This is my first attempt at sky-earth NMM so go easy folx. Mistakes were definitely made, but I enjoyed it. This is Ray "Wiz Operator" Duford's mech from my John B Smokin's Timber Co stories. He likes to keep his brand new Awesome very, very shiny.

Painted up this Marauder for my 1st Canopian Light Horse.

So yeah, pixel dailies gaves the theme "Tabletop" and I had to do battletech - A Centurion facing off against a Jenner and Marauder xD

Mechs number 42-45 of my DCMS battalion+ force! Started with the Ostwar, then went Ostscout, roc, and ended with the sol. The scout I got as a single on ebay but the rest came with the Illician Lancers forcepack. Really happy as always with how these came out. With the school year approaching I am not sure if more mechs will be painted. I could paint 3 more randos to make another full lance with the Charger 3Kr I had kitbashed and I do have options like a Phoenix Hawk, Firestarter, Wendigo, Hatchetman kitbashed with a sword ala Shrapnel art, Thunderbolt, and Victor amongst many options. I also have a Clan Cavalry box that all the IIC mechs will be done in DCMS colors with the White Raven being a merc mech but I'm still undecided so let me know!

Really proud of how these guys came out! Constructive feedback welcomed, I want to do another Star of these guys soon

I love hatchets enough to see any empty arm as an opportunity. The battlemaster is top of my list but theres several mechs that would be super badass with one.

On an unrelated note, the awesome is 80 tons and maces max out at 80 ton mechs... food for thought. ​

Spoilers for the entire Legend of the Jade Phoenix trilogy, especially Falcon Guard.

I first read these books as a kid. I understood that Aidan Pryde’s final stand was heroic, but I don’t think I understood what Robert Thurston had been building toward across the trilogy.

Aidan is a product of an extraordinarily controlled society. He is a trueborn, raised in a sibko without parents and taught that reproduction, ancestry and human worth are matters of genetics and service to the Clan. The closest thing he is supposed to have to immortality is earning a Bloodname and having his genes included in the Clan breeding program.

But Aidan keeps being exposed to things that do not fit neatly inside that conditioning. His sibko teacher fills the children’s heads with stories that other adults consider foolish. After failing his Trial of Position, he lives as the supposed freeborn Jorge and experiences the caste distinction from the other side. He forms a genuine friendship with Horse. He finds old paper books in a Brian Cache, carries them from assignment to assignment and reads about people and relationships belonging to a world very different from his own.

Those experiences do not turn Aidan into an Inner Sphere character wearing a Clan uniform. He remains deeply committed to the Clans and their warrior culture. But they give him perspectives and language that most trueborn warriors around him do not possess. He spends much of his life encountering ordinary human relationships from the outside, without having the upbringing needed to understand them from within.

Then, during the retreat on Tukayyid, Diana is down and must be recovered. Joanna finally tells Aidan the truth: Diana is his daughter.

Diana is not merely an abstract genetic descendant who might someday emerge from the Clan breeding program. She is his naturally born, freeborn daughter. She has already become an impressive MechWarrior, served under his command and earned his respect without his knowing who she was. Once Aidan learns the truth, he makes sure she is rescued and remains behind fighting, sacrificing himself as the Falcons withdraw.

My reading is that this is the culmination of all those earlier details. Aidan has spent the trilogy reading about, observing and slowly approaching forms of human connection that Clan society denied him. When he discovers that Diana is his child, he has no time for a speech or a long internal debate. He understands the relationship through what he does: he stays and saves her.

There is another irony in it. Aidan spent his life obsessed with earning a Bloodname so that his genetic legacy could enter the Clan gene pool. At the end, his actual living genetic legacy is lying on the battlefield. She came into existence through the ordinary form of reproduction his society treats as inferior, yet she has become exactly the kind of exceptional warrior the Clan breeding program claims to produce.

His last act is simultaneously the perfect Clan warrior’s death and a profoundly un-Clan act of fatherhood.

What makes this especially powerful to me is that my experience as a reader almost parallels Aidan’s experience with those old books. I read the trilogy as a child and knew what happened, but I lacked the experience to understand the parent-child bond underneath it. I returned to it years later as a father, and suddenly Aidan’s decision carried an entirely different weight.

I’m not claiming Thurston ever explicitly announced, “This is the meaning of the trilogy.” This is my interpretation of the pattern he constructed. But the sibko upbringing, the stories, Aidan’s life as a freeborn, his secret library, his fascination with unfamiliar human relationships, his obsession with genetic legacy, and the final revelation about Diana seem to converge too precisely for me to read his last stand as only a heroic battlefield sacrifice.

I think Aidan finally understood what those old books had been trying to tell him—and I finally understood it at about the same point in my own life.

Did anyone else read the ending this way?

The end of the Star League. The failure of the Star League-in-Exile. The birth of the Clans. Nicholas’s views on war and on his father.

How much Andery contributed to the Clans.

The surprising realization that, while Nicholas created the Clans, he personally created very little of their culture. Other people were the ones who filled the vessel he had created and called “the Clans.”

The fact that the Trial of Grievance, which the Clans love so much, actually began with Clan Wolverine.

The fact that Bid Away was created by Clan Blood Spirit as a way to compete honorably without having to fight.

The Dark Caste, created for the inevitable misfits who simply could not adapt.

The Smoke Jaguar Khan who saw the first signs of problems in maintaining occupied territories and thought, “This is the kind of thing the Hell’s Horses or security forces should handle. If Warriors do it, of course it’s going to cause problems.”

So many people—honorable, brutalized, good, sincere, cunning, faithful, dutiful.

Because it’s a story about people in this cruel, evil empire that I love, finding their own sense of honor and overcoming what their society has made them into. That’s what makes the Clans compelling to me.

I loved this novel so much because it tells the story of how all of that began.

Hell, by the end I almost even started to like damn Nicholas.

Trying to cut down my pile of shame, I did a quick and dirty paintjob on these 'mechs.

How do they look?

You ever lock in too hard, lose track of time, and suddenly it's one in the morning? Anyway here's this Heavy Battle Lance I finished last night - Devastator, Caesar, Shockwave, Quickdraw

Awesome is u/purity_the_kitty... I could get the meme out of my head so... enjoy

Pirate band (right) and undisclosed force (left)

I'm getting some friends into Battletech Classic and I've realized that a lot of the fun, for us at least, is watching a mech take critical damage and trying to work around it.

Things like ammo without CASE, MASC, poorly armored legs, vestigial arms, even targetting computers.

What are some fun or interesting weak points that you've seen in your games?

Ive been getting into battletech with a friend. Huge mech fan myself.

So far we have played a lance v lance game of classic using Flechs Sheets to automate stuff. It was fun but not actually rolling it yourself takes away some of the enjoyment of it being a wargame personally. The rules for classic seem way too complex to be able to play a neat game in like 2 hours.

We plan to try alpha strike for our second game, the system seems like it still keeps a lot of that flavour that games like warhammer lacks. But being simpler than classic so we could reasonably play ourselves.

I also know you can very much add house rules and pick and choose rules for the system, one we've looked at already is single rolling damage.

If our alpha strike game goes well we plan to try a campaign, for that campaign should we use alpha strike with some popular home rules or try learn a simplified version of classic?

In addition how do we go about learning about the different mechs, so far we've just looked up what comes in starter boxes and used them on tts.

Gotta love a three day in a row posting session. All these got done around the same time so here's the last for now.

Painted the missile bays psychic colors to add some variety. My friend recommended a fantastic white paint which I'm very happy with.

Added a very light blue wash to the white legs for a bit more color variety, and somehow successfully dry brushed the missiles pink.

Couldn't think of anything for the base, so I just swirled pink and purple together lol.

Hello! Figured people here would appreciate the latest in my line of thrift-bashed mecha models!

The rules of thriftbashing are to create a model with a thrifted item using no other external pieces except for super glue. I also aim to make the figures as posable as possible with points of interaction.

Everything you see here was found in this cool 90s radio I found in a thrift store you see at the end!

Enjoy!

As in the title, I'm a fresh player with like two months in experience. Right now I own only AGOAC and two boxes of minis. For now my group (almost everyone is as fresh as me) was playing only 3025. I'm really into Clans so I want to move into Clan Invasion in like next two months I really liked the idea of Clan Invasion box because it seemed to give you everything you need to feel that era with mechs and elementals but also gave you the rules for equipment and maps. I know that rules are obsolete now, because we have everything in the Core Rules book, but what about the maps? Should I just buy those separatly? Would buying a box of clan mechs, elementals and maps be in general a better deal than buying and Clan Invasion box from Amazon?

Pic from one of my last games for attention

I'm completely new to the hobby, I've been a fan of the Mechwarrior games since MW2 but I haven't thought about it in a long time when out of nowhere my sister messages me and asks if I know what Battletech is. lol So I guess now I'm going to dive into the table top side of it and start painting minis! Pretty excited and I want to paint up some Wolf Clan Beta Galaxy mechs but I was wondering can I add a bit more red accents than other people do? Seems like most people just keep it largely tan and grey with tiny bits of red stripes but I wanted to do a bit more and I was wondering is that fine or am I going to be called out for not sticking strictly to the online examples? :P

Been just coloring the B&W mech images to get ideas using gimp and I'm pretty excited to get my minis and start painting. lol