Brief Update On The Ghost Bears

 Sooooo I might have bitten off more than I care to chew on this time.  I got the mechs out of the Simple Green and while most are ready to prime there are nine that are going to need to be partially or wholly reassembled.  Between the eBay orders, the Shapeways order, and the Arkab culling ..... I am looking at around 40 mechs to paint.  I am not sure I can do that many in the same Clan paint scheme without going crazy, so I think I'll have to do some of them in a different scheme.  I would think different trinaries in a Provisional Garrison Cluster could be different paint jobs anyway.  In any event that is what we're going with for now.

Also I have been wanting to add some infantry on bases to use with the various APCs and such since I only have my ELH Jump Infantry bases.  But going to do what I did for those, Warhammer 40K Epic marines wasn't going to work because those up for sale on eBay are STUPID expensive.  So I started looking around for some alternatives and I found something perfect.  SRM infantry in the right scale that is by Death Ray Designs and sold by Fortress Miniatures.  I got three blisters with each blister having a platoon of troops in it.  This will be more than enough to do a number of bases to mix around into the various units I've made for BattleTech.

So that's what we're looking at right now.  I actually have a day off tomorrow which has been rare enough lately and with not many plans and decent weather called for, I guess I'll be trying to get most of this primered so I can look at getting some paint laid on over the next couple weeks.  That's where we stand for now, so I'll see you all next time and hope you enjoy what content there is.

Ghost Bears Revisited

 So I was looking at my Arkab force and considering getting some more of them painted.  But the more I looked at them, the less I liked their paint job.  I wasn't happy with the camo an they had a shiny finish to them that just bugged me.  So there was only one thing to be done.  Cull out a huge hunk of them, order about a dozen clan mechs and expand out my Provisional Ghost Bear force.  I've loved the look of the Arcas mech so a couple of those are being paired with a trio of Grizzlies to form the first added Star.  Heavies and Assaults from the broken up Arkab force formed a couple more Stars with a Star of Mediums to round out things out.  A few more mechs ordered through Shapeways and Aries Miniatures will put the total force at four Trinaries for a Provisional Garrison Cluster.

While adding the addition mechs into my Ghost Bears organizational chart, I also cleaned up the names for the unit commanders as I totally botched that up with non-Bloodnames all over the list.  That's been corrected and the number of surnames trimmed down a lot to something more realistic as well as using proper Blood Names for the Ghost Bears.  The top pic below is of the newly arrived factory fresh ready for paint mechs including 3 Grizzlies, 2 Arcas, 1 Novacat, and 2 Kingfishers.  Bottom pick is some unpainted mechs pulled from the disassembled Arkab force and a Simple Green filled container that is full of mechs going Ghost Bear via salvage.

The remaining Arkab mechs, almost all lights and mediums, will get set aside most likely for the Caselton Militia to help replace the UrbanMechs and Commandos, and such that were removed for the Urba(ie) Defense Force.  I'll probably be diving into this once the Ghost Bears expansion is finished.  So that's it for now and I'll be trying to figure out the paints I used on the first batch of garrison Ghost Bears.  See you all next time and thanks for stopping by.

Urban(ie) Defense Force

 So the past several weeks have been a bit of a whirlwind with a new job that has led to a lot of hours worked on the front side as I deal with staffing and a long laundry list of items that the previous person left unhandled.  I have managed to in small bits here and there make some progress on what I think will be Cheef's favorite Battletech unit of mine, the Urban(ie) Defense Force.  The test model that made a previous post has been tweaked a little.  I had gone for a simple concrete look on the base and the more I looked at it, the more I didn't like it.  So I've based all the models with sand then painted gray over it followed by a black wash to give it a gravel/pavement look that I think is a lot better.

 

This mercenary battalion was formed in the aftermath of the 4th Succession War.  The unit is the remnants of a Liao militia force that was mostly destroyed then bypassed by the Davion blitzkrieg strike into the Liao Commonality.  It's first contract was to the newly formed St Ives Compact doing what it had been doing before the war, defending urban and industrial installations.  Their first client was defending some of the Ceres Metal Industries plants and installations on St Ives while they were evaluated and investigated to insure they were not Capellan agents or plants.

After a year on St Ives, they were transferred to Indicass to defend the CMI industrial complex located there.  After several years of this, and seeing the rising tension in the area, Major Aioki took a contract to move the unit away from an area that looked to blossom into full blown war again.  Taking a number of contracts the unit moved slowly through the Davion half of the Federated Commonwealth until finally arriving in the Outworlds Alliance to defend new manufacturing facilities there as part of the OA's Long Road Project.

So I still need to do up the eight bases of mech infantry using the last of my micro-armor half tracks to finish off this unit.  Unless I stumble across a really good deal for more UrbanMechs.  I mean no reason not to have more, they're like Pringles, you can't stop after you have one ..,

 So that's it for now and hopefully work will get closer to normal in a couple or three weeks and I'll start getting more regular updates and hopefully some games with Cheef as well.  I'll see you all next time and thanks for the views.

MI6 Rabid Fox Team

MI6 Rabid Fox Team Blue Delta
Major Oliver McFaddon

Lance Blue Delta Alpha
Major Oliver Mc Faddon, Phoenix Hawk
Lt. Eloise Allison, Phoenix Hawk
Lt. Timothy Langston, Phoenix Hawk
Lt. Matthew Gatesby, Phoenix Hawk

Lance Blue Delta Beta
Captain Amanda Whitehall, Kintaro
Lt. Paul Owensby, Jenner
Lt. Sebastian Mycroft, Mercury
Lt. Bernard Glendower, Firefly

                       

MI6 Rabid Fox Teams are some of the best trained special force troopers in the inner sphere.  These FedSuns experts deploy along the Liao and Kurita borders to perform reconnaissance missions, data theft raids, industrial and military sabotage, and other missions.  Blue Delta is one of those teams which are most active in the Sarna March portion of the Federated Suns.  Their skill sets, in addition to being top tier mech pilots, includes various specialties such as communications, encryption, demolition, infiltration, and numerous other skills that would aid the completion of their missions.

This team works off of the Invader-class Jumpship Raven Darkholme which has well established itself working the trade routes along the edges of Capellan and Kuritan space near the Davion borders closest to Terra.  They also use a modified Mule-class Drop Ship James Madrox that can drop deploy a pair of battlemechs if needed.  The Invader has been modified to outfit it with extra sensors, concealed weapons to the vessel some extra punch if needed, and several hidden storage compartments.

So that's all for now as it's been a bad week for me on the sinus front.  There are a set of magnolia trees across the street from where I live that have turned everything yellow with pollen and seem intent on starting a major bio-attack along the lines of what the Blakists would try to pull off.  Slowly getting it under control and hope to start paining some Urbans here in the next few days.  Thanks for stopping by and I'll see you all next time.

Continued Progress

 So over the past week I've finished the last seven mechs to re-complete my 21st Striker Regiment of the Eridani Light Horse.  This brings me back to just needing to talk someone into applying decals to 95% of them and still figuring out a way that I like to base the aerospace fighters.  So back to a place where I'm happier with the regiment than I was before I did the reshuffle with it.  All the Assassins and Ravens are out of it as well as most of the Jenners, Commandos, Panthers, and Centurions.  There are still some of the later but much fewer than there were before.  This let me get a lot of the newer Kickstarter and plastic starter box mechs into the force as well as some nicely detailed Shapeways mechs.

So here are some overview pics of the entire regiment now that it's filled back up.

Regimental Command Company and 3rd Striker Battalion

5th Striker Battalion

7th Striker Battalion

1st Armored Infantry Battalion

Next up we have the test model for the Urban(ies) Defense Force. 

I think I'm happy with the results.  Just a black primer coat then a dry brush layer of a dull metallic silver and lastly picking out a few small details in red to break up the dark.  For the base I just went with a plain gray concrete look to complete that urban environment feel for it.

So that's all for now and I'll give it a bit of time to see what input I get back on the test model before starting to roll out the rest of the unit.  Have a great time all and I'll see you next time!

Industrial Park

 So one thing that I've been working on this past couple weeks is expanding my BattleTech terrain options.  I showed some of the big pieces in the last post, but this time I want to not only show some of the new smaller scatter type terrain pieces but how I envision it all going together as well.

So this is an overview of everything except my HPG station piece and my mobile satellite launch station.  I'm trying to tie it all together into an industrial park type scene.  On the right we have the refinery piece as well as a small tank farm.  The scatter terrain piece has some storage barrels, then 5 medium size storage tanks and then one really tall storage silo tank.  Next to that is a small power generation plant.  Then we have a large factory building with a smaller factory in front of it and then a couple scatter terrain pieces of housing for the workers.  Moving on left we have a couple of parked drop ships, a small warehouse building, and scatter terrain pieces for a resupply depot.  Lastly the new orbital defense emplacement and then scatter terrain of AA Defenses, bunkers, and sensor stations.

A close up of the supply depot terrain.  A mix of crates, huge crates, and numerous other supplies and a few small storage buildings mixed in.

Residential housing in a mix of apartment towers and small commercial buildings.  I found these on eBay a while back and finally found something to use them for.

And then a better pic of the refinery part of the complex with its new storage capability.

I still want to add some things for sure.  I'd like some landing platforms for sure, and I have a few ideas on pursuing these.  Some more warehouse buildings are also on my list, and I'd love to find some maybe 20mm scale quonset huts to use for those but I haven't found anything that I like yet.  In any event, this is where the terrain collection stands for the moment   Hope you all enjoy and see you next post.

Yeeesh, It's Been A While I Guess

 Well, with the way the past year has gone, I've done zero table top gaming and that meant I had very little motivation for painting and such as well.  I still haven't managed any gaming but I have at least got some hobby stuff accomplished.  So let's get into it then.

   First up I'll pick up with where the last post left off, the MI6 Rabid Fox Team Blue Delta.  I've done well on keeping this under control and it only has acquired a second lance in total.  A Kintao, Jenner, Mercury, and a Firefly seemed like a nice set of mechs for a special forces lance to back up the Phoenix Hawks.  Still playing around with the fluff ideas for them as I had a bad joke of an idea of calling the team H Gold, and that killed the fluff ideas for a while.

 Next up, with the arrival of a host of new mechs from Kickstarter, I went back and took some mechs I had used to bulk out my Eridani Light Horse out of the unit and Simple Green'd them.  With some other mechs I'd picked up, a host of Wolverines, Griffins, Grasshoppers, Crabs, Kintaros, Longbows, and others got their primer coat of ELH Green.  I have most of them fully painted and based but seven are still just at the base coated stage and need to be completed.  6 of the 7 (all but the Ostol) are new purchases off of Shapeways.

I've also got some BattleTech terrain worked on as well.  I added some detail features to the refinery terrain I had from before and I cobbled together a planetary defense station as well.  It should make for an interesting terrain piece as part of a star port game or as a possible game objective.

And then there came the interesting part, what to do with all the mechs culled out of the ELH ranks ... Well I started looking at the Davion Caselton Militia force I had, and that's where the Jenners, Panthers, Thorn, and other odds and ends are going.  But since I didn't want to expand that unit a lot either, I did a Cheef thing and pulled the UrbanMechs and Commandos out of the Militia and used them with the the new Urbans and Commandos plus a lance consisting of a new Locust sculpt and 3 Assassins to create a new mercenary unit, the Urban(ies) Defense Force.  4 Lances of UrbanMechs, 2 Commando Lances, and the above mentioned lance.  A totally useless force for anything other than defending a factory complex or city center, and even then marginally effective.  Using the rest of my Shapeways order (5 Demolishers and 4 LRM Carriers) to give the force a fire base of support and then I've got enough MicroArmor APCs to put together 8 bases of those to round out the new force.

 I've got the unit as being formed at the end of the 4th Succession War from Liao Militia forces partially destroyed and then passed up in the Davion steamroller offensive.  Hired by the new St Ives Compact and we have a new unit.  They're only primed currently but I plan on an urban camo scheme of some sort for them.

Alright, that's all for now, hopefully not too bad of an update and I'll try to keep new posts coming more regularly to keep me making progress on all of this.