Mecha Design Quest

With everything sorted out covering your supply chain, you got your orders placed and started work cutting steel on the hexapod. The basic skeleton was coming along nice and quickly, and your decision not to supercharge the engine made it very neat and easy to package things in the hull. What neatness and tidiness your engine had achieved, however, had been utterly blown away by the utter soup that was your transmission redirection system.

The problem was, you had an even number of power outputs, and needed an odd number of power outputs. This meant you needed to, at some point, recombine the two power streams to create the power outlet to run the radio's generator. This, plus a fourfold power splitter on each side, made an absolutely horrifying cludge that was a core part of your drive train. Stand testing revealed that of your nominal 610 horsepower out, you were only pushing 500 from the engine. From that engine, your horsepower should have theoretically been stepped down to around 80 horsepower per leg, plus four or five horsepower into the generator.

Instead, you were getting closer to seventy-five horsepower per leg, plus about ten horsepower into the generator, which had the very problematic habit of overvolting the outlet system that charged the batteries and ran the radio. This then tended to light the prototype on fire. Needless to say, everyone got very good at yelling "fire, fire, fire!" and chucking a fire grenade at the unit while someone pulled on a respirator and the foaming extinguisher.

To put it politely, this was intolerable. You needed to come up with a better solution to the transmission problem, and you needed to do it damn quickly. At this point, the main endurance limiting factor was how long until the generator caught fire- you hadn't even been able to run through a full tank of fuel yet!

The problem of the system catching fire every other day aside, you had been making excellent strides on the dry-fit prototype where you were laying out the internals. The dummy actuators and faux-control lines were coming along decently, the selected radio, an ER 52, was proving to be easily controlled from a remote panel, and you had a very workable layout designed.

At present, the total internal layout would be, from bow to stern composed of: the transmission, the engine, the gyro, a very robust firewall, the pilot's compartment so angled as to get maximum view over the foredeck and of the limb assemblies to prevent limb tangles, the radio operator/gunner's position, about a third of a meter up on a step, after which was the radio and under which was the bulk of the fuel tankage.

You're honestly pretty happy that most of the power generation has already been allocated. Trying to work a way to handle anything else into the system would be madness. At least this prototype isn't trying to use fast actuators: there's no way in hell you're going to be going that fast. If all the weight estimates held up, you'd probably be holding steady at 35kph, with no higher sprint speed because trying to sprint a hexapod was impossible.

Still, fixing the transmission splitter. There were a couple options you could go here, even if you didn't like them. First up, you could just redesign the splitter, and dump time and money into making one that actually worked right. Practically speaking, this orthodoxy rubbed you a little wrong, but the fact was your first attempt was a fast and dirty solution to a frustrating problem. Failure was to be expected.

The second option was simply to go back on your earlier decision, and properly get the transmission modified. Trying to work the even-to-odd output had created massive losses on stand testing, and you couldn't afford to screw around with that sort of power rolling around. The first corollary you'd learned to Newton's second law was simple: entropy begets breakage. The more system losses you had, the faster things would break down.

The third option was the most potentially controversial. Talking to your friends in Hotchkiss' offices had told you a few things, and one of them was that all three projects were having serious issues. Horsepower choking and insufficient gyrostabilization plagued both workshops endemically, and at this point the director of the mech project wanted to see some results, damn the torpedoes. If you were clever about it, you could lawyer your way into a new transmission: the SA-61, which was going into the Arignée refits as their transmission. While the system would be overbuilt to hell and back for your scout mechs and correspondingly overweight, it was a proper seven-output transmission, rated to take the Anzani 45's 750 horsepower in one end and use it to full effect.

Still, you had to work fast. Shop #1 had officially started booking up superchargers to fix their horsepower issues, and Shop #3 was already buying up aviation fuel and working up some lever-arm monstrosity to help build a gyroscope amplifier. It was time to get moving.

VOTES
[] [Engine] Keep working with the 500 horsepower out. You're on track to not need too much more than that if you're careful. (Engine is considered settled.)
[] [Engine] You need to find something to throw more power in there. (Work on developing engine power next update)

[] [Transmission] Rebuild your power splitter, except not garbage this time.
[] [Transmission] Bite the bullet, and find a way to modify your transmission.
[] [Transmission] Break the rules as explained to you and play the rules as written, and use the Arignée transmissions.