Mecha Design Quest

Expanding and modifying the radiator and oil cooler was an experience in frustration. Both systems had to get moved rather drastically, and the engine's position meant the cooling tunnel had to go in between the engine and the firewall. More importantly, on units 0-1 and 0-2, a change in the support bracing meant you could only run the tunnel over half the depth of the mecha, drastically reducing throughflow of air. Still, stand testing revealed it mostly solved the cooling issue, and the heavy slats of the original thickness body plate should be, ideally, about as protective as the original body unless shot from a very specific angle.

As an annoying plus, the top access to the radiator tunnel also included a peg in which St. Ignacio had started hanging a tea billy made from a 155mm shell casing on to create tea on the move. What little tea splashed out from the top tended to evaporate quite quickly, and it wasn't long before the work crews started cooking on the radiator coils.

Once the modifications were done, your time was up, and Judgement Day was upon you: the Company Reps would be going over your work.

Parking your three prototypes on the parking lot and getting the workers into their best jumpsuits (you had clean ones bought, with embroidered name patches added, with your own funds specifically for this) you waited for the review by looking over the competition.

Workshop 1 had gone for a very conservative design based on the Lièvre mle.1915 design. Digitgrade legs, single operator, with the primary weapons system being a single machine gun on a cockpit pintle mount. The majority of their work had been in developing the radio, and they had worked extensively with radio developers to come up with a control system that allowed the pilot to pre-dial in channels that they could jump to with a switch-flick, as well as all-band antennas so they could listen to multiple channels at once.

Workshop 2, meanwhile, had developed a more liberal design. Standing near four and a half meters tall, the wire-and-twine contraption looked more like a set of stilts than proper mecha. With massive leg assemblies, the system was designed around a single pilot working with only saunter controls, the hands being relegated to the machine gun and the radio respectively. The design looked hideously unstable, but the pilots managed to operate them fairly agiley, which also allowed you to see another, unmentioned weapon: two batteries of eight rockets.

Finally, all your work was packed onto the train to the proving grounds. Your nerves were palpable, and amongst the panicked fidgets you managed to keep it under control with active use of snuggling the shop's kitten and taking nips of your flask of cognac. Once out of the train, this was joined by a cigar, and soon you were in a large room talking to a lot of officers. Testing was going to start tomorrow, in the following order. All of the prototypes were going to be tested in the order you prepped them, so you at least had some control over what mecha went where.

The most important piece of information, however, was that whatever mecha you cued as your second mecha would be the one expected to participate in Destructive Testing. This was exactly what it sounded like: your poor babies getting covered in rifle and machine-gun fire in an attempt to see when and how they'd break. The heaviest planned weapon would be the new anti-mecha rifle grenades, which were about three hundred grams of fill on a very crude "explosive lens" setup, which would focus the blast down and attempt as much damage as possible.

That night, your crews had to work overtime. Mounting the weapons on each mecha was an Experience, having to shoehorn in weapons at the last minute. While this should be a simple exercise in theory, theory went out the window very quickly as you discovered your guns were… well-loved, you'll say. That was a polite way of saying that the mountings on the guns themselves were blown out from over-use, and you had to refabricate the mounts based on cludgy guesses.

This then meant, naturally, they didn't want to interface with the mounting ports on your mecha correctly, which wasn't a huge issue for the topside pintle mount. That gun position had room to spare. The cockpit gun position, however, had very little room to spare, and more importantly had been utterly screwed by the fact that you couldn't keep the feed can where you thought you could. Fortunately, you could hang a roller off the ceiling to make it work, sorta, although your armorer warned it would probably have deflection issues with spent cases.

Finally, it was the dawn of the testing day.

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VOTES

Unit 0-0
[] [0-0] Test 1: Road March & Field March
[] [0-0] Test 2: Rough Terrain Test & Destructive Resistance Test
[] [0-0] Test 3: Weapons Test & Fire and Maneuver test

Unit 0-1
[] [0-1] Test 1: Road March & Field March
[] [0-1] Test 2: Rough Terrain Test & Destructive Resistance Test
[] [0-1] Test 3: Weapons Test & Fire and Maneuver test

Unit 0-2
[] [0-2] Test 1: Road March & Field March
[] [0-2] Test 2: Rough Terrain Test & Destructive Resistance Test
[] [0-2] Test 3: Weapons Test & Fire and Maneuver test