I've been getting back into Classic Battletech a bit which is a great wargame for anyone pressed for time since the setup is minimal for a basic game. For the most part I've been using my friends mechs because I've been playing with them at the FLGS and their homes but I decided to dig out my old mechs to see what I had. I found I had about 32 Inner Sphere 3025 era mechs mostly old sculpts and also mostly plastic from the various box sets that have come out over the years.Having no particular loyalty to any of the great houses I decided I wanted to paint my mechs as mercenaries and pirates. A friend of mine had ummm "found" several Battletech pdfs on line and a file folder with said pdfs just happened to end up on one of my portable drives. I set down to do a little "research" on existing mercenary and pirate units to decide if I wanted to use and existing unit or make up my own. After a bit of reading I started to remember just how in depth the Battletech Universe was and how hard it would be to write a decent back story for a new unit with my sketchy knowledge of the setting. I opted to pick and existing unit or rather units to pattern my mechs on.
The unit I chose to re-create was "Cranston Snord's Irregulars". This unit as written in their sourcebook was made up of a single company of mechs. 12 figures seemed like a reasonable painting project and a company sized game is a fairly large battle in "Classic" Btech. Another thing that made the unit a good match is that I owned all the mechs required to build the unit as they were written for 3025 and they were all in old sculpts which matched the artwork in the sourcebook. One of the things that really burns me out when painting up "armies" is that painting the same uniform color scheme gets dull for me really quickly. That often causes me to bounce around from project to project which makes painting armies a painfully slow process for me. Fortunately "Snord's Irregulars" have no set color scheme on their mechs. Each mech is unique and the unit has three alternate badges as well so that's a lot of variation I can bring to the mechs. Also from the artwork and background it seems that the mechwarriors of the unit do quite a bit of customization to their mechs paint slogans and such on their machines. I think this will be a fun unit to paint.
From the back cover of the sourcebook:
"Cranston Snord's Irregulars have widely different reputations, depending on who you ask. Katrina Steiner thinks of the unit as one of the most effective, if unorthodox, units in her employ. House Marik would like to rid the Inner Sphere of the unit and has been trying for many years. Jaime Wolf sees the unit as a band of looters who have made good. One way or the other, the Irregulars are probably best known for their ability to get into and out of tight spots created by their never-ending quest for the lost artifacts and/or treasures of Mankind's past. Whether called looters or not, they are still a unit to be reckoned with."
