukan appeared in front of his massive audience in a hall that was tailor-made to showcase the mechs produced by his company.

"Welcome everybody. Today is a day that mech pilots shall rejoice. This is because this will be the first time that our valiant heroes and defenders can gain the opportunity to wield the power of a god, if only for an instant."

That certainly built up a lot of interest.