Eridani Light Horse - War of 3039

The Eridani Light Horse ranks among the most respected, and famous, mercenary commands of the Inner Sphere. The unit, dating back to the star league era, is unique in its organization and employment of combined arms units at the company level - unlike virtually every other unit in the Battletech universe. For this reason alone I enjoy this unit, but they also have one of the most visually appealing-yet-makes sense paint schemes of any in the game, which makes them a pleasure to both paint and see played on a game board. While this unit has a long and storied tradition I ended up settling on the battle for Felannin II as my backdrop for my first foray mostly because I had started painting the Arkab legion without a plan, and retro-actively needed a lore backdrop. Ah, when we fail to plan and all that...

While I have retrograded my projects back in the timeline I wanted to make a complete entry for the Felannin II campaign and went way back in the lore to the original mercenaries sourcebook. If you have a copy dust it off and you will find a complete Table of Organization and Equipment (TO&E) for the Eridani Light Horse down to mech and pilot and platoon leader. For those of you who follow this blog you know I am sucker for cannon units of the succession war periods (because lets be honest, how else do you end up with 2 locusts, a wasp and a stinger in the same company, am I right?) and so I went looking for something interesting, and boy did I find it.

The Eridani Light Horse is made up of 4 regiments, of which the 71st Light Horse and 21st Striker took part on the campaign on Felannin II against the Proserpina Hussars. The 71st Light Horse is made up of an assortment of combined arms units, one of which is the 17th Recon Battalion, nicknamed the Screaming Eagles. In this battalion lies a wonderful cannon unit (because no one would believe a player back story for this kind of make up...) named the 101st Air Cavalry or McCaueys High Flyers. This unit consists of a squadron of mixed weight aerospace fighters and a demi-company of Land Air Mechs. Each lance is made up of a pair of Phoenix Hawk, Wasp or Stinger LAM's and accompanied by 2 aerospace fighters. Its the most eclectic cannon unit I have seen in a while and I love it.

Land Air Mechs get a bad rap - and frankly its well deserved. In game play sense they are pretty low value, likely to get shot up and made mere worthless scrap for not a ton of advantage. They are useful strategic assets in campaign play, able to conduct long range aerial recon in denied areas without need of an airfield and have unique applications when fighting against orbital assets or planetary bodies. All of which are not useful unless you are into long term campaign operations like me.

Anyway, its a cool idea, and I dig it so I spent several months digging thru ebay to find a complete collection of old school ral partha LAM miniatures. Much like the Chain Gang project, I loath the updated designs for the LAMs - no offense to the artist but the classic (stolen...) art for the originals is what a LAM is in my mind and I wanted something authentic to the 19080's world that this sourcebook material was created from.

The other unit here is, admittedly, an error on my part. I really wanted to mixed infantry and artillery unit for the ELH on the board and I didn't pay attention closely enough to the sourcebook (which is organized terribly in my opinion) to realize that the command company I was choosing was actually from the 151st Light Horse - specifically the 50th Heavy Cavalry Battalion, or the Bloody Half Hundred. Why is this an issue? Because they never actually dropped on Fellanin II - they spent the entire campaign in orbit waiting to go onto a follow on system. So technically they were in system - just never engaged in fighting. Oh well, I am not to going to retcon the minis now, they are cool as they are...

For this I wanted a standard Mech lance I could have fun with in the olive drab and yellows paint scheme of the ELH - and this one is about as classic as you can manage. A classic 1980's era lance, its all your favorite 3025 heavy hitters that look great. Battlemaster, Warhammer and a couple of Marauders - brilliant!

In support I wanted to highlight a motorized infantry unit since I had acquired some dune buggies to help proxy for light vehicle mounted motorized infantry from igmakes. They look great in the militarum green contrast paint. And finally I wanted to get some artillery in the mix - Field Artillery is a great campaign play tool and I love incorporating them. Here we have 3d printed Long Tom artillery guns mounted on a track carriage. These are actually from a 3d print of a mobile long tom, but as you can see the gun is very unorthodox for the original art of that unit, so I removed the attachments and mounted some 6mm WWII Italian Artilleryman miniature to the model to give it that field artillery look. These are from GHQ Miniatures and look great - and you get enough little metal dudes in a pack for an entire battery if you wanted. Normally in game the field artillery is hand waved as having assigned transport trucks and you don't have a need of actual trucks to haul the guns, but I had found these half track artillery tractors from (store front) which look awesome and I wanted a supply proxy for the bulldog halftrack so I used these to represent the supply trucks to haul the big Long Tom cannons.

Now I know the bulldog half-track is technically not available in 3039 - but lets be real. Someone, somewhere, produced a half-track supply truck during the succession wars. I am taking some license in the realm of support units and just using the game record for the bulldog half-track to represent a generic half track supply truck. I almost just called it a generic Heavy Transport B1 Half Track - but there is no actual record sheet for something like that - but it would fit better in retrospect. Oh well - they still look good and serve the purpose.

Anyway, these are some really good looking mercs in my opinion. I have already decided to do another company of ELH in there fighting against Wolf Dragoons on Hoff since the source material in Tales of the Black Widow name the companies directly and we have such good cannon reference for what was in them at the time. Plus, lets be real, the ELH is awesome and the paint job looks great. I'd proudly field a whole battalion of these guys on my table.

The paint scheme is pretty straight forward - Vallejo Olive Drab with a Games Workshop Yellow Averland Sunset. The Games Workshop yellow is pretty thick if you don't cut it, which I found was useful after I had base coated in the green - probably will do the yellow areas first next time.