SCMR Chpt 3

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==Chapter 3 - Self Configuring Modular Robot==
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The Self-Configuring Heuristic robots weren't...
...the first spin-off tech from the analysis of the Nirasaki core. You have to understand, any completely new product needs to justify its existence by providing other products that can be sold to fund the research and development-even if it looks at first, like you've got that information already handled.
Nope.
It takes time to train a workforce, it takes time to set up factory floors, and all that commercial and manufacturing space demands lots of investment in resources and materials, and more important, money.
The first product to come out of the Nirasaki core, was something a lot less glamorous. Dalton's seismic network got a big boost with a new primary server, contributed by the R&D department of Garrett Electronics, this new core was smaller, and simpler, but had a much better, more flexible and better optimized analysis software, and a new, unusual architecture.
This got the interest of procurement officials in the FWL Militia, which has been sitting on collections of non-functional hulks and partially salvaged systems for generations.
Updates to Garrett's targetrac and Satcom hardware came next, and some of those updates included some 'possible upgrades' that immediately got the full-blown 'Classified' treatment.
After all, when six 'mechs in your company are sharing a composite tactical overlay that updates realtime and can recognize the basic architecture of an opposing 'mech-even one made out of parts of other 'mechs? You don't go blabbing to the Press.
You also don't tell them that your grandfather's 'mech, which you've nursed, has started handling like a sports-car...even when it's an aging assault 'mech.
You just don't advertise this. Not in a hurry, anyway. Not when you've got Lyrans on one border, or Cappies on the other, or seditious ****** in the other provinces.
Instead, you quietly nod, argue a bit about not needing the equipment gone over, then fork the money for the updates....
...because they're that good.
Engine management modules, tactical software, the nervous systems of Battlemechs? all places where a few tweaks here or there can have major payoffs, all 'black boxed' systems that Garrett was selling hand-over-fist, but only to approved customers inside the League.
Or so it might seem.
What the operators don't talk about (and won't, even to SAFE) is that after an upgrade cycle, their equipment starts 'predicting' what they're going to ask, whether it's a bit of speed, or order of weapons, or cooling cycles, or just slight differences in performance. It's not enough to be immediately visible, not even to Comstar's ROM organization. The fixes, after all, are subtle enough to go unnoticed, for the most part.
But for units selected to run the new hardware as a package? well...
The machines are 'self-tuning' to their operators with use, and maintenance cycles are finding less damage from minor errors in piloting, while gunnery scores improve. For units equipped with updated Command Post equipment, the tactical pictures are just so much clearer and some officers (in private) swear that more threatening targets are brighter on the displays, more quickly noticed, earlier.
Dr. Argent could explain it, if anyone outside the Corporation even knew her name these days. The upgrades were interfacing and sharing knowledge, their learning programs were learning, and the upgrades were working together on sidebands with a 'cloud intelligence' architecture-the more upgraded units in a given area, the more the underlying code can use to develop. It's not Singularity, at least, but in the regiments chosen to test the new technology, it gives a geometric increase in performance and a lowering of failure rates.
The machines are flat making the operators better in the field.
All according to plan.
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