Working with your engineering team, you quickly got to work implementing the simplest engine fix: the tetraethyl lead octane booster. It took a little work on how to best utilize it, but the end solution was to either pre-mix it in the gasoline or to add it with a squeeze dropper straight into the fuel tank once standard gasoline was used. Fortunately for your team, mass production and adoption wouldn't be nearly as troublesome as originally anticipated, however. Talks with the Hispano-Suiza representative revealed that le Service Aéronautique was also looking at the same engine you were stuck using, and that they'd be more than happy to work with you in developing a way to maximize the power output of their truly mediocre engines. You, personally, weren't quite convinced as to the benefits of teaming up with the flyboys, but it did shave a lot of overhead off your theoretical end project.
Still, with the fire issue mostly solved (a halon extinguisher mounted over the engine with a sheet-metal perforated plate to ensure even dumpage over the compartment was considered a bare necessity by the entire design crew as a 'just in case' measure) and the horsepower dragged kicking and screaming to about five hundred sixty brake horsepower. It still wasn't at the promised six hundred ten BHP, but at this point you were willing to call it a win.
With this all done, you went to the trouble next of combining your power prototype and your dry fit prototype into your Prototype Unit 0-0. Naturally, nothing bloody well worked the first time, but that was what prototyping was for. Once everything had been sufficiently hammered into place, with cushions placed in strategic places and canvass-and-straw rub pads inserted in the right places, you called up your test pilots.
Your first test pilot, St. Ignacio, was quickly introduced to the Unit 0-0, and after about an hour of drunken staggering around the parking lot, managed to develop a reasonable enough level of familiarity with hexapodal controls. While he wasn't a bad pilot by any means, the hard terrain you were doing the majority of this rough-and-ready rattle testing for didn't play to his strengths at all, and the man's resume with the Lièvre meant he was used to a bipedal, digitigrade mecha: not a hexapod!
Your second test pilot, Montrove, had very few problems actually adapting from quadruped mecha to the hexapod design. More importantly, he understood hard terrain handling, and proved very quickly that the machine could in fact go through some fairly impressive maneuvers. While it took 'some forcing', the 0-0 could be made to pivot on its axis, advance and corner at full speed, and the autoballancing on the feet meant that the machine could actually sustain full top speed of 35kph on four legs instead of six; if at highly reduced ballance, as proven by Montrove mis-taking the last turn around the garage and plowing into a median. Fortunately, damage was limited to dirt in places dirt should not be.
At this point, you mounted the Notational Weapons Load (logs on a pintle mount and bags of lead shot for the ammo), instructed some brave lads from the workshop to sit in the commander's seats, and for them to do it all again. St. Ignacio reported excellent handling under load with no appreciable change from before, said communicating with his spotter was easy and practical due to the low noise from the engine compartment, and reacted with great alacrity and ease when an engineer from another workshop 'accidentally' nearly hit your mecha with a work-truck. Montrove, by contrast, lambasted the loss of balance the additional hundred and twenty ish kilos of a commander and weapons added, complained mightily that the fixed bow machine gun cramped his forward arcs of view and cabin utility, and felt notably increased stress in the rear leg pair when taking sudden accelerations and decelerations.
Data gathered, you then got to work with the engineers, and ripped apart poor 0-0 down to the bare bones. You were required to provide three 'prototype' mecha for testing, and if there was anything you'd learned in the Army is that 'prototype' normally meant 'artisanal, hand-crafty miracle to never be repeated' with a side of 'the final result will look nothing like this'. To that end, you were going to jump the gun.
Wheras Prototype Unit 0-0 was a prototype with all that involved, her successor unit 0-1 was the Test Type, or Pre-Production Prototype. Going through the construction and deconstruction of 0-0 with a fine-tooth comb, you worked overtime with your mechatechs and machinists to figure out every point in the design where you could theoretically save twenty minutes in construction and not have to deal with a cludge-on-cludge fix later down the line. Rough edges were sanded down, loose fittings tightened in the correct order to stay tight, and cable runs reconfigured to allow for easier assembly and disassembly.
Then you put the test pilots in 0-1 to see the differences. St. Ignacio's first big takeaway was that 0-1 had much better gyroscopic stabilization than 0-0, and had a better fore-aft ballance allowing him to handle corners and deceleration better. It was also quieter, more sure of step, and had more constructive feedback in the saunters somehow. Montrove preferred the instability of 0-0, however, as it let him pull of more drastic maneuvering and calamitous tricks: 0-1, for all his two attempts, couldn't disengage two legs like 0-0 could. What it did have, however, was the uncanny ability to over-ramp its gyro and use it as a way to induce severe leg drag: normally a bad thing, unless deliberately triggered in a rough stop or when control interference was making it difficult for a mecha to safely come to a halt.
Data in hand, history spent a week repeating itself. Unit 0-1 was torn to pieces, your team ripping into every element of assembly and disassembly they could physically lay hands and eyes upon. Interactions were inspected and checked, mountings overseen, and bolts argued against welds as the mecha got put through its paper paces as she lay in pieces on the shop floor. Little issues came to light here- overheating in the insulation on certain wires being part of the fire issue, the tendency for oil to drip below the engine, battery leads shaking loose: ten thousand little shitty mecha problems you ruthlessly wanted to stamp out now, before testing made them become big mecha problems.
Now, you were looking at Unit 0-2, the Production Model Prototype, and she looked good. St. Ignacio agreed with you, putting the mecha through her paces just as strenuous as Montrove had in his first laps with 0-0. Crash stops, leaping starts, alternate gaits and pivot turns: all of them were fair game to the patrol pilot. Once the mecha had been put through her paces, St. Ignacio claimed she handled like a dream: none of the systems had unnatural confliction issues, the engine provided plenty of horsepower to any given leg, the top speed was both easily made and retained even through speed-bleeding maneuvers, and the system didn't redline any loading gauges even when skiddering around a corner in a four-legged pivot maneuver that involved pulling up the foremost and aftmost left legs to make a hairpin turn. Montrove himself was, ironically, least pleased with this unit. With its high stability, he had trouble making it execute the precision maneuvers he was used to, and the no-lag control system meant a lot of common and cheap tricks to increase performance had to go the way of the dodo: one couldn't simultaneously manipulate throttle, choke, and transfer rate to gyro while running controls that were always synched to limb position. The increased stability did help, he was grudging to admit, when the vehicle was burdened with a spotter and weapons, although visibility concerns were still paramount.
With this wealth of data and three completed prototype units, you called in to Company Headquarters, ready to make you plea in terms of testing sites and testing regimens. Fortunately, you had, somehow, got done first, so the paper pushers were willing to cut you a little slack in terms of how this was going to go.
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VOTES
Testing Center
[] La Rochelle Testing Center: Working next to the Navy brings pros and cons, but in the end it's the least busy place to do a test right now
Pros: Little competition for space, access to Naval Engineers. Cons: Navy, sand, few support elements.
[] Toulon Training Area: In the heart of the French weapons industrial area, you can't help but to trip over people interested in mecha.
Pros: Dedicated testing and proving grounds with support staff. Cons: Intrigue, both domestic and foreign.
[] Orleans Muster Area: Close to home and close to work, there's little support you can't call on here.
Pros: Easiest access to home workshop and company resources. Cons: Least ammount of testing time, grognards everywhere.
Testing Regime
[] Endurance Testing: find out how long, how far, and how quickly you can push your mechas.
[] Sprint Testing: Find out how effectively your units can get in and get out
[] Weapons Testing: Find out how effective your units are as weapons carriers.
[] Destructive Surviability Testing: Find out how hard it is to kill your own mecha (GM note: not available this contest)
[] Introductory Testing: Find out how much your mecha sucks via the time-honored tradition of throwing a greenhorn in the cockpit and making him keep up with your test pilots.
