Scorpions, Tracked APC and Infantry - Planetary Militia - Circa 3025

 Planetary Militia often get the short end of the stick in the Battletech universe.  Generally regarded as a speed bump for the house armies, things only got worse during the clan invasion where they were basically bullet sponges or play things for binaries of elementals to conduct live fire training against.  But these formations are not tiny - Armor battalions and infantry regiments are common.  None the less they are generally of little value in defending against anything other than a pirate raid or a light recon by mech or armor forces.  On some worlds, such as Vega during the succession wars, the defense forces were significant, numbering in the tens of regiments.

None the less; statistically speaking given how many worlds there are in the inner sphere, the majority of the military hardware and serving personnel would be planetary defense forces of some kind.  It only felt appropriate to do a militia project, and when I went back and re-read "Painting the Town" by Mark O'Green published in the original Shrapnel Anthology I saw a great opportunity.

This story revolves around a random raid of some kind by an unidentified mech force, likely trying to assassinate Theodore Kurita.  The story is a classic 3rd Succession War skirmish on an unnamed world for trivial reasons that hallmarked that era of Battletech. The story follows a hard luck Sargent and his squad of infantry after they get ambushed riding out to relieve the garrison of a paint factory in the middle of the desert.  A lance of Marauders attacks the convoy quickly dispatching the Scorpion light tanks in escort and reducing the infantry platoon riding in APCs to a few scattered soldiers.

Also - side note - this image here was taken from the House Kurita Sourcebook which gives me the thought that the author wrote a story to go with this image - they are eerily similar in setting.

While the remainder of the story is middling in terms of plot and probability - it stills highlights the long suffering nature of the poor bloody infantry; and especially the infantry not assigned to an elite battlemech regiment.  

For this project I used a 3d Printed set of scorpions and the .STL print files made by hardware studios to represent the squad APC from TRO 3026.  If you have ever ordered the metal IWM models for these units you realise they are wildly out of scale on the small size - they look closer to drones than APCs able to fit 7 soldiers.  These STLs are much better and I highly recommend them.

I used a simple US Drab from Velejo for this - which has defaulted to my standard DCMS vehicle paint scheme - it somehow reminds me of Imperial Japanese units and uniforms, and given the khaki nature of the DCMS uniforms for infantry seemed appropriate.  Infantry miniatures of the IWM Kurita Infantry - I will probably 3d print infantry from here on out, but the standard faction specific model felt right for this project.

(I included this 'dead unit' marker for kicks... in terms of game play it has no impact but I think its kinda cool to throw down markers for where units are destroyed on the game board just for aesthetics.  I am using 3d print fails as my dead units and as a way for me to test new paint scheme ideas.)

Source:

Shrapnel Anthology: Paint the Town