Painting Lore: Miniatures Inspired by the Story

Tai-i Junshi Ukawa got one last opportunity to serve the Coordinator in 2825 when he was offered a chance to join the Dragon's Chain Gangs while serving a long prison sentence following his refusal of orders during the Kentares Massacre.   This is the core premise of "Echoes' of Disgrace"; a short story featured in Shrapnel detailing a Chain Gang mission to Sheat V.  It is this story, which I recommend, which has inspired the capstone project for my Chain Gang project.  In the end the story ends how you would expect, the Chain Gang gets annihilated, but Tai-i Ukawa gets' he samurai's death he desires.   The story, besides being a fine piece of lore about a storyline rarely visited, also afforded me the opportunity to paint a couple of mechs I rarely would get to while still in the late succession wars projects I am currently working on - a Thug and a Kintaro.  By the 3rd Succession War most of these machines are destroyed or used for parts - and perhap...

  I have done two other posts so far about the Coordinator's Chain Gangs, and as I was surveying my collection I realized that having just 2 mechs in a paint scheme was aggravating my OCD nature so I decided to fill out those lances with complimentary mechs fitting the time and lore of each project. For the first Chain Gang project I did I referenced the initial lore for this peculiar bit of succession war history - a side panel describing a raid on Maetsu using a demi-company or reinforced lance of LAM's.  The details can be found in the original blog post here . This project originally leveraged some old school lead Ral Partha LAM models I had acquired from Ebay, and I had another LAM project (Eridani Light Horse company described in this post ) which used up the remaining models all except one Wasp.  It took me a while to find antoher LAM model to finish this lance, but I did finally come across one to round out Chain Gang 23's lance - making it 1 Pheonixhawk LAM, 2 St...

So this is a different kind of post - I already discussed the Grey Death Legion and the lore behind there stand on Helm in a previous post, so this one is more about an updated addition to that formation.  The more I got to thinking about my projects the more I liked the idea of having complete lore based units, and so I decided to add some new elements to my already completed GDL mech company.   I had previously used a proxy model for the Weapon / Troop Carrier listed in the Turning Points: Helm scenario pack; and was pretty happy with it.  But the actual description of the unit was a Heavy Hover APC with a delta dart LRM-10 strapped to the top, which is the same tube launcher carried by a Griffin.  So once I got a 3D printer I wanted to update the formation with a platoon of a model which I think does it justice.  Feel free to download and print one for yourself at by Cults3D page - as with everything I do, its always free. https://cults3d.com/en/users/Pa...

The H-7 Warrior Attack Helicopter is probably the most mentioned VTOL in the lore; principally because it is the primary one which has any offensive value in a tabletop game and it looks cool.  Unlike modern attack helicopters which are the scourge of an armored formations day, in Battletech VTOLs are fragile things which tend to get shot down relatively quickly by the behemoth BattleMechs.  But still, in the hands of a careful and skilled player the VTOLs can still be a nuisance and survive long enough to make meaningful contributions to a team. In the lore you can find several examples of Warrior VTOLs; but the one which always struck me as the most entertaining was that of a mercenary VTOL company composed of Warriors taking on the down there luck, perennial underdogs, Wilson's Hussars on Kimbal IV back in 3021.  Wilson's Hussars were attempting to pull off a little resource raid on behalf of there benefactor, a pirate king out in the periphery, when they ran into the ...