Pilot's Log

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.

And so I unbased my 'Mechs and vehicles (see previous LJ entry) and did a little research (as if I could help it). Of the 'Mechs that are "new to me", I was able to find data at sarna.net for Arbalest, Cougar, Havoc and Solitaire, but they don't have much about the Gambit, Mjolnir or Ursa types. Of course, any info from the public who are more intimate with Battletech/Mechwarrior would be very welcome to me.

I used to have a system for porting MW/Clicky pieces to CAV system simply on what information was included on the Clicky bases themselves. But I'm not sure whether I want to bother doing that now. I'd sooner do a port to Heavy Gear Blitz, as that looks to be my main system in this scale now.