The Mech Touch novel Chapter 1333

After making his choice to design a conditional mech that made use of pirated licenses, Ves began to perform a lot of research.

Not only did he need to find the most appropriate licenses to borrow without paying, he also had to find an appropriate environment to design towards.

A lot of weird planets, moons, asteroids and other crazy satellites and land masses existed in the galaxy. Within the Komodo Star Sector, the Nyxian Gap stood out as a hotbed of anomalous satellites!

Most of them did not offer any opportunities for a smart metal mech to showcase their capabilities.

Nonetheless, after days of searching and reading through scattered reports with questionable accuracy, he narrowed down his choices.

Of the selection, he made a careful consideration and kept ruling out more and more environments until one was left.

Within the Nyxian Gap, a rogue planet existed in complete darkness.

The Nyxian Gap partially received its name due to its absence of stars to provide warmth, heat and a solid gravitic anchor to ease FTL navigation.

The rogue planet that Ves had settled upon should have been a cold, lifeless freezing ball floating randomly in space.

Yet due to its very active internal geological processes as well as the presence of strange exotics, it managed to be significantly warmer than the absolute freezing point!

The planet called Mournshell was still cold enough to freeze water, though, but colonies could potentially settle on the planet if not for one major caveat.

Its upper surface shifted frequently. Sometimes violently. Sometimes gently. Yet the terrain never remained the same after the passing of another day.

If that wasn’t enough, the rogue planet was also a heavy gravity planet! Although its gravity was only a bit more than three times standard gravity, these conditions already imposed significant penalties on conventional mechs trying to operate within its gravity well.

In many other cases, planets without an atmosphere tentatively made it possible for spaceborn mechs to operate in their airless skies.

Yet the heavy gravity of Mournshell threw a significant wrench in those plans! Most spaceborn mechs performed very poorly when subjected to standard gravity, let heavy gravity!

A couple of other conditions complicated the planet’s already problematic environment. The omnipresent asteroids floating in the Nyxian Gap led to a lot of collisions that not only threw the surrounding lands in disarray, but also sometimes introduced new exotics that came with their own strange effects.

"This also makes Mournshell attractive."

One of the defining properties of Mournshell was that all of the exotics interacting with the planet and each other resulted in detectable interactions. Value medium and high-grade exotics that were usually inert and extremely hard to detect would suddenly broadcast their presence upon dropping onto Mournshell!

This was very exceptional because the odds of digging into a random asteroid in order to uncover valuable exotics was very small and not economic!

As a result, Mournshell turned into a small hotbed of activity as a number of outfits vigorously competed to retrieve these valuable exotics!

The planet’s hazardous, unpredictable and ever-changing environment meant that flexible mechs were in much more demand there. The only reason why none of the outfits made use of smart metal mechs was because they were too expensive and high maintenance to make them fully viable.

"There should be at least one customer among them who is stupid enough to buy my mech." He muttered.

Having set Mournshell as his target environment, Ves now possessed a solid direction for his design project. While he still needed to refine a suitable mech concept to base his vision around, it would only be a matter of time before he produced a workable draft design.

"That’s enough for now."

He decided to pause his work at this time in order to mull over the configuration of his upcoming mech. He closed down his terminal, stood up from his chair and stretched his body.

While he could continue to wrack his brains over his mech concept, he didn’t feel very inspired at the moment. He also didn’t feel like forcing the creative process at the moment.

"It’s best to stew on it for a couple of days. I might come up with something fantastic in the meantime."

He idly sauntered over to his bed and picked up Lucky, who was peacefully lounging on its surface.

"Meow?"

"You big baby. Are you suffering from constipation or something? It’s been months since you crapped out a gem!"

"Meow."

"Maybe I should feed you something that works as a laxative in your systems. Should I feed you another nutrient pack wrapper?"

"Meow!"

Lucky angrily squirmed out of his hands and turned intangible before sinking beneath the deck. The thought of eating another nutrient pack wrapper still gave him nightmares!

Shaking his head, Ves left his stateroom in order to stretch his legs. Just as he exited the hatch, he encountered Fe Nitaa standing guard in the corridor.

"I thought I already told you that it’s redundant for you to stand here while our fleet is in FTL."

"I’m sorry, sir. I’ve been taught to take my duty seriously. There is always the possibility that a stowaway might be lurking on this ship for many days."

"That’s unlikely. Lucky would have sniffed the intruders out by now. His senses are much more formidable than you think."