MWO Battlemechs Part 2

Continuing on with MWO designs (well, 4/5 of them, anyway, here's 'mechs numbers six through ten. Good thing for my wallet there aren't that many more out so far. 

If you flip through the 3025 book you'll see that the mechs all have sibling designs in similar poses. The Cyclops here was one of the designs that Duane Loose had created riffing off of the old Macross mecha, in this case the Spartan Destroid (aka the Archer). One of the mistakes the FASA bunch made (besides using designs without permission) was not putting any logic to its mechs and breaking them up by faction and unit type (i.e., all mono-eye mobile suits belong to Zeon, etc)  It would've lent more personality to the factions and headed off the ugliness that followed the 3025 tech manual. 

 Speaking of the Archer, it's been resurrected in all its glory. One innovation that this sculptor/producer's been bringing to the table is a plethora of variant parts, in the Archer's case open-door torso racks. I wish it'd been thought through a bit better, though; the slots for the doors are shallow, so some sawing is required if you want the doors to stay. Even so, it's a brittle system (even though it looks great) and I'm dreading the first time I transport the thing. Still, I'm glad the designer has decided to skew classical with all of the deleted Macross derivations. Speaking of which...

One that didn't hew classical was the Marauder, so I bought his other offering, the Macross-styled Glaug, and painted it like the 3025 cover girl. The dorsal cannon's post hole was shallow, so some extra drilling was required, but the whole thing went together quite pleasingly. The new, blocky Marauder in the game does belong more to the same design series as the King Crab, so I may yet purchase one, but for now, this one's enough for me. 

On the tabletop the King Crab's one of those all-nothing designs that's both a blast and a nail-biter to play, as it's only got five rounds for each of its arm guns. The redesign gave it a waist so it can torso-twist and some less cheesy-looking clamp-style claws, and if you want the model even ships with a closed pair. Come to thing of it, my team of friends won a tournament  back in the day using these things and medium laser carrier Hunchbacks. Ah, good times. I need to come up with a new method for doing stripes, though. I'm afraid these have all come out looking rather flat. 

The opening heats of said tournament, as I recall (it was ever so long ago) were played with limited tonnage, so a pair of mediums/lights was the order of the day, and the Centurion worked pretty well for me. (well, a variant that used an AC20 with its LRM rack, anyway). I forget what its friend was... a more spry up-armored Jenner, perhaps? Well, anyway, the newer version is a delight, with its more stylized armor and right arm shield. Sharp eyed fans will notice the House Marik paint scheme, but I neglected to put the Marik emblem on there as we're all mercenaries here anyway, and I'd rather paint a series of eye-catching models rather than bore you with a whole company of same-old, same-olds. 

Till next time...