Everyone knew what Patriarch Reginald Cross was like.
He was largely unsuited to be the leader of a large and growing clan. He was an ace pilot who was obsessed with earning glory. He was an impulsive man who put relatively little thought in all of his words and deeds.
It was easy to interpret the Crosser ace pilot's offer as a poorly conceived attempt at poaching Ketis from the Larkinson Clan.
However, the swordmaster thought about it from a different perspective.
Journeyman Mech Designers were supposed to be people who had initially found their design philosophies and needed to expand on its starting foundation by enriching it with design applications.
There were many ways in which Journeymen could develop their design philosophies. Ves had once explained the tree model to her in the past. He was an archetypical example of a mech designer who preferred to explore many different ideas, causing him to develop a broad but relatively short tree of skill sets and design applications. Ketis herself limited her output in many ways, choosing to limit her core work to swordsman mechs. That meant that her tree was destined to be narrow.
That did not mean that there was no need for her to travel around and gain new inspiration from different ideas.
The challenge of mech designers who wanted to develop like Ves was not to blindly pursue quantity by developing lots of unrelated design applications. They instead needed to find a way to tie all of these weaker solutions to each other so that they could produce powerful synergies.
A qualified mech designer must always design a mech that offered superior performance or value to their target audience!
There was no point in designing mechs if the output contained a lot of dubious gimmicks that did not offer any meaningful improvement on the battlefield.
As such, broad and adaptable mech designers had to be able to combine multiple design applications together so that the whole was always greater than the sum of its parts! Strictly speaking, Ves was not a typical broad mech designer. His most notable design solutions had already reached a degree of advancement that they could put a lot of narrow mech designers to shame.
It was just that his personality and the nature of his design choices reflected an attitude of not being afraid to explore drastically different subjects. Even if no existing synergy existed, he could always find a way to make it fit into his own design approach.
Ketis was a different mech designer. She purposefully focused on developing a narrow tree out of a clear understanding of her strengths and weaknesses.
As a woman who split her time between mech design and swordsmanship, she could never devote as much time on fanciful explorations like Ves. She had to ration them a lot more carefully.
She understood quite early that if she still wanted to make decent progress as a mech designer, then she needed to minimize her distractions and focus solely on developing her core strengths.
This was why she had no qualms about developing into a narrow mech designer and imposing multiple limitations on her work and research activities.
While narrow mech designers might have it easier on the surface, they still had to endure their own set of challenges.
One of them is that it was quite difficult to develop a narrow tree to a tall height. Ketis had to continually explore and advance her core specialization so that it became notably more effective than the design applications of broad mech designers.
Broad mech designers relied on combining multiple different weak solutions to produce a powerful result through synergy.
Narrow mech designers only relied on a single highly developed solution to outright dominate in a single aspect.
Not everyone was able to succeed in doing the latter. Even if they understood the research direction they needed to explore, they still had to rely on a lot of ingenuity, opportunities and hard work to make continuous breakthroughs and elevate a design application until it clearly overpowered compared to the alternatives!
This was difficult because the rest of the mech industry was not incompetent. There were many Masters and Star Designers that had furthered the development of mechs in so many different ways.
It was impossible for a Journeyman like Ketis to outcompete her most successful predecessors by beating them at their own game.
The only viable way for Journeymen and especially ones that chose to commit to narrow development strategies was to blaze a new trail!
By pioneering a new research field, a mech designer was able to avoid a lot of competition from the established market leaders.
The goal was to fulfill the demands of customers in a different way than usual.
Ves had managed to do so in a magnificent way. He successfully fulfilled a demand that had been left unmet for multiple centuries, which was to give norms way to pilot
mechs.
There were also mech designers who relied on different technologies to fulfill demands that had previously been met by established players.
What enabled them to stand out from the competition was to solve a problem at a much more affordable price, or find a way to increase the performance of their own
proprietary solutions!
Originally, Ketis sought to develop a design philosophy based around designing swordsman mechs armed with swords that offered superior sharpness.
That had gradually changed as Ketis started to shift her emphasis on sharpness to developing a design application based on imbuing the swordsmanship she mastered into her own swordsman mech designs.
It was not that Ketis had lost her passion for sharpness. It still served as the foundation of her personal sword style.
She just felt that she could not bring much value to the mech industry as sharpness was a common specialization to many existing mech designers.
While their methods may differ from her own, she could not deny the fact that the mech market already sold plenty of swordsman mechs armed with blades that could cut
through thick and resilient alloys.
Instead of thanklessly trying to improve a parameter that offered no real unique benefits aside from maybe making her own solution cheaper and more accessible, she would rather break new ground and offer her customers a benefit that they could never attain
from her competitors!
This was why she decisively chose to reorient her design philosophy towards a gimmick that only she could do, which was imbuing her swordsman mech designs with the custom swordsmanship styles developed by herself in the guise of a swordmaster! No other mech designer possessed a combination of professions like Ketis, and she would be a fool if she did not neglect the obvious synergies.
She had clearly made the right bet, because all of her products had been very well received by her target audience.
The Red Association currently registered her specialization as a Class VI design philosophy based on Skill-Imbued Swordsman Mechs.
Her root still remained the same. She wanted to design the best swordsman mechs in
the universe. She just chose to shift her emphasis from sharpness to the imbuement of superior weapon skills. This was why she was successfully able to get away with such a major change in specializations.
She was rather lucky as well that she managed to make this transition early in her career as a high-ranking mech designer.
The later she changed her specializations, the less room she had to make any course
changes.
At that point, too much of her original design philosophy had already become solidified, thereby locking their cognition to the point where they could no longer accept radical changes in their design approach.
In other words, older mech designers had basically locked themselves in their chosen
directions!