Let’s talkabout ‘Mechs bay-bee

Been a bit quiet, so apologies for that. I’ve not had much luck getting any paint down, but have made a few select purchases exploring the options for getting 3d prints of mechs, as I’ve yet to take the plunge with a printer of my own (at this point I think I’m waiting for the crop of projection printers that recently crowdfunded to hit retail next year…). Specifically, I’ve been looking for mechs from the FedCom Civil War on to the end of the Dark Age as A) a lot of these are the designs I’m most familiar with, from Mechwarrior 4 and the Dark Age/Age of Destruction range, and B) well, I think I’ve covered pretty well for everything else from the Amaris Civil War to the Clan Invasion thanks to the CI kickstarter, and I plan to build some forces in the IlClan era…

So, I’ve brought from a mix of Etsy and Ebay sellers and each time found the sellers to be very engaging. I’m currently waiting on an order from Geneslicer on Ebay who provided the Mad Cat Mk IV in the above gallery – they are sorting me our for a Raptor II, Gurkha, Mad Cat Mk III and a Warwolf, some of my fave designs (note – I DO own metals of the Mad Cat Mk II and a couple Mad Cat Mk III’s, but want to see how resin prints stack up. Plus I need to source decent hex bases for them…)

And I picked up the IlClan source book, a really good run through the events picking up from the end of the Shattered Fortress sourcebook, and running through the buildup to and battle for Terra that marks the end of the Dark Age/Age of Destruction and the dawn of the IlClan. One warning – if you’ve been reading the fiction releases that preceded this book, you will know the main beats of what happens, but this book is an excellent resource for the “historical” events and forces involved in each theatre.

And one final tidbit: White Rook Studios Urbies United!

Just comparisons of some of the mechs I already own against the new sculpts from Clan Invasion – Annoyingly I couldn’t dig out an OG Timber Wolf as the three I own are in bits, so instead a couple of Wahnsa resins, a Mad Cat mk.II and a Mad Cat mk.III will have to make do. Overall though? I do appreciate the more consistent scaling of the new minis, and in general they retain the character of the classic designs just updated to modern standards. It’s going to be interesting to see if this is applied to any metals that Ironwind put out going forwards….

Ok, so after 20-odd years of playing Battletech-inspired videogames (Mechwarrior 4: Mercenaries yo), and reading an awful lot of the fiction, after seeing the quality of the A Game of Armoured Combat starter set I rather jumped in hard on the Clan Invasion Kickstarter – first at the Bloodname reward level before deciding “frag it” and jumping up to Star Colonel during the pledge manager. Now I opted for single wave shipping so I knew I’d have to wait until this year to get anything, so picked up the Clan Invasion box and the 4 Wave 1 Lance & Star packs as they hit retail (courtesy of Shiny Games – at the time one of the few UK retailers carrying a decent range of Battletech and honestly still one of my preferred websites to use), a got all tactical with my reward picks:
* I opted for only Inner Sphere Lance packs from the rewards included with my pledge, as each of those would come with a Wave 1 Salvage pack.
*Added the Clan Ad-Hoc and Heavy Stars as I REALLY wanted the Kodiac, Warhammer iiC and Hunchback iiC.
*Went for a Comstar Command Level II for the King Crab, Black Knight & Highlander.
*Legendary Mechwarriors? Why yes, I would like to represent 4 of the most iconic characters from the lore in their custom Battlemechs..
*Why yes, I did order a full Lance of Urbies. AC-20’s for the win!
And on top of this there’s Grassland, Desert & Battle of Tukayid map packs (would of loved to have been able to grab the battlemats but just outside my budget), data sheets and other goodies (loved the Shilone Aerospace Fighter freebie they threw in as a surprise), plus the lore and rules material that were provided as digital rewards.

So I actually tried to get into Battletech years ago, back when Catalyst released their Classic Battletech starter set (the one with the Hammerhands on the front and hard plastics of the Thor & Loki in addition to the more basic bag of one piece ‘mechs), and at the time picked up a few odd metal battlemechs that I could find on Ebay, and honestly Battletech was my main reason for backing Robotech RPG Tactics for better looking version of the classic “unseen” (lesson learnt there…). Now I wasn’t overly fussed with the aesthetic of the classic minis but found the redesigns for Mechwarrior Online pretty nifty, and came across some fairly decent (for the time) resin prints from Warhansa. Sadly as much as I found the setting pretty fascinating (as a complete stack of Dark Age novels will testify) I did bounce off of the rules and just never did any more with the minis (even if I did end up buying the next Start Box that BLG put out wit the hard plastic Mad Cat and Battlemaster).

Ok, so this is going to be a bit of an occasional project inspired by OTT’s inimitable Mr Lyons and his deep, deeeep dive into the world of Battletech, and the ongoing Battletech XLBS thread in the forums.

I’ve got a couple of things I want to do use this project for:
*1st, as a chronicle of how I paint up the ludicrous number of minis I now have, and what forces they end up painted as. I have an inkling that I want to do a couple of forces for specific Eras, with a corresponding OpFor. At the moment that primarily is the 4th Succession War, Clan Invasion, and era of The Republic/ The IlKhan.
*2nd, offer my thoughts on the various products that Catalyst are putting out, especially those I have in hand.
*And 3rd in a similar vein some of the 3P products out there, especially 3d printed minis (I have vast archive of STL’s saved, but no printer, so have ordered some minis from a few Ebay & Etsy sellers – looking forward to seeing how they turn out and stack up against the official minis).

Anyhoo, let’s see how this works out shall we?