Contest 1: Scout Mech phase 6
7734
Trust and verify.
- Location
- Philmont
It didn't take much work to decide to utilize the test facilities in Toulon. With the most convenient access to a mecha hanger and the Navy base to siphon fuel and some parts from, you quickly organized the move. It might have taken the better part of a train to get you there- and the cost of a flat-car to haul the mecha across France was more than a little bit of a hit to your budget, plus the staff car and the boxcars to haul all your respective parts, documentation, fire extinguishers, and good luck charms. Still, once your forty-man crew, test pilots, and cat were packed in the car, you were ready and willing to hit the rail.
Once in Toulon, getting set up wasn't too much of a difficulty, and you quickly proceed to get down to brass tacks. For this work, you were going to be testing at a shore battery training range, giving you a nice combination of soft terrains to work on. Once the fuel and fire trucks were readied- you were taking no risks- you got down to actual testing on surfaces of "not the parking lot"; in this instance consisting of a water meadow, some mud flat, a fair bit of grassland, a small wood, and several sand bunkers used for water control.
St. Ignacio, previously somewhat shaky as a pilot, quickly fell into his own here. With zero loss of performance from his previous work, he could reliably make all three prototypes dance on the clover fields without issue. The woods were a bit more challenging, mostly due to the undergrowth sometimes requiring manual leg adjustment to get placement correct for maximum stability. The mud flats caused some bogging on 0-1 and 0-0, but 0-2 with it's improved weight distribution and leg placement handled it without trouble. Sand, however, was a tricky enemy, and the one obstacle St. Ignacio had trouble with: the shifting sand would cause the autoballancers in the feet to prematurely set their lock angle, and therefore cause some significant slip. While there wasn't any falls due to this, it was entirely due to the mecha being hexapodal and St. Ignacio's skills as a driver: a bipedal mecha with poor footing like this would be incredibly easy to fall from even the lightest interference, due to not having a proper base of footing.
Montrove, however, was a hot mess. The grasslands didn't provide any major issues, but in the mud flats he managed to bottom out Unit 0-0, requiring St. Ignacio in Unit 0-1 and some of the repair crew in Unit 0-2 to recover the mecha. Performance in the other two was little better: his high-speed, aggressive manuveres only ensured that he encrusted the damn things with filth. Fortunately, there were no fires at that point in time. Unfortunately, however, in forrest testing he managed to snarl two legs in the undergrowth, and over-ramped the engine trying to get it out, causing an engine fire as a particularly energetic yank spilled oil on a hot cylinder and prompted an unplanned systems ignition. With Unit 0-1 therefore put out of commission for the day, you quickly watched the damages mount up as Montrove took the Unit 0-2 through the sand trap. What was minor ankle-lock to St. Ignacio, however, was a downed mecha for Montrove, who managed to blow out two hip actuators in a fall he attempted to recover from mid-incident instead of doing the responsible thing and safely riding it down. Fortunately, a concussion removed him from the pilot's seat for the foreseeable future.
That night at dinner, you collected both pilot's request lists. Both pilots wanted more side visibility, citing issues with visual confirmation of leg position for constricted terrain. Montrove was mostly insensate after that, sticking to his soup and returning to his room early. St. Ignacio, who joined you for a cigar and cognac in the hotel's lobby, added in requests for an intercabin telephone to maintain contact with the spotter, as well as the possibility of getting radium-painted gauge needles to help ensure easy readability on key gauges. In addition, he also requested a dedicated pilot's hatch, versus the current arrangement where both crewmen entered through the gun mount.
The next day, you decided to get a jump on dumb military beaucracy. Since the Army would be providing the mecha operators, you would be given a week to teach them to run your prototypes. Therefore, you were going to cheat like the cheating cheater you were, and actually shanghai a few lads from the local coastal artillery battery, and teach them how to actually drive your mecha over the course of a week to get a sort of training manual down.
Rookie Pilot 1, whom you wouldn't really dignify by remembering his name, turned out to quickly and easily understand the mechanics of operating your design. While he did take a day or two to really get used to the hexapodal controls (and frequently forgetting the saunters ran the back legs and not the front ones; that caused some humorous stumbles) the end result was he had no issues running through standard mecha manuveres at the end of his training week.
Rookie Pilot 2 was about the same as Rookie Pilot 1, except he had black hair and a tendency to swear in Italian when he thought St. Ignacio couldn't hear him. Whereas it took Rookie 1 a day and a half for hex controls to click, Rookie 2 took three, but along the way he developed an excellent terrain sense and good foot placement. His mecha manuveres were on point, even if he did have a bit of a rather silly flare to the whole thing. At least he bought plenty of wine at dinner.
Rookie Pilot 3, meanwhile, was a complete and total flop. It took him three days of stumbles, trips, and more than a few flat-out falls to learn how to walk the mecha, and the remaining four were spent teaching him how to continue this on anything other than flat, level terrain. The one, singular saving grace to the miserable work spent teaching him was that when he accidentally overloaded the engine in an attempt to stand up, the resultant fire was quickly suppressed by the onboard extinguisher, and more importantly did not light the still-mostly-full fuel tanks or the battery on fire.
Disregarding the third rookie, Rookies 1 & 2 suggested trying to increase visibility, decrease dashboard clutter, and add in a better way of talking to their spotter. In addition, Rookie 2 also suggested adding in a manual override to the autoballancers on the feet, nominally to allow better soft terrain handling. This made absolute negative sense: the autoballancers only had minor issues with the sand, and any manual override you could install would, at best, be a reset to allow the autoballancer to take another stab at the issue. Presumably Rookie 2 didn't have a clue what he was talking about, so that idea could be safely shown to the dustbin of history.
At present moment, you had about a month before you needed to present results to the company, and you had a reasonably well-equiped shop on loan from the Navy to do repair and modifications at. With your current schedule, you could either go home and perform any modifications at the home shop, or you could squeeze in another round of testing here and bang out the modifications in the Navy shop. Either way, you had time to get some stuff done: best not waste it.
////
VOTES
Modifications
[] Live Weapons Integration: You haven't actually mounted guns on these mecha, and you have live ranges you can use. Best get to it.
[] Easy Modifications: Add radium paint to dials, modify the seats, add an internal comms system to the mecha. Nice, simple, and nothing more complicated than adding a bracket or three.
[] Moderate Modifications: Add that pilot's hatch, rework some of the viewport shutters, and all the easy stuff from earlier. Not too hard, but adds some real quality of life fixes.
[] Extensive Modifications: Rebuild the cockpit to allow better vision, add side viewports, plus that pilot hatch and the penny-work. It'll chunk your budget, but anything worth doing is worth doing well.
Testing
[] Cancel testing, and go back to the factory workshop to do modifications at home with your full tool suite and doccumentation.
[] Continue testing, and perform the following
-[] Weapons Testing: Make sure all the weapons stations you designed into this actually work! (does not require Live Weapons Integration, but will be greatly boosted by it)
-[] Enhanced Maneuverability Testing: Go whole hog on doing difficult manuveres on terrible terrain. There may even be racing.
-[] Endurance Testing: Long, long walks and runs to see how long and how hard you can push your mecha before it starts having trouble.
Once in Toulon, getting set up wasn't too much of a difficulty, and you quickly proceed to get down to brass tacks. For this work, you were going to be testing at a shore battery training range, giving you a nice combination of soft terrains to work on. Once the fuel and fire trucks were readied- you were taking no risks- you got down to actual testing on surfaces of "not the parking lot"; in this instance consisting of a water meadow, some mud flat, a fair bit of grassland, a small wood, and several sand bunkers used for water control.
St. Ignacio, previously somewhat shaky as a pilot, quickly fell into his own here. With zero loss of performance from his previous work, he could reliably make all three prototypes dance on the clover fields without issue. The woods were a bit more challenging, mostly due to the undergrowth sometimes requiring manual leg adjustment to get placement correct for maximum stability. The mud flats caused some bogging on 0-1 and 0-0, but 0-2 with it's improved weight distribution and leg placement handled it without trouble. Sand, however, was a tricky enemy, and the one obstacle St. Ignacio had trouble with: the shifting sand would cause the autoballancers in the feet to prematurely set their lock angle, and therefore cause some significant slip. While there wasn't any falls due to this, it was entirely due to the mecha being hexapodal and St. Ignacio's skills as a driver: a bipedal mecha with poor footing like this would be incredibly easy to fall from even the lightest interference, due to not having a proper base of footing.
Montrove, however, was a hot mess. The grasslands didn't provide any major issues, but in the mud flats he managed to bottom out Unit 0-0, requiring St. Ignacio in Unit 0-1 and some of the repair crew in Unit 0-2 to recover the mecha. Performance in the other two was little better: his high-speed, aggressive manuveres only ensured that he encrusted the damn things with filth. Fortunately, there were no fires at that point in time. Unfortunately, however, in forrest testing he managed to snarl two legs in the undergrowth, and over-ramped the engine trying to get it out, causing an engine fire as a particularly energetic yank spilled oil on a hot cylinder and prompted an unplanned systems ignition. With Unit 0-1 therefore put out of commission for the day, you quickly watched the damages mount up as Montrove took the Unit 0-2 through the sand trap. What was minor ankle-lock to St. Ignacio, however, was a downed mecha for Montrove, who managed to blow out two hip actuators in a fall he attempted to recover from mid-incident instead of doing the responsible thing and safely riding it down. Fortunately, a concussion removed him from the pilot's seat for the foreseeable future.
That night at dinner, you collected both pilot's request lists. Both pilots wanted more side visibility, citing issues with visual confirmation of leg position for constricted terrain. Montrove was mostly insensate after that, sticking to his soup and returning to his room early. St. Ignacio, who joined you for a cigar and cognac in the hotel's lobby, added in requests for an intercabin telephone to maintain contact with the spotter, as well as the possibility of getting radium-painted gauge needles to help ensure easy readability on key gauges. In addition, he also requested a dedicated pilot's hatch, versus the current arrangement where both crewmen entered through the gun mount.
The next day, you decided to get a jump on dumb military beaucracy. Since the Army would be providing the mecha operators, you would be given a week to teach them to run your prototypes. Therefore, you were going to cheat like the cheating cheater you were, and actually shanghai a few lads from the local coastal artillery battery, and teach them how to actually drive your mecha over the course of a week to get a sort of training manual down.
Rookie Pilot 1, whom you wouldn't really dignify by remembering his name, turned out to quickly and easily understand the mechanics of operating your design. While he did take a day or two to really get used to the hexapodal controls (and frequently forgetting the saunters ran the back legs and not the front ones; that caused some humorous stumbles) the end result was he had no issues running through standard mecha manuveres at the end of his training week.
Rookie Pilot 2 was about the same as Rookie Pilot 1, except he had black hair and a tendency to swear in Italian when he thought St. Ignacio couldn't hear him. Whereas it took Rookie 1 a day and a half for hex controls to click, Rookie 2 took three, but along the way he developed an excellent terrain sense and good foot placement. His mecha manuveres were on point, even if he did have a bit of a rather silly flare to the whole thing. At least he bought plenty of wine at dinner.
Rookie Pilot 3, meanwhile, was a complete and total flop. It took him three days of stumbles, trips, and more than a few flat-out falls to learn how to walk the mecha, and the remaining four were spent teaching him how to continue this on anything other than flat, level terrain. The one, singular saving grace to the miserable work spent teaching him was that when he accidentally overloaded the engine in an attempt to stand up, the resultant fire was quickly suppressed by the onboard extinguisher, and more importantly did not light the still-mostly-full fuel tanks or the battery on fire.
Disregarding the third rookie, Rookies 1 & 2 suggested trying to increase visibility, decrease dashboard clutter, and add in a better way of talking to their spotter. In addition, Rookie 2 also suggested adding in a manual override to the autoballancers on the feet, nominally to allow better soft terrain handling. This made absolute negative sense: the autoballancers only had minor issues with the sand, and any manual override you could install would, at best, be a reset to allow the autoballancer to take another stab at the issue. Presumably Rookie 2 didn't have a clue what he was talking about, so that idea could be safely shown to the dustbin of history.
At present moment, you had about a month before you needed to present results to the company, and you had a reasonably well-equiped shop on loan from the Navy to do repair and modifications at. With your current schedule, you could either go home and perform any modifications at the home shop, or you could squeeze in another round of testing here and bang out the modifications in the Navy shop. Either way, you had time to get some stuff done: best not waste it.
////
VOTES
Modifications
[] Live Weapons Integration: You haven't actually mounted guns on these mecha, and you have live ranges you can use. Best get to it.
[] Easy Modifications: Add radium paint to dials, modify the seats, add an internal comms system to the mecha. Nice, simple, and nothing more complicated than adding a bracket or three.
[] Moderate Modifications: Add that pilot's hatch, rework some of the viewport shutters, and all the easy stuff from earlier. Not too hard, but adds some real quality of life fixes.
[] Extensive Modifications: Rebuild the cockpit to allow better vision, add side viewports, plus that pilot hatch and the penny-work. It'll chunk your budget, but anything worth doing is worth doing well.
Testing
[] Cancel testing, and go back to the factory workshop to do modifications at home with your full tool suite and doccumentation.
[] Continue testing, and perform the following
-[] Weapons Testing: Make sure all the weapons stations you designed into this actually work! (does not require Live Weapons Integration, but will be greatly boosted by it)
-[] Enhanced Maneuverability Testing: Go whole hog on doing difficult manuveres on terrible terrain. There may even be racing.
-[] Endurance Testing: Long, long walks and runs to see how long and how hard you can push your mecha before it starts having trouble.
