Red Thunder Insurgents - Conroe Circa 3025

In 3025 Sorenson's Sabres were part of the assault on the Davion world of Conroe; during which the planetary defenders had mustered several insurgent groups from the population to assist the Davion regulars in defending the planet.  During this fighting the communications for the 5th Sword of Light were compromised and the recon lance of Sorenson's Sabres, minus there Phoenix Hawk LAM, were ordered to conduct a 'retribution' raid (I.E. your generic Kurita war crime against civilian population centers).  Once in the town, however, the lance was ambushed by the Red Thunder insurgent group who, besides having a bunch of well armed and angry infantry, somehow had access to a DVE-5B Devastator heavy tank.

Side note:  It is classic early Battletech lore to have House Kurita committing deliberate war crimes against civilians and have the character noting it like its just another Tuesday - "you know, ammo dump destroyed so we are gonna round up all the civilians and gun them down with heavy machine guns; as one does."  But I digress...

I choose this scenario for a couple of reasons, firstly I like insurgent groups.  They can be fun and usually have little constraints on paint schemes etc.  But second is that the Devastator is a unique piece of equipment, noted only in this scenario pack (with stats) and again in Battle technology.  Otherwise it never appears in any TRO; and the only artwork for it appears in Battle technology.  It is basically a demolisher on steroids, fusion plant instead of ICE allows for small secondary armaments of SRMs and Small Lasers and a flamer for those pesky infantry.  Its a serious problem for any mech it encounters if you are within in 9 hexs of it, an apex ambush predator.  The original artwork in Battletechnology is the inspirate for this model, but if you look at the outline of the Demolisher from the original Mechwarrior RPG you will see the distinct secondary armament ports on this drawing as well.  The major distinguishing feature is the side by side arrangement of the massive A/C20's; rather than the offset vertical alignment in later Demolisher sculpts.

I will be revisiting the demolisher family of vehicles in a later post about Halsten's Brigade, but this is a nice teaser.  I choose to represent the Red Thunder name with the basing being Martian red and the camo pattern to reflect the environment.  There is no cannon evidence to suggest that the area of Conroe is in anyway Martian like, but you can imagine a red clay environment similar to areas of Africa if you like.  

I did an excessive amount of infantry - almost accidently.  I had some metal infantry miniatures lying around I wanted to use, but the numbers were just a bit off, so I made individual squads and added a couple of MG teams I had left over from previous efforts to round out two platoons of foot infantry.  I had previously always done full platoons similar to old school classic BT force structures, but there is no reason when you deploy them as squads you need to do it that way so I have migrated to having different squad types in the same platoon - I just keep the mobility (foot, jump, motorized, etc) the same across the platoon.