Mecha Design Quest

[7734]

To you, there is nothing nobler than the fusion of man and machine that is a well-designed war mecha. The elegance of legs and grace of arms serves so well to be a mounting point for the focal point of the creation: weapons. Any gun, no matter how mundane, is improved by giving it the centerpiece position it deserves. The pilot sits in a fusion of man and machine, feeling the beating heart of his chariot around him as the engine thrums. No matter the environment, a titan striving forth is an impressive sight, That's why you decided to get into the business of making them, anyway.

Despite personally knowing how to pilot them, you're more of a dilettante when it comes to their operation. Spending a conscript's time in the army keeping the beasts up to speed has taught you much about their inner workings, and afterwards you decided you wanted more.

How did you continue your fascination in Mecha?
[] You went to engineering school proper, and learned the arts of working with these giant beasts of steel. This grants bonuses in engineering the core mechanical components: the Gyro and the Engine.
[] You volunteered for another hitch, and went to technical school as a Mecha Armorer. This grants bonuses in working with the extremity components: the Weapons and the Feet.
[] You went to Officer School on an eight-year contract, and learned about the follies of man and machine alike. This grants bonuses in sniffing out bullshit from any source: contractors, your company, the military- everybody.
[] You took a technical apprenticeship, and learned the arts of faith in the spirit of the machine. This grants bonuses in engineering the temperamental components of the machine, the Transmission and the Actuators.

Of course, aside from this you also put in your elbow grease in more practical fields. Basic business degrees, some accounting, a little shoulder-rubbing and a fortuitous marriage all got you to the starting line with a sound knowledge of the state of the business and state of the art. That does raise the question, though: what is state of the art?

[] [EASY START] Cyberpunk- The computer is the king of them all these days. Starting tech is Heavy Fusion Reactors, Heavy Electrical Actuators, Autogyros, Fly-By-Wire Controls, Self-Guided Missiles, Electrical Transmissions, and 45-ton Feet.
[] [MEDIUM START] Atompunk- God is dead, for we have killed him in the nuclear detonation, but in that light our salvation is born. Starting Tech is Heavy Fission Reactors, Light Hydraulic Actuators, 10,000 RPM Gyros, Hydraulic Power Assist Controls, Recoilless Rifles, and 35-ton Feet.
[] [HARD START] Dieselpunk- Only man remains, and that man is a stalwart defender of his political order, his home, and his very way of life against the savages howling at the gates. Starting Tech is Internal Combustion Engines, Mechanical Actuators, 5,000 RPM Gyros, Cable Controls, Autocannons, and 25-ton Feet.
[] [EPIC START] Steampunk- In the august glow of the imperial realm, the light of glory shines far and wide when not abutted by greedy neighbors seeking to overturn the natural order. Starting Tech is Steam Engines, Torsion Actuators, 500 RPM Gyros, Bar Linkage Controls, Machine Guns, and 20-ton Feet.
(GM note: harder starts will allow you to progress through the timeline, maintaining progress and offering more chances to unlock Unique Technology)

Sill, you had your technology, you had your training, and most importantly you had a beautiful wife and a happy dog at home. Now all you needed was for that job application you put in for to come back with the green check on it. Any day now...

///

Mech Designing: A Summary

Designing a mech follows a very simple order of operations.
1: Receive RFQ from the military outlining requirements
2: Design meeting w/ staff to determine means of meeting requirements. This is where you figure out what a hypothetical weapons and power load looks like, what the end tonnage will be, how you'll get to that end tonnage in leg configuration, and how many crew your mech will use (GM note: Earlier eras will demand more crew, with related weight issues)
3: Design meeting w/ suppliers to determine out-of-house production. This is where you figure out what you can shop out to other companies- while you can build a mecha from the ground up, outside suppliers may be able to provide cheaper or better components.
4: Prototype Construction Begins. Work on the chassis starts, and the Engine, Transmission, and Gyro have selection finalized and mountings conducted. Any torso-mounted weapons also have their rough handling arrangements decided at this stage.
5: Prototype Cockpit Installed. Work on the cockpit begins, crew number is finalized, and any last-minute modifications to the torso is done.
6: Prototype Legs Installed. Work on the legs starts, and the Feet and Actuators have selection finalized and mountings installed. The inevitable cockpit bugs also get ironed out here.
7: Prototype Arms Installed. Work on the arms starts, and the Weapons and related ammunition storage is worked out.
8: Initial Prototype Testing. The prototype is handed off to the test pilots, who run it through a standard course of mechanical testing to see if it achieves the design envelope. After repairs, the machine is then pushed to the failure point.
9: Prototype Refinement. Working off the notes from the test pilots, changes are made to any unsatisfactory components to increase performance. Generally this will be mostly minor modifications and possibly a weapon modification to deal with inevitable feed issues.
10. Military Testing. Your baby is sent off to the military, and they see how much they like it. With any luck, your work is validated and they ask for a production type model. Either way, your work here is done and you're on to the next project.

Note: the key modules of your mech are as follows, which are the only modules you'll have control over in this Quest. You have people for the rest of the little things.
Cockpit: Its the control suite, crew accomidations, it's all here
Engine: It powers the mecha
Transmission: It moves the power around the mecha
Gyro: It stabalizes the mecha
Actuators: It moves the mecha
Feet: It supports the mecha
Weapons: It arms the mecha

 

[7734]

MECHAQUEST 2

Rolling out of your bed with a gleam in your eye and a hitch in your knee, you started digging around your closet to grab a uniform, before remembering that you weren't an officer anymore. Eight years was habit-forming, what can you say? Instead, the 'uniform' of a civilian in the design and mechanical offices was what you settled into: a dress shirt in bright colors (in this instance, a wonderful teal that hadn't been around when you were in your prime trying to pick up girls on the occasional bout of leave) to be covered with a black waistcoat, in which your pocketwatch and rotary slide rule went. A pair of pens, grease pencil, graphite pencil, and india rubber eraser went in next, as well as a small notebook.

After that went your jacket, and after a quick look at the thermometer outside, your well-worn shemagh and a good heavy overcoat. As the snow whistled around your stoop, you gave the wife a kiss, before heading out to your small job at the hardware store. It wasn't because you needed the money, since good frugality and a house lease from one of your friends who's unit had been stood up kept you out of the red, but more as a way to kill time between job applications. Most of the job involved reading a magazine at the register, talking problems through with people, and explaining that while you could do that jury-rig fix their friends told them about, it would inevitably explode in their faces.

Really, you had to wonder who thought it was appropriate to tell people a doped canvass hose was appropriate for a radiator return line? That wasn't gonna hold under heat.

Of course, after that came the real meat of your work: heading on down to the office bars, and trawling for contacts. Most of the time you couldn't get too terribly much out of the trip, with your ever-so-slight limp, but most of the time between beer and a cigarette you could keep your skills sharp. Along the way, you started picking up a bit of mechanical knowledge, enough to make sure that you had a more clear-cut experience in dealing with one part of a hypothetical mecha.

(choose one)
[] Armament Knowledge. You understand guns, simple as that. More importantly, you also understand how guns interface with your mecha, and the tradeoffs involved in lighter, heavier, and automatic models. (unlocks "hunchback" designs with off-center Torso armaments)
[] Engine Knowledge. Over time, you have been seeped in the machinations of the machine engine. In return, you can finesse the systems of them so as to avoid some of their distinctive cost. (reduces tradeoff costs of mounting radial versus in-line engines, reduces tradeoff costs of mounting diesel versus gasoline engines, reduces penalties for steam engines)
[] Transmission Knowledge. Outside the engine, the transmission is one of the most mechanically complicated parts of the mecha. Now, you can finally start to see the light on how the blasted thing moves the power to where it needs to be. (Increases transmission reliability, decreases actuator strain, and reduces cost for higher RPM gyros.)
[] Gyroscope Knowledge. The ways of the circle are no mystery to you, until someone adds motion to the equation in which case oh dear. Now, however, you have tackled the dark arts of rotational momentum, and find them wanting. (Increases mecha stability for given weight/rpm of gyroscope)
[] Cockpit Knowledge. You've driven enough mecha to understand how a cockpit should be laid out, and more importantly you've crawled around in the underside of a cockpit enough to understand how to pipe the gauges for the blasted things too. (Increases ease of piloting and instrumentation, decreases multi-person cockpit size)
[] Actuator Knowledge. There's only so much you can learn about mecha before running into the ten-ton question of how to move that mass about. Therefore, you've put a lot of work into figuring out the answer to that question (Increases horsepower actuators can accept leading to higher theoretical speeds, and increases wear and environment resistance)
[] Foot Knowledge. The ground is your friend and enemy, and understanding how your mech interfaces with it is critically important. Without good feet, a mecha is a bunker with delusions of grandeur. (Decreases terrain penalties, increases chance of foot improvements, and slightly increases top speed)

Finally, once that's handled, you go over to the old soldier's office, and make sure nothing of interest is happening. Getting a jump on the news is important, and rumors travel faster than light if you're not careful.

What rumors do you hear?
[] The Party has finally decided to support radical groups in Spain, and in case a war breaks out between them and the reactionaries, will be willing to send the best of their troops and equipment to aid their cause- and not to get practice for the inevitable war to reclaim Poland, of course (starting nation: RUSSIA)
[] The Government's faith in the Maginot is wavering, and the Regional Companies are having trouble building an adequate mech to support the Tracked Cavalry. As such, a crash-development company is being spun off Hotchkiss for the explicit purpose of making sure there's at least one solid Mecha available. (starting nation: FRANCE)
[] The Chancellor has decided that, for purposes of agricultural development, there should be a people's light agricultural mecha, to be placed in the hands of frontier farmers. Naturally, anything done to them later is obviously nonstandard and the abuse of the owners. (starting nation: GERMANY)
[] The Army, bogged down in China, needs a reliable fire support vehicle that's not nearly as vulnerable as their truck infantry. To this end, the Toyota Corporation is making its first foray into Mecha Design, and they're standing up a new branch from scratch- and your name could be in the rosters. (starting nation: JAPAN)
[] With Congress slowly letting their death-grip on military funding go, the army has decided it needs a modern mecha to support the Cavalry Arm and carry heavy weapons for the Infantry in order to intensify the effects of artillery, machine guns, and light artillery fire. (starting nation: AMERICA)

 

[7734]

It was some weeks along, that early month in '25 that you got accepted for the job at Hotchkiss et Cie's mecha development works. You'd have to move out to the factory at Saint-Denis, but that was just life: what was far more annoying was the amount of forms and paperwork you had to fill out!

Still, once all that unpleasantness was completed, you found yourself as the lead of one of three prototype and design teams. Your coworkers were all reasonably pleasant men, and the pool of workers you could pull from wasn't badly sized either. Since the main factory was spinning up by applying a simple upgrade package to the old Great War-era Araignée-series mecha, you could poach from the main line without too many direct problems.

Your design team was a simple four people. First was Gregory du Sale, the main structural designer. The skeleton of the chassis was his responsibility: no small job, considering the number of mountings and attachments that would hitch to it. Second was Matthew Javiers, your power specialist. He handled the engine, transmission, and the gyroscope. This also meant he handled the miniscule electrical system in the mecha, along with some other odds and ends. Conrad Moreau was third, taking up the position of the controls designer. The control mains for a mecha were an incredibly complicated arrangement, and his work would be invaluable to make sure that the mecha moved safely, as well as failed safely if a control was lost. Finally was Yves Petiet, your motive designer. While Matthew made sure the system had power, it was Yves who turned that power into motion by designing and controlling the arrangement of the actuators and feet.

Of course, all this was useless without a quote from the government on what they wanted. Fortunately, the current refurbishment to the Ardenéenes wasn't stopping work. The government was looking for a new model of scout mech, to weigh no more than 35 tons, and to be equipped with a dedicated radio, and between one and three machine guns. Speed and endurance weren't mentioned either, but since this was going to be a recon vehicle, it wasn't expected to engage in long combats or survive much fire and as a recon unit it could be expected to get resupply often.

When Hotchkiss got the contract, though, they added some riders to it before passing it on down to you. First off, to save cost all three design units were going to be using some of the same components: a Hispano-Suiza 12X engine, the related mecha transmission (H-S 60G transmission), and a Foucault 2,000 RPM gyro. Naturally, your design team had some suggestions on where to start.

Gregory, in the spirit of adventure, had a pretty advanced design to put forward. A hexapod, this mecha would be extremely stable at any operational speed, but wouldn't get up to a high maximum speed due to the need to run six legs. However, it could use more forgiving all-terrain feet. To fulfill requirements, Gregory called for a pilot, and a radio operator/gunner, to man a two-position fighting nest operating a miniature turret above and the radio below. After discussion with the rest of the team, it was determined that likely problem points would be with the cockpit and limb actuation, but the mech would be incredibly steady in use and not suffer much speed loss.

Matthew was much more traditional, and was proposing a very light bipedal mecha. Using digitigrade legs, it would have a very high sprint speed, if not the highest sustained cruising speed. To fulfill requirements, the mech would have a crew of two: a pilot and a radio operator. Weapons-wise, it would have a single machine gun in a fixed mount for the pilot, as well as a ring and pintle mount for the radio operator. To continue weight savings measure, the crew compartment wouldn't be fully enclosed, but instead open-topped to facilitate dismount and reconnaissance in the field. After discussion with the rest of the team, the problem points would be in the feet and armament to keep the vehicle in weight without having ground penetration issues.

Finally, Yves had the single most creative concept you'd ever seen, as well as an oddly fizzy absinthe cocktail that tasted something like a sweet hammer to the head. His design was a quadrupedal design with plantigrade forelegs and digitigrade rear legs, much like a horse. Managing to take the minimalism a step further than Matthew, Yves' plan called for a single universalist crew member, who would be in charge of the entire mecha. By ditching an enclosed cockpit and heavy weapons, he thought he could get weight down to ten tons. The costs, however, were numerous: starting with the fact the pilot's only real weapon would be a pair of MAS-22 submachine guns, and ending with the fact any of his jobs would need his full attention at any one time. To actually prototype, the team felt the problems would be in the actuation system and weapons systems.

Of course, you could also put together your own plan to talk about. It wouldn't be too hard to put something together, since it would be a few weeks until you cut steel. You haven't put a proposal together yourself before, but it can't be that bad.

Still, time to at least see what plan would be going forward to talking with suppliers. If worst came to worst, you could pitch a design before cutting steel and building the physical prototype, although it would be an open question how far ahead of you the other two prototype teams would be.

----
VOTE (choose one)

[] Gregory's Design (hexapod)
[] Matthew's Design (digitigrade biped)
[] Yves' Design (mixed plantigrade/digitigrade quadraped)
[] PLAN WRITE IN
-[] Write in number and style of legs (even number only)
-[] Write in number of crew
-[] Write in weapons
-[] Write in special equipment (radio goes here FYI)
-[] Write in any further specifications

QM Note- we're not at the stage of the quest when you're supposed to get write-ins, but I figure I should give you the option. I HIGHLY RECCOMEND going with one of your designer's concept plans.

 

[7734]

After tentatively selecting Gregory's hexapod design, your team got to work. Skeletally, the system was going to use a relatively old-fashioned ring arrangement to control the legs, with a forward engine compartment and transmission. The transmission system itself, while nominally a stock part, would probably have to be modified however. Since most mechs these days were bipedal, that in turn meant the transmission had two main power outlets: a bit of a problem when you needed seven! This wasn't a huge hangup, but it would however mean finding an out-of-company shop to make sure that you either had a further power splitter, or a modification to the transmission to split the power locally.

The engine, meanwhile, was an underpowered piece of shit. With a listed 610 horsepower, in reality you had to push the thing to the bare bloody edge of operability in order to get enough power downshaft to throw the transmission wide open. While you couldn't get rid of it, unfortunately, there were options to improve the engine with a supercharger. This would be hideously expensive, however, and the general consensus was that unless you wanted to be the most expensive mecha coming to the floor, you would have to go unsupercharged and just try to push as much weight savings as possible to make up for it.

The gyro, thank God, was just a gyro and very temperate. Making 2.5 thousand RPM, it would be flatly overkill to stabilize a hexapod, and you could probably set up a way to under-drive it if you needed to find a way to scavenge up more horsepower to run the legs.

While all this was going on, you had a far more important job to get on with: scoping out potential contractors. While it wasn't an ironclad order like your engines and related, you did work for Hotchkiss. It was assumed you'd use company guns. Since you weren't planning on getting anything bigger than a Hotchkiss Portative, this was a good plan, and you'd stick with it. Everything else, though? It was like driving off gadflys.

For cockpit manufacture, you really only had one option outside doing it in-house, and that was Guilmont & Sons. Their involvement would shave a good bit of time and money out of cockpit construction, and also get you better radio integration, but came with the very real risk that they'd be overpromissing themselves. Guilmont & Sons wasn't a moniker- it was literally a workshop operation out of Chantilly by some guy and his nine children.

Actuators was far more of a mess of bids. The Societie du Charleville, who produced the original Araignée actuators, was trying to sell you their latest and greatest models. Rated for a theoretical 50 kilometer top speed, they were cheap and lightweight: their rep quoted you nearly 25% off per actuator compared to the in-house estimate. On the other hand, the OSEN group was offering an excellent actuator as well. While not as much a cost reduction versus in-house, somewhere around 15% per actuator, the OSEN actuators were very heavy-duty, and rated for 35kph top speeds without any reduction in lifespan. In addition, for private sale these actuators were warrantied for 60,000 km of road use, even if said warranty wouldn't apply to your contract.

Feet were probably going to be in-house, unless you wanted to go to the Compagnie du Siens and buy from them. They were offering an excellent 20-ton foot, which would meet your terrain requirements, but would also be a solid 5% cost hike over your in-house 25-ton foot. The problem was, that cost hike covered a massively lighter foot, with more elegant actuation systems, better automatic load balancing, and a much better wet terrain handling. If you want to push quality, this would be the place to go.

On the off chance you, for some reason, don't want to buy Hotchkiss for the armament, there's always Fabrique Nationale. They were offering a licence-built Colt MG-52 if you were so interested, and the increase in striking power from a 7.5mm to a 12.7mm round was tempting, if nothing else. The weight increase would be pretty notable and firepower wasn't a goal… but you know, it would be nice to have.

With the contractors identified, the only question was now deciding whether or not to take them up, as well as whether to switch horses to a different design. Since you haven't started work on a physical prototype yet, the amount of lost time will be fairly nominal. If you want to push forwards, though, everything is lined up, ready and waiting.

/////
VOTES
(one vote per category, please vote on all categories. No plan votes, those break the vote counter.)

Engine
[] Supercharge it. Cost will go up pretty notably, but you need that power back.
[] Don't supercharge it. You can make do with lightening the mecha.

Transmission
[] Send the transmission out to be modified to supply the needed power outlets
[] Have a transmission adaptor built to direct the power from the stock outlets to the needed number of outlets

Cockpit
[] Send construction out to Guilmont & Sons. Lowers cost.
[] [Cockpit] Use in-house construction

Actuators
[] Buy from the Societie du Charleville. Lowers cost drastically, works at high speeds
[] Buy from the OSEN group. Lowers cost, is very reliable.
[] [Actuators] Use in-house construction

Feet
[] Buy from Compagnie du Siens. Raises cost, better terrain handling, lower weight.
[] [Feet] Use in-house construction

Weapons
[] Buy new Hotchkiss mle. 1914 guns in-house.
[] Buy new MG-52 Colt machine guns, liscence-built by Fabrique Nationale.

OR (exclusive to any other vote option)

[] Abandon the hexapodal mecha, continue with another concept
-[] Matthew's Concept
-[] Yves' Concept
-[] Previous Write-in Concept

 

[7734]

With everything sorted out covering your supply chain, you got your orders placed and started work cutting steel on the hexapod. The basic skeleton was coming along nice and quickly, and your decision not to supercharge the engine made it very neat and easy to package things in the hull. What neatness and tidiness your engine had achieved, however, had been utterly blown away by the utter soup that was your transmission redirection system.

The problem was, you had an even number of power outputs, and needed an odd number of power outputs. This meant you needed to, at some point, recombine the two power streams to create the power outlet to run the radio's generator. This, plus a fourfold power splitter on each side, made an absolutely horrifying cludge that was a core part of your drive train. Stand testing revealed that of your nominal 610 horsepower out, you were only pushing 500 from the engine. From that engine, your horsepower should have theoretically been stepped down to around 80 horsepower per leg, plus four or five horsepower into the generator.

Instead, you were getting closer to seventy-five horsepower per leg, plus about ten horsepower into the generator, which had the very problematic habit of overvolting the outlet system that charged the batteries and ran the radio. This then tended to light the prototype on fire. Needless to say, everyone got very good at yelling "fire, fire, fire!" and chucking a fire grenade at the unit while someone pulled on a respirator and the foaming extinguisher.

To put it politely, this was intolerable. You needed to come up with a better solution to the transmission problem, and you needed to do it damn quickly. At this point, the main endurance limiting factor was how long until the generator caught fire- you hadn't even been able to run through a full tank of fuel yet!

The problem of the system catching fire every other day aside, you had been making excellent strides on the dry-fit prototype where you were laying out the internals. The dummy actuators and faux-control lines were coming along decently, the selected radio, an ER 52, was proving to be easily controlled from a remote panel, and you had a very workable layout designed.

At present, the total internal layout would be, from bow to stern composed of: the transmission, the engine, the gyro, a very robust firewall, the pilot's compartment so angled as to get maximum view over the foredeck and of the limb assemblies to prevent limb tangles, the radio operator/gunner's position, about a third of a meter up on a step, after which was the radio and under which was the bulk of the fuel tankage.

You're honestly pretty happy that most of the power generation has already been allocated. Trying to work a way to handle anything else into the system would be madness. At least this prototype isn't trying to use fast actuators: there's no way in hell you're going to be going that fast. If all the weight estimates held up, you'd probably be holding steady at 35kph, with no higher sprint speed because trying to sprint a hexapod was impossible.

Still, fixing the transmission splitter. There were a couple options you could go here, even if you didn't like them. First up, you could just redesign the splitter, and dump time and money into making one that actually worked right. Practically speaking, this orthodoxy rubbed you a little wrong, but the fact was your first attempt was a fast and dirty solution to a frustrating problem. Failure was to be expected.

The second option was simply to go back on your earlier decision, and properly get the transmission modified. Trying to work the even-to-odd output had created massive losses on stand testing, and you couldn't afford to screw around with that sort of power rolling around. The first corollary you'd learned to Newton's second law was simple: entropy begets breakage. The more system losses you had, the faster things would break down.

The third option was the most potentially controversial. Talking to your friends in Hotchkiss' offices had told you a few things, and one of them was that all three projects were having serious issues. Horsepower choking and insufficient gyrostabilization plagued both workshops endemically, and at this point the director of the mech project wanted to see some results, damn the torpedoes. If you were clever about it, you could lawyer your way into a new transmission: the SA-61, which was going into the Arignée refits as their transmission. While the system would be overbuilt to hell and back for your scout mechs and correspondingly overweight, it was a proper seven-output transmission, rated to take the Anzani 45's 750 horsepower in one end and use it to full effect.

Still, you had to work fast. Shop #1 had officially started booking up superchargers to fix their horsepower issues, and Shop #3 was already buying up aviation fuel and working up some lever-arm monstrosity to help build a gyroscope amplifier. It was time to get moving.

VOTES
[] [Engine] Keep working with the 500 horsepower out. You're on track to not need too much more than that if you're careful. (Engine is considered settled.)
[] [Engine] You need to find something to throw more power in there. (Work on developing engine power next update)

[] [Transmission] Rebuild your power splitter, except not garbage this time.
[] [Transmission] Bite the bullet, and find a way to modify your transmission.
[] [Transmission] Break the rules as explained to you and play the rules as written, and use the Arignée transmissions.

 

[7734]

At this point, your shop floor was filled by two prototypes, both under constant work. The first prototype was the power prototype, holding an engine, transmission, generator, and batteries. The most notable feature of it was that it caught fire all the damn time, and at this point had caused you to permanently assign a detail of two junior workers to stand around with respirators on their necks, goggles on with the halon extinguishers ready to deal with the damn thing.

The second prototype, meanwhile, was the dry fit prototype. Everything that wasn't the power system went on it, which in this instance meant the beginning of the actuator hardpoints, the cockpit, and the radio shock absorber frame. Currently, it was holding a prototype cockpit, developed by your in-house cockpit design team.

All in all, the cockpit was perfectly satisfactory. Based heavily on the Argnée cockpit, it had all the standard features. Saddle seat, foot saunters hooked up to the rear legs, tiller controls with two-position ring levers for the knee breaks, center throttle lever with a hand clutch, and the normal gauge layout. The one major innovation was independent leg tensioner gauges, allowing the pilot to be able to do damage control on any one individual leg if anything happened. Once that was done and installed to the satisfaction of all and sundry, you moved back to the power prototype, and prepared for pain.

The problem with the original transmission adaptor was that it was a series of power splitters and a power joiner. To fix that, you instead came up with a relatively simple fix: you would take the standard differential from inside, and then you'd daisy-chain together three of them with extensions to the case, with the last case having the end removed to drive a flywheel with any residual power that would then have the generator leech off it. The lab had an utter fit actually building some practicable prototypes, but the system mostly worked, and even let you sneak in a better clutch and gearbox assembly to increase engine torque as needed.

Of course, every solution bred new problems as your team flailed about trying to coax more power out of the engine. Your last resort would be buying the superchargers needed to force more air into it: between the cost and the complexity of mounting the things and re-engineering the fore hull, it would be the least pleasant option as far as you could foresee.

The other options weren't much better, though. The current line of experimentation was in higher octane fuels with assorted fuel boosters in them. There were two sides to that plan, and so far neither had covered themselves in glory.

The first group had been working with a wet nitrous oxide booster system. By injecting nitrous gas into the fuel system after carburation, the nitrous oxide would break down into additional oxygen, with the added nitrogen serving as inert filler to help raise cylinder pressures. Aside from repeatedly damaging the engine as a result of mis-application of the system, they also required a patently absurd amount of nitrous oxide, which would only be used under certain conditions as a way to add extra horsepower in high-intensity situations. The addition of a tank of liquid in a pressure system that would evaporate at room temperature was also a less-than-ideal addition to an already fire-prone mecha.

The second group had been working with a direct fuel additive, tetraethyl lead. While both more simple to work with than the nitrous oxide team, the tetraethyl lead team was much more expensive in secondary costs. The material in question was made with a combination of ethyl chlorine and lead salts in a chemical equation that made your head spin, and was in low supply at all times. If this was to be a key part of your mecha's engine system, the French Army would need to dedicate intensive effort to producing the stuff in job lots. Mind, it would also work on every other engine in the French Army, but that didn't change the fact the initial outlay would be, dun dun dah, your fault.

Still, with the transmission fixed and the cockpit sorted out, you could move forward, specifically to the legs. With the feet and actuators sorted out and no last-second requirements forcing a change here, you could do final prototype leg design. Fortunately, that was dead easy. Each leg had a simple four-actuator design, and testing on the OSEN actuators revealed that they were more than adequate for the loads they'd be placed under. If you'd had substandard or shoddy actuators, you'd probably be screaming bloody murder and redesigning knee joints at this moment, trying to throttle the closest lab tech. Likewise, no arms meant no problems!

(QM note: due to the simplicity of this mecha, step 6: Leg testing and step 7: Arm testing have been omitted from this contest)

All you had to do right now was sort out your engine issues, and decide your test pilots. There were five available choices in your pool, which had inasmuch as you knew no overlap with the other workshops.

Pierre Vans was a young mecha pilot who's served out his tour in the War about the same time as you did, ending the war with four combat deployments in a mle. 1917 Argnée bis combat mecha as the pilot in three of them and the fourth as an interim vehicle commander. Calm, almost phlegmatic, he was a pool of tranquility in the cockpit and rarely made mistakes. Currently he worked as a crane operator at the docks.

Jules Montrove was a racing pilot, who had been mecha repair and refit during the War as a ferry driver and general purpose gofer. Living fast and on the edge in the race circuit, he brought a wealth of experience in handling quadruped mecha, and was more than willing to put any machine you made through its paces. Currently, he was working part-time as a cashier at a florists, due to being between race seasons.

Anna Petroyvina Chompevsky was a Russian expatriate from Rostov-on-Don, and had earned her mecha credentials as an ambulance technician in the War handling the mle. 1916 Tortue det medical recovery mecha. Well acustomed to temperamental machines and terrible terrain, her steely personality could put the skeleton of your mecha to shame. Currently, she was working as an emergency response in one of the suburbs of Paris.

Jerome St. Ignacio was a mechanic and smith with a background in mecha handling in the post-war border patrol. Used to conducting field repairs on the ancient mle. 1915 Lièvre mechs assigned the task, he had been long accustomed to finicky vehicles in harsh conditions. Generally pleasant from his correspondence, he claimed to understand how to use a soft touch to gain more from a mecha. Currently he was unemployed, after the boarder patrol units discarded their mecha for cars in the latest round of budget cuts.

Marc Fitzroy was an engineering student with the Université de Paris focused on applications of unusual mecha body-forms, with two years experience as a test pilot to some of the downright bizarre horrors that crawled out of their laboratories and three years into his degree. Energetic in correspondence, he claimed the ability to be able to handle any mecha produced in the last quarter-century; if one took the time to read between the ink-stained pawprints of a cat and the schematic doodling in the margins. Currently he was a student, whom would be given sabbatical to be employed by your workshop and laboratory.

Now, it was time to shuffle the paperwork off, and get ready for the initial prototype testing.

VOTES

Engine
[] Go for a supercharger (Most expensive option, most reliable option)
[] Install a nitrous oxide boost system (best high end performance, lowest cost, fire risk)
[] Add tetraethyl lead booster to the fuel (best overall performance, moderate cost, long-term cost generator)

Test Pilots, choose two.
[] Pierre Vans
[] Jules Montrove
[] Anna Petroyvina Chompevsky
[] Jerome St. Ignacio
[] Marc Fitzroy

(GM Note: All votes cast off of the old version of 1.4 will still be counted

 

[7734]

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.

-/-/-/-/

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.

 

[7734]

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.

 

[7734]

After discussing things over with your design staff, you decided that it would be worth it to make the modifications now, and get some millage out of the mecha workshop you had rented for the month. The modifications would be simple things you could integrate into a theoretical Unit 0-3 if you decided to make one, or were required to make one for further progress.

The first step to modifications would be to adjust the rake on the pilot's compartment. Originally there was a steep rake holding the vision port, and then a gentle rake back serving as the roof above the pilot, until it hit the spotter's position. Due to the weight of the top roof plate, a single-piece door wasn't really an option. Instead, after some thinking, your team designed a two-piece door that had a very nice set of overlapping flaps. Inside was a simple bar toggle to lock it closed, and a pair of simple handles. Since the roof didn't have any load-bearing components to it, you could easily put the door in.

The vision ports, however, were harder. Each vision port was a five centimer by thirty centimeter block of bulletproof glass, with a supporting shelf on the inside and outside of the tank. It took some thinking, but eventually you determined that if you reinforced the meeting plate between the forward plate of the driver's station and the side plate with an A-pillar, you could put the entire damn vision block on a door and just… open the door. Hinging would be a little weird, since you'd be using a knuckle hinge to get forward and upward motion, but it let you get good visibility over the feet so you'd take it.

The rest of the modifications came easily from there. Adjusting the seats, adding an optional backrest to the standing position for the pilot doing a road march, radium dials, and adding the internal comms wasn't too much trouble. The headsets were standard artillery-rated comms sets, and to change from internal comms to voice radio all the spotter had to do was slam a large switch in the cockpit.

Modifications done, you got ready for the endurance test. This was going to be a rough one, especially since you were participating as a driver. The plan was a hundred-kilometer total run around the perimiter of the artillery firing range, which would involve transversing roads, forests, plains, two sand traps, a river crossing, and a parking lot. It was expected to run two and a half hours, and would be the longest continual test of the mecha to date. It would also be a time trial, to see who was the fastest pilot.

For this test, you were in 0-2, St. Ignacio was in 0-1, and Montrove was in the 0-0, with race order being from lowest model number to highest.

Your race start was at 1425, and you went off the blocks without any major issues. Your years-long hiatus from mecha piloting wasn't slowing you down too much in your opinion, and the first half of the first leg was fairly easy open plain. The second half, which had a rolling hillside, was likewise fairly easy to traverse thanks to the stronger-than-necessary gyroscope and the autoballancing feet. Coming into the woods on the first turn, though, your speed dipped sharply as you started maneuvering around trees and through glades. The opened side doors did massively help visibility, especially in the instance you had to back up and move around a fallen tree covered with hull scrapes.

Once you were through the first turn you had to go through the first river crossing. This was accomplished quite gingerly, the meter-wide stream presenting a several meter wide danger zone of reduced ground stability and traction. Still, you avoided getting your feet wet, and plunked your way through the area before moving into some steeply cratered hills. The shell holes caused you a little trouble, but it was nothing compared to the sand trap that actually tripped you by causing a foot to twist hard enough to activate the safety disconnect. Limping out on five legs and a hobbling stride, you field-reset it (bring leg full up, flex knee joint out, roll hip back and forth, place leg down to set foot flat, dismount, attach seating cable, bring knee back up, wait for joint to go 'pop', remove seating cable and make a note for the shop to check it) and continued moving. The second sand trap was almost as treacherous as the first, but you cleared it without issues at glacial speeds.

The second corner was a water meadow, and once again your speed went from 'good' to 'glacial' as you tromped through the water. Worse, your engine temperature was steadily spiking upwards for reasons you couldn't figure out. Babying the engine until you were out of the water meadow, you frantically went through the gauges until you found the problem: the radiator temperature was sky-high. Since you didn't have a way to top it off, you'd just have to live with it.

The third leg of the course was difficult, not for the terrain, but in managing your engine heat. What few copses of forrest turned out to be easily enough handled, but any effort to bring speed up brought a new host of issues, up until the fourth leg, in which you had to share a road and make the minimum speed of 20kph. After twenty minutes at this speed, you smelled a hint of smoke, saw the radiator temp fall through the floor, and heard the distinctive 'tink' of the in-engine compartment extinguisher going off.

Taking a minute to shut down the fuel supply, you jumped out to inspect the issue and call in to the HQ for a pickup.

It turned out none of your units completed the course, sadly. 0-0 and Montrove had thrown out a hip joint safely when they'd had a leg tangle in the first forest, and 0-1 and St. Ignacio had the same issue you had: engine overheating, leading to a fire (although his was on the second leg, not the fourth.)

At this point, you had to load all three functional mecha back on the rail-cars, and get back to the factory. You had three weeks to go before the testing contest, and these god-damn engines were bound and determined to try and kill you along the way. Fine- if it wanted to make your life miserable, you'd return the favor, somehow. You obviously needed to expand the radiator and oil cooler, but that could wait. For now, you had a train ride to sleep through.

////

VOTES
[] Build a through-body tunnel for airflow from the dorsal to ventral sides.
+ Fast and easy, with little re-engineering structurally
- Liable to have bottom-side debris ingestion, topside grills are a known vulnerability for anti-mecha munitions
[] Build a through-body tunnel for airflow from port to starboard sides
+ Can be used to cool entire engine compartment, including electrical generator and transmission.
- Creates side armor vulnerability, requires some structural redesign
[] Build a two-stage radiator with an external heat loop for the main heat sink
+ Fewest armor issues, and most difficult to disable
- Most complicated engineering, and adds weight for heat sink mass.

 

[7734]

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.

////

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