What's Junk? (The Mech Touch)

[Rustic]

I actually had thought about the mech and how it depended on potential. When I was thinking about it I was mentally picturing larger cockpit cabins with multiple stations. Such as gunner and pilot bigger mechs would get crews like attack helicopter and tank crews.
Smaller mechs would operate as two man crews.
Blizzard star craft and the Goliath. Which is a three man unit when you purchase it.
I thought about this when the drowning man came up as a slow heavy. But then I moved on to the next chapter.

I had also thought about animal mechs. Before ceberous was introduced. That because one of my favorite mech anyway when I was a kid was zoids. I'm not as much of a fan of Gundam as zoids. Probably because Gundam and most Japanese mechs have weird face art. They stick an aleron on the nose of there mechs. That weird stupid v or the odd stars... Don't like it
Mech warrior is cooler. dinosaur mech and scorpion mechs.. are cool.

 

[lost star]

His name was Jack. He had C minus rank potential, which was about average for the pilots working with the Wrench Rats at the moment. Higher potentials tended to head towards greener pastures. Some preferred working with Biters. Others left planet. You could get a ride for a promise of a few years of service, which was a very good deal compared to staying in a planet that couldn't go a year without some sort of conflict.

Working with the Wrench Rats was not the best deal at the moment. It wasn't the worst deal. He got to play with fancy mechs. His only duties were guard duty and practicing. That was pretty good for someone with no ambitions and a desire for just three square meals a day. It was also risky. The Wrenchies were getting fat, and fat rats looked tasty for the cats. Jack was keeping a big eye on things and wasn't alone in wondering when the hammer would come down. It really depended on how the new expert candidate decided things would go.

Future problems wouldn't get present him fed though. Until something happened he followed orders and did whatever the head techs wanted. Which in this case was testing out a new mech. Called Cerberus, it looked like a muscled bulldog with three heads. Pretty scary looking and also looked like a pain in the ass to pilot. Jack was like one of three other pilots that knew dogs well enough to be confident about this, and he still didn't like sliding into it.

Fortunately, it was just testing things so he didn't hate it enough to protest. If he had to take this monster out onto the field he probably would have had words with someone. Not many words mind you. Just a few like 'what are you drinking?!'

His first impression was that the wonderkid had splurged on the piloting seat. It was nice and comfy, and had long term facilities there. Jack could appreciate that. You've never known misery until you had to pull a twenty-four hour shift in a cockpit just large enough to sit down in. Some junk mechs could get absolutely painful to deal with past a few hours and the less said about what ya had to do there after a few hours the better.

Second impression upon booting up was that the thing was actually pretty calm to start up and move. He'd tried Ghoul and been left bruised for days. Zombie took some work, and he'd be damned before he tried a Berserker. There'd been obvious care to make the stance and walk stable, which wasn't always a given in mechs.

Jack did a few trots up and down the testing range, and then bounced a few times on the paws. The motions went off without a fuss. Surprisingly smooth even, considering it was his first time piloting a dog-mech. He shifted the mech back and forth and felt actually pretty confident and happy at the lack of negative feedback. Some mechs fought him and caused some minor tension pain due to his low potential. There was none of that here.

Prominent in the cockpit was a testing form on the main screen. Jack hated paperwork, but it was part of the job. He carefully filled out the results and made his way down the list to the other tests.

The leap was next. Boosters flared and he jumped. The mech soared through the air for a second before landing with a surprisingly soft thud. Inside the cockpit Jack frowned. He then did it again. He was trying to decide if he liked it or not, and didn't like the range he'd gotten. He shifted the paws deliberately and began to trot around, doing leaps at random.

It took some getting used to. The leap and landings were rather fluid, but it wouldn't win awards for speed or usefulness. It was a quick repositioning that could be done every second. That landed the mech firmly on the slow side of medium.

Weapons testing was next on the list. This held no surprises. Two missile launchers on the shoulders was as generic as it got. The dog form just shifted the targeting position slightly. Jack wasn't using missiles with live rounds here so it was relatively cheap to go through the entire loadout twice. This tested the quick reload and the reliability of the missile tubes. It had a decent rate of fire and ammo in his opinion. Nothing special, but useful enough that he wouldn't mind taking this thing into combat with just those weapons. Despite his lack of potential Jack had been in a few battles, so he'd dealt with jank. This wasn't the best, but was viable. Nothing like that one with the pea shooter and a prayer.

With that done, they had to move onto the last part. Jack glanced at the controls and felt a bit of dread as he readied himself. The Drowned Man had sometimes grated against his senses even on low. That thing had a decent and unconventional sensory system so it could see through the mist it made. At high it gave him a headache and gave nonsensical results if he tried to force it. This one was hopefully better. The notes had explicitly stated that it was supposed to accommodate him. Right now everything was set to zero, which was actually a nice feature that he made sure to note as a good thing. No one liked getting blasted on full volume when they started up the mech.

A few targets popped up around the testing area on his command. Jack took a deep breath and began to adjust the senses. One, two, three. He stopped there, feeling strain. With a grumble the pilot dialed them all down again and noted it. A better pilot would probably be able to handle it all. He couldn't.

The man flipped to sentry mode. A few seconds later he tilted his head. Interesting. He toggled the popups. They pinged briefly on his senses and he could see them illuminated, like a dog who's attention had been caught.

Jack grinned just a bit. "Not bad there." This was actually nice. He felt no strain at all. That was almost novel.

Curious, he switched to hunter mode. That felt different. Less looking for irregularities and more a sense that he needed a target. Pacing up and around the targets made it apparent that it should work as expected, but he'd need an actual target to hunt down to verify how well it worked. They'd need to arrange more tests later.

The man looked it over and then made another notation that it needed a dedicated combat mode. He personally didn't want to switch to that full mode and adjust the dials if a scrap started up suddenly. (He also included a request to call it manual mode instead of full.) The modes themselves seemed rather useful and appropriate though, especially as a sort of focus. He could see even experienced pilots using it.

"Huh, look at me, turning into a proper tester." He muttered to the air.

With a shrug the man continued down the list. This wasn't exactly fun, but he couldn't say he hated the job. Also Cerberus was not unpleasant to pilot. He'd probably hate this more if he had to deal with any high skill mechs. Jack was not a good pilot and most mechs were wasted on him. This one actually felt like something he could use all the time, which was surprising because he'd expected to have trouble with the four legs.

It remained to be seen if he felt that was after everything. Piloted crash testing was next. Not exactly the most pleasant part. The man made sure his harness was secured and readjusted his helmet. This was not actually damage testing. It was essentially forcing the mech into awkward angles and unnatural movements. They'd throw a test dummy into the cockpit and have it go through actual damage testing later. Right now Jack just had to act like a drunken fool to test the joints and resistances. He'd had more practice than he'd like to admit for that part.

Four legs made it actually a bit hard to really stumble. There was a lot of care to the movement of this thing. It was very far from perfect, but it was better than any junk mech he'd used. That was very apparent now that he was trying to move it wrong deliberately.

Come to think of it, he should probably write down how quickly he'd managed to handle this thing. Jack knew for a fact it took a lot to get used to unusual mechs. Seemed like something good to put into writing. Then he went back to testing. Still had to run through the entire list again with another version of the same mech to be doubly sure, then revise them and do retests.

He didn't really get the point of it all, but he figured the people in charge knew more.

(This was their first real production model not done in sims and done on their own. It would have to go to the MTA and get tested by them once they ironed out the prototype's flaws. Bolt's family wanted to do it right and as flawlessly as possible.)