I wake up the next day, still reeling from the massive impact the various notifications I got concerning my newfound Path. I, Jack Williams, am on the [Path of the Peerless Royal Mech Creator]. I sat there in bed for a long time, just thinking about what this will mean for me. No one in my family never really felt undervalued, we were too good at what we did, and we did not treat our customers or employers badly. But this was different, as it meant what I would be doing would be super important, maybe even nation defining. As it is, my designs would likely completely change the mechs that the country uses and may even echo out and alter the trends of the rest of mechs the other top Clans. My train of thought is interrupted by a knock at my door, where I quickly throw on some clothes I found lying on my nightstand and opened the door. At my door is one of the minor princes of the nation, being that he was too far down the line succession to matter in real politics, instead focusing on Mech’s for the country. Park Yi-Jun, the youngest of the princes, was out of his depths, and was only told enough understand that Jack William was not from the Land of the Calm Morning but was a mech genius. When Jack and Yi-Jun meet, they are both surprised, as they each expected someone older than them. Yi-Jun expected an old wise man, who would at least look like a refined Asian man, meanwhile Jack expected an older man with real authority from the royal family.

They both danced around the subject of why they were both so young for their positions. Jack mentions that mechanical work was a general focus of their family, being a trade family, but that mech creation, Jack telling a slight fib, was his specialization within his family. Park Yi-Jun mentioned his similar role in the Park royal family, as he was too young among the princes to have a political role, as a result their passion of managing the mechs for the nation became their familial role. Once we both realized they both were competent in their fields, but that this confluence of events would be their trials to showcase their skills, they knew they would need to become good working friends.

“Alright, so if we are to begin our move to outshine our peers, we should probably start with the military mechs, as they won’t require as substantial resources to showcase” I say, since we would first need a proof of concept. Yi-Jun replies “ it will also give us a political out, as the current ones in charge of the Royal mech designs will be less likely to fight the changes to the military mechs”. After that we begin discussing standardizing and simplifying the major mech designs. It turns out that rather than having a standardized design for infantry, artillery, aerial, and sniper mechs, they had slight variations of each grouping for the different regions of the nation. We decided this was a bad move, as it forced the standard mechs to have too many variations, combined with the fact that there talks of creating more elite class mech units for those regions. We first made the argument that doing it this way would allow for any mech warrior to enter any mech from any region without suffering an acclimation period, as well as simplifying the number of mech designs out maintenance and construction crews would need to learn.

With a probationary approval, Yi-Jun spent the next day getting orders out a mech of each type to be delivered to the workshop I was assigned, along with copies of the blueprints used for each variation of the five major mech types we would be redesigning. Since the country has too many mountains, even if not as high as other mountains in the world, I decided some sort of climbing mechanism would be needed on infantry mechs to allow for mountain scaling. I was weighing between some variation of hook hands and retractable spikes on the feet, versus a grabbing hook, Deciding that option one limited too many weapon options, without providing many decent alternative uses. Since the hook could also be used to interact with environments outside of mountains, as well as a last ditch weapon, the mobility it would allow be a universal benefit. With this in mind, I decided a way to create fewer weaknesses and maintenance issues for the arms was to scrap the concept of having a hand at all for the mechs.

Yi-Jun exclaims “how will our soldiers use swords or other melee weapons if they can’t grasp anything!” I calmly explain that it is too great of a failure point, and it requires things like swords and the grappling hook to have a place elsewhere on the mech to attach to, which creates the potential for them to be lost or otherwise be destroyed easily. I told him that this way, the arms would really be needing for four things, a sword, some short range gun, a shield, and the grappling hook. With this in mind, only arm would need much complicated mechanical work outside wiring for energy.

“With that settled, I think a dual short sword combination would work well, it won’t put too much more stress on the arm pieces, as well as allowing for flexibility in terms of ambidextrous, left handed, or right handed warriors. Additionally the crossed swords could function as a back up blocking mechanism in case of shield failure.” I try to explain when Yi-Jun mentions big swords. “It would provide weight balancing issues, along with the fact that these are infantry, not elite soldiers” I counter his suggestion. Once I get it into his head that many of these military mech types won’t be super flashy, but meant to deal with a variety of threats efficiently, that’s when he has an epiphany about marketing the efficiency in combat of the designs. I also remind him that while there will be infantry units and so forth, they will still often be deployed mixed together, or at least heavy cooperation, meaning we don’t need big shield breaking swords when we have snipers or artillery doing the breaking instead.

We focus next on energy production and usage for the mechs, since I am thinking of an energy based gun instead of physical projectiles. I ask about the average cultivation level for standard soldiers, thinking I can use Qi powered guns, rather than generate it on the mech. When Yi-Jun mentions low profound realm as the average, I think it may work. I quickly design a prototype gun, not caring as much about getting it perfect or accurate to final designs, just wanting a way to provide Qi that will be transferred to an output. I ask Yi-Jun to get together some shields of the strength we would be expected to encounter. Once we have a couple barriers and shields brought in, we also send out orders for a couple soldiers between high mortal and low profound realm to come in and have them place their hands against the Qi funneling system. I tell them roughly portion a tenth of their available Qi into a “shot” have them channel it, where it would get fired into the weakest shield first. Once we see that it does noticeable damage to it, we have the soldiers slowly shoot out 10 shots, upon which it leaves the shield nearly drained. I then ask a couple of the soldiers if the time it took to get all those shots would be enough time to close the distance for a melee, without being too quick.

The soldiers reply, mentioning that the channeling times would likely be slightly different for any soldier, but that overall, the distance and time to shoot wouldn’t be too great of a disparity. Using that as a benchmark, I internally note, as well as tell Yi-Jun that I’ll need to work on the speed of the channeling mechanism a bit, but overall work on efficiency. I explain how I am artificially creating a “weapon clip” of ten shots before a soldier would either need to go into a sword fight or use cover to recover Qi. I continue on with this logic as the implied idea is that when a mech needs to close the distance, and go into melee, for what an infantry squad would be best at, that the Qi gun and shield combo would be used to soften the enemy and stay relatively safe. With the gun concept roughly planned out, I suggest we work on the shield next. Wanting to keep in theme for the Koreans, and wanting to preserve the Qi usage, I kept the shield a physical, rather than Qi shield. Using a variation of woven carbon fiber shield in the shape of a buckler to resemble the medieval shields use in Korea. In the rough internal blueprint, I’m making for the mech, I place a slot in each of the arms for a shield to potentially go, with the idea the shield would be slotted in either arm during battle preparation. When Yi-Jin questions why I’m leaving it with so much customization, I mention the idea of higher cultivation mech warriors potentially outputting too much Qi through the gun too quickly, so that without wasting that potential, I’m leaving open the option of having a way to bleed off extra Qi into the shield, or alternatively have an option mounted laser on the arm. I couple the idea of the additional customization for mechs for captains or other higher up soldier Paths that aren’t their elite class.

Now that I have planned out the weapons systems, I investigate what energy systems I can use to run the mech, I find one that only requires an initial Qi pulse to activate the mech, before it generates a sufficient amount of Qi itself to run the mech itself, albeit it would have the mech slower than I would like. I find one of the Qi engines supplied to the workshop, as it is a relatively stock engine used in enough different mechs. I spend an hour or so just tweaking the engine design a bit, trying to eke out a handful percent more speed, just barely getting it to a level I’d like. Combining this with expected Techniques, I leave this as satisfactory for now, leaving a note to double check this for later. With the engines and weapons done, I decide the general frame of the mech is going to be fairly light, to both improve the speed of the mech a bit more, and to highlight the infantry mech as a relatively agile front line mech, giving it enough defense to close the distance for melee, but not enough to hamper it from taking down a more defense-oriented infantry mech. At the end of the day, the mech design starts to look relatively similar to one of the old Gundam designs that used a beam saber, rather than my physical sword combo. After having been working on the infantry mech for nearly half a week, I have a few mechanics get together on piecing together a prototype for mech, while I task Yi-Jim on the color scheme of it, so he can pick between a sort of camouflage set up, or more of a national color combo.

With everything being planned out for the first prototype over the next couple days, I decide to call it a day so that I could get started the next day on getting together the artillery and sniper mechs, as they would likely be fairly similar in overall design, just variations on using larger energy amounts and shielding. I get things locked down in the workshop while Yi-Jun and the mechanics start getting their materials ordered and ready to be delivered tomorrow.