Chapter 122: Educational Deficits and Redesigns

Summary: Learning their limits and going back to school to fix them!

Warning! Chapters 120-123 were all posted back-to-back! Make sure you don't miss any of them!

Chapter 122: Educational Deficits and Redesigns

Momo probably should have felt guilty for the glee she had at having been assigned to the most interesting project she could imagine. Particularly, you know, when the world outside was still going to hell. Even if its descent had been slowed from freefall to something vaguely resembling controlled, there were still a bunch of fellows with horns and pitchforks chanting something down below. She couldn't find it in herself to actually feel that guilt, though, given that it was an interesting project and one that would help the world just as much or more than punching monsters. Also, she was fairly certain that 'going to hell' metaphor had gotten away from her. She'd have to work on that one before using it.

As for the project, despite her glee, there were still some downsides. Pouty Izumi was adorable, so her jealousy at Momo getting the space project didn't really count. The fact that Momo was in the unusual position of having her designs found flawed was a little more uncomfortable, though. She was used to keeping most of her and Izumi's designs close to her chest, not letting others see them, and the feedback portion was proving…educational. Which was, well, kind of the point, she supposed.

"Alright. Moving onto the next section of Yaoyorozu's design. Noriko, go!"

The blue-haired girl that had clearly been caught off guard was, apparently, still sufficiently used to Professor Aiko that she recovered quickly and looked at the holo-projection. It was showing a cut away of the outer hull segments of their launch craft, a triple walled affair with a fair bit of hardware shoved between the walls for efficiency.

"Efficient but nightmarish. If left like that, whatever mechanic had to maintain the thing would snap in three months, hunt poor Momo down, and beat her half to death in a dark alley with a wrench. Or, well, they'd try anyway. I suppose she'd probably fold the wrench in half and shove it somewhere unpleasant."

Momo winced at the dry, impersonal lampooning of her design. Professor Aiko laughed at her reaction and moved from where she was standing to tap on Momo's desk.

"Relax, dear. Noriko was harsh, yes, but only because she's heard the same sort of thing from me. Part of how the Furry Devil of UA got me to come teach was promising me complete control of my curriculum. Far too many of us engineers never learn a critical lesson. One that everyone here but you has already had drilled into their heads during my undergrad classes. Someone, somewhere, ultimately has to maintain and fix the designs you make. It's easy for the designer of a new product to fall in love with perfect efficiency, but a good engineer understands there needs to be a balance. Unless you're building something meant to be thrown away the moment it breaks, you need to consider how difficult it will be to maintain it or fix it."

The professor moved away from Momo's desk, returning to the holo-tank that was projecting the section of their project at nearly half scale. Reaching into the tank, this one the rarer type that was meant to let you directly interact with the projection, she peeled away the outer hull and pointed to…the structural supports? Why those?

"You did an admittedly excellent job with this design. The structural latticework you created is incredibly tough without taking up much room at all. Overengineered, if anything, which is generally a good thing when we're talking about something that might be keeping you alive through a micrometeor strike. The problem is that you designed it so tightly spaced that you can't get at any of the electronics or wiring without completely disassembling the outer shell. Which, since you also designed said shell to be formed in as few panels as possible for greater strength, is an absolute pain in the ass to do. A single fault during testing would mean literally hours of disassembling, followed by a fix, followed by hours of reassembly…possibly just to find that there's another fault. You see the issue?"

Momo winced, easily able to follow the logic now that it had been put in the right context. Worse, she could see where this would only domino into a bigger problem because she'd used some personal principles of miniaturization to make the structure itself part of the wiring scheme. In places, the very support structure was designed to carry current through parts of the hull, in order to minimize weak points. Extremely efficient…and nightmarishly hard to track down faults in by any means other than putting it all together and testing the entire thing at once.

The Professor saw her wince and grinned. With a flick, she dismissed the zoomed in piece of hull. With a few more flicks, she produced and exploded the overall view of the 'command capsule' that was the main and critical component of the overall design. It broke down into sections under her deft hands, and she turned to address the class.

"Now, this is the perfect chance to study the difference between perfectly efficient design and practical design. We'll be taking the initial rough concept Midoriya and Yaoyorozu provided for us and ripping it apart, then putting it back together into something that won't drive us all mad. After all, in this case, we're going to need to maintain this thing ourselves, since we'll be using it to build other structures in orbit. Which means we are the ones that have to suffer through our own poor design choices, at least for the first dozen or so missions. At minimum."

Various students groaned at that, a few of them looking a bit haunted. Momo was abruptly worried just what they'd gone through to get looks like that at the mere mention of needing to maintain their own designs. Professor Aiko, mercilessly cheerful, moved on before she could contemplate it for long.

"Not to mention it all has to mesh together! Now, Noriko, since I'm sure you've taken a look at the hull properly now, suggest some changes that could maintain integrity without us all wanting revenge on Miss Yaoyorozu!"

Oh. Right. If they got it wrong, the rest of the team would dogpile on whoever had made their lives hell. Suddenly, Momo was wishing she'd been able to properly finish her undergrad courses to prepare herself properly for this…

... ...

Izumi and Momo both slumped over the design table as Melissa looked over their shoulders, radiating amusement. Both of them had suffered blows to the ego in the last week as their fellows at UA picked apart their designs and put them back together in a more practical way.

Momo had gotten the worst of it, but Izumi hadn't been spared either when she found herself struggling to adapt to using deliberately less-than-optimal materials. She simply wasn't used to using three parts, all made of inferior materials, to do the job that a single custom and high-quality part would have managed in their place. She'd thought that her work to make the Siphons as generic as possible had prepared her, only to discover that she was wrong and that several teams the world over had farther stripped down or reworked the 'crude' Siphon designs she'd provided based on her general blueprints. Some of them, when she'd taken a look, were marvels of 'making do.' They also made her painfully aware that even her 'crude' design had been an overengineered monster.

"Oh, come on you two, there's a reason I'm the one with the full support license and a Master's degree. You were both working towards your own degrees with the full knowledge you still had a lot to learn."

Momo groaned, having been the one of them hammered harder. Her focus on optimizing her personal design work for her Quirk, which produced what amounted to one-off, single-use masterpieces, had left her extra vulnerable to Professor Aiko's criticism. Melissa wasn't having their pity-party, flicking them both on an ear and getting near-simultaneous yelps.

"Up and at 'em girls, time to put your new revelations to use! We have a 'Big Stompy Robot' to build, after all. You won't even have too many complaints about your weapons designs! Elizabeth was impressed. In fact, I think you two should take a look at your weapons catalog and compare them to the work you're having trouble with. Some of them, you built nice, solid ruggedization into. Which just so happens to have helped with your problem in particular, Momo."

Momo perked up at that, frowning as she mentally brought up the specs for the upscaled designs she'd created of her Gauss Rifle. Slowly, she nodded.

"That…wasn't intentional. I designed the larger scale weapons more rugged to account for possible battle damage, not maintenance. But I can see how the extra thickness and spacing is similar to what I've been learning all week."

Melissa clapped.

"Yep! Which proves that you know how to do it, you just hadn't thought of the need yet. Now you know, and you can work it into your other designs. I've already been going over the blueprints and have a rough redesign of the basic Mech Armor frame, including handling some of the balance issues during rapid movement your original design would have had. Nikolai helped me, pointing out some practical mass-fabrication issues as well."

Izumi groaned at that, reminded of another problem the cheaper sensors she was working on had. There was a big difference between the sorts of things that could be produced in hand-made batches and what could be run off in mass manufacturing lots. The closest she'd come to designing the latter was work on Hero Scouters, and even there other specialists had come in behind her and tweaked her original designs for bulk manufacturing.

"We could just wait until the zero-g assemblers are online…"

Izumi knew there was a whine in her voice, and pouted at the laugh Melissa directed her way. Sighing, she pushed herself fully upright and pulled open the design schematics for the Mech Armor Mk 1. She frowned as she immediately noticed the biggest change.

"It's a good three meters taller, Mel. The original design was already pretty huge at seven meters. This thing is going to be a monster…and hell to balance. Didn't you say you'd solved the balance issues? This looks more unstable, not less."

Melissa shook her head, reaching over to flick the design from the smaller screen Izumi was looking at to a version of the same sort of holographic designers tank that UA used. Once there, she reached out and pointed to the skeletal frame around the hips.

"Look here. You went with what you knew, trying to upscale the same sort of humanoid hip and leg structure that an android like 2B uses. That sort of thing just isn't suited for the sizes we're talking about here, which is why you were having trouble. Both UA and I-island have construction frames in the 5-meter range that use a different design, though. One that scales a lot better. It's bulkier and the walking won't be as agile as you were looking at. The tradeoff is that it's a hell of a lot more stable at scale. I went with a modification of the design the UA Zero Pointers use, actually."

Izumi and Momo both frowned, Momo quickly pointing out the problem with that.

"Mel, those things are clunky as hell. The larger monsters the Mech Armor is intended to take on still move naturally. The Armor won't be able to keep up with them if they move like the Zero pointers."

Melissa, instead of protesting, nodded.

"Yep. You have to remember though, the Zero Pointers are meant to be beaten. Meaning they've never really been fully optimized. I've already improved their locomotion by a good twenty percent just in the initial pass, and I'm betting we can do better if we keep working on it. Besides, one of the things we can do with the extra bulk I added to the frame is add some seriously thick armor."

Izumi and Momo both considered that and slowly nodded. Even if they couldn't get the design up to the same mobility of the enemy, they could certainly make it more durable. Given they weren't really intended to engage in melee, even if they should be able to, that was perhaps more important. The mechs were closer to a high-mobility, all-terrain tank platform than something meant to fight in close. A thought struck her and Izumi pulled up the specs on the frame.

"Mel, how well would the frame take brute acceleration? Something like a rocket assist. If these are intended to engage mostly at range, adding a sort of jump pack that lets them open the distance in a hurry could solve some mobility questions…"

Melissa hummed and reached over to type some calculations. 2B, silent until now, answered before she could.

"The current frame would suffer stress fractures attempting to move that much weight via a jump pack model. However, if the boosters were distributed to the legs as well as a pack, it would be within tolerance. It would likely shorten the lifespan of the joints if we don't find a way to offset the abrupt expansion and compression of takeoff and landing, however."

With that question and answer, the quartet fell into a productive back and forth session as they began serious work toward getting a working MK 1 prototype design completed…