Lucia Cavaletta

Lucia Cavaletta
Personal
Died	27 March 2779
Profile
Profession	'Mech designer

Control System Design Specialist Lucia Angelina Cavaletta was a technician with Lantren Corporation on Bryant, where she worked on the GHR series BattleMech design project. She was a diminutive woman, 1.47 meters tall and weighing around forty kilograms.

Working on GHR prototype #5 (which would become the Legacy Grasshopper), she had an inspiration about a particularly problematic component and engineered a solution within sixteen hours. Having finished a prototype device just past midnight on 27 March 2779, she had just etched her name on the hand-crafted masterpiece when unknown agents killed the perimeter guards and entered the laboratory and workshop hangar she was working in. Cavaletta was gruesomely tortured to death for around two hours, but it was later found that the headstrong designer had managed to mislead her captors into stealing critically flawed earlier design specs instead of the latest results of her work.

The GHR 'Mech design would later be named Grasshopper, presumably in the late Lucia Cavaletta's honor. This had been a naming suggestion for the otherwise unnamed GHR project she had made (with the project tentatively called Ghost Hunter previously), and the translation of her Italian surname. She had also argued that grasshoppers were an underestimated threat to farming on Bryant, acknowledged as dangerous only when they left nothing but dusty fields and in that fashion similar to the design philosophy behind the 'Mech they were building. (Many suggested names for the GHR called back to Bryant, or to agricultural themes.)

The device Cavaletta had built that night would resurface on Le Blanc sixty-one years later, after being scavenged from a Draconis Combine 'Mech. Techs recognized it for a Grasshopper component, a hand-crafted masterpiece of superior quality that well exceeded performance specs, and the etched signature confirmed their opinion that it amounted to a work of art.

The same device was still intact and in use as of 3090, though repurposed for civilian use in an AgroMech that happened to be operating on Bryant. By then the Legacy Grasshopper had already been submitted to the Military Materiel Redemption Program and had been scrapped; it is unclear if Cavaletta's device had been salvaged from that particular 'Mech though.

Bibliography

• Legacy (anthology), short stories What's in a Name? and Epilogue: Where Legends Come to Rest