Pew – pew

If you are unaware, our little company (Creative Juggernaut) is working on producing variant ‘Mechs for BattleTech in limited production runs. To address your questions up-front – I do not have a date when they will be available yet (though rumor has it that the Black Knight’s are done. Don’t tell Brent I told you that though – that’s our secret!) They will be sold through the Catalyst website – we have to for licensing reasons. No, I do not know what the final price will be. In many respects, I am a cog in this machine, and in the case of minis, a pretty insignificant cog.

Brent sent me along a Stormcrow kit so I could paint it up. This comes with the arm fitted with the pulse lasers, and the option of fitting it out with the gauss rifle or the autocannon. I opted for the AC20 because I like using one when I play.

You will see the production baggie (ohh…ziplock!) and the components.



Its like the prize inside the cereal box when you were a kid



The only clean up I did to the parts was with my bare hands, rubbing off a tiny bit of flash. I wanted to duplicate what a gamer might do if he wanted to put in the minimum effort and get the mini into battle quickly.

It fit together pretty well. I uplifted one leg slightly, I like the look of my mini’s as if they are moving. I angled the arms a little on-purpose. Not sure if I like that or not. I’m sure some Senior Tech in the Clan will have my hide for that.

For paint, I used the airbrush to do a layer of black, then gray on the bottom, dark blue, with the top being light blue. I was going for a Ghost Bear look, doing a reversal of the Omicron Galaxy paint scheme. Why Ghost Bears? Because they have some wonderful colors to work with…and they are Ghost Bears! Seriously, I would love to tell you there was some reason for this, but there wasn’t other than I thought it was a neat look. The layering of the paints did a lot of the work for me and the base coat of black took care of the recessed areas. I avoided doing a wash simply because I liked the effect I came up with.




Total paint time for this mini was 22 minutes – the vast majority of which was cleaning the airbrush between color changes. I added some decals, but right now I lack Ghost Bear decals, so I kept it simple.

Overall, I love the results. The ‘Mech is very airbrush friendly and can be posed with little effort. Let me know what you think in the comments below. Enjoy!

 Albertorius wrote:
So, in another step in my quest of using the crappy RRT plastic mechas for something (because I have a ton, dammit), I've started to play around with meklab to design appropiate designs for the VFs.

...because you can't really use them as Stingers and Wasps. I mean, FFS:



Just no.

So I've decided to create suitable 3025 era "Super Stinger/Wasp" designs that are big enough but mainly port the little guys capabilities on a heavier frame. For now I've decided on 55 tonners, mostly because that's the upper limit of mediums and because 55 tonners give you the most options.

My current versions are these:

"Super" Wasp:



Trying to keep the movement as close to the 20 tonners as possible while upgrading the weapons, but keeping everything mostly in the same place.

"Super" Stinger:



Same idea, but exact same movement rates and better armor than the above one.

What do you think, would these work? I mean, they aren't horrible or anything as such, but mayb it would be worth to lower the armor and make them kinda flimsy for 55 tonners, while upgrading the jumping distance for the wasp and heat sinks for both.