No, not an Omnimech…but rather an Insomniamech.

Tuesday a rough night where I just couldn't sleep. About 2am-ish I said the hell with it and started painting.  I did manage about 3ish hours sleep later that night, however I was more or less a zombie for most of Wednesday as a result. 

Nonetheless I did get this mech painted. Like all proper metal Javelin minis, this one also has it's very own tree behind which to hide. While normally hiding is a bit hard with a fiery paint job, the fall foliage does help a bit. 

Some of you may have noticed that this paint job matches that of my Hell's Horses Iota galaxy force. The Horses have a pair metal (lead to be exact) of Stinger Cs and a metal Locust C. Add in this Javelin, and I have a lance of 3020s era mercs to use when we're not playing in the later eras. 

Battletech painting spree!

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Making up for this year's paucity of painted BattleTech Minis!

In a little over a week's time since my Mercenaries Kickstarter minis arrived, I've painted a company's worth of miniatures! Of those, nine were from the KS and naturally (as you can see) they're not all painted in the same color scheme. 

First up are the Defenders of Andurien: 

The Cicada unit leader is a 3D printed mini, the other three came in my KS Mercenaries boxed set and 2 salvage boxes. Also, with the acquisition of the 'new' (to us) table, these are likely the last pics to be taken outside by the house's siding. 

White with blue & green stripes on the arms & legs, how hard could that be?

Bloody awful is that answer to that question!

Don't expect to see anymore Andurien mechs from me!

This lance is armed with: 6 machine guns, 3 flamers, 7 small lasers (6 rear facing) and 8 medium lasers. Clearly this lance is meant for routing out insurgents and pacifying occupied settlements. As such,  I don't expect much out of them on the tabletop...

The Buffet Assault Group's first contract was as a 2nd line support and garrison unit for the Duchy of Andurien during their secession and invasion of the Capellan Confederation. I say 2nd line as they're not a canon unit and therefore not listed in any of the official histories of that time period. The TBAGers didn't see any heavy fighting until first the Capellan counter attack, followed by Marik's reconquest of the Duchy of Andurien. Up until now I've not had any Andurien Defender mechs to run with my TBAGers. This lance is cheap enough to do just that. 

The CCAF is nothing without it's tanks!

Second to be painted is this armor lance which rounds out my Capellan Confederation's Homeguard company. Although, as they're camouflaged, they could easily be one one of a dozen or so Capellan units. So far the Homeguard has been an oh so inflexible 7 Urbanmechs lead by a lone Raven RVN-4X. Hopefully this lance will help mitigate that somewhat. 

Both Urbie lances have 1, 2, 3 & 4 colored stripes on their tops to differentiate mechs. As cavalry's traditional color is yellow, that is what I chose for this lance. 

The Vedette, while kinda worthless in any era prior to maybe the civil war is still fast, cheap and annoying for an opponent to deal with (and the new mini looks great!). The 2 Bulldogs are as always, under armored and over gunned. That said, with their even average speed, they're practically recon tanks compared to the Urbie horde. Lastly the LRM carrier has plenty of long ranged punch and is wrapped in cardboard as one would expect. Since the launcher covers are down, its also an easy proxy for an MRM carrier if I wanted to go that route. 

My opponent was shocked at what a Piranha could do in Alpha Strike at point blank range, and in the rear arc. He killed it in one volley, but by then it was too late and all six points of damage had already been done to his Nightstar!

This past Friday I played my first game vs. an Ilkhan era opponent. We played 250pts of Alpha Strike using whatever era we wanted. I'm not sure which faction my opponent was playing, not that I'd even heard of several of them when I looked that era up on the master unit list. While perusing the MuL, I looked to see what the Capellan Confederation's unit options for that era were, and following that: watch this space for future additions to my Capellans. 

A Griffin IIC and 3 points of infantry.

Speaking of that game, I fielded a late succession wars era, combined-arms binary of my Hell's Horses Iota galaxy. My opponent, 'Badger' (yes his actual real life name) his assault star's lightest mech was an 85 ton Stalker. He was keen to see what a mostly light-medium combined arms force could do against an assault star. Turns out that they can out run, out maneuver, and damned near overwhelm said assault star which was outnumbered by more than 2:1 at the game's outset.   

I've never had any want to field the Savannah Master, so these will serve as two points (platoons) of Fast Recon mechanized infantry. Just imagine a bunch of infantry laser rifles poking out of the side windows! 

I won, though the victory was pyrrhic, as both sides were retreating by games' end. I'd taken down three mechs, with a 4th deep into structure, for the loss of 4 mechs, 2 light tanks, and 2 points of fast recon infantry. In terms of point values of units killed & disabled I was ahead by a mere 25 points! 

These guys planted the final, killing blow to a Sagittaire assault mech! 

Not sure if that makes up for them being such a pain in the ass to paint...

So pleased was I with my force's victory, that I painted up all of the unpainted units used save the Firefly, which I am likely to give to another faction. This leaves me just 1 mech short of a fully painted Iota binary. My paint jobs also drew several compliments which I always enjoy.  While none of the opposing mechs were painted, of the 4 separate forces that Badger had brought with him, collectively about a third of the mechs were painted. 

You just know that the pilot would love to swat that little Elemental out of the sky!

The red & orange ombre was lost under the yellow of this one. 

Speaking of, I met quite a few BattleTech players that evening, and several of those folks play 40k as well. Also, the FLGS has a BattleTech campaign in the works, so I am looking forward to that as I have only ever played 1-off pick up games. 

Alpha Strike: Hell's Horses vs...St. Ives?

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Typical.

Frankie actually stayed home with us for once this weekend. Thus, we got a game of Alpha Strike in Friday night. Looking thru my current collection of pre-existing lists, I found two which were roughly equal in points, with Frankie's being the requisite fast & the furious type of force. Points were 125-ish per side, and here's how it all went down:

The battlefield. 

The St. Ives Cheveau-Legers with 'Little Orphan Urbie' in front. The Jagermech was my CO with Hoss piloting as he always liked Jagers. 

Hell's Horses Iota Galaxy, on what their Khan was no doubt hoping would be a one-way trip.

The Stinger C & Hoss trade fire early on, inflicting 2 points apiece.

Vowing to be more aggressive this time, Frankie's locust charged up into point-blank, rear armor territory on turn two. He inflicted 3 points of damage to the Swayback, whereas the Enforcer missed the damned locust entirely!

There he goes again, doing the same amount of damage to my Vindicator, though at least the Enforcer managed to squash the little bug this time.

Hull down in the burbs.

Frankie checking lines of sight and trading long ranged fire.

The near-crippled Swayback making a glorious suicide charge into short range!

The Piranha makes it into MURDER range, fuck.

The Urbie and second, still surviving Stinger snipe at one another with minimal effect.

Meanwhile, Hoss and the Piranha took each other out. 

I really dislike the fact that in Alpha Strike you can't reverse your guns like you can in Classic.

The hellhound held the middle for most of the game. 

Flushed out of hiding, the Urbie and Stinger would also kill each other in this exchange.

I got a little annoyed at Frankie here, as he was trying to see if his Hellhound could get rear armor on my crippled Enforcer which was hugging the ruins. I told him No, and to quit being a dick, and just take the 2 points of damage to the front and win the game. 

Which he promptly did. 

In the end, the Hellhound was the last mech standing. Aside from getting annoyed with his rear armor shenanigans at the end, it was a good game. 

The myriad array of notes that Frankie adds to his lists always amuses me (which invariably includes a doodle of a dog because reasons). 

Hell's Horses Iota Galaxy Part 2...3...ish?

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Honestly, I think the paint job on the Clan Demolisher came out the best of all of these. 

I finished painting up this force just in time for a game of Classic with Kushial and his favorite Eridani Light Horse this past weekend. The Clan Demolisher and Stinger C's were repaints, the Demolisher just had a generic urban camo scheme that matched nothing else and the Stingers were previously painted for The Buffet Assault Group itself. 

The light tanks are from Microworld Games and used as counts as Mithras light tanks. The actual Mithras mini looks more like a tracked and turreted farm tractor to me than a proper tank. On the tabletop the Mithras lasts about as long as a farm tractor as both died to a single volley of fire. Granted, in one case said volley was all 40 LRMs (seriously WTF?) fired from an Archer!

These three would not survive the coming battle...

I believe Kushial will be doing a more in depth overview of the game, so I just have a few pics here. This list is set up more for Alpha Strike as one of Frankie's preferred 'fast & the furious' type lists. In Classic, with all 4/5 pilots and crews save the Hellhound which had a 3/5 pilot, the above list came out to 8000 points even.

My army's MVP by a mile!

In Alpha Strike, again with all skill 4 pilots and crews, if I drop both of the Mithras tanks, the list comes out to 142 points. That leaves enough left over to boost 1 mech up to a level 3. While the Demolisher isn't fast, it is furious, having fired a dozen AC-20 rounds and hit with all but two! Only one was a cluster round and we didn't even get to that as the target had already disintegrated.

In the end the Demolisher only had a few nicks and scratches, whereas everything else still standing on the board had had the living shit kicked out of it!

Hell's Horses Iota Galaxy Piranha

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This unassuming little mech is very much something to be feared!

Just a quick post to show you that the murder machine is done! In Classic Battletech I've never had much success with the Piranha. Instead its been a distraction that is notoriously time consuming to roll for, while at the same time failing to hit with most every machine gun. 

In Alpha Strike, I renamed this mech the 'Gank!' because it did just that to several of Screech's much heavier mechs.

More recently it got it's Alpha Strike debut where Screech failed to kill it before it closed to short range. In Alpha Strike, the Piranha is an absolute MURDER MACHINE! All the more so when it gets into the rear arc, potentially inflicting up to 6 points of damage per turn!

As such, this well earned paint job was long overdue. 

This week in random paint jobs (part 2)

 

One of these is not like...anything else...ever.

As stated in part 1, bereft of a game to play this past Saturday evening, I opted to clear some of the half painted stuff off of my desk, the Battletech portion of which you can see above. 

Parallel parking a 20-ton mech is an absolute bitch!  

Hot feet! Hot Feet!

This is a Locust C for my Hell's Horses Iota Galaxy. The Locust C, is a refit of a captured inner sphere mech refitted with Clan weaponry for use by solahma (2nd line) mechwarriors. Given that the Iota Galaxy's mechwarriors are generally considered to be dezgra (honorless scum) its really notta bad ride. 

I've designated this class of Frankenmech the WTF-o7.

No weapons face the rear though you can see the remote sensor dispenser's ejection port at the lower waist. Naturally, said sensors have long run out with no hope of resupply. 

This...thing, was gifted to me by Kushial and I had to look it up Sarna to figure out what it even was. Frankenmechs exist only in the periphery where proper mechs are all but impossible to come by, and what few mechs that are there, are little more salvaged wreckage augmented with whatever scrap and spare parts that can be found. 

Once they reach the heavy-to-assault weight class, they're often referred to as 'Corsairs', though I'm just sticking with 'Frankenmech' for my WTF-o7. It's outfitted with an eclectic array of weaponry, armor values that vary across every location (with no consistency what-so-ever), and a half dozen or so wasted tons due to cannibalization, jury-rigging, and shit just no longer working yet not worth the effort of removing (like that sensor dispenser).

This one will be piloted by an Errant mechwarrior, basically the sole defender of a planet. A few of these Errants were the first victims of the Clans when their invasion entered the deep periphery, leading them to believe that the Inner Sphere had degraded to little more than techno-barbarism. 

Anyways, the WTF-o7 will likely fight alongside my piss-poor periphery mercs Battle Rattle. I'll probably toss in a Podunk PDF tank or two and some infantry to round out the points for a game.

Enter: The Self-described 9th Level of Hell

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The fist almost looks to be disembodied in front of the backdrop.

In recognition of being the MVP from my last game, I painted my primed Hellhound mech. However, rather than paint it in Snow Raven colors to match the already painted Shadow Hawk C, I instead painted it in the colors of one of my all-time favorite of BattleTech units: The Hell's Horses' Iota Galaxy, whose members refer to the unit as the ninth level of hell. 

The 'fire' was surprisingly simple, just requiring a bit of patience to allow each color to dry before adding the next.

The Iota galaxy is the worst of the Horses' least respectable warriors, the trouble makers, discipline problems, and problem children. Just my kind of unit! Honorable tactics are about as common in Iota as ethics and scruples. 

Lacking any unit colors barring just plain black, the mechwarriors and vehicle crews have taken to painting their machine with fiery motifs for no other reason than that they simply can. 

I knocked this mech out in under an hour which is quite a bit quicker than painting literally anything GW.

I'm debating on whether or not I'll keep the Ravens' Epsilon painted minis, or if I'll adjust their teal blue sections for fiery blue flames instead.