Though Yelkin was young, he was remarkably bright as far as Ves could tell. Even he felt tempted to take the teenager under his wing.
In the past, he might have considered soone like Yelkin to be his younger brother of sorts. Ves briefly thought back of his brief interactions with Oleg.
It was different now. He had grown older and advanced to Journeyman. No matter how young he was when he reached this state, no one ever considered a Journeyman to be a youngster anymore.
At his age and rank, he was catapulted to the ranks of mid-level ch designers. He had reached the phase in his career where it no longer made sense for him to be buddies with other beginning ch designers and ch design students.
Instead, an invisible gulf had ford between him and the aforentioned people. As an older, wiser and vastly more successful ch designer, he had to think about starting to take on his own students.
In fact, he already did, though he didn’t think he was doing much to guide his current students. Gloriana had already taken on the responsibility of teaching Rennie and Maisie Ann so Ves only had to make sure that Maikel and Zanthar were on the right track.
To be honest, Ves hadn’t invested too much in the two young n. Part of that was because the original purpose for teaching them had partially beco redundant now that Ves had broken off from the Larkinson Family.
Unlike before where only a trueblood Larkinson must take over his legacy in the future, there were over fifty other individuals in the Design Departnt who had the potential to carry on his mantle.
Whether Larkinson blood flowed through their veins or not didn’t matter to Ves. Anyone who was a mber of the clan and connected to the Larkinson Network was trustworthy enough in his eyes.
Still, Ves didn’t want to leave a job half-finished, so he simply carried on with instructing Maikel and Zanthar, if only to gain so valuable teaching experience.
One of them might even be successful like Ketis, who was very close to becoming a Journeyman herself.
"Are there any other students studying under Dr. Navarro like you?" Gloriana curiously inquired as she held Clixie to her c.h.e.s.t.
"Miaow."
The feline looked quite curious at the huge tree structure. It was as if she was itching to climb it all the way to the top!
"I’m the only one so far. The other ch designers working for Adaptive Solutions are just assistants." Yelkin answered.
"How many assistants are working for his company?"
"Around hundred, more or less. They tend to co and go once in a while. So gain newer and better opportunities, while others are in the need of employnt after they graduated with a degree in bioch design."
Gloriana sent a sharp glance at Ves.
Her ssage was very clear. If a Journeyman ch Designer who only sold tens of thousands of chs a year was able to employ a hundred assistants, why shouldn’t they be able to do better?
Ves minutely shook his head.
It wasn’t the sa. Yelkin’s story made it clear that the Novices and Apprentices who chose to work for Adaptive Solutions hardly developed any loyalty or commitnt to their employer. They just wanted to earn their paychecks while gaining so valuable experience and learning resources along the way.
Those kinds of ch designers weren’t suitable to Ves. They weren’t interested in signing on to the Larkinson Clan on a permanent basis either.
While there was nowhere to go right now for any assistant that quit working in the Design Departnt, it was best to hire loyal and obedient assistants right from the start.
Ves needed people with the right mindset in order to make sure that the design teams operated smoothly without needing to play nanny. This was definitely going to be at least five tis as hard if he began to recruit second-class ch designers.
Even the most average second-class ch designers were quite full of themselves! Their overall quality was still leagues ahead of any third-class ch designer due to the stricter entry requirents and greater study load.
He wasn’t even sure if he’d be able to recruit enough assistant ch designers that were willing to play by his rules during his stay in Prosperous Hill.
As Ves wondered about his recruitnt issues, the group finally passed through a huge entrance.
The interior of the tree-like structure looked similar to how it was outside. However, the atmosphere was different, both literally and figuratively.
As a facility that was largely devoted to repair, maintain or upgrade the products sold by Adaptive Solutions, it was not set up like a repair facility for classical chs or machines.
He did not encounter a boisterous hall where bots, production equipnt and crews of ch technicians handled a lot of tal parts. Instead, he ca across strange pools filled with murky liquid. Biochs with visible battle damage were partially subrged in each pool.
Nobody attended to these organic machines. The only humans in the hall were a sparse amount of personnel who wore lab coats and checked the consoles installed next to every pool.
Yelkin seed to know what Ves and the rest were wondering about. He smiled at their puzzlent.
"It doesn’t look exciting, but this is how biochs are repaired."
"I thought biochs are able to regenerate to so extent. Is it necessary to send so of these chs back? They don’t have a scratch on them as far as I know."
"Any living machine that either incurred heavy damage or lacks the special materials to regenerate their core components need to be sent back to us." Yelkin calmly explained. "They also get sent back if they are in need of getting updated to a newer iteration of their design."
Ves raised his eyebrow. "They actually get upgraded like this?"
"Sure. The ch is already doing most of the work itself. You just need to put the necessary nutrients and energy close enough for them to be able to sustain any regeneration or transformation processes. That’s what the pool is for. They are all genetically programd for this. The supervisors you see are rely there to make sure that no mutations or any other oddities occur. It’s easy enough to undo an unintended change when it is just taking place, but it’s a lot harder to undo it after the ch has completed its transformation."
The soupy pools looked like a cross section of an exobeast’s stomach. Ves certainly wouldn’t want to swim in it. All of the acids and other dangerous materials mixed into the liquid would probably corrode his body in an instant!
Yelkin led the group upwards. Fortunately, they didn’t have to take the long way up and ascend via the spiralling surface. They instead entered a large elevator installed near the center of the hollow tree trunk structure.
The ride upwards was fast and smooth. Once they reached at least two hundred ters upwards, they entered a floor that was no longer occupied with any pools.
It was instead set up as an exhibition room where many of Frederico Navarro’s ch designs were put on display.
What impressed both Ves and Gloriana was that the chs put on display were not projections or simple scale models.
"Are they..." Gloriana asked in a fascinated tone.
Yelkin grinned. "That’s right. These are actual, physical chs that are genetically and biochanically identical to our real products. My teacher has just tweaked their growth setting so that they never grow beyond the scale of a human."
There was a greater aning in the scale that Dr. Navarro chose for his iconic biochs. Seeing them put on a raised pedestal where the light shone at them in the most flattering way made them look oddly.. familiar.
"They look like mutated humans." Gloriana straightforwardly remarked.
The biochs were humanoid in appearance. Each of them looked like people who Dr. Navarro had skinned, causing them to look like the victims of a serial killer. If not for the different pignts of their fleshy surface, it would have been far too easy to confuse them for human bodies instead of scaled-down biochs!
"I don’t see any biochs with exoskeletons in this display room." Ves comnted.
"My teacher is not a fan of that style. Hard exoskeletons interfere with the transformations that he is known for. While covered biochs do have their place, Dr. Navarro is not in the business of designing them. He is quite content with the flexible chs he has designed up to this point."
Many biochs were covered by exoskeletons of sorts. N.a.k.e.d flesh alone was far too vulnerable and soft to withstand attacks by themselves. Flesh was seen as the equivalent of internals in classical chs, so they should be protected from damage as much as possible. Grown exoskeletons neatly addressed this need.
However, there was another school of bioch design that favored ’n.a.k.e.d’ or fleshy biochs. Humanity encountered plenty of exobeasts throughout the galaxy who were able to resist a huge amount of punishnt with their muscle density and the toughness of their flesh alone!
By extracting this tissue and researching it to the point where they were able to reverse-engineer and cultivate the hard muscle mass themselves, they could be grown on an industrial scale for use in chs and other applications.
Ves looked quite impressed at the seemingly ’skinless’ biochs. It was undoubtedly harder to design a good ch without the benefit of a hard exoskeleton.
The latter took a lot of cues from classical ch design. Other than the fact that the materials and production thods were different, classical chs and covered biochs shared many of the sa design principles, thereby making it easy to succeed in designing one that could achieve comrcial success.
In fact, so bioch designers even eschewed grown armor plates and simply bolted on tal plates instead in order to shorten the growing period!
Then there were biochs that took a more radical turn from conventional ch design.
Uncovered biochs were significantly harder to design. The defensive properties of fleshy chs were vastly different. While their surface wasn’t as damage resistant, much of their muscle mass exhibited a uniform degree of damage resistance.
An egg shell was quite hard, but the application of a sufficient amount of force would eventually lead to a breach. Once a hole had ford, the vulnerable internals were highly susceptible to damage.
In contrast, a thick block of cheese offered pretty much the sa level of resistance whether it was applied to the surface or deeper inside the biomachine.
The reality was more complicated than that, but this was a convenient way to understand the resistance profile of a fleshy bioch.
As long as the quality of the muscle mass of a bioch was high enough, its damage resistance could easily surpass that of a covered bioch or classical ch!
After walking past a dozen interesting uncovered biochs, Ves asked another question.
"Is it possible to pilot these mini chs?"
"Of course, sir. We don’t stick tiny ch pilots in them, but it is easy to insert a small transceiver in place of its usual c.o.c.kpit. A ch pilot imrsed inside a simulator pod can remotely connect to these display pieces and control them in the manner of an actual ch."
That sounded interesting, but not entirely practical. While it sounded like a great idea to field infantry-sized chs, the signal that enabled them to be piloted from a distance could easily be hijacked or scrambled by enemies.
An odd idea suddenly entered his mind.
The reason why both organic and chanical mini chs were impractical was due to the vulnerability of their control chanism.
The ideal solution was for them to be controlled by a tiny ch pilot, but that was absurd for obvious reasons.
Yet what if there was an alternate solution? What if he could stuff a pilot inside these mini chs who had no body?
For example, Ves managed to harvest the near-complete spirituality of Venerable Foster after the previous battle. What would happen if he tried to integrate it with a human-sized ch?
Would he.. be able to recreate an expert ch on a human scale?
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