The Mech Touch

od of time. ” Avanaeon insisted.
”That means it should be completely self-sufficient in terms of air, water, food, energy, heat, vision and propulsion.
These are the Basic Seven necessities of independent spacecraft. ”

The Basic Seven applied to virtually all spacecraft except for machines dependent on a mothership.

This meant that spaceborn mechs actually fell outside the Basic Seven ’s purview, though in practice they followed the guidelines anyway.
The most obvious outcome was that each cockpit contained a small stash that stored a bunch of water bottles, nutrient packs and maybe oxygen tanks.

”We should also reserve some space for tools, spare parts, medical kits, communication gear, hazard suits, weapons, K-coins and more. ” Ves couldn ’t help but add.
”There ’s no point in being left alone without any means to pick ourselves up again. ”

”That wishlist of yours will take up an awful lot of space, you know. ”

”It ’s a good thing we didn ’t give in to our vanity and chose to go for a cube-shaped shuttle, then. ” Ves idly joked.
”Say, can we fit in an FTL drive as well? ”

”What?! ” Avanaeon almost spat out blood.
”Impossible! Just because the CFA managed to fit an FTL drive into a shuttle doesn ’t mean that we can do the same! FTL drives are monstrous objects and even the smallest and weakest ones are the size of a full-sized cargo shuttle! Aside from that, FTL drives are gluttons for energy! To power one up and to keep it running long enough to reach another star system requires energy cells that are at least half as large as the FTL drive itself to my estimation! ”

Okay, that basically ruled out this possibility.

”Okay, chief.
It was just an idle thought. ”

Several days of intensive design work eventually resulted in a crude, artless design that stripped away everything without purpose and maximized every available scrap of space.Find authorized novels in Webnovel，faster updates, better experience，Please click www.webnovel.com for visiting.

Ves did not feel proud of this collaborative design, but as long as it worked, his feelings shouldn ’t matter.

As Avanaeon admired the finished design, Ves spoke up at that moment.

”The shuttle design needs a name. ”

”Hmm..
I haven ’t thought of that.
Normally, manufacturers don ’t bother naming their shuttles, especially the cheaper and more utilitarian ones.
They just come in a string of codes. ”

”I think this shuttle deserves a proper name.
Even if we only ever produce one copy of it, the design and every aspect of its construction is deliberately put together using our best judgement. ”

They both paused for a moment as they thought of an appropriate name.

”The Cube? The Cubinator? The Cubester? The Failed Sphere? The Six-Sided Dice? ”

Ves palmed his face.
”What kind of naming sense is that?! ”

”Well, I don ’t see the point in giving the shuttle a fancy name.
Since its shape is already blunt, why not give it a straightforward name to reflect its nature? ”

After some deliberation, they eventually decided on naming their shuttle the Six-Sided Dice.
It sounded a bit more sophisticated than calling it the ’Cube ’ or something.

Construction of the Six-Sided Dice began immediately after, though properly speaking they skipped a lot of necessary steps.
Ves felt bad about hurrying the project along, because they spent way too little time on optimizing the design and inspecting it for potentially fatal flaws.

However, Ves had a feeling that it wouldn ’t take the Flagrant Swordmaidens too long to reach the much-sought-after coordinates of the Starlight Megalodon.
Everyone else in the crew felt it too.
The long days of travel would finally end!

In the meantime, though, the Vandals and the Swordmaidens constantly put their guard up whenever they dropped out of FTL.
Due to the fact that they intruded into sandmen space, the allied fleet proceeding along the slowest but most casual route forward.

They navigated to red dwarfs only if there wasn ’t any viable choice.
In their core space, the sandmen mostly ignored these anemic stars, and even if the sandmen settled them, the colony governors usually consisted of the most pathetic examples of their race.

Even if the Flagrant Swordmaidens intruded into such a star system, they didn ’t suffer much repercussion, though the sandman governor doubtlessly passed on their observations of the human fleet to the other sandmen leaders in their network.

In most cases, though, the fleet preferred to jump to the dimmest or the most uninteresting stellar objects imaginable such as old neutron stars and even black holes if they detected any, though naturally the fleet never came anywhere near the event horizon.

Brown dwarfs, the physically handicapped cousins of red dwarfs, became their favored target destinations.
These retarded versions of proper stars were the dwarf versions of dwarf stars, smaller and less physically adept than red dwarfs which at least sustained proper thermonuclear reactions.

If a family of different stars showed up at a wedding, they ’d leave out the brown dwarfs out of the group recordings, because that was how much of an embarrassment these stars really were.
Some astronomers even called them failed stars because the absence of hydrogen fusion reactions make them really dim.

In navigational terms, many brown dwarfs still live in their parents or sibling ’s basement despite being adult stars.
They formed binary pairs with proper stars and stayed that way forever until the normal star eventually reached the end of its lifespan or something happened to crash them together.

This was the equivalent of a brown dwarf waiting for its parents or siblings to die and inherit the mass they left behind to transform into proper stars.
The brown dwarfs never worked properly for their entire lives, and only managed to shape up after cannibalizing the remains of its family.

The ultimate expression of losers among stars were two binary dwarfs spinning together in a single binary star system.
The only redeeming factor between such a system was that if the two dwarfs merged together, a normal star might result.

In any case, the traits that made them so unattractive also turned them into the safest locations in sandmen space.

The only problem was that because they massed so light, it became exceedingly difficult to navigate them unless the fleet was already very close to them.
In practice, this meant that the Flagrant Swordmaidens crawled their way forward, one agonizingly short jump at a time.

However, they weren ’t the only ones who utilized this strategy.