"The Problem With Branding" A "Just So Story" copyright 2010 by Dave Van Domelen based on properties owned by Privateer Press used without permission, but hopefully with forebearance =========================================================================== "Look at that, Jenkins!" Dr. Takahama snarled. "Five million dollars' worth of testbed robotics destroyed in a single shot from a mere shoulder- launched rocket! You said your electromagnetic reinforcement would be able to handle that level of attack!" "It should have, Doctor," Abner sighed. "The tests showed a tenfold increase in the tensile and compressile strength of the steel under the influence of the integrity fields. We'll know more when we've analyzed the data." The diminuative former Sun Industries employee nodded her head gravely. "Be sure to get someone to translate the results into bullet points for our microcephalic corporate masters. I don't want them blaming me if this turns out to require major overhauls." * * * * "Look at that, Mel!" Karla snarled. "One hit from a rocket and the paint job's toast! Okay, sure, the mech itself is a combat loss too, but that's not our department. We're supposed to make sure these things look good even when they look bad, and I thought your new ceramic bonding technique was good against that sort of hit." "It should have held, Ms. Sofen," she sighed. "It might be an interaction with the electromagnetic integrity field, debonding the ceramic from the metal." "Isn't there a way to compensate for that? I don't want our UberCorp's new robots running around looking like they came from some redneck's front yard, covered in bare spots. That paint needs to STICK, and stick HARD, Doctor Gold. Your degree may be in paint chemistry or whatever, but mine's in marketing, and I can tell you that branding is as important as armor in the long run." "Once the test data gets back, I should be able to find the cause and figure out how to work around it," Melissa nodded. * * * * "Look at that, Norb!" Erik pointed excitedly at the test footage of the Carnitron. "Took an RPG to the chest and it's still standing. Okay, it's not moving, but they tell me it's a technical tweak thing in the technobabble shield system. And other than the paint job being ruined, it still looks pretty good." "Think we can hit the planned roll out date?" Norbert asked, a little dubiously. He didn't think the Carnitron would still be standing if it didn't have a huge tail to settle back on, honestly. "Don't see why not," Erik nodded. "Once you translate all the ass-covering 'talk down to the dumb managers' speak in the reports into plain English, it sounds like they're well into beta. Should be able to roll these babies at the trade show like we planned." "Assuming a giant monster doesn't step on the convention center first," Norb arched an eyebrow. "Hey, even better launch publicity if one does...." * * * * Abner was putting in more late-nighters than was good for his digestion lately, but Corporate wanted this ready yesterday. Absent someone in the mad science lab cracking the secrets of time travel, he wasn't going to manage that, though. Those guys were lucky, he mused...UberCorp gave them a budget and a mandate to figure out the crazier "magic" stuff that some of the monsters seemed to use, and if they failed, no big deal. No one really expected them to crack the Cthul sorcery or the mystic mumbo jumbo of those giant elemental monks any time soon. Even a little bit of success would justify their entire budget. But Abner was "stuck" in the more-or-less real world, where results were expected to arrive on schedule and in time for product launch. Okay, he was somewhat less likely to be accidentally turned into a demon...poor Charlie was never gonna recover fully...but he could still end up mundanely hosed. He leaned back in his chair and massaged his temples. "It just can't be done. The maximum is the maximum, crank the field up past the max and it collapses in...wait," he leaned forwards and started entering simulation parameters. Yes, yes! That just might work! * * * * For a marketroid, Sofen had actually had a good idea: branding. Just not in the sense she'd meant, Mel smiled as she thought to herself. The integrity field collapse had indeed fractured the ceramic coating, and there really wasn't any way around that, so long as she stuck with ceramic. But the armor substrate was essentially steel, which absorbed carbon under the right conditions. It'd taken some fiddling, but she'd managed to work out absorbable carbon mixes that turned brilliant white and deep red under the influence of the integrity field, both "activating" the colors and branding them into the structure of the metal itself. Black, of course, had been easy. It's hard to make carbon NOT be black. Blue probably would have been impossible, as far as she could tell, but fortunately UberCorp International's corporate colors were just red, white and black. Some bits of the robots glowed yellow-orange, but that wasn't her department. If corporate wanted them to glow red, they could annoy someone else about it. Mel powered up the test piece, which currently looked dull gray with only the faintest outlines of the UberCorp logo on it. Karla had loved this part of the idea...Mel clicked the start button on her screen and the integrity field powered up to its stable maximum. With a faint shimmer, the carbon mixes bonded permanently with the metal and changed to vivid red and white plus deep black. Then she collapsed the integrity field as abruptly as she could manage short of actually shooting rockets at the metal. The same test had earlier shattered the old ceramic coating pretty thoroughly, worse than the live fire exercise had done to that Carnitron in beta, so she figured it was good enough. The colors stayed intact. It was a stable process, actually changing the color of the outer millimeter or so of the metal itself. You'd have to scrape off a layer of the armor to remove the colors. "Success!" * * * * "Ladies and gentlemen of the press, I present UberCorp International's newest defense against the creatures that plague our world...the Robotic Protection Vehicles!" Erik stepped aside as the giant viewscreen behind him lit up to show a squadron of Carnitrons at a remote proving grounds. There was a non- functional mockup of one at the trade show, but even Wallace Wier's money and connections weren't enough to let them bring a working model into the heart of Las Vegas. Yet. "I know they're not much to look at yet, but that's because these are fresh off the factory line," Erik went through his spiel. "Thanks to our patented ElectroBranding (TM) technology, the paint job is actually made a part of the metal once we activate the IntegroField (TM) generators that make the armor ten times stronger than steel!" No need to mention that the reason they were fresh off the factory line was that they had just barely finished the first batch in time for this dog and pony show. The squadron rippled and vivid colors appeared on their bodies, the tricolor of UberCorp's logo. The audience applauded appreciatively, although most were the sort of jaded tech reporters who saw this sort of thing all the time. Just not, mind you, applied to giant robots. "Look at how the IntegroField (TM) lets them shrug off small arms fire and lasers effortlessly," Erik continued, as a barrage of minor weaponry pelted the Carnitrons to no visible effect. "But that's not all! Sophisticated sensors can tell when an attack is going to be too much for the IntegroField (TM) to handle at stable levels, and will briefly amp things up for a fraction of a second, letting the Carnitron survive short duration assaults that would be impossible for any amount of physical armor to endure! Watch, as a copy of Defender X's main weapon is fired at one of our Carnitrons!" Granted, it was a fairly inferior copy, but you couldn't tell just from looking at the plasma ball that streaked in from off-screen and splashed against a Carnitron. The RPV rocked back on its tail but otherwise seemed to weather the assault. To the extent that emotions could be assigned to it, the Carnitron seemed distinctly unhappy with this turn of events, but it had survived. Now, even the jaded tech reporters were applauding with enthusiasm. "Now, I'll be honest with you folks," Erik confided. "A second shot made too soon after the first would probably blow the Carnitron to pieces. There's only so much power we can pack into the defenses of something that size. Which is why we also have...MECHA KHAN!" The view shifted to a different test grounds, and the show went on.... * * * * "Okay, why does the Carnitron look...blurry?" Dr. Takahama ran her hand over one armored panel. "The armor still feels smooth and solid, but the colors make it appear from a distance as if that plasma blast melted much of the machine." "Maybe the plasma blast did melt the very surface, the parts that were at the edge of the integrity field? The field would have kept the bits from being completely stripped away, but they would have flowed for a little before settling back down," Abner suggested. "Anyway, it's just cosmetic, not really our problem. The armor held, so our corporate masters should be happy." "They're never happy," Dr. Takahama sighed. "But I agree that their rage, if any, will be directed elsewhere this time." * * * * "I can understand why the one that got zapped is a bit melty," Karla frowned. "But look at that one, look carefully," she pointed at a close pan of one of the other Carnitrons. "Wherever the bullets hit, the paint...er, the branding is a little wobbly. What happened?" Mel sighed. "I'll have to run some simulations, but I think that whatever they did to boost the integrity field temporarily introduced some...let's call it noise...into the field. If the metal were uncolored, as I expect the test samples used by the armor lab would be, then the effect wouldn't really be noticeable. And a ceramic overcoating would just get shattered away...worse, now, actually. I think what was causing the original problem with the ceramic was that the metal was shifting slightly under impact, causing debonding. But now it's shifting on the scale of centimeters rather than microns. It's almost as if amping up the integrity field melts the metal while holding it inside its original boundaries, then resolidifies it after the impact. It would certainly allow for better impact distribution, but..." "But it makes your pigment go all melty. Well, I know this wasn't your fault," Karla shrugged, "we can probably find a way to blame it on the integrity field lab guys. See if you can find a workaround, though, in case the armor guys can't fix it at their end." * * * * Erik buried his face in his hands. "They all look like crap. Every time the IntegroField gets amped up, it makes the paint job run like hot wax." "We can paint over them with regular auto paint, but as soon as we even turn on the IntegroFields, the paint starts to debond," Norb shrugged. "We've got a few display models painted up to look pretty, but we've already implemented the metal pigment process for the entire initial production run. And the RPV contracts have already been signed, we're going to have to keep making them this way until a fix can be found, we can't halt production over aesthetics when our paying customers are demanding a way to protect their businesses from rampaging monsters." Erik sat up, ran his hands through his hair, and took a deep breath. "I guess there's nothing to do but suck it up. Try running one of the backup Mecha Khans without paint at all, though, just bare metal, see how that tests market-wise. It'll be dull, but dull beats crap any day...." ============================================================================ Author's Notes: After opening my cases of Monsterpocalypse Series 5: Big in Japan, I was disappointed at how crappy the UberCorp International figures' paint jobs continued to be. Red and black paint sloppily blobbing all over the place, a real jarring contrast to how the rest of the line looks. It got me thinking...what if there's an in-setting reason for the bad paint jobs? UCI is, after all, your basic "faster, cheaper, less safe" sort of corporation, it could certainly have been the result of some sort of budget cutting move, or simple sloppiness caused by rushing to market. And after some thought, I had the core of my story. A "just so story" is a type of myth or legend that tries to explain why some part of the world is the way it is. Sometimes they're big things, like why the sky is blue, or why we have winter. Other times, it's littler stuff like how the tiger got its stripes or why we put up with mosquitos (when the other animals wanted to do away with humans, the mosquitos defended us because we're tasty and thus saved us). They often end up being fairly convoluted, with things like, "...and then, because Persephone ate three pomegranate seeds, she had to spend three months of the year with Hades, during which time Demeter withholds her blessing from the Earth out of sorrow." But in the end, everything works out "just so." All the character names (other than those that are part of official canon) are taken from a common source, which comic readers should be able to figure out. :)