Mecha Design Quest

[7734]

Getting ready in the morning for the tests, your nerves were very perceptible. Your babies were going to go through their paces now, and it was enough to drive you mad!

The first test was the road march. Unit 0-1 had been selected for this, and Montrove had already spent the morning stretching for the job. The goal here was to maintain a comfortable speed, completing the one hundred kilometer track in under four hours. With a pistol-shot, the mecha were off.

Your competitors both quickly blew past 0-1, with your weather eye detecting about a 40kph starting speed on the Workshop 1 mecha and a 55kph starting speed on the Workshop 2 mecha. Meanwhile, St. Ignacio was trucking along at 35kph, hatches open and hair in the wind when he pushed his head out a hatch. It wasn't long before both Workshop 1 and 2 both signalled their pilots to slow down, but you just smiled at their respective section chiefs. You had a secret: your mecha could do this all damn day. After about forty-five minutes, the tortoise- or in this case, the spider- had surpassed the hare, and you stopped looking at St. Ignacio and started looking at the competition.

Workshop 1 and their bipedal digitgrade was doing fairly well for itself, now moving at a sustained 25kph. It had a steady, even gait, clean exhaust, and most importantly to you had the pilot having opened the cockpit's armor panels down to have what had to be frankly incredible visibility. Getting it buttoned back up would be a bitch and a half- those plates had to weigh fifteen kilos at minimum, and you didn't want to think about getting them to latch to the frame around him- but for this, he was incredibly well situated.

Workshop 2, however, was having nowhere near as much luck. While it had clear exhaust, you could see steam coming out of the under-and-behind cockpit engine and transmission compartment, and the gait was barely what you'd call stable. In the turn, it tended to skip, indicating it didn't have enough freedom of movement in the hips and legs, and coming into the straight it had a distinct shudder as it came up to speed.

At about two hours in, your mecha had to pit for fuel. Going down, you took the time to throw Montrove a water bottle. You were doing fine, and as long as he could keep going steady the radiator shouldn't blow. Worst came to worst, he'd creep forward at about 10kph to keep the air moving.

Workshop 1 was draining and re-filling their radiator during the pit, and the pilot was drinking water heavily. Workshop 2 was feeding and watering their pilot, and doing what appeared to be a damn near complete fluid changeover as well as hanging a large pair of barrel drums on the back with hoses to the engine compartment.

The next hour went fairly smoothly, as far as these things go, right up until the barrel drums on the back of the mecha from Workshop 2 fell off and it started spewing steam. It wasn't hard to tell they had suffered a traumatic cooling failure, and had to be taken out of the event. Both you and Workshop 1 completed the course without further incident.

The next test was a rough terrain test over an area of 'simulated' battlefield, which was in reality a large section of battleground that hadn't been previously remediated. Unit 0-0 was prepared with St. Ignacio in the cockpit. This was a more traditional race, with the judges timing the event in crossing the three hundred meter hellscape.

Workshop 1 cleared the course in about fifteen minutes, having to take some small amount of time to figure out how to clear a particularly snarly set of trenches around a bunker.

Workshop 2 cleared the course in ten minutes, having plowed through everything and anything in the way. It was at this moment you discovered the purpose of those long, springy legs: they could, would, and did act as actual springs, deforming precariously as the joints practically popped themselves out and pulled themselves back together. It made you slightly nauseous, but it worked.

Your mecha cleared the course in twelve minutes. The main issue wasn't anything particularly snarly in the terrain crossing, but rather in taking a minute at the start to plan out the best route to take advantage. Once that was done, it was pathetically easy to scurry through the obstacles, the only slowing factor being the low top speed of the mecha.

After that came the first weapons test. Unit 0-3 was selected for this, and since it involved a minimum of actual piloting the test crew was going to be coming from the Army on this one. The test itself was split into two sections: a bench rest shooting stage, and a fire and maneuver shooting stage. The first would be a parked mecha, engaging targets from 50 meters to 500 meters, with targets at 50 meter intervals between the two. The second would be ten targets of unknown range between 50 and 500 meters on a stage, then ten minutes of driving or the time needed to reach the next stage. This was to be repeated five times.

Workshop 1's mecha went first again. On the bench rest stage, the mecha engaged each target prefunctually, with quick, clean reports of fire. Aside from a break to change ammunition belts, it worked out quite respectably to take four minutes on the fixed targets. On the manuvere shooting stage, it took quite a bit longer, with the pilot requiring multiple ranging bursts to set his sights correctly. Moving the mecha from course to course had no real issues, although the fifth course of fire took much longer to complete than the first and the mecha needed to be resupplied after the fourth course of fire. When asked, the test crew said it compared equivalently with a Lièvre, with the advantage of a more stable gun mount and an easier ammunition storage system.

Workshop 2's mecha did poorly on the bench rest stage, taking seven minutes to engage the targets and spewing several bursts of fire erratically as the machine gun's recoil and leverage managed to torque the mecha into using its terrain control to compensate. More importantly, however, it had to be resupplied immediately after completing the test. For the manuvere shooting stage, the results were continually atrocious, before the mecha actually fell down during the transition from second to third course. Due to pilot injury and mecha damage, it could not complete the course of events. Once recovered from his head injury, the test pilot complained about terrible ammo stowage, a rattling mount that was massively overweight, and a complete inability to control the mecha while operating the weapon.

Your mecha was a bit of an odd duck, since nobody had actually expected there to be two separate weapons stations on it. It was decided that, for purposes of testing, the stationary tests would be done with each weapons station indepenantly and the manuvere test would count all weapons together. The testing officials were quite happy at needing to develop this protocol, as they didn't expect anyone to bring more than one gun to this event.

On the bench rest stage, your mecha required five minutes to engage all targets from the driver's gun, with the caveat that the driver had to lower the rear hull in order to bring the gun to the correct position to fire on the four hundred plus meter targets due to limited traverse. From the pintle gun, it took two minutes to engage all fixed targets. The driver complained about this difficulty of traverse as well as brass getting all over the compartment; the gunner was incredibly happy with the accommodation of his fighting space. On the manuvere course, a system was quickly worked out: the driver would hose a target with the battle sight, call out a correction, and the gunner would engage with a quickly-adjusted sight in. This lead to fast engagement of close targets as well as precision fires on the longer-distance ones, as well as less belt changes. The driver was once again complaining about the cramped compartment, and stated he could not shoot on the move; however the gunner loved his position and probably wanted to marry you for it.

The terrain march was the next day, and to be blunt you didn't see it. It was a terrain march, and they weren't hauling you along to observe. You did, however, get to observe the destructive testing. Fires would be conducted from head on, from thirty degrees off port side, sixty degrees off starboard side to avoid port side armor that had been compromised, and finally from port broadside.

First up was Workshop 1's mecha. Powered up and put on the range with a straw dummy containing a bladder of red paint, the first unit to get a crack at it was the machine gunners. With each gun being given ninety rounds, they opened up by the numbers. Once that was done, the mech continued idling for a minute, before slowly collapsing to land awkwardly on its belly. Damage analysis indicated that the fires had managed to server the control main to the gyro, leading it to over-ramp and force the mecha down as the leg system didn't register a power input to stay at altitude. It was then decided to test the anti-mecha rifles. Based heavily off the Tankgewhr, the mle.1921 Fusil Antichar fired an 11mm steel-core round at frankly ludicrous muzzle velocities. Three shots were to be taken from the bow angle and 45 degree angles in an attempt to disable critical material components. Once a new dummy driver was installed (the original dying from bullets having worn through his protective front plate), the trial was attempted. While the mle.1921 couldn't force a toal engineering shut-down, it could and did hit something in the hip mechanism to cause it to keel over on one side, and was then considered dead.

Next up was Workshop 2's mecha. With a series of control wires on the controls to keep the mecha upright- as it required constant control pressure to stay upright- and the test dummy, it was prepared for the test. Then, to the surprise of nobody, it fell under when subjected to machine-gun fire. What was surprising, however, was the fact it then promptly caught on fire. Needless to say, the mle.1921 were not brought out to deal with the remains.

Finally, it was your workshop's mecha's turn. With both positions loaded with dummies, it was put out to the test range. The machine gun course of fire passed quite quickly, leading you to the post-damage examination. Surprisingly, the "driver" was still alive, although badly injured by shrapnel. The engine compartment was badly damaged, and the systems were leaking fluid, but it wasn't inoperable, theoretically. Therefore, the big guns were brought out and discharged. The Army diagnostic crew were a little concerned about the white foam pouring out of the engine compartment when it came time to do the damage assessment, but you just sighed and pulled out your scarf and gloves. It was just halon foam, nothing serious. Still, investigation showed that one round had wrecked the transmission, and another had managed to get into the cockpit to wreck things and kill both driver and gunner.

At this point, the assorted military functionaries disappeared into a small dark room, and you went to the hotel to take a nap.

The next day, the results went out. Workshop 2 was disqualified for producing an unsatisfactory product, but soon enough, you and Andrei Moreau were called into the selfsame small backroom.

The reason why was simple and rather painful. The generals loved the Workshop 3 mecha you had made, but the bean-counters were livid at the cost. At the required purchase number- four hundred and fifty for the first five-year budget- the per unit expense would overrun the budget for this capability addition twice over. The Workshop 1 mecha had not been nearly as well received, since it was basically a re-design of the old Lièvre, but it was cheap enough to buy in needed numbers with some cash left over. Once again, politics took a nailbat to your dream at the knees.

Due to internal needs and the fact the Cavalry Branch was still in snits from the War, there were, however, going to be some contractual snarls you might be able to come through in. Each tranche of the budget was going to be organized on a six-month period to deliver 45 scout mecha, and because both you and Workshop 1 were under Hotchkiss, you could potentially do some shenanigans to the contract since it would have a clause for 'procedural upgrade to the fleet if one is developed within 15% cost of original unit' and some other weasel words.

This just meant you had to cost-shave like mad is all. Once you were back home, they even accepted this plan- albeit with more than a few dirty looks. Your modified transmission system was the main point of cost increase, and while you had managed to technically win the contest on performance, the fact this didn't corroborate with a contract meant there were a lot of very unhappy people. Still, your workshop would be receiving Workshop 2's funding allotment for the next year (as they were dissolved) in order to develop the 1- series of your mecha.

Of course, nothing was incomplete without bureaucratic infighting. Since Workshop 2 was going down in flames, Moreau and yourself were both in line to pick up technical staff: and there had been a lot of technical staff there to design that demented chicken. The big three, however, were as follows.

First was the Leg Construction Team, led by Luke Gabol. Experts in structural design, they had been responsable for the legs on that horror out in the field- and presumably, they had been the ones who figured out how to make it look like there was so few actuators there.

Second was the Engine/Transmission Team, led by Charles Vaus. They had come up with the demented engineering packaging that had allowed Workshop 2 to fit their engine and transmission into three quarters the space of Workshop 1, and one third as much space as you did.

Finally was Jacob Guilliarme, a hydraulics expert, who had the most important secret for the operation of Workshop 2's dynamic disaster, and more importantly had some absolutely revolutionary plans rattling around his head. Revolution might have been a dangerous game, but you had a lot of very simple problems to beat that formed a Gordian Knot of an end state.

You would get one, while Andrei would take two; it was his courtesy to let you go first. After that, you'd need to hit the ground running to get your top spot!

/////
VOTES

Cheapening the Mecha
[] You've got some wiggle room to work with, and you know that there's slack in the budget from the Workshop 1 buy. Cut the cockpit gun, tighten up the metal use and find where you change expensive processes to cheaper ones to shave costs down.
[] This is a serious issue, and you're going to have to cut liberally to get this program underway. Tighten up the chassis, work out new packaging in the engine compartment, find a way to cut, cut, cut.
[] Frankly speaking, if it can go, it must go. Start this operation by taking a pair of legs out to reduce the thrice-cursed transmission, and then repackage and redesign from there.

Expanding the Shop
[] Luke Gabol & Leg Construction Team
[] Charles Vaus & Engine/Transmission Team
[] Jacob Guillarme

AN: Yes, these staffing additions are permanent and affect your redesign. Also remember that you are both time limited and on a budget.

 

[7734]

Spoiler: AN

School's starting soon, work is a bitch, and frankly speaking this pandemic is making it hard to keep all my plates spinning. I think I can run this second contest before things fall apart, though.

After beating your head against the design of your mecha for a few days- and more than a little drinking- it became time to start development of the Workshop 3 Block 1 mecha design. The first and most important part of the redesign was a complete repackaging of the engine compartment. By mounting the radiator horizontally along the top of the engine compartment under a peaked roof, you managed to clear out plenty of room on the design. In addition, by taking the electric motor off the transmission and instead gating it to the gyro, your teams managed to simplify that entire disaster by a not-insubstantial degree. Vaus was incredibly helpful there, with his team also developing a way to adjust the oil sumps to significantly cut down on leakage. The end engine/transmission package was about twenty centimeters shorter and thereby allowed you to shave twenty-four centimeters off the total length of the mecha's forward section.

The aft section was slightly harder to compress space-wise, but since your main issue was cost, certain tricks were used to clean the plate. For starters, the large and frustrating wing doors on the driver's position were deleted wholesale, to be replaced with a larger forwards viewport and vision vent blocks that could be articulated by foot with simple hold-open cams. In addition, the driver's gun was deleted wholesale, vastly increasing vision of the position. The commander and spotter, meanwhile, lost the majority of his gun shield down to only a forward plate, and had to contend with a tarp hatch cover in case of rain. In addition, most of his vision blocks were deleted, saving cut time on the sheet steel, and the decision was made to make the subdivision to the radio compartment and the structural floor separating the commander from the gas tank to be made of grating, instead of full steel plate.

The resulting prototype 1-1 was a total 12% cost cut over the 0-1 and -2 models, which wasn't quite enough to reach 115% cost of the Workshop 1 design, now named the Requin. As such, redesign was continued.

The first thing to go at this point were crew comforts. The kind padded seats were replaced with canvass slings, folding benches, and the bare minimum of cloth. Electric headlights were removed, to be replaced by a spotlight for the Commander, and a single signalling lamp. The internal paint was abandoned wholesale, except for what little was needed around weld points as a sealant. Internal fittings were likewise simplified, and a patently Spartan air was had as the next unit, 1-2, was rolled out.

This model, by Grace of God, or whatever passed for him in this benighted industry, was just inside the cost limit. It had taken four months to do, but the French Army found it acceptable, and far more importantly so too did your superiors at Hotchkiss.

Of course, sending the 1-2 design out to the manufactury floor was a foolish move. The next step was to work with foremen and tooling engineers to work out the vagaries of the design, and figure out where steps could be taken to simplify manufacture. The fact of the matter was for large part your costs were predictions, not reality- man-hour bloat could kill the design here if construction was too difficult. Fortunately, the teams had plenty of experience with the old Araignée refits, and quickly applied most of the same design considerations to building your design. Mecha handling platforms, roll-in roll-out construction, crane scheduling, and leg mas construction were all considered, batted around, and discussed. The decision to order out several subsystems helped immensely here, since it minimized additional line spin-up.

The 1-3 prototype construction line spun up, with the French Army giving your design the temporary model designation of the Char a pied mle.1927(expérimental) and the first batch of 45 were accepted six months after trial. Unfortunately, there was some loss on this batch due to line integration issues, but the French Army gladly paid over so that the contract broke even on that shipment.

From there, the 2-1 design, for final production, was initiated, turning slowly into the 2-6 design as leg improvements and new electronics improved the design to where it was both above specification and producing good profit. Seven months after the 0- series proved their worth, the French Cavalry was properly re-arming with your design, next to the Requin. After being dubbed "Fourmi" by the troops, it was a source of great pride to you, and to the company.

Of course, pride cometh before the hit to the kneecaps. Already the French Army had a new specification they wanted designs for, and this one was a far more demanding set of specifications. Designed as an infantry supporting mecha, this unit was required to be bipedal, hit 35kph at maximum speed or 15kph over broken ground, and most critically carry two weapons: a machine-gun or autocannon, and an explosives projector. The weapon for the explosive projector wasn't specified, but it had to be able to deliver a payload of at least 750g explosive fill per shot.

Talking to your contacts in the Army, you quickly got a few more additional items to look at. Speed wasn't the primary concern here: firepower was, and to a lesser extent armor. The latest German 'agricultural mecha' had been observed with heavy armor, and more importantly a number of heavy hardpoints that could be adapted to filled with heavy weapons. Current logic dictated a downed mecha was a dead mecha, though, so the idea was the largest explosive filled round to maximize odds of control loss and a knockover- at which point, the pilot would bail or the infantry would break out the incendiary grenades.

After putting the requirements, both formal and informal, up in the Workshop 3 Office, you then got to the meat of affairs: celebrating. The entire Hotchkiss design staff, your experimental workshop included, was going out for a weekend on the town in Paris. Wine and absinthe would flow, feasts to be had, and for those interested, more exotic pastimes could be arranged. Still, amidst the antediluvian celebration, something was catching your eye. Even here and now, dancing and celebrating, there was still opportunity: you just had to break loose from the lucre in front of you to grasp it.

VOTES

Who- or what- do you see at the party to give you an edge?
[] A group of engineers from Renault, arguing over a bottle of wine at a series of more than half-finished blueprints. You think you see an engine there? (Engine Tech Upgrade)
[] A too-sober American, playing darts and trying to avoid the temptation of anything stronger than the glass of orange juice in one hand. Pity about the faint whiff of vodka coming from it, but he hasn't missed a throw yet. (Weapons Tech Upgrade)
[] A pair of Chinamen, speaking in quite legible Portuguese, whom seem to be confused about why their odd mechanical toys don't seem to be selling in the market. (Gyro Tech Upgrade)
[] A piss-drunk African preacher, speaking a Caribbean patois you can hardly make out. The mechanics trying to rouse him have a reason, though, and judging from their frantic prayers and the broken car outside, they seem to think his faith is the only thing to bring it back to life. (Eldritch Research Development)

////
AN: at no point did I say this Quest would ever hew too close to the boundaries of reality...

 

[7734]

Waking up from the previous night with a hellacious hangover, you find your head buried deep in the sands of paper, as well as forty small children's tops all left half-disassembled as you sketched out the remains of their operation. A mess of springs and tiny threaded rods inside the toy controlled weights, which then moved relative to the rest of the standing mass to change the distribution of weight. It was quite clever- and more importantly, meant something you could borrow from. One major issue of gyroscopes was getting them up to tempo, and with this system you were envisioning you could get the system up to speed with the weights in, and then adjust speed via adjusting position of those weights instead of running a brake on the shaft.

Collecting your sketches, you got everything bundled up, and dutifully headed off to work. Once there, the gyroscope team dutifully went over your designs, and prototypes were discussed, before being put to the think team. Working off the older Foucalult 2,000rpm unit, there would have to be a lot of adjustments, but if the tunings held correctly the gyroscope team leader thought he could get the same rotational momentum out of a 1,500rpm unit with the new system. Unfortunately, the control rod system would cap net rotations unless someone else came up with something clever, but that wasn't your department.

Sitting down in the work room, you got together with your team of experts and got to work. Hotchkiss wasn't kneecapping you on this project, thankfully, but there was a request to keep transmissions systems simple. More importantly, however, was the request to try and work with Workshop 1 on a common weapons arrangement so that Hotchkiss Arms could start tooling up a dedicated shop for the mechworks. In addition, you were getting a new team lead: Robert Niels, head of the armorers team. While he only had five machinists and ten laborers, the fact he had the licensing and ability to get his hands on whatever weapons you wanted was going to be critical.

Sitting down to talk design, things got started quickly. Gregory du Sale flat out said he wanted to push for a forty-ton design, which opened the discussion with flying coffee cups. Compagnie du Siens only offered up to twenty ton feet, and this design had to be a biped: going for multiple feet was out of the question! With that matter settled- and the broken porcelain swept up- he compromised down to a full-bodied twenty tonner, with the additional caveat that a long-body design would get him better structural articulation to mount armor to.

Matthew Javiers, meanwhile, was much more conservative in his wants. Pushing weight limits was for fools, and more importantly engines were going to be a very hot topic for this design. The Army was pushing for the Hispano-Suiza 12N engine to get used; a newer design, it would be slightly larger and far more powerful than the previous 12X and its major horsepower losses. In contrast, Matthew was looking for the Lycoming R-680 engine: an American radial design. This started another argument, since conventional logic dictated engine dimensions ruled chassis dimensions: a wide, flat dinner plate of an engine would dictate a wide, flat dinner plate of a torso: perfect to shoot and impossible to armor.

Conrad Moreau, the insatiable rascal, had meanwhile decided that it was not enough to watch Gregory and Matthew brawling on the floor, but had to add fuel to the fire publicly. He advocated for a designed two-man system from the start, with a pilot, and a gunner-commander to dictate the operation of the weapons system: since the Army obviously wanted a sophisticated weapons load, it needed its own manager. Since therefore size calculations would need adjustment again, the brawl turned three-way, before you laid into the lot with a fire control hose to restore order.

Yves Pitiet, in a fit of sanity, had no comments on this phase of design.

Of course, Robert Niels couldn't let sleeping dogs lie, since he had solutions for the problem no matter how you designed things. While a light eighty-one millimeter mortar could handle the explosive load task, Robert considered the Army's current doctrine to be one that was… uninspired. Low velocity explosive chuckers were inaccurate and difficult to use; with his suggestion being a primary armament of the new 13.2mm version of the verniberale mle.1914 machine gun. Two of those in free-targeting arms would handle almost any light vehicle, while a small mortar or series of rocket tubes could engage anything else. Once everyone else finished having him turn out his pockets for mind-altering substances, he also begrudgingly admitted that if such a design wasn't plausible, then there might be suitable experimental developments to reduce recoil to such a point where a full-caliber cannon could be used.

Putting all this information together, you sat on it for the rest of the day while the shop prepared itself. Fundamentally, the design issues boiled down to if you wanted to push a one man or a two man crew. A one man crew would be preferable to the French Army for purposes of training, but would massively increase pilot workload and the amount of cockpit complexity. Figuring out a way to aim non-fixed weapons alone would be devastatingly difficult. Adding a second crewman though as a general gunner and loader would fix that problem in the bud- except it would also negatively affect weight, since it meant a larger crew compartment, and therefore more area under armor.

Of course, this discussion then looped back into weapons. If you wanted a decently sophisticated way to throw explosives, you needed a loader. If you were willing to go simple, though- say, with a pre-loaded set of mortar tubes, or rockets, or what-have-you, then you could delete the loader and go about your merry way. Machine gun aiming was going to be an issue anyway with or without him, since the pilot needed a more sophisticated option than a fixed gun (one of the few major issues with the old Araignée) and while the loader could be trusted to man a machine gun, that also meant providing him one and related costs and weights.

This was going to be a messy decision, wasn't it?

VOTES

Engine
[] Hispano-Suiza 12N
(pros: domestic production, in-line engine, easily modified. cons: Hispano-Suiza, water-cooled.)
[] Lycoming R-660
(pros: air cooled, radial engine, will run after traumatic damage. cons: imported, radial engine)

Chassis
[] Single Operator Design
(Pros: Smaller crew area, less armored area. Cons: Simpler weapons, worse endurance)
[] Pilot/Loader Design
(Pros: Better weapons, better endurance. Cons: Much larger area under armor, still have to design machine gun handling system anyway)

 

[7734]

After a great deal of soul- and budget- searching, you finally settled down on a pilot-loader design, as well as the… rather dubious… decision to take in the 12N engine. Fundamentally, it made sense. If you placed the stabilizing gyroscope behind the articulation point of the leg in a digitigrade fashion, then you could put the engine under the pilot, and the transmission under the loader. This lasted for about half an hour, before Yves shat on that plan on grounds of making it bloody impossible to keep the control mains free. He wanted the pilot in front of the engine, as far forward as possible. Matthew then objected in return, listing that he couldn't make the engine sit like that, it was completely impractical. He suggested an engine-aft design, which you then objected to because you needed room aft to put your bloody weapons system in.

Design meetings were adjourned for a week while the question of the transmission was addressed and parts were acquired. The eventual Hotchkiss-Foucault 1500rpm gyroscope was chosen since it had the lowest power draw to stabilization, and you were actually inordinately proud when Workshop 1 sent a formal request to use a copy of the design. That, right there, was what victory looked like.

What victory did not look like, however, was staring at the utter slew of guns across the armory floor that Niels had brought to your attention. Everything from the new 7.5mm light machine guns to a monsterous 120mm gun-mortar were laid out, and you were honestly quite lost. Fortunately, Niels had a plan to 'simplify' matters.

The new mecha needed a large, dangerous anti-mecha weapon. That was what the big guns were for. It also needed an anti-personnel machine gun. That was what the little guns were for. Therefore, to make things easy, you'd decide on both separate the other.

For machine guns, there were plenty of options. The newest gun was the Reibel, a drum-fed in 7.5x54, the 'new service cartridge of the nation' according to Niels, it would be a very solid choice. You weren't personally so sure of the drum magazines, since a 150-round pan was, well… lacking. Sure, it was better than strip feed, but you were a personal proponent of belts.

The old Hotchkiss mle.1908 and mle.1914 stood by, but neither you nor Niels wanted to talk about them. Both were showing their age, and you weren't feeling it about designs as old as you. Worse was the fact they fed old 8mm Lebel, a round that was loosing traction rapidly. Their one benefit was that the new mle.1914/1926 refits could accept up to 500 round belts: more than enough ammunition between reloads.

Fortunately, however, new hotness was next to them. The Hotchkiss mle.1927 was a massively upsized mle.1914 with parts of the guts cleaned up, with the entire design rechambered into 13.2x96mm. While not as powerful as the 11mm Antichar rounds, it still possessed a respectable heft, and Internal Testing revealed that it would reliably penetrate a 15mm flat plate at 150m out of the standard 76 caliber barrel. It wasn't a proper anti-armor weapon, but it was more than enough to handle light vehicles and scout mecha- and more importantly, buy you some extra wiggle room if your choice in explosive weapons wasn't up to snuff.

The high explosive weapons, meanwhile, were more varied.

First on the docket was the old reliable SA 18 cannon. With a 37mm shell and a 21 caliber barrel, she wasn't a looker in the race. The gun had been a staple on the old Araignée, and very few people would look askance if you decided to re-use it, right until technical testing began. Each shell weighed 670 grams with 30 of that as fill; not nearly enough to meet the 750 gram fill requirement! A secondary weapon, if you needed one, but hardly a first choice.

Following along was the canon de 65 M mle.1906. A bit of an antique, it was a mountain gun that was nonetheless both light and incredibly soft-recoiling. While it wouldn't pass the fill requirements, it would be incredibly easy to mount the gun so that it wouldn't cause recoil issues if you needed to go for a high weapons mounting. The one thing worth noting was that there wasn't a huge, ready supply: if you picked this gun, there might be actual museum pieces getting refurbished until Schneider could pick up a contract to produce some for you new.

Lastly, and certainly most prominently in the full-up artillery section, was the venerable Soixante-quinze; the Matériel de 75mm mle.1897 gun. In her appearance here, she was one of the 1914 Schneider builds, with a new recoil control spring and longer barrel. More than capable of fulfilling any shell requirements (and if she couldn't the board would be forced at gunpoint by the Artillery Branch to abandon such foolishness) it also came with the benefit of a massive pre-existing supply of guns. The catch was, however, recoil and weight. The full length barrels made them heavy, and while the recoil dampeners would control the weight of a 75x350R shell, control was not the same as cancel. Either you would need to be very conservative in mounting this gun, or you'd need to cut down the barrel and accept losses in accuracy and power.

Finally came the small weapons, those oddballs not so mighty as to take another task. First among them was the Crapouillot, or more formally the Mortier 58mm type 2. While the launcher was an inconspicuous clump of metal, the bomb of 18 to 35kg on a long stick was not. With 5-10kg fill, depending on bomb size, it would absolutely massacre whatever you hit it with. The issue, however, was hitting things. Even with guidance fins, the bombs were very much area weapons, and their high angle of fall made them near impossible to aim. It took little discussion with Niels to determine that if you were to use these, they would require extensive work to make palatable- but if you wanted to put that work in, the resultant weapon would let you strike like a god.

Next was the rockets. First, but not least, was a copy of the Soviet standard mecha rocket. At 65x400mm, they were a hefty rocket, each with 2kg fill. Standard use had them socketed into ten-rocket racks, tied to a common electric fuse for ignition. One would shoot the entire pack en masse, or not at all. Accuracy was debatable, since you didn't have secret Russian documents, but information from the Germans that had been acquisitioned by people in dark rooms reported that on average a single rack at 150 meters tended to fill a 10x25m square with 8/10 rockets.

Of course, some people couldn't stand the concept of a Soviet weapons system, and had taken pains to Frankify it. The result was the 96x650mm rocket: a much heavier weapon, with 3.2kg fill. The issue was, all you had was the rocket: there was no established weapons mounting for it, or much use data at all. In truth, the only reason it was here was because it had been decided at Higher Levels than you to develop a heavy weapon to mount on the Lièvre and Requin in limited numbers to give them mecha-killing firepower. If you committed to it early, the result would be the ability to dictate a weapons system with incredible firepower, and more importantly one you could port forward across multiple mecha.

Of course, this didn't solve the problem of aiming any of these, but that was a cockpit integration problem. Since trying to design a universal aiming system was foolishness, you'd rather instead get the topic of which weapon to use nailed down first.

Naturally, this is when you walked back into the workshop, hoping to get back to work and instead watched the engineers and tradesmen race wagon wheels out into the fairway with the H-F gyro. Needless to say, they would start getting rather bored if you didn't wrap this weaponry nonsense up soon.

///
Votes

Light Weapons
[] mle.1914 Hotchkiss 8mm
[] mle.1926 Reibel 7.5mm
[] mle.1927 Hotchkiss 13.2mm

Heavy Weapons
[] SA 18 37mm canon
[] 65mm montagne cannon
[] 75mm mle.1897/14
[] 58mm Crapoulliet mortar
[] 65mm rocket pack system
[] 96mm rocket

 

[7734]

There was a time for revolutionary ideals, and there was a time for calm conservatism. However, you were French, so those two concepts were kind of backwards sometimes. Like today.

Once you explained to Gregory, the structural designer, that you were mounting the Soixante-quinze in your mecha, there was a large amount of standing clear as the yelling and the screaming and the waving of hands started. A ton and a half, just in cannon, would be a nightmare to arrange for, plus the weight of ammo. Still, working with Matthew, he thought he could figure out a way to mount it without sending everything to shit.

The trick would be you would end up with a very… avian, that would be the kindest word for it… design. Digitigrade legs would support a reasonably wide body, with a long nose that would hold the majority of the armor and the cockpit. Directly behind the cockpit would be a firewall, and then the engine-ammunition-loader compartment, with a truly fucky layout. Working with Niels had allowed them to come up with a somewhat not theoretical way to lay out the recoil cylinders for the gun that allowed it to have only the barrel outside the mecha, which had allowed them to position the gun off centerline. To counterbalance this, the natural and obvious solution was to put the engine and the transmission en echelon of the gun. This meant the loader was sitting next to the transmission, loading from ammo racks that were next to the engine, above and below the drive shaft, and under his seat.

The machine guns were, meanwhile, planned to go in a chin turret below the cockpit. Thanks to the powers of incredible theft, your team had managed to get Workshop 1's turret system from them in exchange for their gyro, and in the bargaining also got the control yoke they'd set up. Due to the size of the gun and the belts, you couldn't actually rig a full turret system, but you could do something almost as good: plus-minus fifteen degrees of elevation, over a full 60 degree arc over the front of the mecha. The only issue was ammunition was… well, restricted. The core problem was that the 13.2mm round meant the action was too energetic for the old design of belt-stripper that was in turn a modification of the feed strip stripper, and since the mle.1927 wasn't designed to be a mecha weapon, it wasn't actually given a belt feed adapter. As such, you were stuck running a kitbashed together drum magazine, giving each gun a meager 90 rounds.

Niels was already beating on heads over in Hotchkiss Arms & Artillery, but until that fight got finished you had to contend with the fact that your 'light firepower' had been kneecapped. Ideally, the fact you had a monstrously huge cannon would cover this sin. Ideally.

In the meantime, though, it was back to the supplier fights. After the success of the Fourmi, you had suppliers crawling out of the woodwork trying to get you to pick up their parts and contracts. From the littlest widget to the biggest actuator, someone was trying to get in your supply chain. After weeding out the obvious fakers, you were back with the basics.

Guilimont & Sons were back with their custom cockpit design services, and after being subcontracted for some of the work on the Requin order, had upscaled to an actually decent shop. While this cockpit was simpler, you still had to integrate the chin gun yolk into the arrangement, as well as the sighting systems for everything. Workshop 1 was talking a big game about their new 'synthetic aperture aligned holographic gunsight' and if you wanted a chance in hell as to getting that thing integrated, you'd need to get someone who actually knew a fair bit about cockpit systems to do it. As good as Conrad was, the man was already starting to go gray from the mess that was running the control mains to the engine off-center of the mecha, much less the transmission mains that had to go on a special structural member to make sure the engine shaft didn't get torqued if the hull got a good whack thrown on it.

The next, and potentially most interesting contractor offer you got was actually American, of all things. Bethlehem Steel had developed a new armor formulation and annealing technique for nonstructural armor plates, and had a representative offering to license it. The technique only worked on at least 20mm plate, though, which would get very heavy, very quickly. Far more importantly, it would have to be plate: you couldn't use a cast feature here. That in turn meant weight cost to set up the framing for it. Could be lighter in the end than a cast glacis, could be heavier. You weren't sure.

Continuing on, OSEN was back with their super-speed actuators from the Fourmi design, now improved to be able to handle up to eighteen tons gross weight. When you mentioned this was a twenty-ton mecha, the response was that with 'reasonable doubling as per standard industrial knee construction', you could easily mount up to thirty tons on the design, in exchange for a bit of a whack knee configuration.

Naturally, you talked this over with Yves, who agreed with you this was bullshit. After telling that rep to come back with a real fucking product and a liter of blinker fluid, you then got to the other actuator company, the Societie du Frachamps, who were offering a thirty ton actuator designed for industrial quadrupods. It was a little bulky, but what made it a serious offer was that it was a specially designed actuator designed for digitigrade legs. This was important, since a plantigrade knee- such as a human knee- had totally different loading patterns than a digitigrade knee- like a chicken's for instance. While Yves said he could design around the unorthodox knee, there were risks involved. There always were.

The question of outsourcing was weighing heavily on things, which also happened to impact the next big discussion: armor and armoring. The fact of the matter was, your mecha was expected to take a beating this time around, and actually trying to deliberately protect it was going to be, well, hard. More importantly, everyone had opinions on how to lay said armor out.

Your first design group wanted a harsh, angular forward array. With Yves backing them, the plan was to use a sharp, 45-degree leading edge to create four mirrored slopes of perfectly homogeneous rolled armor plate of 35mm. The pilot would have an armored 'conning box' to place his head in with vision slits, and a top hatch. The sides would be flat 7mm sheet steel, with the hips protected by a set of stamped covers of the same hiding them. Internal protection would consist of placing the drive train in an armored alleyway of the same 35mm steel, the driver in a box of 10mm rolled steel, and the loader being issued a rosary in case of a penetrating hit. The largest issue with the design would be getting all that forward armor plate to stay welded to the frame, followed shortly by all the added nose weight.

The second team, by contrast, wanted a smooth, single-piece cast and gently sloping dome piece, of approximately 50mm, with an upper panel of 35mm. The pilot would sit, protected by the lower glacis, with his head and shoulders protected by the 35mm panels, with vision blocks and a topside hatch. The sides would have a tumblehome slope, composed of 15mm rolled steel, with no internal armor divisions. The hips would be shadowed by the tumblehome, and the rear would be protected with a downward-facing pair of skid plates in 35mm steel.

The last team, meanwhile, was simplest. Their plan was a single rolled and cemented 55mm plate, at 25-degree back slant, with a series of six bulletproof, tempered glass panels in a near-115mm thick array that was two panels wide and three deep (with the center at steep angle) to stop any incoming fire. There was also a conning box above, but it was marked 'secondary' on the armor proposal. The rest of the mecha would be covered in near-flat 15mm armor, with the sides protected by a thin, 4mm corrugated sheet steel layer of ablative armor to promote rifle fire ricochets. This skirt would also extend to completely enclose the hips.

With all designs, a set of 'pilot's armor' was also presented. While the Great War had forced many mecha pilots into protective garments, this would be the first 'proper' set of mecha pilot's armor. With a cloth gambeson top and bottom, leather pants and light shoes would have protective studding, as well as large gaiters to make sure the garments stayed sealed. On the upper body, a chain-reinforced wax-cure leather jacket would be the main protective layer, and a heavy helmet with steel inserts and mask would protect the head.

///

VOTES
One per category please.

Contractors

[] [ACTUATORS] Develop these in-house
[] [ACTUATORS] Buy the knee assembly and actuators from the Societie du Frachamps. Better safe than sorry for your legs.

[] [STEEL] Develop this from French manufacturers
[] [STEEL] License the Bethlehem Steel face-hardening technique.

[] [COCKPIT] Develop this in-house.
[] [COCKPIT] Subcontract out cockpit design and equipment to Guilimont & Sons. Sure, it'll cost more, but the features they can work in will be worth it.

Armoring Scheme
[] [ARMOR] Go with scheme 1: proud, very faceted glacis; and little else for armor.
[] [ARMOR] Go with scheme 2: Large cast glacis, protected piloting position, well-sloped sides, dedicated rear armor.
[] [ARMOR] Go with scheme 3:Flat, monobloc glacis with armored vision port and ablative skirts

 

[7734]

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.
////

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.

 

[7734]

After the disaster that was initial mecha testing, you immediately called a halt to all further live testing while things got settled. After designating armor design and gyro teams, you got to work on dissecting the issues with the cockpit.

Sitting in a de-powered unit, you quickly started figuring out how the cockpit worked, and it didn't take long to figure out the issues with the controls. France did not, as a country, have a long history with the conceptual bipedal mecha. America had pushed for those designs the hardest, building to exploit open ground and areas between formations with speed: your national mecha were meanwhile designed to bull-rush enemy lines, straight through blizzards of rifle and machine-gun fire through strength of arms and armor.

Design-wise, the 0-2 cockpit was fairly simple: left and right feet handled the saunters, left hand operated the belly machine guns, right hand runs throttle, clutch, choke, gyro adjuster, parking brake, gearshift, and the three-switch radio and comms set. The refractive sight for the machine guns was set up on a tracking boom arm so you knew where they were aimed, and was normally rotated up and out of the way: everything else was fairly well-handled.

The problem was visibility and instrumentation. Once you got the stool adjusted and positioned yourself for operation, you quickly discovered the viewing ports were completely inadequate. The first thing you learned for handling the Araignée was to make sure you had proper side visibility to inspect for list and roll issues: something you don't have here. That was one thing to fix, both with better windows, and with ways to automatically determine roll, pitch, and yaw. Unfortunately, while you could use a fairly simple pendant-system for the clinometer, everything else would need to have an artificial zeo. That, in turn, meant gyroscopes.

While instrument developers might try and feed you a load about 'reading requirements off the main mecha stabilizing gyro', you knew intimately this was a load of horse shit. Each gauge would need its own, very small, stabilizing gyroscope. They didn't need a ton of stabilizing power if the gimbals were good enough- and gimbals were pretty easy- but they did need to be moving at a decent clip. Fortunately, there was already a Government Approved Supplier who made pretty much these exact instruments for the Service Aéronautique. Unfortunately, it meant developing a vacuum system.

The thing to remember about gyros is that gyrostabalization worked on anything spinning around a fixed axle. So, for instance, if you put a Pelton Wheel on an axle, and put that axle on a gimbal? Boom! Wind-powered gyroscope, as long as there was constant wind. Get the vacuum system set up to provide that wind, and you were in business. Working with Conrad, you quickly integrated the vacuum-dependant systems into their own panel, set up the vacuum system, and you moved on to other cockpit issues: specifically, visibility.

While you didn't like it, the pilot's upper box was untenable for satisfactory operation. Attempting to drive and operate the mecha normally was neigh-impossible while using it, so your first order of business was to delete it entirely and replace it with a flat hatch. Instead, you'd need to introduce a series of four vision blocks, so as not to compromise armor. While there would still be slightly dodgy forward visibility, a pair of safety mirrors attached to the sides of the vision blocks forward would make sure the blind spot extended no more than one meter ahead of the mecha.

Once that was all handled, the next question was pilot safety. Additional pads were to be installed on the vehicle for pilot bumps, and more importantly, a series of five padded grab-bars were added to make sure that in course of operations or emergency a pilot wouldn't grab a structural frame member that was holding something critical, such as vacuum lines, electrical lines, torsion lines, or god forbid the pneumatic line to the emergency gyroscope disconnect.

Once all that was filed and the work done with Guilmont & Sons (who were actually quite happy with the additions of the vacuum system and related gauge panel; one of the sons was talking excitedly about a standardized instrument cluster for the entire mecha) you got to work on other issues: specifically the armor and the gyro.

While the gyroscopic system didn't require many changes, it did require two major ones. The first, and critical, change was to add an automatic shaft speed compensator. If the engine spun up rapidly, the system would initially wind down the gyroscopic weights to compensate. Likewise, the reverse was true now as well. The second major change to make was a mounting one: the gyroscope needed to be mounted about 15cm forward of its current position. To do this required some inspired adjustments, and a large angled brace, since the meat of the support structure couldn't come forward with the system or else it could interfere with the hip structural assemblies.

Armor, however, was the worst modification. Saint-Chamond was very unhappy about modifying their castings for the armor pieces, but needs must: you needed to get as much weight back as possible. The dome would become more oblong, and while peak thickness would remain at 50mm, most of the dome would need to slope down to 40mm in order to make the casting not deform in use and still meet the mounting points. However, the modifications meant you were now only 2cm over starting length instead of 6cm over starting length, and along the way had saved something like a sixth of a ton in actual weight, and potentially infinitely more in effective weight due to shortening the moment arm of the leverage that the armor's weight would be putting against the legs. In addition, you also added something most designers wouldn't consider: a series of chain hooks to the bottom of the mecha. The purpose, you explained, would be to allow mechanics to chain the mecha to the ground while putting on armor, so as to prevent shifts in the mecha.

Once all this was done, prototype mecha 0-2 needed to go out and see how the changes felt. Unfortunately, that meant getting a test pilot- and St. Ignacio was flatly refusing to use it. The man had recently married, and as much as the ladies enjoyed a daring test pilot, they did not enjoy the 'live fast go out in a blaze of glory' mindset when it would be a blaze of glory less than a month after the wedding. As such, you had to hire another test pilot.

////
Votes

New test pilot: choose two, two highest are hired.
[] Pierre Vans: Calm veteran of the Great War.
[] Anna Petroyvina Chompevsky: Steadfast former ambulence mecha pilot.
[] Marc Fitzroy: Energetic engineering student
[] James Colchanac: Desperate Irish Army expatriate
[] Yves Montessor: Seasoned German civil mecha operator

 

[7734]

Looking at the test track with baited breath, you watched Prototype 0-2 making the rounds. After 0-1's fatal failure and structural loss, you were making absolutely sure this mecha was being documented in every way possible. In addition, the cockpit radio was running hot, with the new test pilot running things. Vans wasn't a particularly inspired test pilot, to be sure, but he was very respectful of the gauges and was more than willing to talk. His running commentary was getting transcribed for future reference, as well as to help brief the second new test pilot: Chompevsky.

Once low-speed trials were finished, high speed came up quite naturally. At thirty kilometers per hour, the nose wobble was completely gone. It stayed gone, too, until the mech's gait picked up to fifty-five kilometers per hour and the roll cycle started intensifying. According to cockpit instrumentation, it was holding steady at about four degrees off centerline in the roll, and nose yaw wasn't above ten degrees.

You still capped the speed there: some other morons could do testing beyond that. Cornering tests, meanwhile, showed that at everything slower than forty-five kilometers per hour, the mecha was very stable. At forty-five, though, the turning radius had to be either incredibly shallow, or the mecha would start to have some very dangerous-looking yaw characteristics that tried to push into a roll, forcing the test pilots to max-rev the gyro and pull out of the turn. While nobody got hurt, per say, Vans did put Unit 0-3 through the barriers and instituted a pretty bad fall into the berm around the facility. While the mecha's undercarriage was hideously banged up and the chin machine guns were once again utterly wrecked, the rest of the mecha was fine and Vans only had to retire the day with a mild concussion.

Once walking tests and other ground testing was done, you put together your current progress report to Hotchkiss, and got the rest of the initial five-mecha prototype batch up to current standards. About two-thirds the way through, word came in: you were to take all current mecha to Brest for weapons integration testing. Apparently, someone had only just now told Corporate that Renault was finally sticking their neck in the military mecha show, with a bipedal, hunchback design mounting some lunatic new weapon: an 80mm gun-mortar with a revolving autoloader, as well as a pair of Riebel machine guns.

Brest was… it was Brest. Damp, windy, and full of Navy pukes staring at you for the temerity to bring a mecha into their gunnery training ranges. That didn't really matter, though, as you had rented out sufficient offroad cargo-hauler mecha to get your prototypes in, and an off-base mecha shop. Getting everyone to work was much easier this time, thanks to the fact you'd all done this before, as well as the fact there wasn't a competition this time.

It took about three days to get all the non-weapons testing done- off road, endurance, field repair, basic training- and then came weapons testing.

For this, the plan was simple. You weren't trying to figure out if the weapons were accurate or how easy they were to use: right now, you were figuring out 'would the weapons damage themselves in the course of normal operation'.

To that end, you started with the machine guns. Since they only had 90-round magazines, you weren't worried about the problem where they'd rattle themselves to bits. Instead, you were worried about access and reloading, and as it turns out, you were right.

While initial testing had no problems emptying the drum mags, the problem was exchanging them for filled ones. Eventually, the compromise technique was developed of 'kneeling' the mecha, for the reloader to pop out using the underside escape hatch, unlatch the rear panel, and then disengage both drum magazines, and retrieve fresh ones. The loaders- conscripts recruited from the Army garrison- bitched mightily about this arrangement, and were deeply unhappy with the concept of potentially dismounting under fire.

Continued testing, however, revealed that the chin turret had one significant and unforeseen flaw: specifically, piper drift. The reflective synthetic gunsight was a useful tool, but it wasn't slaved to the mounting. Instead, it operated off a parallel interpretation of input commands. What this meant was that as the turret continually lost zero due to recoil, mecha vibration, and God's hatred of machines, the piper became continually more and more unreliable. A field-expedient repair was cooked up by re-zeroing the piper to the turret, but once again the loaders bitched about this as they had to tie a pole to the gun barrels so the driver could see where the guns were pointed.

Then came the Soixante-quinze's testing, and oh, how you were biting your nails for this. Unlike with the machine gun testing, the flaws you found were many, and all of them were not kind ones.

First and foremost, your team had badly bungled the redesigned recoil system. The problem was, the gun normally had a 90cm recoil path. This wasn't really acceptable, so when it was rebuilt for your mecha, Niels and the armaments team had built a new hydraulics arrangement that, on the trial stand, had cut the recoil path down to about 45cm: just enough room for the old shell to stay on the recoil trail for the loader to kick out of the mecha via a special slat in the belly armor. In testing, however, the recoil absorption was incredibly subpar, to the point that the pilots were reporting significant nose-up at the instant the system ran out its recoil stops.

Second, the feed system and loader's compartment was totally unacceptable. Every step in the loading cycle was fraught with issues. Inserting a shell required a straight kick, followed by a careful maneuver to close the breech: loaders had great issue making sure the shell was fully inserted and the breech totally sealed. On firing, the mecha bucked wildly, resulting in loaders grabbing on to many things they shouldn't, causing nearly a dozen conscripts being injured in the process, with resulting issues ranging in severity from bruised fingers to an amputated foot (as said foot had been resting in the recoil path of the gun on firing) causing much tirade from the base's commander. On shell ejection, the shell rarely completed ejection fully, frequently striking the backrest of the system, and becoming stuck in the breech as they bounced forward back towards the gun.

Finally, and most critically, the gun was severely limited in firing ranges due to limitations of the mecha. This required a little explaining.

Due to weight issues, you and Gregorie had designed the mecha to have a permanent five degree pitch up at the nose in resting configuration, which would steadily 'droop' as the fuel tanks and ammunition racks in the rear of the vehicle were depleted. Therefore, in standard operation, the main spinal spar was at five degrees up pitch. Niels, then, to maximize recoil travel length and structural integrity, then mounted the Soixante-quinze at a negative five degrees relative to the main spinal spar: in short, in normal operation, the gun would be level to the ground.

Now, you had foreseen this might be a problem, and wanted to mirror the standard trailer's twenty degree elevation, which in turn meant elevating the main spar to twenty-five degrees on account of the cannon's inclination.

What happened when you tried using the gun at this position, well, was not pretty. On firing, the shell launched, the gun recoiled, and then math failed you as the legs on your mecha folded up with a scream as actuators gave out and it fell to the ground, ass-first.

Preliminary investigation revealed that the system had flat-out failed after the pilot had felt the mecha rock over the redline for pitch and therefore thrown the gyro and hips into a full downward press. Your preliminary estimate was that this couldn't compensate for the inertia of the armored nose, which had less downward weight due to the high angle, and as such couldn't handle the recoil of the main battery.

Testing revealed that +20 degrees on the mecha did not suffer the same failure, although relative 'bucking' of upward pitch did increase with higher angle fires, so the theory that the nose wasn't able to help control recoil was going to likely be part of whatever solution you came up with.

With weapons integration coming up mostly green- and yes, you checked, according to your liaison from the Army, this was a pretty good showing, you were sent back to the factory with an official notice: trials were going to be in six months, to allow for the adoption to come in with the 1928 fiscal year, first quarter.

According to your napkin math on the train ride back, that was exactly enough time to fix one problem with the mecha. Maybe two, if they were small ones.

-/-/-/-/

Votes

[] Fix the actuator arrangement so you don't have more catastrophic blowouts, and while you're at it see if you can perk up the gyro to improve handling. The automatic system works, but you know it can be better.
[] The gun. That damn gun. Recant against your personification of hubris, and find something smaller to fit in there.
[] The loader's compartment. Obviously, there were issues with how things went, and frankly speaking you knew, at least a little, that this would probably need some touching up.
[] The chin turret. Between the piper drift, the short magazines, and the reloading issues, you need to get that whipped. That might mean replacing one of the heavy machine guns, might mean finding out if you can get custom belt adaptors, you don't know. What you do know is this needs work.
[] General fine-tuning. Everything works fairly well according to the Army rep, and he's the sort you can trust not to talk out his ass. If you spruce the main items up and trust that you can submit revisions later, then anything that bites you in the ass should be rectifiable in the long run.

 

[7734]

Frankly speaking, you needed to fix the main weapons system of your mecha. However, that meant you needed to know what was going to be the main weapons system: the machine guns, or the cannon. As much as the cannon forced a large part of the design of the mecha, it was also only provisioned with forty rounds of ammunition, eighty if your pilots were willing to push a dangerously high load with half the ammo in crates on the back armor in a cargo net. With the multitude of issues there were with firing the cannon quickly, there was no reason to depend on it overmuch for the sudden, shocking combat that was liable to ensure in mechanized warfare, much less the hypothetical mecha on mecha combat that military theorists were devoting reams of paper to.

To this end, the main weapon wasn't the cannon, but rather, the machine guns. There were problems with the turret, problems with the guns themselves, and most importantly, problems with the sighting system. However, in the limited time period you had left, you had to divide and conquer. Setting up teams lead by Matthew, Niels, and Yves, you quickly got to work resolving issues.

The turret itself had a multitude of issues, but fundamentally as a weapons station worked well enough. Despite your dreams, an under-armor reloading system was impossible: the turret was too far forward, and bringing it backwards would make the structural mounting points and hydraulics systems interfere with the hips- and more importantly, the underbelly cannon. As it stood, the cannon's barrel already lived in a sleeve inside dead space around the turret's support structure. With moving the turret leaving the table, you instead sought to increase ammunition capacity inside the turret- and therefore, unfortunately, changing the ammunition feeding of the guns themselves.

Niels was not a happy man when you threw him that job, and you couldn't blame him. Taking the feed strip system out of the design was part of what made the 13.2mm Hotchkiss gun such an attractive weapon to the Army: the single most failure-prone part of the system, gone in a flash. Now you had the temerity to tell the gun designers to put it back in, and to make it a proper belt fed to boot: a daunting task, when you didn't even have your own belt specifications handy!

Fortunately, you worked for Hotchkiss, and Hotchkiss corporate was not against working with Fabrique National's corporate- and Fabrique National had started offering a licence-built American M1919 machine gun, with metallic feed belts. Once you scaled the American belt design up to 13.2mm, and liberally stole the pawl geometry off the licensed M1919, you had a workable belt system. Once that was done, all you had to do was commit blunt force trauma on the firearms designers until a team of interns and junior engineers reworked the old Mle.1914 strip feeder into a regulated belt feeder with your new pawl and a nice, high-pull lever system that should be able to haul on a five hundred round belt.

It took some incredibly problematic geometric wrangling to get two five hundred round belt boxes in the turret, as well as yet more en echelon shenanigans (the left gun now sat four centimeters forward the right, which let you replace centerline struts with wing struts) that ended up with a much easier and harder reloading procedure. On one hand, it was easier- shove the box in, pull the belt out, dump it in the gun, and pull the charging cord twice- while on the other hand it was much harder in that the boxes were an incredibly tight fit. Your workers got very used to lubricating the sides with a bar of soap, before pulling on a work-glove and punching the box in until it hit the stops.

Meanwhile, in the cockpit, the solution was both simple and very, very stupid. The gunsight was slaved to the controls. The solution, therefore, was to slave the gunsight to the, well, guns. This wasn't as easy as it sounded, since Yves started talking about vacuum systems and matching pointers and those interesting new electric things that they were doing over in Hungary, but the end result was that the gunsight worked. More importantly, you also had another pair of small improvements in the cockpit: a gyrocompass, and a non-gunsight turret pointer. Since the meter-long gun barrels were a meter long, it was important to know where they were pointed relative to the 'mech, as well as for another interesting feature: over-the-shoulder fires.

After your turret rework, it was discovered that the turret could reliably actually swing out in a 160 degree forward arc. The problem was, the gunsight could only track about the center 60 degrees, and when the gunsight locked on its riders, the feedback straight on the controls locked the turret because of that. It was dumb. It was aggressively dumb. It was exactly the sort of aggressive stupid little thing that had been going for your kneecaps and kidneys all project, and once it was fixed, the mecha's weapons load was looking much better.

Of course, that's when hell opened up on you, because Hispano-Suiza's company rep came knocking. They'd managed to 'see the light of day' and 'change their ways' since the last time they'd dropped in to shit up your workshop, but that was just sales talk to you. What was important was the fact they were bringing a new engine to demo for you: the Hispano-Suiza 12Y. Roughly based around the crotchety old bastard 12X that bitched and moaned its way through the Fourmi, the 12Y was a fairly powerful step up from the older and more reliable 12N that was currently under the hood of the 0-3 prototype designs. Weight-wise, it wasn't too much more; just a few dozen kilos, the sort of thing you could easily make up by shifting fuel stowage aft and by adjusting round counts. As for why to go for it? An extra two hundred horsepower, which would massively increase the power you could pour down the articulators. It could even be enough to remain standing in adverse firing conditions- the autopsy on 0-2's leg structures revealed that the blowout on the actuators started at the engine loading drums, not in the joints themselves.

Once you'd chased the engine hucksters out the back, a far more welcome telegram came in. Compagnie du Siens had done the impossible, and designed a set of 25-ton feet. While they weren't left-right interchangeable like your current set, an extra five tons of floatation would make your mecha lighter, faster, and much better at handling adverse terrain since there wasn't a way for you to magically bring the mecha up to the listed weight for the feet to handle. Mud that would eat anything less floaty than a Fourmi alive would be far less threatening to you, and more importantly you would be able to go places no other bipedal mecha could even consider. The catch was, you'd need to do a lot of crash re-engineering in the walk cycle and clearancing: designs with toes articulation like a CdS normally had meant you would be in major danger of snagage if you didn't have everything locked down tight with the leg motion.

Either way, it was three months out until the contest. That meant time for one major engineering change, unless you felt like throwing dice with God.

VOTES

[] Replace the feet. Compagnie du Siens hasn't failed you before, and the handling and terrain capatatnce will turn heads and make sure you can always stand with the infantry.
[] Replace the engine. Hispano-Suiza is France's best engine designer for a reason, and more importantly you have spare prototypes. If their shit doesn't fly, you can burry the junker and fix up 0-2 to participate in the contest.
[] Make no changes: you need the time to get the last few niggling bugs out of the design, and big changes are going to make big headaches.
[] Throw dice with God: you can and will add both new components, and the overtime hours it'll cost you won't matter a damn bit once you blow this competition out of the water!

(AN: Some quests do not have wrong options. This quest is not one of them. Choose carefully)

 

[7734]

It pained you, on a fundamental level, to trust Hispano-Suiza. It really, deeply, pained you. That didn't mean, however, you could get away with an underpowered mecha- so you bought into the 12Y engines and accessories, before rigorously beginning stand testing in the remains of Workshop Three.

Stand testing revealed that, for once in their lives, Hispano-Suiza hadn't actually tried to hoist you over a barrel. While the engine was rated for 650 horsepower, stand testing with some basic tuning actually got it up to 750 horsepower and the team figured they could get even more with extra work. The problem was, your transmission capped out at 675 horsepower. That meant you also needed a new transmission, naturally, which in turn meant you needed to repackage the entire goddamn mecha's internals.

This was already looking like a bad idea. The new 800-rated transmission was too big to package like the 675-rated transmission, so it had to actually go directly centerline in the tank. This, in turn, meant you'd need to angle the drive shaft to cut into the compartment in a very nasty slice, which then forced you to move everything around. The loader had to sit reverse to the travel of the mecha, the shell carriage had to be modified for this, the gas tankage had to massively be adjusted (there were now ceiling gas tanks, and you really weren't sure how to feel about that.) and a whole host of other very dumb fixes went to work.

Still, it was about a week's work to finally get 0-3 rigged up to actually use the 12Y engine, and then St. Ignacio took it to the test track. The first thing you noticed was, well, it wasn't actually any faster. You'd think an extra three hundred horses would make the mecha faster, but it really didn't. Instead, what it did was make it more sprightly- actuators tightening and loosening without any hesitation, with the ability to run every system on the mecha at full power, all the time.

When you sat in the cockpit to run it through the course yourself, you had to agree. Every mechanical gauge had a hundred percent of the power it needed, there was zero gyro lag, and even in a dead sprint you couldn't get drum uptake to spool down. The mecha just felt better, really, more powerful and responsive with the additional horses under its belt.

As such, without hesitation you ordered 0-4 and 0-5 over to the 12Y engine spec. With the rebuilding done on 0-3 as guide, your two other test mecha were quickly swapped over, just in time for you to get the dates for testing, about two months out. To that end, you booked the testing yard in Brest again for weapons integration, after which you'd leave the mecha there and take a short holiday.

Unfortunately, as powerful as the new engine and transmission were, they weren't going to save your cannon. Now that the motive system wasn't blowing out like a little bitch, though, you did have a fairly decent chance of passing any sort of fire-and-maneuver testing put in front of your mecha. Before, your pilots had to be very careful to make sure they were planted firmly, or else they'd start redlining strain gauges. Now, however, that problem seemed to be panning down significantly. You weren't up to firing while the mecha was moving- recoil would still put your mecha ass over teakettle, never mind trying to aim- but it did open up a lot of options when it came to shooting.

When it came to fire on the move, the real joy was the machine gun turret. Now provisioned with a decent number of rounds, it was very good for bushwhacking operations, and the wide arc of fire introduced more than a few pilots to the concept of a sweep through dodgy terrain. While you weren't putting out enough fire to literally scythe down grass, you did get enough lead in the air to make it obvious if the ground was going to splash. The infantry assigned to armored regiments that worked with you while working up all had very high opinions of this feature, although they were more than a little concerned with the poor downward visibility. Nearly getting squished by wayward cross-steps to stabilize before firing the soixante-quinze could do that, you supposed.

Before your holiday, you got the official billing of events for the testing, as well as the scuttlebut.

This time, there would be four main events, each requiring two mecha. There would be the Fire and Maneuver Event, which would be one mecha piloted by your driver and one by a French Army pilot. Each course of fire would be a random distance apart, with five targets at a random distance, two for the explosives weapon and three for any weapon. Grading would be by number of shots to complete each course of fire averaged together, multiplied by time. The second main event would be a road march of twenty kilometers, again with one of your pilots and one French Army pilot. Scoring would be based on number of stoppages and average time. The third main event would be destructive testing. Finally, the last main event would be a field maneuver through a known terrain course of one kilometer. Scoring would be based on speed to traverse, averaged between both mecha, both using French Army pilots.

So, the question becomes: how to prepare?

-/-/-/-/
Votes

[] Leave your mecha pilots in Brest to practice while you and most of the shop take your holiday. They need the stick time, and more importantly might be able to sneak some lessons to the potential pilots for the contest.
[] Call up Andrei with Workshop 1 and trade secrets. You're going to be spilling the beans on what the contests really entail, but knowing that canny old coot, he'll have something worth the cost.
[] Cut a week off the holiday, run home, and get 0-2 fitted over on 12Y spec instead of 12N spec so you can bring it too. Even if all it does is eat dirt in destructive testing, it still buys you some breathing room on the repair teams.

(AN: I'll be handling each phase of trials as separate updates, so expect the next few to be smaller)