First battlemechs ready for tabletop!

Decided to finally get some Battletech minis after a lifetime of painting Warhammer figs and piloting big stompies on PC (Mechwarrior 2-5, MechCommander and HBS's BATTLETECH). I bought the Alpha Strike box and figured to test some paints on the clanners first. Next up: IS mercenary company!

EDIT: Lots of people are posting duplicate comments, be aware I will strictly be using the comment with the highest upvote so if you said a mech someone else also said, be sure to upvote them.

I will say, it doesn't have the be developed or even still produced in that era but it needs to be in use in a way people find iconic for the time.

In the process of pulling them out, cleaning them off, superglueing a few dozen back together . . .

Will share more detailed pics later this week as it progresses!

My first job at a dump I found about 2/3rds of these in a box. I know they look a bit dusty, but they've been sitting in a bigger box with my old collection since I got my own place last year. Some of them will also remain missing limbs for the rest of their lives - I used to pretend they were battle damaged 😅

There's also a smattering of Crimson Skies and some kind of fantasy TTRPG made with the same bases.

Let me be up front, this comes across as self promotion, but really I just wanted to make something the community can use, but if it still seems to the mods like self promo then so be it.

When I've played battletech solo, the worst part was running the other side. You know what you're planning, so the enemy never does anything you didn't expect.

Most solo aids give you a generic behaviour table that treats an Atlas and a Trebuchet exactly the same, which is no help at all.

So I built one that reads the actual loadout.

The bit I care about most is how it works out where a mech wants to fight. For Classic it ignores the Alpha Strike damage numbers, because those squash minimum range and each weapon's own brackets into one figure and you lose everything useful.

Instead it walks the hexes in each band, checks which bracket every gun on the mech falls into, applies minimum range penalties, turns the to-hit into a 2d6 hit chance and adds up expected damage. Then it weights that by role.

So a Trebuchet wants long, because LRM 15s reach 21 and its backup lasers are dead past 9.

An Atlas wants short, because the AC/20 and four mediums all peak inside 3 hexes.

An Awesome 8Q sits at medium instead of charging in, because three PPCs have a minimum range of 3 and getting close is genuinely bad for it.

Weapon stats are off the Total Warfare tables and the Tactical Operations advanced weapons tables. Variable damage weapons get handled properly, so Heavy Gauss reads 25/20/10 and Snub-Nose PPC reads 10/8/5.

Both rulesets are in there and kept separate. Alpha Strike gets OV, heat, shutdown and TMM. Classic gets the weapon model plus the full loadout and heat sink count on the card, and it will never quote you an Alpha Strike damage number.

Orders also know how fast the mech is. Someone flagged a Sagittaire being told to close to short range. The range preference was right, five Medium Pulse Lasers and two Large Pulse is a knife fighting loadout, but the thing walks 3 and runs 4. That's three turns crossing open ground barely shooting back. Now it tells you that, and sends slow mechs cover to cover instead of straight up the guts.

Things it does not do. It only runs the OpFor, not your force, so it can't work out your TMM or pick targets for you. It has no idea what your terrain looks like.

It's free, no signup, runs in your browser. If a specific mech reads wrong in play I want to hear about it, that's the useful kind of bug report.

battletechhq.com/opfor-command.html

About a week ago, I asked for help in identifying an unknown mech, which turned out to be a Zeus. I've just finished it, and figured I'd post a shot of him and his friend.

Of note - these are the last two mechs I needed to paint before I cleared my pile of shame. I'm now officially finished.

I always wondered how he got the job at PGI, and what life looks like now since he has been let go.

FYI if you would like to support Alex, he is open to commission work: https://www.deviantart.com/flyingdebris

Best contact via twitter: https://x.com/Flyingdebrisguy

I've got a 3rd Ed. Locust that, somewhere in the 30 years between my middle school bedroom and today, lost one of its MG pods. I've been looking for a replacement and really don't feel like paying someone on ebay $20 for a whole other loose locust, and then I'd have another one missing the pod that I stole for mine.

This seems like a good candidate for 3d printing, but I can't find anyone who has the file for that part. I've considered making a clay cast of the other one but then it's mirrored and that's a pain in the ass.

Any ideas? Anyone have a good scan of that part?

I went with a Jade Falcon Raptor Keshik color scheme. I like designing custom 'mechs and I felt that the honor guard of the former khan of the Jade Falcons would roll in 'mechs a cut above stock.

For painting, I used Army Painter. Black primer, a drybrush of the plate metal for the first coat, then gunmetal on the unpainted metals. The green I had wasn't working, something about being an effect paint, so I borrowed my friend's emerald forest. Then I washed it in strong tone, dark tone was sold out, but honestly, I'm kinda digging the brownishness the strong tone gave. The cockpits are shieldwall blue. I finished the project with satin varnish as I feel an honor guard would be slightly shiny.

Recently got the Inner Sphere command lance, the one with an Orion, thunderhawk, pheonix hawk and Atlas 2. Currently wondering where the best place to find the full game stat blocks are? The mech types are listed but I was after the actual diagram sheets, not the Alpha strike ones.

(Apologies if the answer is somewhere Obvious, this is my first time trying to get into the tabletop after playing MW5 and the 2016 computer game)

Mechwarriors,

Remember, please, when you see someone posting something that breaks the rules and that you don't like -- whether it's AI art, slurs, off-topic controversial stuff, or whatever -- please, please, just report it to us and let us handle it.

Don't flame them out right back, and get your ass in trouble, too. Remember that being 'right' (IE, agreeing with the mods on something) doesn't give you immunity to the rules, and please know that taking moderator action against well-intentioned folks who are agreeing with us, and sometimes even personally defending us, really sucks. But we do it when we have to. Your comments will get taken down too, you'll get warned or get a temp ban, too (ask around, it's happened plenty, and left plenty of folks unhappy).

It's happened, it's happened recently, and we'd love it if it could stop happening (and so would you, so that you don't get banned).

So please. If someone posts something that breaks the rules, report it and move on with your day. Don't cuss 'em out, don't fly off the handle. Just report it, and go do something else, pleased in the fact that the universe trundles slowly ever towards justice and you've still helped solve a problem without having to cause a problem to do it.

You've got folks to clean up the shit for you. Don't reach down and grab a handful to smear yourself with it, too.

So here's the flavor, You are a pirate captain, you commandeered a jumpship and have one functioning leopard dropship, (the other one got crippled by the people you got the jumpship from and you've been scavenging it for parts to get the other one repaired. You've got some heat on your back and need to disappear, but also need money to pay for repairs and people. Luckily you hear some radio chatter among other jumpships about this colony world that is trying to get Comstar to recognize them as a planet and get put on the navigation registry.

A low population world, with poor defenses, that definitely doesn't have an HPG and isn't even on the navigation registry. You don't know what's on planet, but you can be sure there's going to be a distinct lack of hardened targets. If you played your cards right and were quick enough, you could be a king/queen/monarch.

What does your lance look like?

Feel free to go full flavor, or more practical. Era is succession wars, and options are whatever got salvaged by the pirate beforehand.

Are you like me?

Did you too forget to attach the wingy bits to your Aces Box Rifleman C2?

Do you also have an unpainted Spider and a rapidly growing obsession with Inner Sphere partial wing mechs?

Boy oh boy do I have good news for you!

With a little green stuff, you too can have your very own Spider 8x! If you can find a kick-ass sword, maybe even an 8xr!

G'day folks!

I've been humming and hawing about running a TOW campaign for friends and the system seems alright and I have a pretty good grasp of it, but I'm wondering if there's anyone that has made some record keeping apps or websites to help manage the many modifiers to checks? Stuff like character creators, automatic math of different skill check scenarios, etc?

I can absolutely hack something up in Excel, but if something already exists I can utilize that.

Finished a few more mechs for Jade Falcon Omega Galaxy! Loving the red talons on these birbs!

Almost at a full binary of Omega now - I think an Ion Sparrow will be just the thing to round it out!

Mad Cats for display and gameplay.

Following in the spirit of the cover art from Rolling Thunder (1988). These guys will be FWL or Regulan Fiefs legal up until the end of the Late Republic era, when the Grasshopper goes out of general circulation.

Working on the next lance...Heavy Recon!

Really happy how these came out. I backed out of the gold trim idea and just went with the cockpit gold color instead. I want to do more mechs with the black trim color possibly for Ghost bear. Next is the wife's mechs for a 400 point aces combined lance (which I still have to print off some aces cards) and some custom painted mechs. Then we are off to our scoring sands campaign!