78 replies to this topic

[Reinforce]

This thread is made of pure gold!

[Not A Real RAbbi]

Two things I love about casinos:

1.) As long as it looks like you're gambling, drinks are on the house.
2.) As long as you look like you need a job, someone is going to interview you.

With both of the above, I've become accustomed to a certain level of quality in the drinks and the job offers. Neither has panned out very well so far.

I have, nonetheless, taken a job. I'm a mercenary mechwarrior again!

Oh, and there's a third thing that's sometimes awesome about casinos, and that also comes with a now-diminished expectation of quality on my part: GIRLS.

So, I came out a few thousand ahead by about three hours in. There's an old Terran card game, Blackjack, that I enjoy and do pretty well at. At least, as long as I'm not on the high-stakes table, I do well. I've learned that lesson. So, I started in with 200 C-Bills, and walked off from the third different table with just over 6.500. Good take for four hours of free white russians (watered-down, and cheap well liquor, but free is free).

By this point in any regular, sane casino, someone would have approached me with something real to offer; Recon work for a heavy battalion, LRM support pilot, EW pilot for corps HQ, SOMETHING. I hadn't even had anyone so far take a look at the wrench and ask for my tech license number. Nada.

So, enter the girl. Woman, really. I'm 40 (it's the new 18, I'm told), and this gal had a few years on me. She's on the job, too. I'm bored. She has a room in-house. Mini bar. On-demand holofilms (my fellow science fiction fan, I found out). And so on.

1,000 C-Bills lighter, we're off to the room.

EXCEPT, after a few months in prison, I was more interested in the comfort and relaxation. And she wasn't about to go THERE with me anyhow.

This wasn't her first gig. Not even her first CASINO gig.

And then I remembered her.

Natalee! Last ship I was on with Mom, before I went off to the academy, Natalee 'worked'. She was one of Mom's favorites. (Mom would be SO disappointed to know that Nat was still 'working', by the way.)

Nat clocked out and we spent the next several hours watching classic Terran sci-fi films. Fahrenheit 451, Сталкер, The Black Hole, and so on. We had barely even bothered to start catching up, just geeked-out like teenagers (which we both were, last time we saw one another) at a sleepover. It was pretty cool.

Somewhere around 5 the next morning, still wide awake and riding a never-ending buzz from alcohol and excellent film (I think we were into B films, with a recently holo-mastered "The Man with the Screaming Brain" playing), there was a knock on the door.

Who KNOCKS? The door bell was invented, like, 1200 years ago.

I said yes before I even opened the door. The man on the other side wore greasy coveralls and had an antique wrench tucked under his belt (Terran 1-1/8" box/open combo--his Schwartz WAS bigger than mine, I giggled). He came to talk work.

The job that I eagerly accepted was both mechwarrior AND technician. Bryson was a well-known technician and owner of a chain of tech shops on the far side of this planet's main continent.

Turns out, there's an imaginary line on the continent. It follows the New Carpathian Mountains in a north-south direction, bisecting the continent. To the East of those mountains is a LOT of desert, with some small oases along the colder eastern coast. There are settlements all along the coast, and at a few river ports inland, but none of it has been patrolled by the formal house government in nearly a century, since this planet came under Liao control.

This was all well and good when it was just basically the wild, wild East. As with the American West of the Terran 19th Century, law was hard to come by, and anyone with something to protect was better off to hire his own protection than to wait on the law.

Enter Bryson Hess. He had followed the news about my incarceration and pardon. Did a little research. Found out that we had some common friends from the academy. HE had been wanting to hire some REAL security (there are an estimated total of 16 battlemechs east of the mountains on this continent, and all but three are in severe disrepair), and of course he was always looking for good techs. Two birds, meet my one stone.

There's just one problem, right? My Jenner. It's on the other side of a wall that I cannot cross unless I want to go back to prison, this time on an asteroid (encroaching a military installation would invoke house-level charges--the Governor can't pardon that).

So, would you know, Bryson had recently applied for licensing to own/operate a battlemech for security, under a sort of marshall program. He'd demonstrated a need (his facilities had been robbed nearly 200 times in the last 8 years, losing him nearly three million C-Bills, and driving up his commercial insurance premiums). He had a clean record and a good reputation. He had formal know-how, and the facilities to perform most maintenance pretty reasonably on battlemechs. All he needed was a mech (which he could afford if he didn't get robbed all the time, and only needed because he couldn't put the money together).

We were a fit.

So, the local regulars are arranging a VTOL to ship my Jenner out to Jade City tomorrow. I'm spending the night again with Nat, then heading out with Bryson in the morning to meet my mech.

All is suddenly kinda ok with the galaxy again. It's not glory and fame and all that, but it's decent and honest work I've got ahead of me. I'm a tech that also happens to have a battlemech and license to use it (within certain geographical restrictions, of course) at the direction of my employer.

No more comments about my luck.


Oh, and Nat's already talking about moving East, too. Friends are hard to come by in this galaxy...

[Not A Real RAbbi]

Quick note:

WHO DOES THAT?!

Seriously, man, just what the scrap?!

So, the VTOL delivers my Jenner to Mao Field, just southwest of Jade City. They even washed it for me. Sweet, right? Windscreen polished, even the laser lenses were resurfaced and polished. Heck, they vacuumed the cockpit!

Seems a lot to do for an ex-con, right?

Apparently, it was to cover-up theft.

Fired-up the Jenner, and all was working right. She showed-up a ton light, though (in case you didn't know, your mech can tell you how much it weighs, based on the resistance on leg actuators at a rest, and a little bit of trigonometry and physics).

What weighs about a ton and is missing from my Jenner? Oh, y'know, 100 Streak Short Range Missiles. No big, right?

Bryson and I are crashing in Jade City for the night, and tomorrow morning we head southeast to my new home.

Oh, and we spotted some of my future competition (the troublemakers) on the way, just outside of Jade City. Someone's got a beat-up Stinger and a couple technicals with SRMs.

Oh, I hope they know...

Mine is unofficially the seventh-fastest Jenner ever built. (Four of the six faster were experiments that never saw field use, and one of the remaining two has since been lost to a mystery massacre on a periphery world.) There is no Stinger that can keep pace. And it's not a LAM, either--I can recognize those pretty well, even from over a kilometer overhead.

Someone's got a BIG surprise coming.

(Even if I CAN'T get my hands on 100 Streak SRMs any time soon...)

[Not A Real RAbbi]

So, there's an order to everything. In the merc corps, as in the regular force of each house, the mechwarriors of any given battlemech outfit are in the minority.

Traditions here date back well over 1,000 years. The organizational structure of most units, merc or regular, are based on this concept of multiple layers of decentralized leadership, with greater overall responsibility at each higher layer.

A typical regiment consists of three battalions, each battalion of three companies, and each company of three lances. Right?

Not really. Each maneuver company consists of three lances of mechs and mechwarriors, as well as the crew chiefs for the mechs and a few administrative types.

At the next step up the chain, the battalion (some 'Cavalry' units still call this a squadron, as do most aviation and aerospace units), there are usually three mech companies. But in addition, there's usually an overall administrative and staff company, and another maintenance company. This maintenance company does the heavy lifting. Ever tried having a lone crew chief pull an engine swap on a Cicada? Doesn't work so well.

And so it goes on up the line at the regiment level (sometimes referred to as a brigade, too), and up to corps/division/whatever. It is at these higher levels that we see integration of salvage operations, infantry, artillery, armor, and even some non-aerospace aviation.

But back to the battalion maintenance company versus the crew chiefs.

For one thing, the maintenance company has a general maintenance section of a bunch of general technicians. They train the same as the crew chiefs; jacks of all trades, masters of none. They get the more time-intensive jobs, like engine swaps and actuator replacements, in order that the crew chiefs focus more on quicker preventive maintenance and software updates.

The maintenance company also has a large armament repair section. These are more weapons-focused technicians that focus on service and maintenance specifically of the weapons on a mech. The monthly (or 100-rounds, whichever comes first) inspection and service of the typical AC/20 ammo feed system falls on them.

Then there are more specialized shops. Battlemech structural repair (including armor, usually, though some have experimented with a separate, dedicated armor shop), CEI (Communications, Electronics, and Instruments), powerplants, and so on. And then there's maintenance control. They are the brains of the maintenance company, prioritizing and scheduling its work to meet the mission requirements with combat-ready battlemechs. It's the most chaotic, frustrating work there is.

And in regular military outfits, there is also a quality control section. These folks are general techs themselves (and a few also represent the more specialized shops, usually armament), but they are separate from and equal to the maintenance control section, and answer directly to the battalion XO or #2 on maintenance matters. Their job is to follow the techs around and make sure their work is done to standard, and to keep maintenance records on all the battalion's battlemechs straight.

See, one of the VERY few things that everyone in the Inner Sphere agrees on, is that there is a minimum common standard for mech techs, and that techs must be licensed to work on mechs. This is more due to standardized mining practices (and yes, there are still hundreds of non-militarized mining mechs in use throughout each house's space), and the need to ensure that miners' lives are not lost needlessly to careless maintenance practice. So, the Common License for Interstellar Technicians (yeah, I still chuckle at that one, too), class M and M/E (Mech and Mech/Enhanced) was born before the BATTLEmech. The training and licensing is fairly challenging, and quite expensive as well, and regular militaries are not willing to invest that much in their techs without a guarantee of a career (a recent study by ISN found that about 91% of military techs serve less than 4 years) obligation.

So, regular military techs are REQUIRED by the Star League Era agreement on the C.L.I.T. program to be supervised thus.

Merc corps outfits, though, enjoy no such exception.

Thus, though I had technically not been working as a tech for a few months, my license was still valid when Bryson hired me.

I HAVE A C.L.I.T.!

(Again, feel free to chuckle. I did when I typed it.)

What I DO NOT have any more, though, is a separate support unit of highly-trained and professional maintainers, along with state-of-the-art specialized tools and diagnostic equipment. Bryson's are the best private facilities in a 30 light year radius, but they're still dismal next to those of even relatively B-rate merc outfits.

And so, we improvise.

Bryson's recently come into a fairly large grant from the planetary government, on the basis that he now has over 30% of his work force ex-convicts (though I was pardoned and expunged, the application was made before that all became official, and so it counted long enough for the grant approval--he may have fudged a bit and called me an employee BEFORE I said yes, or was even released from prison) and is technically running a social reintegration program through technical training.

Nevermind that we were all technicians BEFORE ever going to prison.

And the picture? Y'know, of the guy that sued me for ruining his face? Yeah. It made the rounds here before I arrived. Turns out that a lot of these guys knew him.

Two of them did time with him.

One of those two was his cellmate.

There are ZERO people that I know of, this side of the mountains (as we say out here in New Arabia), that know him and HAVEN'T congratulated me on that outburst.

I'm not the first to want to smash his face, just the first that got to do it without facing jail time.

Kind of a local hero.

I can live with that...

[Not Bob]

Love the work, keep it up!

[The Shepherd]

The narrative voice in these posts is so incredibly compelling that I am now emotionally invested in this character.
Exceptionally well done. Can't believe I hadn't read these till now. Seriously, I feel like I've done you a disservice.

Also, your technical explanations for in game mechanics are mind-blowingly well considered. I'd take a picture of the drool on my keyboard and post it, but that'd be a tad weird...

[XphR]

Post it.

[Not A Real RAbbi]

The Shepherd, on 03 April 2014 - 06:25 PM, said:

The narrative voice in these posts is so incredibly compelling that I am now emotionally invested in this character.
Exceptionally well done. Can't believe I hadn't read these till now. Seriously, I feel like I've done you a disservice.

Also, your technical explanations for in game mechanics are mind-blowingly well considered. I'd take a picture of the drool on my keyboard and post it, but that'd be a tad weird...

{Thank you very much, and thanks to everyone that has expressed support so far.

As to any technical info, I've so far drawn largely on my experiences as a wrench-bender in the United States Army over two decades.

Most recently, my explanation of the organization of a regular military unit is based largely on US Army AH-64 attack helicopter units between 1996 and 2004. Molybdenum disulfide grease, mentioned much earlier, really is used on many parts of the M230 30mm main gun of the AH-64, including much of its ammunition handling system. Poor choices by engineers are often only realized in hindsight, as suggested by the argument on the position of an actuator system component--this was inspired by an issue with the AH-64D Longbow Apache's High-Power Switching Modules (HPSMs). The box's top access panel is sealed to the body by a simple gasket, as of the last I worked with them (2008), but the box mounted sideways in the main transmission deck area, and thus the box was susceptible to water intrusion in rainy areas such as South Korea. With 400VAC flowing through there, the electrical contactors easily corroded with significant water intrusion, and many a training mission was aborted over the associated problems. Pilots and crew chiefs have a fairly unique relationship; although they're closer to their pilots than are most other maintainers in their units, crew chiefs are NOT part of the air crews for their aircraft in AH-64 units.

ANYHOW, sooner or later, I'm going to run out of ideas for adapting modern world situations to my loose interpretation of BattleTech/MechWarrior lore. Until then, one should expect that the little insights offered by my 31st Century alter ego are informed by the experiences of my real self in the 20th and 21st Century.

And, again, THANK YOU for the encouragement!}

[Mech Wrench]

Never doubt a MechWrench.

[Not A Real RAbbi]

The human body is the most fascinating machine ever invented.

That's what my Aunt Magda used to say, anyhow. She taught several advanced human anatomy courses at the Capellan Academy's medical school. She was Uncle Leonard's first wife, and she left me a TON of money when she passed away. More on that later.

So incredibly capable a machine is the human body, that most mechs have been modeled on it.

Modern battlemech control systems these days include a neurological interface that puts the human system of EXTREMELY fine motor control to work to keep these enormous machines stable.

At a rest, of course, they balance themselves. As long as they're working properly, of course. That part is pretty cool. Every join in a battlemech has a limited range of motion. There are solid stops at either end of that range, and they're pretty darned strong. They have to be. Imagine the force necessary to lift several tons of battlemech leg, and then remember that the stops have to be strong enough to withstand the application of that force, many thousands of times, without ever failing. Yes, this is part of the reason that the internal and superficial structures of a battlemech are so heavy.

So, when a battlemech shuts down, each joint moves to rest against its lower stop (sometimes these stops are actually the higher of the two per joint/axis, but it is the stop for the joint to be at rest in its lowest position). It starts from the top, and works downward, until every joint and axis is at rest against the lower stop. A significant part of the design process for engineers is to design a mech to return safely to this position at a rest, whether commanded to shut down or experiencing a power loss for unintended reasons (like overheating, for instance). The various myomer actuator subsystem processors usually have a limited battery capacity to be able to actuate their respective actuator groups to the lower stop position without main power, in case of such unforeseen circumstances. One more thing to go wrong, they say.

Turret/gimbal type actuators, of course, are an entirely different matter. They have to be command directed back to the centered position. That's why, when you see a mech left behind after the pilot punched out in an overheat emergency, it's rarely ever centered. But it IS almost always 'squatted', as we call it, or safely resting on its lower actuator stops.

Low-gravity operations are interesting, too. Were a battlemech in virtual zero-G environment when it went into command shut down, it would more likely draw its legs up toward its torso, while its arms would go straight down to its sides. This is especially fun to see in Commandos, as they have relatively articulate legs and long arms. They look like big metal gorillas (a gorilla is a member of one of a few now-extinct primate species that were native to Terra, and lived primarily in high-altitude areas of the African and South American continents, and an evolutionary cousin to our own species).

But the fine motor control of a human (or other animal; while there have been experiments with other species, there has been no real success in finding a suitable candidate to replace man at the controls of a battlemech to follow even relatively simple orders effectively) is what makes the machines spectacular 'between the stops'.

From before birth, we learn to use our muscles to pull against our bones, in order to move our body parts. Unborn babies often kick at the walls of the uterus. We learn to crawl, stand, walk, and run, only by doing, and by failing many times. The human brain is still considered superior to any computer ever built by man, for its capacity to manage so many tasks all at once. As you read this, your brain is sending signals to your heart to fine-tune blood pressure and pulse, it's commanding your diaphragm to contract and relax to keep you breathing, and so on. Without you even being aware, your brain knows if there's enough oxygen in your blood. It knows if there's food inside you, and where it is, and that it must keep moving on. And so on.

And of the hundreds of muscles in your body, it is constantly aware of the position of each; it knows if each and every muscle is fully contracted, fully extended, or at what position in between. You likely never consciously consider this, but the brain is aware of it from before birth until it dies. And this is managed, again without much conscious effort, to accomplish the more general tasks that we consciously demand of our bodies, like standing up and walking to the bathroom in the middle of writing a hypernet blog post.

{Excuse me for a moment, but my brain seems to be aware that the amount of liquid in my bladder is approaching its maximum capacity.}

That's better.

So, neural interfaces put the human brain's capacity for such constant and accurate measurements and computations and directions (in real time, no less) to work to make a mech nearly as nimble as its human pilot.

And so, when watching a mechwarrior walk around in the first several minutes after dismounting his mech, you can usually tell what kind of mech he pilots from the odd ways his body acts. The brain takes up to seventeen minutes to acclimate to the body again after disengaging a neurohelmet (the average is about seven minutes, though).

And again, that feedback from myomer bundles is interpreted for the purpose. Individual actuator bundle subsystem processors send position signals back through the system, and eventual through the neural interface processors (there are always four--two input, two output, with all four working constantly, on two separate power buses, both monitoring the same I/O streams, and each monitoring the other, for a fully redundant system, and each is physically located at least two meters, and preferably 3 or more, from any of the other three), back to the mechwarrior's brain, which interprets this as muscle position.

That interpretation requires some really crafty programming with the "chicken walkers", like my old Raven, as you can imagine. If the signals that reached the mechwarrior's brain were accurate to the REAL configuration of the 'muscles' of the battlemech, this would cause (and in early testing, DID cause) some serious mental problems. Some early test subjects suffered significant brain damage and were left unable to walk at all for the rest of their lives. So, enter a really crafty programmer that figured out how to translate the signals, in order that what reached the brain represented what it would be if the legs were jointed like human legs, and then retranslated the brain's instructions back into the real configuration of the battlemech, in order that the whole motor control system could function properly.

It's all very, VERY fascinating, and there are disciplines within disciplines within disciplines on this subject, few of which have been all that thoroughly researched.


Oh, yeah, and I got a REAL kill today. Not just another technical. More on the details later, but I nailed that Wasp that's been raiding out of the mountain pass, that we saw on the way in a few days ago. NUTS! For as old and decrepit as that mech was, the ejection system worked flawlessly. And with the poorly articulated foot of a Wasp being the pilot's last feedback for a couple hours, it was a real hoot watching him stumble around for the next several minutes while Bryson and his guys caught up to us.

Also, it turned into the single worst beating I've ever seen someone survive.

My boss is a VERY angry man, it seems. Glad I'm on his good side.

His VERY good side.

Back to Aunt Magda's money, by the way...

I invested it, being the young idiot I was, in a longshot venture. Some crackpot (everyone said he was, anyhow) thought he knew exactly where an old Star League cache was located, on some moon on the other end of the IS. The payoff was a proportionate share of the take (he had sold his whole family out for about 70% of the capital for the mission, so I wasn't expecting a LOT).

The take ended up being several hundred battlemechs, a bunch of fighters, several drop ships, and all kinds of other goodies.

I now own more than a whole company of battlemechs, and they're being delivered here next week.


So, the deal may change with Bryson. We've had a talk about this already. We're sitting down with a couple of lawyers tomorrow.

By the end of the month I may be the proud co-founder and co-owner of a whole new mercenary outfit.

The deal gained me three each: Battlemaster, Thunderbolt, Griffin, Wolverine, ShadowHawk, and Locust. I haven't heard what the picks are for variants yet, except that there's going to be at least one of each in the original first-run variant.

What I don't have is ammo and repair supplies and a facility and so on, but that's where Bryson and my new security gig come in.

I may never leave this planet again...

[Not A Real RAbbi]

So, I finally had an opponent live long enough that I could taunt him.

WORTH THE WAIT!

OK, so a Jenner and a Wasp are not even close to evenly matched. Especially THIS Jenner. I lucked into a one-of-a-kind, here.

So, in a flat foot race, stock-versus-stock, the JR7-D will crush the WSP-1A every time (I've since decided that, despite some really odd custom work, this guy's mech was a -1A. All serial numbers, and I mean ALL of them, have been wiped, even the three-nanometer etched numbers.). The Jenner has a pretty good jump distance, too, when it's stock. I've got fewer-than-normal jets on this Jenner, though, and they're balanced more for height than distance.

And it's worth remembering that the facility where this occurred used to be a Davion military facility during a brief (and unsuccessful) campaign. This was a semi-permanent forward maintenance facility, which has since been stripped of heavy equipment and tools. But the buildings and berms and bunkers are still here, just repurposed to serve as a non-mech commercial surface vehicle maintenance facility. Two of the buildings are big enough to house an Atlas, though, and one of them has been selected as my 'hangar'.

So, imagine the surprise when a certain Wasp pilot is confronted from his left by an alpha strike from an airborne JR7-D. I ALMOST got the DFA on him, too, which would have been epic.

While the ensuing evasive maneuver was unique, and I credit Lars (that's what I call him, but his real name could be anything... it's about to be Worm Food Esquire) for showing us all something new, the security cameras reveal that it was something akin to the kimchee squat (REAL Capellans know what I'm talking about) at high speed.

Gotta love those old school Rawlings jump jets in those Wasps. That is, they're JUNK by modern standards. They take too long firing up, they take too long getting even a 20-ton mech moving vertically, and they leave NOTHING AT ALL to the infrared system's imagination. You can see them firing up from 100 kilometers away, even on a rainy day.

So, Lars takes his piece vertical from a left-leaning squat, while I'm in full skidding anchor turn (gotta remember not to extend the inside knee on a hard turn, much more so than in a Raven, because of the stride pattern), and he takes an odd bounce off the East side of my hangar.

I've got him in the wide open, panicked, glowing bright as the sun, with his mech's ridiculously thin back plates turned to me.

I caught the tone. Laser capacitors were charged. He was beyond the 270-meter ideal max range, but not by much.

And I think he felt it, too. He cut a sudden hard right and pulled a low-stance sprint in a wide arc, back around the south side of the facility for the mountains.

Still, I'm not sure exactly why he felt it necessary to go right instead of left. A sweeping left could have kept him at considerable range and brought him back in the direction of the city. There's no way he was going to lose me in the open, and getting West from the facility to the mountains out here means staying ahead of a faster mech for some ten kilometers at least. But the city sprawls along Cold River to the west, back to the foot of the mountain and the lower end of Horner's Valley. A smart move would have been to make that wide sweep, dodge (dip, duck, dive, and dodge) back to town as best he could, and try to lose me on the streets.

So, the right turn was another panicked move. Rookie. Very rookie.

I cut my left anchor turn short and scooted along the north berm to take up the chase on the west end of the facility. There was quite a dust cloud (it turns out that there was custom work on those Rawlings jump jets, that allowed the pilot to keep a relatively cool air flow through them in an emergency. Not very useful, unless you're in a very dusty environment, where it can visually obscure your precise silhouette.), but this late at night, and under a new first AND second moon (once every 177 years), IR picked him out pretty easily. 660 meters and holding in an arc.

I'd have to chase him a little. Maybe he just forgot that he's the slowpoke here.

So, a flat-out foot race ensued. It took about half a minute to get caught up to a comfortable range. In that time, as I calmed down, I remembered something I had long ago read about the Wasp. It has pretty weak legs, even in the 20-ton weight class. I also remembered that the SRM-2 of the common Wasp was in the left leg. I needed to take this thing down, but I needed to do it without risking the more valuable salvage.

Right leg it is!

Having cooled down well enough from the previous laser outburst, and with Bryson laughing his butt off over the FM system, I settled the four lasers on the right leg and let rip, one right after the other. It wasn't a true alpha, but it wasn't a chain-fire either. All four fired within about a second. Three of them connected for a solid hit, and the fourth caught mostly foot. Lars and his Wasp went face-first sliding in the loose dust, trailing more dust and steel and myomer. The shots seemed to have cut through all the myomer in the lower leg, and cut off the heel of the right foot. I don't know what I expected, but I was kinda disappointed that most of the leg hung on to the mech, just dragging limp from the knee.

With Lars face-down, his one useful weapon in the Wasp's right arm, I wanted to end up to his left for the kill shot. Short jump (these Smithson jets are a lot faster-firing, faster-lifting, than the old Rawlings jets) to leapfrog over Lars, with a left-twist in air, and I was swinging left and skidding down to a halt, with the lasers cooling off, when I saw it.

Lars didn't even try to make this part challenging. He punched out of a functioning mech. A beat-up, one-legged, ancient, outclassed, outgunned mech, sure. But not overheating, engine still running, weapons still functioning (as we found out in its postmortem), and so on. He punched out ... why?

Hard for him to answer me, with all his teeth and half of his tongue laying in a pile of blood on Bryson's basement floor.

Again, one never travels without one's wrench.


p.s.- Lars was carrying only 17 rounds in his SRM-2, but at least we've got SOME SRM ammo to play with now.

p.s.s.- Bryson's looking for large scrap to build a Wasp-size gallows.

[Hex Pallett]

I'm just reading the first few posts, and I gotta say, this is one of the most interesting 1st-person storytelling piece I've ever read. I could totally imagine Steve Blum reading this in heavy southern accent.

I would pay you 20mil c-bills just for the read so far if MWO allows C-Bill transferring.

EDIT: read through the rest of the post during the past hour. This will become one of my references of "engaging storytelling" from now on in my long-coming struggle of trying to write in English as a second language. Also, I don't wanna sound like nagging, but it would be lying to say I'm not waiting for an update with great anticipation.

Edited by Helmstif, 11 April 2014 - 07:10 AM.

[ApolloKaras]

I just stumbled on these posts today, and I must say your writing is fantastic!

[Not A Real RAbbi]

I saw this old Terran film once, where there was a giant Gorilla (might've mentioned these before--extinct primate, near-cousin of humans) the size of a battlemech is found, brought to some city, and gets loose. Toward the end of the film, the gorilla kidnapped some woman and climbed a tall building in the city.

And just yesterday, I saw footage of a mechwarrior recreating this in a Kintaro on St. Ives. I was kinda bored, because between my recent skirmish with a bandit Wasp and Bryson's hasty construction project going on (yes, he really is building a gallows to hold a 20-ton battlemech), there hasn't been much traffic around here lately. So, I got to thinking...

Maybe this is part of the reason that people seem to fear battlemechs.

I read a study that showed that the average Capellan is more likely to be afraid of a humanoid battlemech (two legs, two arms, etc., generally man-shaped) than a less-humanoid one. For instance, though my Jenner proved more dangerous in every way, the average onlooker was more likely to fear the Wasp it disabled. Who knows, maybe they don't want to see a mech climb a skyscraper?

Fear is a great motivator. The mere presence of a battlemech is correlated to a considerably reduced likelihood of insurgent activity in an occupied city. Ever wonder why you see so many battlemechs during an occupation, even if they're far more powerful than is needed for the job? Yep. Psychological Operations. Many don't even carry ammo at all, and if they do, it's almost never a full load other than for machine guns. There was a case in one of the periphery worlds where a Davion PsyOps team built large polyurethane mockups of battlemechs and parked them in off-limits areas around a city. Despite the occupation being highly unpopular with a well-armed local population, not a single shot was ever fired at an occupying troop.

People are controlled by their fears, even if those fears are largely unfounded. 2,300 kilograms of polyurethane and polystyrene does NOT constitute a threat to human life (unless ingested). What they perceive to be dangerous, they fear. What they fear, they try to control. What they cannot control, they try to destroy. I'm hoping it doesn't come to that.

We (well, I, until the business licensing is all processed) have been served with a cease & desist order. Word got around that I've got 18 battlemechs coming, and that's NOT popular with a certain pretty boy band of mechwarriors on the left side of the mountains. Nor is the Governor, whose following think that I tried to kill him, very happy with the idea of me building an army (albeit a small one) on this side of the mountains.

The ship is under way. I'm expecting drop on April 26th.

Oh, and there's been some back-room trading going on between us investors. I traded out two of the Thunderbolts to another guy for two of his custom Jagermechs. I traded two of the three Battlemasters (no call for anything that heavy out here) for a couple of lighter mechs and a truckload of C-Bills. That got me a Blackjack and (you guessed it) a RVN-3L Raven, complete with functioning Guardian ECM suite, Beagle Active Probe, etc., and a TON of spare parts for it.

Also, there are bout 18 tons of SRM and Streak SRM ammo coming my way.

If I can get it all out of orbit and on to the ground without reverting to outlaw/fugitive status.

If it was an easy life, it wouldn't be worth living.

[Not A Real RAbbi]

Due to some technical challenges, as well as local building code, the planned hanging of the Wasp has been scrapped. It has, instead, been impaled. Pictures coming soon.

Bryson's attorney, Jordan Kalfus, is on top of the legal mumbo-jumbo about bringing those mechs to Homestead. Marshigama's Pretties (that's what they're called by almost everyone but themselves) are none too thrilled by the concept.

Rewind a minute. When I mentioned before that the 'regulars' at the strait stayed out of the fight, that was Marshigama's. Too pretty to risk getting scratched-up in so small a skirmish. We were nearby, and we were therefore relatively cheap. It's rumored that they were tasked for the fight, but elected to subcontract our battalion. Most of their folks, especially the recruits, took the day off from their regular training to watch the big brawl as a lesson.

ANYHOW, back to the present. As far as Capellan policy goes, and given the relatively small size (and influence, therefore) of our little confederation, more is better when it comes to mechs on ground. There's no shortage of conspiracy theory and paranoia between the Inner Sphere's great houses right now, with the mysterious happenings on the other end of the sphere.

Several planets have recently gone all dark. The usual courier traffic from the periphery came to a complete halt without explanation some time ago. Davion, Kurita, and Steiner are all freaking out. So far, everything has been moving away from Liao's space. Obviously, they're all out to get us, and this is just a ridiculously elaborate ruse to lower the Capellan guard before launching a massive offensive.

That's what the news from St. Ives has been hinting at lately.

Invasion or not, I'll feel a lot better with a full maneuver company and support detachment at my disposal.

Finding mechwarriors to pilot all those mechs? THAT might be a challenge.


Mechs and torso twisting. There was a time when several mech models did not have the capability to twist the torso separately from the legs.

Remember, these things are modeled after humans, more or less. Imagine not being able to turn your shoulders without repositioning your feet.

There are some things that even the most agile mechs can't do. You can lean to one side or the other without moving your legs or turning at the waist. You can turn your head without moving your shoulders relative to your feet and waist (some early mechs had this capability, but it was given up in favor of better protecting the mechs' heads and cockpits).

The torso twist is a bit more straightforward in a mech than it is in a human. Essentially, there are two large myomer bundles that handle this.

Your average mech's torso sits on a turret gimbal assembly. The top half is connected to the torso, and the bottom half to the mech's legs/waist (this assembly varies greatly from one chassis to another, and using distinct terms would take hundreds of pages, as nearly every manufacturer has two or three difference sets of components and so on). One section has attachments for the myomers, which attach at their other end to the opposite end of the gimbal. Think of it this way: It's like a tank turret, and there are big muscles attached to the main gun muzzle, and then to the track on either side. If the left muscle contracts and the right one relaxes, then the turret turns left with respect to the chassis. And vice versa.

Remember, too, how torque works. The same amount of force, applied further from the axis of rotation, means more torque. It means less effort per degree of rotation, but more change in the length of the myomers to do it. So, you can use a longer, thinner, myomer to do the job, if you have a longer arm to attach one end of them to.

The opposite has also been applied. That is, using shorter, thicker, bundles, on a shorter arm. Overall, the myomers weighed less and turned the torso more quickly (in testing on the same chassis), but had a smaller range of motion. Most mechwarriors like the faster twist speed, but not the more limited twist radius.

So, it is one of those marvels of engineering to find a mech that can turn a wide radius quickly. Lighter mechs generally do better at this, but the reasons are many and complicated.

Enter rotational inertia. Give the same mass, and uniformity of density of a perfect cylinder, and a frictionless environment, the smaller the radius (or diameter, but for proper engineers, let's stick to radius), the faster it will turn.

Get on some ice skates and start twirling like one of those old-timey figure skaters. If you spread your arms out wide, you'll slow down. If you draw them in close to you (which has no effect on your mass or friction on the ice), you'll speed up. You can even try it on your favorite office chair or bar stool. It works.

So, part of the trick has been keeping the mech's mass as close to the center line of the turret gimbal as possible. Luckily, the heaviest and most dense component of any mech is its engine, and so much mech design puts a heavy focus on centering the engine.

This makes things a bit complicated when switching out to a different engine. Say, like when one stuffs a GM 280 XL engine into a Hellespont Type R endosteel RVN chassis. Getting the mounting job done correctly takes a very deliberate effort, and weeks of work.

The weeks of work put into the custom RVN-3L that I bargained for last week. The RVN-3L that's going to be MINE ALL MINE in two weeks.

Assuming that, like their clients, the attorneys suing us to cease and desist on taking receipt of those 18 mechs are just as focused on vanity, to the detriment of their ability to do their actual job.

We shall see.

If they're half as bad at law as they were at Blackjack, Kalfus & Kalfus should have our clearance for drop by week's end.

But, I have this creepy feeling that things are not going to go smoothly. They never quite do.

And I'm not looking forward to going back over the mountains to the Strait. Especially when I KNOW that someone in those mountains is gonna want revenge on me.

p.s.- Lars fell down some stairs. A LOT. Must've been really drunk. That's the story, anyway. We turned him over to the police in New Dubai. Turns out, there were several warrants out for his arrest, both here and on three other planets, including St. Ives. There was also a handsome reward for him, but only if turned-in alive. Teeth were optional, and not necessarily encouraged, to be intact.

[Not A Real RAbbi]

So, St. Ives. I'm not a fan.

The minor legal dispute over my intent to bring 18 privately-owned battlemechs to Homestead seems to be going my way. That said, Bryson and I have been called upon to make an appearance on St. Ives for an arbitration. If it goes our way, we'll be taking delivery in a week. If not, then the delivery will have to be made here, and the mechs and equipment held on a Capellan government yard until it IS settled.

Which reminds me, I've got TWO working Gauss rifles in that shipment, with a couple tons of ammo and some repair/service supplies.

Gauss rifles are pretty fascinating. Yeah, most mechwarriors know the basics. A nickel-ferrous projectile is accelerated to ridiculous speeds by a set of sequential electromagnets. The ammo is (usually, but you DO hear things) inert on its own, but the gun itself is known to explode from time to time if it's hit JUST right while certain capacitors are charged.

Most often, when a Gauss rifle fails in use, it's during an attempt to fire after the electromagnets have been misaligned by impact, or occasionally, because of excessive heat softening the material that holds those electromagnets so precisely in place.

This reminds me of a story from over 1,000 years ago. My old boss, Calvin, from the auto body days, used to talk about old Terran automobile racing. There was this one team, in what was then the Formula One circuit, that built an automotive transmission case out of carbon fiber. It was the norm at the time for those to be made of magnesium, for it's relatively light weight (compared to iron) and strength (compared to aluminum). But the transmissions' lubricating oil got hot enough, under certain conditions, that it approached the melting point of the magnesium. If the case got even SLIGHTLY soft, it spelled certain doom. Manufacturing processes back there were NOT as precise are they are today, and 0.0002 inches (old Terran length measurement; about 0.005 millimeters) was considered a pretty close tolerance. The rear wing, which provided the downforce necessary for the incredible traction of the rear wheels, could generate up to 6,000 pounds (again, old Terra; well over 26,000 Newtons) of downforce, all of which acted upon one end of the transmission--there was no frame aft of the engine. So, that relatively close tolerance could be violated pretty easily if the transmission case started getting soft, and the transmission could come apart pretty wildly.

Carbon fiber didn't have that temperature problem, even 1,000 years ago. It was just pretty hard to work with--it mostly had to be laid by hand. So, this one racing team set out and built a carbon fiber transmission casing for their car, in which they laid titanium bits to hold those gears within the close tolerances. And it worked. There was just one problem...

The new carbon fiber transmission casings weighed less. As the cars had to fall into a certain weight range, and the new transmission made the car lighter than the minimum weight, the team had to locate a ballast weight in the car. They got to locate this under the driver's seat, roughly centered in the vehicle and low, though. So all their effort went to simply shift a few kilograms of mass a little farther forward and closer to ground.

Mind you, this was not the most successful team in its class at that time.

So, something similar occasionally happens with a Gauss rifle when one attempts to fire it. If the weapon's electromagnet guides have been warped even a TINY bit, that nickel-ferrous slug will wreck the barrel and rip the whole gun apart. Or, in some cases, the magnets may not fire EXACTLY on-time, relative to the slug, and they'll bring it to a near-halt in the barrel. Or, they can even overaccelerate the slug, and rip it to pieces before it's out of the muzzle.

So, why nickel and iron? Well, the iron bit is obvious--it needs to have a metal that's profoundly affected by electromagnetic fields. Fair enough. Why nickel? It's a bit more dense of a metal, but not TOO dense. Previous experiments with these weapons used heavier metals, like lead and even uranium. The problem was with generating a powerful enough magnetic field, and quickly enough, and timing it just right, to accelerate the more massive projectile to a useful speed. It's all pretty much the same on a planet like, for instance, St. Ives or Homestead. In outer space, though, a lighter projectile is preferred. There's no whole PLANET to exert that Newtonian normal force, no atmosphere to resist anything, etc. The old Newtonian two-way means that the slug pushes back on your weapon as hard as your weapon pushes on it. For heavier installations, like railguns or permanent defenses on high-gravity planets, the uranium slugs are sometimes used.

Different types of nickel-ferrous slugs have been tried, too. Some had alternating layers of nickel and steel laid one over the other, as thin as 0.003 millimeters each. These tended to have pretty high velocities, and thus pretty high energy on impact, and rarely overpenetrated their targets. They hit HARD because the layers would all peel and instantly melt at impact with anything harder than typical leaves. This also meant that they weren't the BEST for armor penetrating, and the process has been abandoned for larger guns.

There was also a trial of some blended metal slugs that met with similar results.

What we wound up with is an odd-shaped nickel penetrator with an iron cast-over. More exotic ammo generally just changes the geometry of the nickel and steel bits, but the proportions and center of balance are the same for virtually all Gauss rifles currently in use on battlemechs.

One more cool thing about the Gauss rifles? The slug actually breaks the sound barrier (in most environments) less than halfway down the barrel. When you fire one, you feel two things almost simultaneously. One is the recoil force against the mech, via the gun's mounts. The other is the sonic boom of the slug still inside the gun. I've never fired one in outer space, but I'm told that it's virtually silent compared to atmospheric firing, whereas missile and other ballistic weapons are still heard pretty clearly by the mechwarriors firing them.

Speaking of hearing clearly? Ol' Lars is apparently now completely deaf. Not that he had any business at the controls of a scout mech before, but he'll never pilot anything again. Assuming, that is, that he ever walks free at all. He's facing over 200 years' prison time for his alleged part in a series of robberies East of the mountains on Homestead.

He's not coughing up the info for the legit authorities, either. Bummer. I was hoping our first job would be some cave exploration, and some at the Strait have hinted that it might. We'll have to see.

And speaking of robberies, they've fallen off to zero since Lars's Wasp got impaled. Still waiting on the image from Bryson's nephew back home.

(Did I just call that place HOME?)

So, tomorrow, we go in with the arbitrator. If all goes well, I get my 18 mechs and a new business partner on Homestead. If not, I'm going to be selling the Jenner to move to St. Ives for a while, until I can figure out what to do to get my mechs in hand. The dropship carrying them is stopping at St. Ives before heading to Homestead, so it's no extra fee to just drop them here.

Cross those fingers, friends!

[Aurihalcon]

*Crosses fingers*

Man, he got a whole army for practically free. When will THAT weekend event come around?

[Not A Real RAbbi]

Aurihalcon, on 19 April 2014 - 09:35 PM, said:

*Crosses fingers*

Man, he got a whole army for practically free. When will THAT weekend event come around?

(Project Phoenix, arrived in October and December. Taking some not-necessarily-canon inspiration from PGI. Sold the non-Phoenix BLRs and TDRs to buy some other stuff, worked it into the story.)

[Not A Real RAbbi]

So, this is uncool.

The arbitrator has worked out a deal that will allow me to bring SOME of my mechs to Homestead, but not all of them. He imposed a 55-ton limit. No heavy or assault mechs may be active.

That means, I can still get them dropped on Homestead, so long as they are not in operable condition. As they sit right now, they're a mechwarrior short of combat-ready.

So, the heavy and assault class battlemechs will have to be dropped in at the Strait and held in the quarantine yard. There, we'll have to render them inoperable before they can be moved out, or we can leave them there and pay an impound fee.

Bryson and I are going to figure that part out later. The arbitrator left the door open for us to sue to have the Zhizhu folks split the impound fee, or any maintenance fees and costs associated with partially dismantling them. That, however, is a matter to be decided by the Governor's courts on Homestead. They don't tend to like me. :-/

Anyhow, that's still a full company of battlemechs that I'll be allowed to drop in. We've got to establish a merc corps license to operate more than 3 of them at any given time, but our provisional license (while the full application is developed and processed) will suffice for six months. After that, if we don't have a full-blown license or an extension granted against the pending application, we'll have to dismantle all but three at any time.

This also requires something that had honestly not really sunk-in with me until today. I have to hire mechwarriors. Bryson's already got a bunch of licensed techs in his company, and he has accounts with repair parts/supplies distributors. That part is handled. The business plan came together fine with the exception of operators and payroll.

So, time to scour the job boards for freelance mechwarriors willing to join up and live on the dry side of the mountains.

Oh, yeah, we need a special permit from the office of the Governor to cross the Bates-Willis line (a 90-kilometer-wide zone that follows the main mountain ridgeline bisecting the main continent on Homestead). We're technically also going to have to organize as a local militia under the Governor (and, therefore, under Capellan authority), but this comes with some extra little bonus. Well, for me anyhow.

See, those bandits hiding out in the mountains? We're fully within the bounds of the tentative agreement to hunt them down and run them out of the caves. Really. We can even invoke the authority of our militia status under the Governor to seize their property without invoking salvage rights (that is, we can take what we find there, whether or not we had to disable it in an act of self-defense). Within reason, of course, but what's reasonable in this crazy galaxy of ours?

I'm kind of like a deputy marshal from old Terran Western films.

And it's about time. Seems that word got out about Bryson's new hired hand being off-world. Three new bandit raids in the last 24 hours, including one involving a medium mech, two lights, and about a dozen technical vehicles.

Wait until Dad gets home--he's got a BADGE now!

[Not A Real RAbbi]

Could this be a bigger pain in the butt?

So, I haven't slept at all since we got back from St. Ives. It's been close to 72 hours, and I'm about to take a nap. We've still got WEEKS of work to do before we're ready to maintain a dozen-and-a-half battlemechs here.

Facilities aren't the problem, really. A couple of the overhead dolly cranes in Bryson's heavy hangar are out of date. Easy enough to get those load-tested, though, and it's not a priority at the moment since the 60-ton and heavier mechs are going into a holding yard. Even if the cranes don't pass load test, those are cheap and relatively easy to repair. There are a couple electric motors to move the cranes around on the guide beams, and an electric motor to turn a hydraulic pump for the hoist motor. A few steel cables here, a U-bolt there, and it's just about that simple.

Salvage trucks are plenty. Most of the hand tools, welding/cutting equipment, X-ray and ultrasound and magnetic particle NDI (non-destructive inspection, for the not-mechanically-inclined) equipment are in good shape. Things that Bryson's guys have been using regularly to service anything from personal automobiles to tanks to, in some cases, aircraft. Yeah, his operation has been diversifying over the last few years.

Where it gets sketchy is with weapons systems test sets, borescope kits, and so on.

See, simply installing a weapon, say a Medium-class laser, doesn't set it up precisely on-target. The mech's fire control system knows PRECISELY how each and every bit of the mech is oriented at any given time. The targeting reticles that mechwarriors see are the mech's baseline orientation--parallel to the ground and the direction of the mech's lower body's forward facing. That much is easy. But there are small differences in the manufacturing quality of each weapon, even between two that rolled off the same assembly line back-to-back. I won't make much of a difference in firing across the room, but for a class-2 autocannon it can make a HUGE difference at 700 meters. A quarter of a minute of angle can be the difference between finishing a battle and wasting one's last round of ammunition on a miss.

Enter the boresight alignment kit.

BAKs are manufactured for most mechs, for the various weapons that are equipped to that chassis/variant. They come with the mech, usually. In the case that someone orders 3 or 4 of the same mech, a set goes out with that order. There may be only one BAK for the medium laser for all three of the LCTs you just ordered, even though they're all different variants (say, a 1V, 2M, and 3S, like we're getting TOMORROW). So, it has become clear that we're not getting ALL of the tools we need to boresight all of our weapons.

Believe it or not, this is NOT done by the manufacturer most times. It's part of that initial deployment checklist to boresight-align all the weapons systems dry (non-firing alignment), and when feasible, do a wet (firing alignment) verification on a weapons range, before actually going into combat.

I'm going to be short a LOT of BAKs. Luckily for me, it's pretty easy to get one's hands on the schematics for most BAKs in use, and for most of the chassis/variants out there. One of the big challenges for those few that go customizing their mechs outside the manufacturer's specifications is to develop reliable boresight alignment tools and fabricate them.

Which is what we've been doing.

Spare low-G forged aluminum billets aren't hard to come by. Machining them VERY precisely into interlocking components of a VERY CLOSE TOLERANCE set? That's a trick.

In most cases, the BAK for a particular weapon system mounts to the outside of the mech, near the weapon's muzzle/tube, and uses a low-power laser to determine VERY precisely how the weapon system is pointed, to within a couple thousandths of a mil (6,400 mils to a full circle). IF the frame of the BAK is built precisely, then it can tell the precise alignment of the weapon system in relation to the mech's baseline.

With most ballistic and energy weapon systems (minus flamers, which don't need to be THAT accurate, and machineguns, which are usually area weapon systems and don't have to be sniper-accurate), you have to go inside the mech and shim the weapon within its mounts. If it's a little off to the right, you add a certain thickness of shim to the left side-mounts, and reverify the alignment. Simple enough.
Missile launchers are a bit different, though.

See, inside a launcher, the tubes themselves move quite a bit. They have to reorient themselves after firing, in order to reload. With Artemis Fire Control Systems, it's even worse.

Artemis works by staggering the missiles' launch very slightly, and altering their initial trajectories just a bit, in order to minimize the effect of wind, atmospheric pressure, exhaust turbulence, etc. If you've ever watched an Artemis and non-Artemis Holley SRM-6 fire, you know the difference. The missiles have their own onboard guidance to keep them on the track they were originally fired. The non-Artemis missiles' paths will be a little wilder, and noticeably so. They'll spread further apart. Artemis reduces this by accounting for the variables that affect the missiles' trajectories.

Artemis-enabled launchers weigh a lot more, for all the cool gear it takes to manipulate the tubes independently of one another (instead of in unison, as with a non-Artemis launcher), and take up a bit more space. And they require you to separately boresight-align EVERY SINGLE TUBE. It can take a day to properly align a single LRM-20 rack with Artemis, where it can be done on a non-Artemis rack in under two hours, including the time to mount and remove the BAK.

We've agreed to do this right, though. We even managed to borrow a couple of kits from the Zhizhu folks for a day or two, just to make sure we're putting this all together right.

Interestingly, they're being pretty neighborly lately.

I think they're up to something.

But I need my rest. In about 17 hours, I start taking delivery. The ship's already in our star system.

It's gonna be a long weekend.