6 replies to this topic

[Chaosice]

Hey guys I was thinking of taking one of my old flash drives and redesigning it into some kind of mechwarrior theme while I wait for MWO to be released. I am wanting to make it look like it belongs in the cockpit of a mech. I was wondering if you guys had any ideas of how it should be designed or if you have any good reference pictures. If so please and thank you.

[Sidra]

Make it a urbanmech flash drive

Edited by Sidra, 07 July 2012 - 01:26 PM.

[Buckwylde]

'mechs don't have anything inside of them because of the sterile cockpit rule. Sorry... (/joke)

My mechwarrior rule book has a picture of a cockpit on the cover and the only thing I can see in there that isn't attached is cigarette butts flying out of the ashtray. Really though. Do you think a mechwarrior would have something in his 'mech that was selected for the robot theme? He'd more likely have fuzzy dice (which I think I've seen in another book) than a storage device shaped like a robot or something.

...Try to find a picture of a credstick... I think this is a game that had those.

[Sidra]

Buckwylde, on 07 July 2012 - 01:47 PM, said:

'mechs don't have anything inside of them because of the sterile cockpit rule. Sorry... (/joke)

My mechwarrior rule book has a picture of a cockpit on the cover and the only thing I can see in there that isn't attached is cigarette butts flying out of the ashtray. Really though. Do you think a mechwarrior would have something in his 'mech that was selected for the robot theme? He'd more likely have fuzzy dice (which I think I've seen in another book) than a storage device shaped like a robot or something.

...Try to find a picture of a credstick... I think this is a game that had those.

I would so have fuzzy red dice hanging in my cockpit durign combat

[Chaosice]

I understand the cockpit may not actually have any storage device in it I am just wanting to style it in that type of theme.

http://static.mwomer...75AD924A1F0.jpg

I am meaning that it would fit the general design shown in the cockpit. So a green light for example with a black paint job possibly. I am not meaning to have some little figurine but something that looks like it may belong in the universe.

[Sidra]

Well if memory serves, in one of the dev blogs I think they did say we can customize the cockpit, but to waht extent I don't know

[Buckwylde]

Chaosice, on 07 July 2012 - 01:58 PM, said:

I understand the cockpit may not actually have any storage device in it I am just wanting to style it in that type of theme.

http://static.mwomer...75AD924A1F0.jpg

I am meaning that it would fit the general design shown in the cockpit. So a green light for example with a black paint job possibly. I am not meaning to have some little figurine but something that looks like it may belong in the universe.

In an attempt to help you on this quest I dug into an old Technical Readout book that I remembered had drawings of some gear that characters could get in the Battletech universe. It occurred to me that the stuff they have is largely fictional and generally 'looks' like vaguely stylized versions of 1980's era real world earth items. Since there would feasibly be thousands of products that do essentially the same thing, built on various worlds by various companies, the game simplifies items by what they do and approximately how well they do it. For a real world example, picture the M-16 and AK-47 rifles. You can argue that one is better than the other, but since the differences are debatable, they basically fit the same category of 'rifle'. The differences between those two rifles will often be described in the text as 'this one was prone to jamming' or whatever, but it was up to the Game Master to place actual differences between items into the game as more or less just an interesting bit of the game. Such small differences are best demonstrated as insignificant when a 'mech fires an LRM 20 pack into a platoon of infantry and then rolls the dice to determine how many he killed. For a more interesting example of this flavor text, look up on sarna.net the various conflicting reasons for why larger autocannons have shorter range than smaller ones. Whatever reasons used to make sense of that conundrum, it's just a balancing issue for the game.

The part that was fascinating with Battletech items was what they did, not how they looked (since items are often bought based on if you could find one on your planet or if you picked one up on the battlefield from a fallen foe).

The item that looked most like a USB stick was a vibro lock pick kit. Essentially it's a small object, about the size and shape of a thumb drive (which didn't exist in the '80s) that has a small, extendible blade that vibrates at such a high frequency that it can cut through metal locks. I can't find a picture of one on the internet, but believe me... the mental image of the device in use is much more interesting than the drawing of it (it looks like an ineffective box cutter).

Since the larger universe that Mechwarrior resides in is fully detailed described but essentially a fantasy world, almost all of the imagery exists entirely in your head. This is typical of this sort of game, and a reason that much of the artwork shows large variations picture to picture of the same object. The cover of that Mechwarrior rule book that I referenced in an earlier post had a lot of mechanical gauges, like you may find in an aircraft at the time that picture was drawn. The picture that you linked is a modern drawing from the MWO game and the items in that cockpit are duplicated from a typical airplane of modern times.

If you are electronically inclined, just put a USB powered microphone, op-amp, A/D converter, and an LED bar graph on it. That would be pretty cool looking and you could make up any story you wanted for it (make your own content for this fantasy world). If you really wanted to stick with some 'proper' theme, you could skip the thumb drive idea and build a model of a cone rifle, as that would actually be interesting to people that share the same fantasy world. Do understand that by building a cone rifle model, it would be your interpretation of the creators of Battletech's interpretation of a largely forgotten real world gun called the gyrojet rifle.

I really didn't mean to go on such a wild series of tangents, but your request is not a simple one to answer. The universe that you're trying to extract images from is largely a written and spoken one with very detailed instructions on how to interact with objects (like "can I walk though this building with my 'mech'?" and how to determine if the floor broke and you fell into the basement or if the building fell on you), but very little in the ways of actually drawing the universe and every item in it.