DCMS Salvage Co. - Circa 4th Succession War

Service and Support is a seriously overlooked area in Battletech.  Its pretty sparse for the most part in much of the lore in the inner sphere and damn near non-existent in the clans since all the technicians are a caste below the warriors and therefore get nearly no visibility.  In fact the clans are a tough one to judge how much service and support they actually get per cluster unlike the IS units where there is some lore from very old sourcebooks showing supply companies and what not.  There is only a few references in some of the novels to combat engineers (Jade Falcons employ combat engineers from the tech caste to conduct a river crossing for instance).  In any case the Inner Sphere always has some level of service and support units to hand, one of the major ones in succession wars era was the salvage company.  

We actually have direct evidence of this in the original Galtor campaign scenario pack.  In this the DCMS fields the Galtor Tech Defense League - which is a fancy way of saying they consolidated all there service and support folks into a central location.  This lists out a Coolant Company (read POL); a Supply Company - that's your ammo and B1 heavy transporters etc - and a recovery company which was the mech recovery vehicles and technicians. Therefore we can assume that at a minimum each regiment had a dedicated salvage team.  

Here I wanted a nice blend of vehicles to represent a generic salvage company I could use for any DCMS formation I wanted to field in a campaign or narrative scenario.  So I went with 2 mech salvage vehicles which I think are the best looking on the market right now - both from Wolks-STL-Works. I did leave off the salvage arms from the heavy truck because I wanted a cleaner design, but that gives my salvage company 2 light and 2 heavy salvage trucks.  I also wanted to add some variety to the company and had originally printed to lighter looking salvage vehicles that I did not want to discard and so I went looking into the old periodicals and found a writeup on some salvage vehicles.  In mechforce quarterly 4.1 there is a writeup of salvage vehicles that I used to assign two designs - the light vehicle I designated as a proxy for the UGS-47J Wheeled Recovery Vehicle.  And a second one I found a good recovery vehicle proxy to pull out my disabled tanks and made it a proxy for the UGS-42NA Light Recovery Vehicle.

Finally as I perused the deeper rules developing a pretty mega campaign ideas I have - and will release later as a multi-level extended campaign effort - I found the rules for managing technicians.  It turns out that, according to the rules, every mech has a dedicated Head Tech and 6 subordinate technicians.  Conveniently the same as an Inner Sphere rifle squad. My first impression was that was way to many per mech, since it would mean nearly 900 technicians per Battlemech Regiment... but then I looked up how many maintainers there are per US Air Force fighter jet and its like 20 per aircraft. So maybe not unreasonable since a giant walking tank with a fusion reactor is at least as complicated as an F22.  To help represent these on the table top - and because I had spare odd looking minis available from other projects - I based a platoon worth of technicians to act as targets should anyone break thru to the logistics areas.  Killing technicians can have an outsized impact on extended campaigns - if no one can repair your mech its going to be hard to survive more than a couple of engagements.