BattleTech fan since the early '90s, game design enthusiast since forever.

Monday, September 5, 2016

Have a 'Mech: Hornet LAM

Hornet LAM tro thumbnailold Hornet (The Spider and the Wolf)
I'd hoped to post this Saturday but I took too long putting it together. It might be a while before I tackle anything else that requires editing and research.

Text version here. I still dislike how google is handling image hosting.

I'm pretty happy that I managed to keep it under 1000 words. It no doubt helps that my sources gave me very little text to rehash. Which isn't to say I wrote it wholecloth; like my first two LAMs, I pieced it together from a hundred little notes. That resulted in a bunch of "point, counterpoint" phrasings that I'm not really happy with, and probably contributed to how long it took to finish.

I didn't set out to make three Davion LAMs. But in hindsight, the Davion-centrism and Macross-centrism of the early material did make it kind of likely. I think I'll eventually follow up with a Jade Falcon LAM, a revision of my WoB Tarantula LAM, and a Rasalhague VTOL (an LAM hunter). That would give the series one unit per era, which would be kind of neat.

Images are all related to the writeup. The oldest rendition of a Hornet is seen at left; bottom compares a modern Hornet with the similar Duan Gung; and bottom right is the earliest rendition of a Chameleon trainer 'Mech, showing clear influences from the "I turn into a fighter plane" corps of 'Mechs.

Duan Gung vs Hornetold Chameleon

3 comments :

  1. "Basket of Battlesuits"?

    I don't know if I've mentioned it before, but I like your authors notes. It's a common sense idea for fan write-ups.

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    1. Is it the logic or the alliteration that's in question? :-D

      If a helicopter can fly with a metal box in tow, and if battlesuits can cling to a full-speed Fire Moth, then the suits don't need a proper box to ride in, and whatever it is can be gripped by an LAM in flight. The "basket" descriptor seems inevitable.

      I don't remember if you've mentioned it either, but thanks, yeah, it's one of those things you don't realize how useful it is until you start doing it. The only downside I can see is that they might not fit onto a typical 2-page TRO pdf spread; but with how slowly I'm accumulating these writeups, that's really a pie-in-the-sky problem for some other year.

      PS: I can't believe I've been stitching screenshots together in photoshop when I could've been screenshotting the whole page to begin with! I guess the next step would be to write or find a javascript Mech Designer to format everything into html for me.

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    2. Huh. I didn't know you could do that stuff with FireFox. that's encouraging. But yeah, it's definitely good to not hem yourself in based on some theoretical, maybe-one-day print publication when you're 99% on the internet.

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