The Hesperus factories are noteworthy in the 31st century as a kind of Star League Excess, a massive factory producing hundreds of mechs a year, even in ruins, with a minimal factory staff. But in the 23rd and 25th centuries, the history of the planet makes no sense at all. A check of the planet's history on Sarna shows that it was host to a pope, briefly, and then was the location of a early shared colony between the Lyran commonwealth and the Terran Hegemony, despite being two-jumps from the Terran border. But Hesperus II also has an equatorial temperature of 85 degrees. On exceptionally hot days, water standing outside boils, and even at high latitudes and altitudes, I think the air must exceed the Wet Bulb point. Nobody in their right mind should look at this place as anything other than a resource extraction location, even with terraforming, until the temperature is brought down by a lot.
So what's the story here? Did Hesperus II get some sort of bioweapon unleashed on it that raised it's temperature 50 degrees? Why was the Terran Hegemony building mech factories so far outside it's own borders? Why was there a "archiepiscopal palace" for a pope to rule from here in the 2200s? Who were the civilians the Lyran agents slipped out by impersonating? Does any of this early history make sense to anyone?