Proud Bull Rising Part 1

So something a bit different this time. I've always been a fan of alternative history, not just historical but also based on fictional stories as well. However my writing is far far from what is found on most sites for this so while I've been working on something for some time, I'll be posting it here as opposed to on a site dedicated for that. Point Of Divergence Taurian Concordat undergoes major reforms to the Taurian Military and Economy when Rayna Artantino takes over as Protector of the Realm from Semyon Calderon in 2816 rather than continuing on as before.

2816

The new Protector of the Realm Rayna Artantino and the newly promoted Taurian Defense Force Commander in Chief Marshal Natal Choudhoury assemble a team to begin a thorough review of the Taurian Defense Force as well as the training at the Taurian Ecole Militaire, Concordat Aerospace Flight School, and the various conventional training academies found throughout the Concordant. While findings and recommendations from the review are expected fairly quickly, they are also expected to be thorough. It is emphasized to the reviewers that it is better to take longer than hoped than miss something major or gloss over defects and areas of needed improvement.

There were numerous breakdowns in the brief war with the Canopians. The assault on Herotitus was the largest disaster as it saw all but two companies of mechs and a mixed half regiment of conventional forces destroyed before they even landed on the planet. Intelligence failures resulted in the large quantity of aerospace fighters not being identified as part of the planetary defenses. Poor tactics such as lack of a communication interdiction led to the destruction of almost the entire force and caused the remnents to be forced into surrender.

The Privy Council also begins to look into improving the financial and industrial standing of the Concordat. The Concordat needs growth and investment to rebuild its forces and to fund any needed improvements as well as freeing up capacity for growth as the nation needed to halt its slow economic decline. Trade agreements are to be explored as well as looking to expand the gathering of raw resources to increase the industrial output of the realm. Several exploration missions are planned for a number of the underdeveloped worlds in the Taurian Concordat to examine for potential new mineral deposits or ore lodes to exploit.

2817

Marshal Choudboury's work group finishes its review and begins implementing minor tweaks to training standards across the conventional force academies while also making major changes to scouting training in the Ecole Militaire and the Aerospace Flight School. The Marshal recommends to Protector Artantino that the Taurian Ministry of Intelligence under the Ministry of the Interior also undergo a similar review process for the same reason he instituted changes to the scouting training in the Military Academies, the fact that large numbers of Aerospace fighters were undetected on Herotitus during the recent war with the Magistracy of Canopus.

Former Marshal Gertrude Blake-Andrews, who had already been dismissed by the former Protector Semyon Calderon, had led the Detroit half of the Taurian-Canopian War. The Herotitus half of the invasion had been led by Comptroller Augustin Shapiro who had died when ambushed by the massisve wave of undetected Canopian aerospace assets. The entire brief war had shown that the Taurian Defense Force was lacking in force projection, intelligence gathering, strategic level tactics, as well as numerous other smaller deficiencies being identified.

With the two main leaders of the disaster out of the command structure already, Marshal Choudboury carefully evaluates the rest of the TDF command structure and several Comptrollers, Colonels, and Brigadiers are quietly demoted or retired during this timeframe. One bright spot of the actions was Comptroller Hendras Mohandun's defense of Spencer during the Canopian counterattack. It was one of very few things that went quite well during the war. He was duly promoted to Marshal Choudboury's chief of staff and tasked with helping to implement the changes to the TDF.

So that's the first part and I'll be posting new installments about once a week. Hope you all enjoy and see you all next time.

Davion Militia Slapfest

So this past Saturday I finally got a chance to get another game of Battletech in up in Johnson City and once again against Cheef. While I brought a full company of my Davian Ozawa Urban Defense Brigade, Cheef brought most of a mixed company of his Davion Dixie Cavanaugh Theater Militia. I'm not going to do a full blown report but merely do a photo dump with some thoughts about the game.

I decided that with my force deployed all together (hoping to overwhelm part of his force) that the eight UrbanMechs should have the nickname of Fort AC/10.

One of the things I must say is that my crit rolls GREATLY let me down. I didn't make a single one of potentially close to a dozen crit rolls on his mechs and only made a few against his vehicles. I scored a number of motive crits on his vehicles but that didn't exactly help remove their firepower any. This was balanced out though by his own difficulty in getting a lot of his shots to land that should have been easy hits needing around a 5 or so. All in all it was a fun time though and was great to see two fully painted forces totaling 22 units on the board. As Cheef noted in his own quick blurb on this game, the Alpha Strike game on the table beside us had half as many units on the board but didn't even manage one based, painted, or even primed model.

As I mentioned before I am getting some better supplies and equipment to up my painting game for a new regiment of Eridani Light Horse made up of some new Catalysts plastics I already have plus the ones that will be coming from the Mercenaries Kickstarter. My new magnifier with light as arrived. I've got a new batch of better brushes enroute as well as some contrast paints. I plan on starting on a test model here in a couple weeks and I might be asking here for some advice on things from any readers. Currently the plan is White Primer, then GW Imperial Green base paint with Dark Angels Green and Creed Camo contrast paints.

A Variety Of Topics

Hello all again! A few different things to discuss this time around. First up on that list is the $7.5 million elephant in the room, namely the Catalyst Kickstarter for Mercenaries expansion. I did indeed sink some money into this and am quite looking forward to a lot of it. Oddly enough the main box set is the part that has the least amount of plastic in it that I'm looking forward to. I definitely want to get my hands on all the new rules and fluff in the set for sure, however only the Maxim Hover Transports, Ostsol, Quickdraw, and Firefly are on my want list with the rest just not appealing to me and most likely I'll be looking to trade those away with friends from Johnson City after we recieve everything whenever that is. As to the Force Packs, I can't wait to get the Support: Assault and Cavalry, Support: Objectives, and Support: Recon and Hunter packs. Warrior helicopters, Behemoth and Ontos tanks, Skulkers, Long Toms, Hover Tanks, Demolishers and Shreks, what is there not to love? I'll be passing on the Support: Battle and Fire pack as I don't need more SRM or LRM carriers and never cared for the Vendette Tanks.

I'll also be passing on the Clan and ComStar packs as I'm not looking to expand my Clan forces and no desire to field a ComStar/WOBblie force. IS Assault Lance is one I don't care for the mechs and While I DO want the Ostroc, I'm not getting the IS: Heavy Recon pack for it and three mechs I don't want. The Dervish I want some of but not the others so I'll be passing on the IS: Persuit Lance pack as well. Hopefully I can get Ostrocs and Dervish when people start breaking up their packs to sell after everything gets shipped. Now the IS: Recon Lance packs is on my list to get as I want the Ostscout for sure and Javelins and Firestarters are also nice to have, with the Spector left as trade bait as the odd mech out. IS: Security Lance is one I'm on the fence about. I would like the Whitworth and Vulcan, and the Scorpion is slightly tempting though the Jagermech is unappealing. This is one I might pick up retail after it is all over. I'll be passing on all the Legendary packs as none of the characters or specialty mechs really calls to me. The Support: Command Lances will be one I look at getting though as I love the Hetzer, Sturmfeur, and Von Luckners and I'm sure I'll be able to find a home for the Bulldog. The Support: Battle and Sweep Lances though I'll most likely pass on. While I would love to get some Pattons, the Pike isn't appealing and I don't really want the J. Edgars or Drillsons either. Again, this is one I might consider at retail after it is all shipped and in stores regularly.

Now moving on to the swag is where it gets interesting. I'll definitely be getting a full set of the Eridani Light Horse swag. Depending on how the extras all work out Star League would be my second swag choice to go with my ELH, and if there is a third choice it'll most likely be Northwind Highlanders as the tartan items just look too cool. As to the map packs, I'll most likely look to get city battlemats just for something really different from the paper and cardboard maps I already have. Moving on to the Plushies ... I have to get the one Atlas as it's ELH and that's a given. As much as I would like an Urbie, I just don't care for the units they're done in and will have to regretably pass. The 4" MadCat looks cool, and maybe I can talk Cheef into painting it up for me in an interesting Clan Ghost Bear scheme for me one day. I'll be ending up with quite a few salvage boxes and what I do with those will come down to what is in them. The Visigoth fighter will end up as trade bait as again not adding to my Clan forces.

Even though I worked on Wednesday and Thursday, I did catch a fair bit of the livestream that the Catalyst people did on twitch through SixSidesofGaming. A lot of this was quite entertaining including the interview that Rem, Catalyst's new social media director, did with George LeDoux. He is a very entertaining man who seems quite humble and appreciative of how much he has been embraced by the Battletech community over the years. It was a pre-recorded interview from back in Feb but still quite enjoyable. The last hour of the campaign was interesting to watch the whole team on the stream from various locations taking a moment to enjoy its successes while thanking the community and backers profusely. They seemed quite enthusiastic to get into the next stage of the campaign, the backer kits, while already discussing new projects that are on the drawing board already. I thought it quite nice that even though the 8 million mark wasn't unlocked, Loren, the CEO, said that those items wouldn't be allowed to be picked as rewards for the different backer tiers but that they would be including them as possible add-ons in the backer kit which I thought was a nice gesture.

At the moment I'm not doing any painting as I am trying to upgrade my supplies to improve my painting of mechs beyond just table top minimum quality. I've gotten a better lit magnifier to use and have some much better brushes on order as well. I've been looking at some tutorials as well including an interesting one on how to get better consistency when thinning my paints that I'm going to try. I've also picked up some different basing material to see about doing more than one type of basing per unit like I currently do with just grass, fall flocking, snow, or sand. The one thing I am going to remain wary of doing myself, and when it comes time will probably see if I can bring everything up one game night to get Cheef or Neverness to help with, is decals. I just have always had no luck with them and with the new plastic models in such nice quality, I do want this new regiment of ELH to be properly decalled, especially since I already own all the decals to do it with. So that's where we are right now as far as myself and battletech. Hopefully my ramblings made some sense and I'll see you all next time with a battle review as my Ozawa Urban Defense Brigade will be taking the field against Cheef tomorrow evening.

More Progress And More To Do

So I have made some more progress the past couple weeks. First up I took a lot of older plastic and a few metal models of mechs that either I don't care for the mech or at least that particular version of it. It's a group of mechs that aren't worth selling off and yet didn't just want to throw them away either. Thus I lumped them all together into an op force for use in any planned pics for blogs or such. So since this was for a force I wasn't going to care much about, I was looking for soemthing with a fairly simple paint scheme but still a unit I liked even if in a faction I don't like. Thus I landed upon the 15th Dracon. I've always like the unit's fluff and always felt sad that they never were given the chance to break away from the Liao chain around their neck. They have a nice simple grey color with green trim, then toss in a simple sand base with green trim around the base and they're done.

I've also invested in the Catalyst Games Battletech Mercenaries campaign. After initially looking at my Eridani Light Horse regiment with the idea of thinning it out to make room for the new models, I quickly ran into the issue that the new plastics are great looking and just don't match up well with the older plastics and metal models. So with Cheef no doubt laughing at this and saying that he told me so, I'm going to just start a second regiment of Eridani Light Horse with nothing but new models and a few 3D printed that fit well with them. I've already got some units to start shaping it out with the place of pride going to three of the Eridani Force Pack Thunderbolts that I picked up. I still need 1 more to have a full lance of them. However this has lead to a new issue, that being that I have to figure out how to paint jumpjet smoke plumes.

Next up I have another star of Snow Ravens to finish and they should be in the next update. Thanks for stopping by and hope to see you all next time!