BattleTech 3057 - Recruiting players and co-GMs for new run.

[TheGlyphstone]

Do you mean upgrade the madauder to the MAD-5S variant? That model is the closest to what your saying but doesnt have LRM-10 and I am liking the idea of the marauder. I will do some research on the date on the MAD-5S to see if it was possible in 3057. If so it is a yes.

Something like that, yeah. Sarna says the MAD-5S dates to the Clan Invasion, and we're in the post-Invasion era, so you should be good.

We do have a little flexibility in customization - I'm going to be rolling with a King Crab that's replaced one AC20 with a Gauss Rifle, putting it halfway between a KGC-000 and the KGC-001 despite not being an official variant (and probably inferior to an outright KGC-001, but that's for story reasons. To my exceeding frustration, I can't work out an excuse to upgrade the AC-20 to an LBX-20...Clan Hell's Horses didn't join the Invasion, and the IS version of the LBX-20 won't hit general production until 3058.

[Sel Nar]

Something like that, yeah. Sarna says the MAD-5S dates to the Clan Invasion, and we're in the post-Invasion era, so you should be good.

We do have a little flexibility in customization - I'm going to be rolling with a King Crab that's replaced one AC20 with a Gauss Rifle, putting it halfway between a KGC-000 and the KGC-001 despite not being an official variant (and probably inferior to an outright KGC-001, but that's for story reasons. To my exceeding frustration, I can't work out an excuse to upgrade the AC-20 to an LBX-20...Clan Hell's Horses didn't join the Invasion, and the IS version of the LBX-20 won't hit general production until 3058.

Stolen prototype. Problem solved.

[TheGlyphstone]

Stolen prototype. Problem solved.

And how will I maintain my supply of stolen prototype ammo? I'd be kinda skeptical at the idea that you can just load twice as much LBX-10 ammo into an LBX-20 and call it a day.

[Wheresmycow]

Depends on what kind of support and logistics staff this mercenary group has.  Given the size of the mechs, and the weight of ammo required, you can bet there has to be a lot of maintenance staff in order to keep everything in shape.  With a large enough support staff, it's within the realm of possibility to have small scale manufacturing going on.

So in theory, you could have some in-house production, but there'd need to be an extensive support structure.  Alternatively, the mercenary company could be hired to use experimental wargear and field test.  But these are really out there ideas.

[Blobbe]

And how will I maintain my supply of stolen prototype ammo? I'd be kinda skeptical at the idea that you can just load twice as much LBX-10 ammo into an LBX-20 and call it a day.

You can't. Different autocannon sizes have completely different ammunition requirements in terms of size, weight, number of shells they belch out at once and so on.

I can't see any way to justify operationally using an IS LB-20X before the intro date, and even then it takes a ocuple of years for them to become really common.

[Sel Nar]

And how will I maintain my supply of stolen prototype ammo? I'd be kinda skeptical at the idea that you can just load twice as much LBX-10 ammo into an LBX-20 and call it a day.

Remember that the LBX is quite capable of firing standard shells, as well as its mech-scale buckshot. Personally, I think its main advantage is that it's lighter, more compact, and produces less heat per shot.

[Blobbe]

Remember that the LBX is quite capable of firing standard shells, as well as its mech-scale buckshot. Personally, I think its main advantage is that it's lighter, more compact, and produces less heat per shot.

Standard LBX ammunition is different to standard AC ammunition. That's why LBX cannons can't use alternate munitions, nor standard ACs can't use LBX cluster ammo.

Besides, only the IS LB-10X is smaller. The IS LB-20X weights the same as a standard AC/20 and takes up more critical spaces.

[PaladinZenaku]

The MAD-5S variant was considered standard production as of 3052, so it's almost as common as the Original 3R version by '57. (Personally, I'd keep the old medium lasers instead of the pulse upgrade, and use the extra 2 tons of space to increase the armour on the Marauder's notoriously thin-skinned side torsos.)

That is a good idea due to the 5s has ER PPCs that doesnt have a minium range like the regular PPCs do, so it wont be underpowered up close. I think I might do that but I have to consider I only have 1 ton of ammo for the guass. I would like to try to add more ammo so I wont run dry to early. Maybe down grade to small lasers giving me 3 ton extra space. 2 tons into armor, 1 into ammo?

[Wheresmycow]

This is a work in-progress.

Brooklyn

Pilot

Name: Brooklyn
Sex: Male
Homeworld: Atreus
Original Faction: Inner Sphere

Description: Slightly taller than average height.  Brown hair, blue eyes.  Clean shaven.  Has tattoo of skull with three dice in its mouth, showing sixes, on upper left arm.

Background:

Personality: Professional mercenary.  "Fuck bitches, get paid" attitude.  Primary goal is getting his share, his payday.  However, team is important.  The team is how he makes his money, so will not cheat them at all.  Enlightened self-interest.  Outside of that, pretty mellow personality.  Calm and focused, doesn't get excitable easily.  Dry sense of humour when it shows itself.

Specialty Skills:
Practices Tai Chi and Yoga
Magic tricks, especially card tricks and sleight of hand
Slight gun enthusiast and practices with them

BattleMech Characteristics

BattleMech: Jaegermech
Weight Class: Heavy
Callsign: Payday
Description: Gray with tan tiger stripes markings.  Picture of a bunny girl wearing a skimpy soldier uniform, bills in cleavage, blowing a kiss with one hand while holding sniper rifle in the other.

Loadout: Gauss Rifle, Large Laser, Medium Laser

Modules: Anti-Missile System, Beagle Active Probe, C3 Slave, Double Heat Sink x2

Upgrades: Endo-steel armor

Wargtass, I have a question: how many tons were allocated to ammo on the single gauss Jaegermech you designed?

[Sel Nar]

Standard LBX ammunition is different to standard AC ammunition. That's why LBX cannons can't use alternate munitions, nor standard ACs can't use LBX cluster ammo.

Besides, only the IS LB-10X is smaller. The IS LB-20X weights the same as a standard AC/20 and takes up more critical spaces.

Sorry, but Sarna disagrees on what the LBX series can be fed.
You are correct on the IS LB-20 being same weight, and one slot larger, but the boosted range (from 9 to 12 'hexes) makes it worth it.

http://www.sarna.net/wiki/LBX

The most notable feature of the weapon was its ability to fire both standard HEAP rounds and a specialized anti-'Mech cluster round.

Read: The LBX can be fed any Standard Autocannon round, but is not designed to play with experimental AC ammo, And can't be given the Ultra, Rotary, or Light 'traits' (In part because a Rotary Mech-scale shotgun would be a gamebreaker, and weigh stupid amounts.)

[Blobbe]

Sorry, but Sarna disagrees on what the LBX series can be fed.
You are correct on the IS LB-20 being same weight, and one slot larger, but the boosted range (from 9 to 12 'hexes) makes it worth it.

http://www.sarna.net/wiki/LBX
Read: The LBX can be fed any Standard Autocannon round, but is not designed to play with experimental AC ammo, And can't be given the Ultra, Rotary, or Light 'traits' (In part because a Rotary Mech-scale shotgun would be a gamebreaker, and weigh stupid amounts.)

Sarna is also an unofficial source and any comments in it should be taken with a grain of salt at the best of times.

"Standard autocannon ammunition is incompatible with LB-X autocannon" - Techmanual, p207

So yeah, you can't even load standard AC ammo into a LB-X. You need either specialty LB-X ammo or cluster ammo, but normal AC won't do as a substitute.

[TheGlyphstone]

The other alternative would be a Clan LBX-20, but like I said, Clan Hells Horses didn't participate in the Invasion, and the LBX-20 is one of their proprietary technologies.

I'll just wait an in-game year and snatch one up when it hits the market.

[Wheresmycow]

I have a question about lore and setting: if my character is 27 years old, it means he was born at the end of the fourth succession war, and was around 19 when the Clan invasion started.  What would life be like just after the succession wars and would he be old enough for him to serve in the Free Worlds League military during the Clan invasion?

[Sel Nar]

Depending on where in the FWL he was born, anywhere from pseudo-contemporary 20th century life (most major cities on sub-core planets), to 'wild hair in the ass scrub farmer' (periphery/subsistence planets, such as the 'Trinity Worlds' that the 17th Recon Regiment hails from), to 'What, you don't have a personal trivid, hovercar, and million C-bill house?' (Core Worlds, such as principality capitals, like Regulus, Atreus, Oriente, et al)

Lore-wise, the general public really doesn't give much of a shit about the Succession wars, really; they go to work, pay their taxes, and the only difference when a planet's subjugated by a neighbour is that their money has a different face on it, there's a new flag, and the tax rate's slightly different. The Clan invasion was a ~massive~ shock that put pretty much the entire Inner Sphere on a war footing, however, so in the back of most everyone's minds, there's concern that the clans might resume their drive towards Terra again, and due to the mass publication of what Smoke Jaguar did to the City of Edo on Turtle Bay, John Q Public is very tempted to go to the local armory and get certified with a Zeus 12.7 for home defence.

(Context; The Smoke Jaguar commander, after several weeks of sporadic riots and similar in and around the city of Edo, basically said 'Fuck this shit' Pulled his ground forces out to the city limits, then ordered a Smoke Jag Heavy Cruiser to Bombard the city from Orbit until it was a smoking crater; He then ordered his ground forces to go in and kill any survivors.

Needless to say, that 'incident' was a large reason why the Inner Sphere decided to Utterly Annihilate Smoke Jaguar in Operations Bulldog and Serpent in 3059-60.)

[Wheresmycow]

I was thinking my character came from the capital world of the FWL, Atreus, so I guess this means he's from a high technology background.  I'm going to say he joined the military at 19, when the Clan invasions just started.  How do you become a pilot though?  My google-fu is weak, so I haven't been able to find any info on what it takes to get recognized or if there's a training program.  The Sarna article on mechwarrior pilots was a bit brief as well.

[Sel Nar]

I was thinking my character came from the capital world of the FWL, Atreus, so I guess this means he's from a high technology background.  I'm going to say he joined the military at 19, when the Clan invasions just started.  How do you become a pilot though?  My google-fu is weak, so I haven't been able to find any info on what it takes to get recognized or if there's a training program.  The Sarna article on mechwarrior pilots was a bit brief as well.

As Atreus is in the Duchy of Oriente, the premiere Military acadamey is Princefield; of note is that the Acadamey has an 80% failure rate; It only graduates the top 20% of each 18-month class, to mechwarrior/Aerospace training (2 year course) and while, in theory, the acadamey is open to everyone, in practice it takes Money, or Political connections to get in.

http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Princefield_Military_Academy

As for becoming a Mechwarrior, well, a few years of training is a start, but, for the most part, it does require a lot of 'in the seat' action; that's why there's a lot of training units on planets with acadamies.

[There was a long comment here. It's gone now, for good reason.]

[Thorne]

Uch. Sel, you're being awful pushy. >.<

I was thinking my character came from the capital world of the FWL, Atreus, so I guess this means he's from a high technology background.  I'm going to say he joined the military at 19, when the Clan invasions just started.  How do you become a pilot though?  My google-fu is weak, so I haven't been able to find any info on what it takes to get recognized or if there's a training program.  The Sarna article on mechwarrior pilots was a bit brief as well.

Two ways to do it. One, Sel Nar already mentioned - he forgot 'luck', which may also factor heavily.
The other is not uncommon to those without money and connections, but still requires luck - you get yourself 'apprenticed' and learn in between doing chores for your benefactor(s).

In the end, it's up to you, though - it's your character.

Whoever mentioned Sarna.net as being a half-helpful source is right - I start there, and hit one of the TROs for confirmation. Not all the stuff listed is wholly accurate.

[Sel Nar]

[There was a comment here too, it's also gone, because it kicked me in the shin and ran away to find someone better to hang around with.]

[Wheresmycow]

Hmm, it mentions that in Princefield, some commoners are admitted.  I think I'll do a mixture of both luck and training.  Say that before the invasion, he was going through the motions of getting a degree at some other academy.  When the invasion came, he applied to Princefield in the hopes of getting a more involved training and by luck, was selected.  Grit and determination allowed him to get into the mechwarrior program, but by the time he finished the war was already over.  So while competently trained, the war he was training for was over and he found it tough to find any work, especially since some nobles didn't like the fact that a commoner 'stole' a position over another more deserving noble.

[Blobbe]

So..here's my char...I accidentally deleted the pm that had the mech specs in it before I could copy down the upgrades..

Spoiler: Click to Show/Hide

Name:  Kendra Wheeler
Sex: F
Homeworld: Atreus
Original Faction: Free World League

Description: Kendra is around 5’4, 144 pounds, with dark skin and long black hair. She tries to keep in good shape, as piloting a mech can be strenuous work as well.

Background: If there was anything remarkable about Kendra' early childhood memories, she can’t find them. She was born to, while not a lap of luxury, to a modestly successful lawyer and former dancer, who’d found his own career in the holovids. for a time, being one of the few remaining direct descendants of the Santee tribe from Terra.
   At the age of fifteen, she began to experiment and fiddle around with several Mech sims, doing amazingly well. Better then anyone would have expected. Soon, thanks to her father's contacts in the entertainment industry and some of her mother’s rather upscale clients, she began to enter various competitions and auditioning for advertising contracts. She did quite well, becoming something of a minor celebrity in the Mech circle, doing the equivalent of air and trade shows with them. She was afforded some private instructors as part of her training and advertising, becoming a fairly skilled pilot.
   When her mother was indicted along with the company she was currently working for, her family lost almost everything. Her prospects almost immediately dried up, and the only thing she owned outright, her Mech, was nearly taken from her. Thanks to the few remaining credits she had stashed away, she managed to get off planet before it could be seized. Desperate for money, she put to use her best talent, bouncing from planet to planet, amassing what she could, finding most of it had to go right back into the Mech, before falling in with a new group of pilots.


Personality: She’s fun loving but not what one would call bubbly, coming from the entertainment industry she knows how to blend into wild parties and upper class society just as well.She’s never seem to let her circumstances get her down, at least on the outside.

Speciality Skills: She can read a contract like nobody’s business, owing to her years spent in said industry prior to becoming a mech pilot full time. She can perform minor repairs on her Mech, but couldn’t rebuild or do heavy repair work on it. She’s also a halfway decent marksmen with a pistol.

BattleMech Characteristics

BattleMech: Hellbringer
Weight Class:  Heavy
Callsign: Kunoichi
Description: The mech is painted in a bright green color, There are several swatches of blue running across the mech, almost as if someone a giant hand in paint and slid it across.

Loadout: The Hellbringer has 4 large lasers, 4 Medium lasers, 2 LRM missile pods, and a pair of machine guns, designed to take out infantry and light tanks 

Modules:  Kendra’s Hellbringer carries a retractable blade along with an ECM module to baffle enemy sensors. 

Upgrades:

It looks good, but I'm going to agree on the 'Mech. The Loki (The Inner Sphere codename for the Hellbringer, and the one that the chracters would be using) is a Clan 'Mech, which means that it would be very hard to come by. If the character had been fighting on the frontlines during the Clan wars, then yes it would be possible, but nothing in your chracter's background suggests that.

(Also, the Retractable Blade weapon doesn't exist until the late 3060s, so a decade after the game's beginning)

There's plenty of other heavy options around that would work better. The Warhammer would probably be the best fit.

[Wargtass]

You guys... seriously need to stop scaring away potential new players. The next time when I have to leave on a short notice, try to remember who the GM is and that it's the GMs decision what goes and not. Bottom line is, stop brow beating the new players. I'm too tired to deal with this fully now and I got other things on my table to deal with.

[TheGlyphstone]

Borrow my rolled-up newspaper to whack them with, Warg?

[Wargtass]

I already did. Good night everyone.

[Sara Nilsson]

Pilot

Name: Elizabeth Blackwell
Sex: Female
Homeworld: Fincastle
Original Faction: Federated Suns

Description: A short little redhead with tinted glasses and dressed in creaking leather or latex tends to make people think anything but mech pilot, more then once she has been mistaken for some hired pleasure girl then a warrior. It is almost unheard of to see her carry any form of weapons (since they tend to be more dangerous to her then to the enemy), but when forced she prefers shotgun type weapons where her terrible aim doesnt matter.

Background: The daughter of a career military father and one of his many mistresses (he liked to have one woman waiting on every planet he ever served on), her mother worked whatever job she could to support herself and her daughter. Elizabeth grew up pretty much without parental supervision and soon found herself involved in a small gang, and would probably have ended up with a short violent streetlife had the clan invasion not shattered everything. She was told her father had died during one of the first battles but to her that meant nothing, what meant something to her was how badly her people where getting mauled and lots of innocents lost their lives. Perhaps a little sliver of her father sparked into life inside of her and she along with many enlisted, however the battle at Tukayyid ended the invasion before she could actually see any action in her assigned little Tarantula.

Personality: Impulsive, headstrong and adrenaline junkie. It is three words her superiors usually use when describing her, while her coworkers are usually adding, "one hot lay" to that description. The kind of person who is willing to strap herself into a lightly armoured coffin strapped to an oversized engine tends to try and live life to the fullest, she knows that her chances of surviving if the enemy finds her is almost zero unless she can run her little metal legs off. With no family to hold her back she lives like each day is her last, boyfriends seldom last longer then a few days before she is bored of them. Song, dance, drink and whatever illegal drugs she can get a hold of is her daily routine. With life inside of her mech being either mind numbing boredom when she is just hidden in one place spying to heart pounding terror as she is fleeing the much larger mechs everyone is fielding she has trouble working if life outside of the cockpit isn't filled with much the same. She was assigned that mech as the training showed she was very good at mechpiloting in difficult terrain and at high speed, but alas a very lousy shot. Her instructor basically told her to close her eyes and then fire and it might by pure chance make her hit the inside of the mech hangar.

Speciality Skills: For all intent and purposes she is double jointed and likes to show off by contorting herself until the onlookers whimper in sympathy pain.

BattleMech Characteristics

BattleMech: Tarantula
Weight Class: Light
Callsign: Gnat
Description: She always makes sure it has an appropriate camo for whatever terrain she is in, in the cockpit she has built in a little hidden safe behind a console where she can hide whatever drug she is currently on.

Loadout: Streak SRM-2, 2 Medium lasers

Modules: -

Upgrades: 10 Double Heatsinks, 8 Jump Jets

[Wargtass]

8 JumpJets. Jumping fucking Jesus! 

Btw, all of you, I am just waiting for character sheets. If there is anything you are waiting for, poke me.