Painting Lore: Miniatures Inspired by the Story

 One of the most famous leaders of the pre-clan and clan invasion eras; Tor Miraborg inspired a whole generation of Rasalhague citizens into patriot, perhaps even fanatical, devotion to there nation.  Born in 2994 he would come to power during the great struggles of the Ronin Wars and Clan Invasion . Originally a member of the 1st Tyr Regiment , a unit formed in 3027 by House Steiner as a resistance element to the Draconis Combines presence in Rasalhague Tor Miraborg rose to a command position by the Ronin Wars during the early days of the Free Rasalhague Republics formation.  His most notable action came on Gunzburg while fighting the 211th Mechanized Assault Command with support from a mercenary unit the ' Dragons' Breath '.  Betrayed by his mercenary subordinates Tor would lose his formation and be severely injured by tank fire as he ejected from his crippled Grasshopper.  He would eventually recover from his injuries, severe as they were, and carry the s...

Logistics wins wars.  While Battletech is a game of small scale armored combat if you have ever fought an extended campaign the reality of mechanized warfare becomes apparent - even with big, stompy, robots.  If you can't bring up the autocannon and LRM ammunition, or the replacement parts and armor slabs then your campaign is going to be very, very short.  In later years of development the game has (to my great delight as a campaign oriented player) introduced a number of logistics units to add to the complexity of game play.  I will save my commentary for the distinct lack of clan logistics units for a later post - but one can only presume that the clan dominance of orbit allows resupply via drop-shuttle and dropship... but I digress.   What I imagine the logistics from a typical  Succession Wars planetary invasion would  look like... i.e massive. Today we pay homage to the grand daddy of all Battletech logistic units - the J-27 Ordinance Carrie...

The second installment of the Gray Death Legion Project I took inspiration from the novel ' Mercenary Star ', the second in the GDL trilogy which details the Legions adventures of - well basically acting as a Special Forces ODA team conducting Unconventional Warfare.  An interesting take on the universe this has all kinds of interesting logistical elements like the need to maintain extensive Mech repair sites; as well as the practice of hiring mercenaries from Galatea .  The Kuritans serve as foil once more in this book and generally paint the Draconis Combine in a harsh light - which is also true to most everything before Heir to the Dragon . This novel focuses on the GDL as they train and raise a guerilla army to fight the Kurian occupiers on a world of little strategic importance known as Verthandi .  The guerrilla force is known as the Verthandi Free Rangers and spend there days hiding int he jungle only to emerge into the cities or grass plains to raid supply depots ...

As part of my Gray Death Legion project I reread the first book in the DGL trilogy; Decision at Thunder Rift.   While it is still 80's sci-fi and has some descriptions of Mech combat (such as stingers 'shoulder rolling') which are a little too derivative of the japanese mecha of its time, it was still a decent read with a lot of nostalgia. To summaries (and spoiler alert - though in fairness it was written in 1986 so if you want to avoid spoilers, you may be a bit to late) a small mercenary company known as Carlyle's Commandos is stationed on a backwater periphery planet named Trellwan under contract to the Lyrans Commonwealth when it is over run by Kuritans posing as bandits.  Everyone is killed, or escapes except the son of the mercenary commander Durant Carlyle, Grayson Carlyle.   Grayson Carlyle Trapped on the world he scrounges together enough locals and left overs from his previous company to mount an insurgency and defeat the Kuritans with primarily anti-mec...

Everyone's favorite cautionary tale, Tai-i Mercer Ravannion was one of those characters so inspiring he ended up referenced as side note in several sources.  He was famous for pushing a tactic where by a group of small, fast and expendable machines would swarm a larger mech trading several light replaceable losses for a single larger enemy unit.  This tactic is born of the late succession wars era where (if you read the early fiction) Stingers and Wasps are a dime a dozen but the bigger machines are harder to come by.  While speed has some advantage a Wasp or Stinger is woefully under-gunned and poorly armored - and for some unknown reason everyone put Machine Guns on things back then.  Which tend to blow up.  Seems like bad defense engineering. Ravannions experiments are covered in TRO-3025 in the Stinger and Blackjack entries as well as in the Fox's Teeth scenario book which describes a battle set-up in detail.  In the Fox's teeth entry Ravannion pilo...

We are going deep into the Lore today.  I am re-reading all the source material to come up with inspiration for my painting, and being the Drac at heart that I am I started with the House Kurita Sourcebook .  This tome goes into probably to much detail (2nd Soviet Civil War of 2015 did not age well...or do we count the Ukraine war of 2022 as that?) but thats what we like about Battletech; its rich and diverse story.   Here you have a little nugget from the early succession wars era.  Faced with a need to secure the periphery boarder against a bandit kingdoms which had been raiding his worlds without retasking line regiments needed for Lyran and Davion fronts Coordinate Shinjiro Kurita created a bounty program.  This program was open to all DCMS veterans and offered surplus military equipment, to include a limited number of battlemechs, for anyone willing to hunt bandits in the periphery.  Free jumpship transport was also provided to the bounty hunters....

  Hanse Davion is an Icon of the late succession wars period  His command of the Federated Suns at the twilight of the classic era was full of great dramas including a respectfully rivalry between himself and Takashi Kurita.   Hanse also played a key role in one of the first Batteletech novels, The Sword and the Dagger - a poorly constructed story involving a Liao plot to impersonate Hanse. This is only relevant in that it created a story arc leading to the 4th Succession War but also it gave us the fact that Hanse drove a Battlemaster as his personal battlemech.   Since I had already painted a 2nd Sword of Light Battlemaster for Takashi's adventures on Halstead Station it seemed only fitting I would paint Hanses same mech, piloted on the same world, during the same excursions.  This one is painted in the unit colors he commanded on Halstead Station, the Hanse Davion 1st Davion Guards in the classic striped paint scheme of that unit.  Halstead stat...