From SanderS: Saxons and Stompy Robots! (330 points)

Hoi,

Last week I missed my posting window because I was busy painting up this lot! We'll start off with some more Big Stompy Robots for the Side Duel okay? As I really love Battletech I have quite a few different factions. One of those is my FedCom Aragon Borderers regiment. The colour scheme for these involves a lot of blue and to make it a bit more interesting I included some white panels. 

Next up are some of my 1:72 plastics. These are early Napoleonic Saxons in their spiffing white uniforms. I painted up a brigade as that's pretty much all the Saxon infantry I have to compliment my early war Prussian army. 

Points wise this is rather a nice amount for the leaderboard: there's the 8 mechs at 5 points each counting up to 40 points. The 3 regiments of 24 figures each in 20mm/ 1:72 is 288 points unless I am mistaken, which makes the total a whopping 328 points this week. Pretty much the closest I will be getting to a points bomb this Challenge I guess. Off to painting contributions for the circles of Hell now!

Cheers everyone!

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Holy smokes, this is quite the bomb, Sander! I always enjoy your Battletech entries as they are so wonderfully clean and colourful. I really like the saturated blue you've used and I think your choice of a few white contrasting armoured panels is spot-on. They look terrific. The same goes for your Napoleonic  Saxons. Very spiffing and tidy work here. I love the early war uniforms with the bicorne - everything is better with a bicorne, I say. The only thing better is a czapska, but I digress.

328 points? Lets round it up to 330 to include the brave banners (and because it rolls off the tongue better).

- Curt & Huck

From SanderS: Enter the Stompy Robots! (55 points)

 Hoi,

This far into the Challenge it is about time I start making progress in the Stompy Robots Side Duel. As I have a huge amount of unpainted Battlemechs for Classic Battletech laying around I grabbed the spray can and basecoated a bunch of them. Today's entry brings you 8 mechs (2 lances) of mechs in the colours of the 5th Sword of Light a crack unit of the Draconis Combine ruled by the Kurita family. One of my favourite Inner Sphere factions. 

Decals I used are from Fighting Pirannha Graphics. 

I also painted up some jump infantry for my Clan Jade Falcon. These elementals are vat-bred huge superhuman warriors making use of superior exoskeleton armour to fight their enemies, 

That just leaves working out the points and that's bit more difficult than my other posts today. Officially Battletech is a 1:285 (or 6mm) scale. The elementals are indeed more or less 6 mm high so I am counting 30 figures which comes down to 15 points. The mechs are far larger, akin to a Space Marine or in any case a 28mm figure and have been counted as such elsewhere in this Challenge so that's 8 figures in 28mm and that adds another 20 points. Together that makes 35 points methinks. 

Back to the painttable which is stacked with more Mordheim, 20mm Napoleonics and 30K figures.

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Big stompy robots are always a crowd pleaser, imagine the noise a cohort of these makes! The orange armour is a standout and screams "danger ahead" to their foes!

I'll take your math on the points and add another 35 to your scoreboard.

(Math is hard (I know cause I often have to take off my socks for the big stuff): 8 x 5 = 40 for the mechs and 15 for the infantry makes 55 points. - Curt)

- Sarah

From SanderS: More stompy robots (50 points)

 Hoi,

Last week left me with little enough hobbytime so I decided to take a different approach to some of my Battletech mechs; contrast paint! I am on the whole not a big fan of "slapchopping" miniatures or, for that matter, contrast paint. To me, contrast paint and all other brands' equivalents are in the main a sort of wash/ ink to be used when and if required,. This has led to some of the guys at the club calling me a traditional painter, I take that as a compliment. 

Anyway, a long story short; for battletech I don't mind if the miniatures are only painted to tabletop standard and so I tried out the army painter range of Speed Paint  paints. Don't tell anyone but I am rather happy with the results and might even do this with other mechs, not sure about using it like this on "real" miniatures though. So for now, let the conga-lines commence:

As I mentioned last mech post, a unit of 5 Clan mechs is called a star, now a unit of 2 stars is called a binary. Therefore here you see a binary of Clan Jade Falcon mechs belonging to Delta Galaxy (galaxy being the name for regiment) together with the other star they make a trinary.

So pointswise 10 roughly 28mm figures is another 50 points for the scoreboard for me!

Cheers Sander.

Sylvain: I will join your club and call myself a "traditional painter". I have not experimented with contrast paint yet, but seeing the great result you obtained, I feel encouraged to give it a try. I like how bright and colorful your mechs are, no risk of friendly fire in this case. Great submission! 

 

From SanderS: Overdues and Returns, Clan Jade Falcon! (50 points)

 Hoi,

Let's travel from the Fantasy Department in the Library to the Overdues and Returns section with some Battletech figures that have been cluttering my pile of shame for at least 5 years. 

These are 6 Clan Jade Falcon mechs that I have painted up in the colours of Delta Galaxy, i.e. jade green with yellow accents. Usually Clan mechs operate in units of 5 called stars (each star has 5 points after all) but I had these 6 basecoated since the Kickstarter for the Clan Invasion by Catalyst Games was released. 

There's 3 older white metal figures, shown below, and I do like the hefty feel of them as opposed to the new plastic ones.

The plastic mechs however are far easier to paint with better details and sizes. 

I only applied transfers for the Clan itself (the green bird with katana on a blue white square backing) and for Delta Galaxy (the white bird with a blue wave in the background) on their legs, there's too little flat space to add other decals like numerals etc. 

Now again these miniatures are roughly the size of a good 28mm figure and together with the Library bonus that should net me 50 points. Oh and of course they will net me 30 points in the Stompy Robots Side Duel ;-)

Cheers Sander.

Sylvain: Camouflages is for sissis, that's what these lovely painted mechs are yelling at me. The vivid contrast between the green and the yellow works very well and the details on the panel lines emphasizes their mechanical nature. 50 points well deserved!

 

From DaveS: Heavy Metal (121 points)

This week has been a week of two halves.  I started with a plan to work lots on my Florence Army, and got started with that.  I managed to turn out a unit of Mounted Crossbowmen, a light cavalry unit, made, as is becomming traditional, from the Perry Plastic sets, with a few bits from the Warlord Landsknechts.  These are in teh same Red and White colour scheme that I have used for all of the regular forces for the army, and are, as usual, based for Basic Impetus II.

While I was waiting for an ebay order to get the Polearms I need to finish the last of the "regular" units that I have to do, I moved onto a unit that both inspired me to choose this project, and scared me a little.  THe Landsknechts.  I decided to start with a small "Skirmish" unit, the Zweihander armed models.  These, I think, are skirmishers only because they roamed in front of the main units.

I knew that I had to make them "colourful" and not uniformed. I think that I might have taken this a little bit too far with this unit, but will jusitfy it to myself by claiming that these are the most flamboyant of their troops.

At this point, my cunningly laid plans were thrown apart.  I love battletech, as may have been obvious from the number of my posts that are about it so far this year.  Unfortunately, it's been quite difficult to get hold of some of the new sets, and some of them have not yet been released.  So when I found out that the local shop had gotten in not a couple, but 5 new sets, I had to go shopping.  They also had the beginner box in.  Now, despite having been playing this game for nearly 30 years, I needed the beginner box simply because it is the only place that you can get the Griffin, a really rather useful medium Mech.  When it turned out that the other FLGS had got in some supplies of some of the models that had previosly been out of stock that I needed, I was like a kid in a candy store.

The goal for me, with Battletech, has always been to try and restrict my choices of mech to the force I am playing.  Rules wise, this is not required, but to me, it seems logical.  To that end, I spent a few hours with a list of models, the rulebooks, and both the "Master Unit List" and "Sarna" websites.  This, plus some planning, has led to me now having plotted out a Battalion of Mechs for the Capellan Confederation.  A lot of these had been painted, but I had 16 to do, to have the whole force painted.

To that end, I now present the first 8 of the "reinforcements" for the Battalion.

Cataphract

Centurion

Cyclops

Griffin

Highlander

King Crab

Of course, one small consequence of the plan to only use time and faction specific mechs, and to build to Battalion size is that it leaves me with left over mechs........Oh well, lookks like I'll have to learn to paint Lyran Alliance and Draconnis Combine as well..... and then there are all the new clan mechs....

Points wise, this is 4 cavalry (10pts), 5 infantry(5pts) and 8 mechs(7pts), for a total of 121 points

I do like your flamboyant swordsmen. The King Crab is a mech I don't think I've seen before and it looks kind of cool. Now you must paint an opposition with the leftovers!

Barks