The $1.00 Pirate Starfighter

Several years ago I purchased several little plastic starfighters at a $1.00 shop because they looked like they would scale well with 28mm ship. I think I bought 6 or more. After all they were only a dollar each.

They each had one of those pull back motorized gear boxes to make them roll on little wheels. I've never understood why you would make aircraft/spaceships with this kind of thing but I've found it's pretty common especially with cheaper toys. Anyway I took the wheels and motors off and messed around with a failed landing gear idea and them boxed them for over a decade.

I think they sat around that long mostly because they were too cheap for me to feel the need to put much effort into. They aren't exactly stunning looking either but they seemed like too good a deal to pass up. Well I decided yesterday to start digging them out and putting some landing gear on them so I could paint them.

I know I make a lot of ships out of cheap toys but I suck at making landing gear. In fact the gear on this ship is scratched from: some wooden stir sticks, wooden beads, a toothpick, and some plastic clothespins. They are simple and the hold the ship up and don't look too awful. I'm not a scale modeler and I'm not building these things for display.

Here is a shot of the new pirate starfighter along side two other ships in my collection also modeled from toys. I'm pretty happy with the way it looks considering it's cost in time and money. I've got another of these set up right now with landing gear but my daughter has claimed it. I'll post a pic when or if she finishes it.

The Ships of Station 42

I decided I should put up a new pic of my fleet of space ships for my space port project. I have a few others but this pic represents the ones I'm sure are going to be finished as functioning ships A lot of the others I have may end up as wrecks or junkers.

I'm going to try and get some of these ships ready to prime today and hopefully work on finishing up the "Black Dog" (the gold and black ships in the front row).

My goal for Febuary is to try and finish up at least one ship a week. A couple of these ships are going to take a lot more than a weeks work but there are several that won't need that much work and I need to make myself a deadline.

TMNT Spaceship!

Well today I was at a local junk shop and I ran across a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle space ship. It was a great size for converting into a game ship. The biggest problem I have with coming up with ships for my space port and sci-fi games is that toy space ships are usually no bigger than a large shuttle and only suitable for very small parties. The TMNT ship is larger. At least light freighter in scale and reasonable enough in size for most RPG parties.

Here's a few shots with some of my other ships. As you can see it's larger but not so large as to make it unplayable. I can wait to get started fixing it up.

Battletech Rio Jihad Campaign:3076 Raid on the Artillery Convoy

Tonights Battletech campaign game was quite a bit closer than a lot of the previous battles. Stone's mercenaries were ordered to capture a number of "Long Tom" artillery pieces from a convoy being supported by six battlemechs and a number of Arrow IV carriers. The Word of Blake forces fought a hard battle against the mercenaries supported by their artillery which had a devastating effect on the mercs.
Three of the mercs battlemechs were destroyed in the battle but they did manage to capture several artillery pieces.

Battletech Rio Jihad Campaign 3076: Supply Raid

We had another campaign battle for the Rio Jihad Campaign yesterday. Again I was playing the Opp. Force for the players with the help of my friend Mike. The senerio called for Stone's Mercenaries (the players) to break through the lines of the local militia and intercept a supply convoy. The militia consisted entirely of super heavy LRM carriers and infantry spotters.
Although Sone's Merchs had several mechs damaged in the fight they lost no mechs or pilots and were able to intercept the convoy.

Battletech Rio Jihad Campaign 3076: Assault on the Repair Base

I played the Opp Force in another Jihad campaign game for the local Battletech group. This battle was a Manei Domini assault on Stone's mercenaries repair facility. The mercs had just received a airdrop of supplies (the little white rectangles) and were in the process of moving them into the base. Additionally a group of pirates called Grimm's Anarchist had heard of the assault via a contact. They planned to raid the base for some of the supplies.

The Manei Domini brought 8 celestial omnimechs and the pirates brought 6 assorted mechs. Stone's mercs had a company of heavy mechs and a few vehicles. The mercs defended the base well suffering only a single mech out of action. Some of their other mechs were damaged including a Black Knight who lost his targeting computer half was through the battle. The pirates suffered the loss of a Locust who ran into a mine field at the start of the battle. The Manei Domini suffered at least 50% losses due to the fact that the defenders chose to concentrate on them.

This is a map of the Blake Protectorate. Rio is in that eastern peninsula near Tikonov.

Battletech Basic Training Training Scenario #1: First Run

I've been playing Battletech again at my FLGS for a couple months. It's been almost ten years since I was a regular Battletech player. My wife use to play Battletech before our daughter was born 14 years ago so we are both very rusty players. Since I've been playing with a local group I've dug out my old mechs and started painting and re-painting them. I've also started purchasing new mechs. My wife and daughter are both gamers so when my daughter expressed an interest in learning the game my wife decided she would start playing again as well. I've got the newest rule book "Total Warfare" but most of my mechs and record sheets are classic Inner Sphere so I turned to my 3rd edition boxed set for training scenarios. Fortunately Battletech has changed very little in 30 years compared to other games so this worked out just fine.
The scenario calls for Wasp and a Griffin as the Defenders and a Stinger and a Wolverine as the attackers. The first side to score a kill wins the simulation. I chose to run the defending mechs. My wife chose the Stinger and my daughter chose the Wolverine.


Early on the Wolverine took several hits but it's tough armor held out quite well. I chose to keep my mechs mobile through jumping and running. This also made it harder for me to hit but not that hard. My wife jumped the stinger quite a bit too but the Wolverine had no jump jets so it ran quite a bit which it why it took some damage.

Later on in the game all that jumping and shooting was really starting to overhead my Griffin. The old 3025 mechs have very poor heat management. Usually they have only single heat sinks and more fire power than they have heat dissipation. The 3025 Griffin-1N is notorious for it's heat problems since it carries a PPC and a LRM 10 launcher which generate 14 heat alone. With only 12 heat sinks you can't walk and fire for more than a couple turns without starting to take overheating penalties. Another problem is the PPC has a minimum range of 3 hexes and the LRMs are even worse with a minimum range of 6 hexes. This ment that I had to stay mobile to stay at range especially since my wife and daughter were doing the best they could to stay inside my minimum ranges. Eventually I had to start walking and firing only one weapon at a time but I was still having heat issues.

With my Griffin overheating I decided to try and get my Wasp into the fight a bit more. The Wolverine had taken some heavy armor damage at this point but had lost no internal systems. My Griffin's heat was going down but I was still taking movement and heat penalties. I tried to jump my wasp behind the Stinger to get in a physical attack and some close range back shots. Unfortunately I miscalculated the Wolverine's run and was able to get into physical attack range with me. The Wasp managed to shoot the Stinger but only managed to hit a leg. The Griffin missed entirely due to the fact that the Stinger had jumped the the Griffin was still suffering a +1 to hit due to heat. To make matters worse the Wolverine blew the Wasp's arm off in the firing phase. I missed my kick on the Stinger during the physical attack phase but the Wolverine connected sending the left leg of the Wasp flying off and knocking it on it's back.

On the last turn my Wasp managed to stand back up but it's SRM 2 pack did minimal damage to the sturdy Wolerine. I decided to fire both the Griffin's weapons at the Stinger in an attempt to get a draw. One good shot on the Stinger with the PPC could easily take it out and the LRM 1os can do massive damage to a light mech too. Unfortunately despite being at perfect range for the LRMs neither shot hit. The Wolverine completely opened up on the poor Wasp with everything it had blowing the 20 ton mech into several pieces.

The simulation was over with a solid victory for my wife and daughter.