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.

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!

Mechwarriors,

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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.

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!

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.

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.

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!

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!

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.

Mad Cats for display and gameplay.

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!

It's a real pain trying to get three gun barrels lined up nicely They still came out ok tho. The little one in the front is an extra insert, because I ran out of old paint pots. It can be swapped in for another if I need to use all the Light ones.

Working on some more Marik Militia next, and then another Lance of House Hiritsu Mechs will bring me up to a full Company for each House.

EDIT: Oops, I just found two more that I apparently dropped and forgot about when I was bringing them in after priming. I guess I'll get to those next time I work on generic Units.

Okay, so after making sure that sharing mech designs was okay I will share this one.

I don't have a name for it yet, hence the Experiment designation.

It's a 95 tonner, and is probably the most expensive thing I have ever designed.

I have run it through the Mech Factory's combat trial sim several times and it seems to me to work very well.

Obvious weaknesses are the XL engine and the ammunition dependency,,, as well as the complete lack of CASE.

And sorry if the drawing is crappy. I banged that out in about an hour. It was suggested that an image works well, so I included one.

Comments and critiques, pitchforks and torches are all welcome.

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

Cleaning out my battletech closet. Normally I have them all labeled or can recognize them but these two got me stuck. Help please.

I’m curious how other people approach DropShips once their mercenary command gets into the late game, because I’m at a crossroads.

Right now my force has grown to roughly two BattleMech battalions, an aerospace wing, plus all the logistics, support vehicles, and spare parts that come with a force that size.

My original long-term goal was to build a successful command, make enough money to buy my own DropShips, and eventually become self-sufficient instead of relying on employer transport.

Now that I’ve finally reached that point, I’m honestly questioning whether it’s worth it.

I experimented with adding a Union to see how it would change things. It was definitely cool, and I enjoy missions involving DropShips. I also remember in an earlier campaign with a Leopard getting missions where protecting my own DropShip was part of the objective, which I thought was a fun part of the game.

The problem is that one Union only carries a fraction of my overall force. To transport everything myself, I’d need several DropShips, which would mean an enormous investment.

That leaves me with a choice:

• Sell off a large part of the force I’ve spent years building so everything fits into my own transport fleet. • Keep the force intact and continue using employer-provided transport, which seems easy to obtain in MekHQ anyway.

That’s where I’m stuck. Employer transport is readily available through contracts, so I haven’t really felt pressured to own my own fleet. The biggest gameplay difference I’ve noticed is getting access to hot drops, but I’m perfectly happy deploying from the map edge if it means I can keep the larger force.

So I’m wondering how other experienced MekHQ players handle this.

• Do you eventually transition to owning enough DropShips to transport your entire command? • Do you intentionally keep your force sized around your transport capacity? • Do you keep a larger force and continue relying on employer transport? • Is owning a transport fleet mostly about immersion and roleplaying, or is there a strategic advantage I’m overlooking?

I’d really like to hear how people who’ve played long campaigns solve this, because this is the first time I’ve reached this stage and I’m not sure what the “intended” progression is.

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

Is it within the rules to share mech designs for constructive critique?

I've been playing BT since they changed the name from "BattleDroids", so I have made a LOT of mechs in my day... I've even seen some of my old designs seeing print when some dev or another had the same ideas I had.

Just wanted to ask before dropping a mech sheet into the pot.

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?