THE MECH TOUCH Chapter 11: Cash Woes from buzai232's blog

THE MECH TOUCH Chapter 11: Cash Woes

Ves made the biggest gamble of his life so far. If he won, he'd be able to produce a stellar mech and sell it for a hefty profit, making more than enough money to meet his impending interest payment. Success danced on a string, and each time Ves stumbled, he risked the whole scheme coming apart.To get more news about The Mech Touch, you can visit innread.com official website.

First, Ves needed to grow accustomed to the Caesar Augustus. Fortunately, a real universe production license also counted as a virtual license in Iron Spirit's terms of service. He only needed to send a copy of the license agreement to the game's support to be able to tinker and sell the model in-game.

As a lastgen mech in today's standard, the CA-1 counted as a 5-star mech in the game. This meant only older, more skilled potentates had the capability to buy the mech. The Caesar Augustus could be sold for a higher price, allowing Ves to earn some actual profits from his sales if he designed a good enough variant.
A Gold Leaguer had access to both 4-star and 5-star mechs. Most potentates that did not pursue a professional career in piloting mechs languished in this League.

When one reached Platinum League or further, they gained unrestricted access to every mech, even the mythical 10-star mechs. However, the higher the tier, the more expensive the mechs cost to purchase and to repair if it ever got damaged. The fancier mechs even required weeks of in-game time to repair if they got completely destroyed. This meant that a fair number of Platinum and Diamond players still occasionally took a 5-star mech into a match for the purpose of earning some easy gold.

This resulted in 5-star mechs being one of the most profitable tiers in Iron Spirit. High performing models especially attracted attention. However, whether Ves could break into this market was still a question, considering he lacked familiarity and expertise with the Caesar Augustus.

In the 45 days of time before the Young Tigers Exhibition started, Ves needed to produce an extensive and realistic redesign of the CA-1's stock model. He needed to acquire new sub-skills and credits to buy virtual licenses of the components he needed for his redesign.

In the meantime, he had to release a number of mech designs in the game in order to generate even more credits. Much of the money would be used to buy the real universe production licenses of the components he had used in the game.

It sounded terribly complicated, but actually Ves didn't need to change what he had been doing so far. Essentially, Ves only needed to continue to design variants and put them onto the in-game market to sell.

First, Ves contacted Iron Spirit's support in order to receive his virtual license. A production license of a lastgen mech already cost many millions of credits. He'd be damned if he was forced to purchase a 5-star mech's virtual license, which potentially ran into the millions.

While he waited for his application to be approved, Ves shut off all distractions and loaded the CA-1 into his the System's Designer program to begin tinkering with it. He wanted to pry apart its shiny armor and see how much of a mess its infamous internals looked like. Besides finding a replacement material for its armor, Ves also needed to optimize the its internals in order to turn the CA-1 into a competitive mech.

One look and his hopes were dashed. It really did look like someone took a plate's worth of spaghetti and tried to stuff it in a small cup. It was doable, but it mashed everything together and left far too little slack. Cables, pipes and structural supports all crammed right next to each other, sometimes dangerously so. For example, if a certain cable broke and released electric sparks, it could ignite the gas released from a punctured pipe.

Though Ves knew these linkages could produce a catastrophe, he lacked the skills and resources to fix them. He could only document each fault he came across and come back to the problem later. Ves spent the rest of the day combing over each and every component, to the point of dismantling the engine even if he understood little on how the advanced component worked.

Ves took a deep breath when he finished going over the Caesar Augustus. If he wanted to understand the model deeper, then he needed to fabricate the stock model. He took a minute to log into the in-game market and inspected the model's market conditions.