It took three weeks for the convoy to ander through Republic space, dropping a couple of ships off at every star system along the way, before it reached the Tarry System. By then, the convoy only consisted of a handful of ships.
The three ch designers noticed none of that. The crew kept them in their assigned compartnt and never issues any notifications except to warn them of FTL transitions.
As a group of outcasts, none of them shared much in common, nor did they speak too much about their background beyond the basics.
The restrictive passenger compartnt contained nothing but furniture and food. The few projectors they found couldn’t be turned on to display a news feed or outdated dramas.
Thus, with nothing else to do, they shifted to talking about the only thing they had in common.
"What are the nuances of designing aerial chs? What do you have to take into account?" Ves asked as he sat across the table from Laida.
"Aerial chs are designed specifically according to a range of gravities. Most designs work best at 1.0 g, the standard gravity of Old Earth, because most states prioritize on terraforming planets that closely match this gravity."
"Not all planets feature standard gravity. A significant amount of planets have gravities that range from 0.5 g to 2 g."
Though the woman was rather shy when it ca to her personal life, she carried herself with a bit more confidence when it ca to her expertise.
"That’s why a ch that’s designed to operate at 1.0 g will always lose against a ch designed to operate at 0.6 g on a 0.6 g planet."
"Why is that so?" Ves furrowed his brows. "A ch that’s rated to fly at 1.0 g carries a much stronger flight system. I can understand why it won’t be able to perform as effective in a 2.0 g environnt where gravity is twice as strong, but if the gravity is forty percent weaker, shouldn’t it be forty percent stronger?"
"You landbound ch designers are all the sa." Laida rubbed her head. "You have to realize that aerial light chs devote up to half of their volu and carrying capacity to their flight systems alone. I can’t say too much about dium chs, but for light chs, every cubicle centiter is as precious as exotics. Space that could have been used to strengthen the ch’s armor or firepower instead has to be dedicated to powering the flight system or shunt away its heat."
"Ah. So it’s a matter of priorities. So if I understand you correctly, an aerial ch that’s designed to fly in 0.6 g will allocate less capacity to supporting the flight system?"
"Correct." Laida bobbed her thin head, causing her bun of hair to bob in a cute fashion. "You can say that such a ch is becoming less of an aerial ch and more of a landbound ch. In extre cases, such as small moons or large asteroids, an aerial ch could theoretically make due with a handful of anti-grav modules for three-dinsional propulsion, though the lack of atmosphere in those environnts is better suited to spaceborn chs."
"What’s the difference between spaceborn chs and aerial chs?"
"Early on, there wasn’t any difference. chs with flight systems did double duty because it was more affordable to design and produce a single model that could do both than dedicate two separate models entirely. It’s only later that the two classifications ca into being."
"Because of specialization?"
"Yes. A ch designed to operate in space doesn’t need to accommodate for gravity. Instead, they have to be designed to withstand a lot of g-forces and rapid changes in course. As for aerial chs, they need to be able to retain their balance in the air at all tis. Their flight systems are also tweaked to be highly efficient in counteracting the force of gravity that is being exerted from below."
Laida freely explained all of the nuances behind designing aerial chs. Ves heard about so of these maxims, but never in such detail and accompanied by the personal insight of a ch designer who knew what she was talking about.
Of course, Laida didn’t explain her insights for free. Among ch designers, an exchange of this nature required Ves to put up knowledge of equal value.
As Laida finished providing Ves with a general overview of aerial chs, she began to ask her own questions. "What do you need to pay attention to when you design an original ch on your own?"
"A lot of things. There’s too much to ntion. Leaving aside the material requirents such as possessing the right licenses and having access to the production equipnt, designing a ch is mainly a test of your vision."
"Vision?" Laida frowned as she pursed her lips. "What is vision?"
That caused Ves to stare at Laida as if she forgot to wear a helt on a spacewalk. "You studied at the Ansel University of ch Design, right? Don’t they teach you the importance of vision in their classes?"
Laida still looked clueless. "They primarily focused on teaching the sciences to us. The school calls it setting a firm foundation. Without knowing the math and science behind designing chs, there’s no chance of becoming a qualified ch designer."
Through their talks, Ves found out that Laida was indeed fairly competent in that area. Her intelligence couldn’t be underestimated and it was impressive how well she grasped the chanics of designing an aerial ch.
However, Ves found it really strange that her school neglected to teach the artistic side to ch design.
"Designing chs is both an art and a science. Building up a foundation sounds good and all, but that doesn’t prepare you to design a ch on your own. Did they even teach you the steps you needed to follow to develop an original design?"
"...No. Many graduates of the AUMD are expected to learn these lessons after graduation. A lot of promising alumni take in the most promising graduates and teach them the ropes."
Despite her talent in learning, Laida fell outside their scope. Her hotown of Haston did not fit in the elite society of Ansel.
She was lucky that other employees still valued her AUMD degree. She reluctantly joined a design studio as a junior assistant and enjoyed a first-hand glimpse on how the designers of the studio created new aerial ch designs.
However, the design studio’s generosity had limits. the senior designers never seriously grood her into becoming a senior designer in their studio.
Perhaps that was why Laida radiated a lack of confidence.
"Laida, designing an original ch is not that hard." Ves said softly. "It cos from the heart, not the mind. True, a ch is a technical product that can be broken down in a set of paraters, but if everything can be solved with numbers, why don’t we leave the job of designing chs to AIs?"
Creating a complex war machine the size of a building opened up an endless amount of possibilities. Its design could take on countless of shapes. So of them might be better than others, but none could claim to be perfect. Even the strongest processors in the galaxy would never be able to derive the perfect ch design.
Because it didn’t exist.
"Rittersburg might not be the most renowned institution in the Republic when it cos to ch design, but the thod they taught has served well in my career."
Ves understood why the AUMD took a different approach. For Novices and Apprentices, it was indeed important to accumulate as much knowledge as possible. Soone who didn’t know the answer of one plus one could forget about designing a ch.
For the next half hour, Ves conveyed her with a brief introduction of the basic approach on how to design an original ch.
It started with setting a vision. Without a solid clue on what you wanted to design, your work wouldn’t be constrained by any rules. ch designers who forgot about vision often strayed from their initial intentions and let their designs to be affected by feature creep and disharmony.
Only after a designer established a vision for their ch could they begin to follow the other steps. Ves briefly explained on what she needed to pay attention on when she moved to the draft stage.
"The specifics aren’t very important. A good draft design is flexible enough to accommodate a number of different component licenses. Don’t set anything in stone, or else you will limit yourself to components that turn out not to fit with your design."
After that ca feedback, the initial design phase, the initial simulation phase, the prototype testing phase, and depending on the amount of ti, manpower and resources available, the design process might loop back into a second round of designing and testing.
"That sounds exactly like how we work at the design studio." Laida nodded once she realized she ca back to familiar territory. "Designing chs is a very iterative process. Involving more designers allows for more directions to follow. Sotis, the lead designer of a project changes after each new iteration. The studio takes the original design and publishes it while the design team that’s in charge of the project is already developing a new variant."
Ves nodded in understanding. Adopting such a developnt cycle enabled the design studio to co up with a large amount of variants, each of them carrying unique traits due to the change in lead designers.
"When you work on your own, you don’t have the luxury to iterate all that much. Up to now, I only went back to the design board after one or two rounds of testing. Due to practical constraints, I couldn’t spend more than a couple of months on each of my original designs."
"That’s still an impressive achievent!" Laida softly praised as her eyes grew a little more worshipful at him. "I could never finish an original design within a year."
"A year is too long. If it takes you that long to get a design together, then you aren’t ready to embark on this venture."
"How can I speed up my work, then?"
"Think long and hard about your plan. When I designed my chs, I could have spent a lot more ti on modelling the performance of my design. Yet I only spent a month or so on this at most. Do you know why? Because the tradeoff wasn’t worth it. I could have spent another month at crunching the numbers, but it would have only improved my work by one percent or less."
Granted, many people cared about about that one percent. The whole point of the ch Corps drafting so many ch designers was to provide more manpower to operations that only achieved sothing substantial as long as it involved enough people.
It was a very brute force way of solving a problem, but as long as it worked, the ch Corps did nothing wrong.
Laida needed so ti to realize this point. "I learned never to let go of an opportunity to improve the design, no matter how slim the paraters grow. It’s hard for to adjust my thinking into letting these opportunities go."
"Trust , when you run your own business, you need to get used to balancing costs and priorities." Ves chuckled in amusent at her struggle. He felt as if he threw a cat in a bathtub full of water. "When designing your chs, you should never lose track of your vision for your design. Paraters are important, but I’d rather let go of so percentage points of performance and adhere to my vision than the other way around."
Ves truly provided a different perspective to Laida. Though his approach to ch design didn’t sound very complicated, it different substantially from everything she learned from the design studio. None of the senior designers there talked about a vision. The only thing that resembled a vision was a list of demands that their designs should et.
A different voice spoke out from the side. "You’re wrong, Mr. Larkinson."
They both turned around to see Pierce, who had just finished taking a shower.
"Why am I wrong?"
"Your thod is too rigid. It’s all well and good to visualize your end goal at the start of your design process, but designing a ch is a very fluid process. The more you flesh out your design, the more you start to reconsider the choices made at the start. You always know more when you are in the middle of designing your ch than when you started on the draft."
"The iterative cycle is ant to accommodate a ch designer’s desire to change his choice."
"That’s different." Pierce retorted. "It’s like putting a box of rusting bolts from one side of a storage room to the other side of the storage room. The correct decision here would be to take the box away from the storage room entirely."
This was a very different mindset from what Ves had encountered before.
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