Ves approached his latest design process like a project. Gone were the days where he haphazardly designed a ch ad-hoc in week-long sessions. His improved skills gave him much more possibilities and opened his eyes to many factors he previously missed.
When he previously competed at Leemar, Ves had no ti to double-check his work. The brutal ti limits imposed by the rules forced him to follow his previous thodology of trusting his intuition that he got it right.
His latest project called for a cycle of design followed by testing and back to design. With his increased base of knowledge, he was able to wield the System’s many mathematical models without acting like a caveman.
With every design choice, he could verify the results through rigorous testing. He could find better solutions and avoid mistakes as long as he spent enough ti crunching the numbers.
Certainly, it took ti. Despite the System’s prodigious processing power, Ves could only draw a portion of its aweso capabilities. More than that, Ves might frequently resort to tweaking the models in order to simulate many different conditions.
He did not intend to lose sight of his initial goal. Before he began to design, he created a simple schedule.
"Let’s see. Three weeks should be plenty of ti to co up with a decent design. Any more than that and it’s not worth the effort. I’ll spend one week on shaping the design, and two weeks on refining it through modeling and simulations."
Ves also split the project up into different phases that corresponded to the parts he modified. He preferred to start from interior and work his way out, so the first phases dealt with the internal fra and the various internal components. Each ti he finished modifying the relevant components, he’d test them vigorously until he beca satisfied or ran out of ti.
He’d go through each phase in this manner until he combed over every part of his design. At the end, he reserved a decent chunk of ti to testing out his new ch in a holistic manner.
"Let’s start with the internal fra."
The skeleton of the base model disproportionately favored the waist and legs. The Hoplite put an enormous amount of stress on the legs when it initiated its powerful dash.
Ves decided not to ss around too much with the internal fra. Any minor change he made here cascaded into a ton of follow-up effects. The basic design of the fra already worked okay. He rely updated the two-hundred year old design to modern standards and rigorously tested his changes. The fra’s upper portion resisted heavy impacts a little better.
He turned to the core components next. He did not swap out any of the core parts, but trimd their design in order to fit its current use. A real ch needed to be robust and last for years. A virtual ch only had to last a couple of team battles at most. The Hoplite offered a lot of redundancies at the cost of putting on a lot of weight.
Due to their self-contained nature, the modifications he made to the power reactor, engine and other parts required little ti to test. Lindholm obviously licensed these components from specialist equipnt manufacturers, so Ves found very few instances where he could optimize the design even further.
"Those manufacturers and research institutes make their living off licensing their products. They must have spent years in optimizing their builds."
The lack of faults prevented Ves from making gains without losses with regards to these components. Thus, he mainly exchanged robustness for reduced mass in a proportional relationship. Ves considered the tradeoffs he made to be worth the cost.
After that, he moved on to the next phase. He devoted a lot of ti on reworking the internal layout of the ch from the ground up. With his Journeyman-level chanics and Apprentice-level Electrical Engineering, Ves chose to focus on increasing the ch’s range of motion.
Among all ch types, the knight had the most restrictive range of movents. It didn’t need anymore due to its plentiful armor and sluggish motions. This also made knights an ideal ch for trainee pilots to start with, because they didn’t have to master many maneuvers in order to beco proficient in piloting this type.
"The original Hoplite anly uses its spear to thrust forward with incredible montum. Lindholm didn’t design the Hoplite to fare well at a closer range. They even included an augnted shield in order to knock back any chs who ca into knife fighting range."
This presented a big problem to any ch designer who wanted to turn the Hoplite into a sword wielder. The ch lacked the responsiveness and range of motion to keep up with a serious clash.
Ves did not wish to compete directly with more experienced designers who tackled the sa problem. He only wished to transform the Hoplite into a proficient sword wielder while retaining much of the internal integrity of a knight.
He did not directly reference the old layout. Instead, he built up his own internal layout first before comparing it to the original version, spending a lot of ti in the process. Due to the need to maintain a focused intent, Ves required frequent breaks in order to finish this boring hurdle.
When he finally finished his own layout, he compared the new one with the old. The differences were imnse. He reconciled the two by adopting the best parts of both, and put the new sche through a barrage of tests.
With each iteration of tests and tweaks, the resulting design sche reached a new equilibrium. Ves succeeded in shaving off bits and pieces while keeping enough redundancies in place. The extra space allowed him to improve the range of motion of its arms.
At this point, Ves reached the halfway mark of his project schedule. He spent a significant amount of ti doing tests, but gained better results than before.
Along the way, Ves frequently paused his work when he couldn’t maintain his concentration. Since he cared deeply about imprinting the Instructor to his new design, Ves did not dare continue working when his mind started to fray.
In order to distract himself, Ves devoted the majority of his free ti to tutoring his new employee. Carlos also worked hard in trying to understand the assembly process, but achieved little success so far.
"This ch is a nightmare!" Carlos moaned during an evening after work. "It’s like soone stuffed two different chs in a single fra!"
Ves took a sip of a can of beer. "The Marc Antony isn’t pretty once you look past the armor. I did my best to simplify the ss, but there’s only so much I could do at the ti. I have so more ideas now. I’ll try them out once I finish my current project."
"You’re planning to update your only real product, right? I’ve been thinking about it while I’ve practiced fabricating it. Don’t you think the missile launchers are kind of redundant? Even the Caesar Augustus rarely finds an opportunity to make effective use of it. There’s not enough capacity or firepower behind the missiles to achieve anything aningful alone."
To be honest, Ves did not like the shoulder launchers either. They added unnecessary bulk for just two salvos worth of missiles. The mounts were troubleso to detach and even harder to put them back.
Yet Ves never considered removing them entirely. His ongoing work on the Hoplite variant gave him a better appreciation of the knight class. He gained a better understanding of what Jason Kozlowski wanted to achieve when he initially ca up with the design.
"The missile launchers are an essential part of the Caesar Augustus series. There are many hybrid knights that combine laser cannons with swords and shields, but very few of them dare to add a third weapon to the mix. The launchers can hold a variety of missile types and add much-needed flexibility to an inflexible ch."
"Inflexible is an understatent. The Caesar Augustus is as stiff as a board."
"It never tries to excel in this aspect in the first place. The Caesar Augustus is still a capable knight up close. Any ch pilot that has received advanced knight training should be capable of working around its weaknesses."
An advanced ch required an advanced ch pilot to make full use out of its capabilities. The normal rank-and-file pilots did not normally touch sophisticated models like the Caesar Augustus. The Marc Antony was basically the bargain bin version, but it still retained much of the advanced characteristics that made it difficult to master.
"I doubt most advanced pilots even care about the missile launchers."
Carlos had a point, but Ves still insisted on the missile launchers. Removing them turned his variant into a regular hybrid knight that competed directly against a large number of mature designs.
The next day, Ves went back to work. He finished the insides of the ch. Now he had to work on the most important part of a knight.
The Hoplite is similar to the Caesar Augustus in that both designs are clad in as much armor as possible. If they carried anything more, then they’d lose too much speed to be of any use when dodging enemy fire.
His main goal in redesigning the armor sche was to complint his previous work. He had to accommodate the ch’s increased range of motion without compromising its defense.
First, Ves stripped off the old armor sche and designed the broad strokes of the new one. His knowledge in tallurgy allowed him to leverage the properties of the alloys used in the Hoplite’s armor system in a modern fashion.
"Too bad the old armor has already benefited from armor compression. The only thing I can do is apply the existing formula to any existing plates."
With the help of dium Armor Optimization II, he refined the sketch into a precise shape. Once he started modeling his work, he realized the true value of this sub-skill. It did not rely give him better ideas on how to shape a ch’s armor.
No, the true worth of the Armor Optimization skills was to help him understand the more advanced simulations. More than that, he could also fine-tune the mathematical models to achieve a preferred outco. Furthermore, he saved quite a bit of ti by skipping redundant calculations and combining several models together.
Ves made full use of the extra ti he bought by refining the armor increntally. The improvents were marginal but welco. More than that, he caught two minor flaws and eliminated them before they could act as potential weak points.
The end product deviated quite a bit from the base model’s armor sche. Ves basically broke up the largest, stiffest portions of the armor in favor of smaller segnted plates. This increased the armor’s flexibility at the affected part without giving up too much defence.
To offset the vulnerabilities that ca with the increased amount of moving parts, Ves thickened many critical sections. He kept this to a minimum by modeling the result of every potential reinforcent. He decisively rolled back the changes when it hardly brought any benefits.
Now that he finished redesigning the fra of the ch, Ves turned to his variant’s equipnt. He left the Imperial Sword alone, since he lacked the expertise to know what he was doing. He was already satisfied with its current specifications.
As for the shield, Ves saw an opportunity to increase the reliability of its active systems. The number one complaint the Hoplite received was that the augnts often malfunctioned when put under pressure.
"It’s a two-hundred year old experint. Even if I’m not allowed to use more modern components, I can still see plenty of ways to strengthen the augnts."
It wasn’t as if Lindholm knew any better. Two-hundred years of progress in the Age of chs hadn’t birthed a technological revolution. Only a couple of high-end inventions caused a stir. The lower-end technologies only received incrental improvents.
Iron Spirit did not allow Ves to introduce any innovations that broke the 3-star limit. Much like he did elsewhere, he only implented optimizations that could still have been achieved two-hundred years ago.
Naturally, he didn’t limit himself to replicating the obvious. He sought to refine the augnts even further by building an improved shock absorbing shell around the fragile components. It took a lot finicking and testing before Ves tentatively accepted the latest iteration as the best he could do.
"Only a specialist or a much more experienced ch designer can do better."
Now that he finished going over the sword and shield, Ves put the entire package through a myriad of simulations. He asured its performance in a variety of environnts such as deserts and snow plains. He simulated combat against a host of different chs. He tested how the ch fared in a duel as well as in a large-scale battle.
Though the simulations had their limits, they all proved useful in catching weaknesses that only showed up under very specific circumstances.
For example, in an extrely hot environnt, the ch channeled an excessive amount of heat through a specific spot near the ch’s arm joints. This degraded the performance of the arms and increased its susceptibility to heat-based damage such as lasers. Ves modified the internal structure and the armor plating at those sections in order to plug the leaks.
After pushing through thousands of near-identical simulations, Ves finally had enough and called it a day. "I’m almost at the end of my three week deadline. It should be about ti to wrap up this design."
Ves was very proud of his design so far. The variant exceeded the original Hoplite in many aspects. Its specs easily reached the standard of what an Apprentice ch Designer should achieve.
If he approached the project in a casual manner, then the resulting design might only be eighty percent as good. Though he needed to spend a lot of ti to achieve that extra twenty percent performance boost, it was well worth the ti.
Now he only needed to put the finishing touches to his design.
"Wait a minute. I think I forgot sothing." Ves suddenly halted. He stood still for several minutes until he realized he forgot an old friend. "How could I forget about the Festive Cloud Generator?!"
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