Mecha Design Quest

Once you were back in the suburbs of Paris, you made the call. Your mecha would be contracted out to the Christie-Ford plant, with arrangements made to begin production postehaste. In the meantime, your station would get to work smoothing out production bugs in the system- or so you, and corporate, believed. Reality, however, had other plans.

Your first order of twenty mecha was coming online about two months out of the contest, when Christie-Ford called, requesting a mecha for analysis. You sent two, before getting a memo a week latter that the mechas had their analysis completed. Considering you'd also previously sent complete and unredacted plans, this was above and beyond an oddity. Fortunately, your friends in Accounting agreed with you, and the decision was made to go and conduct an inspection.

When you got to the plants in Normandy, what you saw was horrifying. The entire time you'd been busting ass to fulfill the order, they'd been converting the plans over to operate on their American machine tooling. This meant conversions from first perspective to third perspective, and more importantly every measurement on every component had to be converted to imperial. Hundreds of parts, each with tens of measurements, all being converted- and in several cases, being redesigned entirely- in a madcap rush.

Of course, once that got done, then the madmen had to re-loft the entire mecha. Every part, cut in paper, one to one, to be compared against a completely disassembled mecha, to ensure that every part was in tolerance. On most parts, this was simple enough, even if it was an unnecessary check, but on several it was critical. The walk cycle control drum, for instance, had been having screaming fits until your sample mecha had been delivered, and in the end the entire walk cycle control unit had been completely redesigned and replaced to run on a pendulum and oscillating drum unit instead of your original monodirectional drum and alternating cam unit design.

It took two weeks after your visit that their first mecha finally rolled off the production line, and as expected, nobody was happy with it. Since they were the primary producer, and weren't producing, you had to beg off complete delivery of the first order, eat a painful late fee, and promise the Army you could make up the shortfall. This then turned into using your own workshops to make up the shorted mecha, a horrible experience. You were a prototyper, not a production engineer, and it wouldn't be hard to tell the mecha you personally had a hand in producing would have some problems.

Six long, frustrating months into the project, you finally had the issues with the Christie-Ford plant worked out. It had resulted in more than a few gray hairs, but you could safely say that they were finally producing mecha at the contract rate. Of course, that now meant it was finally, finally time to unlock the secrets of Christie's improved actuators.

When you got down to it, the design was the sort of madcap ingenuity only an American could come up with. By springing everything off bellcrank systems to allow for increased leverage against the main beams, the Christie system had both larger passive absorption springs than any of your designs, as well as nearly triple the range of powered articulation on any given joint, before considering the Christie team doubled up articulators. Far more important, once you unpackaged the designs, was the hip assemblies. While larger and heavier than yours, these were true two-axis articulating hips, with full and powerful suspension systems involved. It would take a lot of study, and a few testbed vehicles, but once you had the kinks worked out you'd be able to make a much more efficient walk cycle. This wouldn't necessitate a faster mecha per say, but it would pick up speeds for a given horsepower engine.

Either way with all the issues settled down, finally, you had two things to choose: where to hold the company party, and what to spend your workshop's discretionary budget on.

The second one was, nominally, more important. Since you managed to develop a way to shave victory from the jaws of defeat, that meant you got a few thousand francs put in a 'discretionary account' for research and development. Of course, everyone had ideas as to what to put the money towards.

The first concept was building a few test mecha to figure out the Christie System with. These would be a selection of unarmored engines-on-frames style, with most of them being bipeds or hexapods. You'd gone to the trouble of buying in that tech, so therefore, the logic went, you needed to use it. Getting the kinks out early would definitely be nice, but there was a very valid concern that this could look like a frivolous use of funds.

The second concept was to start breaking out the bribe money and talking to the Ordnance Department and designing a custom mecha weapon. As much as your adoption of the soixante-quinze had smoothed the process of getting your mecha purchased, it took no work at all to admit that it was a poor fit for your mecha, and had forced some massive design issues around it. To that end, you had roughly enough money to start prototyping a mecha-specific gun, which you could then fit into whatever you built next without nearly as much pain and suffering.

The final concept was a new building for your prototyping. You had three decently sized garage bays now that Workshop 1 had closed up, but frankly you knew you could get better. Spending the money to refit the building into a dedicated prototyping facility would let you do better on parallel processing, and more importantly would also let you have more mecha partsed out and moving between different work stations. Plus, you could finally put in every mecha designer's dream: a resting beam to adjust walk cycles with!

Less important, however, would be the vacation spot. In order to Maximize Vacation Effiency, all the bachelors (and more than a few of those with dependants) had decided to handle vacation in one block. There were a few great choices for this you could see, and all of them were going to be a blast.

First up was a trip to Marsellie, which would let you catch the news on the Schneider Cup, as well as have a wonderful beach holiday. Fun, sun, sand, and most importantly, a chance to avoid talking shop unless you absolutely wanted to. Plus, going down there would let you avoid your numerous business entanglements in the north of France that had been eating up so much of your time.

The next item of note would be a trip to Majorca. While there were rumors of rampant communism and the Aragonese stirring up unrest, there was also the possibility of making sure everything was dirt cheap. Francs spent very, very well in the Balearic Islands, and you knew your people would be able to make an excellent time of it all.

Finally, in the most daring plan, there would be a mass excursion to Mexico. French interests had secured themselves a dense thicket of towns for which to vacation in, and the exotic locals would surely stand to bring something new to the table for your mecha designs. More importantly, you'd been hearing stories of the Aztec and Maya tombs there, and archeologists were gnashing at the teeth to go explore them, as well as other civilized folks with outdoors hobbies.

As for what you'd do right now, immediately? Well, your armchair by the fire looked nice, and you had a glass of cognac right there next to it after all.

VOTES

Upgrades
[] [UPGRADE] Test Mecha: Pump out between four and twelve testing mecha to determine the best way to operate the Christie Actuation System. It'll be a bit of a bitch, but it'll make sure you're not going to get blindsided by any sort of weird system knock-on effects. Mecha will be tested during the Intermission
[] [UPGRADE] Custom Weapon: Start work with the Ordnance Department and Artillery Corps to develop a custom mecha weapon. Development will occur during the Intermission.
[] [UPGRADE] Improved Building: The workshops and garrages you own will get heavily overhauled, and in many cases rebuilt. Development will be automatic.

Vacation
[][VACATION] Marseille: The most French of places to enjoy a holiday, and far more importantly the most domestic. Plus, you might run into a few fellows working on mecha too, what with the talk of the Schnieder Trophy and the engineering discussion around it. (Chance of improving transmissions or cockpit)
[][VACATION] Majorca: A pleasent international option, the slight air of intrigue in the local Catlan community will add a wonderful touch of spice to the trip. Plus, if you're sufficiently casual about it, you might be able to organize a few... we'll call them private sales. The company won't sneeze at the extra business, and you'll certainly learn. (Chance of extra sales or political connections)
[][VACATION] Mexico: An exotic locale, with strange people and interesting places around every corner. The perfect place to escape to if you're afraid of working off the books, and more importantly, a place where the natural enviroment will let you learn about mysteries of the past and future. (Chance of improving esoteric elements or feet)

AN: We're moving into the Intermission, which will cover the 1928-1932 period. Updates will be larger, more sprawling things, and I advise keeping a friend who's comfortable with European interwar history handy. Several votive options here have subsets that will take effect some number of updates into the Intermission. Choose wisely.