Men, women, transexuals, intersex, or genderqueer, Minako doesn't care, she's pansexual.
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You don't know many details about the local economy, but you've read that it's three main exports are electronics, fancy jewelry, and Atlas Black Rum. You've never actually had any of that fabled liquor, but it has a brand recognition that penetrates deep into the Inner Sphere, and a single bottle commands a high price. You've been able to read the labels though, and you know that the stuff is aged for five years (which is like aging whiskey for 25 years, thanks to the high heat around here) in a barrel made from alien wood that grows nowhere else in human space, then carefully blended to bring forward it's best qualities. It is said to taste like allspice, caramel, and a bunch of other flavors depending on who is being paid to have snobish opinions about it. Mechwarriors take it straight, while most other people have to make do with having it in mixers, not being paid enough to afford it.
You find to your annoyance that the famed Atlas Black brand is almost completely absent from local bars because it all gets exported and thus one must pay interstellar import prices even on it's world of origin. There are other drinks though, and you sip your way through a variety of Cachaça, Rum, and Tequilla based drinks. You sample Pulque in a street bar and decide that it is a definitely acquired taste with it's milky color and syrupy texture. You find a sushi bar where the fish is good but the rice is somewhat off and you are served Baiju instead of Souchu. You hit up a discotheque, and spend a good half hour on the dance floor dancing with guys and ladies. You work on the local language as well, trying to avoid English entirely and attempting to translate even as you get steadily more and more drunk. You preform a drunkards walk from bar to bar, the establishments getting more and more lower class as you leave the center of town and worm your way back towards the hotel, before finally cutting it short just before 13 o'clock and heading back to your hotel room.
You don't feel so hot once you stop drinking for about half an hour. It's a quirk of genetics and despite several centuries of genetic engineering, you have somehow inherited a non-functional copy of a gene that codes for mitochondrial isozyme. You like drinking-but the hangover is literally killer as your cells simply can't deal with the toxic by-products of your drinking. Despite plenty of water, you know that there's gonna be a steep price to pay for your drinking. And it makes you a lightweight, so you've never been able to put away beer after beer without consequences. You have medication for this though, so you pop pills, relieve you bladder, and get into bed. As a result, you feel only slightly like an elephant is standing on your head the next morning.
Getting into work, you're pleasantly surprised to find you're no longer alone in the office-and less pleasantly surprised to find that you have a meeting scheduled with the Lead Designer first thing. You and the five transfers head to the the meeting room and sit down for your briefing. Mr. Sanjiv wastes little time on minutes or other prefunctory standards. "Right. We're bringing in the new hires for this department this week-your task will be to bring them up to speed, brief them on their responsibilities, and work out the worst of the kinks. I want you to also decide on what design you're going to be working on to start them off. Don't pick anything too complex, or you'll be spending months debugging and fixing problems." (Status effect: Green Designers. +2 to all TNs to design mechs until you complete either two designs or one design with more positive than negative quirks.)
Mister Sanjiv also has something to show you. The tiny ingot is shaped a bit like a lower case l, thinned in the middle and thick at the ends, which indicates to you that it's one of those ones you get cast to test an alloy's quality in tension and compression. Picking it up off the table though, you're shocked by it's lightness-it's small, yess, but it feels like it's barely there at all, and certainly not solid. "Endo-steel. Our friends at the national academy have been working on a production process for some time now, and they assure me they are close to a breakthough. Some asteroid-base in the inner belt, they've had mining operations there for decades but always just test runs and experimental production. They still have some bugs to work out though." You give the piece a flex in your hands and it pops alarmingly after a few moments straining that makes your arms shake-you drop it to the table and grimace at the crack, but your boss just sighs.
"That's not supposed to happen. But they're having trouble with brittleness? I don't think we can use it if they're having that much." You tap a fingernail on the cracked ingot and then slide it down the table to the next engineer for their inspection. "Why bring this up now?"
The boss grunts and fidgets. "There is a...suggestion that there might be an order to use advanced metalurgy if it becomes available. Especially on lighter designs-and I know, this isn't ideal, but if it can squeeze out a little extra performance, General Rodriguez is hot on it. It will be easier to design for it in such an eventuality, but I cannot say if the material will actually be available."
You seem caught on the horns of a dilemma here. Not only do you need to decide which of your prospective designs to move forward on realizing in metal and myomer, but you need to decide if you want to do so with expensive materials that seem to only theoretically be in production right now. You're reminded of the original Mackie, which went into production with it's armor so new that production of the armor had been the limiting factor, and a six month delay had ensued when half the first company saluted and plates fell off. And that was a good example of immature technology being used in a design!
[ ] Suggest a design that will use standard structure.
[ ] Suggest a design that will use Endo-Steel Structure.
[ ] Suggest a design that will use ...you're not sure, you need time to crunch numbers.
