Malachor V
Clan Laquell Territory
When people thought of Beskar forging technique, they saw large Mandalorians hammering a large piece of metal in a fiery plasma pit. The truth of it was far different as the young Khadeus Laquell was quickly learning, watching his father delicately shave layers upon layers of space dust from an asteroid the size of a wookie.
Clan Laquell had elevated the crafting of Beskar to the level of art and Khadeus' father was the clan's senior armor smith, meaning the scene now unfolding before the boy's eyes was something Mandalore himself would kill to see.
The elderly man's fingers were thick and callous, twisted by years of work and combat, but they handled the plasma cutter like a painter working on his masterpiece, the whole lit by the green hues of Malachor.
The man did half the work before handing the tool to the boy. "This is your armor." He explained, stepping away, arms folded.
Khade walked up to the rock and began cutting, listening closely to his father's advices; "Don't cut too deep, every slash you make in the iron reduces the quality, shave off layers at a time and be patient." Khade tried, but it was taking so long and he was so eager to get his armor… "Control yourself, Khadeus!" his voice carried the authority of a trained field marshal, but the warmth of a father, "True warriors do not give in to their feelings, push aside any other thought, let the work become your only focus."
Khade did so, or tried to as best he could, working slowly and without the dexterity one would expect from a young man this well trained. "It is not a tool, it is your weapon, the filth is your foe, this is combat, let your heart guide your hand, just as you did in training."
It was a strange balance, listening to your guts, your instincts, yet pushing away your emotions and Khadeus was not afraid to point it out.
His father smiled and shook his head, "Do not push back your feelings, let them settle in, analyze them, know them and use them, but do not let them guide you."
And so, Khade began a deep introspection, seeing his fear of failure first and foremost, but some anger as well at the fact he had to fulfill this manual task where other warriors simply bought their armor in pieces. Pride came in third, pride to be the son of such a wise man, being a Mandalorian and being a warrior. He was surprised to find only calm at the end, a soothing and warm feeling of doing something right. He had hunted plenty of times before and loved the feeling, but this was different, he was no killing, he was creating.
The process continued well into the darkest hours of the night and only when he had fully extracted the pear shaped mineral from the dust did the young Khadeus realize his exhaustion. He had combat stims in his bag and took one without second thought. He wanted to finish this, sleeping could wait.
His father frowned. The stims were no more dangerous than a caffeinated drink, but he didn't like seeing his son take them. He did, however, like seeing that the kid had neither hesitation nor reserves when it came do doing his job right.
Next step was the hammer; a large flat rock attached to a complex pulley system and a large wooden wheel installed horizontally and around the rock. Khadeus, at seventeen, was quite strong even by Mandalorian standard, and the wheel had only one handle, indicating it was meant to be operated by a single man, but the young Mando'a still struggled with it at first, his boots sliding in the sands or digging in. He could not break inertia, so his father told him to take the footwear off.
His naked feet dug in the sand and toes curled to create a grip, clawing in the sand as the young man pushed with all his might. The wheel turned, slowly, and began to click every second or so, the rock rising slowly above ground. It climbed that way until it reached five meters, then, the old blacksmith told his son to stop.
Together, they brought the beskar pear above the wheel and under the rock, a cortosis-rich ciridium block, as Khadeus' father revealed. Turning the wheel a little more would release the block and let it fall on the Mandalorian Iron, hammering it into shape hit after hit.
The sand they stood on was rich in ultra-dense graphite, formed by Revan's super weapon and halfway between carbon fiber and diamond. The rock would incrust cortosis to the iron where it was hammered and force the carbon in the microscopic fractures and imperfection across the plate.
"The longer you hit it, the better your armor will be." Khadeus nodded and returned to work.
There was a point to not using machinery for this process, as they would simply create a 'satisfactory' result, up to par with scientifically exact analysis and calculus; a good thing when mass producing suits of armor, but here, no fancy science could surpass a warrior's guts and sweat, especially considering the myriad of tiny variables to take into account, like the quality of the iron, the natural stress fractures on its surface, the amount of carbon and cortosis absorbed every time and the density of the end result. A machine needed invasive testing to figure these out, a Mandalorian needed only his instincts.
And it made the kid work for his armor, made it so the suit's quality would be proportional to the effort he was willing to put into it.
The hammer came down tirelessly until long after the sickly Malachorian sun had re-appeared. The beskar was long since a perfectly circular plate spread evenly across the bottom of the hammer, two meters wide, four centimeters thick and as smooth as the surface of a Dantooinian lake in a boring day.
Khadeus stopped as much out of satisfaction as necessity. His arms and legs felt like they were on fire and his lungs seemed unable to extract oxygen from the thin atmosphere of Malachor.
"Get some rest," his father ordered as servants extracted the plate, "the next step will require all your skills."
So Khadeus did as told, dragging his feet to the workshop and collapsed on the nearest couch, snoring before the servants were done with the plate.
Servants, not slaves, Jora, Khade's father, had no use for slaves and freed these two along with hundreds of others almost ten years prior. Only these two, a male Zabrak and female Cathar, accepted his job offering. They were paid, fed, housed and he even allowed them some off time on their home planet.
Jora had nothing against slavery per see, if the slaves were too weak to free themselves, they were likely better off in their current situation, but he disliked employing them because it resulted in poor work and gave his products a sour aftertaste of repressed anger and fear. And artist thing.
Beating a slave, however, was an excellent way of finding out how much of a good shot he still was. Slaves were weak, granted, but they were not meat nor cattle, they were people under their master's responsibility and if the master wants quality work, he should just pay for it.
Kodos, the Zabrak, whistled in approval as his fingers trailed the surface of the plate. "This is good work, no significant burns, no apparent impurities…"
"What did you expect," Zin scoffed, her pointed ears perking in amusement, "this is the Boss' son!"
Jora shook his head at that, "He received no more training than other Mandalorians of his age, what he accomplished here is the result of his own determination, nothing else."
Zin's smile revealed two gleaming fangs, "That's what I meant, boss, chip off the old block."
They ran a few resonance tests to evaluate the quality of the material and all three agreed this was some good iron. Not the best ever produced, not some astonishing piece of metallurgy, but good work nonetheless, especially from a beginner.
The next morning, the three would wake up to find Khade already at work, ruffling through electronic supplies and drawings like an hyperactive Jawa. A quick check of the stim reserve confirm the kid was only being enthusiast and a long check of what he actually worked on confirmed he was Jora's son.
The suit Khadeus was designing, though definitely Mandalorian in its conception, drew inspiration from many exotic designs, namely Czerka powersuits and Gamorean tribal armors.
Powered suits were no novelty to the Mandalorians, although few opted to use them for both maintenance and cost issues. What Khade had thought up did not resemble traditional powersuits, however, as it used force amplifying circuits weaved in to the lower suit layers instead of hydraulics. This would increase the wearer's strength somewhat, but nowhere near as much as the alternative. The amount of circuits weaved into the armor was actually equal in strength-per-volume to human muscles.
But that was pretty basic, wealthy manual workers and mercenaries used such circuits quite often to give them a boost in hazardous environment without the weight of powered armor.
The chest piece covered the upper body and shoulders in thick plates combining sharp edges with smooth, organic curves, so as to never offer the enemy with a flat surface to shoot at. This was the biggest part of the suit, prominent enough that the wearer could not possibly see his feet.
The stomach would be covered by independent ribbons, separated between themselves by a finger's length of undersuit. The upper arms were armored in a similar fashion while the fore were encased in rigid plates while the legs would be fully encased in heavily articulated plating and supported with some more traditional servos, linked to a relatively large power plant in the belt.
Finally, the helmet was also a combination of rough edges and rounded surfaces, covering the head and jaw quite well, but leaving a Y in its center that went from one temple to the other and finished at the chin.
Nothing about the suit was innovative in itself, but it was most certainly an unusual design, far heavier and more complex than regular Mando boys liked.
Of course, Khade, as the son of the galaxy's best armor creator, was certainly not just any Mando boy.
The day would then be spent turning the beskar to thousands of tiny foils, using only high pressure water jet and no heat at all. The foils would then be molded to the desired shape and layers added until the required density was met and glued in their current shape. Then, the Mandalorian would bring the pieces to one of many cracks in the planet's surface and, with the help of advanced force field generators, lowered the pieces extremely close to Malachor's unstable heart where the phenomenal pressures caused the plates to fuse on the atomic level, all loosing 10% of their overall mass in the process, but becoming bound together tighter than any amount of heat could have achieved.
The rest was simply garnish; jump jets in the boots and clavicles, cortosis/beskar/carbon fiber undersuit, internal padding, flame thrower, laser, grapple, rocket/dart launcher, deflector shields, helmet electronics, life support, power generators, stealth belt, field carbonite freezer and a digital camouflage paint job, incorporating blue, black, green and a few tinges of red.
The finished piece, with Khadeus strapped inside, was impressive. Khade was already impressive by his own right, but with the massive armor plates and intricate systems covering the suit made him look like some extremely advanced war droid.
The plates were a perfect fit and far lighter than they looked, and this, combined with the strength enhancing circuits, allowed the Mandalorian to move around just as he would unarmoured. He hopped on the spot, clenched his fists and did a few martial arts moves, finishing with a perfect spinning kick.
"You ever seen something this beautiful?" Zin breathed, as her boss and his son discussed the boy's future assignment.
Her Zabrak friend was far less overwhelmed than she was. This suit was far too well-built to have been the work of some rookie Mandalorian warrior, no matter how many inspiration it drew upon. It was a prototype that achieved flawless success on the first try. It should have been a clunking, wheezing piece of junk, but Malachor often did strange things seemingly on its own accord, so he decided to shrug off his concerns and finish uploading the combat algorithms to the kid's helmet.
He had been chosen to lead a small task force on Balmorra. An actual field mashal was supposed to go, but Khade had challenged the woman in the battle circle and won, earning the right to prove his command skills in the upcoming battle.