Now, with only 41 gears to spend, he had to choose wisely. To be totally honest, the only skill that really screamed out to him was the first. However, he’d have to wait before he had the right amount of gears to purchase it.
For him to actually be able to form his own alloys to use in his designs, he’d have to buy base metals then mix them together himself.
In the virtual design section of the TechForge Simulation Lab, he could literally just mix the metals together with ease. They would be liquidised and just swirled together like they were a smooth cream.
Cael could tell that was not how it was going to be in the real world. However, it was only 4 extra gears that he required. One single sale or match in the vault would likely cover the rest of what he needed, so there was no need to fret.
Now, with this finished, Cael had to move on to actually try and complete his quests. He felt his heart beating a little heavier upon noticing how much time had passed since he was given his skills.
He had spent the past few days working up his gear total to then gain skills to complete them, but this simply cut down the amount of total work he could put toward getting such quests done.
“Come on Cael, just calm down. No man is free who is not a master of himself.” He convinced himself, before opening the TechForge Simulation Lab.
He utilised the resources handed to him through his institute in the vault, and had acquired 112 extra gears, bringing his total to 153. This was after a few sessions, and it was now much harder for him to accumulate the same success from his matches as before.
Even with his more advanced exoskeleton, there was a stark difference between those within the rookie and novice ranks. For one to reach the novice rank, they couldn’t be a total casual and would need some form of fighting experience.
[Metallurgy]
[Lv. 1 Alloy Mastery]
[Improves the user’s ability to form alloys of metals that are functional and an improvement based on the component metals.]
[COST TO UNLOCK: 45 Gears]
[Lv. 1 Heat Forging Proficiency]
[Allows the user to better utilise heat to forge metals with a greater control over its properties.]
[COST TO UNLOCK: 20 Gears]
[Lv. 1 Impure Metal Boost]
[Gives the user knowledge on adding impurities to metals to augment its properties, or possibly grant them new strong suits.]
[COST TO UNLOCK: 40 Gears]
[Lv. 1 Alloy Mastery Unlocked!]
With his remaining 108 gears, he sought out to upgrade his microscale manipulation skill. He didn’t want the internals to be as big of a problem with his subsequent designs, but he knew that it was something that he couldn’t become extremely skilled at in a flash.
It was truly an art and would take profound knowledge before he could see some substantial, noteworthy results.
[Lv. 1 Microscale Manipulation -> Lv. 2 Microscale Manipulation]
Here, he had 28 Gears remaining in his account, and simply moved on with his design.
His first job was to improve on his drone design. The general premise behind the drone that he wanted to upgrade was the same. He wanted it to be impressively agile, and lightweight to avoid damage. To do so, he wanted to inspect the previous drone design that he created to start off and see where to make improvements.
“Ew.” He blurted out, upon looking at the abhorring design that floated before him.
He slowly swayed it around and could see inconsistency after inconsistency. He remembered the theories that he had created behind these designs of his but could readily shoot them down in his mind.
Opening the design to see the internals, he knew that a lot of improvements could be made. Within the simulation lab, he started using the design feature, and used his previous design as a base to work on.
Removing the armour and shell, he entered deeper into the design and started making changes.
Firstly, he wanted to give the drone the ability to spin. With thrusters aimed upwards as well as downwards, its agility would be greatly improved to allow for true three-dimensional movement.
For now, he added two areas on the top of the drone for thrusters to be placed. As he did so, he started promptly moving around the wiring and internals of the drone. He could already feel that the system was starting to fit together much more easily, and he also could decrease the number of wires and connections he needed to keep everything together.
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After he had added the two holes to allow thrusters to be placed inside, he simply focused on improving the internals of his drone.
Even though he had unlocked his skill to give him better understanding of internals, he was not perfect. He found himself forming makeshift connections in places and struggled to find a way to improve the design further after his initial changes.
Instead of getting bogged down in just the internals, he decided to move on to trying to improve the shelling.
Days passed as he was hard at work, thinking of new methods to improve his design. He could tell that progress had been made, but it simply didn’t satisfy him.
He felt like he could do much more to try and improve his design, but his feeling was not set in reality.
After unlocking and upgrading various skills, he felt like he could almost just make the perfect design. However, that simply just wasn’t the case. He’d have to put a lot more work into his system before he could fly through the design-making process in such a fashion.
For the armouring of the drone, he made it thicker and made from better quality metals. He had decided to opt for using an alloy of two metals. One was called Seprum and was known for its amazing strength. The only issue was that it was highly dense. It wasn’t seen much in drones due to its weight, but Cael felt like he could manage since it would be the smaller unit of his theoretical alloy.
The main part of the alloy would be another metal called Rescanor. Rescanor was a metal, that wasn’t exactly cheap, but was known for its strength-to-weight ratio.
There were many more impressive metals in that attribute, but it was found mainly in mid-to-low tier drones as a great option for protecting the technology, while keeping it light.
Cael wanted to make his alloy stronger than Rescanor but minimise the increase in its density and weight.
After unlocking the metallurgy skill, he felt like a 90-10 split would be optimal. Now, his knowledge was by no means vast. Compared to any competent novice, he would be viewed as a beginner and at best, a new novice.
However, he was convinced that this was at least a path that was followable. Any higher and he could tell that the Seprum would have a detrimental effect on the alloy. However, any lower and there would be no need to add the metal there in the first place. Therefore, he decided to go for this alloy, and named it ‘Seprum-enhanced Rescanor’.
He couldn’t be bothered giving the alloy a commercial, catchy title since he felt no need to take this metal alloy far.
Many devices just used special alloys made specifically for the device, but others resorted to the highest quality alloys known across the galaxy. They were great to utilise but came with great costs through things like licensing costs and the like.
Corporations were quick to try and create their own special alloys so that they could patent them and sell them to future customers.
It was not easy to improve on readily available alloys but every few years, it would be done and the quality of metals in the market would incrementally increase.
He had no area to actually make his drone, and didn’t have things like a factory to work in.
Going on the web to find more information, he felt heartache upon seeing the cost of factories would start from a low end of 30,000 dollars and would increase up to as high as millions of dollars per month to rent them.
Judging from the models that he was going to be making, he didn’t need much space. All he needed was a way to forge metals, and an advanced 3d printer to get his metals forged and created.
“How can I go about doing this?” He said internally, in deep thought.
He mused about the situation, with his hands at his waist, and came up with an idea.
His apartment had a living room area that he rarely used. For most of his time at home, he spent it in the comfort of his own bedroom. He had an apartment that was somewhat spacious for a single person, and he decided that he would section off an area of it to allow for his makeshift workshop to be created.
For him to have a system that allowed him to make alloys, he’d need a good air conditioning system so that he wouldn’t end up overheating while in there.
He had a decent amount of space to work with, but it wasn’t optimal.
Cael created a basket on the ExoTech Marketplace of all the items that he needed to buy in order to get to work. Finding the cheapest and smallest 3d printers on offer, they would still cost him around 35,000 dollars.
For smaller size 3d printers, they weren’t advanced enough to make the equally large but intricate shells of metal armour used in support bots and exosuits. Instead, he’d have to use a 3d printer at the industrial grade.
Moving onto something that wasn’t as expensive to ease his mind slightly, he started focusing on thin wall borders that he could use to practically section off the workshop. All he needed was wood to do so, and he found borders for just 150 dollars that worked like a charm.
Next, he would also need to install a form of air conditioning to make sure that the area that located his metal forging system wouldn’t just overheat the entire factory.
The system costed around 2,500 dollars, and he was rather high up in his apartment building, so it only made it more expensive for him. However, the price for such a system had decreased significantly due to technological advancements.
The only thing that kept the prices quite high was demand.
With that, the next main thing that he needed was a small-sized induction furnace. He didn’t need something that was large and used in factories, because he was starting off with a relatively miniature scale. All he needed was enough size to create individual parts and armour plates in one go.
He didn’t need a furnace that was big enough to fit an entire exosuit inside it.
Therefore, it only cost him around 10,000 dollars, and he needed to spend a decent amount to make sure that the furnace that he would use would be powerful enough to melt metals with extremely high melting points.
With a total cost of 47,650 dollars just for the equipment, he’d also have to rent a team of support bots that would install all the equipment for him too.
With the use of these intelligent bots, it would be incredibly easy for them to get everything done in just a few hours.
Their services were quite expensive since they were so useful. It would probably cost him around 10,000 dollars, and that was for some of the lower tier bots.
These would be bots with less advanced AI capabilities, with many of the workers having intelligence inferior to humans, as it wasn’t exactly necessary in this field.
All you needed was a brain and a few additional workmen to get the job done.
With a few extra items, such as furniture and painting the items, this brought the total costs up to around 60,000 dollars. Cael still didn’t like having to pay such a large sum of money, and this was just for a small makeshift factory in his apartment.
However, it was an immediate payment that had to be done. In the short-term, he would take a hit but in the long-term, he would be grateful.