Another visit to some Kuat space docks

The first 45 minutes

I somehow assumed that you, the reader, might find it amusing that it took me that long to get finished what you'd see in the two photos below. Something like twenty minutes went to bending the main hull into shape, especially that "chin plate". That's the bit in front of and below the viewport when the ship's landed and above the pilot's head when it's flying. The instruction sheet's "just bend it by hand" didn't really help much and somehow I had positioned myself so that the lights were continuously reflecting into my eyes. Getting anything aligned was bothersome.

That same silliness went on while I was working on the twin blaster cannons. Their rotation/aiming piece was easy, getting the cannons on that was still ok but oh my, getting that subassembly into the airframe.. that took some swearing. Again, the first one required much more work than the second copy.

All in all, this small amount of stuff took a ludicrous amount of time. And here I had thought that out of the two 'wars vessels this was the easier one!

The second round

This was ridiculous. Six (6) pieces that were to be installed flatly against the hull took a sick amount of time. The reason was that the airframe was curved and getting straight plates on it was more complicated than it sounded like, as the connectors just didn't align with the traditional "turn them 90 degrees and that's it" technique.

Luckily I got to start the first wing-rotating bit after these armour plates. Of course I then had to stop working just before I could proceed to the half-circle-shaped armour plate's twisting, turning and installation phase.

And third...

Getting that arced shape into proper form and then installing it was complicated. Again I had learned from the first one and the sequel went easier and with less head-scratching. Still it took about half an hour and I was about to break some bits while re-rebending them.

Here was the easiest piece so far: the Z-like shape that forced the main hull into its actual shape. After this I got to attack the cup-shaped bottom piece and while working on it I totally forgot to take wip pics.

The "best" part was that the parts that were supposed to lock the cuplike piece into itself just didn't fit together (either the slits were bent out of shape or the tongues were, something just didn't work like it was supposed to) and I decided to give up on them before I actually broke or bent something into unfixability. Maybe sillily I trusted that the decorative pieces hiding the seams were going to be enough to hold it all together.

Fourth session

I started by sealing the cup's front part with that extra armour piece. The grimacing was quite ugly, but there was nothing I could do with the actual attachment bits being totally useless.

Luckily the hull was installed in a way that hid the stupid gaps complately! I was actually surprised that this part went with so few curses.

These double cones weren't nozzles for the main drive but repulsor generators. They were still there to move the ship around, so for a non-fanatic this was assumedly a non-issue, if even that much.

The fifth and final element

After a couple of weeks of not working on the model I continued with the bottom disc. There were many greebly bits and they were all fascinatingly shaped, but still easy to install so the progress was pleasantly rapid.

Getting the last subassemblies together was (again) hair-greying fun, but as soon as I had the bottom disc locked into the cup-shaped skirt, I could bend the wing's top supports into the main ones and that gave the hull noticeably more stability. Those square-shaped bits were just a bit tight for twisting the attachment bits, but still I got them turned enough.

Slave I's display base was confusingly small considering the size of the rest of this model, I even had to bend the leg a bit backwards to get the setup to stay upright. Then I proceeded to work on the final bits - the wings.

Dear me, how complicated those buggers were! Getting the wing installed into the support bar was also a struggle of a kind, but it all worked out in the end. And as usual, the first one taught me how to do it all so the second one almost flew into place.

I wasn't sure if it was because of the angles of the photos or my own weirdness, but somehow, looking at the model in these pics, I got a strange asymmetrical feeling. Unbalanced.

Project II/18

Some company for the Falcon

Fittingly as the Falcon had taken flight the next model in the queue was a ship that belonged to a bounty hunter, who had worked for the good guys as well. A ship that was legendary and just so incredibly cool. I remember, when I was a kid and beyond excited during those few moments when Boba Fett or Slave I were on screen, preferably making sounds as well. This applies to the Empire Strikes Back, that is.

The instructions were of a much larger font and image sizes than I was used to (that was nice, doubly larger pics felt clearer) and were spread out on eight pages. In english: two two-sided pieces of paper.

Somehow the pieces engraved onto the plates were even a bit disturbingly complicated and it felt there were awfully many of them this time. Even though it was in the same ballpark as on all the other MEM kits, but if you thought of the shape of the ship, there was going to be an amount of greeblies.

Finished: Project I/18

The fastest hunk of junk in the galaxy

So here it was: a Corellian Engineering Corporation's model YT-1300f, a Light Freighter. This individual was heavily modified and was known as the Millennium Falcon. For a long while it worked in the shady businesses of the smugglers but then its owner joined to take an active part in the bad guy's side of the galactic civil war.

A couple of hours worth of tinkering

Almost done during a single sitting

The topside of the saucer looked a bit odd to begin with, as the C-shaped plate that gave it its shape was closed up into a donut. The front bit that hid, among other things, the Arakyd ST2 Concussion Missile Launchers also covered up this structural feature.

What I found very bothersome was the corridor to the cockpit and the cockpit itself, being built out of a single peculiarly shaped piece. Either I had managed to twist the pieces into a stupid shape or something just was blocking. I decided that I wasn't going to break it (yet) with violence but I'd fight it only when I absolutely had to and not a millisecond earlier.

Interestingly I really couldn't remember that the Falcon had those vertical winglets on top of the main engine's exhaust port. That of course didn't mean that they hadn't always existed.

The B-side

The underside of the saucer progressed just about as nicely as the top side. Maybe a bit faster, as now I knew by experience how this model worked.

Again the baseplate didn't give the name of the model. Of course there were the Lucas Licensing markings (this time I bent those on the inside so they wouldn't be ruining my visuals). So, below you'd see what I got done in the first session, only joining the halves together and adding the left/right side docking ports / escape pod launchers / whatnots were left for the next evening. Forgot to take any photos of the remaining three steps, sorry.

Project I/18

At long last! The first project of 2018 was about to begin. I decided to start from the top of the pile, also known as the two Metal Earth Models sets I got from the yule goat. Of those I chose for a change one from the rows of the baddies of the series, a well-known light freighter.

Before opening the packet I assumed that this wasn't going to be too easy, as the Falcon was basically a flying saucer with decorations. These not-too-straight angles had proven complicated in the previous projects.

Finished: Project IX/17

Off with the nonsense

After it was bathed and the liquid remains had evaporated the model was ready to be cleaned up. Because the resin was soft the support structure could just be simply and quickly cut away with sidecutters and any remaining excesses could just be scratched off just like that. I was a bit worried of squeezing the carbonite slab with too much force and causing it to bend or something. But my fears were vain, it wasn't that soft.

Sunbathing

For the rest of the day I left Solo into a tube lined with UV LEDs. A few hours were supposedly enough, but we left him there over the weekend to harden up.

Done!

I took the piece home as a surprise and said that I was going to paint it to look like it was in the movies, but Han Solo was snatched off my hands with words "Don't touch it!". I guess I'd paint any potential second attempt, then. There he remained, on the bookshelf, next to his older self, in front of a bunch of uncle Zahn's books.

Project IX/17

The Empire strikes back

My significant other was wondering why my first idea when playing with a 3d printer wasn't the obvious one, Han Solo in carbonite. I guess we just had different priorities in life :p

Again I bothered my colleague Nathan, during the last months of 2017 and we played with the Formlabs resin printer. Somehow I always managed to start these things in the afternoon so that the printers were left alone overnight.

Friday. Morning.

As soon as I got to work I brewed a cup of coffee and started chiseling the printout off the printer's printing plate. Let me tell you, it was turning my few remaining hairs even greyer, beating the softish resin lump off with a spatula. I shouldn't have worried that much as the violently treated piece was just the footprint of the support structure. For some curious reason the printing program (or was it the slicer?) wanted to set the actual model slanted at an angle.

First thing after detaching it the piece had to be bathed in spirits, twice. The first time it was submerged to the first tank for a good while and then removed to dry up a bit. Then it was submerged into another one for a bit again. One of those bathes was longer-lasting than the other one, but while writing this I just couldn't remember how it went. All I can say the other one was 15 mins and the other one a bit less. Maybe.

While inhaling the ethanol fumes I was admiring the details. Especially captain Solo's hands were amazing.

Battletech

Kickstarter

I Kickstarted* the BattleTech-themed game project of Harebrained Schemes in the late '15 and immediately in Spring '18 my Steam library had a game to be tried out. Maybe I was nursing some massive hopes as FASA's Jordan Weisman was going to be a part of the project and so on. After its release there's been a few updates, the latest I have played before the publishing of this post had a few new difficulty sliders for different areas of the game, a "make it go by faster" for the action animations, but skipping the tutorials wasn't implemented yet.

*) while I'm writing this I had 5 projects "on the way", two had a delivery estimate for 2015, one for last year, one for April and the latest for July. Luckily I wasn't in a rush with these things :D In the end I've always received what was promised, as long as we exclude that one brainfart of Peter Molydeux.

The campaign mode

Of course I started poking at the story that was set before the Fourth Succession War on the BT timeline. As soon as I had the game installed and had some little time to actually give it a shot, that is. The tutorial took me three evenings, the early (1 or 1.5 skull difficulty assumption) random missions were short enough to complete a couple in a session. Securing Argus was surprisingly quick, maybe because I had mentally prepared it to be a long and tedious mission with a hundred enemy waves.

Somehow it just bothered me that the main story missions seemed to be these things I have always loathed: "teehee, you have max. 4 'Mechs to finish a mission and you're gonna get a bunch of plot twists and many, many more times enemies thrown at you than what you got"-kind of things. Luckily the different turrets, could be blown up en masse just by dancing on their control building, for example. As long as you could find out the most optimal, quick and safe route to them first.

Gathering all your 'Mechs around a fallen enemy to kick it to death: risky business that ought to end up in you getting your ass kicked nine times out of ten

The game's intro movie was just gorgeous, I really liked it and the overall style. Each cutscene in this game was not a prerendered video clip but a slightly animated painting-like image with background music. Just like behind the link above.

Then the main bit, the campaign mode. Its point was the running of a mercenary company: as time progressed, you got new contract offers and you could choose, in which order to do them, if you wanted to. Sometimes you could only choose one of the interesting ones (as their validity dates excluded each other). The same system didn't typically have many contracts open, often the contract required many days (planet to planet) or more typically many weeks (system to system) worth of traveling. Which also costs, because when you travel, you aren't working. So, touristing around wasn't going to be sustainable for awfully long with the monthly bills and whatnot to be paid.

Offline-multislayer

After I had gotten past the very beginning of the story, I thought against my deeply ingrained habits that I could give the multiplayer mode a shot. Of course, in the time of the evenings when I could play something, no one else was online nor were there any games open. The very few existing lobbies were full or otherwise blocked. I really didn't feel like opening up  my own games in the vain hope of someone else testing that crap at the same time.

I played against the AI instead, mostly with mixes of different Catapult variants. The four K2 battery in a hot desert was amusing once, just like trying out very weird custom variants (maybe the most idiotic was a 'pult with two flamers and nothing else, with which you could mostly attempt DFAs and go for the melee attacks).

After my experiments I mostly played with a Lance with one or two sharpshooter dual-PPC 'Mechs and the rest being 2xLRM15 + 2xMLas units. Sometimes the enemies fell quickly, one by one, to the relentless missile rain, while sometimes my team got their metallic asses handed to them. As it should be.

Stop the press, I got online after all!

Just for shits and giggles I thought I give the multiplayer option a chance one random evening in late August and behold: there was a lonely lobby open. I tried to join, got in and into the game (with a randomized Lance). The fight began in a decentish way, as we killed a 'Mech each on the same turn. I took a noticeable risk with my third back-shooting unit in a row (which happened to be a Catapult) and alphastruck despite the overheat warning, as I wanted that enemy 'Mech down on that round and not the next one. Yes, it fell gloriously but my 'Pult required a cooldown round and that among some bad, rushed choices turned the tables against me and I lost. But it was fun!

MechLab

Do guess, how much I liked that the 'Mechs had typed hardpoints instead of proper Critical Slots? Exactly, not one bit. I guess it made balancing and difficulty levels simpler when all the BattleMech models could not be hyperoptimized to the point of ludicrousness. This way the models were actually somewhat different instead of every player-machine being a perfected monster.

Still, the MechTech was supposed to be exactly for that, replacing the autocannon in slot X with a death ray. Her or his skills would then define, if it took many years and zillions of C-Bills or not, which would've fit this game like a PPC bolt into a cockpit, as these freebirhts hadn't yet (or again) invented the OmniPods and time == money. GRRR!

At least the armour amounts could be tweaked freely, the jump jets were somehow capped, maybe (even by hull?) and those damn typed hardpoints ("missile", "laser", "ballistic", "support" (MG, Flamer, SLas)) could take any of the type as long as the space (slots) and weight limits allowed.

It just kept offending me that to build a K2 you needed a different hull for it instead of taking your Catapult frame and swapping the LRM units with PPCs. I have complained, am complaining and will keep on complaining about this braindead rule.

In the game itself

Playing was nice and pleasant. The UI took a bit to get used to and I have to admit that I most likely haven't noticed all the cool little things yet. While playing the tutorials I collected way too much damage when I didn't think of how the direction of the incoming damage was important - and that the straightest route was never the sane nor safest one. But quickly it came back, I started going around to catch my enemies unaware and that stopping the movement too close to an enemy wasn't wise, as the nasty buggers played just as dirtily as I did - when I remembered to. Basic stuff.

My pilots have been pretty bad still (IIRC none had better than level 6 on any skill), the screenshot's even older than my memory. All the four main branches had a justification and honouring the ways of RPGs you couldn't get them all maxed during one game.

My character's name was twisted into Iesed (somehow this reminds me of my EVE Online test where my first name was assumed to be faking to be some sort of an importantish thing in the game universe and I got some negative feedback from the company running the game) and just used the random last name generator. Calvo - bald in English - somehow fit me like a PPC bolt into the viewport and I happily accepted it.

As the time ran forward in the campaign some random events fired at half-random intervals. In those I had to solve some crew or ship -based issues in the role of the commander, choosing from a multi-choice optionset. If I did this, crew member A did something better and maybe B worse; if I did that, C happened. In the pic below we had ran out of mocca (a critical error anywhere!) and I could've either given the last cupful to Dekker or Medusa, quaff it myself, or as I did, share it evenly between the two. This way they were both happy for a month (proper caffeination is damn important, I know) and the team got some nice bonuses.

In a different event my choice got my Mech Tech Virtanen to work like Scotty himself for a bunch of days (or was it weeks?), in a third one my crew's ouchies cured faster (sadly that buff lasted for a month that were in transit the whole duration and more, and no one was getting cured after a fight). I found those funny and they kinda made the crew feel a bit more than just names + portraits in a list.

Salvage

While negotiation the contracts you could set your payment within certain limits. For that you got two sliders, one for the monetary compensation and another for the salvage rights. Playing with those either gave you more money and less junk, or vice versa. In case you turned one of both purposefully downwards, your company got a reputation boost, which didn't pay any bills but helped you get more lucrative and difficult contract, as far as MRBC was concerned. Whatever you did with these sliders, you always got some money and salvage, in case you caused any salvage to be had*.

Each different faction had their own reputation points as well and if a contract required a good relationship but you didn't have one, you couldn't even try to negotiate. So far I haven't found more than one mission that'd needed a bit warmer friendship with the Capellans than what I had.

*) I once ran with a single Light 'Mech through a prototype-stealing mission without firing a single shot. That was easy, as I just had to run around the map instead of running directly from dropoff site to the nav alpha. The enemies guarding the site only saw my Locust when I was parked in the backyard of the science centre and on the next round I was already running away at full speed, back to where I started. That was lots of fun as well!

A mumbled verdict

Based on ashamedly small amount of playtime (34 hours) I have enjoyed BATTLETECH, it's been a decentish substitute for Classic BattleTech with paper maps, dice, miniatures and friends to play it with. The rules have been bent here and there (to hit -value gets better when someone even shoots at a target, walking/running are different actions and after sprinting you couldn't shoot (even badly) anymore and so on), but somehow I've kind of accepted them. Maybe HBS folks wanted to make those '80s rules easier to swallow?

Whatever, the game has been running nicely and I've had a good time. I've even enjoyed some very funny moments, even though playing alone in front of a screen can never reach the fun of tabletop gaming.

The Project Mumblings approve and thumbs are lifted upwards like flak cannons, towards an incoming Overlord-class DropShip.