The Design Department hadn't gone through any expansions lately, so there were only around fifty assistant mech designers.
That was way too few. Expert mech design projects were only geared towards individual mech pilots, but their complexity vastly exceeded that of regular mech design projects.
While the burden on the lead and contributing designers was far greater, they still required the support of a large amount of assistants. The integration of many powerful miniaturized components in a compact mech frame resulted in a lot of mutual interference and unintended interactions. Many of these problems were difficult to predict and could only be discovered by performing endless simulations or prototype testing.
Still, it was still workable, just not ideal. Ves was already thinking about recruiting a couple of hundred low-ranking mech designers in the next big stop of his expeditionary fleet.
