Bleakbane Plays BATTLETECH

[Triaxx]

The Urbie is... a bit of a weird outlier. It's not fast or flashy, because it was supposed to be cheap and easy to produce. So it comes with a tiny engine, and a big gun, so it can take advantage of it's home terrain. It doesn't have to be terribly fast if it only wants to get to the end of a block and lay an AC10 shell into the ST of a mech or smash a tank to bits.

MWO is a bit non-representative of BT, but as an Urbie driver, being able to peak in reverse? Super good. You back into an intersection, then full speed back out of sight after a shot.

Also the stock engine is incredibly bad. Standard 60 is what you put in a lawnmower. Replace it with an XL 180 and 3 heat sinks, then fit it with Meds and Machine guns. Excuse me while I strip your back armor and then crit the soft exposed internals.

[Aotrs Commander]

The Urbie is... a bit of a weird outlier. It's not fast or flashy, because it was supposed to be cheap and easy to produce. So it comes with a tiny engine, and a big gun, so it can take advantage of it's home terrain. It doesn't have to be terribly fast if it only wants to get to the end of a block and lay an AC10 shell into the ST of a mech or smash a tank to bits.

MWO is a bit non-representative of BT, but as an Urbie driver, being able to peak in reverse? Super good. You back into an intersection, then full speed back out of sight after a shot.

Also the stock engine is incredibly bad. Standard 60 is what you put in a lawnmower. Replace it with an XL 180 and 3 heat sinks, then fit it with Meds and Machine guns. Excuse me while I strip your back armor and then crit the soft exposed internals.

I can imagine being able to reverse would be quite useful if its not something every mech can do, though in TT everyone can.

Question, though since you're here. HBS moved all the rear weapon mount to forwards - does MWO do the same? If not, does anyone find much use in rear-weapons, and if so, do you ever think that "wow I wish I had a rear-firing gun about now?"

I ask because I have never really found rear-firing weapons to be useful, at least in the games we've played and it always seems to me, you'd be better off having those weapons giving you better damage consistently at the front than what is little more than a mild irritiant behind you. (Firepower you can't bring to bear is wasted, after all.) And MWO I would have thought is advanced enough in UI and such that if they (and/or MW5) also made the decision not to have rear-firing weapons because it was too complicated in a simulator, it probably says that the idea was probably not a particularly practical one when dreamed up by the TT rules.





Bleakbane Plays BATTLETECH, Part Thirty-Three:

Spoiler

Show

Last contract a 2.5-skull mission. Data needed to be extracted from a secret facility and transmitted to a satellite, which mean triangulating the position and holding station...

Oh, this could be nasty.

Zuranna would swap the Decapitator for the Atlas (more armour). Poppy would take the Bull Shark, Anja the Annihilator and Summer would grab the Phoenix Coil, in case they needed to rush to position.



Not a great position to start in...

Oh, great, there were EIGHT enemy mechs in the area. The only good news was that all of them were lights except for one 50-tonner - though one of them was a Raven, from the ECM field.



Summer was in the most danger, sprinting to the furthest to the west, though the largest number of enemies. Zuranna would take the closest one, and Anja was doing to dash to the east - Poppy would follow, but first there was at least three enemy mechs that she could land a Thumper on...

No.. Four!



Three enemy mechs down! That made things a bit better! Zuranna jumped up and showered the larger mech - a Crab - with LRMs.

The Raven made the bizarre move of walking up to the Atlas to use an active probe, revealing itself and putting it in melee range and right in the beacon point. The other four mechs - the Crab, a Commando and the pair of Javelins - focussed their fire on the Atlas. But it was the most heavily armoured mech in the Paladin's arsenal and this was exactly what the lance had brought it for.

Anja was distressingly JUST short of the beacon range on a sprint, so instead, she walked, spun and shot the Commando in the back (as it had run past her to shoot Zuranna). Summer sprinted up past the point and spun around - she'd be able to sprint back into position and maybe even get a shot off in a moment. Poppy also sprinted up to Zuranna, where she could draw a bead on more enemies.

The Raven got punched to death. The first beacon was in place, and it was the Atlas that would be attracting the initial fire.

The Javelin backed up. Which meant when Summer dashed down to the second beacon, they presented their backs to her aimed shot. To her annoyance, she missed the CT and only blew a torso off.



Poppy and Zuranna didn't managed to take the Crab out - the range was a bit far - but Summer and Anja had the beacons down and they could move now.

Summer sprinted right up to the Javelin she'd shot and pressed the COIL-M right up to the surface of its rear CT armour and cored it right through.

The Crab finally blew up under the concentrated fire of three assault mechs.

The remaining Javelin backed up. So Summer ran behind it and kicked an arm off.

(Okay, game, you tell me to wait two rounds, and THEN tell me I have three rounds to extract to an extraction point miles away. Yeah, that's not going to be possible.)

It ran away again, so she dashed up behind it and punched the whole RT off. Then, annoyed, sprinted away, It was unlikely that everyone would get to the extraction point right away, but she would at least try and meet them there.

(Yeah, no, it took ANJA all three rounds to reach the extraction point, and she was closest. Not even Summer reached it.)

The lance didn't make it before the kill team was going to arrive, but never mind, the idiots were going to drop RIGHT in a place where it would hurt.



The enemy lance was a Spider (which immediately ran behind the Bull Shark), a Raven (which immediately ran up to between the Atlas and Bull Shark and did a sensor lock), a Kintaro (which immediately hit Poppy in the head) and a Griffin.

Summer snarled with fury, having a FIFTH chance to shoot/punch something in the back and whiffing her punch on the Spider.

Zuranna smashed off the Raven's entire right side, leg and all, with the Atlas. The Griffin had presented - once again - its rear to the Annihilator. (The enemy was really strange about doing that today.) And, like, right close, too.



It, unsurprisingly, exploded into a fireball. Joined a moment later by the Kintaro, curtesy of Poppy.

The crippled Javelin, showing great gumption, but little sense, ran up to head butt the Atlas in the rear. The Atlas ponderously turned around and actually made the motion of cracking its knuckles. The Javelin looked up and up and then down and then back up again. The pilot reflected, for a moment, on the poor decisions he'd made in his life, leding up to this moment.

The Capellans late found the Javelins' reactor imbedded several feet into the rock some scores of metres distant. Just the reactor. And some rear torso armour.

The Spider jumped to shoot the rear of the Atlas too, but achieved little.

Summer, really frustrated now, failed even to kill the Raven by stomping on it and it staggered up and limped away. Though not far enough to re-cloak and Anja just blasted it to pieces. The Spider pilot just had time to realise that this was not going to be his day, when the Bull Shark fired and reduced the Spider to slag.

Then it was just a brisk stroll to the evac zone. (Except for Anja, who hadn't even moved.)



Spider and a Javelin for sale.

And they were done. Time for a quick bit of shopping, then! Lynessa bought a ++LB-X AC/10, three pieces of Banshee 3E and one of Highlander 733P - it was about 8 million cbills for those (they had about 47 million at the moment), but it completed their collection.

The Overlord could now be repaired. The Bull Shark could also get an upgrade - exchanging one of the +LB-X ACs for the ++ gave it another half-ton of armour. The autocannon removed could be fitted on the Annihilator to replace the standard one it had, allowing that an extra half-ton of armour too.

To the next flashpoint (there wasn't much point making stops in Capellan space on the way) - 4-skull Mitchel (which was also a Black Marker.)

They arrived without incident at Mitchel.

Lynessa and Darius went out to do a bit of contract networking, joined by Llana for a bit of fresh air. As they were walking through a farmer's market a rather foolish Volkovite (who apparently hadn't left with the rest of them) spotted them and came running up.

Lynessa, spotting a load of Liao guards, dispatched Llana to go and distract them. She did so easily - having picked up a few tricks from her extended stay with the love/sex paladins - and with a winning smile and few entirely true tails of her awesome exploits, kept them very distracted. The local Capellans (not even all of whom were Volokovites) were delighted to meet the saviours of the little exodus, and Darius and Lynessa were inundated with fresh fruit and vegetables. Darius noted with some embarrassment that Lynessa not only carried nearly twice his load, but she did it without any apparent strain...

There was a lot more in the black market this time. A ++ER PPC and ++ER medium laser, a ++Narc beacon (ironically they had literal tons of Narc ammo from all the Strikers), a ++medium pulse laser...

Lynessa was not going to buy anything just yet, though, since there were several pirate contracts in the system. Two battles and a recovery. Doing all three normally would improve the paladin's reputation to skim into neutral (for the best discount they were going to get). Lynessa figured it would not be hard to tank their reputation down to minimum before the end (a quick trip to Arano space, for example). No, the difficulties now were going to be finding missions against Kurita to make them loathe the paladins, and missions for Steiner to get them up to 100; after this series of flashpoints - perhaps even as they did them - the Kurita issue could be tackled.

Starting with the problem that the flashpoint they were about to undertake for the Capellans - Siegebreaker - was against the Lyrans. Oh, well, get it down before they got it up, Lynessa hazarded?

Marina Liao - casting an uncertain glance at Mylassta - explained that a Steiner Hauptmann-General Alistair Dobrescu was holding a dozen million people of the megacity of Gauthier under siege. And the citizens were genuinely likely to starve to death before the Capellans could break the siege.

Well, Lynessa thought, that sounded just mean. She suddenly didn't feel so bad about this.

The planetary militia were a rather unorganised lot - and the two remaining commanders Azura "Cheval" Damestroir and Ellen "Jailbird" Valazquez apparently hated each other or something and were more likely to fight each other than the Capellans.

To sort them out, the paladins would have to drop in to help one, then the other. There was not, unfortunately time to drop, say a second lance of paladins to help them both at once, so Sumire would have to extract and drop them point to point.

And there was a 75-ton maximum limit. Well, the somewhat unorthodox, but the paladins could work with that.

Mylassta would take the Fair Marauder, Vey the Laser Knight (since she had coolant vent if it did get a bit hot), Anja took the Archer and Summer took the Shortbow. (And Lynessa patted herself on the back for not shelving the Archer just yet.)

Wait, no, there was also a max 240 ton restriction, damn, that was 40 tons over.

So Vey swapped to the Shortbow, Anja got to test out the Fireforce and Summer took the Phoenix Coil; that hit 240 tons exactly. (Fireforce rather than the Trebuchet since while the latter had jump jets, Fireforce was a bit sturdier for consecutive missions plus it had a higher damage out; the range wouldn't matter so much in an urban area anyway.)

The first part would be helping Azura defeat a Steiner scout lanc-

...

Oh dear goddess.

A Steiner scout lance!?

Why had they not brought all the assault mechs?

Actually, the paladins couldn't EVEN match a full Steiner scout lance...!

Okay, so it was just one Atlas to start with. That they could handle...

Seriously, though, Lynessa thought, what kind of lunatic used an Atlas as a scout mech?

* * * * * *

Meanwhile, in a near-mirror-universe not far away, in General Hayalyn Haelariel's mechbay...



"Right, I'll take the High Commander; Helia, you take Atlas II; Alluria, you take the King Lobster and Illy, you take the Atlascout! We've got reconnaissance to do!"

"Woohoo!"

* * * * * *

The militia lance was a Firestarter, Hatchetman, Locust and Rifleman. Good job the paladins were there...

Mylassta first shot damage the Atlas's autocannon. The rest of the lance moved to a better attack position. No sense in wasting good salvage, right?

Her second destroyed the right torso... And they still couldn't take another precise shot. Darn it.

"Vey, Anja, Summer and I have got this, you two go intercept the drop pods coming in!"

"Right!"

"Yes, ma'am."

Firestarter, Vulcan, Assassin, Shadowhawk, incoming.

Mylassta snarled. "Third try!"



"Atlas is down, paladins! Atlas is down! Summer, go mop up!"

Summer had a full run for five chevrons, but sadly 60% of 125 was not enough to take even the leg off the Vulcan - but it was enough that the Capellan Locust could finish the job. Vey ran up to the Assassin and blasted half of it away. It and the enemy Firestarter moved to attack the Archer's rear - but the Firestarter had jumped onto a building...

Anja put the Vulcan down, and the allied Hatchetman cored the Assassin through the holes in the left side Vey had opened.

Summer dashed up, aimed for the building the Firestarter was silly enough to stand on.



The fall ripped its leg off. Mylassta, coming in from extreme range, picked the other leg off.

Vey focused her SRMs on the Shadowhawk and detonated its ammunition.



Azura seemed to think that the Lyran might come running with all their assault mechs as their scout and their... "infantry...?" lance got wiped. She was going to lead them off for the lance to go help Ellen. Azura warned that Ellen was Not Very Nice and too watch their backs. (Lynessa was initially inclined to believe Azura - she meant, like, Azura had a very trustworthy name and was quite nice.)



Three parts Atlas salvage, thank you...!

Ellen needed help bringing down a "heavy Steiner patrol lance," which probably meant, like, a regiment of Atlases or something.

Ellen had a Thunderbolt, a Raven, an UrbanMech (an R90, with a PPC - Lynessa initial thought it was the one with the AC/20) and an Assassin as her lance.

The lance moved up, until the enemy contacts emerged. Then they pulled back a bit, since there was a Raven right there, so why rush, right?



The first idiot round the corner was a Jenner. Anja, Summer (who had moved to the back of the field to ramp up a full strike next turn) and the swarm of SRMs from Vey blasted it apart. And enemy Assassin meanwhile, jumped up, trying to shoot the Fireforce. Jumped onto a building.

Mylassta split her fire, the AC on the building and the laser on the Assassin. One fall later, the Assassin was sans leg.

The Raven shifted position slightly, exposed the Shortbow, and an enemy Griffin jumped into view to have a shot at it. A second one joined the fight, shooting at the allied Assassin.

The enemy Assassin, having been dropped out of sight, proved what a slow learner they were, by jumping onto ANOTHER building.

The nearest Griffin took two head hits and lost a leg and the pilot went out.

Summer took a moment to calculate her run - this time the Assassin had chosen a slightly tougher building - but...



It would not be getting up again.

As the lance started on the last Griffin, a second Lyran lance was coming in. Anja quickly headcapped the Griffin so they could meet the new threat.

As the lance followed the Raven (it couldn't quite work out which way it wanted to go first), the first enemies came into sight was a Spider - taken down between the Thunderbolt and Vey - and a Wolverine further back. Summer locked an UrbanMech, and following that was a 70-tonner.

The paladins advanced with the Raven, taking shots at the Wolverine as it closed.

Summer weakened the UrbanMech's CT, but Anja failed to capitalise on it, leaving Mylassta to finish it. As she did, the enemy 70-ton Archer strode onto sight and bombarded the allied Assassin, even in the ECM field. It survived, though it was not in a good state.

Vey blasted the Wolverine's right torso off, though didn't kill it; but then the Raven toppled the destabilised mech and the militia UrbanMech finished it off. Teamwork!

Mylassta hit the Archer in the head. Summer hit it solidly with the COIL-M and then Vey's SRM salvo caught it in the head too, finishing it.

Ellen - who was not as dodgy as advertised, which is why you held judgement - explained Azura had gotten her put in prison after an accusation of sleeping with her husband. (Azura's husband, obviously.) From the sounds of it that had started a fight or something.

Lynessa sighed. Sounded like they needed the council of the Paladins of Azurella. Sharing was fine (encouraged, even, a good chunk of the time, at least among the paladins) but ONLY if all parties understood and agreed to it.



Enough salvage for an Archer!

So, now the Steiner forces were scattered and the attack on Dobrescu himself could begin. This was his master-plan to...

Respond to the annulment of his marriage because his former wife had fled here to escape under Marina's direct supervision.

Darius, Farah, Sumire and Yang gulped. Even Marina suddenly looked worried. The temperature in the room actually dropped, and not metaphorically, because frost was forming on Alarhan's hands. The command crew had never seen the Paladins look quite so serious and quite so ANGRY. Even Mylassta, whose temper was more... explosive, had gone ice-cold.

Azura was quite annoyed herself.

Killing Dobrescu alone wouldn't be enough, they had to ensure there was enough of the militia left to capitalise on the issue. Which meant Ellen and Azura would have to work together. And they would not.

Right. Fine.

"Okay, ladies," Lynessa said in a sharp tone which shocked both women ram-rod straight. "If you two are going to bicker like children, you will be treated like children. You can sit in the naughty corner while the grown-ups deal with the problems.

"And when we are done, you two WILL be sitting in a room, having counselling, do you understand me?"

"You can't order me arou-"
"No way, I'm n-"

The SMACK of Lynessa's longsword against her palm, and the sudden aura of warm green and showering sparks surrounding her, combined with the LOOK in Lynessa's eyes cut their protests short.

"Do you understand me?" Lynessa repeated, slowly, without even raising her voice.

"Yes, m'm!" Ellen squeaked.
Azura nodded frantically, looking pale.

"Good girls. Paladins, let's roll."

Anja had completed her training at this point, and quite hurriedly got out of Alarhan's way.

This was likely going to involve turrets, so Alarhan was taking the Trebuchet this time.

Vey made to step away from the Shortbow for Lynessa, but Lynessa shook her head. "No, Vey, I trust you to carry Azurella's will. You have this."

Vey smiled brightly, and hopped back in.

The lance dropped in. Ellen and Azura were cowed enough to at least take control of the base turrets.

And then Dobrescu hailed everyone, demanding they "hand over what was his" or the city would starve. Yeah, no, this guy was going to die and hard. He'd be lucky if the paladins didn't castrate him first.

"Wait, we do know a guy," Summer growled. "We can kill him, raise him, castrate him and kill him again!"

(Funnily enough, the love/sex paladins were REALLY intolerant of sexual abuse and there was no WAY this wasn't that.)

First enemy - a Centurion, followed by a 20 and 25 tonner and a Rifleman.

The paladins, to there annoyance, did little more than knock the Centurion over.

The lance had to quickly fall back, since the enemy forces were ignoring the lance and making a beeline for the base.

Alarhan destroyed the fallen Centurion.

Oh good, there were Lyran forces around the base too.

Lynessa totally missed the Rifleman, not even an aimed shot, just a regular one.

It took Alarhan and Summer both to destroy the Locust.

Vey had to jump back, since there were two Spiders rushing in, spotting for the other defenders.

The fracking turrets hit NOTHING AT ALL and the Rifleman, which having not been headcapped because of course it hadn't, destroyed the nearest one, despite being shot at by the lance.

(Okay, RNG? If you don't stop being kvetchy right now, I'm not even going to try and we'll start with the reloading for every shot right now.)

Summer finally CT'd the Commando.

And the Rifleman took a shot form Alarhan, ignored the paladins and destroyed the next turret. Mylassta got REALLY annoyed.



(And if you hadn't done that, RNG, we'd have been going back several turns and doing it until you did.)

Vey obliterated the first Spider. Alarhan and Summer sprinted to a new position, needing a moment to cool down. Vey annihilated the second Spider. Mylassta jumped up to take a shot at an approaching Phoenix Hawk; there was almost certainly a Cataphract coming in behind that.

Nope, it was a Warhammer. Mylassta tried headcapping it, while the other three's combined fire knocked down and CT-killed the Phoenix Hawk.

Mylassta's second shot damaged the Warhammer's head, and Vey's last salvo managed to head cap it.

Right, two rounds until the first reinforcements came. Time to sprint towards the drop-point to the east.

Locust, Hatchetman, UrbanMech and a Blackjack. All of which were doing the "ignore lance, charge base" thing.

Summer's punch and Alarhan's PPC toppled the locust.

(And the game didn't move Mylassta where I wanted it to, so she could only kill the Locust and not shoot the Hatchetman.)

The Shortbow was doing a lot of the heavy lifting here, CT-killing the Blackjack. And after Mylassta failed to headcap it... Shooting the Hatchetman in the back,.



Summer and Alarhan knocked the UrbanMech over with a punch and an LRM salvo. It got up. They knocked it down again. Mylassta CT'd it.

Wave one down, and wave two was almost upon them - back to the west.

Commando, Firestarter, Cicada and Griffin. And they were all fast mechs, which meant there was very little chance of them being taken out in one shot, so the paladins each had to hit one (two of them physical, which at least resulted in the Commando getting its leg ripped off) to get their attention.

And of course, wave THREE would come a round earlier, which was just tedious...

Summer, having hit the Griffin in the CT rear, did just enough damage that a second COIL-M shot ithout charge killed the Griffin exactly before it could move, and then started rushing towards the other drop-point. Alarhan smoked the Firestarter before it could move. Mylassta leg-capped the Commando. And that just left Vey to obliterate the Cicada with SRMs.

(Huh. Didn't expect that.)

Just time to rush back to the east drop-point.

Two Locusts, tow Trebuchets.

Summer only just managed to catch the lead Locust, but her shot in the rear annihilated it. Mylassta jumped in and shot one of the Trebuchets in the back, killing that too. Vey had the same chance (a mere 45%) of hitting either Locust or Trebuchet, so went for the latter, She blew an arm off, but that at least got its attention. Alarhan fired her PPC to get the Trebuchet's, but failed even to hit it.

The Locust dodged up behind the Fair Marauder, but didn't do any damaged before Alarhan sprinted up and levelled it with the Trebuchet's fist.

That just left the last Trebuchet. It foolishly stayed still and took a PPC shot - it was a 7K - at Vey and missed.

Which meant Mylassta got to backstab again.



Right, That cleared all the enemies. Just the base - and potentially its turrets - to deal with.

(Why still in combat, game? Makes moving to the base real tedious.)

No turrets, so that made it easy to level the buildings. Dobrescu screamed furiously all the while, foolishly getting close to the window in the last building. Vey was splitting her fire two take the last pair (damaged by Summer and Mylassta) down in one go.

It was almost certainly by chance, then, that one of those SRMs just happened to wobble a bit in flight and strike the screaming manic in the crotch before exploding.

The momentary trace of golden, divine light on the missile's fins was probably just a trick of the light.

It was as well, Mylassta was down to one AC round left. The Shortbow, notably, was still about 30% full.



Enough salvage for a Blackjack, Rifleman and Commando.

Lynessa didn't feel at all sorry for dealing with that, potential allies or not, that needed to be done. An abusive ego-manic had been put down and the literally millions of people he was prepared to kill for his depraved lust had been saved. This was a solid win, probably the most solid one the paladins had made this trip.

Marina was very pleased.

Now, there was just the matter of those two ladies to settle. They seemed to have made a bit of their peace, and there was talk of Ellen disappearing into the frontier and Azura not stopping her, and that might have happened if Lynessa wasn't around.

What ACTUALLY happened, though, was a little surprise extraction by Magical Paladins and the two were brought to a room, both carried by Vey - who was, as mentioned, quite a large girl in every respect, including height - one under each arm like little children. (Neither woman was particularly tall, being of Capellan ancestry.)

And in there, There Was A Talking To.

Lynessa, after all, was an expert councillor and a paladin.

By the time the paladins were ready to leave - Lynessa continuing to defer to Mylassta as field commander - Therapy Happened. Both Ellen and Azura came out much better people. Azura wasn't maybe quite ready yet to forgive Ellen, but they were on speaking terms and they were trying. Ellen was, after all, deeply repentant over what she did, in a moment of passion and again in a moment of anger. Lynessa, of course, had the experience with talks with Illy and Alluria to drawn upon (she'd been the one to work with them as they were assessed for joining the Paladins), and those two had literally being the bitterest of enemies for a good century and a half, demon verses devil, after all. A bit of a stabbing in the heat of the moment was nothing, really, by comparison...

It was a good job the rewards were mostly spiritual, because the actual rewards were pretty crap - nothing at all of note.

The Capellans only hated them paladin now (that wouldn't last for long0, but it meant Lynessa could at least look in the shops...! Pity there was nothing worth buying.

Never mind.

Contracts, then.

What good will they had with the Capellan state (though perhaps not the people) was about to go up in smoke!

First off a 4.5 skull battle for the pirates. As usual, they were trying to be all clever about it, trying to frame it as something other than it was revenge for failed extortion, but whatever.

Zuranna climbed in the Overlord, Mylassta remained with the Fair Marauder, Natasha (still in high spirits - it had been for, like, 90 days or something) in the Bull Shark and Summer switched to the Annihilator.

Two 65s, a 70 and a 75.

the lance waited. When the enemy got into range, the first group of three was a K2 Catapult, a Grasshopper and a Marauder.

The Bull Shark and Fair Marauder headcapped the Grasshopper. Summer damaged the head of the Catapult.

The enemy's reinforcements were coming in, and from slightly behind the lance.

Mylassta was not having much luck with her headshots today. Summer damaged the Marauder’s head, this time. Zuranna punched the Catapult's leg off and Natasha used the Ultra ACs to destroy the other one.

Mylassta missed again, but Natasha managed the headcap the Marauder, meaning the long-range LRMs stopped.

The near 65-tonner appeared, a Thunderbolt 5SS, close enough to put flamers on the Overlord (for all the good THAT did). And a Banshee 3M was coming in ahead of the other lance, another 65-ton mech on scopes.

Natasha had a pot-shot at the Banshee with the autocannons, and was delighted to see its head explode.



Mylassta finally destroyed a head!



Zuranna edged forwards, spotting another Thunderbolt. An 80-tonner and 90-tonner were just out of sight.

The Thunderbolt jumped on top of a building. Zuranna grinned. The building exploded, dropping the Thunderbolt and doing far more damage than if Zuranna had just shot it. Repeated fire from Mylassta and Summer broke both legs.

There was a Cyclops and the 80-tonner left, the former acting a spotter. Summer missed the head entirely, but did destroy a leg. Zuranna, without much else to do, lobbed a Thumper shell as she could just catch both of them. Mylassta then headcapped the Cyclops as it lay prone.

The last mech was an Awesome 8T. Summer and Natasha tried to headcap it, but merely destroyed it instead.



Three parts Banshee, one of Awesome and Cyclops, a +2 damage LRM 15 (useful) and a ++Gyro (hit defence).

The next mission was a 3.5 skull recovery mission, same lance - getting a pirate and his data out.

The lance headed to pick up the pirate. The first enemy defenders detected were a Marauder and another 75-tonner.

While there were only four enemies on scopes - a second Marauder, a Thunderbolt and what was probably 0X Catapult - there was definitely a second lance in the vicinity.

Zuranna sprinted to grab the pirate while the other stood their ground, taking pot-shots at the Marauders as they moved into and out of sight behind the buildings.

Summer used her lock to confirm that it was, indeed a Cataphract with ECM. Natasha didn't headcap it, but did tear off a leg and destroy the ECM system.

The enemy seemed reluctant to engage, but the second Marauder and the Thunderbolt finally showed themselves again.

Natasha and Mylassta headcapped the Marauder (though it took them a couple of tries) and Summer and Natasha headcapped the Thunderbolt.

There was now a THIRD Marauder coming in, plus an Assassin. Which did the "stand on a building" thing and thus promptly got dropped on the floor again thanks to Zuranna.

Summer and Mylassta headcapped the next Marauder. Summer started on the next one. Zuranna, shrugging, ran up and grabbed the data.

(And you know what, RNG, I'm sick to the back teeth of you hitting my high spirit pilots in the head, so no, reload, you're not having that one, not when I've got, like five or six 4.5/5-skull missions left.)

Natasha dodged some fire and she and Summer headcapped the last Marauder. Mylassta smashed the Assassin, but only broke its arm, causing it to flee. Mylassta chased it and shot a leg off, and Zuranna's LRMs wiped the other.

They lance could now see the mysterious missile unit, a JagerMech. It was out of sight... Until a Thumper shell took out the building it was hiding behind. Summer grinned brightly. No point in headcapping now...

The JagerMech exploded.



A staggering five Marauder 3R parts, one part short of them getting two Marauders at once!



I was going to do the last pirate mission, but with one thing and another, it took longer to that mission than I thought, so we'll call it there.

So, I might do some more tomorrow or Wednesday (depends how I get along), otherwise they'll be one more session on Thursday and then that'll be it for a week.

[tyckspoon]

I can imagine being able to reverse would be quite useful if its not something every mech can do, though in TT everyone can.

Question, though since you're here. HBS moved all the rear weapon mount to forwards - does MWO do the same? If not, does anyone find much use in rear-weapons, and if so, do you ever think that "wow I wish I had a rear-firing gun about now?"

I ask because I have never really found rear-firing weapons to be useful, at least in the games we've played and it always seems to me, you'd be better off having those weapons giving you better damage consistently at the front than what is little more than a mild irritiant behind you. (Firepower you can't bring to bear is wasted, after all.) And MWO I would have thought is advanced enough in UI and such that if they (and/or MW5) also made the decision not to have rear-firing weapons because it was too complicated in a simulator, it probably says that the idea was probably not a particularly practical one when dreamed up by the TT rules.

I've never found them useful in mech vs mech combat. If you want to shoot behind you, you take out the mech's lower arms and just swivel the guns backwards on the shoulder mounts. Theoretically, the use case for the kind of small weapons they usually rear-mount is for defense against small targets; you use them to try to deter infantry squads or power-armor teams that might be hiding in the rubble and pop up to put a few SRM rounds in your back. But IME everybody just wants to use mechs, because they're cool and it's the whole point of the game, and using piddly little normal human units just slows things down and requires using additional rules that the players probably aren't super familiar with.. and if you're willing to slow the game down by playing a larger model-count game, you just use more mechs.

[Aotrs Commander]

I've never found them useful in mech vs mech combat. If you want to shoot behind you, you take out the mech's lower arms and just swivel the guns backwards on the shoulder mounts. Theoretically, the use case for the kind of small weapons they usually rear-mount is for defense against small targets; you use them to try to deter infantry squads or power-armor teams that might be hiding in the rubble and pop up to put a few SRM rounds in your back. But IME everybody just wants to use mechs, because they're cool and it's the whole point of the game, and using piddly little normal human units just slows things down and requires using additional rules that the players probably aren't super familiar with.. and if you're willing to slow the game down by playing a larger model-count game, you just use more mechs.

After some effort getting on (I wanted to ask them about what TRO to get to catch up, since the last one I got was 3060), having actually gotten onto the Catalyst Labs Forums, as I asked them too. Turns out that it's not-quite, but nearly universal that rear-firing weapons are basically largely pointless.

(What I ended up doing yesterday and Tuesday was Spending Pennies, getting one hard-copy of the only TRO I could find at sane price (the vehicle annex) plus about £70 of stuff from Ral Partha Europe and then buying some rulebooks!)




Bleakbane Plays BATTLETECH, Part Thirty-Four:

Spoiler

Show

Okay. 3.5 skull urban battle for the pirates to distract some Capellans. The same lance as before: Zuranna in the Overload, Mylassta in the Fair Marauder, Natasha in the Bull Shark and Summer in the Annihilator.

The lance advanced and spotted a LB-X AC Demolisher. A Shadowhawk and another 80-ton vehicle were flanking. Mylassta broke off to engage the Shadowhawk, missed and already reinforcements were inbound. Summer destroyed the Demolisher and a building by mistake.

Natasha moved up to take a shot at an approaching Cataphract. Luck was not with the lance at all.

A second LB-X Demolisher rolled up and neither Summer nor Natasha could get a bead on it; Zuranna wasn't close enough to hit anything in melee and Mylassta again failed to drop the Shadowhawk.

The Demolished mostly missed, however, and destroyed a building or two, but had gotten close enough for Mylassta to stomp on it.

Natasha, not being able to make a precise shot and only firing her LB-Xs last time, now managed to headcap the Cataphract.



Summer and Zuranna turned their attention to the incoming lance, the latter moving up to spot a JagerMech and a Marauder for Summer to start shooting at.

Mylassta shot at the Shadowhawk again, and it finally died when Natasha's attempted headshot (sans lasers) set off its ammunition. Summer CT'd the JagerMech and scowled, that was twice she'd aimed for the head.

The reinforcement lance had only one more mech - a Catapult. It now chose to jump up on a building... Mylassta rolled her eyes.



Zuranna's punch exposed the Marauder’s centre torso, which meant it died when Summer shot it. (And missed the head again...)

The Catapult jumped out and shot at Zuranna. Summer blew off the right torso (with a snarl of annoyance) and Zuranna ripped the left leg off. Mylassta rushed up, double-time and managed to jump into position to take the other leg before the Catapult could stagger up.



Lots of salvage, but the only thing of note was the last piece to complete a Marauder.

That put the pirate in neutral. Lynessa had a good clear-out getting rid of a lot of the default weapons (going down to stocks of 6 or even 2 if they had a lot of + versions and even getting rid of some of the + versions).

This let them by a ++ER Medium Laser, ++ER PPC, ++Narc Beacon, ++Infernos, a ++medium Pulse laser, a pair of +++arm mods (at least one of which could go on the Shadow Punch or the Overlord when they had a moment) and a finally 3.8 million on the last part of a Bull Shark M3, for a grand total of about 16 million or so, so quite worth the effort.

And what potential the MAZ-M3 had! Sue, it only had single heat sinks, but it had no mortar or other special gear. It could actually mount four LRM 20s. It could mount paired ultra AC5s and 10s. It could mount 3 PPCs and an ER PPC and have just enough room to run almost neutral even without cannibalising one of the other mechs.

Come leaving this planet, either the Awesome or the Stalker Barrage would be being retired!

(Lynessa was 50% convinced to spend another 8 mil to buy two more MAZ-£M parts for future usage...!)

Or... Or... There were three parts of a Warhammer 7A (which Lynessa hadn't even seen, which was a STAR LEAGUE Warhammer) for a total of 7.5 million.

Lynessa decided, sod it, she'd but one more MAZ-3M part, so if they ran into another on the field, they could build one.

Right, a massive chunk of shopping done, back to business!

Time to upset the pirates again! A 4.5 skull destroy base in the desert. Scarlet took over from Zuranna. Mylassta swapped places with Summer, Mylassta dropping to no.4 position, but taking the Ballista instead of the Fair Marauder.

The lance advanced towards the base, infected my some sort of virus used by the pirates. A 70-onner and 90-tonner on scopes. along with three heavy turrets.

Summer blasted the first turret they'd spotted away. A 60-tonner was also approaching, but the enemy weren't in sight. Mylassta was provided with a lock on the next turret (the one Scarlet thought was most likely out of line-of-sight) - a heavy LRM turret and destroyed that with her own LRMs. Natasha stepped into view of the third turret and blew up that too.

A Quickdraw wandered into view, spotting for a whole host of missile attacks. Summer failed to head cap it, and Natasha couldn't actually get a bead on it, so she hit it with the Thumper and Mylassta finished it with LRMs.

The Grasshopper that walked up next to shoot at Natasha got a face full of death.



Scarlet locked another Quickdraw and Mylassta started to bombard it. Summer locked onto an approaching Highlander, just to identify it.

The enemy managed to breach the Overlord's armour with LRM fire and the Highlander, once again all landing in roughly the same spot.

(Remembering that the Overlord has the second-highest armour of any of the paladin mechs.)

Scarlet, thoroughly annoyed, blew the Quickdraw away. Natasha vented coolant and had a go at the Highlander's head, but failed.

The whole lance shot at the Highlander's head, blowing off a torso and dropping it, before the repeated head hits killed the pilot.

The lance edged forwards and Natasha hit the last turret.

The buildings went down... But no extraction. There were more enemies around, weren’t there?

Yep, almost as soon as the lance moved a Cyclops HQ and a third Quickdraw showed up.

Scarlet and Mylassta showed the Quickdraw with missiles until it was no longer dodging and Natasha blew its head off. Summer, seeing the Victor was likely to dodge most of her fire, elected to go for the right torso - when the AC/20 ammo was instead and was gratified to see the explosion. It was de-fanged at least.

A Banshee 3M entered the fray, but still out of sight range to attack the lance.

The Cyclops took SIX headshots (and one LRM salvo from Scarlet to knock it down) from the lance before they finally got the head. They then switched back to the slowly approaching Victor and destroyed it, just as the Banshee reached its combat range.

Summer clipped the head with the LB-X AC/10; Natasha had run out LB-X AC ammo, but her salvo damaged the Banshee’s head - and the very last missile of Mylassta's salvo blew it off.



IS'd by 1 point. Of course. So if a single missile had not clustered...

Enough salvage for a Banshee, Highlander and Grasshopper.

Next, Davion was putting a contract out some pirates in the city that had downed one of their mechs, 4.5 skulls.

Mylassta swapped back into the Annihilator, Summer grabbed the Shortbow and Zuranna brought in the Decapitator to replace the Overlord.

A single mech, they said. That was both right and wrong. No sooner had the lance flagged a 95-ton target than a lance of Marik mechs showed up, with the same idea.



Oh HO, they were having that!

They were! Natasha didn't quite head cap it. Summer dashed to attack, forgetting she was in the Shortbow for a half second. Worried she'd core it, but only needing single hit, she switched off half her missiles - and did the job!



Just a little down the street was a Blackjack and Griffon. There was a Victor behind and a Catapult in the next street over.

Summer attempted to core the Blackjack, but only blew the right arm off. Zuranna ran a little close and only using the large lasers, shot its leg off. The Griffin, meanwhile, jumped up on a building... Natasha this time tried a Thumper round, and dropped three buildings - and the Griffin, though not hard enough to snap its legs off, sadly. Mylassta, unable to get a shot at anything else, headcapped the prone Blackjack.

Summer had a shot at the Griffin's legs, but this time was not successful in hitting them at all. Natasha decapitated the Victor. Zuranna ran around the corner to the Catapult and made a spirited attempt to hit it in the head. Mylassta shot at the Griffin, who lived a charmed life, as both legs stayed on - but the damage knocked over, at least.

Summer had had enough - she sprinted around the Catapult's rear and unloaded a full salvo. And she would have taken it down, but for one missile short. If it wasn't for the Bull Shark kill, she'd have been having a bad day... Seeing as the damn thing was still mostly intact, Natasha vented coolant and blew its head off, just leaving the Griffin. Not to be out-done, Zuranna vented coolant, too and -





Let's see, salvage, THREE PARTS BULL SHARK! Lynessa was very glad she'd bought that one part. Sure, they might find another one yet this system, but that was fine!

They also picked up a couple of ++LRM 5 (+2 damage). Excellent! Those could go the Overlord to replace the pair of +1 damage ones later.

Second Bull Shark went to storage, as they couldn't do anything with it at the moment.

Back to fighting Capellans! This time, it was 4.5 skull urban mission to track down and kill a Capellan terrorist.

The girls headed back out.

The headed east, trying to catch the guards first. Mylassta and Natasha blasted away as a Dragon, while Summer and Zuranna headed towards a pair of Thunderbolts, moving in and out of sight between the buildings.

Mylassta destroyed the Dragon. Summer, mystified as to why the Thunderbolt walked past where it had seen them, exposing its rear armour to her and Zuranna for no apparent reason... Well, she was going to look a gift CT rear in the mouth...



Zuranna sprinted out into the street where the second - and now third - Thunderbolt was standing.



Well, if they were going to offer...

Summer was peeved that it was short one missile. But Zuranna had her back, jumping behind the Thunderbolts, and switching to medium lasers only, shot it in the back as well, destroying it.

Natasha failed to headcap the third, so Summer figured, third time's the charm!

Three Thunderbolts, all killed by being shot in the back at point-blank range!

That was a new one!

(The paladins later found they were piloted by triplets. That sort of explained it a bit. Maybe?)

The girls regrouped and head off towards the primary target.

They spotted him near a little park, stomping around in a Victor.

Each of the girls shot it in the head, each one getting a single nonfatal hit. Zuranna, the last, shooting as it lay prone, knocked over by the storm of ACs and SRMs, finally killed it.



A lot of mech salvage, but no completed mechs.

Finally, a full five-skull desert escort for Marik, intercepting and re-directing a Capellan supply convoy. Lynessa took the risk (not that it was a big one) and had Zuranna take out the slightly dinged Overlord, as the Decapitator was not friends with desert heat. Mylassta traded Summer the Annihilator again, and she took the Fair Marauder.

The Capellan patrol, consisting of a Cicada, Dragon, and Quickdraw first needed to be eliminated. Mylassta started by trying to core the Cicada, but didn't quite make it, even with Zuranna lending her missiles. Natasha and Summer knocked the Dragon flat between them.

Mylassta finished it off before it could get up, more or less at the same moment the Quickdraw ran into view, making a futile attempt to stop her. Natasha blew it head off, and Summer blasted the Cicada apart. One lot - clearly the first of three lots - down.

This time, for once, the pick-up point was fairly obvious, so with Mylassta to set the convoy off, the others proceeded to where they thought the enemy might appear.



Perfect!



Mylassta destroyed the Shrek before it knew what hit it. Zuranna ripped the Trebuchet's leg off. Summer and Natasha weren't quite as lucky with the Catapult and Orion, though both took a solid hit each.

Mylassta headcapped the Orion before it could recover. The Trebuchet staggered up and made a poor shot at Natasha. Zuranna ignored it, turned around to the Catapult behind her and punched its right torso off. Natasha destroyed it with her LB-X ACs while putting her Ultras into the Trebuchet. Another slug in the rear by the Overlord dealt with that little problem.

Two lots down!

The reinforcements dropped in. Another Orion, a Grasshopper, a Rifleman and a Thunderbolt.

Mylassta shot at the Thunderbolt. The Rifleman ran up and shot one of the APCs, but failed to kill it. Natasha hit the Orion and Zuranna the Grasshopper, leaving Summer to blast the offending Rifleman. And blast it she did.



The convoy was away.

Natasha performed the same trick to the Orion. On a roll now, Summer headcapped the Thunderbolt. While Mylassta cursed as she missed, Summer gleefully made a hat-trick of head kills.



Salvage was a 0-tonnage arm mod (stability damage, but they could use 0-ton arm mods on almost any mech, let alone the mostly-punchy-ones), plus parts to complete a Quickdraw, Orion and Dragon.

Glentworth would be the next stop, for the next flashpoint. It also had a Kurita presence, so with a little luck the paladins could do a load of missions against them.

Maintenance time! First of all, the Overload, while it was being repaired. The two LRM 5s were upgraded to +2 damage versions, giving the Overlord very slightly better firepower. Lynessa swapped in the +++melee damage arm mod, raising the punch damage by 20 to 235. This actually left a ton to play with... But there wasn't anything to really DO with it. There wasn't any way to increase the punch damage more at the moment, and it wasn't enough for anything else. Small lasers would have been great, except the Overlord had no support hardpoints. Adding a single medium laser was pointless, and it already ran super-cool. So Lynessa just added another ton of armour instead. (Maybe if they got another +++melee damage arm mod, they could drop that back a ton have something to do with two tons...?)

It was, Lynessa felt, time to get rid of the Archer. They'd never found a second +2 damage LRM 20 anyway. If they did that and dismantled the Ballista, they'd have four +++LRM 20s to put on the new Bull Shark.

Four LRM 20s, each with two tons of ammunition; a ++ and + heat exchanger, +3 hit defence gyro, ++ rangefinder and just enough heat sinks to hit above neutral heat by 2 points put the armour exactly at the tonnage that the Stalker Barrage and Ballista had shared.

Payday:



(After quite a bit of reloading, I finally got a trio of missions against Kurita. Probably not worth doing any of the other missions save one Taurian one against the Capellans, but eh, it's a start.

...

Naturally the flashpoint after this one is a Kurita one...)

The Rocket Shark was completed!




Just enough time to swap the Trebuchet's +1 damage LRM 15 with a +2 damage one before the paladins arrived at Glentworth.

Woohoo! Couple of 0-ton arm mods in the Davion store. Lynessa stopped by the Black Market. They were back up to 50% price hike but there no pirate missions in this system.

11 million would get the paladins three parts of a Star League Atlas... Very tempting..

++LB-X AC/10. Definitely having that one, that was another spare ton for the Bull Shark...

Lynessa shrugged. Sod it. ++medium pulse laser, three parts D-HT Atlas, ++ER small laser, ++heat exchanger. They still had 8 million left.

Time to start the One Man's Trash flashpoint!

There was a long pause as the paladins regarded "Ed Corbu," their employer. He appeared to be a parrot wearing sunglass.

No. Really.



Sure his "holocamera was on the fritz." A likely story. (Lynessa didn’t believe that "trusted client" tag either...)

So, he had "associates" who were interested in Star League stuff. (Like everyone else...)

"Totally a pirate," Mylassta murmured to Darius. "He's talking just like them."

Darius was forced to concede.

But apparently, these associates were interested in even Star League junk (archaeologists maybe...?) and Ed had a source on an island called Men Lojowen. The equivalent, apparently, of a Star League stapler factory - but one that was nonetheless being fought over by apparently two groups in beat-up old tanks.

Ed had called the paladins because he had a mate he did dodgy dealings with on the Mercenary Review Board.

Lynessa shrugged. This was going to go horribly wrong, but what the hey, there were here, right?

So this should be a "simple" polar recovery mission. 200 tons max weight, plus 55 max tons limit. Lynessa congratulated herself on keeping all five mediums, since the Shadow Punch, Fireforce, Phoenix Coil and Trebuchet all fitted neatly in the weight limits, piloted by Zuranna, Mylassta, Natasha and Summer respectively.

(Huh. 377 hours and it's the first time I recall seeing the "right click on enemy to see status" loading message.)

An "unsavoury character" Nigel Binton hailed the lance to relatively politely tell the lance he'd be murdering them today. One Hampton Modge hailed them to make a more creative threat to both Nigel and the paladins.

Oh goody - two SRM carriers to start off with. Better kill them FAST!

They did. Zuranna and Natasha both jumped and fired at one, Natasha using a precise shot to finish what Zuranna's AC started. Mylassta and Summer teamed up on the other one. Both vehicles died, fortunately.

Two Strikers approached. Summer and Natasha took one out between them. Mylassta was not in position to help Zuranna - but it didn't matter, the Striker totally missed Natasha anyway, and then it was close enough for the Shadow Punch to run up and stomp on it.

And that was that.

Farah confirmed that they had, in fact, retrieved a load of commercial grade Star League LosTech desk accessories.

Yay?

(As Farah said, people died for this stuff?)



Now there was a slight problem that the two gentleman from before had teamed-up to contain Ed in his little condo because they were under the impression from a former client that the vault contained... Not staplers.

"Ed," Lynessa said reproachfully in her best "talking to small children" Teacher voice. "Was that client you?"

"Ys, m'm." Ed said in exactly the same guilty tone as a five year old caught putting leaves in another child's hood or something.

And the reason was because no-one aside from the paladins would take a job to retrieve LosTech staplers and so he'd made up a treasure to get them on-board.

There two options. The first would involve coming and fighting around the condo, but the problem was, it sounded like nothing more than 40 tons would work - and Lynessa not REALLY keen on sending the Raven down unsupported, so that was out.

The second option was lure the two villains out uisng the treaure as bait, so they would could in their assault mechs which was clearly what the lance was going to do, why was option A even on the table, seriously?

Okay, so the enemy would be "big-ass assault mechs" so the lance would drop in with Zuranna in the Decapitator, Mylassta getting to play with the new Rocket Shark, Natasha in the Bull Shark and Summer in the Annihilator.

More or less as soon as they lance touched down the pair of idiots started bickering.

Nigel had a 95-tonner supported by a 25 and 35 tonner.

Natasha started off with dropping a Thumper on the latter two, destroying a Commando and hilarious blowing the ECM off a Raven.

Summer toddled up and blew Binton's head off.



The unfortunate Raven got to be the first test for the Rocket Shark.



Hampton arrived dispatching a pair of Locusts. The locusts must have been confused, seeing the assault mechs run away, but really, the lance was just buying time for the Thumper to cool down, because it amused them.

Aw. the Locust 1M didn't get close enough. Oh well. It got the Thumper, the 1E got the Rocket Shark. Surprisingly, it survived that (Mylassta hadn't aimed) and Zuranna blew it up with the Decapitator.

Hampton in his Stalker and a Galleon TAG followed behind. Hampton got his head blow off by Summer and Natasha and one burst from the Decapitator was all it took to put paid to the vehicle.



Three parts of Banshee, but no significant salvage. (The Stalker also got an ammo explosion.)

It seemed very likely that Ed's "associates" were ComStar, from the way he talked, not that he'd put that together.

The reward was really nothing special at all, just a few mech parts (most of a Dragon).

Eh, easy come, easy go!



And on that note, we shall leave the paladins here for the mini-hiatus while I'm away. Possibility there might be the next one a week on Saturday, but in theory we should be back for definite a week on Sunday, assuming nothing goes Horribly Wrong, but this year, that's a distinct possibility...

[The Glyphstone]

Ed Corbu is the second-best Flashpoint client in the game.The best is Reynauld Yamaguchi, the Kurita merc liaison.

[Aotrs Commander]

Ed Corbu is the second-best Flashpoint client in the game.The best is Reynauld Yamaguchi, the Kurita merc liaison.

Yes, Reynauld Mollaro, I mean Londo Yamaguchi is indeed the best.



Bleakbane Plays BATTLETECH, Part Thirty-Five:

Righty-doke, then, where were we?

Spoiler

Show

That's right - anti-Kurita missions. Starting with a 4-skull mission to capture a newly-activated factory from them for Davion.

It was in polar climes, so the current lance - Zuranna in the Decapitator, Mylassta in the Rocket Shark, Natasha (still in high spirits) in the Bull Shark and Summer in the Annihilator - would do fine.

The lance quickly encountered a Grasshopper, at the bottom of a ridge. Mylassta showered it with missiles, but the rest of the lance couldn't spot it. Natasha could draw a line on an approaching Victor, though, but it meant losing sight of the Grasshopper - all to the good, it'd make it come to them, along with the other 80-tonner coming in.

Natasha moved up, sending a steady stream of fire into the Victor's head.



The Grasshopper hopped up into sight, and Natasha spotted first a JagerMech and then an Awesome stomping up.

Zuranna took a long-range shot at the latter, followed by Summer and Mylassta hit the Grasshopper again. It turned and fled to stabilise. Natasha decapitated the Awesome; Summer started on the JagerMech.

The Grasshopper - perhaps a little unwisely as Zuranna stomped menacingly towards it - stayed exactly where it was, even after a third barrage from Mylassta. Darius warned there were likely reinforcements incoming.

The JagerMech made the equally as odd decision to fire at Mylassta and then walk closer, where Summer could blow its leg and head off.

The Grasshopper did not want to die. Even after a sold punch from Zuranna - which took off the left torso - and a further missile shower - which took off the right - and it still stumbled out to head-butt Natasha. It took a FIFTH salvo of LRM 20s from a fuming Mylassta and only FINALLY died - STILL on its feet - when Zuranna punched in the back.

Just in time for the reinforcements to arrive, starting with another Grasshopper.

Well, Natasha wasn't having any of that, and with autocannons alone destroyed the head with one burst.

Zuranna quickly turned around and sprinted towards the enemy, revealing a Victor and a Quickdraw. Followed by a Catapult C4, which managed to hit her in the head with a fluke shot (especially considering the short range).

Two consecutive missile salvoes knocked the Victor over. Summer, now able to draw a bead on the enemy, destroyed it, though not quite like she'd have preferred.

Zuranna jumped up and attempted to shoot the Catapult in the head at close range, but only dinged it. Natasha's continuous fire blew the Quickdraw's head off as she approached. Zuranna's second salvo finished the Catapult off. And after that it was a simple job of strolling into the factory.



Enough salvage for a Victor, Grasshopper and C4 Catapult.

Next up, a 4-skull battle against Kurita in the highlands. Shelat and the Overlord replaced Zuranna.

Warhammer, Dragon and TWO 100-tonners!

With only 3/15 salvage, Natasha didn't hesitate and just cored the Dragon, stopping it spotting. Summer spun and blew the Warhammer's head off. Two down.

Shelat and Mylassta bombarded the next mech - an Atlas - with missile after missile. Bulwarked and in the forest, they did little damage, but a full 200 LRMs finally knocked it over.

To no great avail, however, as Summer and Natasha did not manged to remove its head before it got up and the second Atlas lumbered into sight, both pounding the Bull Shark. Natasha vented a burst of coolant and took one more shot, taking it down this time.

Shelat and Mylassta switched fire, but were unable to knock the other Atlas over - fortunately, Summer's headshot rendered the point moot.




Enough salvage for one Atlas, at least.

Three-skull tundra battle next, dealing with some Kurita terrorists. Mylassta switched to the Awesome for a laugh.

This was going to be... Interesting. Local government forces were incoming too, and they didn't apparently want anyone to take their glory or something.

Oh well, less work for the paladins...

As Mylassta had hoped, the lance got close enough to spy a Kuritan Highlander before the government forces (bounty-hunters, apparently) dropped in nearly on top of where the Kuritans were. So they paladins about faced and dashed off back down the road to a nice copse of trees for a bit of a tea-break while the two sides fought it out. Mylassta munched on a bar and watched, just close enough to see the light from the explosions - it was night - but nothing else.

Two Kuritan mechs went down first, at the cost of a government mech. From the burst of the explosion, Mylassta hazarded one of the former might have been carrying ECM - and there had been quite a lot of clunks of melee hits coming over the hills.

Then it went quiet. Apparently, two of the government Blackjacks had gotten bored and decided to go and pick a fight with the paladins. The first one went down after a Thumper shell landed between them and the first fire came in after; the second lost a leg, but managed to get up long enough to see its last approaching comrade - a Wolverine - get decapitated, before Summer's casual shot blasted the other leg off.

So, just two Kuritas left, then.

The Highlander had survived, to the lance's lack or surprise...



...But not for long.

Apparently, though, it was the last 50%, which suggested there had only been two Kurita mechs after all. The government forces, Darius reported had been hit by the Kuritas a day or so before, it was just bad luck (and worse judgement) they had showed up at the same time and didn't want to join forces.



From the salvage, it appeared the other mechs were a Centurion and a Victor, so probably not ECM after all.

Enough bits for a Wolverine.

That just left the last contract Lynessa was going to attempt - a mission for the Taurians (they'd lose that rep soon enough!) against the Capellans. She'd have not bothered, but it was another mission for the skull-count...

As this was a prototype base capture, Mylassta swapped back to the Rocket Shark.

The lance moved up and easily destroyed the first three turrets before the enemy even knew what hit them.

They were disturbed by the presence of an Assassin and a Zeus moving into range from the right flank.

The first round of fire was fairly desultory, though the Assassin was knocked down and subsequently killed by Shelat.

As she approached the Zeus, Natasha spotted a Rifleman. Knowing they had a better sensor/visibility range, she and Summer switched targets to blew its head off.

The Zeus inexplicably turned it back on the lance. As this prevented Mylassta from blowing its leg off, she didn't waste the resolve aiming and just hammered it. It lost the weakened leg anyway and though Summer tried to take the other, it died to CT destruction. Shelat and Mylassta turned their attention to lock on to and destroy the last turret instead.

This left Natasha to destroy the last enemy mech, an incoming Centurion - and it did not stand two salvoes from the Bull Shark.

The base was then easily captured.



That left a Rifleman and Zeus for sale. Neat!

Next stop was Flintoft, for a Capellan Flashpoint against Davion (oops) and then the next flashpoint was for Kurita against Davion (double oops), but never mind, the reputation damage would be easy to fix, hopefully...

So, time to use some of that new stuff! First off, the Bull Shark could upgrade its last +LB-X AC/10 to ++ and add another half-ton of armour.

Next, the Awesome replaced its regular PPC with the new ++ER PPC. By removing the TAG (which the Awesome rarely got close enough to use) for juggling the available heat exchangers and adding a heat bank, it got down to 57/61 heat.

After a lot of thought, Lynessa stripped the +++large laser from the Decapitator. This left enough tonnage to install one of the ++medium pulse lasers (keeping the damage the same), the TAG and another heat exchanger, bringing it down to 30/70 heat (from 30/75) and adding the TAG, at the cost of some range - though at this point, the Decapitator tended to want to get close to use all the lasers, rather than half-heartedly shooting at range. (It could still headcap with the larger pulse laser if it got lucky.)

There wasn't really enough tonnage to sensibly fit the Narc launcher, not unless Lynessa wanted to functionally cripple its damage output, but it was a start.

That was really about it for the moment. The heat-dispersion issues meant there really wasn't much else Lynessa could squeeze on anything - like for instance, putting the ER lasers on the Raven or Black Knight or something.

Oh well.

A few days into the trip, Lynessa realised that the Flintoft flashpoint was going to expire long before the got there, and switched targets to Lindsay.

Lynessa heard a bit of a ruckus and on investigating, found Anja and Summer in a rather heated argument. Summer had said something (which she'd already apologised for) but Anja was accusing her of putting on airs and such. Summer was clearly getting very frustrated (and holding herself back), while Anja ranted on and it was clearly going to escalate, as Summer might not have quite had Mylassta's temper, but also not the same level of control. Lynessa interrupted and suggested they take it to the gym.

Anja was daft enough to agree and ended up in a sparring match with a magical paladin. To Summer's credit, she didn't use a whit of magic, but Anja was primarily a MechWarrior who did a bit of brawling, and Summer was primarily an unarmed combatant who did a bit of mech piloting.

It was certainly an entertaining match, but the outcome wasn't really in any doubt. Summer, of course, did not lord it over, but helped Anja to here feet, did bit a little bit of curing - though Anja still would be out for a week. Summer was feeling pretty pleased with herself, though.

(Oh, GREAAAAAAT, Lindsey is a half-skull world. Grind incoming... About the third or fourth reload, I got a load which were 5/7 against the Taurians and mostly battles, so at least they'd be quick.)

Payday:



Day 1051 (149 days to go!) the paladins arrived at Lindsay. Nothing on worth in the store, save a single basic heat bank.

On to the Long Hunt flashpoint, working for the Draconis Combine against Davion.

Londo, sorry, Renauld Mollari was unusually serious. one Colonel Basil Lees of the Armed Forces of the Federated Suns had gone and massacred a farming village, including one of Londo's mates.

Well, if there was one thing that got paladins REALLY annoyed, it was massacres of people. There was an arse-kicking approaching.

Shelat grabbed the improved Decapitator for the assault on the villain's base, located in the jungles.

The base was defended by turrets, with a 70 ton and two 40-ton mechs on scopes. No, as Mylassta levelled the first heavy LRM turret with her own missiles, two 70-tonners.

One of the 40-tonners was an Assassin, which took a shot at the Decapitator and then ran. As the enemy was hesitate to close, Shelat popped into view of one turret and locked the next, so Summer and Mylassta could take both down. They spotted one of the 70-tonners was a Grasshopper. Natasha, rather than exposed herself to all the enemy fire, contented herself in dropping a Thumper on all four mechs since they'd clustered up for her.

They stayed close together - the Assassin, what was likely a second and two Grasshoppers. And darn if it wouldn't take a moment to get the Thumper reloaded...! Oh well, they'd just have to do it one at a time, Natasha figured...



Summer headcapped the other Grasshopper. Mylassta turned her attention to the forth turret that Natasha's move to the ridge to fire had revealed. Shelat dropped the first Assassin with a salvo.

The lone Assassin survived an LRM barrage just barely, so Natasha vented coolant and then blew it apart.

Summer obliterated the first building - and it was at this point, enemy reinforcements were detected. Shelat finished destroying the buildings, and the lance moved towards the evac point - where, predictably, the enemy awaited.

The largest - a Cataphract - immediately died to Natasha's guns. Summer couldn't get a line of sight, so just dashed to a new position. Shelat and Mylassta teamed up to hit the rear-most mech on their scopes - a Rifleman - with sensor-locked LRM fire.

An enemy Catapult had barraged them while the Cataphract spotted and the Catapult now moved to engage Summer. (Mylassta had surmised it was a Catapult from the incoming fire.) She and Natasha blasted it apart between them. Meanwhile, Shelat and Mylassta continued to batter the Rifleman.

The last mech, a ubiquitous Quickdraw, now bounced up onto the ridge. It was, again - somewhat unintentionally - obliterated by the Annihilator and Bull Shark. The Rifleman did not survive Shelat and Mylassta's third round of fire.



Salvage for a Grasshopper and Cataphract...

But to Lynessa's complete lack of surprise, Colonel Lees had not been at the base, because of course he hadn't. And he was calling now (with Londo muted and listening).

Mostly just to be insulting and challenge the paladins to come and fight him. Darius wasn't too keen... But Lees had anti-ship missile targeting the Argo.

That was not good. Mylassta, of the girls, was best suited to actual space-operations and stood a fair chance of being able to shoot the missiles down. Poppy was not quite as skilled in that particular area, nor was Lynessa confident that they could prevent all of the missiles hitting.

Londo had one possible other option - go for the sensor array that was targeting the Argo.

"Screw that," Mylassta said. "We're down here, we'll go kick his butt!"

"You are a very brave little girl," Londo said. "Foolish, but very brave." Mylassta just rolled her eyes. "Good luck to you then commander," Londo said, taking a swig from his glass.

The paladins headed out on Mylassta's order to the swamp where Lees was waiting. His initial welcoming committee was a pair of Cataphracts - one of each sort. While Summer and Natasha fired at the 1X, Shelat locked onto the other Mylassta had spotted the tell-tale signature of an active ECM field - and now with a lock, could drop her LRMs.

As the 1X headed towards the 0X, Shelat locked the latter again and this time Mylassta could aim - and went for the left torso. she didn't destroy it - but maybe a Thumper would finish the job? No, sadly, though Natasha caught both Cataphracts and a 60-tonner in the blast. Summer, meanwhile moved to shoot at the Grasshopper standing well clear of the field, but didn't achieve much.

A shower of LRMs from the left flank indicated enemy reinforcements were on the way - this could get messy!

Shelat quickly locked the 0X Cataphract again, and this time, Mylassta blew to torso off and flattened it. That let Summer CT-kill it before it could get up. Natasha engaged the east lance's incoming Rifleman and head-capped it.

As more LRM fire - rather desultory, making the girls wonder if it was a couple of Assassins - came in, Summer killed the remaining Cataphract.



The Grasshopper went down to the Bull Shark and Decapitator's fire.

The lance regrouped to Mylassta, the furthest west. Their suspicions were confirmed when a pair of Assassins and a Hatchetman came into sight of the Bull Shark's rangefinder. Natasha dropped a Thumper on them, and Summer headcapped the Hatchetman.

The Assassins lived charmed lives, having stood in a spore field, both avoiding no less than three attempts by Mylassta and Shelat to blow a leg off. (On the last shot, Shelat had good chances to hit and only fired the TAG and large pulse laser and both missed entirely.)

Their luck did not last, however; Mylassta split her fire to remove the evade chevrons and finally blew the leg off the left-hand one. Natasha destroyed the other leg; Summer CT-killed the other Assassin.

That just left one enemy - a JagerMech down in a valley cleft. It couldn't get close enough and backed away slowly, meaning that it got hit in the head by repeated sensor-locked LRMs, until its leg gave and the pilot went unconscious.



Salvage for a JagerMech...

Now it was time to deal with Lees himself.

Darius was concerned about the lance dealing with a third round, but his concerns were muted by raucous laughter from the girls.

Time to capture the dude. Since he was all bluster and was not prepared to step into a mech himself, the paladins would have to fetch him.

Lees was overconfident, boasting about how the lance had a "campaign worth's of attrition."

"He knows we creamed his goons without taking more than superficial armour damage, right?" Mylassta asked rhetorically.

She opted to break left up a slope around to where Lees' tower was, and as she'd expected, there was an 80-ton mech (a Zeus) on that approach, and a 95-tonner (a Banshee) down below.

Neither seemed to be inclined to get close. Shelat took a bead on the Zeus, but it was bulwarked and in cover, so she had a desultory pulse laser shot at it and Mylassta held fire. Shelat inched closer and immediately the Decapitator's new load-out proved its worth. It wasn't worth a called shot, but landing a TAG hit on it (and the large pulse laser for the sake of argument) was definitely worthwhile.

The Banshee was not so fortunate, as Summer opened fire.



Mylassta and Natasha unloaded on the Zeus. Having shot at the Decapitator, it was no longer bulwarked, so while the fire did not do a great deal, it knocked out a couple of weapons and destabilised it.

Meanwhile, two 60-ton mechs were closing in.

Mylassta's next salvo blew off both the Zeus arms and knocked it down, but sadly, it died to CT damage instead of being headcapped by Summer.

Shelat moved to shoot at the first 60-tonner a Rifleman. She missed the head, but the TAG lit it up.

Natasha and Summer ripped half of it away, blasting a leg off, but Shelat didn't quite manage to take the other leg off. Mylassta hammered the other mech, a second Rifleman. Shelat then jumped in behind it and cored it through the Rifleman's paper-thin rear armour. As the lone remaining Rifleman limped forwards, Natasha switched to ER lasers only and blasted its other leg away.

Colonel Lees, seeing his mechs so effortlessly destroyed, was trying to make a break for it, when the strange, LRM-armed mech he'd never seen before stopped. The cockpit opened and a young lady FLEW out, surrounded by a lilac glow. For a second, he was too stunned to go for his gun. His remaining men were already dropping theirs, since the handful of them did not want to tangle with four assault mechs, even if one of them didn't seem to be piloting right at the moment. Lees managed to gather himself to get off one shot, which skittered off the lilac field, before the girl blasted him clean into a tree with a burst of lavender energy out of her staff, knocking him out cold.



Salvage for a Banshee and a Rifleman this time.

"AAAAAAAAAH, Commander," Londo Yamaguchi crowed over the comms, once again in good cheer. "Excellent job, yes! The good colonel has rather lost his composure, I'm afraid. Screaming himself hoarse in the cell as we speak. And on his way back for trial. Thank you again, commander!"

A war-criminal was down - everyone was happy at a solid win (except maybe his Davion superiors, but then if they didn't want to lose material, they shouldn’t have let him run loose, now should they?)

Nothing special in the reward, the best being a ++heat bank.

Now to win back some favour.

Well, starting with the pirates - a one-skull desert battle.

Shelat exchanged the Decapitator for the Overlord, Mylassta swapped into the Fair Marauder and Summer into the Rocket Shark and Natasha, for variety, grabbed the Atlas.

The enemy was a single Thunderbolt (headcapped by Mylassta with one shot), followed by a Locust and three vehicles, all in poor condition.



Locust salvaged, next job, again for the pirates, a battle in the badlands...

Two Locusts, a Raven (miles away from the others), a Hunchback and a Lyran lance that elected to drop in and be aggressive, consisting of two foolish Javelin pilots.



Hunchback and Locust salvaged. Next!

Base destruction in the jungle. Mylassta grabbed the Atlas and Natasha swapped back to the Bull Shark, because of the Thumper and all these knackered mechs would make for even easier killing.

Javelin, Jenner and four turrets. Splortch.



Never mind selecting salvage there was only six pieces of anything TO salvage two mech parts and four small jump jets...

Next was a-

"Motherf-"

"Mylassta!"

-training mission with Mylassta's favourite people, Burger Time, Guano and Pontoon. Mylassta, already banging her head on the console, took the Decapitator.

The Panther and UrbanMech were no problem, but the surprise undamaged Dragon was slightly more of a challenge. Or not, as it ignored Mylassta who'd walked up right next to it; it was seemingly intent on the lights that had scattered out of its sight. She cored it through the rear armour with one shot.



Panther and an UrbanMech salvaged... Next!

Hunt down a Taurian war-criminal (lot of that going around at the moment). A whole skull, this time.

Zuranna took the Decapitator from Mylassta, who took the Rocket Shark; Natasha grabbed the Bull Shark and Summer, for variety, the Awesome.

Two Locusts a Jenner and a Shadowhawk... Double-splortch. (Especially for the Locusts, because Thumper...)



Nothing of note to salvage...

Next!

One-skull mission to capture an ancestral fortress...

"No, Darius, it does not look like 'a modern, operational military base,' are you EVEN looking at the feed?"



Locust, Javelin, Jenner; the latter two swatted by the Thumper. They didn't even mange to HIT the Decapitator.



Javelin for salvage.

Last one!

One-skull battle against pirates.

Two Javelins, Locust and Commando. Splortch again.



No salvage of note.

Right, that cleared that out.

So, Davion rep was only back to 90, Kurita rep was... Back to 0. Ace. More anti-Kurita missions required, then...

(And... Of COURSE the Flintoft flashpoint had come back now.)

Next stop, Flintoft, which was annoyingly a 13-day trip despite being but a single jump. Lynessa HAD rather wanted to stop by the Davion faction store at Brockway for more ultra ACs, but time was running out.

Onward, then...



And there we shall leave it there for today, while I try and get some contracts...

[Aotrs Commander]

Bleakbane Plays BATTLETECH, Part Thirty-Six:

Spoiler

Show

(So, after a LOT of reloads to get some anti-Kurita contracts - not helped by the fact that my new BT toys came today and I got very distracted and was doing stuff like starting to get the profiles sorted in HeavyMetalPro - we were ready to carry on!)

The paladins arrived at Flintoft. There was nothing aside from a 0-ton arm mod in the store, so time to get on with the Double Agent flashpoint.

Marina Liao wanted the paladins to take Taurian contract to capture a Davion base, then betray the Taurians and turn it over to the Capellans.

(So, for the first time, I paused to look this up just a little. On the one hand, don't want to not do a flashpoint...)

Lynessa was a little dubious about this, but the Taurians couldn't hate them more than they did already and something about this didn't seem right.

This was a 240-ton limit, with a maximum of 75 tons per mech. Tricky.

Lynessa opted to send Summer in the Shortbow (Summer was still in high spirits, though Natasha had finally calmed down), Mylassta in the Fair Marauder, Alarhan in the Raven Fair and Zuranna in the Shadow Punch. 5 tons under the limit. No LRMs for turrets, but with ECM cover, hopefully they wouldn't need it. (She had considered and discarded using the Phoenix Coil and the Fireforce or Trebuchet instead of the Raven Fair and Shadow Punch, which would have fitted into the tonnage exactly.)

The base didn't look up to much; didn't even appear to have turrets. This was very suspicious.



As the lance approached, a Davion lance of two Vindicators a Griffin and a vehicle dropped in.

Darn, it was not going to be possible to leg-cap a vehicle - Lynessa had the medics on stand-by...

The lance fell back slowly, taking careful aim at the enemy's legs. It took a good couple of goes, but they finally destroyed the Griffin's legs. With some SIGNIFICANT effort and VERY careful fire, the de-legged both Vindicators. The last had taken a miss-aimed leg-shot both to the CT from Mylassta's first shot, so they had to be extremely careful not to CT kill it.

They did the best they could with the Manticore tank, Mylassta only hitting it with the large laser (her autocannon had been off while she carefully shot at Vindicator legs) so as to minimise the damage when she disabled it.

They reached the structure, but Sumire picked up it was sending some sort of distress beacon.



That was fairly easy, considering, had the paladins not been actively trying to take the mechs down without harm to the pilots, it would have been very easy... (All the pilots and crews survived, though it was touch and go for a couple of the vehicle crews.)

One Vindicator salvaged (and sold right back to Davion!)

Farah had disabled the distress beacon, and discovered the base was actually a secret Davion intelligence prison. Yang reckoned Davion must have captured a spy for either the Taurians or Capellans, which was why they were so hot to take it - most likely the Taurians.

No, actually, it was a CANOPIAN agent - though why Davion had been all down on her to the extent she was in such a bad state was... Oh, right, because people of Colonel Lees ilk existed.

So, the choice was to hand her over to one of the paladin's designated enemies for More Torture (and likely a death sentence under Liao) or send her back safe and relatively sound to the paladin's most spiritually close allies.

HMM. WHAT A DIFFICULT CHOICE.

So, Mylassta's lance would be running interference for the Canopians, likely against both Liao and the Taurians. The same tonnage restrictions applied, so they took the same lance out.

THIS time, they wouldn't be shooting to disable, either!

Both enemy forces would likely be attacking each other. Sadly, Mylassta's thought of being able to sit back under ECM cover and let them kill each other off were a bit dashed by the Canopians sending a lance to help. Irony, the one time they'd have been better without help. And they'd sent a Javelin, Locust, Quickdraw and Cicada, just to make it more difficult...

Oh well...

The lance swiftly encountered a Taurian Locust, Blackjack and Cicada, which took a PPC shot at the Canopian Locust. The Canopians had at least moved into the ECM field, but the Locust had sensor locked. Mylassta figured, then, she had better make the enemy Cicada the first target. She cursed as the autocannon missed, preventing her from destroying it in one hit. As Zuranna moved up to fire and deal some damage, she spotted a Vulcan behind as well.

Summer jumped to the maximum extent of the ECM field and destroyed the Cicada, leaving Alarahn to take a shot at the enemy Locust.

And then the Capellans arrived.



A Spider, two Assassins and a Wolverine. Fortunately, the Taurians were as keen to shoot the Capellans as everyone else, and the incoming Capellans were functionally fighting 12 to 4. Zuranna picked the leg off one of the Assassins, already damaged. The allied Cicada and Quickdraw quickly moved in and picked it off.

(To my surprise, the allied AI seemed to ACTUALLY actively be keeping inside the ECM bubble, too.)

Mylassta, not having any luck at all, failed to CT kill the spider, and Summer didn't do much better with a regular salvo - but it allowed the Canopian Javelin to down it, so that was fine in the end.

Except that the Javelin was now exposed to a lot of enemy fire. To try and draw some off, Zuranna broke the ECM field to run up at punch the Wolverine. Naturally, NOW was the point the Taurian Blackjack decided to start shooting - at the Javelin, too.

Summer elected to core the Assassin.



Mylassta took a shot at the Blackjack, but failed utterly to headcap it.

The Canopian Javelin wisely ducked back into the ECM field and hid. Not massively helpful, since the Taurian Locust ran into the field.

Naturally this meant the Javelin died due to the Vulcan apparently blowing both legs off.

(Dammit. Not much I do have done about that; only Alarhan could have acted and I don't think shifting position would have helped and at close range, the Raven can't one-shot a Locust with two MLs and an LRM 10.)

Zuranna ran back and tried to shoot the Locust but totally missed. The Canopians turned their attention to the Blackjack, so Mylassta smashed the Locust apart with a melee strike. The Blackjack sensor locked the Raven Fair - a bit pointlessly, since there was no-one left to shoot it. Summer spun about and blasted the Wolverine's left side off, dropping it. Alarhan chipped away at the Blackjack.

Zuranna and Alarhan turned back around and shot the Wolverine's other leg off. Summer shot off the Blackjack's left leg (unintentionally, she'd been going for a head shot and expecting a CT-kill). Mylassta plugged the Vulcan in the head.



The Canopian Locust ran up and kicked the downed Blackjack. which was hilarious, not very effective. More usefully, Alarhan blew its crippled right leg off. The area was clear!

The paladins extracted the dazed (and embarrassed) Javelin pilot, so at least there wasn't a fatality.



Wolverine and a Blackjack salvaged.

Ana Marie Centralla was very pleased with getting her agent back.

The rewards was nothing special a few mech parts (one of which was an Awesome so would have been exciting at the point 2.5 skull missions were the lance’s limit), but what the hey.

Right, time to do more damage to Kuritan reputation!

First off, a 4.5 skull mission to assassinate a Kuritan smuggler at the poles.

Zuranna took the Decapitator, Mylassta the Awesome, Alarhan the Bull Shark and Summer the Annihilator.

Two sets of guards... Mylassta headed the lance off east to attack the reinforcements first.

No use. Both lances still converged on them. An Orion from the west lance and Quickdraw from the east - both in poor shape - acted as spotters and seemingly everything had ace pilots or was only heavies, since the entire enemy force took shots at Zuranna before the lance could do anything. Mostly via indirect fire, so the damage wasn't too bad, but even so.

Well, Summer wasn't having any of THAT. She headcapped the Quickdraw. Alarhan followed after by doing the same to the Orion, the efforts aided by the appalling state of the enemy armour.

Mylassta and Zuranna took some pot-shots at the next Quickdraw Alarhan's viewfinder had exposed.

The enemy moved in. In addition to the Quickdraw, the eats lance had an Assassin and a Catapult; from the incoming fire and the tonnage, it was likely the west lance was a Rifleman, Catapult and Orion.

Seeing how weak the enemy armour was, Alarhan moved forwards towards the west lance, where she could hit all three - the 65-tonner was behind a ridge, but Mylassta had guessed right about the other two. Her thumper didn't kill any of them...



But they had very little armour left!

Summer shot the leg off the Catapult and Zuranna finished it off. Mylassta headcapped the Quickdraw.

Quite astonishingly, the enemy force severely damaged BOTH legs of the Bull Shark with the massive barrage of fire.

(I really didn’t think it'd taken THAT much damage, but it was down to 50% armour, pretty much, by the end of the second salvo. That's INCREDIBLY annoying - it even has 1480 armour now and was the most heavily armour mech on the field.)

Alarhan turned and dashed back out of line of fire. If the enemy stayed close, maybe a second Thumper would splortch them anyway...

Summer CT-killed the Assassin, clearing the eats flank. Zuranna and Mylassta moved to a new position, the other side of the rock outcropping that was covering Alarhan, hoping to distract some fire. This may not have been the best idea, since the enemy Orion managed to IS the Decapitator now.

(SERIOUSLY?)

Alarhan stayed where she was - the Thumper had reloaded.



And that was that.

Summer stepped up to shoot the last mech - a Thunderbolt, not a Catapult - and the escorts were cleared, but at an unusually high cost.

OH. The smuggler was in a Cyclops HQ! No WONDER everything was going before the lance was, despite them bringing their own. Fully undamaged too.

That mattered little, though, as Summer and Mylassta's headshots hit it almost at the same instant.



Ouch. The Bull Shark was down to 60% IS on both legs. Alarhan was lucky she'd not gotten an ammo explosion.

(Oh, and haha, this mission reward was AWFUL; the cash max was about 600k if I'd gone for that and the best salvage (which I did) was 3/15.)

Cyclops HQ for sale, along with a Quickdraw.

The next mission was a 4-skull assassination mission, dealing with another Kurita insurgent. Hopefully this one wouldn't be as costly. Zuranna switched to the Overlord and Alarhan to the Shortbow - since they needed a new spotter, as the Bull Shark was out. (Lynessa had not quite decided to pause to repair the damaged mechs yet.)

Again, two sets of defenders. But this time, the reinforcements were at the opposite end of the Operational Area from the lance - so it would be as well to go straight for the nearest ones.

(DARN IT! Give the enemy initiative, it looked like ANOTHER force with a Cyclops HQ or something lurking around.)

This time, the lance spotted a Dragon, a Shrek and another 80-ton vehicle to start with. Again, they had poor armour. Fortunately enough.

Alarhan blasted the Shrek apart with one salvo without even having to aim. Mylassta and Summer headcapped the Dragon.



This was better, at least the lance wasn't getting fire from umpteen enemies before they could react this time.

Mylassta destroyed a second Shrek moving down the mountain to the west.



Zuranna ran forwards to lure the last Shrek - for that was what it was - into Alarhan's missiles. One lot down.

The lance started towards the primary target - it looked closer than the reinforcements - but a Phoenix Hawk appeared at extreme range first. Summer blew it apart.

This left its Catapult, Thunderbolt and Quickdraw friend to blunder into sight range.

Summer knocked the Catapult over by destroying a leg; Mylassta headcapped the Quickdraw; Alarhan destroyed the Thunderbolt by ammo explosion. Zuranna managed - though not before it got up and shot at the Shortbow - to blow off the Catapult's other leg.

The enemy Cyclops - it HAD to be a HQ Cyclops - was just entering range now. Alarhan jumped it to shot at the head. No, it was a Cyclops Z, like the Decapitator, which was nearly as bad. Alarhan damaged the head and badly destabilised it, allowing Summer to knock it over and blow the torsos off, which left Mylassta to finish the head.



There, that was a bit better...

No notable salvage, just a few mech parts (3/4 of a Cyclops Z for one...)

Next up, the final foray against Kurita here, a 4-skull polar capture of a manufacturing base.

Shelat swapped in for Zuranna on this one, and Mylassta snagged the Rocket Shark.

Mylassta lead the lance east, across a ridge, so they could look down on the enemy base - no turrets, surprisingly. Alarhan spotted a Kuritan JagerMech standing guard. Summer put some AC rounds into its head before the pilot even knew what killed him.

The lance moved along a little further, and the JagerMech's lancemates - a Marauder, Centurion and Griffin - walked out into view, wondering what happened.

Summer, Mylassta and Shelat knocked the Marauder over and destroyed it in short order.



The Griffin disappeared into trees out of sight, and Summer, not aiming properly, didn't kill the Centurion. Mylassta and a Shelat knocked it over, though and Shelat's second salvo CT-killed it neatly. Summer made up for her previous error by headcapping the Griffin.

The lance moved along the ridge towards the base. Reinforcements were inbound - but the lance had a nice little sniping spot.



Hatchetman, Orion, Wolverine. Orion first, Summer figured. She didn't kill it, though, so Mylassta and Shelat knocked it over with LRMs.

A Victor joined the party and the Wolverine and Hatchetman got close enough to Alarhan to start shooting at her. Mylassta quickly hit the Orion again, CT-killing it before it could get up.

Summer made short work of the Victor.



Alarhan jumped down and cored the Hatchetman. The Wolverine was unable to stand up to the full fire of the lance, though it ended up dying due to leg-loss, since head shots were much less likely with all the missiles.

The base was easily captured.



+3 hit defence gyro and an impressive Victor, Centurion, JagerMech AND Griffin for salvage!

So. There were other contracts in the system, by Lynessa really needed to pay attention to the reputations now. The flashpoint back in Capellan space was for... *sigh* the Draconis Combine. It was also only 2.5 skulls with a "rare weapons" as a reward. No hurry, then. Lynessa considered going to another Black Market world - so maybe missions for pirate reputation...? There was a Davion 5-skull desert escort fighting pirates (pass), a 4-skull mission for the pirates with VERY generous salvage and if she went one off max, it was still 6 selectable pieces and the rep would take them to neutral. But it had a restriction of 60 tons per mech, and Mylassta was really NOT keen on the idea of fighting a 4-skull operation with the mediums (since she had no 60s); the other pirate mission was a 3-skull attack and defend, which would require max rep to be worth it...

So, no, Lynessa abandoned that idea.

Instead, they would head for 4-skull Carmichel, which only had Kurita/Taurian/Davion presence, and thus hopefully a better chance of getting decent anti-Kurita missions.

The Bull Shark would be repaired; the Decapitator too, but while it was there, two 0-tonnage stability damage arm mods were replaced with +10 damage ones. Those mods removed went on the Phoenix Coil; the Marauder Fair got a few more stability damage mods and the last of the mods (and a replacement upgrade) went on the Atlas.

As they set out for Carmichel, Ayasha Hadley attempted to contact them. Attempted being the operative word, since Lynessa did that thing where when you get a spam call, you just put the phone down and walk away (while it cost them money) until they give up an go away.

A new flashpoint appeared; 4-skull and all the way over in Marik space. (Against Steiner, because of course...) But for LosTech rewards. 300 days until it expired, though so that was more time than they had...

Onwards.



And we shall leave it there for this session!

Right, off to start part 37...

[Destro_Yersul]

Kind of funny how friendly AI lances are usually way more a liability than an asset.

[Aotrs Commander]

Kind of funny how friendly AI lances are usually way more a liability than an asset.

I was honestly surprised they were smart enough to mostly stay in the ECM field - and to a point, the Locust and Javeling did actually a couple of time move and entrench after being badly shot, putting them out of sight; but the Javelin really wanted to get that shot on the downed enemy, unfortunately...



Bleakbane Plays BATTLETECH, Part Thirty-Seven:

So, did I say this part would be Thursday? Hahahaha, silly me, forgot that the RNG would rather do ANYTHING than actually let me, like, paly or anything. Yesterday was a late start (whereas normally on Thursday at the moment I can get a goodly few hours in) and what time I had was frittered away mostly reading Sarna while I tried to get some decent contracts.

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(Okay. So, in numerous reloads - a LOT of reloads, both today and Monday after I finished the session - NO missions against Kurita were generated at ALL. Missions FOR them? Yes. Against? Nope, it was nothing but pirate and Taurian opposition. The complete lack suggests to me that it isn't possible to generate any missions against Kurita at Carmichel, which is kinda of surprising (there’s only Kurita/Davion/Taurian in the system), but either it's STUPENDOUSLY bad luck or it's mechanically prevented).

So after probably an hour (or admittedly sporadic tries, as I was reading random crap on Sarna while doing so), I settled for one set that had four vs Taurian. Two for Kurita, but I'm not 100% comfortable with the idea of tasking a mission for just rep and then withdrawing in bad faith JUST to tank the rep. Okay, no, I'M fine with it, but that's pushing Lynessa a little too far.

And then I remembered I had only SPECIFICALLY gone to Carmichel for anti-Kurita missions, because with only the three powers in it, it looked like the most likely candidate AND then there was sweet FA in the shop.

So that was kind of a massive waste of effort.

So. RELOAD. We'll go somewhere else, back towards Marik space (where Steiner missions are).

Lynessa blinked, waking up from her dream, as they were about to depart for 4-skull Lochmantle, not like in her dream...

Ayasha Hadley called up. There was a moment's pause as both she and Lynessa had a strong sense of deja vu, and then Lynessa turned the comms over to Zuranna and quietly murmured to the dwarf to go to town with invective. Ayasha cut the comms very quickly after that.

Because they had another couple of weeks before they got to the planet, Lynessa decided she'd have a laugh, so they dug out the King Crab, and slapped two Ultra AC/20s (with three tons of ammo each) and then stuffed it full of heat sinks and all four assorted heat banks (so it had an amazing shutdown heat of 170) and then slapped four +++Small Lasers on it for good measure, leaving a single ton for extra armour.

It would be complete just a day before they arrived.

Payday:



(Well, at least Lochmantle was consistently generating about ONE anti-Kurita mission per reload, which makes Carmichel all that more suspicious...

...

Or not. The RNG was throwing an absolute screaming wobbly, because apparently it has a massive stiffy for Kurita (makes sense, given how much it HATED Davion earlier in this run.)

Much, MUCH time later - it DID NOT want me to have more than one, if that, vrs Kurita mission - at about the time it was time to quit for the day, I settled for the only set I'd generated with two vrs-Kurita missions. And frankly, with having had a fairly paff day sorting other stuff out and generally (the 3D printer's no dead-dead, and so I'm down to back-up for the next 3-4 weeks until the new one comes), so I was like, "yeah, I'mma quit while I'm ahead, if this is any indication of what it'll be like in-mission.")

The paladins finally arrived, after what Lynessa felt was an unreasonable long trip.

But the King Crab was finished.




(Okay, let's see if we can get owt actually DONE today...!)

First then a simple 3.5 skull battle against a Kuritan lance.

Shelat in the Overlord, Mylassta in the Bull Shark, Vey testing out the King Crab (Vey because it was expected she might need coolant vent...) and Summer in the Annihilator.

The lance quickly encountered a Warhammer and a Catapult, both at the edge of range.

Mylassta took a shot at the Warhammer, which didn't have Bulwark.



That seemed like a good omen...

The others sprinted forwards - Shelat spotting (and getting shot at by) a Banshee and a Battlemaster. she kept running and punted the Catapult. Which rather daftly kicked her back. That was a fight it was going to lose...

Summer and Mylassta closed and headcapped the Banshee.

Vey closed to take a normal shot at the Catapult.



Okay, that was a lot of room to build up heat...

The Catapult was badly destabilised by the hit, so Shelat knocked it over. Mylassta switched to LB-X ACs only and CT- killed it.

Okay, the Battlemaster wanted to stay there and shoot Shelat, did it...?



That was a lot more heat, but still no problem...!



And first headshot for the King Crab! Neat!



Enough for a Banshee and Warhammer salvage!

Next mission was a 4-skull fight against two Kurita lances... in a Martian atmosphere.

Mylassta switched to the Fair Marauder, passing the Bull Shark to Vey. Summer stayed with the Annihilator - it did run relatively cool.

Mylassta moved up to take a couple of head-shots at the first enemy mech - a Thunderbolt. Shelat took a pair of regular shots at it, as the other two moved up, locating a Cataphract 1X to the east and a 75-tonner to the west (an Orion, they spotted as it flittered between rocks).

Long-range fire was starting to come in, but the girls were in position to make the most of their shots.

Vey did so, taking the Cataphract's head off.



Summer caught an LRM in the head, which was unfortunate. But the Orion proved a suitable vent for her anger.



Mylassta and Shelat double-teamed the Thunderbolt, Mylassta helping to essentially clothes-line it for Shelat's charge, dropping it hard on its arse. A quick stomp from the Overlord ensured it would not be getting up again.

The reinforcements would actually have to get close enough to do their own spotting now...

The Bull Shark picked them up, two 75-tonners, a 60 and a 50. The lance was in a dust storm, so felt no need to rush to the enemy. Shelat locked one and determine there was at least one Marauder in the enemy group.

The enemy milled around, but a Thumper dropped on them got them moving and a Marauder marched into sight. It left it, just as quickly, and Vey and Summer blew its head off.

The next hapless victim was a Rifleman that fell to Vey after a burst of coolant. An Orion strode up and into Summer's sights and it too went down to a headshot. (Mylassta, bulwarked in cover, was going a grand job of tanking the enemy shots.)

That last mech, a Centurion, got a second Thumper while it approached. A pair of shots from Mylassta and Shelat easily dealt with it.



An entire Orion salvaged, with a part for the next one...

Well, that was it for fighting Kurita. Next would be a 3.5 skull against the Taurians in the badlands.

Mylassta swapped to the Atlas and Pseekie took over the Annihilator.

A Rifleman and a Marauder were the first mechs the paladins ran into. Vey decapitated the Rifleman. The Atlas and Overlord knocked the Marauder over, though Pseekie failed to head-cap it while it was prone. Incoming PPC fire suggested a Warhammer and either another Marauder or an Orion.

Shelat moved up and determined it was the former and they'd been right on the Warhammer. For good measure, she CT'd the prone Marauder.

Vey and Pseekie headcapped the Warhammer. The final Marauder was pummelled by repeated fire, knocked down and CT-killed. Mylassta was not hugely happy, she'd not got a kill again...



Another Warhammer to sell...

Last contract that Lynessa would do here (as the other three were for the Capellans, Kuritas and Taurians) was capturing a Taurian manufacturing facility for the Federated Suns (4 skulls).

Grumbling a bit about not getting any more mech kills, Mylassta switched to the Rocket Shark.

No turrets, which made Mylassta grumble louder.

The enemy soon were visible, though; a JagerMech, a Quickdraw and a 90-tonner.

Vey's failed headcap attempt did open the way for Mylassta to blow the JagerMech apart, however. And the paladins could now see the other two mechs of the enemy lance - a Highlander and a Cyclops. Summer managed to land a clonk to the Cyclops' head as she and Shelat took pot-shots at it from range.

As the Summer and Shelat's second shots went at the Cyclops, Darius warned Taurian reinforcements were incoming. Vey vented coolant and took off the Cyclops’ head - good, that would drastically reduce the enemy’s ability to get the drop on the paladins.



Mylassta contented herself with battering the Quickdraw and, when Shelat finished the job of knocking it over, hit it again and destroyed it. That paved the way for Summer to headcap the Highlander - just in time for the reinforcements to start coming in.

(Also denying Vey and action, so she couldn't cool down because the enemy immediately got a turn. Tiresome.)

Two incoming Rifleman. Vey dashed to change position - mostly to cool off. Pseekie downed one of the pair with a headshot, and Shelat and Mylassta teamed up to again knock an approaching Black Knight down.

Unfortunately Pseekie blew it up instead of beheading it. The second Rifleman likewise couldn't stand the fire of the Bull Shark AND the Rocket Shark. That just left a Thunderbolt which Pseekie decapitated.

That was that, and a simple stroll into the base captured the facility.



For saying she was not expecting to get much, Mylassta managed three kills...!

Enough salvage for a Cyclops, Highlander AND Thunderbolt.

That wrapped it up for this system though.

Well. Lynessa sighed. In order to get the reputations sorted, they would need to quickly get the Kuritans to hate them and they still were only at 30 reputation with Steiner (and there was a Marik Flashpoint for Lostech against them...)

Well, looked like there was no choice for it - time to deliberately upset the Draconis Combine by taking a contract for maximum reputation and then just walking off.

Then they would set out for Horsham (a 4-skull world) to make their last attempt to fight Kurita before dashing across to Marik (ignoring the flashpoints for Kurita and Liao now).

(We're going, I think, to end up doing the reputation stuff for thre score bonus - there's only 115 days left. If I get that and make it back to Manthraka before time is out, I'll call the end of the Let's Play there; else after day 1200, we'll potter about doing flashpoints until there's only Manthraka left as the climax, I think.)

The Kuritans were quite upset the paladins just left the pirates alone after Mylassta chipped a nail or something or put the wrong dress on and they just HAD to go back to the ship, then, didn't they? (Mylassta COULD mug quite convincingly, to be fair.)

It hurt the MRB rating by 3 points, but it also dropped their rep with the Kuritans down by 34 to -80, which was significantly more than Lynessa had expected. Excellent!

Poppy got some bad news from home, unfortunately, that Llana had gotten by mistake. Llana had been tempted not to tell her about what had happened to an old (very close) friend of hers, but did anyway and Poppy was understandable a bit low.



And that brings us to both time and the spectre of having to reload a ton for contracts again (not a single one vrs Kurita in the first six attempts, that's comforting... So we might be back tomorrow, assuming it doesn't take all evening to get any contracts again...!

Bleakbane Plays BATTLETECH, Part Thirty-Eight:

So, considering this got edited in on Sunday, you can imagine how well it went on Saturday's session, can't you...?

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On day 1102, the paladins arrived at Frazer.

"Frazer?" Lynessa asked a cheerfully humming Poppy. "Weren't we going to Horsham?"

"Um, no ma'am," Poppy replied, smiling softly. "Why would we go there? You wanted to fight Kuriat, didn't you?"

"Yes," Lynessa replied, feeling confused. "Yes, I did..."

(Okay. In the past NEARLY TWO HOURS (so most of today's available time) have taught me anything, it is that you CANNOT generate contracts verses Kurita in a 4-skull system. I tried Horsham. I tried Midale. I tired Desolate Plains. (And of course Carmichel before.) And by the end, I recognised the patterns of a very small number of contracts, which were all vrs Taurians or Pirates. Contracts FOR? Yes. But not against. The ONLY place I saw ANY anti-Combine missions were on 3.5-skull Frazer - which notably generate a different set of missions. So we can add this to the pile. Apparently, OpFors are NOT generated randomly on missions, there is clearly some other factor at work. So, really WHY, HBS, WHY would you make a contract system that is so very heavily RNG and counter-intuitive?)

Nothing at ALL in the shop, Lynessa had seen better stocks in the Periphery.

There were two battles against Kurita here - the rest were missions for Davion against pirates (no) or for Liao (also no).

The first was a 3.5 skull battle in the jungle. So Zuranna took the Decapitator, Mylassta the Awesome, Vey the Bull Shark and Summer the Annihilator.

The enemy scout lance consisted of a Quickdraw, Wolverine and Griffin.

Vey started off by decapitating the Quickdraw. The Wolverine withstood the fire of all three other mechs, before Mylassta finally destroyed it with the second salvo. Vey failed to headcap the Griffon, so after Zuranna's salvo TAG'd it, Summer CT-destroyed that too.

The last mech was a JagerMech. Vey's salvo detonated its ammunition.

There were clearly enemy reinforcements, but the lance was in the jungle, in a lake, so even the Decapitator was happily keeping nice and cool. They waited in the lake and soon enough another Quickdraw jumped into view.



Vey removed its head.

A Grasshopper and a 75-tonner slowly approached along the lake - the former visible as it jumped. A Catapult appeared on the ridge above. Vey and Summer's salvo blew that head off too.

(And then the Orion came within on hit point of blowing Vey's head off. And I stopped and went, "you know what, RNG? You've been nothing but crap for the past three frelling days, no, I'm not having you put the Bull Shark out of commission before then 4.5 skull battle coming up next. RELOAD." Which was only back as far as the end of the previous turn. )

Vey headcapped the Grasshopper, and Zuranna closed and blew the Orion's head off.

(Better.)



Orion for salvage.

Next was a 4.5 skull battle in the desert. Zuranna swapped to the Overlord and Mylassta to the Fair Marauder.

This was going to be tricky. The paladins located the "heavy enemy mech" they'd detected soon enough - but there were four other mechs with it and they HOPED there weren’t another three somewhere or this was going to be very bad...



Nope, the Atlas was on its own. Mylassta grinned.

Zuranna moved closer to thumping range - there was Overlord's fist had an Assassin's name on it. She spotted a Rifleman and two Catapults, a C1 and K2.

Vey couldn't get close enough to drop her Thumper on all four (they were beat-up in armour), but she could hit all but the C1 with it and did some serious damage. Summer (to Zuranna's mild annoyance) picked off the crippled Assassin.

Mylassta bounced over to shoot at the C1 Catapult. The other two mechs made the mistake of closing to try and shoot at the Overlord. Zuranna charged up and shoulder-barged half the Rifleman's side off.



Vey headcapped it, and Summer took a shot at the K2 Catapult.

Mylassta dropped the C1 with a neat headshot. The K2, apparently being insane, ran PAST Zuranna to shoot at Vey - and missed aside with one medium laser at that.

Zuranna, shaking her head in disbelief, thumped in the back.




Enough for an Atlas!

Well, that was quick, that was this system done. And Kurita suitably hating the paladins.

Lynessa sighed. Of COURSE there were not any worlds with Steiner influence that had black markets...

(So, after that brief respite, guess what we're back too! Yep, that's right "try and generate some contracts!" I'm not even going to try this time and project where the paladins will end up - there's a few Steiner places over the top of the map, one obvious one being 4.5 skull Sindalin, but a short jump away.)

As they headed out, the paladins caught another distress call and rushed to save some unfortunate Davion citizens from a lingering death in space.

The paladins arrived at Sindalin, where no less than four contracts for Steiner - all verses Liao and one for Davion as well - awaited.

(THAT'S more like it, and it was in a relatively short (like, about five) reloads. And before that, I got one with a good couple.

Aaaand break for the night...)

First up, probably the most dangerous contract - a 4.5 skull convoy ambush in Martian environment. Summer took the Overload, Mylassta the Bull Shark, Alarhan the Phoenix Coil (likely they'd need the speed) and Natasha the Rocket Shark.

The paladins sprinted to the enemy escape point. The assaults were just about reaching it when the first enemies came into detection range an Assassin, followed by a Zeus and Rifleman. Summer moved up and sensor locked the lead vehicle, a Bulldog, which Natasha blasted apart with LRMs. Mylassta took a long-range snipe at the Zeus' head, but didn't take it out. Alarhan moved up and destroyed the Assassin's right torso.

Alarhan took more fire from a Griffin and broke around right, trying to get at the convoy. Unfortunately, the Manticore she could see took both her COIL-M shot and a salvo of missiles from Summer aimed at the same spot. Mylassta headcapped the Zeus, thought, so that was one threat down.



Natasha attempted to kill the Shrek PPC carrier next in line, but fairly to take that out, either - and Alarhan spotted a Demolisher behind that.

Alarhan let out a snarl of rage as she ran up and stomped on the battered Manticore and it STILL didn't die. Summer had more luck, rushing up and one-punch-girl-ing the Rifleman. Natasha split her fire and this time, both the Shrek and Manticore went down. But the bad news was - of course, enemy reinforcements were coming and of COURSE they were landing BEHIND the paladins... And Mylassta couldn't do anything but sprint to cool down.

Alarhan dashed around and kicked the Demolisher. Natasha, taking incoming fire, moved up and split her fire between the tank and the Assassin, but failed to kill either. Mylassta was cool enough (barely) to CT-kill the Griffon, and Summer did and end-run around the Assassin and finished off the Demolisher.

Alarhan ran up to punch the Assassin in the back, but it staggered up and ran off to attack Mylassta, Summer put it down for the count, and now the paladins had a moment's breathing room to cool off. Mylassta had JUST got her heat down when the first enemy Warhammer came into view.



One - apparently only of two - down. The other mech was a Thunderbolt. Alarhan took a shot at the head but missed. Summer and Natasha assisted by knocking it flat and giving Alarhan a clean shot to decapitate it.



Thunderbolt and Zeus salvaged.

Next up, dealing with a heavy mech and its escort in the desert (5-skulls). Summer remained in the Overlord. Mylassta swapped to the Annihilator, giving the Bull Shark to Natasha and Poppy took the Fair Marauder.

Oh good - enemy mech, enemy escort and enemy reinforcements. This was going to get messy. Mylassta had the girls break left, and there they ran across an Orion, a Black Knight and a Shrek SPPC, which Summer spotted as she moved up. A pair of cluster rounds coming indicated there was a Demolisher nearby too.

Mylassta took an aimed shot and blasted the Shrek apart, as the biggest danger (headshots). It wasn't worth the heat build-up for Poppy and Natasha to fire, so they just sprinted closer until they could take some precision shots.

Natasha opened up on the Black Knight.



The girls were not as lucky with the Orion, but they managed to at least flush it out into the open. Mylassta swung her guns right and destroyed the incoming Demolisher LB-X before it could drop more shells on onto Summer and Natasha. Natasha vented her coolant and blew the Orion's head off this time.

That bought them a moment to cool off and a reprieve from the incoming LRM fire - but only a brief one, as a Victor stomped into range. This turned out to be the primary target - with the reinforcement lance only a step behind, being spotted for by a Quickdraw.

Poppy failed to kill the Victor, but Mylassta didn't, popping the head. Natasha was still cooling, so she took a step forward to reveal the Quickdraw's companions, a Catapult C1 and a Thunderbolt.

Natasha headcapped the first Catapult, only for a second one to emerge from the shadows. Mylassta fired...



And it met the fate of the first one.

Summer dashed past the Quickdraw. Poppy moved up taking shots - her second salvo, aimed this time, took the head of the Thunderbolt off. The Quickdraw fired - and mostly missed - at Mylassta, so Summer punched its torso off...



And then Mylassta headcapped it.



Victor, Orion and Black Knight salvage. Not bad at all!

Next up, a 5-skull operation to re-capture a base that contained a cache of bioweapons. Poppy exchanged the Fair Marauder for the Rocket Shark this time.

The paladins immediately ran into the defenders, spotting a Demolisher right away. Mylassta destroyed it with a single salvo. Summer locked on to a Shrek PPC carrier, but the Rocket Shark's missiles didn't quite destroy it, thought it was not in a position to threaten them.

A Rifleman broke cover and immediately lost its head to the combined fire of the Annihilator and the Bull Shark. Summer locked the Shrek again and Poppy dropped down to a single LRM 20 to wipe it out. That just left an 85-tonner coming their way. This turned out to be a Stalker. Mylassta and Natasha turned their guns (with some vented coolant for the latter) and took that down via headshot.

Summer now inched forwards to get a lock on the first turret for Poppy to obliterate. The two repeated the process, wiping all of the turrets out. As the last one remained, Summer starter moving forwards, at which point Darius helpfully warned the paladins the base was defended by turrets and an enemy lance!

Good job, Darius, good job.

Summer's eyeroll came in unison with Mylassta groan of annoyance. There was even a quiet sigh from Poppy. By this point, even Farah was groaning, and the only reason Sumire didn't smack him upside the head was because she was in the Leopard. So Farah did it.

The site was captured, but there was still enemy reinforcements to locate and destroy.

The paladins had barely stepped around the base when they ran into them - an Archer plus a 65, 80 and 90 tonner.

Mylassta and Natasha unusually failed to take the Archer out between them. Summer switched fire to destabilise the Catapult that had just moved up to support the Archer, and Poppy split her LRMs, hoping to knock both down, but only succeeded in the toppling the Archer. Meanwhile, the other pair - Highlander and Awesome - moved into range.

Mylassta dispatched the prone Archer. The Catapult had come nice and close to Summer, but unusually, she whiffed her punch.

Natasha and Poppy blasted away at the Highlander, but failed to headcap it or even knock it down.

Summer's second punch destroyed the Catapult. Mylassta's headshot at the Awesome missed. Poppy's second salvo of LRMs flattened the Highlander, allows Natasha to drop to ACs only and finish it off.

The Awesome took some killing, but finally went down under the combined fire of the Annihilator, the Rocket Shark and the Overlord.




Rifleman for salvage.

Apparently that wasn't the only part of the bioweapon, as the paladins now had a 5-skull recovery contract to get the rest off of the Capellans.

The facility was on a tall outcropping, with only one approach. Following it, the lance encountered the enemy defenders, starting with a Grasshopper. Mylassta fired.



One down!

Summer locked on the Battlemaster, but as it sprinted along, Poppy's missiles failed to gain any heavy mark. Natasha didn't waste the heat to shoot at it.

Its lancemates soon came into view - an Orion (which Natasha promptly headcapped) and a King Crab - and LRM fire coming in suggested a second lance, too.

Mylassta and Poppy chipped away at the Battlemaster, detonating its SRM ammo. Summer punched it flat for Mylassta to deftly headcap.

Natasha moved up to attack the King Crab and detected a lance of an 80, 90 and two 95 tonners. Ooer.



Well, that was on obstacle out of the way...

Sensor-lock-guided missile showered the Bull Shark and Natasha took a head hit.

Summer locked the 90-tonner, a Highlander and Poppy blasted it with missiles. There was little for Mylassta and Natasha to do other than sprint forwards. As the second batch of 80 missiles flew overhead to strike the Highlander, Natasha's last sprint enabled her to spot two Banshees, 3S and 3M - and finish her cooling. Mylassta's own run spotted the last mech, an Awesome. The enemy pummelled both paladin mechs.

Mylassta blew the 3S's head off and Natasha nearly did the same to the 3M. Summer hit the Highlander again. Poppy switched to the 3M, hoping to take off its damaged head. She failed, but did blast off the right torso, reducing the incoming fire.

Mylassta again missed the head - missing entirely with a couple of shots, and the repeated PPC hits having taken a toll - but she knocked the Banshee down and Poppy was able to land the single missile hit to the head needed to finish it. Natasha, running hot, charged the Awesome in melee, while Summer detonated the Highlander's ammo in the right torso. Both enemy mechs turned their fire on the relatively undamaged Overlord.

Mylassta and Poppy destroyed the Highlander with a pair of shots. Summer and Natasha headcapped the Awesome between them. That cleared the area. Natasha strolled to the secondary pick-up point - where the second lance had been hiding - but it was a longer dash for Summer to run back up to the primary.



Banshee and a Battlemaster for salvage.

Hmm. The last mission was a 5-skull target acquisition. Lynessa was not very keen on that and their rep with Davion was fine... Na. Lynessa decided she'd pass on that one, actually.

A 29-day trip would take them out of Capellan space an into Marik space for the flashpoint - and hopefully, they could recover some of the Steiner rep they'd lose as well at Pilpala. Time was running short though...

Payday (90 days left to go...)



As they approached Pilpala, Anja dropped in, saying she'd had - somehow - a letter for Vey from a former lover breaking up with her. Lynessa was a bit puzzled, since Vey hadn't mentioned anything about that (and frankly, Lynessa was fairly sure that Pseekie would have had something to say about the issue even if Vey didn't). Anja wasn't sure whether to pass it on. Lynessa suggested thatsge did. But a day or so later, Anja clearly hadn't done it yet and it was tearing her up, concerned about upsetting Vey.



Okay, four Steiner missions to get back the good will they were about to lose...

Davinder Singh of the Free Worlds League. The Lyrans had apparently built a military installation on the planet that Marik needed to be rid of. It has, of course Been Steinered to the point it needed artillery to take down. The paladins would be placing the targeting beacons, while Gwydion Company (another load of mercs, under Commander Ellis "Carronade" Carnby) kept the Lyran's heads down.

Sumire wondered why they didn't just, y'know, shoot from safety, but Davinda pointed out that if they were not smack on target, they'd hit the local farmers, which was an obvious no-no.

No tonnage limitations (which Lynessa was surprised by, as it has implied there would be), but a 4.5 mission in the jungle nonetheless.

Lynessa assigned Summer in the Phoenix Coil, Mylassta in the Annihilator, Zuranna in the Atlas and Natasha in the Bull Shark. Summer would be dashing to the furthest, Zuranna to the middle one (as she had jump jets)and Mylassta and Natasha to middle one.

(They'd have to make do with the Overlord or the Decapitator this time.)

Oh, this was going to be "fun" fight; the garrison and the reinforcements, destroy a building to let the Gwydion company even lane, place the beacons AND get out again.



Oh good, turrets as well! This was going to be wonderful.

Summer took a shot at the anti-aircraft generator, but as she couldn't get a full run up for some reason, she didn't destroy it. The only good news was that the enemy garrison was currently just vehicles.

Mylassta started out by destroying the nearest, a PPC carrier. Zuranna jumped forwards and blasted the generator. As Mylassta had hoped, that destroyed all the turrets. One problem down.

The Allies landed, a Panther, JagerMech, Catapult and Trebuchet. These moved to engage the enemy.

Naturally, of course, the enemy lance was coming from the location Summer was aiming for, so she'd be caught between the Gwydion and the full enemy force...

Zuranna jumped again (it got her further than sprinting with the trees in her way) and picked off a Bulldog the mercs had already damaged.

And the only place the Mylassta and Natasha could go to get a shot off was to be in the target zone. Oh well, this wasn't going to be done all at once, was it? Actually, never mind, Mylassta couldn't get a shot anyway, so they both just moved. Natasha now sighted a JagerMech, Cicada and a Second Shrek.

Summer sprinted, picking up a Dragon as well.

The Marik Catapult was taking some hammer, as the enemy fired at it, but they also attempted to take shots at Summer as well. A second JagerMech entered the fray.

Mylassta destroyed the Shrek; that was one less enemy to worry about.

Darn it, there was an LRM carrier WAY outside where anyone could hit it.



(Top left, Summer being bottom left)

Summer dashed close by - actually, maybe they could make it in one go.



One down.

The Marik forces pummelled the remaining enemy JagerMech. The Cicada ran behind Summer to kick her in the back and shoot its machineguns, but didn't do a lot of damage (And Summer could do damage back, with some luck).

Summer was getting way too much fire, but then Zuranna entered the targeting zone, and the enemy immediately switched to hammering at the Atlas - which of course could take it. Natasha, switching to AC only, destroyed the Cicada, clearing summer's arse. Mylassta couldn't get sight of any targets, so just stepped back into the beacon zone.

The target sight was now confirmed!

Summer, Mylassta and Natasha broke into sprints, heading towards the Evac point (which was past Zuranna). Zuranna jumped and sent a salvo that destroyed the remaining enemy JagerMech which the Marik mechs had been dismantling. The Marik Catapult was in a sorry state, though, having been hit by the LRM Carrier and losing a torso.

Summer jumped, hoping to get close enough to be able to see the LRM carrier (so someone could swat it), but with her first jump only got far enough to take a pot-shot at the Dragon. Mylassta and Natasha continued sprinting, without a line of sight to do anything else.

Zuranna jumped again to take a shot at the Dragon.

The artillery fire came storming in.

(I'd have gotten a shot of it, but the camera moved it off-screen!)

"Little too close for comfort," Natasha yelled to Mylassta as they dashed past.



Marik knocked the Dragon down.

Three rounds to evac. Summer did some quick calcs, and she could JUST reach the Evac zone in two leaps, so she jumped up and took a shot at the surprised LRM carrier - and as she'd hoped, Marik finished the job. The Dragon stumbled to its feet, but failed to do much damage with one laser (as its arm was missing) to the Marik mechs.

Zuranna took one last shot at the Dragon - and the Marik mechs finally knocked it down and knocked the pilot out. Now, could the paladins (well, Natasha) get to the evac point before time ran out?

Yes. Now that Natasha and Mylassta were out of the lake and on the road, the lance did it exactly at the last moment.



Dragon for salvage!

Unfortunately, despite getting put without losing a mech, Gwydion Company weren't quite fats enough to get away from Steiner and got cornered. And Steiner was essentially bribing the paladins to go take a nice paying job far away.

Well, no. Lynessa wasn't about to leave allies in the lurch when they were calling for help. And, like, Rescuing People (especially a Fair Maiden, like what commander Ellis was) was, like, literally a paladin's shtick.

Sumire started "But we won't get... payed..." She wilted under the glare of fifteen paladins. "I'll, uh, I'll just go get the Leopard prepped shall I...?"

Gwydion company had had to take cover in a bunker (to be fair, the mechs had been in a right state), so it would be down to the paladins to knobble the Steiner lance.

"Ah, frack it," Summer said, grabbing the King Crab. This marked, then, the first 395 ton lance, the heaviest the paladins had ever taken out. Lynessa felt the Steiners would, somehow, approve...

The cavalry was coming... Very, very slowly...

They spotted the enemy as a Hatchetman peaked the top of the ridge. Mylassta and Zuranna had casual shots at it, but didn't do much damage as it was bulwarked.

A pair of Quickdraws joined it and a 100-tonner that MUST be an Atlas - coming up behind.

Mylassta wondered how odd it must feel for the Steiners to be the ones one-tonnaged for once...

Summer made ahead shot at the Quickdraw and even in missing smashed huge chunks out of it. Natasha, not able to get a precise shot, contended herself with dropping a Thumper which tore the Hatchetman's left arm and the Quickdraw's left torso off.

Zuranna jumped forwards and blasted the Quickdraw to pieces. Mylassta cored the Hatchetman.

The other Quickdraw did the inane thing of running up to the Atlas and King Crab and punching the King Crab. What was even more amazing was that apparently all the fire had only hit the King Crab's arm, since the hit went internal.

Funnily enough, getting punched by two angry 100-ton mechs (both with support weapons too) did not do the Quickdraw any favours.



Mylassta and Natasha sprinted past towards the enemy *(as much to make sure it didn't have a go at Summer), ready for when it came around.

OH. NOT an Atlas, a King Crab! Which shot at Natasha point-blank! Natasha’s reflexive alpha strike didn't kill it (she was too surprised).

"HEY!" Summer yelled, rushing up. "Pick on someone your own tonnage!"



Well, at least the King Crab's small lasers had gotten a work-out (and a kill, actually...)



Elis was understandable relieved (and just a little bit impressed, but the paladins WERE really good at riding to the rescue and looking good doing it).

Three parts of King Crab for salvage, but not much else.

So the reward. One rare mech part (Grasshopper 5H, woo...)

+ER PPC, not bad.

And...

One. Part.

AS7-D-HT!

HUZZAH! Star. League! ATLAS!!!!

So, what could they do with it? At the moment, something like the +ER PPC, ++Medium Pulse laser and both ++Ultras ACs 10 (two tons of ammo), the one -10% heat exchanger, jump jets and a lot of heat sinks to drag it back to heat neutral, with but half a ton off max armour. Not a bad theoretical, but they'd see what else they could find.

Okay, contracts! First off, a contract for Steiner against the Free Worlds League, assassinating an incoming Marik captain; 4.5 skulls, in the highlands.

Zuranna took the Decapitator and Summer swapped to the Awesome.

(Actually, Lynessa thought, they could probably strip the Awesome and use it to make the Atlas II...)

With two groups of enemies again, Mylassta broke right to head for the reinforcements first.

Natasha got a nice line of ducks, all in a row.



Quickdraw, Catapult, Thunderbolt.

Her opening salvo dented the Catapult's head, but it was at long range. so no kill. Mylassta and Zuranna likewise did a little bit of damage to the Thunderbolt and blew its left arm off.

A Shadowhawk came running down from the far east to join the battle.

Luck was not with the girls. Natasha failed to headcap the Catapult and instead destroyed a leg, but no-one could get a line of fire on it. Without any more precise fire, the best Mylassta, Summer and Zuranna did was to knock the Thunderbolt over.

Mylassta at least managed to destroy it while it lay prone, while the other mechs shot at Zuranna and Natasha. Natasha once again failed to headshot the Quickdraw even with a full salvo.

Worse, a sensor lock followed by an enemy salvo from behind Zuranna (a PPC hitting her in the head to boot) signalled the arrival of the other mechs. She jumped down the cliff out of harm’s way and cored the badly-damaged Quickdraw.

Mylassta and Summer quickly dispatched the Shadowhawk and Zuranna, dodging fire from both that and Catapult, cored the latter as well. The flanks were clear!

Natasha re-deployed to cool off. The bad news was the incoming enemies was one, if not two, ECM Cataphracts - Summer's sensor lock confirmed one.

No, a single ECM Cataphract and a 1X, which confused Summer enough that she'd locked the wrong one the second time. And it took both Mylassta and Natasha to take it down. Zuranna jumped back up and took a shot at the Rifleman that had shown itself, but at long range with only the one large pulse laser didn't do a lot of damage.

Summer locked the 0X Cataphract this time. Natasha once again failed to deal any significant damage with the Bull Shark, and in return, got a heavy pounding from the last mech in the enemy lance, a Black Knight. The Bull Shark's armour was starting to weaken under the continuous fire.

Mylassta finally headcapped the Cataphract.



She shifted her guns and dropped the Black Knight's head half a second later.

Zuranna, wiping a trickle of blood from her mouth and grinning, moved in to the Rifleman, which foolishly shot at her with its PPCs at close range. In return, she gave it a face full of lasers.

That cleared the escorts, just the target to worry about now.

It was an 85-tonner, in the lake at the bottom of the cliffs. Without an LRM mech, the lance just had to mostly wait until it decided to come and play. Perhaps a Thumper?

The Zuranna spotted a beach she could run down where she could get a shot at it - a Stalker, she saw. She didn't kill it, but it WAS now nicely TAG-marked. Mylassta followed the beam and put her autocannon shells into the Stalker's head.



Mylassta had had a good day there, Zuranna too, for a rare occasion.

Rifleman and Stalker salvaged.

That was the hardest mission (in theory).

Next was a 3-skull convoy intercept for the Lyrans, like the previous mission, against Marik. Summer took over from Zuranna, but grabbed the Overlord, as this was in the badlands. Alarhan brought the Phoenix Coil into the open slot.

The lance moved quickly towards the denial zone, and soon spotted the convoy. The guards consisted of a Thunderbolt, Kintaro, Commando and Spider.

A nice bracket artillery shot for Natasha to open with...



No kills, but significant damage to the two lights.

The Commando nonetheless managed to run out and head-butt Summer in the head (having lost both its arms). She took more fire from the Spider and Kintaro, but ran past them to stomp on the lead vehicle, a Galleon. Mostly because it gave Alarhan, who had a full run-up down the road, something better to shot 125 damage at. She shot the Thunderbolt, but didn't do much damage. Nor was Mylassta having any better luck, trying to take out an LB-X AC Demolisher and failing to hit with one of the cannons. Natasha, at least, managed to headcap the Kintaro.



Alarhan still had a clean run down the road (and one more shot before she got heat problems), so she dashed past the convoy's middle vehicle - a Manticore - and destroyed the Demolisher.

The two lights continued to harass Summer, but she ignored them and ran out the way to stomp on the Manticore, obliterating it. Which left the lights, starting to turn around, to watch with horror as the last Thumper shell landed between tem, where Summer had just been. The artillery blasted them both to fragments.

That just left the Thunderbolt. It lost an arm to Mylassta, but ran right up to the Overlord, showering Summer with MG fire. And it was now right between the Phoenix Coil and the Overlord. Two punches and it was down.



No significant salvage; the Kintaro obviously lost more than its head, as there was but one piece of each mech available.

Desert battle (3-skulls) against the Capellans this time. Pseekie took over the Overlord and Alarhan changing to the Shortbow.

The initial contact was an Archer, stood out on its own. It when down to the combined fire of the lance before a Cicada, spotting for the reinforcements, even got into sight. The Archer had a partner somewhere it seemed - for a moment, Mylassta thought it was the Cicada, but after Alarhan blew on leg off and she and Pseekie the other, it seemed not.

That was fine, it gave Natasha a chance to cool down anyway.

The lance moved west along the cliff-sided valley they were in and found the reinforcement lance (a Grasshopper and a C4 and K2 Catapult) up on the top of the ridge. Alarhan and Mylassta managed to knock the Grasshopper down by removing one leg. Pseekie couldn't do much more than further annoy it, since she couldn't get up to them to punch them. Natasha took a first shot at the K2 Catapult, but though she hit the head, it was not hard enough to take it down.

Alarhan made sure the Grasshopper stayed down with burst of SRMs. A couple of PPCs hit Natasha from the west, indicating the Archer's partner had finally come to play. Mylassta had a crack at the C4 Catapult but only destroyed its left torso. Natasha this time headcapped the K2.

Alarhan shot off the Catapult C4's other torso, leaving Mylassta to finish it.



At least they knew which way the enemy was - though when it finally came on sensors, it was down the bottom of the valley, not on the ridge like they'd expected. It was a Warhammer (Mylassta had guessed based on the PPCs and the tonnage before they actually spotted it).

A pair of salvos from the Bull Shark and the Annihilator wiped it out.



No significant salvage, since everything had died to CT kills this time (not for lack of trying...)

One more mission for the Lyrans and their reputation would be maxed and it wouldn't take much effort to get the FWL rep back, either.

But that will have to wait for tomorrow.

[Aotrs Commander]

Bleakbane Plays BATTLETECH, Part Thirty-Nine:

Spoiler

Show

Next mission - a 4-skull clash of the titans between a Capellan Assault mech and... Someone else.

It in the badlands, so the lance would be the same as previously - Pseekie in the Overlord, Mylassta in the Annihilator, Alarhan in the Shortbow, Natasha in the Bull Shark.

The enemy lance was very close. A Hatchetman and a Cataphract took a couple of shots at Pseekie. Mylassta and the lance turned and ran, leaving the enemy to go and deal with the incoming enemy lance.

Time for a quick break, while the Capellans dealt with the pirates (off to their right...)



The paladins observed the Capellan lance had a Cyclops 10Q and a Javelin F, as the fight occurred just on the fringes of their visibility. The Capellans scored the first kill, on a 55-tonner, but the pirates destroyed the Hatchetman immediately thereafter.

The pirates destroyed the Cataphract and the Javelin in quick succession a few round slater, leaving just the Cyclops, in plain view of the paladins, fighting a battle against an unseen foe. It lost a torso and a leg, fell down, and then staggered back to its feet. The pirates seemed to have a lot of PPC mechs. Mylassta expected possibly a Banshee as the other assault.

The cyclops finally went down to more PPCs. Four to one losses; that was rather one-sided.

A mostly-undamaged Kintaro entered sight. Mylassta and Natasha took aim...



A Marauder, followed by the expected Banshee came around the corner. (No wonder they'd flattened the Capellans, they significantly out-tonnaged them). Mylassta and Natasha failed to successfully knobble the Marauder, bulwarked as it was, but it got a fair bit of damage.

Natasha dropped a thumper on them but that proved to be a mistake, since it just edged her into overheat for some reason. Good job this was more or less the last mission...

Mylassta dropped the Marauder and Alarhan moved up and cored the damaged Banshee.

Natasha was so embarrassed about overheating the Bull Shark. It took a great deal of careful handling by Lynessa to avoid her really getting into a state about it.



Kintaro for sale...

There was one last contract for Marik, but it was against the pirates, and Lynessa wanted to at least get to a Black Market before they did that.

So off to 2-skull Salardion - a world they'd not visited that was fairly close; and maybe they would catch the next flashpoint after that before it expired or if it restarted, but if not, they wouldn't...

First job would be to repair the Bull Shark and King Crab. The Awesome would be retired and the gear used to put on the new Atlas, which would do the Awesome's job, but better!

The new Smite would have no less than THREE ER PPCs, plus the Snub PPC, two tons shy of max armour, an ER small laser, jump jets, the ++Inferno and the ++Narc Beacon and thanks to all the heat exchangers and double heat sinks plus a few singles, ran at 78/80, even when firing all the weapons!

It wouldn't be ready for the next stop, but never mind.

Payday (60 days to go):



(Okay, so with this being a 2.5 skull world, I didn't care about the contracts. A quick analysis of the scoring indicates that it's not worth at this point doing missions for the sake of skulls for score, since it's not going to get maxed anyway and the reputations give more bang for the buck. So I settled for some passable ones and something actually meaningful in the black market. (I've basically given up hope of ever finding an intact Star League mech to buy for the double-heat sinks everyone else doing playthrough seems to have scads of - though that method. A saw a MAZ Bull Shark a couple of times, but even if I got the pirate rep up to max level, it'd still be all the cash I had for the sake of three DHS. So, yeah.)

Anja finally worked up the nerve to tell Vey about the letter. Vey read it and then sighed. "Oh dear," she murmured. "Anja, thank you for telling me and... Oh dear, this has hurt you rather more than me hasn't it? Well, don't worry. He was a nice enough boy I met, another paladin trainee, different deity, but he..." She paused. "He rather got himself a bit into the whole courtly love sort of thing, you know. Grand gestures and such, but that was about it. I think his idea of a date would have been just looking at me and spouting poetry, which was... Awkward. I did everything but be rude about it, he was kind of sweet, but he never quite seemed to get the hint. So I'm glad he's found another..." Vey resisted the urge to say 'target' "...ladylove, so you don't worry about it anymore."

Anja looked decidedly relieved.

The paladins arrived at Salardion.

FINALLY some luck in the store. A ++ ER PPC; TWO ++Gauss Rifles (but, naturally, only two tons of ammo, of course *sigh*), a ++ heat exchanger, a ++ Snub PPC and a +++TTS (for missiles) all of which Lynessa bought. That got through about half of their cash reserves.

Two contracts for the pirates (not worth doing), three for Liao (ditto) and two for Marik.

The first was a 1.5 skull convoy ambush against the local government,

Zuranna took the Decapitator, Mylassta swapped to the Rocket Shark, Alarhan grabbed the Phoenix Coil and Natasha remained in the Bull Shark.

As it happened, it was kind of pointless bringing the Phoenix Coil, since the colony evac point was right next to the lance.

The lead vehicle, still a blip, started firing at Alarhan about the time the girls realised that there was no-one to sensor lock. Oops.

A Thumper took care of the ECM vehicle (most likely a Packrat) and one of what had likely been a Striker. A couple of shots from Zuranna and Alarhan a piece destroyed the next two. The paladins could now detect four more vehicles (a mix of escorts and convoy like the front four) behind.

Natasha moved up, splitting her fire between an Inferno Carrier and a Galleon and taking both out. Behind them was an SRM Carrier and a second Galleon. Mylassta shrugged and did the same, but only destroyed the SRM Carrier. Zuranna's large pulse laser finished it off.



No significant salvage; Lynessa picked some now pretty irrelevant ++ gear and wished she'd just done it for the rep, it would have been more useful.

Next up, a polar base capture (2.5 skulls) again against the government. Summer took over the Decapitator, Natasha and Alarhan swapped positions, the latter swapping to the Rocket Shark as Mylassta got the Annihilator.

The enemy lance consisted of two Trebuchet 7Ks, a Javelin and a Locust.

Mylassta decapitated the first Trebuchet.



Natasha destroyed the first turret with the Ultras and damaged the Javelin with the rest of her weapons. Summer moved up, destroyed the Javelin's leg and her spotting allowed Alarhan to bombard the other Trebuchet with missiles.

The Locust moved up into sight and thus attracted a Thumper, which destroyed all three remaining mechs.

The light turrets went down very fast (Natasha took two out simultaneously), but to the girl's surprise, a lance of enemy reinforcements dropped in.

The Bull Shark spotted a Hatchetman and a Blackjack, plus a 30 and 35-tonner. Natasha lobbed her other Thumper on them to softened them all up. Summer closed in to reveal a Spider and Jenner. She shot the latter and Mylassta hit the Hatchetman and blew an arm off.

Alarhan switched off the sole LRM she'd used to finish the last turret and divided her other three onto the Hatchetman, the Jenner and the Blackjack, making rare use of Breeching Shot. No kills, but the further damage helped Mylassta drop the Hatchetman and Summer de-leg the Blackjack. Natasha moved up and slaughtered the only target she could see, the Jenner. Which left Alarhan to easily pop the Spider and Blackjack.



Trebuchet and a Jenner for sale.

Right, that was it for the planet! Off to the flashpoint at Bellerophon.

The Smiter was done, but about to be revised again, but first, Lynessa swapped the +5 dmg AC/10 on the Annihilator for one of the ++Gauss Rifles, putting on both tons of ammo (really, 8 shots was just not enough to make it worth using one of the other two they had...) While it was a ton heavier than the AC, it enabled the removal of a heat sink. (Actually, two, but Lynessa didn't want to add any guns or additional armour, so left the other for maybe if they got some more ammo...)

The Smiter upgraded one of its ER PPCs to the ++version and swapped the Snub PPC to the new one. This did less stability damage, but generated 10 less heat. With a little juggle of the heat exchangers, this now gave the Smiter a 72/67 heat curve, which meant it would only generate a single point of heat if it jumped AND fired all the weapons.

Lynessa considered putting the ER PPC left over on the Trebuchet, but it made the heat curve far too high.

And a 0-ton arm mode added to the Atlas for the sake of argument.

The Smiter was done!




So, once the paladins arrived at Bellerophon to do the flash point, there would just barely be time to go the Manthraka for the campaign flashpoint.

(We're definitely coming to the end phase now. A few reloads gave me three missions against pirates, and four for the pirates that I could use to cheese them off to bottom out the reputation now I'd bought the last load of gear, functionally, for this playthrough.)

Time to start the White Lies Flashpoint!

Davinder Singh was having problems with a group of mercs (Arslan's Janissaries) - Mylassta sniggered, "Arse-lan!" - who were attacking several Marik, families including his own, to bankrupt them. Getting shot of the mercs was a minor issue, the real problem was finding who hired them, and that Davinder was having trouble with.

The mercs were based from this planet, so the paladins were going to capture their HQ and find out who was behind the attacks by mining their data.

The temptation was to take out the Smiter, but this was a base capture in the badlands - so Summer in the Overlord, Mylassta in the Annihilator, Natasha in the Bull Shark and Alarhan in the Rocket Shark.

Natasha destroyed the first two turrets of the Janissaries' base with one salvo. Summer sprinted up to spot the next pair and Natasha and Alarhan neatly blew them up.

The Janissaries retaliated with... Four vehicles. Summer showered the now-visible Striker with missiles.

Mylassta lined up on it.

(Wait, what, Gauss rifles do HEAT damage now TOO?! Hahahaha, that's ridiculous!)

Funnily enough, the Striker died. Natasha performed another double-kill, as a short pace put her in sight of an Inferno carrier and a Shrek. That just left Alarhan to take a step forward and obliterate the SRM Carrier.

Wow, that was EASY.



No meaningful salvage, obviously.

As Singh's forensic team looked over the base, the paladins had a call from a "mysterious figure." He claimed that the information Davinder's team would find would credible point to house Steiner, but that this was a trap.

The mysterious figure was an information broker. He suggested that the paladins swapped one set of information for another, pointing to one of Singh's rivals, whom had a lot of rare salvage that the paladins could have some of if they hit him.

None of this would actually get the true culprit, though, and would likely lull Davinder into a false sense of security. So, paladin-y-ness said to turn down the offer (but obvious tell Singh his information was likely a trap).

The real target was quickly discovered to be one Murdoch Dhawan, a small-time extremist. He was basically just "anti-the-rich," so his attacks were nothing more than random violence, and the end goal of the misinformation was just to start a fight between Davinder and the equally "rich" Steiners. So time to go and wipe the little idiot out.

Okay, NOW was the time to test out the Smiter. Mylassta got dibs, so Alarhan grabbed the Annihilator.

Two lances of enemy mechs again, so Mylassta opted to again close on the furthest one. Which was a pointless exercise, since where the marker indicated they were turned out to be appeared to be was behind an impassable lake and they appeared finally nowhere near that location anyway. So when the paladins finally got some contacts, it was which five mechs, so probably both groups at once. And the lance was on a narrow strip of land.



A Jenner, two Trebuchets, a Vindicator and a Wolverine.

Well, Mylassta figured, no time like the present to ruin someone's day...

Surprisingly, the Trebuchet survived (which was a shame, since the Smiter was basically the Annihilator Plus, down to the three headcappers and the scattergun...)

Natasha moved forwards and spotted a Bulldog and a Hunchback as well. Five mechs in a cluster was too good a chance to miss, though... Thumper!

Alarhan played it safe and destroyed the Bulldog.

Summer, grumbling, was only in a position to shoot at the damaged Trebuchet, but at least destroyed it. For that, she got shot by every other one of the enemy units.

Natasha, moving towards the Hunchback, spotted a second behind it and a Shadowhawk moving up to engage as well. She didn't bother with aiming for the head, just cored the Hunchback. And then a Grasshopper rolled up. Wow, the enemy were really all coming in, weren't they?

Mylassta aimed for the Wolverine, as the target with the highest heat. As she blew its head off, though, that became a moot point.

Alarhan got the first Gauss Headshot on the Grasshopper.



Which was apparently NOT the primary target, okay...

Summer sprinted. She was hoping this would mean she attracted less fire, but apart from the one Trebuchet that shot at Alarhan instead, it merely meant Summer was HIT by less fire. Natasha fired the Thumper again, catching the Jenner (destroyed), the Shadowhawk, Vindicator and one of the Trebuchets, severely damaging them.

Mylassta and Alarhan concentrated fire on the other Hunchback, not killing it, but making it unstable enough to be knocked over for Summer's LRMs to CT-kill it.

Murdoch was apparently in one of the Trebuchets, oddly enough...

Mylassta headcapped the other one. Natasha vented heat and CT-killed the Shadowhawk. Alarhan obliterated the Vindicator.

Murdoch was undamaged, but on his own now...

The little crapper was determined, though, hitting Summer in the head with his PPC - JUST not doing any IS damage, fortunately.

Well, Mylassta wasn't having any of THAT!




Grasshopper for salvage...

The new Smiter proved itself VERY nicely.

The reward was some gear that was, at this point totally redundant.

Okay! Time to deeply upset the pirates!

(Watch there be REALLY GOOD stuff in the Black Market at Manthraka now...)

The MRB score was up at a thousand, so better to do the upset stuff first and then the other three missions for the 22 negative rep they could get out of that.

Three 1.5-skull mission and one 2-skull for rep only in which the paladins walked up, shrugged and went home made the reputation tank nicely (by 62 points!) It was cost them 5 points of MRB rep, but the screams of outraged pirates made it kind of worthwhile. (Mylassta might have enjoyed it a bit too much, Lynessa worried about that girl sometimes...!)

So, next were the missions against the pirates they could do normally, starting with a 2-skull base destroying mission.

Pseekie had been filling in for Summer this whole time, and for this mission Alarhan swapped to the Rocket Shark.

The first enemy turret - in that nasty high-walled compound type it was nice to be attacking for a change - died to Natasha's fire.

The enemy lance was a Javelin, Commando, Kintaro and Wolverine.

Alarhan split her fire to take out the LRM turret in sight and Breeching Shot the two lights. Summer ran towards the Kintaro, while Mylassta and Natasha obliterated the Wolverine.

(Oh, sure, now I'm attacking the enemy has USEFUL turrets to shoot, both rear ones being LRMS...)

Turning one's back on the Overlord to shoot the Bull Shark was foolish.



A Thumper took down the Commando. Surprisingly, the Javelin withstood the LRM barrage - but not three ER PPCs, a Snub PPC and an ER Small laser.

Then it was a simple case of levelling the turrets and the base.



Commando for salvage.

Pirate rep was now bottomed out!

Next, a polar 1.5 skull battle.

Bit of a "last ride" time; Pseekie took the Decapitator, Mylassta the Atlas, Natasha the Laser Knight and Alarhan the Stalker Barrage.

(It had been kept all this time, might as well be used!)

Well, this might be a bit of a non-ride, actually, as lance of hostile Canopians dropped in to fight the pirates...

The running battle went on, while the paladins stood there, watching. A pirate Javelin finally decided to stupidly attack the assault lance, so the Laser Knight cored it. The Canopian Panther did the same, and got a torso full of Stalker Barrage LRMs. This was apparently the signal for the remaining mechs - two Canopian Firestarters (out of flamer ammo) and a pirate Phoenix Hawk and Blackjack - to attack the paladins. And promptly get downed, one mech a shot a piece.



Javelin and Griffin salvaged...

Two-skull desert battle for the Canopians.

Luximai took the Overlord, Poppy the Fair Marauder, Vey the Bull Shark and Velina the Shortbow.

The lance lurked behind a ridge as the enemy mechs - a Crab on the far left, a 20, 45 and 50 tonner to the right - closed in. Vey dropped a Thumper on the 20 and 45 tonner and the light mech died. Poppy took a long-range shot at the crab. Velina popped up to brutalise the 45-tonner - a Vindicator, revealing the 50 as an Enforcer, which Luximai charged towards. It helpfully closed in and missed with its laser. So Luximai ripped the Enforcer's leg off and one more stomp finished it. A second barrages of SRM destroyed the Vindicator. The Crab ran close to once again completely miss Luximai, while Poppy steadily shot at it until the inevitable happened.




Crab salvaged.

Right, that was it for this system; next stop: Manthraka!

Penultimate payday:




As the paladins arrive back and Manthraka, that will be the end for today.



Manthraka is going to be the last stop. The only planets with in the remaining travel-time are less than 2 skulls, which is just grind at this point. Manthraka itself only has a single half-skull contract, to there's no point doing that. So the Manthraka flashpoint and the end of the flashpoint campaign will mark the end of this run.

(Probably as well, since it's JUST starting to get to the point where I'm starting to have had enough. At it will end with a nice round forty parts!)

Bleakbane Plays BATTLETECH, Part Forty (Finale):

Spoiler

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So time to pick a fight with Natasha Kerensky.

The Dobrev had been located. Crashed and severely banged up after the idiots misjumped with it so many times.

And Yang had discovered that the crate the Bounty Hunter had given them (that had the Bull Shark bits in it) was, surprise, surprise a trap, with a homing beacon imbedded in it. So that was another problem to have to deal with.

The paladins needed to take that ship back, and fast. Moderbjörn had prepped her drones to assist.

This would be a fight in the badlands to clear out the Baumann Group from the Dobrev, so Zuranna would take the Overlord, Mylassta the Smiter, Natasha the Bull Shark and Summer the Annihilator.

Moderbjörn had dropped in two medium and two heavy drones.

The lance quickly found the Baumanns, fielding an Annihilator, a Victor, plus a 95-tonner (that HAD to be a Bull Shark) and an 85-tonner.

Mylassta failed the first headshot on the Annihilator; Summer at least managed to blow off the Victor's right arm and thus deprive it of its AC. Natasha and Zuranna just closed.

The "good" news was that the 95-tonner was only a Banshee.

Bad news, a second Baumann DropShip was heading in, better do this fast!

Mylassta, the medium drones and Zuranna all pummelled the Annihilator, but it only went down when Summer shot at it.



Natasha had more luck with the Victor.



The drones continued to attack the 85-tonner - a BattleMaster - and the Banshee approached the paladins.

As Notker Baumann's second lance dropped in, he called up to say he was quite tired of having all his men killed by Lynessa and the paladins.

Unfortunately, the BattleMaster easily took out one of the medium drones. That was annoying.

Unfortunately for the BattleMaster, the Smiter had jump jets.



The Banshee made the very silly mistake of running up to Zuranna and trying to punch her. She deftly dodged its clumsy attempt and hit it HARDER.

The enemy lance - 100, 95, 90 and 80 tons - were still deploying.

Summer blew the Banshee's head off.



This was great, because it gave Natasha chance to sprint to cool.

The 90-tonner stepped into sight: a Cyclops 10-Z. Well, that was a mistake!

Natasha grinned.



No more improved initiative for them!

Summer stepped up and locked the 80-tonner which turned out to be a Zeus. This let one of the heavy drones put a few missiles into it. Mylassta jump back down and cooled off. Zuranna just approached a little closer to spot the 95-tonner as another Banshee and drop some more LRMs on the Zeus.

Summer only succeeded in blasting the Banshee's arm off, but Mylassta was more successful.



The Zeus was in punching range, but Zuranna uncharacteristically missed. But she also spotted the 100-tonner, another Annihilator. Natasha did another sprint to cool, saving her coolant vert for the moment.

Combined punching and fire from Summer and Mylassta took the Zeus down.



The Annihilator annoyingly managed to internal the Overlord's rear, because it was stood where no-one could shoot at it.

Natasha's sprint took her to a position where she could, however.



That was that for the Baumann group.

Moderbjörn and Farah got to picking over the Dobrev with all haste.



Four Annihilator and four Banshee parts (wow, that was nice salvage!) which gave the lance two mechs to sell!

Moderbjörn had determined the star charts were damaged, but not irretrievable - but it would take time to restore them.

Notker called in to admit when he was very thoroughly beaten. Wait, no, he was ACTUALLY trying to bribe Mylassta with two million cbills to walk away.

Sumire looked as though she thought it was a good idea, but Lynessa just laughed.

"No, Mr Baumann, no. Not a chance."

Despite Sumire bricking herself about having to fight two famous MechWarriors, the paladins prepared. Two hours later, two DropShips showed up.

Darius, though, was damned determined they were going to kick butt. Sumire's protestations were drowned out by a collective cheer from the girls.

"Hail, Mz Kerensky, if you would please," Lynessa said. It was only polite, after all. "Now, my dear," she said to Kerensky, who bristled a bit (but honestly, Lynessa WAS older than her, she just didn't look it). "I'm going to guess that you are going to refuse to have a polite conversation and resolution about this, aren't you? So let me cut to the chase. Your lance, my lance. And we will fight."

"Well," Mylassta piped up. "Less fight, more... Pest control."

Kerensky's reply was rather course, but between the expletives, Lynessa got the impression she was going to agree.

Now the cunning plan would be to try and get her and the Bounty Hunter to fight each other a bit as well, as they hated each other. The crate would be dropped to lure the Bounty Hunter in.

Lynessa considered. They had a little time before the drop ships arrived. Should they repair the Overlord?

(As much as I was sorely tempted to do a four-100-tons assault lance, the Atlas was not a replacement for the Bull Shark and the King Crab ran too hot in the desert; plus I figured I might need the initative and damage reduction.)

Yes, they might need all the extra help.

Lynessa, though, would be leading this one from the Overlord herself.

Well, they were right on top of the enemy. So the first thing they were going to do was turn and run away. Kerensky laughed, assuming that, in the face of Darius' smack-talk, the paladins had broken after all.

Of course, they hadn’t, they were just waiting for the Bounty Hunter to come in on top of Kerensky.

And they immediately stared duking it out.

Lynessa glanced her mech's head across to Mylassta, and the tip of the Smiter's head indicated she was grinning too.

Being a Paladin of Azurella meant fighting for right. It did NOT mean that you couldn't cheat a bit occasionally. That was just strategy. All was fair in love and war, after all. (You know, provided the former was done with consent and maturely...)

Yikes. Something there had a couple of Gauss Rifles! This was the SMART decision, clearly!

Woah. There were a LOT of Gauss rifles firing over there. Lynessa was ALMOST tempted to go and engage.

Almost.

First blood to the Black Widow.

Then an Atlas showed up in the paladin's sight.



Nice!

Summer failed to head cap it and CRINGED as she accidently destroyed a double-heat sink.

One of Kerensky's mechs went up.

Mylassta blew the Atlas' head off.



(WAIT, DAMN, four-piece salvage means I can't salvage if it's a different variant.)

UH OH, there was his nibbs, the Bounty Hunter in his Marauder!



"DAMN IT!" Mylassta snarled, missing the head and blowing the leg off (precious DHS!) instead.



And then Natasha C-killed it.



(MOTHERFRACKER!)

And then the last Bounty Hunter mech bought it.

Well, okay, then.

The Black Widow company seemed to be standing around, so the lance eased out to spot an Annihilator and an Archer, followed by a Marauder.

None of which were Kerensky.

(Ahahahahahahaha!)

Natasha and Mylassta double-tapped the Marauder's head.



Summer blasted at the Archer's (it had Infernos) and Lynessa dashed towards it.

The Annihilator hit the Bull Shark with a LOT of LB-X AC fire.

Lynessa was now in punching range of the Archer.



Natasha vented coolant and smoothly took the Annihilator out.



Mylassta put a fair bit of damage (and heat, and a Narc) on the Archer, but only damaged the head. Summer just took a normal shot.




And that was both OpFors down!



Sure the buggers would be back soon (though how Bounty Hunter was getting away with a CT-kill was anyone's guess...)

(Honestly, I'm surprised it let me shoot at his head.)

Oh. No mech salvage anyway.

No Gauss Rifles (or even ammo, damn it) among the salvage. Actually VERY disappointing salvage, not a single piece of LosTech among it, bar some LB-X ammo.

(Come ON, I at least killed the Annihilator with a headshot!)

Eight bits of salvage and the choicest pieces were +3 hit defence gyros and some -30% heat exchangers and after that it was really bad, down to ++LRM 20 in the last slot.

((Pointless selection, too, since I got all but one ton of MG and AC/5 Ammo anyway.)

Still, they beat two legendary MechWarriors; well, on a technicality and Kerensky was no doubt melting the Dobrev down right at the moment, but a win was a win.

Moderbjörn had got her charts. The paladins would drop her off at the next stop (Lynessa figured they'd just slip back to Independence, since that was where they could easily go home) and Moderbjörn would be able to trace where the Star League went.

And then the paladins were hailed by Londo. He was dreadfully disappointed to learn the ship had been slagged. But he offered to pay for the information about there the crater was (done!) and offered a little party on his DropShip for the afternoon.

Lynessa thought that was a fine idea, a nice-little wrap-up party.



(And that gave me... 250 million cbills. A +++LRM 10, a +LRM 10, ++LRM 20, a ++SRM 4, a piece of Kintaro, two of Wolverine and a basic TTS...

And +15 to all reputations COMPLETELY tanking ALL that work I did for the negative reputation score.

ARE. YOU. FRACKING. KIDDING ME?!

No-one could have warned me about that?

So, in summation, that last mission gave me absolutely NOTHING and in fact, put me in a worse position than I was before!

And that was supposed to be a "LONG" assignment; that was only two missions!

And game? You can FRACK OFF with generating the Black Market shake down event now, you're NOT having it, just FRACK OFF.

Wow, what a hell of a miserably depressing 2020 way to end the playthrough.)



The paladins, at least had a nice spectacular party.

So, all that was left to do was sell a load of stuff off, as it was no longer needed, and head back to Independence and spend the last few days packing up and saying their farewells.

As Lynessa was down packing, she saw Yang, who'd found an AgroMech fight club, and wanted to join the winner in a drink. The pilot, Archangel, was about to put himself on the hiring hall. Lynessa smiled, and suggested that he talk to Darius. As if Llana and Anja were going to carry on, they'd want some back-up...

Then it was time for Lynessa and the girls - now legends - to return home.

So we shall wave goodbye - for now, at least, to Lynessa, Mylassta, Alarhan, Summer, Poppy, Scarlet, Pseekie, Vey, Natasha, Velina, Shelat, Luximai and Zuranna as they depart back to the United Concorde of Divine Realms.




Mylassta did, more or less, get to be the Protagonist for once, so she was VERY happy...!

So. How did they do?

Spoiler

Show

So, that last minute little kick in the guts with the reputations cost 5000 points, and pushed it from Elite to Veteran, which really hurts. I was genuinely so disheartened by that.




The Paladins:

Spoiler

Show

Mylassta "Protagonist" Spiritweave
Deployments: 175 Mech Kills: 267 Other Kills: 51 Injuries: 18 Ejections: 1

Natasha Spellshadow "Spellshadow" Dawnbright
Deployments: 106 Mech Kills: 153 Other Kills: 53 Injuries: 8 Ejections: 0

Alarhan "Frostwitch" Tyanar
Deployments: 106 Mech Kills: 120 Other Kills: 63 Injuries: 6 Ejections: 0

Lynessa "Serene" Fair"
Deployments: 95 Mech Kills: 126 Other Kills: 53 Injuries: 15 Ejections: 0

Summer "Hurricane" Glow
Deployments: 125 Mech Kills: 121 Other Kills: 39 Injuries: 14 Ejections: 1

Poppy "Quiet Fury" Blossom
Deployments: 77 Mech Kills: 122 Other Kills: 27 Injuries: 6 Ejections: 0

Shelat "Psion" Valcorel
Deployments: 79 Mech Kills: 94 Other Kills: 30 Injuries: 12 Ejections: 0

Scarlet "Red Devil" Kaxatari
Deployments: 67 Mech Kills: 91 Other Kills: 15 Injuries: 4 Ejections: 1

Vey "Shatterpoint" Lataylaern
Deployments: 64 Mech Kills: 78 Other Kills: 29 Injuries: 8 Ejections: 0

Velina "Flower" Mistmoon
Deployments: 50 Mech Kills: 75 Other Kills: 25 Injuries: 9 Ejections: 0

Pseekie "Mechanic" Rala
Deployments: 81 Mech Kills: 67 Other Kills: 38 Injuries: 7 Ejections: 0

Zuranna "Barbarian" Ruby
Deployments: 66 Mech Kills: 66 Other Kills: 15 Injuries: 9 Ejections: 0

Luximai "Sorceress" Iceshadow
Deployments: 32 Mech Kills: 55 Other Kills: 11 Injuries: 4 Ejections: 0

Anja "Wildfire" Bray
Deployments: 35 Mech Kills: 51 Other Kills: 14 Injuries: 0 Ejections: 0

Llana "Strider" Huxley
Deployments: 36 Mech Kills: 42 Other Kills: 8 Injuries: 2 Ejections: 0

Mylassta was the clear winner here, with a shocking amount of kills, though she deployed the most. (All those training missions, clearly...)

Despite all the early injuries, she in the end only averaged about one every ten missions - poor Lynessa averaged one every six! Velina was the least lucky, having one every 5.5 missions. Summer, second most deployed, made one every eight missions. Anja was never injured at all!

Velina got the highest kill ratio to deployment ratio, at average two kills per mission. Natasha was second and Poppy a fraction behind her with Mylassta not far behind. (Natasha did so well by getting high spirits for, like, 90 days while being an ideal pilot for the Bull Shark.)

You may have noticed after about half-way through, Lynessa took a back role. Partly this was because as commander, Lynessa didn't count towards the score and honestly, towards the end, Zuranna tended to do the job of piloting the Cyclops (for punching) better when they didn't need sensors.




So, what have I learned?

First of all, 4-part salvage was a HUGE mistake. It cost me massive amounts of money and more besides. Not just the 25% loss from not selling as many mechs, but it kept me on low-skull missions for much longer, which hurt the XP, the money and contract score. (Notice how I didn't EVEN manage 25% of the money score?) It didn't make the game harder, it just made it longer and way more grindy. I definitely won't be using THAT again.

It pains me to see all the other playthroughs going on all the while and people trotting around with multiple Gauss Rifles (I managed functionally one, right at the end) and double heat sinks (I got FOUR plus the three on the Bull Shark and I saw one in a shop once the the entire game). That said, I don't even think I ever saw a Star League mech complete for sale aside from the Bull Shark MAZ at any point, either. If it wasn't - again - for the 4-part salvage, I would have had a least a Star League Warhammer.

In future, I think I'll definitely go for stingy cash and generous salvage too.

I found, to my surprise, Coolant Vent was way more useful that Breeching Shot, which I almost never used. That's something to take into consideration when I next play (or if I go to my campaign save). I think I'll have more Bulwark/Coolant Vent/Multishot pilots next time, as that better suits my style of "multiple head shots better."



The Annihilator probably has to get mech of match. The Bull Shark probably killed most enemies, but it had Star League tech. After that one early mission (and it was made sure never to get too exposed), the Annihilator provided a stirling job of killing with the three ACs and LB-X for a bit of head-hit-fishing. The Fair Marauder certainly accounted for a good number was well; the special abilities of it and the Cyclopses made them pretty much indispensable. The Overlord combining both features was very useful, and even if it had to trade out for little killing power - except for the punch - but it did not do bad at all.

I think this ended at just about the right point. I was more or less running out of flashpoints, and without an end-goal (even just a time limit), I tend to not handle sandboxes well!

I am now reading 427 hours logged on Steam (I started at 138, I think), which is about 289 hours (of which probably 40-50% was me writing up (or reloading...!)) and this means BT has the second-highest hours logged on any game on Steam. This let's play has been a desperately needed outlet, and bit of structure, for me during what has been the single most difficult period I've ever experienced over this past ten or so weeks. (Heck, we couldn't even go without one more kick to the metaphorical vulnerables, could we...?)



So all that remains is for me to HBS for creating this game for me to play; to TheGlyphstone on Giant in the Playground for my repeated requests to double-post this up on the forums, and to you all of you that have read and followed along.

I hope you have all enjoyed this odyssey!

I might see some of you again when/if I do another Let's Play.

But for now I'll probably take a break from BATTLETECH for a little bit; while I still have a bit of enthusiasm, that's better saved, I think, for tinkering with my campaign save and for maybe trying RogueTech, perhaps at the time when my Clan Invasion stuff comes next year - though I'm still in the throes tabletop-wise, assuming I ever get to play again...! But for the moment, I think, I'll have a play at something completely different.

*salutes*

[Destro_Yersul]

It was a fun ride. I couldn't have warned you about the reputation boost, because I've never done that one and I don't know how the scoring system works because it's nothing I'd pay attention to myself. 4-part salvage does seem to be a bit rough, because you can only ever get three pieces from a single kill, meaning you effectively have to kill at least twice as many mechs in order to build a new one. Later on it's not so bad, but early on it makes it very hard to properly snowball.

[Aotrs Commander]

I couldn't have warned you about the reputation boost, because I've never done that one and I don't know how the scoring system works because it's nothing I'd pay attention to myself.

That comment was directed more at the BATTLETECH Paradox forum crowd than here or to the Fimfic audience.

It was a fun ride.

*tips helment*

4-part salvage does seem to be a bit rough, because you can only ever get three pieces from a single kill, meaning you effectively have to kill at least twice as many mechs in order to build a new one. Later on it's not so bad, but early on it makes it very hard to properly snowball.

That's not even the worst of it, that's just what I thought it would do (since the setting was so regularly used by everyone). The hidden price is you get WAY less money because you get less mechs - so less money for gear - the story rewards become less rewarding - because of course, it's not adjusted for you getting less parts - and the loss of XP and being able to take higher-skull missions.

The thing that stung most was watching (not rigorously, but casually) a gentleman on PDX whose has been doing a run to attempt to get to max score (which means he has to be on difficulty 1.0, not the 0.8 I was on). Notably, he can do that with settings which include 3-part salvage and having 50% cost Argo upgrades made me realise I REALLY should have had a look at the maximum score guide; since while I was never going to attempt that, I definitely could have done a much better job tuning the difficulty for myself. And the other chaps I saw also tanking around with loads of Star League tech before they'd hit the half-way point, because they'd been able to, like, buy Star League mechs off the Black Market, something I never could afford. Just because I'd picked 4-part salvage.

What I SHOULD have done is 3-part salvage -0.05 difficulty from what I had, stingy money (+0.05), generous salvage (-0.1), lethality (+0.1) and maybe considered half-cost Argo upgrades verses no rare salvage (since I'd have a LOT more money to buy stuff from stores) as a balance for the same difficulty settings - or instead of the no rare salvage turn the OpFor up to Hard, even. Though that might make for a rough start, but as it it mostly does is change the effective skulls of a mission, it might be a self-correcting probably quite fast.

Heck, if I had 3-part salvage, I could likely have still come off better with stingy money and regular salvage, since I only went for money very early on because light mechs are not worth much; but 3-part salvage would have got me 33% more mechs and would have allowed me to punch up to higher skull missions faster. (Especially with that lucky kill on what would be the Decaptator very early.)

Its certainly what I will look at when I eventually have a dabble in RogueTech, depending on how their difficulty settings work.

[The Glyphstone]

Now I'm curious, would you still have gotten the reputation boost if you hadn't fought Kerensky and the Bounty Hunter? I'm wondering if they coded that as a direct result of defeating two legendary Mechwarriors.

[Triaxx]

Breaching shot is most useful on a headshotter with a single large impact weapon, like a Gauss/AC20 that's capable of reliably doing the one shot kill damage to get full mechs. And all the mod packs i know of set it up so if you have bonus parts over the default you can get that. IE head cap on 3 parts, you get three parts. Headcap on 8, all 8 are on the field to be picked up. But if the mech is in woods, or braced/bulwarked, it takes damage reduction. A breaching shot mech gets to ignore that.

I definitely recommend BTA (Battletech Advanced) over Roguetech, if only because BTA's experience is more curated, than Roguetech's throwing things from tabletop straight in then balancing them. They share a team though so you get most of the RT features after a lot of the bugs have been ironed out. Also the creator streams a few times a week so you can see new stuff he's working on early.

[Aotrs Commander]

Now I'm curious, would you still have gotten the reputation boost if you hadn't fought Kerensky and the Bounty Hunter? I'm wondering if they coded that as a direct result of defeating two legendary Mechwarriors.

No. That was, I think the point.

If I'd have taken the two million and not done that mission, I would have been in a better position.

Breaching shot is most useful on a headshotter with a single large impact weapon, like a Gauss/AC20 that's capable of reliably doing the one shot kill damage to get full mechs. And all the mod packs i know of set it up so if you have bonus parts over the default you can get that. IE head cap on 3 parts, you get three parts. Headcap on 8, all 8 are on the field to be picked up. But if the mech is in woods, or braced/bulwarked, it takes damage reduction. A breaching shot mech gets to ignore that.

Thing was, this run, at any rate, I was tending to rely on multiple headshotting weapons, since 18% (33% with the MAD) is not particularly reliable. I generally seemed to have more luck with lots of shots, even if they were bulwarked (especially with the back-up LB-X/Snub PPC back-up to finish the head off if one of the mains hit it) - it gave me generally a VERY good chance of taking a mech down it two headshots, if one wasn't enough. I thus found that coolant vern was something I used quite a lot (and wished I'd had on more pilots) than Breeching Shot (Bulwark/Multishot/Breeching Shot was my go-to in 1.2 when I first played; I honestly didn't think I'd use coolant vent... And then I got the Bull Shark!)

I definitely recommend BTA (Battletech Advanced) over Roguetech, if only because BTA's experience is more curated, than Roguetech's throwing things from tabletop straight in then balancing them. They share a team though so you get most of the RT features after a lot of the bugs have been ironed out. Also the creator streams a few times a week so you can see new stuff he's working on early.

Noted. I was not aware of that.

[AMX]

Anybody know if the save/reload trick lets you salvage the special mechs from the Dobrev mission?

[Aotrs Commander]

Anybody know if the save/reload trick lets you salvage the special mechs from the Dobrev mission?

I doubt it, considering (if you are talking about the one with Black Widow et al), it didn't even let me have any mech salvage at all (let alone only lostech equipment salvage)

[AMX]

I doubt it, considering (if you are talking about the one with Black Widow et al), it didn't even let me have any mech salvage at all (let alone only lostech equipment salvage)

Yes exactly.
Just like Vicky's custom King Crab in the final campaign mission - you can get that anyway if you save and reload during the mission.
At least that used to work, I suppose it's possible that's been fixed.

[Aotrs Commander]

Whelp, I tried BattleTech Advanced 3062.

First mission, half-skull, an UrbanMech with a COIL blew the right arm off my Shadowhawk and at that point I realised there was no in-mission save.

Nor does it look like there will ever be one, since RogueTech apparently doesn't have them because it's too unstable or something.

I finished the mission, but that ended up with seven day's worth of repairs, some arm/hand actuators that I can't even fix because you can't buy them and you don't have ANY stores at all.

So it's harder and more punishing and therefore more grindy from the start, where the RNG has the most effect.

So. Yep. That's a deal-breaker.

That, very disappointingly, is the end of that. I simply cannot be dealing with the stress that would inflict instead of, y'know, relieve.

[Triaxx]

COIL Urbie is a Heavy Metal Addition. Running into one in your first mission is just hilariously bad luck. Hand/Arm Actuators should just be replaced when you hit Repair All.

In mission saves are disabled because modded game saves guarantee save corruption. So instead of dealing with constant complaints about corrupt saves, they disabled them.

Hand/Arm actuators can be found in stores, but aren't vital to the function of the mech. They provide slight accuracy bonuses, but can be safely left out, particularly if the mech has no weapon hardpoints in the arms.

Also what start did you pick? I've just checked 3 different planets and all but one had both available. The last only had better versions.

[Aotrs Commander]

COIL Urbie is a Heavy Metal Addition. Running into one in your first mission is just hilariously bad luck.

Which is why you can maybe see why I'm incredibly relucatant to hand myself over to the no-mercies of RNG...

Hand/Arm Actuators should just be replaced when you hit Repair All.

It didn't look like it was replacing them (as it did on the damaged foot actuator), but removing them like a normal damaged component (it was lower and hand actuators). (Whether it actually replaces them I don't know, as I didn't go further than queue uo the repairs before I called it quits.)

In mission saves are disabled because modded game saves guarantee save corruption. So instead of dealing with constant complaints about corrupt saves, they disabled them.

I gathered. Which is just unfortunate. I mean, I can't reasonably expect them to do, for nowt, what would be a full-time dev's bug-fixing job (on a constantly changing system) that would probably take weeks of coding work. But it is what it is.

Hand/Arm actuators can be found in stores, but aren't vital to the function of the mech. They provide slight accuracy bonuses, but can be safely left out, particularly if the mech has no weapon hardpoints in the arms.

Also what start did you pick? I've just checked 3 different planets and all but one had both available. The last only had better versions.

Canopian.

There weren't any in the store at the world I started from, perhaps indicating again how hard RNG was just laughing at me.

[Triaxx]

So apparently after asking in the discord, it's only upper and shoulder actuators that are auto replaced.

Anyway glad you at least gave it a shot before giving up.

[Aotrs Commander]

So apparently after asking in the discord, it's only upper and shoulder actuators that are auto replaced.

Anyway glad you at least gave it a shot before giving up.

Out of desparation (and because I wasn't 100% sure how to uninstall it), I plugged on, and the RNG hasn't been as bas as I feared, at least at the low-skull mission end. Sounds like (from something one of the loading hints said) and by the complete lack, head hits have been reduced to almost nothing, since I didn't appear to have either taken one or dealt on (at least not enough to be noticed). The only injury I've had so far was a mantatory one for starting the main campaign-as-a-flashpoint. The additional mechs and non-removable chevrons have made it such that only that first mission was the most serious instance of damage.

(The Firestarter has been absolutely MURDEROUS, armed wuith six flamers (and now I've just upgraded to -P version, which has eight and two ER MLs to do the same job, but better.)



I have noticed an oddity - one of the KS pilots (T-Bone) started with three level 5 skills (and apparently can get a level 8 one), but Strider (starting with none) took two but appears to be lockd out from taking a level 8 skill. Is that something it's supposed to do, to make some pilots be better (and some now inherently worse) or is it some sort of odd glitch?

[Triaxx]

Haven't wanted to uninstall, but I suspect you'd have to reinstall the entire game to do it.

Head hits still occur, but they're more rare and usually from high skull missions where the pilots are better.

T-Bone is actually a BTA team member, and so gets the special power of having 3 L5's but no 8's... I don't know about Strider though. I'll ask in the discord when the mod dev is online, he'd know if it's intended or not. Edit: Dev confirm's, it's a bug, should be fixed next update.

Yeah, Firestarters are nasty. I eventually ended up with a pair of Omni's.

[Aotrs Commander]

The skill thing is definitely a bug (I've reported it on Nexus, but if you happen to be on the discord, you can give the dev a nudge.)

Now that I have been able to get pilot retaining unlocked, it happens if you take level 8 in ANY skill. So, for instance, if you do what I do with my standard bulwark/gunnery pilots and get the two level five abilities and then switch to max tactics out. (Or you did, laike bulwark and piloting for you melee dude and tried to max piloting...)

Spoiler

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Get level in skill normally, no problem.

And as it doesn't give you the "warning/selection" prompts, it means that you don't know you've done it unless you happen to spot it. (And I apparently didn't THREE TIMES, as while compiling my bug report, I noticed that I'd done it to all THREE of my guts/gunnery pilots.)

[Triaxx]

He just pushed an update which should fix the bug. Just go ahead and update via the launcher and it should fix it.

[Aotrs Commander]

He just pushed an update which should fix the bug. Just go ahead and update via the launcher and it should fix it.

Ahahaha, naturally this happens JUST AFTER I spent 1.5 million retraining my pilots.

And from the looks of this, having hit install, now I suspecting my Firestarter is about the be nerfed.

Typical 2020, innit?



Edit: Yep. FANTASTIC.

Edit edit: Right, bollocks to that, I got that just nice and there's nothing to spend two tons one otherwise. I am just about barely capable of doing a very minor bit of mode programming, so let's put those two AP hardpoints back... Woohoo! Fixed it! Sketchy's Overheat will continue to function nicely, thank you...