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[Aim64C]

So, it's the craziest story. Supply requisitions are quite interesting, and the paperwork errors are a continual source of humor, here at the shop. But this one takes the cake.

Last month, we had old Jimmy filling out some part order forms. A we were running low on 32-bravo bearing casings for the leg actuators. We'd been operating in Tourmaline far more than average, lately, and the silica was really taking a toll on moving parts. So, anyway - Jimmy is somewhat clumbsy with a keyboard - so he likes to copy and paste when he puts in order entries. I'm not sure if he just mistakenly copied a portion of the part order, or copied from the wrong section... or what, exactly.

Either way - the effect was all too apparent last week, when our Comstar contracted delivery came in. Rather than a set of bearing fittings - we got a whole damned BlackJack! Our CO was on FTL comms all day trying to sort out the problem. Long story short - that's the way supply works, the command budget wasn't affect, and we were told to keep the BlackJack (something about it costing just as much to send it back as it was to build a new one). It and the 50 small pulse lasers that showed up via a similar error in supply paperwork were now ours.

Jimmy has, since, become our dedicated safety-wire specialist and is attending typing courses at the nearby university after work.

And, there, the BlackJack sat in the far corner of the Mech Bay. We canabalized the bearing fittings for the custom ride of one of our field operatives, since that took priority. It's been something of a joke around the shop that Jimmy will never live down. It is his responsibility - but, at the same time, fifteen other people reviewed and signed off on the paperwork... so it's perhaps even more their fault than it is his, as they hold the purse strings.

We were overjoyed when the salvage crews brought back a fully functioning XL fusion engine with an output rating at 280 megawatts. A lot of our mechwarriors have a paranoid fear of losing their engine from a side-torso blow-through, so our CO shelved the thing in hopes he could use it in negotiations with a nearby Steiner world that is having trouble maintaining its fission reactor power grid.

With our deployments shifting us toward some frozen city that command insists on fighting over, a lot of our assault mech pilots have been ditching double heat sinks and refitting with close-range ammunition intensive weaponry. We have a whole corner of the shop stacked to the roof with double heat sinks... where the ammo used to be.

Anyway, some new bearing fittings came in just before the weekend, so we fitted them to our shop joke that evening. A bunch of us without family planetside decided to get together at the shop for a barbeque the following day. A bunch of nerds and grease monkeys sitting around, having a good time, with a bay full of tools, a surplus of weapons that are laughed at by most mechwarriors, and a mech that had fueled nearly every joke in the shop for the past week...

The temptation was too much. The mech that had sourced our jokes was now fitted with the source of jokes for mechwarriors in the extreme. One of our Jenner pilots decided to trial-run the mech in a few friendly war game exercises, "4 teh lulz" is how he put it.

Here is the recorded feed from his drops:





The first video feed cuts off prematurely... unfortunately, the pilot's device for recording his engagements had run out of storage space in the middle of recording.