[1-200] THE MECH TOUCH

Chapter 47: March of Progress

The inevitable advance of science and technology rendered today's machines worthless and turned tomorrow's miracles into everyday goods.

One of humanity's better characteristics was the race's insatiable curiosity of the unknown. Nothing better expressed the rise of humanity better than to track its technological advances. From fire and sticks, the race took a scant blink before it mastered more advanced technologies such as agriculture and forging. A few thousand years after that, humanity escaped the limits of their home planet and spread their presence into the greater galaxy. Each time humanity advanced, it was due to a new scientific breakthrough.

This dynamic process of introducing new technologies to the market was not an entirely positive experience to everyone. To the people involved in the mech industry, many companies might lose all of their customers if they progressed one step slower than other firms.

The earlier years of the mech renaissance was a wild west, with new inventions haphazardly being introduced into the market as soon as they turned economically viable. This led to bizarre situations where there was once just nine years in between one generation to the next. All the businesses that invested heavily in designing and fabricating the mechs of the old generation were left with a huge pile of underperforming junk.

Those who hadn't yet made the jump got lucky and invested in the new technologies, thereby massively gaining an edge over the producers burdened by old ballast. The financial crash that resulted from the imbalance was the largest since humanity spread out into the stars. So much wealth had been lost that some economists calculated that it set the humans back as much as thirty years.

Losses valued in trillions of credits could potentially continue if this chaotic advance was left unchecked. Fortunately for everyone on the supply side of the industry, the MTA's restrictive certification and sales procedures imposed some semblance of order in this process of renewal and destruction. The mech industry now adhered to a semi-fixed schedule of grouping technological advances into generations, each lasting about thirty to fifty years.

Commercial mechs that incorporated modern technologies available to be licensed in the open market were regarded as the era's so-called current generation, or currentgen for short. The generation that preceded it was called the last generation, or lastgen. Generally, the differences in performance between the two was distinct, but not overpowering. As an offhand rule, it took four lastgen mechs to beat three currentgen mechs. This left producers stuck with lastgen designs a period of time to accumulate savings in order to invest in new technologies.

Ves was currently in this boat, except he had much less time to renew his aging assets.

Most analysts plying their opinion in the talk shows warned their audience that the current generation was going to be a short one. As about twenty years had passed since the first currentgen mechs were put on sale, that meant Ves had ten to fifteen years to invest in a new production line.

In practice, his time was shorter as at the last three years, hardly any pilot could be fooled into buying a lastgen mech on the verge of turning obsolete. From now until the generations shifted, the prices of lastgen mechs would continue to decline.

First, he had to come up with a new design. If he chose to produce variants, then he'd have to license a decently good base model, and those often cost a fortune to license. At a minimum Ves expected to fork out a billion credits for a basic currentgen mech. If he wanted anything fancier, then the cost might rise to as much as two to four billion credits.

Then he had to find replacements for his rusty 3D printer and assembler as well. If Ves wanted to fully exercise his growing skills, then he'd have to acquire a more robust assembler system, which amounted to about 300 million credits. He also couldn't leave out the vital 3D printer. Without renewing his old model, it was impossible to fabricate all of the latest gadgets by himself. A small but premium model could set Ves back by 700 million credits at a minimum.