Pilot's Log

The current terrain scale for Battletech is 1/600. It used to be 1/400 but it changed in later editions.

The game Dropzone Commander has downloadable modern city building paper models in their scale of 1/150. So if I want a batch of buildings in Battletech scale I could print them out one-fourth their intended size...and pack SIXTEEN of them onto one sheet!

The other day, I went to Gatlinburg to window shop and to just plain avoid the noise and chaos of the renovation being done to Rather Manor's bathroom. At a sports memorabilia shop, I found some keychains of FOX Sports' robot mascot Cleatus in various team colors. I may buy one eventually, but I feel little urgency.

I'd thought, on the way back to the house, to "stat" him out for wargames, as the keychain figure was of a good size for CAV, Heavy Gear and other games I could play. While looking to get started, I found something that I'd been looking for for weeks but kept missing--a concept for a marketing campaign. (I had NOT misfiled it...just that I had changed my mind about where it belonged, and the other parts of my imagination didn't get the memo!)

Back in the Nineties, I was trying to get hired by a company that imported model kits from around the world. At the time, it was the height of the real robots genre of anime, and this company sold South Korean knockoff/bootleg versions of the popular model kits of the day. My thought, as an alternative of the cliche practice of making mecha into Transformers automatons, was to make a deliberate alternative continuity in which there could be hints of the "real worlds" but not infringe on existing anime properties.

I never came up with a title for this idea. When the CAV game came along, I adapted some of my concepts for my own use, but haven't done much with it. Like many sci-fi wargame continuity creators, I am loathe to make factions "good" or "evil"--although some concepts are easy to make one way or another.

Anyway, I've come back to this because now I have the resources to take the overall concept into new and more interesting directions. Suddenly I have NINE political factions to make livery, insignia and themes for and a galaxy to redraw.

Not that what I'm working on means anything, or that I might get paid for it.

Years ago I was into a wargame put out by Reaper called CAV. It was their "answer to Battletech", with complexity between it and the Mechwarrior "clicky" collectible miniatures game. I was into it basically for the creative aspect of the construction rules...I was dabbling with making up new units and porting ones from other games. When I heard that the construction rules were being phased out in an update, I gave up and only peeked back every so often.

Found out that another edition is in Beta testing, and a new set of construction rules are available in tandem with the game rules. A whole new philosophy is in place; all the possible mecha and vehicle chassis types can be described on only a couple pages. While there are a few avenues for tweaking, the majority of baselines are hardwired in and the new system is a lot simpler.

So I'm going to do my homework and see if I get interesting results updating my stuff from years ago.

Hey.

Today I was continuing my conversion of Battletech to Heavy Gear system so I can play my MechWarrior "ex-clicky" pieces...and now I'm working on the PowerArmor and BattleArmor suits. Luckily I don't have to go into as much detail as I will need to adapting a whole BattleMech. But then again, none of us in the official DreamPod9 room have gotten a real solution on the weapons dilemma.

And this still means nothing unless I wind up with other players to play against.

FP

Via the CM's Corporation Website:


( Loads More Japanese Collectable Toys Behind This Cut! )



There is no such thing as "enough", alas.

Demo For The Beta Of An Unauthorized MechWarrior Expension To Crysis.