Since I've pretty much dropped 40k I've gone back to playing a decent amount of battletech the renewed interest was also aided by the release of their 25th aniversary set. The game mechanics for the most part are the same, there's a few minor tweaks and some new weapon options but it feel like putting on an old comfortable pair of jeans.
We had a game planned for this weekend where each person would play a 100 ton assult mech, there's no rule in battletech that models have to follow WYSIWYG like in 40k but I wanted to convert a Daishi Widowmaker as it's a mech I make use of ocassionally and I never pass up a good excuse to modify stuff. So I pieced this together for the game and should be painting it up over the next couple weeks. (me paint??? shocking I know
) I still need to add a pair of medium lasers on the torso but I replaced the arm weapons and added the ultra autocannon to the torso which is just so much killy goodness. Shame I could barely manage any hits in our game with it, but when it does hit it punches really hard.
For the paint scheme I prefer militray drab on my mechs, I'm looking at doing a dessert tan on this one as it'll give a good contrast with black and dark green detail areas. A lot of battletech players like loud colors and patterns for their mechs but that just doesn't sit well with me as theya re supposed to be walking tanks and military stuff tends to be very dull and functional rather than in your face.
I primed this with painters choice spraypaint which I think does a pretty good job, you just have to watch the thickness as it builds up fast but overall it does a bang up job and is a fraction of the cost of hobby primers. ($3 a can) I need to go in and remove a couple small flakes and grit particles and I can get to painting.
Back around 1995 FASA got sued over the rights to a lot of their original mechs and had to stop making them. They had been liscensing the designs from a 2nd party company that went under and later found out that they no longer had a valid agreement with the parent company in Japan. They'd been in court for the better part of 12 years involving the designs and Mechwarrior games, in the end they had to stop producing a significant portion of the old mechs which are iconic for much of the game. (and sadly most of my favorite mechs)
I've not really keen on most of the new designs so I've been cleaning up a lot of my old minis, many are in lead if that gives a good idea of just how old they are. Even back in the day it was pretty hard to get some of these as I was 12-18 years old and was limited to what the local store could stock. The popular mechs were tough to get as they'd always sell out and there wasn't online options like there is nowdays so to me the older mechs are worth their weight in gold. I have a pretty extensive collection but as everyone knows there's always room for more little men
I've been messing around with cleaning up some of the better condition minis to get them in useable shape, a difficult task as 20 years ago when I was a kid a shoebox was a perfectly acceptable container and many of them have some badly rounded out and dented details as a result. Things were so simple when I wasn't such a hobbysnob
An assault lance of warhammers, I'll be painting these up likely in Draconis Combine colors. So far all that's done was glueing the parts on, I'll be cleaning up the minor amounts of flash before adding a layer of priming.
