Earth Invades Mars

A deniable Black Ops funded invasion of Mars landed successfully today, under the plausible deniable cover of scientific research. The so called Curiosity rover is a one ton cybertank armed with state-of-the-art laser beam designed to teach the Martian microbes the harsh lesson that invading Earth is to no avail.

PS: Tongue in cheek, but there was a palpable sense of relief in the the Paint it Pink household today when we read the news. My partner is on the periphery of this from working for the Imperial College Department of Physics. So yippee, time to break open the Champagne.
   

The OGRE Comes Around

"And I heard, as it were, the noise of thunder... And I looked, and behold a pale horse, and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him."

  

Just to show what I did yesterday afternoon. As you can see if you check here, I've revised the camo scheme on my Mk5 OGRE, and I'm in the process of updating the partially completed work I had done on the three Mk3s too.

I had become slightly disenchanted with the old scheme as it didn't quite work for me. This slightly revised reworking keeps the theme, but I feel makes the models pop more, or will when they are done.

Still a fair ways to go at this point.

21 years to 21st Century

To say it has been a while since I painted any OGRE game miniatures would be like saying that dinosaurs ruled the Earth a long time ago. I've been playing OGRE/GEV since the first edition of the bagged micro game.

Back in the early eighties I acquired a Grenadier Models Mark 5, which is still my pride and joy, but I've painted nothing for the game for 10 years. You have seen those here. With the impending release of the Kickstarter edition of Ogre I was moved to dust off a tray of miniatures and start working on them, as you can see above.

And here is them all painted green ready for the camo scheme.

I had a light bulb moment when I realised that I should just re-label my Pan European forces as the 7th Demi Brigade Légion Etrangère, rather than keep calling all my North American Combine vehicles that, especially as I have a whole load of Combine OGREs also on the bench being painted.

Why the title for this piece you may ask yourselves? 

Quite simple really. I bought all these miniatures when they were first released back by Ral-Partha back in 1992, which means that they have been maturing for 21 years.

Freedom Army of Mummerset Infantry

  

Back last year I wrote a post on infantry with no pictures, just saying pictures later. A year has passed and now there are pictures. First is some Power Armour troops using MechWarrior Dark Age miniatures. These are rather nice models, and what I found interesting was that there were at least two sculpt made, or two separate moulds, as there are some slight variations between figures.

And the second platoon that I finished recently are the motorised, à la BattleTech definition of same, infantry. These are quad bikes with what looks like some sort of rotary machine gun mounted on it. Too big to mount in pairs, hence individual basing.

Finally, the FAM company. I still need to paint up a command (two figure) base for the foot infantry (serves no actual command function, it's just useful to be able to remove figures in different combinations during the game).
 

House Steiner Infantry

Previously, I gave an update on the things on my wargame bench awaiting further work to finish, for definitions of finish that include expanding army's as needed, and wrote about basing them here.

So above and below are some of the resulting figures from my post here, now based and painted.

I sorted the MechWarrior Dark Age figures  by weapon types, and then made mixes to give each platoon variety and add flavour to the game. These are flamethrower figures being used to represent a combat engineer platoon. All I have to do now is make some flame markers like Sidney did.

By having a couple of bases with one figure, and a base with two figures, it's really easy to add and remove casualties to keep track of the platoon's strength.

And here are four platoons acting as a Company. I've still got to paint up two more platoons; one to replace the combat engineers, and the other to add a motorised scout platoon to the TO&E of the player's force.

Kuratas

   

Okay, it's the Japanese and they are mad about mecha and all, but here is a genuine battlemech.

Post excitement, now I have time to comment properly as an addition....

This most reminds me of the Tachikomas in Ghost in the Shell, but I can imagine that pretty soon someone will take the next step and have working legs too. Then the mech will be very much like the Scope Dog in VOTOMs.

Look through the video to check out he different colour schemes they are offering the Kuratas in too. Finally, how soon until we see a miniature from someone?

Technical details for this mech appear on Advanced Dungeons & Parenting, citing it weighs about 4,500kg (4-tons), ultra light mech, that stands 4m-high (13 feet), 3m-wide and 4m-long. The Kuratas seems to have gone global.
  

BattleTech Canon 2

 

In Part 1 I laid out the idea of rules as being canonical and playing games as liturgy, or service to the rules. This time I want to look at the books that make up the BattleTech bible, so as to compare and contrast them in order of canonicity. From this we can ask what books are apocryphal and what this means to the BattleTech universe?

Starting with the easily categorisable books, which are all the various editions of the rules found in the boxed sets that have been released over the years; BattleTech, CityTech, AeroTech, BattleForce, Solaris VII, BattleTech Reinforcements I & II etc. After this are the Technical Read Outs starting with the original 3025 and now up to 3085, plus and XTRO Prototypes.

All of these were written as part of the rules and therefore are part of the primary canonical sources for the game.

Now we can move on to those books that add to the background, but are not rules, or catalogues of things that are made using the rules for playing games of BattleTech. Here things become less clear, because there has been a move to categorise information in some of the books as rumours, or beliefs held by the in-universe narrator. I think that this is rather a slippery slope, which is further developed as the novels are now described as the characters point of view and is not necessarily totally true i.e.: they are biased.

For me the end sum of this stance is to make such books Apocryphal, and therefore no longer canonical. If you agree it means that large swathes of the BattleTech universe history are now just one point of view of what happened, but not necessarily facts, or even for that matter true.

Perhaps the whole history is a conspiracy to hide the truth that the Wolverines are holding back the alien hordes from over running the Inner Shere.

How's that for a thought?
   

BattleTech Canon 1

Canon comes from the history of the Romans and the Catholic church and the idea of rules and law to govern. It is literally a "need" for society to function. In this case BattleTech Canon is needed to play a game of BattleTech.

The BattleTech canon is quite interesting if you look at it as a liturgical process. By this I mean I am equating being a fan of the game as "worship", and that "service" is following the rules of the game. There is no implication of religious idolatry here, just a functional behavioural comparison that sees both as being a similar process.

Liturgy derives from the ancient Greek concept of service to the state, and carried with it a financial burden taken on by the citizen. Using this we would see that buying BattleTech products as the financial burden undertaken so as to be able to follow the rules of the game; the "service".

As you can tell this post was driven by my previous post about citizenship brings service.

Rules are generally written down in books, and law is the literal enforcement of the rules. So, when we play a game of BattleTech (or for that matter any other game with a set of rules) we are engaged in a lawful act (thereby being good citizens). No wonder people get involved with arguing the finer points of the rules, because otherwise they would be seen as acting unlawfully (this is probably worth a post all of its own, and again I find myself inspired by my recent experience as a juror).

The first canon, now redacted, were those rules found in the BattleDroids game from FASA. Unfortunately, I no longer have a copy of this book, because as soon at the second edition of the game came out I moved to using those rules, because they were expanded and had clarified, or changed how things happened. For instance the sequence of actions within a turn were changed, and the construction rules for making battlemechs were also changed, as just two examples.

From this canon came the first Technical Read Out, or TRO as I will now refer to these works.

The famous and much loved TRO:3025. I will now suggest that a TRO is a catalogue of legal things that the rules allow you to use. This is a bit like "case law" under the British legal system. Case law is known as common law from precedent, which means quite simply if something has been agreed on before that it is only fair to apply the same ruling when it happens again. So if a battlemech designed under the rules appears in a TRO it is part of the canon of BattleTech.

So by extension all books that are based on the game canon, become canonical, which means it is the normal standard one plays by. However, just to remind you, I am not talking about BattleTech being a religion whereby errors and omissions become heresy, but a game where the terms and conditions are that errors and omissions will be corrected in later errata, which is more like British case law that I mentioned earlier. To be continued...
   

Citizenship Brings Service

Heinlein's Starship Troopers has the line that "service brings citizenship". Having just completed two weeks jury service for the Crown Court, I suggest to my learned readership that citizenship requires service. What was interesting to me about the whole experience was the emphasis that the defendant was innocent until proven guilty by the prosecution, but the important part of the process was deciding beyond reasonable doubt that you were sure, based upon your experience and interpretation of the evidence; not the prosecutors, or defense advocates, but your judgement as a juror.

Needless to say that the retiring debates were interesting, and reminded me of the times I've been witness to debates about game rules when something one player does appears to contradict the rules, or interprets the rules in a way that the other player of the game disagrees with.

Observing the advocates presenting their respective cases I noticed the similarity of approach, the pedantic observation of detail, and way of questioning that suggested that the witness had remembered events wrongly. The judge was interesting because his role was made very clear to us by both sides; he was the law (images of Judge Dredd now racing through everyone of a certain age I guess?).

It strikes me that having an umpire in any game is a bit like having a judge, with the players as advocates, and the game being the process of advancing to one's objectives by following the rules of "law" aka the rules of the game. No wonder players get so het-up about rule perceived rule infractions, it is about the playing a game within the "law" of the game, because generally people want to not break the law/rules, unless they think they can get away with it of course.

And there is the rub of it.

People in general will behave in a lawful fashion until either they become over aroused and angry, or see a chance to gain advantage with no cost to themselves. I think it is a measure of civilisation that people can sit down and largely play games by following the rules. With the caveat that I mentioned.

PS: Totally stoked about the new Starship Troopers animated film that is set for release this August.
   

Marik Marauders: 2 Additions

To see some updated photos of my House Marik mechs go here, and when you come back you can see the new additions to the force below.

The Cicada is one of those nothing to write home about mechs, as it is a bit too fast for its size, which in game terms means it's not able to carry what I would consider a good combat load. Mine are all therefore refits that fix this problem by changing out the stuff it carries and slowing it down.

I never liked the original sculpt of the Jenner, but this one for the Clans looks nice, so I use it as an Inner Sphere captured mech now under House Marik care.

Above is a left leg forward repose of the classic Locust model, which was a tad tricky to do, and I think I can do an even better version now that I've got this one under my belt.

I like Locusts, they are one of my favourite mechs in the game, and I tend to do well with them when playing. This is my interpretation of an LRM5 version.