Finished: Project II/23

The personal BattleMech of the Arcduke of Arc-Royal

First things first: my memories and knowledge of the co-founder of Kell Hounds were mostly based on the Classic BattleTech novels I read in early 2000s that told the main storyline. Of the Inner Sphere side, I've only read the Blood of Kerensky -trilogy multiple times, but I was going to get to reread the Warrior trilogy soon enough.

During the Clan invasion Morgan Kell didn't seem to spend that much time on the battlefield (excluding the Battle of Luthien, of course) as the stories concentrated more on the next generation. Somehow I had this idea that such a big shot, mister-sir colonel was mostly operating a propaganda-worthy 'Mech. Pretty often the artwork of 'spheroid 'Mechs had lots of personalizations like graffiti, victory markings, catchphrases and whatnot. In my opinion those didn't suit this character, which is why I painted this mini as a "pure" Kell Hound.

I felt that the cockpit effect worked pretty nicely from a certain point of view - or some points of view, even though it had its issues. The next ones would be better again.

ARC-2R Archer Morgan

The original stock-set ARC-2R had been updated during the Clan invasion with some Star League and tech stolen from fallen Clan Warriors. Its LRM launchers were relaced with Clan LRM-20s with the fantastic Artemis IV fire control system, single Heat Sinks were replaced with doubles, which freed up space for more armour and missiles, CASE, and for an Active Probe. None of this was visible outside except for the CASE panels, so all this was just for backstory purposes in this project.

 

One thing I was wondering, how didn't they replace the Diverse Optics lasers with Clan-sourced ER Lasers. Perhaps the greatly improved LRMs with Artemis IV were a performance leap enough.

This hex base looked neat. Maybe I should repeat the same process a couple of times in the future to be sure.

That was it, of course I forgot to actually check how much time I had used, but I didn't think it took even three hours of active work time. I wrote up five process posts, in the calendar I think it spread over seven different days.

Taking and editing this handful of photos didn't take much time either, less than an hour in all. My original guesstimate was that I'd get this completed within a 7,5h workday and I ended up using about half of it. In a way it was funny to think that one single miniature took a bunch of hours, but on the other hand maybe I've moved forward from the time when I managed to build, paint and (badly) photograph a Ju-87 in one short evening... Hopefully the end results have improved since that.