[401-600] THE MECH'S TOUCH

Chapter 426: Boondoggele

Developing and improving the Hellcat design required an enormous amount of effort. Yet the Hellcat design team only consisted of four permanent mech designers with two temporary additions, of which Ves was one of them. Professor Velten supervised the entire effort and occasionally stepped in to solve some difficult issues, but she was too busy to spend all of her time on a single design.

"Professor Velten isn't as spry as she used to." Alloc said in an emotional fashion. "A couple of decades ago, she could easy keep track of dozens of concurrent designs, but now… she's barely holding it with three concurrent designs."

Any mech designer who advanced to the rank of Senior was a formidable person. No one ever reached this height by being stupid. Professor Velten must have been an intellectual force at her prime.

Ves barely knew anything about the 6th Flagrant Vandals or Professor Velten. Both diverged so much from how the Mech Corps usually organized their units that Ves wondered what lay at the heart of their difficulties.

"Sir, I've just arrived and I'm not very familiar with the Tarry region or the Vandals. Can you give me a rundown on the mech regiment?"

Alloc sighed and released a weary breath. "The Flagrant Vandals look kind of bad, don't they?"

Ves nodded.

"That's because the Vandals never quite fit into the Mech Corps."

Alloc briefly explained the origins of the Vandals. It used to be setup by an ambitious general over sixty years ago. The general tired of the constant defensive attitude of the Tarry region divisions, so erected an additional mech regiment with the express purpose of giving the Vesians a bloody nose.

"The only problem with the Vandals is that the Tarry region is poorly endowed. It can barely field whatever forces they already possessed. Burdening the regional headquarters with a full regiment of mechs and everything that came with it pretty much broke the budget."

Other problems also became apparent. Entering Vesian space was a perilous ordeal and while the Vandals achieved some early successes, they occasionally ran into a prepared opponent that decimated their raiding forces. The regiment used up a lot more mechs, mech pilots, ships and supplies than originally projected.

"So what changed from the start?" Ves asked.

Alloc shrugged his head. "Headquarters came up with a new order for the Vandals that's never been recalled. The 6th Flagrant Vandals needs to be completely self-sufficient. They have to fabricate or procure their own mechs and ships and they need to recruit and train their own mech pilots."

This completely cut off all of the support that was necessary to sustain a mech regiment. Maintaining the mechs alone drained a lot money, but supporting all of the ships was even worse.

If Ves didn't know anything better, then the Tarry region's regional HQ wanted to dissolve the Vandals by starving it to death.

"It's a good thing that we're more resilient than that." The Journeyman Mech Designer grinned. "We slimmed down our ships and mechs, all of our mech pilots have taken pay cuts and steal everything we need from the Vesians when we're short on something."

Still, financing an entire mech regiment through raiding planets and trade ships could only stretch so far. Most mech regiments would have collapsed eventually from the burden.

"Our budget declined year after year. Nothing we did could have changed our downward slide. The biggest burden by far is the cost of replacing aging mechs and ships. Even if we're able to recoup most of the costs by recycling them, we were still bleeding a ton of money this way."