Monday, August 12, 2013

Hardly any time means hardly any painting time...

Whew, this is turning out to be a whirlwind of a month! My grandparents are moved in, and the entire weekend was spent trying to get them all settled into their new house. Indeed, most every night this week will be spent doing that. Well, at least for the beginning of the week, towards the end I'll be getting ready for a few days outta town with my GF for my birthday (and after all of this moving stuff, a vacation will be needed!).

Now that the heavy lifting is done, my Dad is coming down for a visit and to help my grandparents on the 22nd. Had the prior move dates not been moved back onto his anniversary (during which he and my stepmother were on vacation), he'd have been here to help with the move as well. Regardless, that visit will wipe out the one weekend that I had open for gaming this month as I'll be outta town over Labor Day weekend as well. As such there has been, and will continue to be minimal hobby time till September it seems.

I have had a few moments here and there to do a smidgen of painting though. My Grymn have received a little bit of painting time, but mainly I've only had time for Battletech. Tiny tanks, especially partial repaints are easily weaseled into my schedule!

At some point they'll get decals which will be the only thing that ties them together.

First up on that front, I've added the 1st Chisolm's Raiders to my unit roster. They've had a checkered past and to my knowledge were wiped out in the Fedcom Civil War. Rob insists they were rebuilt afterwards and may have been. Dunno, he's read more of the CBT fluff than I have, that or he's still trying to convince me to try the Dark Age crap. For the most part I've been pointedly picking out units that were wiped out prior to when that era started. The dark age era is epitomized to me by the bombast laser, which has a 'formula to calculate the roll needed to hit'.

WTF, really?!?

Like this game isn't convoluted enough...

Anyways, the best part of the 1st Chisolm's Raiders is that they have no unifying color scheme. This fits well with the ADHD type of time frame that my hobby time has been reduced to here of late. I can just sit down and paint whatever I want, without worrying about any kind of consistency. It also allows for repaints, or partial repaints as you can see on the Centurion and Scorpion above which were previously Draconis Combine units trimmed in red.

The large desert camo tank is an old Battledroids Hunter. The current Hunter tank is about the size of the Scorpion next to the old mini, so I'll instead be using it as a Fusion variant of the Ontos (pre-3050s upgrades). 2 LRM10s and 10 (!?!) medium lasers will make for a scary, if mud slow MBT. It does violate my 'no expensive tanks cause I hate the motive crit chart' rule but whatever. Every rule needs an exception I guess. There's also a temptation to use it as an Ontos LRM variant which would render that crit chart moot anyways as it wouldn't ever need to move.

I never liked how I went too light on the grey layered dry brushing. The result of which made this stick out like a sore thumb amongst my other DC units. Now trimmed in blue, it'll fit right in with all of my other misfit paint jobs!

As big, slow and scary as the Ontos is (think of all of those lasers as an LBX10, only each point of damage is multiplied by 5), it needs some supporting units to escort it. So I have a cheaply acquired Typhoon arriving via ebay soon, and the Goblin above (again, formerly of the Draconis Combine). Those three running in tandem thru the city in which we usually play CBT will put a lot of hurt on anything they comes across. The lone Scorpion on the other hand will wander around and just snipe I suppose. By itself its not much of a worry, meaning it hopefully won't draw too much fire. That's the theory anyways. At some point I'll probably stick some precision ammo in it by mistake and inadvertently move it way up on the priority chart!


4 comments:

Kushial said...

Looks like the force is coming together fairly well. I'll admit I'm nudging the LRM Ontos onto my first list just cause it should be fairly hard to kill with that armor and that's a lot of missiles to throw downrange in a volley.

Da Masta Cheef said...

Well, it has the same launch capacity as a standard LRM carrier, albeit with a turret and more armor. Same with the LRM Partisan, apparently in the 3025 era you couldn't fire more than 60 missiles per vehicle in a turn no matter what tank it was...

Kushial said...

I was reading on the Catalyst forums that they actually upped the Ontos LRMs slightly. It's loaded with 2 LRM 20s and 2 LRM 10s now instead of LRM 5s, so it's a possible 60 missiles flying downrange in a volley now. But the 10s still have half the ammo reloads as the 20s though.

Da Masta Cheef said...

Well yeah, that still totals 60 missiles per volley, whereas the LRM carrier has 3 LRM 20s. However the LRM Ontos lost all of its lasers with the upgrade. So once something fast gets up on top of you, you're all but helpless.

The LRM Partisan is also in the same boat as it has 4 LRM 15s, but just a pair of front mounted MGs for close in defense.