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Wouldn't it be cool to play a battlemech game in 28mm?
That's the task that the club has taken up. We're going to run a battlemech combat game in 28mm at the Little Wars convention in late April in St. Charles, Illinois.

I'm going to use this thread to chronicle.
-The building of the mechs and other vehicles.
-Preparation of Terrain
-Development of the scenario and playtesting.

Some of what we've done so far:
-Decided to use the "Mech Attack" rules by Armorgrid games. It's a fast playing system with many nods to Battletech, but plays in a quarter of the time. Also, the club is familiar with the rules.
-Submitted this description to Little Wars of the 4 player 2.5 hour game we will be running.
Event ID E118: Mech Attack!
In 2165 the defenders of St. Martin's Parish on Melk 3 successfully fought back expeditionary elements of the Unified Colonies. This pivotal battle reversed the momentum of the invasion and led to the eventual expulsion of the UC from the planet. Refight this small but historically significant skirmish which saw Mecha, Armor and Infantry engage in brutal combat in the confines of the village center.
-Decided there will be 4 players and two "sides". Enemy Invaders, Enemy Mercs, Defender planetary military, Defender Partisan militia.
-Each force will have two units of troops (some with transport, some without) and 3-4 vehicles/mechs, at least one of which will be a large (7-8 inch) battlemech.
-All necessary troops are coming from our personal collection, so there is no painting to be done for them, but there are alot of mechs to be built and painted.

More later, but here's a couple of pics of what we have so far for the Enemy invaders and mercs.

Invaders. This mech and two squads of the armored "Ventauran" figures. We will not be using the cloaked "Khiff" dog-men who are visible on the right in the group shot.
Figs by "Deniezen". Medium Mech is a 1/35 Gasaraki model




Mercs. Two squads drawn from the troops pictured. The small grav vehicle is a transport for one squad. There is also an MBT from Pig Iron for this group. Figs are Pig Iron (Leader by Reaper) Vehicle is a converted toy from a 1990's show whose name escapes me. I think it might have been "Reboot".

First Update,
Here's the first two mechs. A pair of Macross "Valkyries" I think. Battle tech players will know these as Stinger and Wasp, but may be a bit disappointed when they see how these compare in size to the other Mech toys we are using....

These were generously donated to me a while back by a fellow on Bartertown. However they were obviously the product of one boy/teenager's love of mecha, and not the product of an advanced model builder. Lots of glue and paint globs, a few broken parts and sprue tabs everywhere. As you can see I went at them heavily with a clippers, sandpaper and file. I could have tried to completely disassemble them, reglue, etc but that would have been more effort and time than I want to put into these. We're making wargame miniatures after all, not finescale models.



We're going to leave the remaining paint and decals in place. My friend has generously donated his time and airbrush skills and is going to over spray them black, then dark grey, and then mask a few spots and spray with light grey. The object is for them to be relatively close to the general colors of the AT43 UNA troops and smaller mechs that the defending military player will be using. Like this:

I forgot to do a scale pic, but these measure around 8 inches high! Doesn't sound like much, but that means they're as tall as the dreamforge mecha (though not so bulky).

Yep, almost as tall as this guy!

Not much to report. My friend just send me a pic of the first go over with the airbrushed primer. It's going to take a few passes and dry-times to get them totally primed.

I can already see some parts I should have cleaned up better, but we'll just have to disguise them with a bit of dirt/damage/rust/grime.


I spent the evening trimming the flash from and doing a bit of converting of a few russian robogear models that will serve as light mechs. They are considerably smaller than the mechs above which will be the heavy mechs in the light/medium/heavy range that the rules allow. A few pictures of those tomorrow.

I also picked up the roofling tiles that I will cut into road sections. They were free, but unfortunately many are also brown, so I will have to paint them black before drybrushing and adding lines. Luckily my friend also had some leftover black paint as well!

Got the next pic from the painter. The base coat of grey has been applied.

Really nice to see that many of the flaws I saw before appear to be gone! Next comes the masking for camo and dark blue-grey layer.

Yesterday I put the bascoats on the frames of 7 crate-buildings. I'll put up the pics of them tomorrow.

Also, a week or so I found the grey building section of this playset at a resale shop for 2 bucks!

Today I began converting it into a hive/urban tenament. It's only a two sided building so I built the back and right side from other toys. It's a big one! Pics of that soon also.

I finished the assembly for a Sci-fi Hab building. As mentioned before, the pokemon building only has 2 sides so I ended up building most of the right side and rear walls, as well assome other area using parts from a Toy Story "FIsher Price Imagnext Tri-County Landfill" Playset. The pictures don't do this thing justice, it's well over 2 feet tall!


I found one missing most of the parts (just the structure mostly) at the resale shop for a couple of bucks. Unfortunately it's made of soft plastic, but rubberized superglue for the small stuff and 2 part epoxy for the large stuff worked out ok. I've cut it apart into usable sections so parts of it will surely make an appearance in other projects.

Anyway, here it is so far. I'm imagining it as a sort of Sci-Fi hab building. Something really old probably occupied only by vagrants now.

Various toy bits for AC type units


Rear view showing the extent of the Toy Story walls. On two sides I used long pipes to disguise the joins between the walls.


Each floor is accessible.


Ground floor. Plain card for the cement sidewalk type sections. Once this is rubbed with fireplace mortar (the only premixed concrete-type patch I was able to find) It will look nice and concrete-ish.


The Roof. The blue sections were cut from the base of the Toy Story playset. The power Station is part of a burger king toy that I of course found in the resale shop bin. The crates are random toy bits, but are essential to provide a firing platform otherwise 28mm figures can't see over.


So it's not perfect -some of the surfaces are too smooth and the ladder is notably large for 28mm,- but once I've given it a bit of texture with the mortar and primed it (pictures coming soon) It will look good. This one was actually a bit of an indulgence as I don't really need buildings this large for the game, but it was crying out to be built, so here it is.

Lastly, here's the tape bits cut out that my friend is going to use to mask the mechs for camo airbrushing.


I also spray painted the frames of the other buildings. I'll post those pics soon.

To populate the table quickly I decided to go with buildings made from small crates. My friend showed me the idea at first. His buildings can be seen here: http://chicagoskirmish.blogspot.com/2012/10/terrain-office-buildings-and-lamp-posts.html

And look like this:


We'll be using his in the game as well, but as I couldn't find any white crates (all of mine are in pastels) and wanted some variety I have sprayed mine with various colors. Mostly Krylon Fusion -based Camo colors which will reliably stick to soft plastic. These are all from Dollar Tree. So the price was certainly right


After a bit of paint touchup, I will be adding roofs cut from actual roofing tiles to add a bit of texture and some Blocky AC units on the roofs as well. They will get painted window backdrops like the buildings above and probably a light drybrushed highlight. The wider openings will be garage doors and the smaller will be regular doors.

I found one solid sided crate in a resale shop that I decided to use as an industrial building.

The detail bits are parts of plastic clothespins, and various sizes of round, rectangle and square precut wood that you can get in little baggies at Michael's. Part of a contact case is used for the side vent grill. As a scale refference, a space marine can easily walk through the entrance at the bottom with plenty of headroom.

The center of the roof was already recessed so I put a piece of cross stitch mesh in there and the vent bits are random bits from who knows where. Being soft plastic, most of the parts were attached with 2 part epoxy, though a few used rubberized superglue. I tried PVC solvent glue, but despite the terribly toxic fumes, it doesn't seem to hold that well.

There was one other crate that I found at "Big Lots". It is the same size as the other crates and the same height as the first white crate, but with a different "window" arrangement. Here it is next to the primed Hab building. GIves you an idea just how big the Has is!

More pictures of the Hab tomorrow...

Lastly, my friend sent me pictures of the mechs post camo.

Any suggestions on how to highlight and darkline the panels would be appreciated. In the past I've only brush painted over black so the panel lines came from the black undercoat. With the airbrushed layers, there is no visible undercoat.

Last week we playtested the scenario. The grey mechs above weren't quite finished and there's another green mech in the works, so we used a few unpainted mech toys as stand-ins, but the effect was still pretty impressive. Full writeup here:
http://chicagoskirmish.blogspot.com/2013/04/playtest-28mm-mech-attack-scenario-for.html
A few pics of the action.




Lots of pics in the blog post above. We've purposely not shown or told everything about the scenario yet. Next weeks playtest will have a few surprises....

Milk crates are a great idea, consider it stolen, loving the progress on this.

I remember going to the POD Battletech centre for simulator pod combat, as well as the awesome intros to the old computer games. Love me some Battletech.

The scenery looks great - correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think this game will actually focus on people fighting inside the buildings, but warring on the outside, no? In that case, the crates are perfect for this to make uniform buildings and streets.

As for the BattleMechs, are you guys going pure Inner Sphere? I see the Valkyries (dunno what you call them in the BT universe - Stinger and Wasp, I think?) and other minis... And are you going to attempt to create some of the more iconic BT designs (Axeman, Madcat/Direwolf, Vulture, Hollander, etc.) at any point?

Subscribed.

-Remi

Theophony wrote:Milk crates are a great idea, consider it stolen, loving the progress on this.

Glad you liked it. They are all much smaller than milk crates. I think they're intended for storing CD's and DVD's.

If you're trying to source them..
-The White ones were formrly from Office Depot, but now appear to be OOP.
-The larger one with three rows of windows was from "Big Lots" last year.
-The Factory building is a crate from who knows where
-The most common are the large-Windowed 2 story ones which are currently for sale at "Dollar Tree stores"

We just cut out spots for the doors and then spray painted them with various colors (Krylon camo sprays with "fusion" tech seem to stick best). We painted cardboard in various blue white and purple streaks for the windows. Then I cut out the tops (bottoms actually) and pushed pieces of roofing tile into the openings where they were secured with caulk or epoxy.

HF Izanagi wrote:The scenery looks great - correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think this game will actually focus on people fighting inside the buildings, but warring on the outside, no? In that case, the crates are perfect for this to make uniform buildings and streets.

As for the BattleMechs, are you guys going pure Inner Sphere? I see the Valkyries (dunno what you call them in the BT universe - Stinger and Wasp, I think?) and other minis... And are you going to attempt to create some of the more iconic BT designs (Axeman, Madcat/Direwolf, Vulture, Hollander, etc.) at any point?

Yeah, it's kind of abstracted. Infantry units entering the building are just placed on top and combat continues as though they were in base-to base. They are given an improved save against fire from outside the building. The game doesn't require detailed interiors.

As for the Mechs we're not to picky. I love battletech universe, but I'm not sticking to BT fluff because my mechs aren't even all BT/macross, and though they all look good with 28mm figs, they don't scale correctly since some are toys and some are models and they come from different sources. For example, my stingers and Wasps (Macross model Valkyries) are taller than the toy Archer, Warhammer and Riflemen (Robotech/Exo-Squad Destroid toys) and my Mechwarrior Legionaire (Die cast toy) is a touch smaller as well. You'll also notice in the pictures a custom mech made from a ww2 german armored car and toy robot, a Gasraki mech (the green one) and a Kryomek Strider.

Just finished up the final Playtest this evening. We streamlined a few more rules and cut the forces by about 20% and it's become a really smooth playing scenario.

Took a bunch more pics so I should have another blog post soon. In the meantime, here's two "family" pics including a couple of the mechs that I finished off and/or based this weekend with a 28mm fig for comparison.

Here's pics of the completed mechs, where they are from and measurements.
http://chicagoskirmish.blogspot.com/2013/04/the-mechs-of-mech-attack.html
Here's a couple teasers from the blog.

A Destroid toy with "head" coms unit replaced with a hatch.


The final pics of the two refurbished and repainted Valkyrie models (still not sure about the scale, 1/72 maybe?)

Lots more pics in the post.
In other news, the convention game was this weekend. It went off well, but the blog post is still being assembled. Should have the final report up later this week. Suffice to say it was an epic game and the players all had a great time.

The Game finally happened about a week ago. Posted about it here:
http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/525697.page#5592333

Lots of great pics (much better than mine) and more info about the game.
This is what the game looked like:

Awesome ! I'm trying to do the same . Keep us up to date with new progress reports . Very cool