Mecha Design Quest

With everything settled down, it was time to get down to the nuts and bolts of actually building your design. Spa-Frachamps got back to you fairly quickly with the leg designs, which looked like they should hold up to military overclocking fairly well, and the 12N engines were delivered without any real difficulties. Since the weapons load was something like twenty percent the weight of your end design, though, you had to buy a few decommissioned guns to use as test load. Physically shipping a prototype to Guilimont & Sons was rather painful, but it was a necessary move to get the kit worked out on them.

It took nearly two months, and thousands of francs, but the skeletal bodies of 0-1 through 0-5 were lined up on the shop floor, with the first armor kits rolling in the door. Built by Saint-Chamond, the armor kits met your descriptions exactly- complete with the cast protrusions onto which they were to latch and bolt to the frame of the mecha. It was at this point the monkey's paw curled.

The fact was, the utterly massive forward glacis plate was not light: a ton and a half at least. You only had the one heavy-lift crane in the shop, but the problem was actually figuring a way to hold the bloody thing. It took three hours for the laborers to figure out how to sling it correctly to get the mounting points to line up, and then a half hour to get it bolted in correctly.

That's when 0-1 planted chin-first into the floor, crushing the decoy 13.2mm machine guns in the belly blister. The legs had completely given out, taking maximum tension out of the delay system to make it as graceful a fall as possible. Foremen were screaming, and you were scrambling. Finally, you came to a rather frustrating solution. After stealing the crane from Workshop 1, you got the entire front chassis off the ground on the power of one crane, and used the other to mount the back panels. It was now a balanced squat on the floor, resting up on wooden blocks, as the team fit out the rest of the armor package.

Once it was complete and the drive train was looked over for damage, you started sweating bullets. Nothing had gone wrong yet past your ability to fix. Still, you had to take it out for an experimental test run still. So far, everything had gone fine. Absolutely fine. Montrove had volunteered to handle this mecha test drive, and you trusted him as the mecha got trucked out to Hotchkiss's test track. Nominally it was for the truck division, but you could use it.

Once 0-1 was gassed up, Montrove got himself strapped in, and started it up. It stood up straight off the flatbed hauler, and its first few steps were cautious, before Montrove started moving into the track proper. To your eyes, the gait looked reasonably crisp, and it handled its prodigious bulk quite well. Ten, fifteen, twenty, thirty kilometers per hour were all quite well-handled speeds. Then, as Montrove took it up to fifty kilometers per hour in a strong trot, disaster struck.

You first noticed it in the thirty kilometer per hour turn, but the mecha had a bit of a tendency to yaw at the nose in an unusual way. The inner foot would come down, the shoulder would dip, everything would be coming up clean, but then as the outer foot came up the aft would yaw inwards sharpley, until the nose came back around just a bit steeper than it needed to. It wasn't part of the walk-roll cycle; if it was, you'd see the bright red cheque on the top of the mecha painted there to determine that exact thing. Normally, you'd consider it just a handling quirk, until the mecha hit fifty and went into the turn.

This time, the ass wobble was more severe, and at the apex of the turn, you could see Montrove as he stopped cutting engine power for the inward pull of the turn and started pouring it on for the outbound half. The ass wobbled, the hip jerked too sharp- you think- and the nose hauled in hard- and then it rolled. It was like watching a train crash as the nose slammed into the sand of the track, and you could see an armor panel pop off as the frame under it torqued under the still-pushing legs. As the inboard leg came up- whether in some demented automatic manuvere from Montrove or just lingering system impulse- it started to heel over mightily, until the outboard leg shoved it right over, hard enough to roll the mecha onto its roof.

Emergency response was quick, and you had designed an emergency bottom-access hatch for this exact purpose. As the firemen started foaming down the engine (institutional memory from the Fourmi), a nimble lad managed to get down and identify Montrove. Recovery would be impossible through the crew tunnel between compartments: he had a broken shoulder and leg, with back damage likely. The eventual health toll was a broken back at the tenth vertibrae, and he died in the hospital some four days later. You attended the funeral in between days of tearing out your hair on why the crash happened.

Finally, as near as yourself and Yves could figure, between film of the test, deconstruction of the remains of 0-1, and Montrove's diction of the accident when he was somewhat lucid between doses of morphine, what had happened was a complicated interaction between a couple of factors.

First, the gyro was underpowered during the turn. Since it was straight-clutched to the engine with a manual adjustment on the weighting system, it wasn't preventing enough roll until Montrove spun the weights out to the max- as they were found on the crashed unit. Therefore, when he spiked the engine, he also spiked the gyro to the same level of momentum it should have during a full straightaway sprint, overpowering it and thereby countering necessary roll: which would have been what caused the ass jerk as the gyro overpowered the frame for a moment.

Secondly, the nose was too long. In order to get the requested curvature needed for the plates of the nose, you had agreed to a 6cm extension of the total length of the mecha over original design plans after coordinating with Saint-Chamond. This got you much better bracket mounting to the frame, and more importantly, got you a little extra depth for storage and the arrangement of the belly gun mount. The cost, however, was that it vastly increased the moment of inertia on the nose armor. You had initially thought the overload tolerances on the legs would be enough to handle this added weight: true, while stationary. In a high power turn, however, the added momentum added to the roll and yaw of the mecha; which was the nose yaw you had observed and the main cause of the accident.

Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, there was no way for Montrove to actually be able to gauge that there was anything wrong until he had that terminal wiggle. He had no knowledge of the tilt or roll, didn't know about the yaw, and most importantly, didn't realize that the mecha was out of control until it hit the sand: the move that kicked it up and over, breaking his back when he fell out of the chair and into a structural beam, was an attempted recovery move. This turned out to be fatal, since normally the knee bend would stabalize by allowing a plantigrade knee to hit the ground and brace, before the other leg got engaged. Instead, with the digitigrade leg and residual roll (as the gyro safety disconnect engaged in the crash) it threw the mecha over on its back.

With condolences written and flowers sent, it was time to make sure this never happened again.
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Vote

What do you personally fix?
[] Gyroscope: That fatal destabilization was the root cause of this mess. You need to develop an automatic momentum control adjustment system so a sudden power surge or dropoff can be safely handled without requiring manual attention.
[] Armor: This armor scheme does not work. You'll need to work with Saint-Chamond and get something else figured out, because your previous prototype maximum length has gone from a soft guideline to a stone solid limit.
[] Cockpit: Montrove was a damn good mecha pilot. If he had known this was happening, he could have corrected at best, or at very worse made sure that the crash didn't involve a rollover. You need to redesign the instruments in the cockpit and design a way to make sure you don't get more rollover-induced fatalities.