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This Is My Wrench...

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#1 Not A Real RAbbi

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Posted 30 October 2013 - 09:43 PM

There are many like it, but this one is MINE!

You can't convince an old school mechwarrior of that. He thinks everything that touches his (as if he actually owns the thing) mech is his, techs included.

Let me back up a bit. Here's a joke: A Mechwarrior and a tech walk into a bar. They both stand there for a minute. Then the mechwarrior spits on the tech and walks out. The bartender calls the tech over. He asks, "What was THAT all about?" "He expects me to do everything for him because I work on his mech." "OK, so what do you want?" "I dunno. What IS this place?"

You either get it, or you can carry your sorry carcass back to whatever stinking house you call home this week. Dom't worry. There are three types of mechwarriors in this galaxy: House noble brats, REAL mercs, and everyone else. I could care less about the brats, and everyone else is trying to BE the brats. Mommy and Daddy just aren't THAT rich. As for the mercs, well, there's a reason I gave up on humping wrenches.

And the reason is this: It's actually safer inside a mech as a mechwarrior than it is outside the mech as its tech. No kidding.

So, while I'm not nearly as good at all this tactical stuff as I was at just repairing the stuff that other not-so-good folks broke on their last drop (sometimes just getting loaded onto a dropship does a few million C-bills of damage, if the Duke of Pants-Wetting slept through that lesson in his prep school), I'm still a lot less likely to get killed or dismembered this way. And the Kurita prison cells are supposed to be a lot nicer for "officers" than for the little proletarian technicians.

And no, I'm not crazy enough for infantry. Not yet.

So, I'm gonna tell you a few tales, mechwarrior mercenaries of the galaxy. Maybe your house is {Scrap}, and you'll get all butt-hurt. Your problem. U MAD BRO? Maybe you won't.

I don't care. Just follow the rules, and don't shoot me after I eject from my 3.2-million-C-bill mech that you just crushed. Remember, I did this to feel safer...

#2 Not A Real RAbbi

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Posted 02 November 2013 - 08:45 AM

OK, so the feeling of safety is somewhat ... degrades, I suppose you could say ... when your techs are idiots.

There I was, 3 hours out from orbit, briefed and ready to go fight on my first no-kidding combat drop. Some hole of a planet with barely any atmosphere and a lot of volcanoes. Someone wanted control of the mineral-rich volcano at such-and-such. They hired us to go take it from some other mercs working for some other ... someone.

And it looked like a good matchup.

And I go to have another look over my baby. I call her the Electric Blueberry Disco Lollipop. Brightly multicolored, and absolute eyesore on the field, she's the most twisted RVN-3L in the inner sphere. I've poured hundreds and hundreds of hours of work into this thing, from somehow shoehorning a 295XL power plant into this beastie, to swapping some custom-tweaked double heatsinks in, to just pumping all sorts of custom code into the fire control system and long-range sensors, this thing is distinctly mine.

But, y'know, we have a separate team of techs, and there are times I just can't be there to watch over their shoulders while they prep my blueberry. "Trust them--they know what they're doing", my lance commander told me.

Yeah, right.

So, again, three hours out of orbit, maybe five TOPS from being on the ground on planet Hell, and I find ... well ... it's special, in the not-so-nice sense of the word.

So Tech Sergeant Jack Monkey (I don't know if that's his REAL name, but that's the nicest thing I've ever heard him called) is monkeying around in my cockpit. Half the armor is stripped off my blueberry's left leg. WTH, I wondered. So I asked him. Went something like this...

"OK, what in the worlds do you think you're doing?"

"Oh, was just giving it a once-over, and I found something wrong with the left leg subsystem processor."

"What was the problem?"

"Well, whoever put it in before put it in a weird place. It didn't look right, so I tried to put it back where the tech manual says it goes."

"OK. Do you know WHY it was mounted on the BACK of the upper leg primary structure?"

"Looked like it fell off."

At this point, I already had my old partner-in-face-rearranging in my hand--the deadly 22 millimeter combination wrench, a particularly long and hefty one, that never EVER leaves my side. I was starting to lift it, so as to better swing it downward and give TSgt Jack Monkey his (likely) fourteenth concussion.

"You know I mounted it there for a REASON, right?"

"Huh?"


I'll spare you the details of the ensuing fisticuffs. Suffice it to say, he questioned my judgement and held-up the TM as the Gospel of the Raven. The TM did not spare him what I'm told were 7 fractured bones in his face, the no-kidding fourteenth concussion (that we know of), a few teeth, and a job.

He might have pushed it too far by questioning my mother's morals. Turns out, he knows her. I mean, he KNOWS her. Y'know? Story for another day, though.

So, try as they might, the rest of the tech crew couldn't get blueberry back together in time. I couldn't help, on account of being locked-up on the commander's carpet for an hour and a half. It's what a sports team would call being 'benched'.

Maybe next time. The guy that got the nod to go in my place ended-up being one of only two mechwarriors in my company that had to be picked-up by the salvage crew. His Jenner couldn't handle the Guardian ECM suite (coulda told you that, but no one ever listens to the ex-tech). Nice experiment, but it shut his engine down right in front of the other guys' best scout pilot. Jenner-on-Jenner crime is best witnessed from orbit. He got *****, so to speak--4 medium lasers right in the center-rear plate, and it apparently pierced the power plant shielding in mid-hot-start.

The other guy got his, too. The shower of water-plasma from the pierced XL 300 kinda hot-sand-blasted his cockpit glass in a way that no laser ever could, and by some weird miracle of backup-battery-function, nooblet-boy's ECM was the only thing still functioning on his mech after he punched out. Fried both mechs' positioning systems (they work on orbital position referencing from friendlies in low orbit, and the constant jamming of that system from Guardian can literally FRY it after a minute or so, which is part of the reason Jenners don't carry ECM).

Orbital artilleryman. I think I qualified for that job just then. 8 rounds out, 5 of them hit torso. 7 had effect on target. Sadly, the eighth round, by yet another completely wild one-in-a-million occurrence, hit the other guy's ejected environmental pod dead-on in mid air.

Best scout pilot in all of 3050's mercenary corps was just killed from orbit.

But the good news is that the blueberry is up and running again, quite literally! And I'm back in the rotation for our next drop--the fabled "Crimson Strait", for a change!

And that processor is back where it belongs. Where I say it belongs. And no one, by order of the corps commander, touches my blueberry without my approval. The memo he circulated bears a picture of Jack Monkey's post-beating face. It's pretty satisfying.

Oh, and he's suing me.

Can't win for losing...

#3 Hazar Kath

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Posted 02 November 2013 - 09:20 AM

Nice work. Keep em coming. Love the spheal on Jenners and ECM.

#4 Davoke

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Posted 02 November 2013 - 02:22 PM

Yes please continue, these are hilarious. XD

#5 RadioKies

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Posted 02 November 2013 - 04:00 PM

Posted Image

#6 dal10

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Posted 02 November 2013 - 04:20 PM

Posted Image

source is the oatmeal

#7 Not A Real RAbbi

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Posted 06 November 2013 - 07:10 PM

So, things always have a way of getting worse. Remember Tech Sergeant Jack Monkey?

He MIIGGGHHHHTTTTT be the plaintiff in a lawsuit against me. Yeahhhhh.......

Turns out, the suit also named our employer as a defendant.

And, that they decided to settle it. How, you ask, do they intend to do that?

Read your contracts, mercs. Because I just lost a cherry RVN-3L over a worthless tech. 3.1 million C Bills flushed, to pay the settlement.

And now, for poetic justice. Guess what I'm piloting for the foreseeable future.

A JR7-D Jenner. And not just ANY JR7-D Jenner, but the crazy one that just got salvaged from that last incident I mentioned. I haven't picked this much shrapnel out of a mech in years.

But there's a bright side! I no longer have to worry about other techs messing with my mech. No, my lance commander told me that there's now a standing order that no one, NO ONE, put wrench to my mech without my direct supervision, and that I am the crew chief of my own mech.

Which means that I get the lead on piecing that lump back together. AND that I get to drop into the fabled Crimson Strait in a mech with some patchy (being kind here) rear armor and a very hot-running 300XL engine. And the ejection system MAY or MAY NOT function properly--the cockpit was mostly salvaged from a JR7-K that was legged-out in a river of lava, and not all of the electronics are quite ... right ...

I cannot stress enough the importance of reading EVERY LAST SINGLE LINE of your contracts.

At least I don't look like I head-butted a moving tank, though.

So.

There's that.

#8 Not A Real RAbbi

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Posted 09 November 2013 - 08:39 PM

View PostTheRAbbi, on 02 November 2013 - 08:45 AM, said:


He might have pushed it too far by questioning my mother's morals. Turns out, he knows her. I mean, he KNOWS her. Y'know? Story for another day, though.



And today, on my one five-minute break during a near-total rebuild of a JR7-D, is that day.

I'm no orphan. I have a mother, she's alive and well, and she's a 'working girl'. It wasn't always like that...

I'm one of a few weird kids that was born aboard a jump ship. You may have heard of those wondrous Liao house-owned pleasure cruise jumpers that scoot back-and-forth across the Inner Sphere. Enormous. Complete with fake beach, casinos, hospital, and all sorts of things. And if you have, then you've probably heard that they have other ... accommodations ... aboard them.

At one time, Mom was working as a nurse aboard one. Couldn't tell you which. Some rich nephew of one of the Liao family D-bags was aboard for his wedding and honeymoon. Off to the such-and-such nebula, they went. There was an assassination attempt, and three or four of the family wind up in the hospital. Then attempt number TWO happens, while they're IN the hospital. Yeah, I know, no weapons were allowed on board back then. When Liao family members say "that doesn't apply to me", they mean it, and no one in their space questions it.

Well, in the second attempt, the life of a patient in Mom's care was lost. The family blamed her. An official inquiry said so, so it MUST be true, right? Her license was yanked. But you can't just eject someone mid-cruise, and the ship's home system was attacked by Davion (I think) in the meantime. So, they're stuck in the such-and-such nebula for the foreseeable future. And whaddaya know, Mom needed to keep working to pay off her nursing school loans.

One thing leads to another. She ended up in the back rooms of the casino end of the ship--no one questions you about your employees' records there.

Sooner or later, the ship got a new home system, and it got under way. Mom got off (quit chuckling, idiots) at the next opportunity. But she was unable to find suitable employment anywhere in our piece of the IS, so eventually she found her pregnant way back aboard, running the low-profile health service for 'ladies of the night'. Among whom she occasionally also counted herself, when the bills started piling up.

I was born somewhere in that time. Early 3010. Not the best year, but far from the worst. Aboard a ship. In space.

I got to spend most of my childhood planet side with various aunts and uncles. No one mentioned my father, I never thought to ask, and I'm told that homeschooling does that to you. Age 17, I completed my basic education. I elected to go learn to be a Rabbi.

No kidding. I went to Yeshiva Gedola, and I was AWESOME. Until the first time someone said something about my mother...

Y'know, religious institutions tend to frown upon their students killing one another. Shame, really. I was doing so well. But you can only go so far as a Rabbi when everyone knows you cut a kid's throat with a ripped-off hard cover of his Torah. Tends to go over pretty badly with the older generation, at least.

So, back to the career drawing board. And in case you're wondering, male escorting was not on my list of possibilities. 1.) I've always been a bit clumsy, and lacked adequate physique for anything other than the post-menopause crowd, and 2.) EWWWWWWW!

A friend threw me a bone (again, quit laughing you chuckleheads!) and got me a job at his father's brother's best friend's auto dealership. Planetside, low-key, and easy. Started in parts. Picked up some tech tips, and was replacing engines within a year.

A spot at one of the independent mech technician academies came open, and another friend (from school, one who hated the deceased would-be-Rabbi as much as I did) pulled a string for me. It's good to be connected.

Y'know, sidebar time here, it's good to be Jewish in the Inner Sphere. No one talks about us. We're pretty low on the radar. Russian Jews, doubly so. There are maybe 90 or 100 of us anywhere in the IS. So, when you need something, you know pretty much EVERYONE in your community. We have it made that way.

So anyhow, by 3036 I was enrolled, by 3038 I was graduated. My final project was a crazy COM chassis rebuild that was FAST, had a kicking' blue-and-silver paint job, and carried four sweet medium-class lasers. Some D-bag wanted it for scaring the diapers off his trainees, so he kicked the contract to the academy. They chose my project, he liked it, he paid them a few million, and I got a piece of paper saying that I graduated. More or less fair.

So that takes us up to about 12 years ago.

Mom's still taking care of 'the girls', though she hasn't really BEEN one of 'the girls' in about 18 years. Most of the family won't talk to her, but they ask me all the time if she's alright.

I never did get around to asking after my father. If she even knows. I don't want to know if she knows. I know it's NOT mister "3.1 million C bills can't make my face look human again" that just sued me. It's probably someone just like him, though. And I just don't want to know.

Y'know?

Edited by TheRAbbi, 09 November 2013 - 08:44 PM.


#9 Not A Real RAbbi

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Posted 11 November 2013 - 03:43 PM

I have never, EVER, been this tired.

I spent 42 straight hours slaving over that Jenner. Give or take a few minutes. Went right up to the drop briefing. Thankfully, I hadn't been tasked to prepare intel or anything else for the briefing.

One battalion dropping in the inlet side of town on the Crimson Strait. Limited close air and artillery support. Enemy was coming up from the highway at the other end of town.

I got sent off to the far end of the point--recon, report. And boy, what a surprise I had to report.

I caught a visual without radar. I recognized the chassis--RVN. No radar meant it was likely a -3L running a Guardian ECM suite. Fun. One-on-one, and my two Streak SRM-2 launchers were pretty much useless.

I knew he had spotted me, and I was not exactly being cautious up to that point. So why didn't he fire right away? How long had he been on to me?

You know, as lights go, the JR7 is pretty much the best tackler. I found this out rather unintentionally.

So I had taken a little juke to my right, meaning to come around the far outer end of the point and see if I could get behind the Raven. Turns out, he was thinking the same thing about me. As I swung around the weird tree-stump-thing (plants on that world creep me out), almost full-speed, cutting hard left, I ran pretty much head-on into the raven's left knee.

Jenners are actually fairly well built for head-on collisions. There's a set of three solid rails running aft-to-fore, supporting the engine and cockpit, as well as the waist turret gimbal. The cockpit is set back just enough from the leading edge that you can go head-on with any other light (usually, though I wouldn't recommend it) at least once without cracking the outer windscreen, just as long as your target submarines you. And I had my Jenner's nose JUST above that raven's knee.

Now, this HAD to look ridiculous, had anyone been watching. My nose was thrust upward and away, and I nearly lost balance and rolled. NEARLY, thanks to those wonderful jump jets. The poor raven got stood up, pretty much stopped in place, and twirled around about 270 degrees to its left--it was left facing back inland. Must have tweaked something in the left leg, too, because it started as if to run off in the original direction again, but the left leg more or less crumpled at the knee. The -3L was hobbled.

No one will ever know for sure, and I sure don't remember, but it's a safe bet I have never EVER smiled like that before. For a moment, I was evil. I was Death herself. And it didn't seem the least bit odd to me, in that fine moment of glory and destruction, that at the very moment I was lining my shot up, Streak lock lit up. I cut loose. Full alpha. Rear center plate. It practically evaporated before the missiles hit, and they cruised right on through, between the splotches of green and blue and purple paint across the back torso sides, right into the engine, shredding the shielding and directing a blast through the cockpit.

I had killed again.

And it seemed familiar, somehow, that a RVN-3L's ECM would flick off momentarily after a hard knock. There was something ... right ... about that quirk in that particular ECM. As though it may have had a loose set of wave guides on the transmitter set, like the ones I was going to ...

NO!

That was no regular -3L. That was MY -3L! Well, it had been. Before the hot plasma spewing out of its breached 295XL engine melted through the Streak SRM ammo magazine just under the left bank of heat sinks. All that's left of that raven today is the armor, and most of it for that matter. Even the paint was cooked off. MY paint.

Yep, no doubt about it. That was the RVN-3L I used to call Blueberry. The mech I lost in a lawsuit to a guy I beat in the face with a wrench. The mech he immediately sold to his cousin, who worked for another merc outfit. The mech that was turned around just in time to make the drop, in order that it be destroyed by its former owner.

Anyhow, our defense of the Strait held. We lost a pair of Blackjacks there, but the other side left 10 of theirs smoldering on the disgusting, smelly, red waters of the Strait. Their commander surrendered the force, and he was allowed to walk off in his AS7-D-DC. We got the salvage.

So, I got my mech back. Kinda.

Turns out, after a close examination of the collision-damaged left leg of my former RVN, that the other unit's techs had done the same as Tech Sergeant Jack Monkey, and had relocated the controls and wiring to original tech manual specifications. It came loose, apparently, after the collision. See, that controller grounds to the structure. With it dislodged and no longer in contact, and with the enormous DC voltage that came surging through in the attempt to pick-up a run again, it basically burst into flame. It was scorched from the inside out.

That's right, Jack Monkey. I TOLD YOU, SUCKER! First, your face. Then, your cousin.

WHO'S NEXT?!

Oh yeah, so I never made it to the fabled casino at the Strait. I was so freakin' exhausted, after almost 48 straight hours and destroying my own (she'll always be mine) mech, I parked the Jenner in the first Gazelle available and passed out in the cockpit.

And now, to do my least favorite thing in mech maintenance--body work. We'll be dropping this planet's moon in the next couple days, and the commander wants to wring me dry of 'beginner's luck'. Cool...

#10 Not A Real RAbbi

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Posted 13 November 2013 - 04:52 AM

Ah, the academy days...

Believe it or not, I caught a break. Intel came back pretty favorable on the moon drop, so they pushed it back a day and tagged the salvage team to handle it. And so, after another long day and night and next day in the mech bay, I'm getting caught up on my relaxing.

And I'm thinking about the academy days.

The moon drop was going to be a resource hunt. There are several automated copper mining rigs on that particular moon, and we were going to go reset them to a certain company's control. (By that, I mean that we were hired to return them to ComStar's control.)

That certain company has had some weird goings-on lately in the near-periphery worlds, and they need all the metal they can get to have their precious hyper pulse generators repaired. I suppose it's a good thing--I haven't heard from Uncle Leonard in a few months, and his planet is supposedly clacked-out due to an unknown HPG malfunction.

So, much of the electronics and communications curriculum at the academy HAD to be taught by ComStar employees. They were all very uptight about their information.

Those drill rigs were designed to be dropped by specially-refitted dropships, programmed remotely, and left. Most of what goes on in them is automated, including storage and offloading of mined resources. There's actually little that one CAN program. Most of the operation is handled by solid-state electronics and a firmware set that requires a hard (wired) link to alter. Little stuff, like who owns the rig and its drilled resources, is reprogrammable by wireless interface.

Now THIS is where it gets interesting. How does the Company Commander's mech, 2 kilometers away, know what mech you're targeting and how jacked-up it is and if you're just unloaded LRMs on it? Also a wireless connection. And what happens if the AS7-D-DC moving BETWEEN you and the CO flips its Guardian ECM on in DISRUPT mode? Yup. No connection.

Turns out that ComStar was called to intervene in this years ago. ECM, they agreed, was useful on the battlefield, but those mining rigs (and other similar devices used for non-combat purposes across the IS, including some of THEIR OWN equipment) are not considered fair game for ECM. So, the Guardian ECM suite had to be specifically designed to NOT be able to interfere with non-military equipment, such as automated drill rigs.

So, why didn't battlemech systems like C3I and such just move to the same band as those ComStar-protected peaceful platforms? ALSO ComStar's doing.

It's pretty ridiculous how that one bunch basically controls ... everything. You'd think they were destined to save us all...

So ComStar had to ALSO specify that no battlemech systems would operate wirelessly on the same band as any peaceful systems. THUS, why I can't get my personal computer to talk to my Jenner's on-board diagnostics, and have to use the clunky pieces of junk that were sold with Jenners. Ravens. Whatever.

Every battlemech originally moved from the factory with a companion computer that is used for diagnostics, reprogramming, and occasional games of Solitaire. They only usually excel at that last thing.

Those computers, too, have two means of communicating with the battlemech's systems. One is wireless, the other is through a wired diagnostic connection, typically in the cockpit. The latter doesn't require the mech to be powered-up, but the former requires at least an external AC power source, if not the full reactor start-up. Again, depends on the mech and the level of psychosis experienced by its designers.

A lot of us have figured out that things can be connected through the wired diagnostic port(s) to operate in parallel with the battlemech's systems WHILE it's actually running, moving, and even fighting.

Let's bring this back around to the mining thing. Battlemechs were derived from old-school harsh-environment mining mechs, I'm told. Before there was a 100-ton man-like Death Walking Terror [Cannibal Corpse reference could NO LONGER be avoided, for which I apologize. Just a little.] killing stuff on the battlefields, there was a mining mech. And the design of some of these mining rigs dates back that far, to those days. So even battlemechs are built on an architecture, both hardware AND software, that interacts with mining rigs and other mining equipment (field repair stations, derived also from mining equipment of long ago) by design.

And thus, the most menacing and effective way to secure someone else's mining rigs for your use is by parking a battlemech next to it, and letting the battlemech's systems naturally open and reprogram the commodities management software in the mining rigs.

There's a lot of security going on in this transaction, and I don't pretend to know THAT software well at all. ComStar, once again, plays that close to the chest. But it seems that they have whizzed in someone's cereal along the way, and a disgruntled former software tech leaked an interesting companion program for battlemechs that bypasses some of the mech's own security protocols and speeds up the process of reprogramming the rigs.

This is pretty much a MUST for these commodities capture raids.

This also CAN, on some occasions, be left on board the mech by a sleep-deprived tech, overnight, powered-up. The software isn't PERFECT, you see.

So, I get to spend my day off reprogramming a Jenner.

Because my little JR7-D now thinks that it's a copper mining rig on a moon. And it needs to be serviced soon, it tells us.

FML

#11 XphR

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Posted 13 November 2013 - 11:39 AM

Thats no wrench, its a spanner!

#12 dal10

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Posted 13 November 2013 - 12:24 PM

what about a hydrospanner?

#13 XphR

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Posted 14 November 2013 - 04:50 PM

This spanner is hydrophobic.

#14 Not A Real RAbbi

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Posted 17 November 2013 - 05:04 PM

We're moving out of this system.

I can't tell you where. That is, if I knew where we're headed next, I couldn't tell you. But I don't.

No more word FROM Uncle Leonard, just ABOUT him. Deceased. Listed among about 200,000 or so known deceased, and about 3,000,000 more suspected. Something about a large-scale covert military strike. But no one's owning up to it. And of course, the big houses are all pointing fingers at one another.

Great.

The local Governor came aboard the jump ship to see us off and thank us for liberating his planet. Funny, there's a pretty well-equipped garrison (2 corps of mechs, more infantry and armor than you can imagine, a couple squadrons of decent fighters, etc.) on his little backwater. So, why were WE called in to do what little fighting there was?

He dodged that question. Wasn't a fan of it at all.

This is the stuff you never see on the news. They'll mention that one house's forces were defeated by those of another house. Or something like it. But no one ever tells you that neither house's forces actually took part. They were held in reserve. They were wagers. to the victor go the spoils, it is said. Whatever military force was on that planet is now technically under someone else's control, but it didn't suffer so much as a scratch in the paint.

That's what we were paid for.

We took the risk. They sat at home and played Call of Duty. We got a paycheck. They got a paycheck AND a parade.

And they're not coming with us to Planet: I-Can't-Tell-You-Which-One-But-You'll-Hate-It.

I was looking forward to some zero-G, too. Finally got all five jump jets working right on the Jenner.


Also, I hate myomer work. It's the only thing I hate more than automotive body repair.

See, myomere were designed after the VERY successful skeletal muscles of the human body. Chemically, they're pretty similar. Lots of calcium ions, molecules that work kinda like ratchets when an electrical current passes over them, etc. But here's the catch: unlike in the human (or any animal) body, the myomer bundles in a mech can't be replaced a cell at a time during use by organic processes, like those in your body. They're not lubricated by fluids and cartilage and such. SO, there's another way of doing that.

Between each strand of myomer actuator cord, there must be placed a lubricating sheath. It's usually a set of graphene layers with a thin coat of molybdenum disulfide (or similar) grease between each. This, as you can imagine, gets a little messy.

It's even MORE messy when the mech's actuators haven't been cleaned out in FOREVER. (This is supposed to be done at MOST semiannually, or at any teardown, whichever comes first--that's been the standard since the Star League days.) The MolyB grease squeezes out from between the myomer bundles and runs.

See, like many other greases, MolyB DOES get a little runnier when it gets hotter. Not nearly as badly as those long-ago hydrocarbon motor oils, for instance, but with the kind of heat that mechs generate, it gets kinda like syrup.

This stuff has been around forever. 20th Century Terran airplanes used it to lubricate the moving parts of their machine guns, for instance.

It's very dark grey in color, and as the name says, contains molybdenum--a corrosion-resistant heavy metal. So, ingesting it is HIGHLY discouraged.

Also, getting it on your skin isn't the greatest idea. It's hard to avoid if, say, all the techs in your outfit refuse to help you out because you almost killed the last guy that touched your mech, and you can't find a set of reasonable gloves to wear while working to clean and re-skin your myomers.

And then, let's say that someone conveniently 'forgot' to tell you that you were expected on deck in 15 minutes to meet the Governor of Planet WhoCares. And then, you can't get the grease off your hands because there's no hand cleaner available in the hangar right now, and 15 minutes isn't time enough to get back to your quarters.

And let's say, then, that when the Governor shakes your hand, he gets ... dirty ...

It's the first time my Battalion CO has smiled in my presence since I started working here.

Seems no one likes the Governor.

And I just got word from a friend planet side that the Governor is sick and had to miss the big parade.

Shoulda washed his hands...

#15 DavrosDalek

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Posted 17 November 2013 - 06:56 PM

Great stuff. =]

#16 Not A Real RAbbi

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Posted 18 November 2013 - 05:11 AM

Little update:

The governor was hospitalized. He'll probably pull through alright, but he's pretty sick at the moment. Local conspiracy theorists called it an assassination attempt. While the planet wide news outlets have mostly dismissed that possibility, I am nonetheless persona non grata on their little world for the foreseeable future.

My FIRST trip to the strait, and I get banned from the planet. Great...

#17 Not A Real RAbbi

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Posted 20 November 2013 - 03:31 PM

And THAT is why you don't store ammo in mech bays and hangars...

So, the Vlar 300 XL fusion engine is a pretty magnificent thing to behold.

More magnificent yet, when it's been installed in a JR7 chassis. Because the Main battlemech we see these days that was originally produced with the big Vlar is the AS7-K Atlas. So, squeezing that engine into a mech 1/3 the weight and 1/4 the size of an Atlas is a pretty amazing thing.

The Vlar 300XL is also a fairly reliable, solid engine. Well, as XL engines go, anyway. It has just one notable little flaw, but we'll get to that in a bit.

More to the point, though, and as we probably all know, these fusion engines run on hydrogen. You get a certain hydrogen isotope hot enough, and the atoms start bonding at the nuclear level to create Helium. Then the Helium nuclei split again, and release a lot more heat when they turn back into hydrogen. That heat causes the newly liberated hydrogen atoms to fuse again, and so on...

Key point? Hydrogen. There's a LOT of it in a fusion engine, even a lightweight one.

Like, for instance, the 300XL that's in my JR7-D. Or in my old academy mentor's JR7-D, on which I have based my own.

When it mixes with oxygen-rich air, like the air that you and I and everyone else breathes to live, and the air that is ambient in most mech maintenance facilities, that hydrogen is ... explosive ...

Know what else is explosive? Ammo.

Ammo, for instance, like the rounds for the big 20-class Autocannon in a HBK-4G. The cartridges go upwards of 100 pounds each. Just the feed mechanisms in the HBK's ammo storage to move those massive cartridges to the gun are incredibly heavy, which is why you can only get about 7 rounds in a mech per ton, and why a lot of mechwarriors have opted for the 10-class auto cannon version of the HBK chassis. Replacing a HBK-4G ammo feed system is a PAIN--I'd rather have to rewire an Atlas's shoulder actuators. ANYTHING but an HBK-4G main gun feed system overhaul.

Sometimes, of course, mechwarriors and their techs, and more importantly, their commanders and financiers, get in a bit of a rush to get from one job to the next. Some damage to a battlemech may go without repair, but definitely NOT that damage that renders a 14-ton cannon inoperative.

And sometimes, when that gun just HAS to be up and running and firing straight and true in under 48 hours, and the mech is already aboard jump ship, and the most ideal conditions just cannot be made available for repair of a battlemech, techs do what they can.

There's not a lot of space inside a Gazelle drop ship, and thus not a lot of places to set aside ammo from a gun feed system that's being replaced component-by-component enroute to some acid-atmosphere desert volcano.

But this is low-gravity work, and the narrowest part of most mechs is the head. And the part of a mech bay with the most free space in a drop ship is overhead of the mech, which only works in zero- or low-gravity.

IDEAL, you say?

Sure. But, a neat thing happens when the Vlar 300XL engine in the JR7-D in the next bay, the bay where about 13 AC/20 shells were being temporarily stored overhead, starts to leak hydrogen from a crack at the 7 o'clock lower shield.

That hydrogen gas has a way of over pressurizing the inside of the Jenner and squeezing out of the environmental seals around the left bank of jump jets.

And in low gravity, it DOES still rise. Just slowly. And slowly enough that it has more time to mix with the air it's rising through.

And become explosive.

KINDA like the AC/20 rounds overhead are explosive.

AND near the upper catwalk.

The upper catwalk, that is, on which Jermaine Nelson, my old academy mentor, was standing, as he oversaw the work on his lance mate's Hunchback ...

... when what I'm told was a gas explosion started by a hot work light, provided just enough fiery heat in that enclosed environment, that it caused an ammunition explosion over Nelson's head.

And a rupture of the inner hull of the drop ship.

And the destruction of two battlemechs.

And the loss of seven lives, with three more hospitalized.


Oh, and it cost someone his privately-financed attempt to seize a cadmium mining operation on a mostly-uninhabitable planet.


But mostly, it cost the life of the man that taught me most of what I know about fixing battlemechs.

He was like a Dad to me in many ways.

Especially in that he left the remains of his prized JR7-D to me. Remains that include, among the few serviceable components left, a very special piggyback module he had developed.

I'd rather have his advice than his mech, though. Any day...

Edited by TheRAbbi, 20 November 2013 - 03:36 PM.


#18 Not A Real RAbbi

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Posted 27 November 2013 - 08:02 PM

So, about that prized JR7-D...

While the mech itself was quite literally smashed, much of the electronic system controls was salvageable. This is a very good thing!

I've been going over my old notes from the days of tech academy. HE talked about this thing like a daughter. And he let a little detail slip every now and then, when he'd get on about how the engineers did a scrap job of something in the Jenner, about how he'd improved on the design on his own.

Between the little slips that I noted from his lectures and labs, and systems control data from the scrapped mech, I'm piecing together a few really cool tweaks for my own.

For one thing, he had played with some actuator subsystem modules to get them to log feedback from the myomer leg actuators in real time. Knowing how that data was formatted, I found an interesting bit in that piggyback module. It seems he had figured out the baseline data for feedback from his own mech when it had no other heavy equipment around it moving.

So, each myomer bundle has a VERY predictable resistance to electrical current. That resistance is lowest when the bundle is extended, and highest when it's contracted, and it increases by a pretty simple linear function in-between (assuming all is in perfect working order). Each mech uses that data to figure out if the actuators are healthy or not.

But that's ALL the mechs do with the data.

See, he figured that if the system controller knew how many volts it was sending to each bundle, and at how many amps, etc., and it knew what was coming out the other end, and it could calculate resistance in real time during use, and the function for that resistance over time is pretty constant anyway, then any noise in the resistance number (observed resistance versus expected resistance) must indicate SOMETHING, right?

Turns out, it does. Sometimes. These things are sensitive enough to detect, albeit inadvertently, the extra, tiny little bit of resistance to movement caused by vibrations in the ground, received by the various leg actuators through the mech's structure. Those have to be some pretty significant vibrations, and they have to be near by. Say, something weighing 20-100 tons, placing its weight one-at-a-time on one of two feet, only a few square meters in surface area.

Yeah.

A seismic sensor.

All that was really needed was for someone to look at the data the mech was already using. Well, and to access it in real time (rather than through a maintenance data recorder interface after the mission is over).

But THAT is the trick. There's a memory segment allocated to MDR data, and that is the only segment that can be accessed externally while a mech is powered-up. That's NOT where this information goes, at least not in real time. The data is logged in movement control system memory, and is only copied out to the MDR block on shutdown.

How does the movement control system know to push that data to the MDR block? Well, it gets a signal from the integrated system processor, at least in the case of the JR7-D. Different manufacturers call it different names, but the concept is the same.

And in pretty much every mech I've studied, which is a lot of them, the MCS can push MDR data WITHOUT shutting down, or even interfering with normal operation. Actuator shut-down is the LAST thing to happen before the power plant is set to shut-down. So, it can't interfere with normal actuator operation.

All that's needed is a simple 2-bit 6.2 VDC signal sent to the right pin on connector J377.

Which can be sent, of course, from the MDR port.

If you know how to program just a little.

It's nice to know when there actually IS a Warhammer on the other side of that building. And now, I DO know.

As long as I'm standing still, anyhow. Programming the module to work all this out on the run is a bit...tricky.

Oh, and I missed services for Uncle Leonard. ^_^

#19 Not A Real RAbbi

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Posted 28 November 2013 - 10:18 AM

By the way, Happy Chanukah!

#20 Not A Real RAbbi

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Posted 28 March 2014 - 07:50 AM

Do you smell that? Of course you do. It's very distinctive. I'm told there are some trees on Terra that smell like it, but not as strongly, and they're not nearly as widespread on mankind's home world.

That's right. I'm back at the Strait. Have been for a couple months.

When last I updated, my battalion and two others were headed to meet up with the corps' main body at a little backwater on the periphery.

So, we arrived at the system's jump point, and were met with a hold order. Late to the show (due to some legal hassles that resulted from my inadvertent attempt to assassinate a Governor), we were the reserve force.

That hold order was the next to last order received.

At some point, as many as 17 jump ships were in hold at that jump point. If you don't know interstellar navigation that well, I should tell you that this is a pretty dangerous situation in itself. Let that suffice (I'm not exactly a trained expert on the topic, or I'd attempt an explanation of jump point protocols).

After nearly three days of waiting at the jump point, and NOT in orbit (where we should have been), we received one last order from corps, to depart the system and await further orders at our previous location.

That wasn't so well thought-out.

See, while he was deathly ill in the hospital, being attended to by his personal medical staff (a surgeon, two medical residents, a physical therapist, three attractive young massage therapists, a radiologist, a psychiatrist, a psychologist, and more nurses than are found in most central hospitals), the Governor had drafted an executive order allowing his regular house military to arrest suspects of felony crimes even in orbit, and even at the system's jump point.

I'm told that our jump ship's arrival occurred within 4 hours of the Governor's signature on the order. You can't BUY luck like that, not for all the CBills in the Inner Sphere.

So, along comes our cool ship, back to orbit, requesting permission to enter stationary orbit and transfer personnel to the surface. We were boarded within 20 minutes.

I got to spend the next several days being paraded around (finally got my parade, at least) in front of the population, trotted into a court room, tried and convicted for the assassination attempt, incarcerated for a term of not less than 20 years, and then...

PARDONED.

Not that the Governor saw the hilarious (and nearly deadly) error for what it was. Rather, knowing that I was now ruined in the house Liao, that I was hated by the few dozen million people currently inhabiting his little world, he took pity on me. In something reminiscent of 19th Century Russia (Terran history--learn it), he had known all along that it was a dumb mistake and not a REAL assassination attempt, and had used the opportunity to simply convince the house leadership of his need of continued regular military presence (oh, and his multimillion CBill personal 'medical' staff). Now that the people and the house had become solidly convinced of his personal strategic importance, he could also cast himself as a merciful and reasonable leader.

I was granted a full pardon and released, my criminal record expunged of the violent felony.

In the intervening couple months, though, my battalion had been reflagged to headquarters and command of the corps. Main body had never been heard from again, and it's still a great mystery what happened to them and the reported 495,000 tons of battlemech deployed to that planet to reinforce the thirteen brigades of regulars already planetside. So, my little battalion of dimwits had to also move out. Without me.

They were, however, nice enough to leave all my stuff here. My contract was terminated, and my belongings transferred to the Governor, who placed them in the care of the military garrison at the Strait.

Which brings me back to the smell.

One of the constant complaints from the local military folks is the proximity of the Strait garrison to the water, which floods twice a year with bleach/mushroom smell of runoff from the forests of those creepy plants. Otherwise, it's a pretty sweet station.

And it's the station where all my belongings, other than my coveralls and wrench (I NEVER go anywhere with the extra-long 22 millimeter combination 12-point box and open end wrench), are being held.

So, even if I HAVE been pardoned, and my record HAS been expunged, I still find it difficult, as would any civilian with no formal documentation of how he came to be on this planet, to gain access to a regular military installation, in order to claim possession of a JR7-D Jenner battlemech.

It's right there. I can see it. All my personals, like my photos of Mom and Uncle Leonard, and my last pay (in cash, no less), are in the cockpit, or so I'm told in the curt termination letter given to me in my prison cell.

I have about 300 CBills to my name, and it's likely going to be a week or two getting all this straightened out.

Gonna try my luck at the Red (second-largest casino in the Strait). It can't get much worse, right?





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