#Mechamonday for September 16th - Locust Again and Home Improvement

As mentioned before, Locusts are one of my favorite mechs. In the image to the right, the painted Locust sculpt is from the Battletech Alpha Strike Boxed Set. There is no official source for more figures, so I purchased a few from Etsy.

Here is the link I used. I am not an affiliate of Etsy or this seller. I just like the product. I gave it 5 stars, I honestly couldn't be happier with these mechs. 

You'll notice these are variants, with long gun barrels on the arms and no chin cannons. When they arrived, I thought of cutting the guns off to match the other model. The obvious bend in the barrels bothered me to. 

I couldn't do it. I want them as they are. 

I decided to fix them. These are obviously resin printed, so fixing them is relatively easy and the technique works on many types of plastic models. 

Step one: get a cup of very hot water. I've seen people say it must be X degrees and then they name some arbitrary number below boiling. 

Stop. Let me offer some free home improvement advice then tell you about using hot water to bend plastic. 

You have three basic choices of water heating: on-demand, electric, or gas. If you have on-demand hot water, you can skip this because that will make as much, and as hot as you like water until the fuel runs out. If you heat water by gas or electricity you have a hot water battery in your home called a hot water tank.

Modern hot water tanks have two heating elements, one at the top and one near the bottom. The cold water comes in from the bottom of the tank and is heated by the first element. The hot water rises and is kept at temperature by the upper heating element. Cold water comes in to replace it and the process continues. This is actually kind of neat. When not in use, the water starts as a column of cold to hot and turns into a column of nearly uniform temperature water. 

Have you ever noticed that your water comes out cool and warms up over time? That is two different processes at work. The obvious one is the water in the pipes is cooler than the water in the tank. The second process is as the tank replenishes the flowing water, and eventually, both heating elements turn on. 

This is very efficient. This is also why I say not to use the hottest water possible for bending plastic. You won't be able to control how hot it can get consistently because of the heating elements. 

If you notice you burn yourself at the sink when the dishwater or shower is running, turn down your hot water tank temperature. It's too hot. Remember, the shower will dump water over your head even if it's too hot. Second, turning the temp down can save you enough over a month or year to buy another mech. 

This ends my home improvement section. 

Ok. Get a cup of hot as you can tolerate water. You'll be holding your fingers in it for about 30-60 seconds. Plan accordingly. 

The reason for no specific temperature is, I don't know what kind of resin you are dealing with and I don't want you to melt it to slag. Repeating this process several times is better than destroying a model with very hot water. 

Also, get a cup of cold water. Again, not as cold as you can get it, but cool.  

Initially, I held my model in the water for a minute. Next, I bent the gun outwards and dipped it in the cool water. In the picture to the left, you can see the guns are less bent but not entirely fixed. 

I repeated the process. Since the water didn't damage the models, I felt comfortable dropping all three into the hot water and repeated the process. 

After the next dip, I thought they looked good enough. I might do it again before priming the models. 

This technique works well with bent airplane landing gear, drogues, and antennas. You may give it a try on slightly warped larger pieces, but only if you can press the model's complex shape against an opposing shape. I have yet to fix a model where 2 halves of the model are warped by pressing them up against each other. 

It is always too much flex to work but you may have better luck. 

As always, you can pick up a copy of this game on DrivethruRPG, but if you hit up brick-and-mortar stores, you can get the physical copy with minis. I will be doing a review of my favorite place to shop and play Battletech soon. 

#MechaMonday for September 9th - Commando

The Commando is a light mech and missile boat. It's an interesting option, as it pairs a single laser with two different missile racks. The range is short and shorter, but it's cheaper than a Locust. And there is something to be said about a low-heat mech. 

The Commando Gallery

You can pick up a copy of this game on DrivethruRPG, but if you hit up brick-and-mortar stores, you can get the physical copy with minis. 

#MechaModay for September 2nd - The Archer and The Locust

 #MechaMonday is here and I am leading with my two favorite mechs - The Locust and The Archer. 

It's been years since I have painted and I started right in with camouflage. We'll see how that goes. I'll get better pictures up soon. 

The reason I like these two mechs is you can get a 2:1 movement ratio. Sure there are pairs of variants that do not have this ratio, but you have to look for them. You can start advancing with the Locust zig-zagging while the Archer lumbers along behind. 

Thanks to the variants, you can pretend to be something you aren't by moving slightly slower. This shouldn't work by the rules, but it sidesteps the rules by repetition. If they see you move 8" and 4" every round, they will assume that you will in the future. The rules don't assume for player assumptions.   

This creates many possible attack positions for the pair: 

• The Locust can move in lockstep with the Archer, forcing your opponent to pick between a sure kill on the closer Locust or trying to kill the distant Archer.  
• The Locust can dash through the enemy and end up at their rear or better, a flank. 
• The Archer can dash forward and end up slightly in front of the slowing Locust.  
• The feint is a good gambit, where the Locust moves to one side dragging the enemy around so the Archer can turn to face a different foe or objective.  

This combo is costly in terms of Locusts but you can wreck formations, cut off individual mechs or make fancy powerplays with low-end mechs. Personally, I like the satisfaction of getting the Archers in front of the Locusts because my opponent has to sweat the dice to kill an Archer while worrying about what the Locusts are really doing. Even if they aren't doing anything.  

The Archer Slide Show

The Locust Slide Show

You can pick up a copy of this game on DrivethruRPG, but if you hit up brick-and-mortar stores, you can get the physical copy with minis. 

Content Preview - August 2024

I am back from hiatus and led with a post about the laser I purchased. My intention for the laser is to come up with new and unique content to support my gaming habits. I have no intention of transitioning to "Laser Dude", but the laser will help me transition to new types of content. Models and such. 

Here is a content preview which is my guidepost: 

As you can see, there is a lot of game content there. On the right is Dungeonland hiding under B1 and L1, a trio of favorites. On the other side of the image are the DragonLance modules. I would expect to see a couple of module reviews soon.  

Next to these are two Battletech products. My game plan is to alternate Mech Monday with Module Monday, so I don't burn out on one type of content. This will also drive me to do some painting. I hear some people actually paint models and figurines. I figured I'd give it a try and see if it's as rewarding as I hear. 

If you take black and white pictures,
painting skills don't matter.

Since I lost all of my game books, I have been carefully replacing the best of the best. I was mad at the loss of my D&D 3.x books. I took a step back and rather than replace them with difficult to find, out of print books, I figured I'd dive into Pathfinder. 3.x was my favorite generic ruleset as it was a toolkit for every 'verse. Yes, it's D&D but it can also be Star Wars, Farscape, Top Secret, or anything else you'd care to do. It's a very nice set. 

This isn't say my B/X content will disappear. I am hoping to get a weekly game going using the modules and my OSE sets to supplement content. 

As I figure out how to use this laser, I can squeeze laser content into my gaming and modeling posts. It seems reasonable. I have also signed up to be an affiliate for Creality company so there is an aspect or two monetization here. If I am able to crank out some nice gaming products and accessories, I would be happy to sell them to you. 

There is another aspect of monetization here. If you look to the right, you can see a small image of a game and a massive image of a bottle of wine. Unless something interesting happens, that large image will disappear. These types of links don't perform at all. 

I am formulating an idea for that space. Future you will see a bottle of wine in that space, but it won't be an ad. It will be something else. 

I hope you join me on this new adventure. 

The Weird Unboxing - Gifts from the Past

I've made an effort to push past certain things that happened in the past two years, but I want to bring something up that I have been ignoring because it's strange and interesting. 

After the house fire, the ceilings fell down, revealing a stack of cardboard boxes we had in the attic. It was very odd because the attic entry was in the garage and the attic is over the house. These boxes were stuffed "way in the back", which corresponded to the center of the house where most of the destruction was. We had no idea what was in these boxes until Jack, our contractor got a ladder and recovered them. 

Well, having lost nearly everything, anything in the boxes would be surprising. 

Inside was my wife's Cabbage Patch Kid from when she was a child, 3 packets of photographs from right before our wedding, a cat carrier, a dishrack, a baby bathtub, and a few of other oddities of mine. Exactly how these cardboard boxes survived in the center of the house, where the ceiling collapsed is a total mystery to me. 

I'd like to detail the gaming things found in that box. 

The first is a paper, hand-drawn map from when I was in high school. I recall putting it away after spilling something on it. Back in the 90's the only way to fix such a thing would be a lightbox or tracing paper. In 2023, the magic of photo editing software can do this in seconds. 

This was one of my first campaigns with a good map and spilling Coke or coffee on it annoyed me to no end. I stuffed it in a box and tried to forget about it. I can't believe how easily this problem is fixed now. 

The map pairs nicely with the dozens of photos I found. In 2021, I made an effort to scan every photo I had and backed them up to the cloud. Boy, I am glad I did. We were vaguely aware that some photos were missing that we attributed to moving right after getting married. 

We were half right, they made the move... to the attic. 

I figure I can spend next weekend scanning like a nut. 

Next up are a series of Reaper minis in the package and a blister pack of Micro Machine Star Wars figures. The packages were at the very top of the box and suffered a lot of smoke damage. They probably protected the things underneath them. Once I disposed of the packaging, the figures looked (and smelled) brand new. The Star Wars figures are plastic and the Reaper figures are soft metal. I'm shocked that they survived at all. 

By way of comparison, I had a box of Battletech Archers (or Robotech Spartan, if you like,) in the basement. Oddly, some of them are super clean like they were never painted and others are slightly charred. Notice the damage to the arms. I liked to kitbash models and often replaced or repositioned an arm. The glue vaporized, leaving me with armless figures. 

Presumably, the arms fell off and were swept up as debris. Understandable considering how much of the first floor fell into the basement. 

I am not too worried about that. I've modded hundreds of Battel Mechs and I have new material to work with. If you zoom in on the Grey mecha, (top row, second from the right), you can probably see the wood grain on the left arm despite the painting. That's because it's balsa wood. 

A while ago, I discovered a different material for figure mods: soapstone. I am going to fix all of these figures up in the coming weeks and I can't tell you how excited I am to try this new material and method. Soapstone is super soft and easy to carve and cut with hand tools. But relative to a metal figure, it is about as durable. 

Soapstone is ironically fireproof.

I am so done dwelling on what has happened. But there is this odd comfort in remembering what DID NOT happen. We all survived to get to this point of moving forward. Finding this box was a sort of gift from the past. I look forward to putting these things right and I will probably post a lot of images as this little project progresses. 

Preview of the Weekend to Come!

Last week, I got the immobilizer taken away from me. This week, I'm gonna have some fun. I have a couple of ideas for my next couple of posts. As you probably know, I am writing a campaign setting over on Ko-Fi that has sparked the idea of creating my own ruleset. 

To that end, I have decided that I need to stop cross-posting between Ko-Fi and here. It's super boring for me and I love this stuff. Also, I need to dig deep for ideas and things that make gameplay fun. I would like to thank everyone on MeWe for taking my poll, it was really helpful. 

So, what's happening this week? 

Battletech at Kingpin Comics and Games! 

I've never been there, so I can't wait. Hopefully, I can use a light mech like the locus. There is something really fun about a hot rod little mech on the battlefield.

I haven't played Battletech in a hot minute, so I really hope it's Beginner's Night. I hope to do a game report, a review of the Beginner's set, and meet new friends. I really need a night out and pushing mechs and throwing dice sounds great. 

Abandoned Project Circa 1988

Back in 1980s, Battle Tech was my favorite tabletop game. It was quick and easy to play. However, I was baffled by the plot line and story. I'd make up my own stories that covered the bases. 

What I really enjoyed was Robotech, I totally understood that plotline. At some point, I collected all of the Palladium game books. However, I was baffled by the difficulty in using the rules. It could take hours to kill one opponent. 

Then it hit me. I could use Battle Tech to play Robotech themed battles. Back then, the Unseen were common mechs between Battle Tech and Robotech. They had the Veritechs, they had the Maurader which was an Office's Battlepod. 

But what they were lacking was a standard Battlepod. If I could mash up Battle Tech and Robotech, and devise my own stories, I could certainly make a Battlepod. 

Yeah... I'd kitbashed some models together, but whipping up a figurine from scratch was beyond me. 

I dug through my models and stuff, trying to come up with something. Legs were easy, I used the Maurader model for those. The hips need to be reworked out of wood. Sculpting the engines were simply two U-shaped pieces of balsam. The feet were plastic beads. 

But what about the body? 

I found a skull ring that was about the right size. I shave it down on the sides and bulked up the chin with that green fill used for models. The central eye was a wheel from an airplane model, 1:144 scale. The guns were antennae and wheels from helicopters. 

I had done it!

Given it had taken me hours and hours to build the thing, I realized I could have exactly one. The bottleneck was the skull ring, something I got from a vending machine. Where Robotech depicts odds of 50 Battlepods to each Veritech, I had the opposite. 

How unsatisfying. 

A friend came to my rescue with a handful of bullets and a can of air vulcanizing rubber. It didn't go smoothly. The rubber reacted with some of the plastics and while it took the shape I needed, it melted the original. 

Tonight, I found the results of my experiment. There were a lot of blowouts. Sometimes it was the small details like guns. Other times, it was in the hip/leg joints.  

For the life of me, I cannot remember why I abandoned this. Unfortunately, half of the mold is missing. 

But I do have two useable models to start again. Maybe someday.  

Mecha Review in Battletech Compendium - 10 Ton Mechs

Stuff you don't fight with a 10 ton mech.

10 and 15-ton mechs don't work for Battletech. Mechs of these sizes are punished by the math. Every cockpit is 3 tons. Every mech requires a gyro that weighs a ton per 100 units of rating. Tack on the internal structure of 10% of your maximum loaded weight. 

A hidden penalty is hiding in the construction rules of The Battletech Compendium. It's the units of 1 ton or 1/2 ton per part added. Some of the math results in values much lower than a half-ton, but rounding dictates either full ton or half-ton depending on the reading. 

Personally, I modify that rule to be 1/4 ton because .75 and .25 are just as easy to add as 1 and 1/2. It's not a "grab" to do this, it is just convenient to pair .75 tons of gyro to a 1/2 ton machine gun and 1/4 of ammo. It's not battle-effective, but it makes a lot of mechanical sense from a manufacturing point of view. 

One way to analyze mechs is to build them backward. A 10-ton mech needs a 3-ton cockpit, 1 ton of Internal Structure, an engine, and a gyro. The engine and gyro weights are linked. On the table below, everything in parentheses uses my 1/4 ton rule. 

Mech Tonnage	Cockpit	Internal Structure	Engine Rating	Gryo Size Rating/100	Engine Tonnage	Remaining Tonnage
10	3	1	100	1	3	2.0
10	3	1	90	1	3	2.0
10	3	1	80	1	2.5	2.5
10	3	1	70	1 (0.75)	2	3.0 (3.25)
10	3	1	60	1 (0.75)	1.5	3.5 (3.75)
10	3	1	50	1 (0.50)	1.5	3.5 (4.0)
10	3	1	40	1 (0.50)	1	4.0 (4.5)
10	3	1	30	1 (0.50)	1	4.0 (4.5)
10	3	1	20	1 (0.25)	0.5	4.5 (5.25)
10	3	1	10	1 (0.25)	0.5	4.5 (5.25)

As you can see, the 1/4 ton rule modification doesn't do much at all except for the extreme last two cases. It does make a difference in larger mechs. 

Just looking at that chart I built, there is hardly any room for weapons, ammo, and armor. If you slap 2 tons of armor on the mech with an engine rating of 100, you have a crazy fast mech that can only engage in melee. That won't last long at all but there is a case for an unarmed scout. 

At the other end of the spectrum, you could have a mech with a move of 1 or 2 toting good armor and small weapons but they will never get into range of a bigger mech. 

In order to understand a 10-ton mech, you need to consider what every mech can do. They move. They have a reactor for power and heat sinks. Mechs tower over the terrain and protect the occupants. These advantages aren't enough for combat, but they may take a role in combat support. 

Every 10-ton mech can lift loads and move things fairly rapidly with a footprint smaller than a vehicle of equal size. They can provide power and sensors at a base. These are your jeeps, your radars, and your delivery vehicles. In terms of Battletech, these are more targets of opportunity or a terrain piece to dodge around. Sort of like shooting up the parking garage. 

Where they do make sense is in the RPG Mechwarrior. The characters need appropriately themed transportation. A 10-ton mech with an engine rating of 100 is a sprinting Maserati while one with a rating of 10 is a robot-themed bulldozer. 

They have their place but they don't have to be combat effective. 

Game Review - Battletech Compendium (1990)

Title: The Battletech Compendium
Rule Set: Battletech
Year: 1990
Editor: Donna Ippolito
Publisher: FASA
Pages: 144 pages
Rating: 5 of 5 Stars 

Battletech started in 1984 as a boardgame called Battledroids. Over the years, Battletech expanded the universe with a series of boxed sets like Aerotech and Citytech. Each one came with a set of rules, folding Mechs, bases, and two large maps. By 1990, Battletech was ready for a revamp, with all the rules in one place and streamlined. This took the form of The Battletech Compenium. 

And boy is this book concise and detailed. Within these 144 pages, you get Mechs, Aerotech fighters, infantry, dropship, tanks, heliocopters, and even subs all with integrated rules and easy to understand construction and pricing methods. 

The game is a great "I go, you go" game. Pick you mech or mechs, set the map, roll initiative and go crazy! 

One of the great things about Battletech is the heat system. Heat is the limiting factor on what you can do in a give round or game. Sure, getting a limb blown off slows you down, but if your reactor overheats, you're done. Like "went nuclear and got a fork stuck in you" done. You can actually explode from your own actions. 

Oddly, unlike other games where bad rolls can turn deadly, you have control over what harm you could inflict on yourself with heat. Every data sheet has a schedule of what occurs at each heat level. If you find the risk too high, slow down and cool it down. With great management, heat is never an issue. It's really a great game which lends itself to either one-on-one matches or full scale battles. 

For small scale fights, the rules are quick. Larger battles can bog down, but with some familiarity of the rules, they are still manageable. Even better, large battles work best off the hex map, so this set includes full color rules for tabletop battles with terrian. There is a massive selection of 1/287 scale figures for use with this set and to be honest, having the mechs is more fun than playing. 

Models for black and white pictures don't need to be painted.

This particular book requires more information than what is included. You will need Mech Data Sheets, a map or table, ruler, dice, and figures or tokens. There are plenty of resources online or use can use the ruleset to make up your own vehicles and mechs. The creation rules are extensive but intuitive. 

I got my copy on Abebooks. You can try this link for the The Battletech Compendium to search by ISBN on their site.  

You can also check out Classic Battletech on DriverthuRPG? While they don't have this exact title, they have tons and tons to choose from in the Battletech Universe.