The Mech Touch novel Chapter 5154

The third and final class that Ves was scheduled to teach was Advanced Manual Superfab Operation.

Different from Frontier Wisdom and Introduction to Living Mech Design, it was a lot more practical in nature. The course description already made it clear that students needed to be prepared to complete a lot of manual work as opposed to standard book learning.

The subject of fabricating mechs attracted a lot more interest from the student body than living mechs. A hundred students had been enrolled in the course.

More had actually applied before the start of the semester, but Ves and the school administration wanted to limit the number in order to make the classes more manageable.

When Ves entered the Hyper Chamber and established a connection with the Eden Institute again, the chamber began to construct a completely different environment this time.

Cool metal walls made out of unknown but extremely resilient alloys surrounded Ves on all sides.

As a mech university, the Eden Institute encompassed a large number of mech workshops. A third of them were constantly in use during a typical working day, and that occupancy tended to increase by a lot at the end of a semester.

That was the time when fifth-year students had to complete their graduation projects and prove to the school that they were fully capable of designing complete first-class multipurpose mechs.

Fabricating a mech did not have to be so complicated for many Terran mech designers. If they wanted to, they could just press a single button in order to have a materializer produce a highly accurate physical copy of a mech that previously existed in theory.

Of course, those who truly wanted to produce a more superior mech knew that there were certain processes that materializers were unable to do well.

There was still a case for using more 'manual' production machines such as superfabs. This mostly had to do with the fact that more energetic and volatile first-class exotics needed to be processed in specific ways. This could make the resulting mech perform a little better or reduce its malfunction rate.

The fact that it was possible fabricate masterwork mechs with superfabs but not with materializers was proof that it was still worthwhile to master the manual fabrication process!

Ves learned from his teaching assistant that Terran mech designers generally undertook this work when they had progressed a lot further in their careers.

They already had to do a lot of learning in order to gain proficiency in all of the essential high technologies that made up a modern first-class mech.

Then they needed to devote a lot of time on additional studies in their specializations and areas of interests.

Powerful augmentations or not, a lot of Terran students were already pressed to their limits! How could they possibly spare so much attention to learning how to fabricate their own work by relying on an outdated production method that had already been phased out in the general mech industry?

An important distinction to make was that first-class mech fabrication was incomparably more difficult than second-class mech fabrication.

The greater the proportion of advanced tech, the more variables a mech designer had to take into account.

The higher the quality of materials, the easier it was to ruin a job due to misprocessing.

Ves already had a taste of this when he had begun to fabricate quasi-first-class mechs. The jump in difficulty was not small!

It made a lot of sense that first-class mech designers chose to skip this part about mech design entirely!

The only situations where superfabs may be utilized at greater frequencies was when Master Mech Designers wanted to attain the best possible result when producing a high-end machine.

At that point, Masters had become so smart and powerful that it became a lot easier for them to master the essentials of fabricating mechs with superfabs!

Nonetheless, Ves did not think this was a good approach towards the profession. He had always been a believer that the journey was more important than the destination.

A Master who never seriously fabricated a mech until he had reached the apex of his career could never internalize the charm of making a machine by hand. Such a figure was already set in his ways. The difficulty of fabricating masterwork mechs for them was doubtlessly a lot higher as a consequence!

As the students who enrolled for this new course started to enter the mech workshop, Ves remained silent and folded his hands behind his back.

He had chosen to wear a white lab coat as was traditional in this kind of setting.

The students also changed their smart clothing to a more protective configuration even though they all wore personal shield generators.

Compared to his previous class, the students who signed up for this course all came with greater and more defined purposes in mind.

They knew that Ves was most likely the best mech fabricator that they could learn from. He had done the impossible and fabricated over half-a-dozen masterwork mechs when he was still in the Journeyman stage.

This was incredibly relevant to this batch of ambitious fourth and fifth-year mech design students!

Sure, they could learn a lot about manual mech fabrication from a stuffy 300-year old Master Mech Designer, but the gap was too great in that case! _{ƒreewebηoveℓ.com}

After speaking a bit more about the importance of channeling their artistic senses as opposed to filling their heads with numbers, Ves decided to give them a more direct taste of excellent craftsmanship.

"Please raise your hands if you have ever seen a masterwork mech in person."

Over half of the students did so. While masterwork mechs were generally rare, it was still possible for most people to be able to witness them with their own eyes if they visited a mech exhibition hall like the Chance Bay Masterwork Gallery.

"Who among you have been able to touch a masterwork mech with your own hands?"

A lot of hands dropped all of a sudden. Only 8 students enjoyed this particular privilege.

Ves found that to be regretful. This was why he intended to do something about this inadequacy.

"Well, don't fret if you haven't been able to raise your arms. Today is your lucky day, because today you will be able to touch an actual masterwork mech, if only in a reduced form."

It was at this time that Alexa Striker came back after retrieving a secure container.

The assistant proceeded to unlock the container before carefully lifting up a mech figurine based on the Valkyrie Redeemer model.

What caught every student's attention was that this was not an ordinary scale model. It was an actual masterwork, which was unimaginable to these would-be mech designers who were still too far away from creating their own sublime works of art!

Ves had fabricated it with the help of the Hammer of Brilliance years ago. He never really had a use for this little toy aside from putting it on his trophy case. Since he did not have any better use for it, he thought that he might as well use it as a teaching aid for this advanced course.

Alexa carefully passed the miniature to the student standing on the far left. The clever Terrans did not need to be told that they should only take a few seconds to enjoy the exquisite work up close before passing it on to their neighbor.

"What do you think?" Ves smiled at his enraptured audience. "Can you feel the personal touches that I put into the work? Are you able to appreciate the stylistic choices that I have made? Do not look at this masterwork from a technical perspective. Look at it as if you are looking at a painting or a sculpture. Mechs are tools, but they are not limited to that classification. They can be artworks as well, and the proof is literally in your hands."

He saw that each student who got their hands on it treated the masterwork miniature as a genuine treasure.

He wondered how these Terrans would react if they heard that his children occasionally took it and used it to play silly little games!